Blowing in the Wind

The giant flower that sprouted Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles isn’t a reminder that warm weather is here. It’s a reminder that the Cold War is not.

Sculptor Michael Tansey climbed 30 feet into the air to convert an abandoned air raid siren at Olympic Boulevard and Figueroa Street into a huge yellow daffodil.

The exercise wasn’t as daffy as it sounds. Officials say that if passersby like the look of the flower, many of the city’s 200 other sirens could similarly be turned into works of art.

The sirens were installed in the 1950s to warn of potential enemy attack. For decades they were tested on the last Friday of the month with synchronized wailing that echoed across the city at 10 a.m. But by 1985 the sirens had begun falling into disrepair and officials ordered them disconnected. Because of the cost, the city never took them down, however.

This newest siren test was devised by Tansey after he learned that the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency was offering $20,000 grants to local artists who had ideas for brightening downtown streets.

The money, part of $2 million set aside for public art projects over the next five years, comes from fees paid by developers of high-rise office buildings. Other artwork installed through the project includes 10 stylized bicycle racks in the downtown area and a series of window displays in an office building at 5th and Hill streets.

“I grew up in the Carthay Circle area and I remember the sirens,” said Tansey, 51. “Like everybody else, I experienced that moment of fear that yes, we were going to be blown up every time they went off.”

The concept of “turning swords into plowshares”--coupled with memories of a 1969 photograph of a soldier with a flower in his rifle barrel--prompted the idea of turning a symbol of war into an image of peace, he said.

It took eight months of trial-and-error aluminum casting to make the 450-pound daffodil petal. Before a crane could lift the blossom into place, Tansey had to cut a 10-foot hole in his downtown artist’s loft to get it out of his studio.

Now that he knows how to do it, future blossoms can be more easily and cheaply crafted for both the canister-type and trumpet-shaped sirens, Tansey said.

Redevelopment agency consultant Lesley Elwood said five other downtown air raid sirens have been pinpointed as potential flower sites. And her agency, or other organizations, could commission similar blooms for the city’s other abandoned sirens, she said.

Grinning onlookers seemed to enjoy the unusual noontime planting.

“Truthfully, they should put more flowers up. L.A. needs it,” said Guillermo Zavala, an employee of a copy shop that overlooks the daffodil site.

“It’s wonderful to look at. L.A. has so many good ideas--Angels Flight, this,” said Carmen Williams, who for 12 years has managed a neighboring car rental shop.

“But L.A. needs a lot more work” on problems like street prostitution and homelessness, too, she added.