Farewell to the Farting Muffler Shop, an East Los Angeles folk art landmark gone like the wind
Gentle reader,
It was probably the weirdest service business in East Los Angeles: a sprawling combination auto bay, antique collection and outsider art gallery, occupying the prominent northeast corner of Whittier Boulevard and Record Avenue, just west of the Catholic Calvary and Jewish Home of Peace cemeteries.
If you’re partial to blue and yellow stripes, you would find a lot to love in El Pedorrero, aka The Farting Muffler Shop.
The burly proprietor was named Guillermo “Bill” London or Londono, but he also went by Alcapone. Yes, his shop repaired noisy mufflers, but over the years this service became incidental to Bill’s inspired expansion into folk art installation. The entire corner was an integrated work of art.
In the 1986 Best of Los Angeles issue, L.A. Weekly declared El Pedorrero to be The Best Muffler Shop for Freudians, a cheap place to get your car fixed while enjoying the strange and constantly changing op-art patterns, 16mm films in the yard and Bill’s fart noises. And in 2005, artist Rubén Ortiz Torres brought a tour group from Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Hollywood to explore every corner of the space, including the usually inaccessible basement sculpture garden.
We spent time in the shop on several occasions a little more than a decade ago. Our Spanish isn’t great, and Bill spoke a sort of visionary language, from which we pieced together the message that the entire place was vibrating at a frequency that only automobiles could understand, the particular colors and rhythms a form of mechanical language meant not for humans, but for the traffic zooming by on Whittier Boulevard.
But what was the message for the cars, and did they answer back? Blue and Yellow were the automotive equivalent of Black and White, Dark and Light, Evil and Good, the prime duality. It was Zoroastrianism, for machines.
There was a lot going on, visually and conceptually. On our last visit, as Bill spoke in circles, it started to feel like we were inside a bee hive, loud and hot and humming. Bill noticed we’d become overwhelmed, apparently a regular occurrence, and suggested we go next door to see his art gallery.
This was a setback warehouse, decorated with an asymmetrical mix of signage, windows and polka dots, in colors not meant to attract the attention of cars. Simple labels described the human serving businesses that Bill wanted to bring to the block.
But these, including the whimsical And Anothers, were aspirational. The entire open space contained a gallery of huge paintings representing Bill’s dreams, which were full of pop culture symbolism and candy. The artist was Oscar Sandoval, hired for his dual talents as a muffler mechanic and representational painter.
It was fascinating, strange and confusing—and unlike more famous folk art environments, so little known that we were tasked with trying to figure out what it all meant on our own.
We intended to come back, ask more questions, take some photos. But we didn’t. And then Bill closed his shop and put the whole corner up for sale. We took a few pictures of the shuttered corner, still striking though lifeless, and wondered what had happened to Bill and his paintings and his huge collection of weird old stuff.
And then, in February 2020, we read that the County was helping affordable housing developer ELACC fund a new complex where the farting muffler shop had been. (PDF link.)
So like we had with Peabody-Werden house, we reached out to let ELACC know that their development was poised to impact an historic resource worth preserving. Let’s meet on site, we suggested, to talk about Bill London’s folk art legacy and ways that elements of this unique place might be integrated into the new project and make sure any artwork left behind doesn’t get sent to the landfill.
But then the pandemic shuttered Los Angeles, and the farting muffler shop and everything else fell off our radar. And when ELACC’s construction site a couple miles away burned down in September 2020, we had so much to do trying to preserve the fire damaged Unique Theatre next door, which has been a wild mix of hope and heartbreak. (Despite multiple fires, the facade at least is slated to be saved.)
We felt badly about neglecting Bill’s magical blue and yellow corner, and avoided passing by. Until now.
While their burned out project next to the Unique Theatre appears stalled two years on, here ELACC has been busy with demolition and new construction, with their two-part Whittier Place Apartments now nearly complete. The quirky, colorful muffler shop is only a memory.
Or is it?
What’s that at the corner, casting its long funky shadow over the boring beige apartment house? Miracle of miracles! It is the last surviving piece of El Pedorrero, a candy striped telephone pole still broadcasting Bill’s impassioned message to the passing traffic!
What a sweet surprise to find this, when we expected everything weird and cool to have been destroyed. Soon, people will live in this building, walk down the street to buy beer, look out the window at the sunrise. They’ll notice the funny telephone pole, and if they’re new to East Los Angeles, they’ll wonder why it’s striped that way.
But now you know all about the secret language of automobiles, and that the next time you’re cruising Whittier Boulevard, to pull over at Record Avenue to pay your respects to a great folk art environment that’s only been 99% destroyed.
The farting muffler shop is dead. Long live the farting muffler shop! Honk honk poot!
We’re back on foot exploring the city tomorrow, Saturday July 9, with a Bunker Hill history walking tour led by the lost neighborhood’s historian Nathan Marsak and special guest Gordon Pattison—the lovely house at left belonged to his family. The tour departs from Grand Central Market, and ends with an opportunity to buy signed copies of Nathan’s Bunker Hill books. To learn more, or book your spot, click here.
And just announced, on August 6 we’ll take a walk through Raymond Chandler’s Noir Downtown Los Angeles, in the footsteps of the Jazz Age oil executive who harbored a secret desire to be a writer, and finally got the chance after he was fired for drunkenness and absenteeism. Places that Chandler knew well as a businessman became settings for his Philip Marlowe stories, and many of them still survive to beguile and delight you.
If you missed our live webinar about the weirdness surrounding Steven Luftman’s efforts to landmark B’nai B’rith Lodge in the Pico-Union District, you can catch the recording here. If you’ve only got a few minutes to spare, check out Nathan Marsak’s Cranky Preservationist video.
yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
Psst… If you’d like to support our efforts to be the voice of places worth preserving, we have a tip jar and a subscriber edition of this newsletter, vintage Los Angeles webinars available on demand, in-person walking tours, and a souvenir shop you can browse in. Or just share this link with other people who care.
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