Finding Time in a Bottle

When Danny Gellis uncovered some dusty old medicine bottles and a corroded red license plate in a weed-strewn North Hollywood lot, he thought he had stumbled on hidden treasure.

But Gellis’ jewels were only culls from a dumping ground concealed for generations under house foundations, lawns and driveways. In the six years since the buildings were torn down, the soft earth has offered up a haphazard time capsule of San Fernando Valley life around the turn of the century--a vein of artifacts tapped by countless collectors, local history buffs and even several Los Angeles firefighters who work next door.

Removed from the lot on Vineland Avenue near Bloomfield Street have been porcelain doll arms and heads, Model-T Ford parts, guns, ivory false teeth, a pewter faucet and some brass costume jewelry.

But mostly, there have been bottles.

The ones Gellis, 17, spotted while taking a break from bicycling had shapes both squat and elegant. But they look puny next to the bounty found by firefighter Kurt Wiese.

Inside the fire station next to the lot, where even a speck of dust on a fire truck earns a thorough hose-down, Wiese opens one in a row of identical off-white lockers to reveal crates, boxes and bags of dirt-encrusted bottles.

In the informal museum of Fire Station No. 86, he has perfume bottles, bleach bottles, curative oil bottles and whiskey bottles. Wiese has makeup bottles, stomach medicine bottles, soda bottles and solvent bottles. He has bottles with Chinese characters molded into their sides, a few bearing Spanish words and several made in England and New York. He has a very early Perrier bottle.

They stand upright and lie on their sides. Engraved, cut, chiseled and embossed. Clear and milk-white, pale lavender, emerald green, cobalt blue and golden brown.

The 26-year Los Angeles Fire Department veteran first learned of the urban archeology site when he saw a police officer and his friend digging there.

“I laughed at them. I said, ‘You guys are nuts,’ ” Wiese said. “Next thing I knew I was scratching around out there, too.”

The police officer, Sgt. Randy Richardson of the Los Angeles Police Department, said he happened on the site by accident. He was patrolling North Hollywood neighborhoods one afternoon in 1982, he said, when he saw some youngsters throwing bottles at each other on a side street just north of the Hollywood Freeway.

“I thought they were going to cut themselves,” Richardson said. “I stopped and saw the bottles were real old bottles.”

Richardson found out that the bottles had come from the Vineland Avenue lot, where a 60-year-old swimming pool had been removed. A row of run-down houses there also had been recently leveled.

When he got off work later that afternoon, Richardson headed back to the site and started digging. Within weeks, curiosity drew Wiese and a few fellow firefighters out, too. Collectively they pulled up thousands of bottles over the next few years.

“It’s kind of like digging for gold: You never know what you’re going to turn up,” Richardson said.

Los Angeles County tax assessor’s records show that the lot and surrounding neighborhood once was the Lankershim Wash, part of the Lankershim Ranch Land and Water Co. Based on the dates on items he found there, Richardson believes it became a popular regional dumping ground for household garbage in the mid- to late 1800s.

Bottle collector Gary Frederick, a member of the Los Angeles Historical Bottle Assn., said he was not surprised by the discovery because waterways are among the first places local history buffs look for clues to the past. Any incline provided dumping ease for early wagons and cars, he said.

Wiese is most partial to his Owl Drug Co. bottles, which are purplish-blue and sometimes three-sided. The owl logo imprinted in the glass bottles changed through the years; it was first realistic and eventually became more stylized.

After 1940, the West Coast company was taken over by Rexall Drugs and the owl logo was abandoned, Frederick said. The Owl Drug Co. bottles are rare enough that a few of the larger ones can sell for as much as $200 at a bottle show, he said, but most are worth about what other old bottles bring: a few dollars each.

About a year ago, Wiese and the other collectors called it quits. They had sifted through most of the top six feet of the lot, Wiese said, and they became worried that someone would be injured in a cave-in.

After the digging stopped, Frederick sold and traded some of his bottles, Richardson built a display case in his garage and Danny Gellis gave his bottles to his mother. But Wiese hasn’t quite decided what to do with his. He said he quickly tired of cleaning and cataloguing.

“For me,” he said, “the pleasure is really finding them.”