Virtual Children's Books Exhibits

 LEO POLITI 

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Angels Flight

Leo Politi

 

 

 

4.  Piccolo's Prank.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965.

Politi's picture book about an Italian-American organ grinder and his runaway monkey shows Angels Flight as it looked in the mid-1960s before the city put the funicular railway into storage to make way for the construction of the California Plaza complex. In February 1996 the two cars, Olivet and Sinai, were put back on a track a half block from the original site. The eighty-eight-year-old Politi was there on the occasion to autograph his lithograph prints. He died a month later. After a fatal accident in 2000, Angels Flight was closed again. As of January 2010, the city has yet to make good on its promise to reopen this famous landmark.