Book Soup Takes On Water After a 1916 Sunset Strip Main Ruptures

A pipe installed under Sunset Boulevard in 1916 gave way at two-thirty in the morning on July 16, 2026, and the water reached a bookstore where David Bowie used to shop.

The bookstore at 8818 West Sunset Boulevard

Book Soup sits at 8818 West Sunset Boulevard, a few hundred feet from where the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power spent the middle of last week welding a new section of steel into a ruptured transmission line. The store, founded in 1975 by Glenn Goldman and David Mackler with fifty thousand dollars in seed money while both were still UCLA graduate students, has been a fixture of the Sunset Strip for half a century. It carries roughly sixty thousand titles across floor-to-ceiling shelves, and it specializes in art, film, photography, music, small-press literary fiction, autographed editions, and international periodicals through its in-store newsstand, News Mews.

The store's identity is inseparable from the specific stock it carries. Signed art books, limited-run photography monographs, and small-press first editions are exactly the inventory that does not survive being wet. Two golden dog sculptures, an Elvis bust, and an inflatable boat have been part of the decor since the doors first opened in 1975. A poster near the checkout counter labels Elton John the Patron Saint of Book Soup, reflecting his frequent visits. Over the years, David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Stephen King, Bob Dylan, Bette Midler, Muhammad Ali, Annie Leibovitz, Gore Vidal, Chuck Palahniuk, Howard Stern, and Ozzy Osbourne have all been publicly associated with the store, whether as customers, event guests, or authors whose signed work sits somewhere on the shelves.

Book Soup itself has changed hands once. Goldman announced the sale of the store on January 2, 2009, and died of pancreatic cancer the next day, on January 3, 2009. Pasadena's Vroman's Bookstore agreed to acquire it on October 9, 2009, and has owned and operated Book Soup ever since. A second, smaller outpost has run continuously at Los Angeles International Airport's Tom Bradley International Terminal since July 2017.

What broke, and when

The transmission main that failed on the Sunset Strip is a thirty-six-inch riveted steel line installed in 1916, one hundred and ten years old at the moment of rupture. It gave way at approximately 2:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 16, 2026, releasing water at high pressure into the streets, sidewalks, and underground parking structures of the surrounding blocks. LADWP was notified of the leak at approximately 3:55 a.m. and shut the water off by 7:25 a.m. local time.

Joe Castruita, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told reporters after the failure that the pipe "is near the end of its useful life but still has some time left in it," and noted that modern replacement pipes are engineered for a two-hundred-year service life. Crews cut out a twenty-five-foot damaged section of the transmission line and began welding in a new steel replacement, a process the utility said could take up to sixteen hours.

Cleanup crews later removed approximately one hundred and ninety-five thousand gallons of water from the immediate repair site. Tadeh Ghazalian, co-owner of the neighboring Dialog Cafe, told local reporters he understood the total release to be closer to seventeen million gallons. "All that water came out of that line, immediately went right in my front door, and it continued for four or five hours," Ghazalian said of the moment the flood arrived.

What the neighborhood woke up to

The Sunset Strip is a stretch of Sunset Boulevard that has been continuously commercial since the 1920s, and by first light on July 16 much of it was underwater or barricaded. A large sinkhole opened on the sidewalk near Sunset Boulevard during the rupture, and two pedestrians fell into it before it was discovered during the morning rush hour. A Metro bus was partially submerged. Floodwaters entered underground parking garages up to a depth of four to five feet in the lowest levels, and hundreds of privately owned vehicles were damaged.

Transit service warped around the closure. Metro bus lines 2, 16, 105, 212, and 217 were disrupted, and the West Hollywood bus yard was temporarily shut down. Sunset Boulevard between Larrabee Street and Sherbourne Drive was closed, along with segments of Holloway Drive, Palm Avenue, Cynthia Street, Harratt Street, and Nellas Street. West Hollywood parking enforcement was suspended in the affected zone through 7 a.m. on July 20, 2026, and property and vehicle damage claims are being processed through ladwp.com/claims and by phone at (213) 367-4600.

Businesses on either side of the barricades absorbed the shock differently. Dialog Cafe, the influencer-favorite coffee shop that opened at Sunset and Holloway in 2007, was flooded and closed indefinitely, with Ghazalian launching a public fundraiser to support roughly ninety staff members. Mel's Drive-In, the diner further east on the Sunset Strip, reported a thirty to forty percent drop in same-day sales because of the surrounding road closures. Tehran Von Ghasri, a West Hollywood resident, told reporters, "I thought this was an earthquake. I didn't imagine this was going to be a water main break."

What this means for Book Soup

Book Soup was affected by the July 16 rupture, and the store shared a public update after the flood describing the damage as gut-wrenching, according to the New York Post headline that put the bookstore at the center of the story on July 17, 2026. The store's own dollar figure for the loss has not been published, and the count of ruined books has not been made public. What is public, and what makes the update land the way it does, is the nature of the inventory itself. Signed monographs, small-press first editions, art and photography books, and international periodicals do not tolerate water. A single wet shelf on Sunset Boulevard is not the same kind of loss as a wet shelf in a chain warehouse.

Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, said of the pipe's age, "This is one of the challenges when our infrastructure is so old." That challenge has a schedule attached to it. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has scheduled the systematic replacement of nearly ten miles of adjacent aging trunk lines for the years 2031 through 2035. The 1916 line under the Sunset Strip failed several years before its formal turn in that queue, in front of an independent bookstore whose stock is exactly the kind of thing you cannot re-order from a distributor.

The store is still standing. Its future beyond the initial update has not been reported, and Vroman's, which has owned Book Soup since 2009, has not published a reopening timeline. What is on the record is the shape of the loss, the age of the pipe, and the address where the two met.

Sources

• New York Post coverage of Book Soup's post-flood update
• Los Angeles Department of Water and Power incident and claims information
• City of West Hollywood traffic and parking advisory for the Sunset Strip closure