The Los Angeles Wonder Aluminum Rathas!
Jayananda prabhu built the original Los Angeles Rath carts in 1978. They were completed for a fantastic festival that proceeded down the boardwalk and culminated in Venice (Muscle) Beach. By 2003 they required annual repair because the carts were parked along the ocean and deteriorated from the salty moist ocean air, which rotted the wood and rusted the steel. The annual maintenance was excessive, and the whole process was unsustainable because the landlord of the place where the carts were parked kept raising their fees which had come to $25,000 annually just to store the chariots.
I approached the temple president of LA and suggested we make three new carts out of aluminum that would fold up and could then be put into a single 53′ tractor. Fitting all three of the carts into one trailer provides the ability to relocate the carts to a very low-cost parking spot in the California desert and get them away from the corrosive sea air and huge lot rental fees.
What follows is a video of the new carts that were designed to meet that objective. The video is very well done and captures the whole parade. After the first three minutes we see the carts coming out of the trailers prior to the parade, and then at the end there is a quick time-lapse showing how the carts collapse to about 1/3 of their volume and fit back into the trailer.
At the time this was filmed in 2010 only two of the carts were assembled. The small Subhadra cart in the middle was designed for the Martin Luther King day parade and has been used for numerous other parades since then. The following year, the third cart was built. The carts collapse in all three dimensions, which makes it possible for all three of them to fit into a 53-ft trainer. The plans for these aluminum carts are also posted under the Ratha Yatra section of the Jagannatha.com “Library” tab.
Runtime: 11:25
