Riot on the Strip

Pandora's Box was a one storey wooden building about the size of a house, lavender stuccoed with bold orange and white stripes down one side and its name hand lettered in red, standing on a concrete traffic island where Crescent Heights meets Sunset. On the night of Saturday 12 November 1966 a crowd of two to three thousand young people gathered outside it. The curfew they were protesting was decades old: since the 1940s both the city and the county had forbidden anyone under eighteen from loitering in public after ten o'clock. What changed in 1966 was enforcement. The Sunset Strip Chamber of Commerce had pressed the Sheriff's Department to apply the rule strictly, deputies escalated through that summer, and the police followed suit in the districts alongside. What made the corner remarkable is that it sat on a boundary. The island lay just inside the City of Los Angeles while the county Strip began a few blocks west, so that night there were several hundred riot helmeted sheriff's deputies on one side of the line and an equal number of Los Angeles police on the other. A fire extinguisher was set off inside a transit bus and the crowd rocked it, a window was broken, about fifty people were arrested, and the damage came to a hundred and fifty eight dollars. The city council voted that month to take the club by eminent domain and the wreckers came on 3 August 1967. The island is still there, bare ground with a bus shelter on it, and nothing marks any of this.