Here's a link to an article over at BBC News about Joe Barbera's letter to the City Council to try and save his old studio building. And here's a clarification by me: It's incomplete and maybe misleading to say that Hanna-Barbera was sold to Warner Brothers in 1996. That, coupled with the almost-true statement that Bill Hanna worked every day up until his death, makes it sound like Bill and Joe kept the place going on their own until '96. The history is that they sold out to a company called Taft Broadcasting in 1966, though they continued to run most aspects of the firm. Taft was acquired and reorganized as Great American Broadcasting in 1989 and that company was acquired by Ted Turner in 1992. What happened in '96 was that Turner merged his company into Time-Warner. So all that time, you have H-B (and therefore the building at issue) being handed around from company to company with no one saying, "Hey, we have to preserve the place where Wacky Races was produced!"
It's also misleading to say, as the above-linked article does, that the City Council wants to tear the place down and put up apartment buildings. I don't think the city owns the property, nor does the council make that kind of decision. More likely, the building is owned by some private company which is going curiously unmentioned in these reports. That company is considering several development proposals for its investment, some of which would raze the old H-B building, so Barbera and others are asking the City Council to step in and designate it as some sort of historical marker and/or configure the zoning of the land to encourage a plan that would maintain the building. Perhaps city funds will need to be coughed up to compensate the present owner for what it would lose by not replacing the birthplace of Peter Potamus with condos.
Not that my support matters one iota but I think, before I got behind any such move, I'd want to know who owns the property and what kind of taxpayer dollars might be spent to keep this building intact. And someone ought to ask the question of why, if it's so important to the history of the Hollywood cartoon, Time-Warner (which owns so many of them) isn't footing the bill to put a museum or something in there.
Thanks to "Destiny" (master of this weblog) for the link.