Andy Chase

Our apartment building and its identical twin next door have been getting repainted for the last month and a half. This is mostly a good thing; the color scheme since we moved in has been a lovely battleship grey with dusty blue-grey trim and doors. The new color scheme is white with dark green trim, and it certainly does lighten things up a bit.

Along with the paint, though, have come a couple of less graceful renovations. The first was the installation of some new light fixtures outside everybody's apartment doors. The old ones had become mismatched over the years, but the original fixtures had these great cone-shaped shades and complemented the building's late-40's architecture perfectly. We were lucky enough to have one of these outside our door.

The new light fixtures are these ugly, oval things that more closely resemble drop-lights than residential fixtures. And because they're using those newfangled compact fluorescent bulbs, it's like having a searchlight outside your door.

I don't know what happened to the fixtures they took down; I'm assuming they were thrown away, but I saw no sign of them in the dumpster the night after they made the switch.

The other clumsy renovation was the replacement of our mailboxes. Now, these definitely needed some kind of improvement; they were so small that anything more than a couple of bills and a few circulars would result in half of your mail getting ripped as you yanked it out of the box. But what the contractors did was terrible; they ripped out the old mailboxes, slapped pieces of plywood over the recess in the wall, and mounted these new aluminum boxes on top of the plywood without bothering to refinish the wall at the gaps around the edges of the plywood. So where there were once nicely recessed mailboxes that matched the style of the building, there are now these big, shiny boxes sticking about 12 inches out of the wall, with ugly gaps on either side where the plywood doesn't quite cover the hole where the old mailboxes used to be.

The most ominous change that I noticed happened to the other building, which got repainted first. High up on that building's facade was a sign labeling the building as "Sherman House" - similar to the sign on our own building reading "Sherman Terrace". Both signs were rendered in a classic postwar pseudo-script of the type which graces older signs and buildings all over L.A. About a week after they finished painting the walls and trim of Sherman House I noticed that the sign was gone. I held onto hopes that they would repaint the sign and put it back up, but as the weeks went by it seemed pretty clear that the sign was gone for good.

As they began to paint our building, I kept a close eye on the "Sherman Terrace" sign. One morning last week I noticed the sign laying in an unceremonious pile in front of the building; it had been taken down to facilitate repainting the front wall. It lay there up until yesterday afternoon, when I saw one of the painters pile it into a shopping cart and wheel it back behind the building. I didn't follow him, and thought perhaps they were going to repaint this one, since it was lower on the facade than the "Sherman House" sign and thus easier to put back up.

Nothing doing. I spotted the sign in the dumpster last night. My immediate inclination when I saw the sign sitting on the ground last week was to grab it then and save it from its brother's fate, but I held off lest they really did put it back up. Now that it was in the dumpster it was fair game, and I resolved to save it as soon as it was light out again. It's currently sitting under a tarp in front of our parking space in the car port, awaiting some minor repairs and a couple of coats of Dutch Boy Molokai Blue paint.

Aside from the obvious cool/kitsch factor of having this sign hanging on a wall somewhere in the apartment, the notion of saving the sign from some anonymous landfill took on the importance of a holy mission as soon as I noticed the other sign missing. I am haunted by my experience with the Sundown Drive-In Theatre, and although I could never have saved a part of the Sundown, I could save the sign from our own apartment building.

I discovered the Sundown quite by accident in September of 1998. I had to run an errand in Whittier, A city I had never been to before and wouldn't have much reason to visit again... I drove east around a curve on Washington Boulevard and came face to face with the giant screen of the Sundown. It was a beautiful old place, built in 1954 and closed as a drive-in in 1990. After two years in Los Angeles, I had driven by my fair share of 50's architecture, but the Sundown was the best-preserved example of high-1950's exuberance I had ever seen. By the time I saw it, it wasn't even being used as a swap meet any more, although I didn't know it at the time. I managed to return to the Sundown once more that month to take some photos with my low-quality, blurry Casio QV-100 digital camera.

At some point during the year that followed, those pictures got lost due to a hard drive failure (or possibly sheer file mismanagement.) I'd had my excellent Olympus digicam for about a month when I decided to take a Sunday afternoon and drive down to Whittier to get some proper photos of the old drive-in. Before I left I did a quick internet search on the Sundown to find an address to feed to Mapquest, and that was how I found out the Sundown had been torn down 8 months earlier. I still get crestfallen just thinking about it. So profound was the impression the Sundown made on me that for a while I named my erstwhile freelance pseudo-business and web site after it. I eventually dropped it, because the best domain I could get was sundown-media.com, which was too close to sundownmedia.com (An adult web site company, as it turns out) for comfort. And the domain I really wanted was sundown.com, which somebody in Ohio has been squatting on for years now.

The loss of the Sundown Drive-in is a little easier to bear after salvaging a piece of Sherman Terrace. Like some twisted variant of Gift of the Magi, it was a merry Christmas morning indeed. I saved a bit of classic Los Angeles and picked up a one of a kind wall decoration at the same time.