Sunset and Vine Standoff

I'm sorry to say that I had never heard of the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters Museum, which (along with the Society of American Magicians' Hall of Fame and Magic Museum) is apparently housed in the basement of the Washington Mutual Bank at the corner of Sunset and Vine.

Not that I could actually visit it anytime soon: According to today's L.A. Times, a fire in an underground power chamber last December spewed smoke into the bank, "coating its money vaults, tellers' counters and customer areas with toxic PCBs" -- as well as the two museums.

Now the museums say they don't have the money to clean up their spaces -- and Washington Mutual says it can't renovate and reopen the bank branch until the magicians and broadcasters vacate. A stand-off has ensued.

I wish I had heard about the mini broadcasting museum sooner. It sounds up my geeky alley:


We have thousands of transcriptions and tapes of old radio shows and old radios and technical equipment dating back to the 1920s. We have examples of the first TVs, thousands of old scripts, a huge collection of antique microphones, including Bing Crosby's personal mike — the one he felt made him sound so good," said Martin Halperin, a vice president of the 500-member broadcasters group.

"These are one-of-a-kind things. They're irreplaceable. We have broadcasters oral histories, the entire KFI scrapbook that traces that station back to its start. We have the original SigAlert radio. We've duplicated a complete working studio down there, with turntables and equipment. We have the very first audiotape machine — the Ampex 200, serial number 1."

The Washington Mutual bank (formerly the Home Savings & Loan) sits on the historic site of NBC's one-time Streamline Moderne-styled "Radio City" Hollywood studios:



Sadly, the building was razed in 1964, after NBC moved to Burbank.