The holiday season arrived at a time...

The holiday season arrived at a time of financial hardship for some, but not for our servants.

We mean, our public servants.

By a happy coincidence--for them--L.A.-area legislators at the federal, state and city levels have all received juicy pay raises recently.

Members of the House of Representatives hiked their own salaries 25% to $125,100. Assembly and state Senate members granted themselves boosts of 28.6% to $52,500 (to go along with $20,000 in yearly living expenses, plus other fringe benefits). And L.A. City Council members received 40% pay increases, raising their salaries to $86,157.

Happy holidays, dear legislators, from the rest of us--your Santas.

The first French dip sandwiches in L.A. were served at Philippe’s, the 82-year-old eatery near Union Station. L.A.’s first chili burgers are usually credited to Ptomaine Tommy’s, a sawdust-on-the-floor fixture on North Broadway for four decades before it closed in 1958.

But who served the first pizza here?

In a letter to the editor of Westways, the Auto Club magazine, Frank Gehley of Mission Viejo recalled that “in the early ‘40s, we knew of only one place to get pizza, a food that wasn’t all that popular then. It was in Hollywood in a small cafe run by a gentleman who played bit parts in movies.”

Westways restaurant critic Paul Wallach responded that there was such a cafe on Cahuenga Boulevard “called Patsy D’Amore, which was also the name of the man who owned it. . . . It attracted a huge celebrity following with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante.”

OK, now here’s a tougher one: The first kosher pizza place.

We nominate Fairfax Kosher Pizza Dairy Restaurant, established on Fairfax Avenue in 1986. The cafe’s business card notes that it’s open Sunday through Friday, closing Friday “2 hr. before Shabbos (the Sabbath, which starts at sundown),” in keeping with Orthodox Jewish law.

T om LaBonge of Silver Lake nominates a stretch of a few feet along the Zoo Drive off-ramp of the Ventura Freeway as the shortest respite between construction zones in the city.

Lake View Terrace residents in the San Fernando Valley thought they had won their battle to prevent a drug treatment center from moving into a vacant hospital building. Then they were startled to see the building suddenly outfitted with barred windows and razor wire-topped fences.

But worried calls to local leaders quieted their fears: The building has been transformed into a maximum-security mental institution for the filming of “Terminator 2.”

miscelLAny:

Traffic reporters say that one of the questions most frequently asked of them is: What’s the No. 1 lane? Answer: It’s the fast lane, closest to the center divider.