Wilshire--Going, Going . . . : Los Angeles Faces a Dwindling Trove of Architectural Conceits

A flamboyant London art dealer, Roy Miles, tells a nice story about himself. In the days when he had a gallery on Duke Street, St. James’s, he had placed a $500,000 Dutch still-life painting on an easel. It represented a large twig sticking out of a wicker basket, with a single plum hanging on it. The late David Carritt, who also had a gallery on Duke Street, came in and admired the work.

“I do like the conceit of the plum,” he said.

Miles was not quite sure what the phrase meant, but when a Texas oil millionaire came in and stood looking at the picture, Miles decided to try it out on him. He glided up behind the oilman and murmured: “I do like the conceit of the plum, don’t you?”

The oilman swiveled around. “You been drinkin’, boy?” he asked.

The word conceit does not, of course, always mean big-headedness, amour-propre. It can also mean a fanciful thought . John Donne perpetrated a conceit when he suggested that “No man is an island . . . .” A multiple conceit is the phrase “Life is a melancholy flower,” ingeniously corrupted in the children’s song, to the tune of “Frere Jacques”:

Life is butter / Life is butter

Melancholy flower / Melancholy flower

Life is but a melon / Life is but a melon

Cauliflower / Cauliflower.

In art and architecture, there can also be conceits. Giuseppe Archimboldo’s faces, made up of fruit and vegetables, are conceits. Salvador Dali’s melting watches are conceits. The stone folly at Dunmore Park, Stirlingshire, Scotland, in the form of a giant pineapple (you can hire it as a vacation home) is a conceit.

Los Angeles has more than its share of architectural conceits, though that will not long be the case if the present rate of destruction continues. Many of them are illustrated in “California Crazy: Roadside Vernacular Architecture” by Jim Heimann and Rip Georges (Chronicle Books: 1980), including “Tail o’ the Pup,” the hot dog stand in the form of a huge hot dog, which has been due for demolition. (“One 17-foot-long hot dog to go,” as Steve Harvey’s witty but saddening report in The Times put it.)

Even when the conceits are not actually scheduled for destruction, they are often deprived of much of the illusion on which their suspension of our disbelief depends. You need only to add some foreign element, and the trick is exposed. Take “The Darkroom,” the delightful little camera shop on Wilshire near Cloverdale. The building was erected in 1938 (Marcus P. Miller, architect), its facade a pretty good replica of a Leica camera, complete with “lens” and shutter-speed indicator. Now, it has become an Indian restaurant, Sher-e Punjab Cuisine. (The temptation to call it “The Black Hole of Calcutta” after its previous avatar as a darkroom must have been extreme.) Some of the old lettering has already been torn down by the new proprietor, and who can blame him? Why should he continue to advertise cameras and films when his stock in trade is pilaos and biryanis ? The same sort of problem faces owners of large movie houses, now that audiences have dwindled because of competition from TV and videotapes. Commercially, it makes sense to divide an auditorium into three separate theaters, showing different movies at the same time--and if the original interior was a masterpiece of Art Deco, bad luck.

What is needed is some kind of city funding that can be used to protect vulnerable buildings of historic interest. And Mayor Bradley should appoint a superintendent of conservation to keep in touch with local conservation groups whose worthy efforts are at present proving largely ineffectual. (The superb restoration of the Wiltern Theatre is a shining exception; and a special word of gratitude is due to the managers of the Bullocks Wilshire and May Co. stores for knowing when to leave well enough alone.) Los Angeles is a tourist city, and the tourists don’t come merely to see Magic Mountain and Universal Studios--those busy fabricators of conceits. They come to see the old Hollywood, too--the buildings of the ‘20s and ‘30s amid which their screen idols led their un-humdrum lives.

A Punch cartoon pointed up the paradox; it showed a tour guide in London telling a camera-festooned gaggle of Americans: “This is your hotel. It stands on the site of one of the 18th-Century buildings that you have come here to see.” As Jim Heimann, co-author of “California Crazy,” has said: “It’s getting so this city doesn’t look any different from Houston or Dallas.”

Wilshire Boulevard as a whole is one great area of vulnerability and devastation. The old Brown Derby opposite the Ambassador Hotel was carted off earlier this year. The beautiful black-and-gold bank building on Wilshire near La Brea is plastered with “For Sale” notices and has been up for grabs for months. Who is to say what will happen when it finds a taker? Conversion into a massage parlor? Or demolition and replacement by a new building? It was designed by Morgan, Walls & Clements in 1929 and is a reminder of that firm’s glorious Richfield Building, demolished in 1968.

The El Rey Theatre of about 1928, on Wilshire near Burnside, is being converted into a nightclub and is getting a face lift. The new black-and-gold decor is in keeping with the period, but it replaces the original color scheme of this cinema, described by David Gebhard and Robert Winter in the 1985 edition of their “Architecture in Los Angeles” (Gibbs M. Smith Ltd.) as “a small, angular Art Deco Moderne gem with marvelous box office and original signage, a king’s head etched in neon.”

Then there is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art building (Pereira & Associates, 1964). I have great admiration for director Earl A. Powell, and it is inevitable that a man as go-ahead as he should have expansionist ideas, but the big new extension of the museum being built now is a perfect example of spoiling a period building before its period has come to be admired. Even Gebhard and Winter, so alive to the qualities of “Streamline Moderne” architecture of the ‘20s and ‘30s, dismiss the museum building in a curt phrase: “Although salient, the architecture is not much.” But I loved the reticulated roofing, the vertical ribbing and the conceit of the imaginative moat, now gone.

The greatest irony is the new Marie Callender restaurant, which has sprung up on Wilshire in the last year. It is a ludicrous mock-Victorian confection, with Olde Worlde lamps and gleaming brass knobs. It is a pleasant restaurant, with a charming staff. But here we are, building pastiches of 19th-Century architecture, outdoing anything in that line at Universal Studios, while the real period buildings that Los Angeles should be cherishing and preserving--even if a commercial purpose cannot immediately be found for them--are being mutilated.

In the new Marie Callender restaurant is a well-painted mural showing the stretch of Wilshire outside as it was in the 1930s, with enticing shop windows, jazzy sports cars, and women with mad coiffures and madder hats. Unless we are vigilant, that mural may before long be the only evidence to posterity of what between-the-wars Wilshire looked like. The restoration of the Wiltern Theatre shows what can be done. Where there’s a Wilshire, there’s a way.