Downtown 'sunbathers' were taken away - and not by the artist

Calder Greenwood, one of the artists who stationed some papier-mâché figures in the vacant pit where the state building in Downtown was razed five years ago, says he doesn't know what happened to his sunbathers. They were arranged in the pit Monday evening, he told the LA Times. After bloggers began writing about them, news media like the Times became interested. The figures disappeared after lunch on Wednesday, probably — as Joel Bellman speculated to me that afternoon — rounded up by the federal general services crews who keep an eye on the pit while it sits empty pending construction of a new U.S. courthouse. "Unfortunately, they were removed by someone else," Greenwood said. "Who knows where they are now, most likely at the bottom of a dumpster. But I'm glad people saw them while they were up."