Daffodil “Down and Art”
by Pasadena Adjacent
Approximately 200 air raid sirens were constructed to serve Los Angeles county during WWII and on through the cold war. As we continued to practice “duck, cover and roll” our city continued to test the sirens on the last Friday of every month. The city discontinued the practice sometime in the 80’s but chose not to dismantle the sirens because of cost. Artist Michael Tansey managed to symbolically beat swords into plowshares by visually transforming one of the sirens into a yellow daffodil (I plagiarized that last sentence). “Daffodil Metamorphosis” had a good run as a gateway marker to the South Park area of downtown until it got in the way of expansion (first photo). In 2007 it was relocated. Now it’s hidden among trees in a burm next to a Pasadena Freeway on-ramp. You won’t notice it
Here’s a recording of the Chrysler air raide siren (it starts slow but it eventually builds up a head of steam). The Chrysler “Big Green” served as our cities biggest sirens; atop city hall and Mount Wilson(?).
Variations on the suburban model
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Pasadena Adjacent 
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On April 10, 2003, David Stall of the tiny town of Fayetteville Texas purchased the Chrysler “Victory” Air Raid Siren seen in the post. The Michigan factory that made the Sirens called them Big Red. This particular one was green; the standard paint color found on equipment owned by Los Angeles County. The technology used on the air raid sirens came out of the laboratories of Bell Telephone. I can’t help but think these smaller suburban models were somehow hooked into the telephone lines. They put the monster sirens on top of Mount Wilson (I think) and downtown buildings. They could be heard for a distance of five miles.
In the adjacents, we have a mini screamer near Ave 64 on Meridian. I’ve also seen one on the eastern border of Eagle Rock on Colorado Blvd. The siren in the post is near LAX in Westchester.
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Your siren sounds less frightening than ours in Israel. Each of these photos is fascinating.
P.S. There is an answer now to your good fill-in-the-blanks comment. Thanks for the question.
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Speaking of warning signals, the television one baffles me. It sounds like a dying aardvark (Ok, that’s just a guess), but it wheezes: eeeh-eeeh-eeeh, then has some primitive roll at the top of the screen. To prepare us for mass destruction, this the best they can do? I’d prefer Veloso.
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Damn, what a great find and post!! Had no clue about that!! Thanks.
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Now folks are probably going to demand giant flowers instead of palm or pine trees for their cell towers.
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Love the giant flower. I totally agree with Jean. I demand a giant flower for my cell tower.
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I adore the 1st photo. With a vintage 76 ad. A felled daffodil. How great is that?
Now that you mention it, I do recall the siren in the 70’s in HP. It’s sort of mixed up with walking home from LB Jr. High from summer school, the Watergate hearings on TV and the heat in the aptmt.
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I’m hoping someone out there can tell me where they’ve seen a Los Angeles air raid siren. I’ve identified four out of 200…anymore?
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Dina: Yup, I bet it’s a pussy cat in comparison but you have to admit, our siren “once upon a time” put out a pretty good roar
AH: Remember computer dial up? it’s kissing cousin. I had to look up Veloso.. the singer, not the tennis player yes/no?
Above: I bet you have one in your “adjacent”
Jean: Wouldn’t that be great! Giant Gladiolas dotting the landscape…
Margaret: It would be like entering Alice in Wonderland. Lets draw up a petition and present it to the city
Tash: Do you remember them being tested? I don’t.
That summer 73/74 is when I got my horse I kept at the stables off York. My first year of High School, buses, Watergate, Patty Hearst and horses, horses, horses.
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It’s interesting when public art gets installed during one phase of ‘progress’ then moved during the next phase to a place where it is less visible. That’s got to be a major bummer for both the artist and the people who regard the work as one of the fixtures of their neighborhood.
I haven’t seen any other sirens, but I bet The Scout has. I’ll ask him.
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I wish they would get this creative with cell phone towers!
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Kelly: I have a unwritten rule that after the first year I don’t return to a site. There is a militaristic chain of command running through the erection of a civic structure and the art/artist is on the low end of it.
Ann: They have!
http://www.utilitycamo.com/sites.html
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I’ll look on my way DT today and if this post is still up in a day or two I’ll tell you a good story about the air-raid sirens in San Francisco still being tested in the early 90’s.
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something unusual and different :)
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I have a list with the locations of all the sirens somewhere on my computer, but refuse to read it, preferring to find them by chance. This is what I have found so far:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&t=h&msa=0&msid=109113074798981062295.00046243a98bb67245c71&ll=34.042579,-118.307562&spn=0.769245,1.553192&z=10
I also have taken photos of each one I have found. I have published a few here:
That daffodil one was in a siren-dense area. There still stands one down the street from there on the other side of the 110 next to the ARCO gas station. And there was another one just east of there on Grand that was cleared when high-rise condos went in.
The other siren you show, looks like the one behind Optimist High School on Figueroa. Others in the area are Gavanza park (headless, just the pole), Longfellow, Avaca/Yosemite-90041, Colorado/Monte Bonito-90041.
Oh, and from what I understand, there was a Big Green diesel siren on top of Montecito Heights. (Where the radio towers are today?)
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Sorry I haven’t seen any sirens. What’s wrong with fleas or other giant insects?
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Mid-Town-G: The post will be around proceeded by newer posts. Check out Waltrr’s comment.
Deepak: My blogs a mixed bag. Sometimes serious, sometimes stupid and sometimes factually wrong; but hopefully amusing. Nice to have you visit again.
Waltrr: You’re my hero. I knew someone out there would be a fan of this sort of thing but who knew that someone was so near! thank you so much…this is great. Montecito Heights? no kidding
Chris: I’ll bring that up with City Council
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Cool post. I love this kind of thing, and I have my own little anecdote about cold war sirens. In San Francisco I am grade school adjacent, and up until 2003 this particular school tested its siren for a full three minutes at noon every Tuesday without fail. Whenever I happened to be at home working, I’d look out at the 5- to 10-year-olds out on the playground for recess screaming and I’d see them covering their ears and pretty much writhing in pain because of it. I myself had to cover my ears from inside my home, and I can only imagine what it was like to be directly under the blast. I don’t know if this had anything to do with it, but it stopped shortly after I had a conversation with the principal of the school where I mentioned that I was surprised they hadn’t been slapped with a lawsuit for causing deafness in members of their student body. Now there is one much quieter up and down blast of the siren, and then a recorded voice comes on the loud speaker and explains that this is only a test. It’s still annoying, but at least I don’t have to relocate to the other end of the house when it goes off.
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Bokchoyboy: Your probably adjacent to a public school. I wonder if that’s the only siren left running on the Pacific coast and why. Great share. Did you check out Waltrrs links?
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Sorry for the delay, I took a long break from surfing the Web. You all seem to have moved on from this subject, but this is the result of a quick search, it seems SF is full of sirens. My neighboring school is definitely a public one.
http://www.sfgov.org/site/acs_index.asp?id=104606
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