For sale--freeway, cheap: Just as we (and...
For sale--freeway, cheap: Just as we (and probably everyone else) predicted, an entrepreneur has bagged some of the remains of the late, great I-10.
“We’re going to put them in small packages, paperweight size, that will say, ‘Actual Santa Monica Freeway Rubble,’ ” explained Curtiss Briggs, a bumper-sticker dealer. “There’ll even be a piece of yellow caution tape around the box.”
Briggs, who hopes to put the $2.99 treasures on sale this weekend, said he had arranged for the demolition company to bring him the rubble taken from the collapse in the Fairfax area of L.A. But his hometown of Santa Monica balked, he said, even though he wants to donate half the proceeds to the Red Cross.
The city wouldn’t allow the demolition company “to drop off two loads at the Civic Center,” he said. “They seemed to think we might have a disposal problem. It would be about 80 tons.”
Briggs, who has since found a private spot for packaging, figures the freeway rocks will be more popular than a previous innovation of his--commuter bibs.
“They were very absorbent,” he recalled sadly. “Not like the lobster bibs in restaurants where, if something splashes on it, it just drops onto your lap.”
Come to think of it, the I-10 could have used a big bib, too.
*
Sherman hoax? Ursula Schwadron and Janet Crosby point out that Time magazine is the only publication to detect one dramatic earth movement here--the shifting of Sherman Oaks from the Valley to West L.A. (see map). And the disappearance of Culver City.
*
Some “Twilight Zone” theme music, please: Marcia Murdock, a kindergarten teacher in Downtown L.A., says that when she showed up in her classroom after the quake, it was in good order. The only object that had fallen was one of the 1-through-20 numbered cards hanging on a wall--No. 13, of course.
And Tom Mills of Sun Valley swears that the only one of his videotapes that was damaged was “Poltergeist.” Some critics would say he was lucky.
*
Death Row duty: Did you notice one proposal to recover the medical records in the quake-crippled Barrington Building in West L.A.? Authorities had deemed it unsafe to enter the six-story structure, prompting an Internal Revenue Service agent, who worked nearby, to say: “They ought to get someone from Death Row to go through the building and save the records.”
Well, the building has since been demolished. But that plan would have been problematical, anyway. If an inmate had been sentenced to plunge inside, you just know that a Supreme Court justice would have given him a midnight stay of execution.
miscelLAny:
Jamal Ali of West L.A. points out that Northridge’s original name--Zelzah--is eerily close to an Arabic word for a Southland menace. The “English-Arabic Conversational Dictionary” translates “zelzele” as “earthquake.”