The L.A. That Never Was

Tourists mob the Mann’s Chinese Theatre, Rodeo Drive, Disneyland. But why don’t they visit the handsome Frank Lloyd Wright-designed theater that sits beside the lake on Vermont between Sunset and Hollywood? Why do they avoid the indoor skiing found at “Ski-Land, The Hollow Mountain�? And when will they discover the art museum in Griffith Park, with its full-scale replica of the Parthenon, displayed in a gargantuan hall 750 feet long and 200 feet wide? Never, that’s when. Those three projects and dozens more, some loony, some visionary, exist only in The Big File of Unrealized Ideas. And they’re just the first stops on a tour of the L.A. That Never Was. . . .

Visitors would arrive at any of three unbuilt airports: the one that changed Elysian Park from urban playground to busy landing strip; the Los Angeles River airport, a three-mile- long platform over the perennially abused waterway; or the ambitious floating airport, five miles off the coast, brainchild of the late ‘60s. In Neverwasville, we get around on one of the most extensive, well-designed, never-funded mass transit rail systems in the country. Proposed in 1925, it was supposed to include nearly 255 miles of elevated tracks and more than 43 miles of subways, mainly downtown. Ah, there would have been much to admire there. No one would have wanted to miss Lloyd Wright’s towering Catholic Cathedral. With its four 800- foot crosses lit nightly, they couldn’t have if they tried. The artificial waterfall that might have dropped from Hill Street down to Broadway never had its day. Nor did the sobering Cold War-era bomb shelter, west of City Hall, an underground refuge for 90,000 citizens in case of nuclear war and a 5,600 car garage on days without an atomic cataclysm. Above all, the unbuilt civic center, with its stately plan of public squares and submerged avenues, stands, or doesn’t stand, as the epitome of our lost future. It’s the centerpiece of a 1925 proposal that also envisioned Bunker Hill reborn as pastoral Las Alturas, a downtown oasis as long as the Mall in D.C.

For the visitor who finds all the good design in the Downtown That Never Was too tame, the Monorail That Never Was offers escape to Long Beach. Here would have been the longest pier in the world, a mile out and a mile across, a legacy of the never-left-the-drawing-board 1967 California World’s Fair. Sightseers with binoculars would have been able to walk on the pier, look west and groove on the atomic-powered desalination plant on Catalina, which wasn’t built either.

Any tour of the L.A. That Never Was has to include the tallest building in the world, not brought to us by Donald Trump at the site of the Ambassador Hotel. Also stop by Sunset and Vine, where British-born Mayan-revival architect Robert Stacy-Judd designed a monumentally kitschy Mayan hotel, monolithic 13-story Mayan department store and a domed Mayan mega-auditorium with 23,000 seats. Then head a short distance west to Runyan Canyon Park, where you won’t see anything that looks like four flying saucers parked on a cliff, one with cascades of water dropping off its disc-like edge. Frank Lloyd Wright’s plan for a futuristic resort in the Hollywood Hills never got off the ground. But don’t leave yet. Not before driving down Wilshire Boulevard, a grand parkway lined with single-family homes. Take a ride on the Veloway, the fantastic unbuilt West L.A. freeway for bicycles only. Then head up to Malibu and reminisce at the Bob Hope Museum. It’s right next to Pepperdine. You can’t miss it. Or rather, you can’t find it. Because it never was.