Demolition

The two-bedroom stucco house at 3304 Drew St. in Glassell Park was once the center of one of the most menacing drug marketplaces in Los Angeles. From the house, Maria "Chata" Leon, an illegal immigrant, her family and associates controlled drug and gang activity on the street for years, police said.

The Century Lounge, an LAX-area strip club that has titillated and disgusted tourists for decades with its blinking "Nude Nude Nudes" sign, will be demolished and replaced by a parking lot, officials said Thursday. The lease for the tawdry Century Boulevard landmark -- best known for its psychedelic, red-and-orange marquee -- expired at the end of August, according to John Day, general counsel for property owner L&R Group of Companies. The club will be razed next month and incorporated into L&R's adjacent WallyPark parking structure.

More than three years after Fullerton residents raised $3.5 million to save the historic Fox Theatre from the wrecking ball, the 82-year-old structure remains in peril. Despite the efforts of preservationists, the dilapidated one-time vaudeville theater and movie house stands in contrast to the urban hipness that has swept downtown Fullerton, now brimming with upscale restaurants, jazz clubs and a lively street scene.

In the latest setback in the construction of Orange County's Great Park, demolition crews that were supposed to tear up 600 acres of runways at the former El Toro Marine Corps base have gone home with little work completed. Recycled Materials Co. of Colorado caught city officials off guard last month by sending a terse memo announcing it was pulling up stakes from what the company's senior project manager called "the World's Largest Recycle Project." Lennar Corp.

Preservationists hoping to save the facade of a Richard Neutra-designed building at Hollywood's most famous corner have been told they are 70 years too late to stop demolition. Workers are removing the remains of the Basque nightclub, which was gutted about six months ago by a mysterious predawn fire at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

Helen Burns got word Sunday that something seemed fishy at Johnie's Broiler, the iconic roadside 1950s drive-in where she had cruised her green metallic Ford perhaps thousands of times in her youth. It didn't matter that the landmark -- whose soaring neon rooftop sign and midcentury glass-and-stone facade helped spawn a new architectural style called Googie -- had been selling used cars instead of burgers and malts since 2002.

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs lost a bid to demolish a Spanish Colonial Revival-style mansion he owns about 30 miles south of San Francisco. A California appeals court ruled Wednesday that Jobs and the city of Woodside, where the 17,250-square-foot mansion was built in about 1925, didn't consider alternatives to destroying the home. Jobs said he never liked the 30-room Jackling House -- named after its original owner, copper magnate Daniel C. Jackling -- which he bought 21 years ago.

To some, the four sprawling three-story brick complexes may not look like real estate worth fighting over. But with inhabitable housing of any kind at a premium here, the fate of New Orleans' four largest public housing complexes -- St. Bernard, C.J. Peete, B.W. Cooper and Lafitte -- is at the center of another battle in the city's turbulent efforts to reshape its future. The U.S.

For three decades, the Linda Lea theater sat empty and boarded up on the edge of Little Tokyo, with the image of a kimono-clad woman looking down like a ghost from the marquee. In its heyday, the theater was among the nation's premier exhibitors of Japanese movies. But as downtown L.A. declined, so did the Linda Lea. Crews completed demolition of the theater this week, and the act marks both an end and a beginning.

Masked demolition workers protected by police tore down a Copenhagen building that served as a makeshift cultural center for Denmark's anarchists and disaffected youth, ignoring sobs and screamed obscenities from a crowd of young people. Four days of riots followed the owner's decision to evict squatters from the building. The violent demonstrations were Denmark's worst in a decade and drew people from across Northern Europe. More than 650 people were arrested and 25 injured.