Fading Landmarks : Eating Away at Oddball Architecture

One 17-foot-long hot dog--to go.

That was the disturbing order that Eddie Blake received the other day at his Tail o’ the Pup, the 39-year-old stand shaped liked a king-size hot dog (with mustard).

Blake, who leases the location on La Cienega Boulevard, was told he must move his cement bun by Sept. 1 so the site can become part of a development consisting of an 11-story hotel and a second Ma Maison restaurant, which will be shaped like an expensive French restaurant.

Stationed inside his steel reinforced frankfurter the other day, Blake admitted this is the biggest crisis ever faced by the Pup--bigger even than the time a woman walked head-first into the protruding dog and sued (she won an undisclosed sum).

‘Save the Hot Dog’

“People tell me, ‘Let’s save the landmark. Let’s save the hot dog,’ ” said Blake. “I hope I can--if not here, then I hope I can move it somewhere else.”

If the Pup is unable to find a home, Southern California will have lost one of the last survivors of an era when merchants tried to catch the eye of motorists with buildings shaped like doughnuts, frogs (Toed Inn), igloos, farm animals (the Pig Cafe offered service through its snout), shoes, coffee cups, jails, pumpkins, dogs, cameras and zeppelins.

It was a time, restaurateur Arthur Somborn noted in 1926, when you could sell food out of a hat. Some friends doubted him, so Somborn built the Original Brown Derby.

This style--using a structure as its own sign--became known as “programmatic architecture.”

The slogans were unusual too. Arthur Whizin’s Chili Bowls (est. 1933) advertised: “We cook our beans backwards--you only get the hiccups.”

Derby Doffed

Now, the Derby, the landmark that symbolized Los Angeles’ anything-goes style, is gone, though the hat itself survives. One of Whizin’s bowls is a body shop; another is a bar.

Less enduring were such now-vanished wonders as Sanderson’s Hosiery in West Los Angeles (topped by a 35-foot-tall, nyloned left leg), the Mother Goose Pantry in Pasadena (customers ate inside what must have been a size 2,000 shoe), and the Dugout restaurant in Montebello (whose warlike ambiance was reflected in sandbags circling the exterior and a World War I-vintage plane sticking out of the roof).

“These places were distinctive, the kind you’d say about later, ‘I went there as a kid,’ ” said Jim Heimann, co-author of “California Crazy . . . Roadside Vernacular Architecture,” a study of the “programmatic” period.

“It’s getting so this city doesn’t look any different than Houston or Dallas,” Heimann said.

City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, whose district includes the Pup, said rising property values on the Westside contributed to the stand’s problems.

“Investor confidence in West Los Angeles is both a blessing and a curse,” he noted, “a curse in the sense that we sometimes see old neighborhood businesses disappear.”

While the Pup’s status is in doubt, another icon has apparently staved off extinction for the moment. The 20-foot-tall Big Donut (now known as Randy’s Donuts) recently was slated to come down for redevelopment in Inglewood, co-owner Larry Weintraub said, but officials have since shelved the project.

And why not? The Donut--though no longer fresh at 33 years old--is still one of Inglewood’s biggest celebrities on its perch near the San Diego Freeway. It recently appeared in singer Randy Newman’s video, “I Love L.A.” as well as in the movie, “Breathless,” starring Richard Gere as a fugitive with a sweet tooth.

Through the Donut

In the latter film, the camera shoots Gere through the Donut’s hole. “You see him making a left turn out of the parking lot,” Weintraub proudly pointed out.

Other surviving examples of older programmatic architecture in Southern California include the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. in the shape of an ocean liner on Central Avenue (1936); the Bucket in Eagle Rock (1935), whose handle is missing from the roof; Knudsen’s Dairy on West Slauson Avenue, crowned by a half-century-old, giant milk bottle (remember milk bottles?); the Wigwam Inn in Rialto (1955), which offers teepee-like cabins, and a few other former Big Donuts.

Some survive only as shells of their former selves.

East Los Angeles’ cracking, 40-foot tamale, whose teetotaling founder advertised “Tamales, but no beer” when it opened half a century ago, is boarded up. The hilly Mount Baldy Inn (1927) in Pico Rivera now sports a sign on one slope that says, “Dancing,” and a sign on another slope that says, “Upholstery.” The City of Commerce’s Assyrian temple (1929), once a tire maker, is closed, though the exterior is intact and visible from the Santa Ana Freeway.

Giant Pickle

One day as he drove down Pico Boulevard, author Heimann saw the giant pickle that once stood majestically atop Pickle Bill’s before it went out of business.

“I spotted this Tiki war god with bumps near the entrance to Kelbo’s Barbecue,” Heimann recalled, “and I thought, ‘No, that can’t be the pickle!’ But I checked and it was.”

Four of the original 18 Chili Bowls are still standing: reborn as a body shop in Glendale, a bar in Huntington Park, a Mexican restaurant in West Los Angeles and a Chinese eatery in Montebello. The durability of the half-century-old structures doesn’t surprise Whizin, their founder.

“When the Long Beach earthquake hit (in 1933), my Chili Bowl on Florence (Avenue in Huntington Park) was the only building on the block that wasn’t damaged,” recalled Whizin, who now maintains offices in Agoura in a pyramid-shaped shopping mall that he designed.

Chili and Quakes

“It’s because of the circular shape. It gave evenly in all directions. The place was full and all 28 customers ran outside. After a couple of minutes, they peered inside the window, saw everything was OK, and came back and finished their chili.”

The Chili Bowls were a staple of radio gags in their time, especially the restrooms, which were located in small shacks with blue lights in the parking lot. “It made giving directions to the bathroom easier--just tell people, ‘Go outside and look for the blue light,’ ” Whizin said. “Jack Benny used to call it the Blue Room.”

The early programmatic buildings began to pop up as automobile travel came into vogue.

The feeling, architectural historian David Gebhard wrote in “California Crazy,” was:

” . . . If Californians were going to be fully committed to this ‘auto-mania’ (as it was called in the second decade of the century), then why not cultivate a set of architectural images which would instantly catch the eye and which we would continue to remember? . . . California’s mildness of climate, with the resulting ability to cheaply and quickly erect structures, encouraged a non-serious view of not only architecture, but symbolism and salesmanship as well.”

While the design often revealed the product, some exotica were more inscrutable, such as Fairfax’s Sphinx (a realty company, which quietly disappeared one day); the Coca-Cola ship (the nautical image was supposed to connote coolness and cleanliness), and the Assyrian tire plant (apparently related to the original name, Samson Tire Works, which smacked of the Middle East).

Recent descendants of the programmatic period include the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood, shaped like a stack of 45-r.p.m. records with a stylus on top (remember 45-r.p.m. records?); the camera-like Shutter Shack in Westminster; and the recently dismantled 23-foot-tall mascot of Chicken Boy in downtown Los Angeles.

A design firm called Future Studio acquired the garish fiberglass figure, intending to install it on its headquarters in Glendale. “But the owners of the property didn’t want him up there,” spokeswoman Amy Inouye said sadly. “So he’s in storage in Monterey Park. We had to take his head off to move him, and it’s lying between his legs.”

Crowning Glory

The Brown Derby’s hat, in contrast, is making a comeback. Saved through the combined efforts of preservationists of the Los Angeles Conservancy and Hollywood Heritage, it will sit atop a two-story shopping center to be called Derby Plaza at its old location.

A few years ago, it appeared that the Pup might also relocate, to the nearby Beverly Center, then under construction. However, Blake and Beverly Center developer Sheldon Gordon were unable to reach an agreement.

If Blake is uprooted, he points out that it wouldn’t be difficult to deliver his big frankfurter somewhere else.

“The dog’s not in concrete,” he said. “I got a hook on top. All I’d have to do is bring in a crane and haul it away.”

Moving landmarks can be hazardous, though.

When the Big Red Piano went out of business in 1976 after six decades downtown, it was acquired by preservationists and transported to a lot in Venice. When it was set in place, the Big Red Piano promptly collapsed. And no piano tuner could save it.

Blake hopes his hot dog is tougher.