Only in L.A.

Long Beach, home of the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose, will one day be able to lay claim to a new attraction: an actual race car posed as though it’s crashing through the window of a restaurant on Ocean Boulevard.

Once the Grand Prix-theme eatery is built, the city will be the showplace of a ship that doesn’t sail, a plane that doesn’t fly and a car that doesn’t drive.

Long Beach, as you can see, is making a serious bid to become the Immobilized Vehicle Capital of the West, if not the nation. It would give new meaning to the city’s current slogan: “The Most on the Coast.”

But there’s more scavenging to be done. As a public service, we’ve compiled an inventory of other local candidates.

List of the Day:

1--The red 1933 Willys draped over the roof of Sampson Auto Salvage in Vernon, a fixture since 1934.

2--The DC-8 that has been parked for seven years near the corner of Figueroa Street and Exposition Boulevard at the California Museum of Science and Industry.

3--The fishtailed Cadillac jutting out of the roof of the Hard Rock Cafe on Beverly Boulevard.

4--”Back Seat Dodge ‘38,” the art piece by Ed Kienholz, showing a couple cavorting in a car, at the L.A. County Museum of Art.

5--The motorcycle, atop a pole, that seems to be carrying a mannequin into outer space at U-Pick Parts junkyard in Sun Valley. The mannequin is wearing a helmet in accordance with state law, by the way.

The news reports mentioning a new conspiracy theory involving Jimmy Hoffa in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy reminded writer Sal Perrotta of a story he once heard about the vanished Teamsters boss.

In the late ‘60s, Perrotta, then editing a union paper, met an advertising executive in the bar of the Sheraton-West Hotel (now the Sheraton-Town House) on Wilshire Boulevard. The ad man not only mentioned that he knew Hoffa but, with the help of an assistant manager, took Perrotta up to the suite Hoffa had reserved for years.

“When we were inside,” Perrotta said, “he (the ad man) walked over to one wall and reached around the side and pressed something, a panel, I think. And damned if the wall didn’t open up and a bar rolled out! There were bottles in the cabinet and they had Hoffa’s name on the label.”

A few years later, in 1975, Hoffa disappeared.

Which brings us to the present.

“Every once in awhile,” Perrotta said, “I wonder if maybe that’s where Hoffa is, behind that wall.”

miscelLAny:

What do Thomas Edison, the Harlem Globetrotters, astronaut Neil Armstrong, Lassie and composer Igor Stravinsky all have in common? They all have stars on Hollywood Boulevard.