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A neon sign that has drip, drip, dripped its message—"The Leak Stops Here"—on Los Angeles' Westwood Boulevard for 60 years is coming down next month.
The animated Clayton Plumbers sign is too expensive to maintain, says its owner, Jim Bacon, who bought the building in 1979 and paid $20,000 to restore the 1947 sign six years ago.
"It got too costly to maintain. It was over $1,000 a month," Bacon says. "I finally said, 'No, I'm not going to do it anymore, that's it. I'm taking it down.'"
A crew will remove the sign, which is about 20 feet tall, on April 16, Bacon says.
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The architect Renzo Piano has withdrawn from a project to build an 80-story tower in Boston that would have involved the demolition of a 1960 building by Paul Rudolph that is valued by preservationists, a spokeswoman for Mr. Piano said yesterday. The spokeswoman declined to give a reason for the architect’s decision, but Mr. Piano said earlier this month that he was resisting pressure from the project’s developer, Steven Belkin, to increase the width of the building. Mr. Piano also said at the time that if his project were to proceed, the 13-story Rudolph structure, also known as the Blue Cross/Blue Shield building, would have to be removed to make room for a plaza. Preservationists are battling to save the Rudolph building, whose somewhat ornate exterior ran counter to the then-prevailing Modernist preference for unornamented exterior glass walls. The Boston Landmarks Commission imposed a 90-day delay in the demolition of the Rudolph building on March 13, but Mr. Belkin said that the Boston firm CBT Architects intended to “implement Piano’s design, making appropriate refinements as needed during the design review process.”