#la landmarks

CultureLA: The Hollywood Sign

The iconic roadside attraction/hot-dog shaped hot dog stand, Tail O’ the Pup reopened at this new location in 2022. Tail O’ the Pup first opened in 1946 at 311 La Cienage Blvd, moved to San Vicente Blvd, in the 1980s, and closed in 2005.

Reborn in the new location, the Pup also includes a two-story dining room that has the look and feel of a 1950’s diner, minus the jukebox. There’s also a large outdoor covered patio. The menu includes combos, hot dogs (you can customize them with add-ons), corn dogs, burgers, chili, fries, onion rings, shakes, and floats. I noticed some gluten-free and vegan options (e.g., vegan hot dog, vegan chili). A plain hot dog is $6.95.

Place your order at the hot dog building and get a number. Go inside the dining room to pick up your order, including your fountain drinks (Pepsi Spire machines).

Combo #4 – 1946 pup, fries, & a medium drink with free refills for $14.45 (upgrade to onion rings for $0.99). A 1946 pup is a split and grilled pup, toasted bun, grilled onions, and house mustard. If the bun was toasted, I could not tell. It was very soft, like a steamed bun. The bun was fresh though. The hot dog had a nice snappy quality though it was on the salty side. There wasn’t a lot of grilled onions but there was a lot of mustard (a strong whole grain mustard). I thought it was good but the bun wasn’t toasted, there weren’t enough onions, and almost everything costs extra (there are no free toppings like relish, raw onions), or a pickle spear. The onion rings were good – the batter was crunchy and not that thick.

The hot dogs are 100% beef with no fillers and no nitrates

While you wait for your order, check out the photos of celebrities at The Pup and movies and TV shows that have featured The Pup. There’s also a Gary Baseman illustration of Tail O’ the Pup. They play 80’s music

Happy hour is every day from 6 PM – 9 PM with beer specials. Parking is very challenging in the area.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Pan Pacific Auditorium, Los Angeles, California.  Glory, fading, fire, rebirth as the entrance to California Adventure.

Pan Pacific Park on Beverly Boulevard was the location of the Pan Pacific Auditorium, which is the exterior of the club in the film Xanadu starring Olivia Newton-John, Michael Beck and the late, great Gene Kelly. Built in 1935, the auditorium played host to wrestling, the ice capades, the Los Angeles Home Show, and concerts by Elvis and Leopold Stowkowski.  JFK spoke there three days before his election.

A rather pedestrian auditorium inside by all reports, the front was once one of the finest examples of the Streamline Moderne style in the country. Closed down in 1972 when the Los Angeles Convention Center opened in downtown Los Angeles, there was almost immediately talk of restoring the place to some community use, but it stood vacant, slowly disintegrating and providing a home for transients. In the meantime, the parking lot, which was of considerable size, was tagged to become a park, so the problem of where you'd put people if the building was refurbished kept stymying progress.

Named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, it's next to last hurrah really was as the exterior in Xanadu. In 1983, there was a fire which damaged the northern in and on May 24, 1989, an arson fire gutted the structure and for one last time, Los Angeles' attention was focused on the Pan Pacific as it went up in flames, coverage dominating the airwaves that morning.

I have spent the last two hours poring over old historical landmarks in Los Angeles, searching for the perfect building to commit my crime.

And I certainly hope it is not unappreciated by readers, either.

Oh yeah, I could easily make up a place or even just throw a famous LA landmark out there and use it, but I'm going for authenticity here.  Which I usually try to do in my work, despite the major bitchfest that erupted over one person's dislike of my using the occasional modern slang term in my stories, thusly rendering them totally historically inaccurate, thereby banishing me to the "Bad Writers Club" for-EVER and EVER and EVER, in that person's eyes.  Of course, I had good reason to use modern slang here and there, for one thing I do it to connect to modern readers, and for another, I'm not spending two frickin' hours of my valuable time, nitpickily researching out the itty bitty historical details like slang terms common to that time or what the exact paint name was on an exact year/make/model of a car, just so I'm 'historically accurate' in all angles of my work.  And I've read shit where every historical detail was painstakingly correct, and ya know what?  It didn't really add to my enjoyment of the story, for I often felt that focusing on those kinds of minor details and making them a bigger part in the story than they should be detracted from the overall message of the piece, not to mention the plot.  Gets kind of annoying to have a constant history lesson running as you read, really.

Anyway, I digress.  So I have spent the goodly portion of my evening finding out what hotels/apartment buildings were in LA for my story, learning quite a bit about the historic architecture and backrounds of places like the Biltmore and the Argyle, not to mention the Chateau Marmont (aka, where John Belushi died).  I thought of using the Ambassador Hotel, since torn down, but it didn't fit my requirements, which was it had to be tall and have balconies.  I kept narrowing places down, trying to keep the place within Adam-12's patrol district while also meeting my requirements, and finally I settled on the Sunset Towers.  It's a lovely old place and fits my needs nicely, and BIG PLUS...it was used in a couple of Raymond Chandler's stories/novels/films, which is pretty goddamned cool to me, 'cuz it ties in well with the noir-fic I'm working on as kind of an homage to the hardboiled genre I love so much.

Which may be a hit or a disaster, I dunno yet.  It's still quite fluid in my mind and I've had a hard time getting the beginning going, because it's been awhile...like several years...since I've read my Chandler and Hammett novels, so I'm rereading them to refresh my memory on how noir reads and sounds.  And it's a bit hard to translate the police procedural into that genre, as it works better with a lone-wolf persona, but Pete Malloy actually fits that well, despite his being a cop, so it's just a matter of me kind of playing loose and fast with the procedural crap in order to tell what I THINK/HOPE/PRAY is going to be a good story once it's done.  I'd originally planned it as a one-scene oneshot around Pete and a femme fatale, but now it's expanded into a fuller piece that I will likely end up chapterizing once it's done.  Which I will make SURE it's done when I post, 'cuz yeah, I'm not opening up another chapter fic and then lose my muse on it and leave it hanging on the site, unfinished.  So it'll be done before I begin to post it.

The Details:

805 West Manchester Avenue Inglewood, CA 90301 Phone: (310) 645-4707 4am-12am Every Day

The Giant Donut in the Sky

Los Angeles has a handful of famous landmarks. There is the US Bank building, which is probably most famous for being blown-up by aliens in Independence Day. There is the Capitol Records building, which is torandoed to smithereens in The Day After Tomorrow (people love to destroy Los Angeles in movies for some reason). There is the Hollywood sign, of course, the blue lifeguard stands, the Santa Monica Pier, and Randy's Donuts. This iconic building, like The Brown Derby and Tail O' The Pup, was built to catch the eyes of passers-by. I don't often find myself fiending for donuts unless I'm near LAX on the 405. And then, like a sweet, doughy beacon, Randy's calls to me.

This donut shop doesn’t make the very best in town. That honor remains with Bob’s Coffee & Doughnuts at the Farmer’s Market. But Randy’s makes very good donuts — much better than most places. I’m still fascinated by this health-nut-dominated city’s obsession with donuts, but that’s a mystery for the Hardy Boys, I suppose. Check out Randy’s exhaustive photo gallery of their sweet treats.

This is a great place to take a visiting, out-of-town guest. Once you are there, they will realize that they have seen this Los Angeles landmark in countless movies and television shows, including Iron Man 2. And if you have never been, don’t delay. Make the trip today or this weekend. Remember to always be a tourist in your own city. Your reward, this time, is a chocolate long john.

Click on the image below to see the entire Randy's Donuts set on Flickr.

Map To Location: