It’s End of the Trail for Old Corral Bar

Five months after a Hollywood film crew’s simulated fire turned into the real thing, city officials on Thursday began demolishing the gutted Corral Bar on the corner of Osborne Street and Foothill Boulevard near Hansen Dam.

Area residents had been calling on the city to clear the property--which has been designated as the future site of a library and environmental learning center--because it had become a magnet for illegal dumping and vagrancy since the bar burned in April.

Before it closed three years ago, the Corral Bar was a lively nightspot featuring honky-tonk music and hitching posts in the parking lot. Its rustic interior was used as a set in several Hollywood productions, including “Terminator” and “Every Which Way But Loose.”

The property is also adjacent to the site where Rodney King was beaten by Los Angeles police officers during his arrest on March 3, 1991.

“It was a great local bar,” said Russ Bellenot, as he watched demolition crews tear into a corner of the building with a large tractor. “There’s a hitching rail in the back, and you’d come down here on a Friday night and there would be 15 horses tied back there.”

Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon said the city purchased the property in March to be used for a planned 12,500-square-foot library and Environmental Awareness Center.

The $3.1-million project, which is being financed in part with money from the Lopez Canyon Community Amenities Trust Fund, will be the only one of its kind in the city.

Both the library and the learning center, which will focus on ecology and environmental issues, will utilize solar energy and be built with recycled materials.

“Originally we were going to take materials out of the building to use to build the library,” Alarcon said. “But now it’s in such a condition that we can’t do that.”

Groundbreaking on the project, which will take about a year and a half to complete, is not expected until 1998 or 1999, library officials said.