R.I.P Tower of Wooden Pallets

About 5 months ago I was looking up historic sites in the area when I came across something called The Tower of Wooden Pallets, which was just down the street from me in Van Nuys on Sepulveda and Magnolia. I didn’t have any information on it, other than the fact that it was a LA Cultural Heritage Monument (No. 184) and it was down the street so I decided to take a look. I didn't even know what to look for, I pulled onto Magnolia and saw nothing but a fenced off lot near the 405, guessing that might be it I got out to take a photo but all I could see was what looked like a stack of wood and some old dilapidated homes in this lot. But the lot was HUGE and I couldn’t see shit through the amount of over grown weeds and various wooden pallets blocking my view. I noticed a huge wire-cut hole in the fence but I also noticed some tire tracks, a path, and some orange cones among other things that led me to believe someone might be back there and I might be shot if I were to trespass. I will tell you something if you don’t make fun of me. Thanks. I waited around for about 15 minutes trying to get the balls to get in there but once I convinced myself there wasn’t anybody working back there I become paranoid about an imagined delusional squatter-schizophrenic-junky that lived back there and would stab me with his hypodermic needles when I invaded his “home”. I said don’t make fun!

Frightened for my life I left and came back about 3 weeks later no longer scared of the imagined maniac (there are a lot of crazy maniacs in this city though) and decided to check it out, two cameras in hand. When I got there the hole in the fence had been conspicuously closed up. I found another smaller hole further down and entered the property. Truly an amazing site, right in the city was what looked like an abandoned estate in rural Oklahoma. Two homes caved in on themselves, one of which was two stories but it was not structurally sound enough to go to the second floor, 3 to 4 sheds filled with books and cans of food literally from the 1950s. There was a bus and about 5 cars on the lot. I spent hours taking photos here but the center piece (although not the most interesting thing there) was The Tower of Wooden Pallets. Shown above it was made of pallets from Schlitz Brewing and was around 20 feet tall. I got an amazing roll of about 25 pictures from the site but I don’t have them loaded onto the computer yet I will post them when I do. I took some old film strips, a Christmas card, some photo negatives, magazines, and books from the property as mementos. In one of the sheds, the floor was about a foot high in old records, books, and magazines.

Unbeknownst to me, this site was in the planning phase of being torn down for an apartment building, and although it’s status as a historic cultural landmark was questionable at best, as it was basically a heap of shit, as I took the photos I knew I had no reason to ever come back, but just to document the existence of something that you “Don‘t see everyday“. Within the past couple of months I heard it was torn down and it made me a wee bit sad, only because I experienced it in it‘s lonely neglected state but I did capture its last moments. A time warp, a representation of the existence of an obvious eccentric, but it was it’s time. R.I.P.

More information about The Tower of Wooden Pallets.