Bob Baker Marionette Theater

A parade of puppets managed to string along Los Angeles City Council members long enough Wednesday to persuade them to designate a West 1st Street marionette theater as a historic-cultural landmark. The animated figures danced and pranced atop the council's ornate horseshoe-shaped desk in the City Hall chambers before officials voted 14 to 0 to place the Bob Baker Marionette Theater on the monument list.

From the outside, the low-slung, white concrete building huddled underneath the Beverly Boulevard bridge looked like any other building in its industrial area just west of downtown, adorned with razor wire and a forbidding exterior. Inside, as an elderly man wielded a marionette, the place's distinction became apparent. Bob Baker slowly tilted his hands this way and that, pulling on a series of delicate strings.

Pinocchio danced on the table and wise-cracking Fred Mingo sat on it Thursday as they helped convince Los Angeles officials to consider making a marionette theater near downtown an official city cultural site. Fans of longtime puppeteer Bob Baker pleaded for his puppet stage and workshop at 1345 W. 1st St. to be protected with the landmark designation as they struggle to keep the Bob Baker Marionette Theater afloat.

Humorist, kitsch collector and "histo-tainer" Charles Phoenix has earned a national following for his sly theatrical tours through other people's slides and home movies from the 1940s, '50s and '60s.

Not far from downtown L.A.'s new crown jewel -- Frank Gehry's glittering, iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall -- is another L.A. gem, a far humbler yet genuine cultural treasure: the Bob Baker Marionette Theatre. Forty-four years old, it's the country's oldest continuously running puppet theater.

"No messages, just a little love." That's puppet master Bob Baker's accurate description of what happens inside the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, a historic fixture on the unglamorous outskirts of downtown L.A. for more than 40 years. Behind the humble facade of that cinder-block building, with its cracked concrete patio, faded plaster clown and painted daisies, cozy marionette magic is still making children smile six days a week.

In an age of high-tech toys, fast-moving video games and slam-bang cartoons, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater quietly sits as a beacon of traditional children's entertainment. But that beacon may soon fall dark, as the theater is nearly half a million dollars in debt and may not survive beyond the Christmas season, say its owners. The theater has produced magical but decidedly low-tech marionette shows in 36 years of operation, making it quite possibly the oldest working puppet theater in the U.