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December 27, 2007
Bulldozer Bonanza Brought Down Important Landmarks in 2007
It's the end of another year and LA has lost yet another handful of important buildings. LA Weekly has the goods on the "big ones" that were lost this year including the Ambassador Hotel and Cocoanut Grove, Trader Vic's, Johnie's Broiler, Mann National Theatre and our personal vote for deepest loss of the year, Tail o' the Pup.
It seems we're not the only ones who mourn the loss of our favorite hot dog stand:
As an architectural writer, probably 80 percent of my calls — even though it’s been gone for a year — are simply “Where’d the Tail o’ the Pup stand go?” It vanished after the owners lost their lease when talks of developing a retirement community on-site began. The famous hot doggy mysteriously disappeared one day, and remains officially MIA.While most of the properties are gone for good (goodbye, Ambassador pool, we will miss you), Johnie's is poised for a come-back. A moratorium on building at the 90,000 square foot site will expire on January 23, 2008. The City of Downey has entered into an agreement with the site's owner to prevent further deterioration of the site until a team of experts can develop and agree upon a plan for resurrection. You, too, can join the coalition of those willing to eat at the Broiler once again.
The 2007 teardowns were a blow to our city's history and heritage, and it looks as if the destruction of our beloved landmarks is far from over. Many important LA structures are still in trouble, according to the LA Conservancy. Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House, the Golden Gate Theater, the Lankershim Train Depot, and the Santa Anita Racetrack are among the buildings and landmarks they'll be watching closely in 2008.
Yet, despite all these tear-downs and a mortgage and credit crunch that has many LA developers slowing down or halting projects altogether, several big buildings are going full steam ahead (for now) in 2008. The most notable? The Grand Avenue Project downtown, which today's Real Estate Journal included in a list of "mega-developments being planned for the world's biggest cities."
As with every year in LA, we're sure 2008 will give us more teardowns and more buildups. What now-demolished LA haunts were your favorites? Which about-to-be built projects are you looking forward to and which ones do you hate?
Photo of former Ambassador Hotel site by minuk via Flickr
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I'll try to take some pictures, but whoever was tearing Johnie's down seemed to do a really bad job at it. Many parts are half standing in ruins and it's in such bad shape I wonder if it won't just have to be completely razed/rebuilt.
At least it's no longer a car dealership, which made you wince every time you passed by.
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Aldo - Pictures would be AMAZING! Especially the googie sign, which is very cool. There are tons of excellent photos of the partial teardown on Flickr, but they're "all rights reserved" so I couldn't include any.
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i grew up in downey...
ate at johnnies a bunch of times, went to the car shows there..
but more importantly there used to be a dive n surf school next to it.
when that closed down us kids used to hop the fence and skate the pool.
i skated with one of my childhood heroes, mark gonzalez, the gonz, there.
that was the best pool to skate besides combi in upland.
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They're actually off by a year on the Ambassador, which was demolished in 2006. January 16, the final portion of the structure was demolished -- with the exception of the piece of the Cocoanut Grove that still stands. Now, the LAUSD wants to demolish it too, and the LA Conservancy is fighting them on it... but there wasn't all that much physically that changed this year at the site; the Ambassador was already long gone.
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i *love* the ennis brown house.
But -- and not on your list -- a building I loved growing up (and that we drove by nearly every day) was that weird building that was like a steam boat on Ventura and Barham. Bye-bye, childhood!
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Oh God, Please don't touch Santa Anita!!!