Once lost, lions roar back into public

If concrete lions could talk, what a tale the Los Angeles Zoo's newest attractions could tell.

They might fill in the little gaps in a circle-of-life story that stretches from early Hollywood to a scrapyard in Colton and back to the limelight, a story with history and mystery and a feel-good ending.

The ending came Thursday when the L.A. Zoo unveiled four life-size lion statues, dotted among the shops and cafes just inside the front gate, where employees said they've already become popular backdrops for patrons' snapshots.

"They pose well," joked receptionist Marta Livingston, whose desk in the zoo administrative offices is yards from the statue of a crouching lioness.

The beginning came in 1915, when a Hollywood pioneer named William Selig hired Italian sculptor Carlo Romanelli to create statues of lions and elephants for the arched entrance to the film studio and zoo he founded in the Lincoln Park area of East Los Angeles.

The studio known for the first Tom Mix westerns and Tarzan movies and other jungle dramas went out of business in the 1920s, and the region's first zoo was wiped out in the '30s by the Great Depression and a flood.

As the narrative has been pieced together, the 14 statues of lions and elephants survived the property's transition from zoo to zoological gardens to amusement park but fell into disrepair and were all but forgotten.

"And then they disappeared," John R. Lewis, the L.A. Zoo director, said Thursday.

Jump ahead to 2000, when then-L.A. Zoo director Manuel A. Mollinedo read a reference to the statues in Mike Davis' "City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles." The book hinted that the statues were in Fontana.

Mollinedo, a Southern California native, was intrigued by the possibility of reviving an element of the past in a place where he complains "we often destroy our history." He envisioned bringing the statues to the L.A. Zoo.

Mollinedo sent Gene Arias, an L.A. Zoo docent and researcher from Sherman Oaks, on a concrete lion and elephant hunt.

Arias said he started his three- or four-day adventure by simply asking around in Fontana, where someone pointed him to the elephant in the front yard of Ontario resident Archie Feichter. After initially demanding $1 per pound for what he said was a 10,000-pound statue, Feichter agreed to donate the sculpture to the zoo.

At a McDonald's in Colton, a couple of women told Arias that, sure enough, they knew where those lions and elephants had run off to.

"They said, `If you go down this block, there's a fire station, and if you turn right you'll see a nudie bar, and right across a cinder-block fence you'll see this flatbed truck with animal statues on it,' " Arias said on the phone Thursday.

And there they were, most of the statues he sought, on a flatbed truck in a storage area for carnival equipment.

It turned out carnival promoter Larry Davis had known of the statues when they were tucked away in a friend's amusement park on the old Selig Zoo grounds, and had purchased them for $1,200 in 1967 from a Paramount crane operator who said he kept the artifacts after he wasn't paid for moving them. Davis, who'd intended to use the statues for his shows but never did, gave them to the L.A. Zoo.

For all of Arias' sleuthing, all the L.A. Zoo had at that point was a menagerie of crumbling concrete, barely recognizable as jungle kings, victims of time and vandalism.

The restoration was paid for by a $150,000 donation to the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association from former Mattel chairman John Amerman and his wife Jeri through their family foundation.

The four lion statues are on public view for the first time in more than 60 years. The rest of the statues await placement at the zoo.

After the unveiling of the statue nearest the entrance - a striding, roaring lion - actress and zoo benefactor Betty White reached up and petted the big cat's mane.

Walking on, visitors would see depictions of a lion couple leaning on each other, a lioness with two cubs, and the crouching lioness.

City Councilman Tom LaBonge, whose district includes the zoo, said his mother grew up in Lincoln Heights and he'd heard all about the Selig Zoo.

"To be able to recapture it," LaBonge said, "is a special, special thing."

GLAZA President Connie Morgan said the return of the lost lions to their former glory at the entrance of a popular zoo "closes a 100-year loop of history."