The latest in local status symbols?Well, Yamashiro...

The latest in local status symbols?

Well, Yamashiro Restaurant is proudly telling everyone that it was recently an ersatz ruin.

The Hollywood eatery sent out a press release noting that it was used in an explosion scene for the new television series, “Alien Nation.”

“The final result,” the release cooed, “presents the illusion that the entire restaurant was destroyed.”

Gives new meaning to the term dining al fresco .

Actually, when it comes to crumbling structures, Los Angeles has plenty of the real thing.

In fact, there’s no reason why the city couldn’t emulate Rome, Athens and Cairo and offer a tour called, “The Ruins and Antiquities of L.A.”

Who knows? With a bit of promoting by the Chamber of Commerce, youngsters on street corners might soon be hawking “Maps to the Ruins.”

The latest spot to qualify as such an attraction would be the 54-year-old Pan Pacific Auditorium, which stood neglected for years and then was destroyed by fire in May. Only afterward did politicians take notice of the art deco treasure and say it should be saved.

Certainly, there are plenty of other interesting remains.

Imagine a tour guide pointing to a building shaped like an Assyrian palace off the Santa Ana Freeway and telling awed visitors:

“Sixty years ago, this was the headquarters of the Samson Tire and Rubber Company.”

(The guide would go on to explain that the founder, Adolph Schliecher, thought big.)

Other stops for the tour bus would include:

* The boarded-up mouth of a tunnel off Glendale Boulevard and 2nd Street downtown. It was the site of Los Angeles’ only subway until 1955, when it was decided that the city didn’t need a subway.

* A crumbling, 99-year-old footbridge over the railroad tracks east of Chinatown. Tough guy Alan Ladd used the crossing to escape from the police in “This Gun for Hire.”

* The former California State Building (1932-1976) on 1st Street, now just a few stairs and cement foundations. You can almost feel the excitement that attended the doings of legions of briefcase-carrying bureaucrats there.

* The 80-year-old, boarded-up Los Angeles County Engineering Building at 108 W. 2nd St., perhaps downtown L.A.’s filthiest structure. The engineers are, of course, the people who oversee construction throughout the county.

*The idle Olympic Auditorium on Grand Avenue, where a boxing crowd that included Rudolph Valentino and Jack Dempsey watched Newsboy Brown win the feature match at its opening on Aug. 5, 1925. Now covered with graffiti, the arena’s broken marquee lists a partial phone number. (It should be 911.)

* The Tamale, a defunct, 61-year-old eatery shaped like its name, on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles.

* The Venice Pier, shut down in 1987 after the discovery that its concrete base was chipping away. Its future unclear, this old-timer is 24 years old.

*The former airport hangar used in the farewell scene of “Casablanca,” off Waterman Drive in exotic Van Nuys.

The climax of the tour would be an inspection of a series of mysterious pillars to the south of Los Angeles.

“We don’t know what civilization created these columns,” the tour guide might say. “Some scholars believe it was supposed to be part of something called the Century Freeway.”

Speaking of crumbling landmarks, scaffolding has been set up under the giant spider known as the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport.

After a huge chunk of stucco broke off one of the legs of the 28-year-old structure and crashed on the roof of a building below, the airport commissioners quickly authorized $75,000 in emergency repair funds.

Some airport visitors are nervous enough without having to worry about stucco falling out of the sky.