There's a fine line between history and history that's on pricey real estate.
Los Angeles is rich with history. Unfortunately, we've paved over most
of it with offices, apartment buildings, mini-malls, and lots of other
useful crap that we need. It's not that we don't value our history.
It's just that there is more value in destroying it and building new
stuff on top of it. Since the value-niks outnumber the preservationists
in both quantity and capital in this town, the commercial buildings
outnumber the historical ones by a mile.
For
all of our apparent disdain for our own history, L.A. was actually at
the forefront of city preservationist movements. In 1962, when it
occurred to enough people that urban overgrowth was swallowing our
past, Los Angeles enacted the Cultural Heritage Ordinance. It was one
of the first of its kind enacted in any major urban center, even
predating a similar ordinance in New York by three years. Under our
city's ordinance, the Cultural Heritage Commission, a five-member panel
of mayor-appointed citizens, was created to review and recommend sites
for landmark status, a designation that over 700 of them have since
received.
In one instance, preservationists even managed to
relocate our history. In 1969, a group of prominent citizens teamed up
with the help of the city's Cultural Heritage Board to create Heritage
Square, a sanctuary that now consists of eight historic buildings --
and a recently acquired boxcar. The square is on some unused acreage at
the end of a cul-de-sac in a Highland Park neighborhood where urban
overgrowth appears unlikely to encroach. In one way, Heritage Square is
encouraging. We revere our history so much that we make the effort to
find a compromise with the commerce that threatens it. When looked at
another way, however, it's kind of sad that we think so little of our
history that, rather than let it be, we shove some of it in a vacant
lot in the barrio.
But generally, our history, unlike the rest
of our city, remains hidden and unflashy -- and, except for rare
instances like Heritage Square, not freeway-close. If the average
tourist came up to the average L.A. resident and asked him where a guy
could go to look at historical landmarks, the average L.A. resident
would be stuck for an answer. Some people would suggest downtown, but
few would be able to name more than Union Station and Olvera Street.
Some people might suggest visiting the missions, even though most of us
don't know where they are -- or even how many we have. There was a
time, not that long ago, that if any tourist asked me where to find
historical landmarks, I would have suggested Boston.
I've since been somewhat enlightened. I would suggest tourists -- and locals - find a copy of Landmark L.A.
Nearly 500 pages of photos and multiple cross-referenced indexes make
this the definitive guide to our city's historic and cultural
landmarks. Anyone who thinks we are nothing but a bunch of
money-grubbers need only look at the 700 sites listed in Landmark L.A. Why, we have century-old Victorians. Frank Lloyd Wright residences. Sleek postwar buildings.
And pallets.
When
I first got this book, I went straight to the section on San Fernando
Valley landmarks. What were the cool old things in my valley that I
must know about? The Van Nuys City Hall is in the book. Cool. I've been
there. The La Reina Theater on Ventura Boulevard is in the book. I saw
movies there before it was turned into a Gap outlet. There are a bunch
of other places I've never even heard of, some of which I've driven by
and never noticed. I must visit these places, I thought.
Then on
page 243 was something called “Tower of Wooden Pallets.” It was located
in Sherman Oaks, halfway down the part of Magnolia Boulevard that
dead-ends at the San Diego Freeway. Maybe I don't have an artistic eye,
but in the picture, it looked like a five-foot-tall woodpile in an
empty lot. A couple of years ago, I did a drive-by of this “monument”
just to see what it was all about. There was a chain-link fence around
the property, there was a bunch of brush growing over everything, and
near the street was a pile of wood that vaguely resembled the photo in
the book. I don't think I even turned my engine off. I just made a
U-turn and got on with life.
But perusing the book again
compelled me to dig deeper this week, so I did a little legwork about
the pallets. In 1951, a man named Daniel Van Meter lived there, and he
was known largely for being eccentric. Among other things, he was once
convicted of failing to register as a subversive during World War II.
One day, he heard that the Schlitz Brewery was going to discard 2,000
wooden beer pallets. So he schlepped up to Schlitz and took them back
to his property, where he built them in a stack around, he claimed, the
burial site of a child who died in 1869. In 1977, when the fire
department said it was a hazard and threatened to demolish it, Van
Meter sought refuge via historic and cultural landmark status from the
Cultural Heritage Commission. The next year, he got it. As Jeffrey
Herr, Arts Manager of the city's Cultural Affairs Department, writes in
the preface to Landmark L.A., the list is “peppered with some
non-traditional landmarks that help define the character of Los
Angeles.” Then again, as one commission member later said of their
decision, “Maybe we were drunk.”
Since Van Meter died in 2000,
his family has been seeking to undo the commission's decision so they
can sell the property, a 1.43-acre lot valued at $7 million by one
estimate. The present plan is for a developer to build an apartment
complex on the site, a move that would fulfill a jeremiad that Van
Meter wrote nearly 30 years ago: “In a few years, this piece of the
good earth may be covered by apartments for the storing of surplus
people.”
I found out something else: It wasn't a five-foot-high
pile of wood. It was a 22-foot-tall room, a cavern with a staircase
spiraling around the outside and a plumb line hanging from the roof. I
even found a picture of Van Meter standing inside it, holding a
chicken. Why doesn't it look like that in the picture? Why didn't I see
this thing on my drive-by a couple of years ago? How can you miss a
22-foot-tall building made of beer pallets? Wait -- did I read on
another website that it was sagging, or had been partially demolished,
thus the five-foot-high pile? Now I had to see it. Wednesday afternoon,
I dropped what I was doing and raced down Magnolia Boulevard to get
what may be a last look.
On my way, I sped past another
historical landmark on Magnolia Boulevard, a two-story Spanish Colonial
home with detached garage and chauffeur's quarters that received city
landmark status eight years after the stack of pallets did. Ever since
I found out this manse was there, I always glance at it whenever I
happen to drive by it. Wednesday, I didn't look at it.
I found a
parking spot across the street from the lot, which looked bigger than
when I last remembered it. Something else was different too: The gate
was open. I wandered in and found a photographer, a genial fellow who
had been contracted by a historian to take pictures of the thing. Take
pictures of what, I couldn't tell. It was an abandoned lot filled with
weeds, brush, trees, and, as I discovered, junk, including a bus and at
least two cars. I followed him deeper into the lot.
Then I saw it. Landmark L.A.
got the wrong photo. This thing was for real. It may have been sagging,
but it was still 22 feet high, or thereabouts. It was an igloo-shaped
thing, an overgrown beehive clearly laid out with thought and care. The
photographer told me I could go in if I wanted. A narrow entrance had
been built into the side. I went in. It was dirty and grubby and had
empty bottles on the dirt floor, but the plumb line was still there, a
cement anchor hanging from a beam across the top of the open-air roof.
It was quiet. Hundreds of prismatic snapshots of the outdoors could be
seen in every direction through the pallets. It may have once been a
glorious sanctuary, the kind of place that a convicted unregistered
subversive probably enjoyed building and sitting in during his spare
time.
The photographer referred me to a freelance historian
who was overseeing the photography as part of a survey of the property.
She explained that before demolition of a designated city landmark
could be authorized, a historical documentation of the structure and
the land around it had to be conducted. But it was largely a formality,
she said. The apartment complex isn't a done deal, but it looks like
the developer is going to get his way.
A determination of the
artistic merits of the pallets has been playing out since Van Meter's
death. A 2004 environmental impact report included an analysis of the
tower from an artistic and historic perspective. The analysis deemed it
historically insignificant and artistically uninventive. The historian
I met said that, on occasion, museums and galleries raise funds to
disassemble, transport, and reconstruct large pieces such as this at
their venues. To date, no such facility has stepped up to do this.
Except for a 2005 Los Angeles Times article about them, there
has been little mention in the media about the tower's threatened
destruction. Unlike other historic monuments that are faced with
demolition, no outraged preservationists, prominent scholars, or
concerned citizens appear to be doing anything to save the pallets.
It would appear that, at the moment, the pallets' only hope is me.
I
don't know when art should trump commerce, and the more I think about
it, the more uncomfortable I am with the idea of arbitrating such
things. Lacking the ability and the desire to assign a dollar value to
the pallets, I'm left with a default view: As much as I loathe the
trend toward expensive ticky-tack rental property overtaking the city,
I'm all for individual liberty. I see no reason why the owners
shouldn't be as free to sell this property to a developer as the
previous owner was to use it for a giant fort that his goats could pee
on.
But as long as I'm here, if you or someone you know has the
wherewithal to rescue this tower and properly move it to Heritage
Square or elsewhere for preservation, well, that would be nice. What's
a city full of non-traditional people without a peppering of
non-traditional landmarks?
L.A. Nuts is a weekly look at the cast of characters that make up this city.
