Content area
Full Text
For safety reasons, outsiders rarely are allowed to enter the Vernon Light and Power plant. Even Hollywood directors, dreaming of chase scenes atop its five enormous generators or in its Art Deco control room, are denied permission to film in the 1932 plant.
This Sunday, however, a caravan of tourists will descend on the East 50th Street facility and many other industrial sites in Los Angeles County--an unusual experience for both the visitors and the visited.
The Los Angeles Conservancy, which has led previous tours of historic houses, landmark movie palaces and grand civic structures, is sponsoring Sunday's survey of meatpacking plants, produce warehouses and factories.
Organizers for the preservation society plan to point out examples of architectural beauty--and sad decay--in the often-gritty landscape within a few miles of the Los Angeles River, from Eagle Rock to Commerce. They also hope to promote understanding of how important a vibrant industrial sector is to the entire Los Angeles region.
"This is long overdue," said Pete Moruzzi, a conservancy activist who is chairing the tour. "The industrial backbone of Los Angeles is what made all the rest possible. So we want to look at where people work, how they work and what are the buildings they work in."
The tour route of "Cruising Industrial Los Angeles" is diverse.
In some spots, factories and warehouses are vibrant enterprises, filled with employees sewing, welding, driving forklifts or sorting vegetables. In other spots, abandoned and vandalized buildings symbolize Southern California's alarming loss of heavy manufacturing jobs in the past two decades. In yet other locations, restored and recycled structures display new life: the old Pabst beer brewery in Lincoln Heights turned into an artists' colony, the Assyrian-style Uniroyal tire factory in Commerce that is now the Citadel shopping center.