Happy Halloween from the Portal of the Folded Wings, a section of Pierce Bros./Valhalla Cemetery in Burbank. 

Adjacent to the runways of historic Burbank Airport, this monument serves as a kind of community memorial – one of the few – of the huge role the San Fernando Valley played in the mid-century aviation industry, later dubbed “defense,” later still, “aerospace”.  This industry, with its thousands of high-paying jobs, filled the Valley with middle-class settlers, mostly from the Midwest, during the 1930s to the 80′s. Then poof!  the entire industry – the hangars, the fliers, the defense plants and services, the middle-class Midwesterners – vanished into ghosts. Some, at least, of those fliers and workers are buried here. 

It is a strange, ghostly memorial: the grand Spanish Baroque archway lists quite a bit to the north, like a tilted tombstone. The plaque is vague on what it was built for, or where, or how it came here.

The space shuttle model, sadly, but frugally, commemorates both the Challenger and the Columbia disasters, depending on the side from which one Views the fuselage.