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Franklin Avenue has begun a fun blog exercise. He's seeking nominations for the treasures of Los Angeles that are getting up in years and will be missed when if they go. To get it started, he nominates KTLA newsman Stan Chambers, the Arroyo Seco Parkway (better known as the Pasadena Freeway), the Radio Walk stairway in Los Feliz, the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro and See's Candies (with a photo of Mary See herself.) The Los Angeles Aqueduct is also on the list, but unless Mike has some insider info, I doubt it's going anywhere very soon. Could get awfully thirsty around here if it did vanish.
William Mulholland's 1913 engineering marvel still does what it was designed for, and became controversial for doing. It drains the Owens River of millions of gallons of Sierra water that used to sustain trees, crops and a large lake in the now desert-like Owens Valley. The water flows 233 miles to the head of the San Fernando Valley by gravity, siphoning over mountains and requiring no pumps. California's other big water projects are huge electricity guzzlers, but the water in Mulholland's aqueduct (and a more recent parallel aqueduct) generates power as it plummets toward Los Angeles in open channels and through tunnels and giant pipes like the one shown. Notice the man leaning against the pipe.
Meanwhile: Franklin Avenue's sister site Ambassador's Last Stand has demolition photos from this week showing the exposed wall of the former Sammy Davis Jr. suite above the Cocoanut Grove. Davis took over the Grove around 1970, gutted all the classic stylings from the nightclub's heyday, and reopened it as a Vegas-style showroom called the Now Grove. Guess what—it didn't work. People still stayed away.