The city’s 1923 Spanish Colonial Revival bandshell in Bixby Park reopened this weekend–despite not being a shell at all, but rather a building with an open stage.

And the Los Angeles Times, which last took note of Long Beach when all those manhole covers went missing a couple of weeks ago, sent its “L.A. Then and Now” columnist Deborah Schoch out to write a piece on the bandshell–tracing it all the way back in time some 60 years to the massive Iowa picnics of the 1940s.

Nice piece–though two stories in two weeks still doesn’t mean they actually cover us. It means they cover us … periodically. Sporadically.

Schoch recalls the days when this burg really was Iowa by the Sea (and, presumably, when sales of those three-wheeled electric cars were through-the-roof–remember those?).

She notes that the bandshell closed following a 2005 storm which sent a ficus tree smashing into it, and finds mention in the files of a similarly violent 1936 lightning storm which threw one young Long Beacher off a picnic bench and singed the arm of another.

Uh … and the bandshell? Why do we call it a bandshell when it’s not? And was there ever a bandshell? Nothing. Bupkis. Schoch does offer this, from Long Beach historian Stan Poe: “There’s supposed to be a shell. It’s supposed to be rounded, so that the sound comes out to the people.”

Um, yeah! Maybe it’s the bandshell … in all of us.

Oh, and Deborah Schoch? She’s apparently inherited the “L.A. Then and Now” column from its originator, Cecilia Rasmussen–whom I admire for, among other reasons, having started at the Times in 1983 as a secretary. (I began my career as a Press-Telegram typist.) Rasmussen retired recently amid the Times‘ untimely “staff reductions.” Here’s the item from Adrienne Crew, over at L.A. Observed.com.

So, what have learned? It’s like Professor Harold Hill’s boys’ band (or perhaps the monorail on The Simpsons): there weren’t never gonna be a bandshell. Or was there?

Paging Ken Larkey … . Mr. Larkey, you have a telephone call.

Tags: Adrienne Crew, Bixby Park, Bixby Park bandshell, California, Cecilia Rasmussen, Deborah Schoch, Iowa picnic, Iowa-By-The-Sea, Ken Larkey, L.A. Then and Now, laobserved.com, Long Beach, Los Angeles Times, missing manhole covers, press telegram, Southern California, Spanish Colonial Revival, Stan Poe, The District Weekly, The Simpsons, Theo Douglas, three-wheeled electric cars