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One 17-foot-long hot dog-to go.
That was the disturbing order that Eddie Blake received the other day at his Tail o' the Pup, the 39-year-old stand shaped liked a king-size hot dog (with mustard).
Blake, who leases the location on La Cienega Boulevard, was told he must move his cement bun by Sept. 1 so the site can become part of a development consisting of an 11-story hotel and a second Ma Maison restaurant, which will be shaped like an expensive French restaurant.
Stationed inside his steel reinforced frankfurter the other day, Blake admitted this is the biggest crisis ever faced by the Pup-bigger even than the time a woman walked head-first into the protruding dog and sued (she won an undisclosed sum).
`Save the Hot Dog'
"People tell me, `Let's save the landmark. Let's save the hot dog,' " said Blake. "I hope I can-if not here, then I hope I can move it somewhere else."
If the Pup is unable to find a home, Southern California will have lost one of the last survivors of an era when merchants tried to catch the eye of motorists with buildings shaped like doughnuts, frogs (Toed Inn), igloos, farm animals (the Pig Cafe offered service through its snout), shoes, coffee cups, jails, pumpkins, dogs, cameras and zeppelins.
It was a time, restaurateur Arthur Somborn noted in 1926, when you could sell food out of a hat. Some friends doubted him, so Somborn built the Original Brown Derby.
This style-using a structure as its own sign-became known as "programmatic architecture."
The slogans were unusual too. Arthur Whizin's Chili Bowls (est. 1933) advertised: "We cook our beans backwards-you only get the hiccups."
Derby Doffed
Now, the Derby, the landmark that symbolized Los Angeles' anything-goes style, is gone, though the hat itself survives. One of Whizin's bowls is a body shop; another is a bar.
Less enduring were such now-vanished wonders as Sanderson's Hosiery in West Los Angeles (topped by a 35-foot-tall, nyloned left leg), the Mother Goose Pantry in Pasadena (customers ate inside what must have been a size 2,000 shoe), and the Dugout restaurant in Montebello (whose warlike ambiance was reflected in sandbags circling the exterior and a World War I-vintage plane sticking out of the roof).