Snakes shed scales. Roses drop petals. And Los Angeles levels buildings -- about three per day.
Taken together, a year's worth of demolition permits amount to a new sort of ghost town, one whose structures once were scattered over the city's 465 square miles. It's an upscale ghost town, dominated by more than 135 Westside homes, many scraped away to make room for houses even larger.
The rest of phantom L.A., as gleaned in a Times study of 2001's 1,211 demolition permits, includes sites as familiar as the Gilmore Bank -- the '50s Modernist structure at the Farmers Market complex, leveled to make room for the Grove shopping mall -- and as obscure as the Shell station at South La Brea Avenue and Rodeo Road, which is now a bare-scraped lot.
This "erase-atecture," as some architectural historians call it, gives builders room to press forward with their perpetual reinvention of the city, and it often protects the public from unsafe structures. But nobody knows just how much valuable history the wrecking balls obliterate each year, because in most cases, nobody's keeping track.
About 85% of the city's standing structures have never been surveyed for historic or cultural significance, a study by the Getty Conservation Institute found in late 2001. Experts say this appears to put Los Angeles substantially behind such cities as Chicago (which completed a survey of its pre-1940 properties in 1995), Seattle (which in 2001 began a six-year building inventory project) and New York (where officials have stopped short of a citywide survey, but have logged a list of landmarks and historic districts that includes 22,000 properties, roughly 3% of the city's total). By those and other measures, authorities in and outside Southern California say, official Los Angeles lags behind most major U.S. cities in attending to its architectural history.
"You hate to wake up to the sound of chainsaws or bulldozers," says Dwayne Howard, who failed earlier this year in his efforts to block partial demolition of a Mar Vista home designed by modernist Gregory Ain. Although Howard's efforts may lead to designation of a tract of Ain-designed homes as a historic zone, much of the threatened house was torn down in May.
The city's leaders "have a responsibility that they're not living up to," says Alan Leib, volunteer chairman of the Los Angeles Conservancy's modern committee.
For 40 years, city officials have been building a list of historic monuments, but without any particular methodology. Typically, a property goes unnoticed unless a resident nominates it, and those nominations, usually a dozen or two a year, frequently materialize as last-ditch acts of desperation when demolitions are threatened.
"I dare say that Los Angeles has never chosen to take itself seriously," said Timothy P. Whelan, director of the Getty Conservation Institute, which is trying to build support for a citywide survey.
But among homeowners and entrepreneurs who are wary of creeping government restrictions, the word "historic" alone can start a debate.
"In the abstract, I don't have any problem at all with surveys," says attorney Tom Larmore, who is part of a Santa Monica homeowners' revolt against that city's historic-designation process. "I think inventory is an important part of any system. But the city should not be in a position of mandating that your house be historic. It's just a fundamental impairment of individual freedom. In the process of trying to preserve some old building so you can drive by it once a year and say, 'That's nice,' you're really impinging on somebody."
If that movement's signature-gathering campaign succeeds, says Larmore, Santa Monica's voters may in 2003 or 2004 face a ballot measure that would essentially give single-family homeowners veto rights over any historic designation.
In Los Angeles, meanwhile, the scales are weighted differently. Demolition applications get less scrutiny, and repeated efforts to take better measure of the city's architectural history have collapsed.
"We don't know what we have in this city," says Ken Bernstein, the Los Angeles Conservancy's director of preservation issues. In 2001, he said, his organization lobbied to save about three dozen imperiled addresses, usually alerted at the 11th hour by protests from neighbors. Some of those buildings have been preserved and given historic monument status, like the Chateau Colline apartment building in Westwood. Others, like the Gilmore Bank, were leveled anyway when city officials were unable or unwilling to intervene.
Among the demolition targets that nobody told the conservancy about, the roll call runs from sacred to profane: in the 5900 block of South Main Street, a church dating to 1929. In the 2500 block of North Soto Street, a 1940 dance hall. On West 4th Street in San Pedro, a 1932 mortuary. On North Telfair Avenue in Pacoima, a chicken coop from 1938. On Newcastle Avenue in Northridge, a bomb shelter from the early Cold War days of 1956.
