Built not to last -- yet still standing

Richard G. Mitchell, head of the Community Redevelopment Agency, complained that it was just another monolith of concrete, asphalt and steel atop Bunker Hill. The mass of girders and slabs, perched atop what look like stilts, "fights you," Mitchell said. He predicted it would have a "depressing effect" on downtown.

Robert Bolling, president of the Southern California chapter of the American Institute of Architects, agreed, warning that the structure would have a "deleterious effect on the fabric of the city."

At the time, the 1,062-car structure's saving grace was that it was temporary. Planners promised the "portable parking structure" would be dismantled and moved somewhere else, replaced by a more fitting form of architecture.

But as with so many pieces of the L.A. landscape, it wasn't that simple. The fact that it is still here "does say something about the mythology that all of Los Angeles is temporary," author D.J. Waldie said. "Even something that is supposed to be temporary has hung around longer than many residents of the city."

The city is full of examples of how Angelenos tend to take the impermanent and make it endure for the ages. The Olympic rings were meant to hang on the Coliseum only for the 1932 Summer Games -- but still adorn the structure. The Hollywood sign was erected to boost sales for a housing development in 1923. MOCA opened the Temporary Contemporary in 1983 as a provisional exhibition space at a downtown warehouse; it's still in use. We end up relying on those symbols as pieces of our civic fabric, evidence of the fact that we have history and permanence.

The parking structure is officially known, in the bureaucratic parlance of Los Angeles County, which owns it, as "Parking Lot 17."

For a generation of Southern Californians, the strange convergence of steel and asphalt has been the place where citizens parked before filing over to the criminal or civil courts nearby to serve jury duty. Over and over, proposals were made to replace it with a skyscraper -- only to have the plan fizzle and the structure remain.

Looking at it perched atop Bunker Hill, some confused it with a half-finished office building. And as the hill became populated with true architectural gems -- MOCA, the Cathedral and then Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall -- the "Erector set" became even more of a blight.