Sunday, June 01, 2008

Confirmed: The Clock Tower is Gone

Truly a sad day for film fans... for the clock tower has burned down.

Clock Tower 2


I took that picture in the spring of 2005, when I was still relatively new to Los Angeles. At the time, I didn't think much of our visit to Universal Studios, but looking back, I consider myself lucky. I had a chance to see not just the Hill Valley Square set, but also the New York City sets I've seen in dozens of classic films, and go through the chesseball King Kong portion of the set. And now they're gone.

The LA Times has a report on what exactly burned; given how large the studios are, this was a fairly small fire. Check out the "Map" popup to get a sense for the layout, and where the fire was. According to another article, it looks like low water pressure stymied early efforts to get the fire out. Universal Studios is built on unincorporated land, so it's part of LA county, but not the city, so has less stringent regulations. I'll bet they're reconsidering those regulations after today.

To be fair, several of these sets have burned before, and been rebuilt; this story lists a few of the more spectacular studio fires, the overwhelming majority of which have taken place at Universal. Seriously, they should take a look at that water pressure.

I bet a "Save the Clock Tower" drive/website is set up in a matter of days. And when it shows up, I'm there.

Here are some fire photos I took today – my lens has a few spots, so forgive the smudges, but there was one hell of a smoke cloud. All were taken from the Herzog & Company office building. Click on any photo to see some more.

Smoke Plume 3


Smoke Cloud and White Balloon


Brett, Trina, & Fire

Fire Under the Mountain

Just over a year ago, I was posting pictures of a fire in Griffith Park.

Now, I'm on the roof of the office building I work in, and the Universal Studios are aflame.

I woke up to find an e-mail from my brother Ian, telling me that there was a fire. A quick trip to the LA Times confirmed it, and a look out at the hill from over our pool showed a huge smoke cloud. Crazy. The ground around our office is covered in pretty large ash, and the smoke cloud is heading northwest for miles.

I don't have any pictures to post just yet - I'm actually working today, and I took the shots with my Digital SLR, so I need to load them into my system a bit differently. But, tonight I'll get them up, and you'll see just how nuts this looks right now.

In the meantime, here's a story from the LA Times with a lot of info. Looks like the King Kong tour/set, and the New York City and New England standing sets are taking the brunt of the fire, as well as an archival vault containing "copies," so it looks like no serious history is going away. The Clock Tower from Back to Future is right in this part of the backlot, though, so who knows if it'll survive this.