More Los Angeles sites, November 10-11, 2008

For the first time in a few years, I was able to convince my employers to send me to the USENIX Association's annual Large Installation System Administration conference, this year held (for the last time) at the Town & Country Resort and Conference Center in sunny San Diego, California. It was my third visit to the T&C—all three times for the same conference. LISA 2005, where I presented an invited talk, also led to a photo gallery. I knew I didn't want to take any of the tutorials being offered this time, so some towering was clearly in order.

For some reason, whenever I go to San Diego, I always end up doing my towering in Los Angeles. This has the somewhat perverse result that, even though I've spent much more time in San Diego County than I have anywhere else in California, I've still never seen either Mt. Soledad or Mother Miguel Mountain, the two most important multi-station sites in the San Diego area. This trip would be no exception: I arrived at San Diego's Lindbergh Field on the evening of November 9th, picked up my rental car, and immediately headed north to Anaheim for my first hotel of the trip.

I had some more specific reasons to want to go to L.A. this trip. For starters, Paul Sakrison, who had left CBS some months ago in a round of budget cuts, had landed at the ~~Anaheim~~ ~~California~~ L.A. Angels' radio operation, which includes sports-talker KLAA (830 Orange), a very recent drop-in. There was also the newly-completed KFI tower rebuild (the old tower having been lost in a December, 2004, plane crash—see my 2004 L.A. gallery for some photos of the aftermath). There was also the impending retirement of Jay Leno as host of NBC's Tonight Show, and with it the impending relocation of NBC local and national television production from their aging Burbank home to new digs in Universal City, made possible by GE's acquisition of Universal from Vivendi a few years ago. Finally, I had been compiling a list of old L.A. studio locations, with the help of David Gleason's archive of Broadcasting Yearbook scans from the 1940s through the early '70s, and I was interested in seeing some of these addresses to see what was there now.

The Tonight Show taping came to dominate the schedule. NBC does offer tickets by mail, but they distribute more tickets than there are seats available in Studio 3, the smaller studio Leno moved into several years ago. (Tonight under Johnny Carson had been taped in the cavernous Studio 1, where Access Hollywood is now produced.) Because tapings are oversubscribed, prospective audience members must spend at least an hour and a half—longer for better seats—in line outside the door in order to have a chance of seeing the show. (The line starts forming even earlier for high-interest and high-security guests, like presidential candidates.) I had chosen the hotel in Anaheim principally because I wanted to get the KLAA tour, and I didn't want to be driving to the other side of the L.A. basin late at night after a long airplane trip. Unfortunately, if I was to be in Burbank by noon (to get the NBC studio tour and still be in time for the Tonight Show line, I would have to leave Anaheim no later than 11 AM, and Paul's schedule didn't allow visitors until some time in the afternoon. Scratch KLAA.

Much more tragically, John Paoli—KFI's chief engineer and one of the most respected people in the L.A. engineering community—died suddenly in October. While I knew there was someone at Clear Channel who would be able to give the KFI tour, that project was very much John's baby, and it didn't feel right to be asking for tours so soon after his passing. KFI would still be there next time, and I could wait to see it until whenever “next time” would be.

When I travel to the west coast, I generally try to maintain as much of an Eastern Time schedule as I can. This usually works out for the first three or four days, but then I get increasingly tired and can't wake up as early. Since I had arranged the radio part of my trip to come first—with the help of the Veterans' Day holiday I only needed to take one vacation day—I would at least be able to see something on Monday morning before heading up to Burbank. I spent quite a bit of time staring at my maps before deciding on a plan that would take me south all the way down to Newport Beach, where I could see one of the two LPFMs that have (amazingly) been squeezed in to market #2, and then up the 405 to Signal Hill and the Long Beach stations. From there I had any number of options depending on time and traffic to get up to Burbank, but I ended up heading straight up the Harbor Freeway to the Hollywood Freeway, then (in a roundabout manner) heading east on the Ventura Freeway to the intersection of Olive Ave. and Alameda Ave., where I ate two hot dogs at the famous Wienerschnitzel across the street from NBC before taking the 1 PM studio tour and then getting in the Tonight Show line.

I countinued towering on Tuesday, visiting sites in Burbank and Glendale (including a return trip to 3000 W. Alameda and 3400 W. Olive) before having lunch with long-time L.A. engineer Burt Weiner. After lunch, I stopped by the historic Glendale Hotel, home for many years to the studios and transmitter site of KIEV (870 Glendale, now KRLA), before locating the station's current Eagle Rock transmitter site. Given the already-late hour, I then headed down to the Baldwin Hills area to see the 1330 and 1460 sites, along with a few nondescript class-A FMs, making a few studio stops in Culver City along the way. (All those other old studio sites? Maybe next time.)

Post Script: On December 9, 2008, NBC announced that Jay Leno would not be leaving after all. He will develop a new show, to air weeknights at 10 PM starting in the Fall of 2009, keeping most of his old staff and (notably) his old studio, at least for the time being.