(Flickr photo by Scott Lowe -- taken on the Great Wilshire Walk!)
L.A. Times "Then and Now" columnist Cecilia Rasmussen is back on her game exploring some of L.A.'s obscure mysteries, this week answering the question, what's up with those old air raid sirens around town?
First off, she notes that the sirens haven't worked for years -- and the entire system shut down in 1985. Sirens were first installed in 1942, during WWII, but popped up all over the city in the 1950s as the Cold War took off:
After the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in 1949, the United States established the Federal Civil Defense Administration to develop standards for fallout shelters and for warning the public about a nuclear attack. Old sirens were reconditioned and reactivated. The system was expanded with 165 newer models.
Everyone knew the sirens' wail would mean imminent nuclear attack. People were to flee to the nearest fallout shelters in underground garages, basements, film vaults, tunnels and the mile-long subway — Los Angeles' first, built in 1925, with an underground station at 4th and Hill streets.
The subterranean trolley route ran from the Pacific Electric Building at 6th and Main streets to the Belmont Tunnel, where the trolley emerged near the intersection of Beverly and Glendale boulevards. For a while, the tunnel housed 329,700 pounds of soda crackers, intended to keep 69,940 people alive for 14 days in the event of a nuclear war. The crackers were transferred to Utah after the tunnel sprang a leak during heavy rain in 1969.
Later, the Belmont Tunnel was used to store automobiles confiscated in narcotics arrests. Today, much of the old subway is blocked by the foundations of nearby buildings.
By 1980, the federal government had stopped paying for the sirens' upkeep, and then-Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess called them "virtually useless," she writes. Monthly tests ended in January 1985. Since then, the aging structures have sat useless (although many in terrible disrepair have been removed).
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