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The Hollywood Sign in Ruin

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In a city that has always been short on postcard landmarks, there is arguably no more recognizable symbol of Los Angeles than the Hollywood sign. For many visitors, and even many Angelenos, it exists as a kind of platonic emblem—eternal, unchanging—of the city and the entertainment business: nine letters, each 45 feet tall and as white as an actor’s teeth, perched at the top of Mount Lee. 

In truth, as civic symbols go, the Hollywood Sign has lived a changeable and even tumultuous life—one that evokes many of the themes that undergird the various sections of this report and its recommendations. One such theme is the unusual number of landmarks and memorials that persist here despite being designed, long ago, to be temporary, or for some purpose far removed from history, memorialization or garden-variety nostalgia. Another is the importance of maintenance and care—upkeep, rather than creation from whole cloth—to the work of civic and cultural memory.

 Built in 1923 at a cost of $21,000, including its system of hidden bulbs to illuminate it at night, the sign originally read “HOLLYWOODLAND” and marked the opening of a high-end residential subdivision financed in part by Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler. It was meant to stand for just a year and a half. The final four letters were removed in 1949 after the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce agreed to repair and rebuild it. This gave rise to a new period in which the sign began to stand in for the movie business and the larger relationship between Los Angeles and filmmaking.

By the 1970s, the sign had badly decayed and fallen into near ruin, a fate similar to that of Hollywood the literal civic district, the place on the map, as opposed to Hollywood the glamourous ideal. (By then every studio but Paramount had decamped from Hollywood proper to the San Fernando Valley or further afield.) That’s the state the photographer Ken Papaleo, shooting for the Herald-Examiner, found it in when he captured this image in 1978. A campaign (led improbably enough by Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner, among others) was launched to raise money to bring the sign back to life. Donors were able to adopt a letter for a gift of just under $28,000 each, or $250,000 in all. By the end of 1978 it had been fully restored, its letters newly and securely anchored on new footings before being repainted.

That shine, too, faded over time, and in 2005 the Chamber launched another restoration effort, this one financed by Bay Cal Commercial Painting. The sign, however, is nearly big enough to require continual painting and upkeep, as bridges do. When you’ve finished touching up the letter D, in other words, it may be time to begin again with the H. ●

Ken Papaleo, Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library

Beyond Paul R. Williams: Black architects in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

Show Footnotes
Members of this roundtable:
Christopher Hawthorne (facilitator) is the chief design officer for the City of Los Angeles, the former architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, and a member of the Civic Memory Working Group. 
Dr. Wesley Henderson is an architect, educator, and historian and assistant professor at the Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Science at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama. 
Gail Kennard is president of the Kennard Design Group and a commissioner on the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission.
Melvin Mitchell is a practicing architect and a fellow at the American Institute of Architects in Washington, DC, and the former director of the Institute (now School) of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

Over the last decade, the work of Paul R. Williams (1894–1980), the most prominent Black architect in Los Angeles during much of the last century and a prolific designer of houses, churches, and public buildings covering a broad and inventive stylistic range, has seen a welcome and overdue revival of interest in Southern California and nationally. In 2017, Williams was named the posthumous winner of the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects, the group’s highest honor. In 2020, the Getty Research Institute and the University of Southern California School of Architecture announced that it had jointly acquired the extensive Williams archive. Less broadly understood, especially by the general public but also among scholars and practicing architects, is the work and influence of the group of Black architects who emerged alongside and after Williams in twentieth-century Los Angeles. This roundtable discussion was organized to explore the work, influence, and legacy of some of those architects, including, most prominently, James Garrott, Robert Kennard, and Norma Sklarek. For more on Sklarek, see the excerpt from her oral history elsewhere in this report; it was prepared by a young Wesley Henderson, who joined us as a member of this roundtable.

 Christopher Hawthorne: Welcome! And thank you for being here. Let me briefly ask each of you to introduce yourselves. 

Dr. Wesley Henderson: Right now, I’m teaching at Tuskegee University in Alabama. Part of my background is that I did a dissertation on the architects Paul R. Williams and James Garrott while I was a student at UCLA in the early 1990s. I originally came to UCLA to do a doctorate on art deco architecture, and a faculty member just kind of steered me toward doing a biography of someone important. And the only Black architect I knew at the time who was someone important was Paul R. Williams. As I did research on Williams, though, I came to become interested in Garrott. I saw them as two interconnected people, two interconnected architects. Garrott was born in Alabama. He was a teenager when he came to Los Angeles. He was always, I guess, not in competition with, but certainly his practice was in reaction to Williams. As my work on the dissertation went on, I had to sacrifice Garrott just to finish. So it ended up being mostly about Paul R. Williams, because much of the information that was available was on Williams and not Garrott. I wish I had been able to do more work on Garrott and bring him to the fore.

 CH: That’s very helpful, because one of the goals of this conversation is to give young scholars, young architects, and young critics some other trails to follow, some other work to look at.

Gail Kennard: I’m the daughter of Robert Kennard, who was an architect, African American, and born, like Paul Williams, in Los Angeles. So my father spent his childhood hearing about Paul R. Williams—and because of that, when he was in high school, he decided that architecture was possibly a career that he could pursue. Had it not been for knowing that Paul R. Williams existed, I doubt that he would have had the inspiration to pursue architecture. I run the firm that my father started in 1957, so I’m also a practitioner. I also serve as a commissioner on the L.A. Cultural Heritage Commission. Dr. Henderson and I have a number of connections. I’m very grateful to him for doing an oral history of my father in the early 1990s. There was very little documentation of the history of African American architects in Los Angeles. So he kind of started it. And now others are starting to pick up on doing that research, which is very important. 

Melvin Mitchell: I come to this situation in an interesting way. I’m a former Angeleno. I left the city at about the time when I was beginning to become interested in architecture and a career as an architect. At the beginning, the only person I really knew about was Paul R. Williams. Not too long out of high school, I was living over Western and Adams, and of course his signature work—the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building (1949) is right there. There was something that attracted me to that building, and I used to always find an excuse to go in and out of it.

 CH: We should note that the earlier Golden State building, from 1948, was designed by James Garrott. 

WH: The old one, right, on Central Avenue. And why he got that commission rather than Paul Williams is that Golden State early on thought Paul Williams was too big a firm for them and wouldn’t give them a really good hearing. So Garrott did that.

MM: Later, I wound up on the East Coast and I spent the first five years there in a building that Paul Williams designed [the Langston Terrace Dwellings (1936)], although I didn’t know it at the time. Of course, not only did Paul Williams design the building, but I also came to find out that a Washington, DC, architect, Hilyard Robinson, was his partner and they had a bicoastal partnership. With all that said, I really didn’t begin to truly appreciate the depth of the Los Angeles scene until after I was well away and into my career in Washington, DC, as an architect. As a young professor at Howard University, getting my hands on Wes Henderson’s dissertation—oh, that was just a feast. It’s a 600-page document. And I have it. And it’s dog-eared. Over the more than 50 years since I left, I have always, every single year, found an excuse—sometimes as often as a dozen times a year—to be back in Los Angeles and to work with Los Angeles architects. And I came to have a great, great appreciation for Gail’s father as well as for his young protégé and partner, Art Silvers [a partner at Kennard and Silvers Architects]. I’m still here doing all the things I like to do, practicing architecture, writing, and teaching in Washington, DC.

 CH: Terrific. We’re in good hands, clearly. I think that what you’ve all mentioned about documentation is quite important. I will say that for me, as a critic, and now working in City Hall, there is simply not enough of that documentation when it comes to work by L.A.’s Black architects. I was just looking through the best-known architecture guide in Los Angeles, the book by David Gebhard and Robert Winter.07 Robert Winter and David Gebhard, An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles (1965; 6th ed., Santa Monica, CA: Angel City Press, 2018).
 Beyond Paul R. Williams, there is virtually nothing on the work of the architects we’ll be talking about today.

Let me continue the discussion with a simple if fraught question: what did it mean to try to practice architecture as a Black professional in the twentieth century in Los Angeles? And if you’d like to distinguish among certain periods—prewar, postwar, perhaps the late twentieth century period—please do. 

WH: The Black community is not monolithic, and so there are different, I guess I would say, subcommunities within it. And one of those subcommunities really involves politics. There were some conservative architects and then some more liberal and progressive architects. After World War II, that became a little bit more pronounced. During the war, Garrott went to USC, and at USC he met the progressive community. That changed his work completely. He was no longer a historicist. He came out of USC and out of World War II very much a modernist. The Black architects had relationships with white professionals, but it depended on the politics that they were practicing. Garrott, for example, had a really good relationship with [the architectural photographer] Julius Shulman. So did Paul Williams, for that matter. Shulman and Garrott saw themselves as progressive and I guess left-leaning. And so Shulman does have some photographs of Garrott’s work. Garrott also had a wonderful professional partnership with the architect Gregory Ain based in part on shared politics. Mr. Garrott lived in Silver Lake, and Silver Lake was a hotbed of progressive folks. I wish that somebody would purchase the house he designed for himself [at 653 Micheltorena Street] and preserve it. And Garrott also began a personal relationship with politicians like the county commissioner Kenneth Hahn. And so there came a time when, I believe, Garrott was blacklisted. And then once the blacklist ended, he got some commissions from the county of Los Angeles, and there are several of his buildings around that I wish got more recognition, including his library—the Los Angeles Public Library on Manchester Boulevard in Westchester. 

MM: The politics of that time in architecture were fascinating. 

GK: I can echo what Dr. Henderson’s talking about. It was very different before World War II compared to after the war. My father was in World War II, serving in Europe. When he came back, he was very into the modernist thinking in architecture. He didn’t want to have anything to do with traditionalists or any of the revivalist stuff. He actually interviewed for a job with Paul Williams, but Paul Williams was not at the top of his list. He really wanted to work for Richard Neutra because of the modernism thing. There was a move after the war to do something about the social problems we were facing—and an idea that architects could do things to help the lives of everyday folks. Remember, there was an influx of population coming into Los Angeles in the war years and the postwar years, so there was a demand for housing and all that. And so instead of designing for the elites, he was focused more on designing for middle-class folks. And so architects like Gregory Ain, A. Quincy Jones, and others—Victor Gruen was another one—they gave Black architects an opportunity. They were able to get jobs, which had not been the case previously, before the war. There was a big shift after that. Even firms like A. C. Martin, which were politically conservative, they were hiring. There was a different mood in terms of what architecture could do after World War II, which opened up opportunities.

CH: I suppose the next major figure in this chronology, after Williams and Garrott, is Ralph Vaughn. 

GK: I actually, through another architect, found his son, Ron Vaughn. He became an architect also and lives in the Bay Area now. He was telling me that his father came to L.A. and worked for Paul Williams. I know through my commission work that two of his buildings—at least two—are designated historic cultural monuments. One is Chase Knolls [a garden apartment complex from 1948], which he designed with Heth Wharton, and the other one is Lincoln Place [built in 1951 in Venice, also by Vaughan and Wharton, financed under a historic mortgage insurance program administered by the Federal Housing Administration]. 

WH: I was able to interview Mr. Vaughn. I made a mistake and didn’t keep my tape recording of that interview, however, so I don’t know where it is. But he said that he met Paul Williams when Mr. Vaughn was still a college student at Howard, and Paul Williams invited him out to the West Coast. And he came out. And I think the first project that he worked on with Paul Williams was the MCA building in Beverly Hills [in 1938]. Also, what Mr. Vaughn told me is that he worked in the movie industry, doing set design. 

GK: His son told me that he worked for MGM. 

WH: Especially during the war, Vaughn worked for the movie companies and that’s what kept him going.

 CH: And then he broke off on his own, left Williams’s office? 

WH: Well, he did work in Williams’s office for a while, but fairly early on he started working for himself. During World War II, Williams was kind of at a minimum. And I believe that he had to let some people go. And one of those was Ralph Vaughn, and so he had to fend for himself. And one of the ways of doing it was working in the movie industry. After the war, Vaughn became progressive and radicalized. And so that’s how we got involved in housing like Lincoln Place.

CH: We move next, I suppose, to Robert Kennard. Gail, he was born in 1920? 

GK: Yes, 1920. He would have been 100 this year. My father was in the service, and he got the GI Bill so he was able to go to USC. And that opened up a network of folks that he met who were also students, and he was able to parlay into work with DMJM [Daniel, Mann, Johnson, and Mendenhall]. He decided in 1957 that he would start his own firm, starting with residential designs first. One of his early homes is in Beverly Hills—actually, the Somers home. And the city of Beverly Hills now lists him as a master architect, which is kind of cool. In the 1960s, he was doing homes, but because he had worked at DMJM, he realized that the public sector was really the best track for him. Unlike Paul Williams, he didn’t have access to Hollywood celebrities, and that wasn’t his inclination either. Remember, I’m telling you, he’s more of a progressive. He wants to do public housing. He wants to do those kinds of projects. So he shifts to public work. And that’s where he really made his mark—in public buildings. With Robert Alexander and another talented architect, Frank Sata, who’s still living, he designed the Carson City Hall and the community center there. There’s a list of things that he’s done that are buildings that people would recognize, like the Van Nuys state office building that he did with Harold Williams, another Black architect. 

He was able to do all that in large part because of two political situations. Number one, in 1965, was the Watts riots. After that, there was a push on the political side to hire Black professionals, Black architects, to do this work. So all of a sudden, he was doing planning work, redevelopment in Watts, and then school district work for L.A. Unified. Paul Williams had done work for L.A. Unified before, but it became much more open. And people like Carey Jenkins and other contemporaries of my father’s who came out of USC in the late ’40s, early ’50s started to get into public work. They were on the coattails of Supervisor Kenny Hahn. So Carey Jenkins was able to get the contract to design the King Hospital. My father redesigned some elementary schools and then ultimately L.A. High School, the old high school that was damaged during the earthquake in the 1970s. 

And then along comes Tom Bradley. And that was a boon too, because then suddenly, there’s Tom Bradley and then there’s three City Council members who are Black. So that facilitated a lot more work. There was the affirmative action program, but it was more perception than that. I think my father was able to get the work not just through the mechanics of the affirmative action stuff that came a little later, but because people perceived that Tom Bradley was somebody who was open to hiring diverse people. So it was Latino people, Asian people, Black architects, and other professionals. My father did a number of buildings. He was fortunate. He hit it at the right time. And he could get major projects as the prime [i.e., as the lead architect, not in a supporting role].

 CH: On a more personal level, Gail, what was it like to grow up as the daughter of an architect? 

GK: Oh, I had a ball. I’ll just tell you one story. My parents would travel around a lot, ultimately internationally. But when I was a kid, we traveled in California, and my father would always take pictures of buildings. And I just grew up thinking that, you know, your father takes a picture of a building and you’re in the corner, as a kid, just for scale. You weren’t really getting a picture of you. It was just the building and then you were in the corner. And then I started going over to my friends’ houses, and they had pictures of themselves. There was no building in the picture! I thought, that’s different. But it was a great way to grow up.

 CH: Gail, let me tell you, my kids can relate. Mr. Mitchell, thoughts on Robert Kennard? 

MM: During my time in L.A., it was just Paul Williams. That’s all I knew. I think I became conscious of Bob Kennard after I’d left and had started school and then practice in DC. One thing I would say, though, is that when your father, Gail, began to get prominent access and get work, the connection to Tom Bradley—that kind of thing was happening all across the country. It was the age of the Black mayor. Black architects were really invented by Black mayors. When Black mayors started taking over cities, that’s when Black architects started getting work—every city where there was a Black mayor.

 CH: Let’s move to the work of Norma Sklarek, a really interesting figure who deserves to be better known [as] the first Black woman to be licensed as an architect by the state of California, in 1962. 

GK: She was from New York, came here, worked for Victor Gruen. Gruen’s office was really an incubator and a launching pad for a number of people, including James Silcott, an architect I think all of you know, and Frank Gehry. [Silcott went on to become the first Black project architect for Los Angeles County.] She was one of the few women in architecture of any race. But Gruen was very good in terms of giving opportunities to people of color and also women. To this day. Gruen was important to Norma Sklarek. She met her husband, Ralph Sklarek, at Gruen. She had been Norma Merrick. She stayed at Gruen until she went to work for John Jerde. I’m not sure if this was her ambition, but she got pigeonholed into doing construction documents and she was really known for doing the management part, the construction documents, director of production, and all of that. She was very good. She was a tough woman. I mean, she could really get work out of people. And she had to be because she had to, number one, assert that she could be taken seriously, and two, not be blown away by younger architects who just thought they were the bee’s knees. 

In the ’80s, she partnered with Margot Siegel, who had her own practice, I believe, and Kate Diamond. And they started their own practice in the mid-1980s. I remember when this was afoot because they would come and visit my father. My father was helpful to them. He mentored them, encouraged them to do that. And when they started their practice, they were touted as the largest woman-owned firm in the United States. But much more research needs to be done on that and what they did. We lost Norma, but Kate is still with us and so is Margot. So there really needs to be more documentation on them—all three of them, but especially Norma and her contributions. Of course, she’s most well-known for the design of the “Blue Whale”—the Pacific Design Center [in West Hollywood, on which she worked with César Pelli while at Gruen]. She did university work, too. There just needs to be more research on this. 

MM: Norma Sklarek came to the West Coast with pretty solid credentials. In 1958, I’m in high school, and Ebony magazine drops this bombshell issue—one of the featured articles was 19 successful young Negro architects. Norma was one of those featured because she was already a designer at Skidmore [Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, or SOM] in New York. She was licensed. So she came to Los Angeles with some pretty heavy, heavy credentials. Now, about her stint with Jon Jerde, I have this one thing to add. The way that I intersect with this story is that my classmate and best friend also worked in that Jerde office, and the way he characterized it was that they were a bunch of, I don’t know if “hippie” is the right word, but they were just designers. And Norma was really the person who pulled everything together. They were getting commissions from and working for some hard-nosed developers who, when it came to their work, wanted it right and tight and on time. And so she wasn’t just doing the working drawings. She really filled the role of what had to happen after all the sketching and the fun was over and it had to be delivered, you know, so that people can get paid.

WH: The UCLA oral history program recruited me to go and interview several architects, and Norma Sklarek was one of them. There should be eight, nine, ten hours of interview with her on tape. But I’m not certain if UCLA has gone forward with that interview; I’m not sure if it’s been edited. She went into a lot of detail on her early life and early career. She was very talkative and I had a tape recorder running.02 After this roundtable was complete, Gail Kennard contacted UCLA and discovered that the oral history had in fact been completed. We are pleased to feature an excerpt from it in this report, as well as information about where to find it in full.

CH: We’ve talked about James Garrott, Robert Kennard, and Norma Sklarek. Who else belongs in this conversation? Gail, you mentioned Arthur Silvers—do you want to talk a little bit more about him?

GK: He was also local. He came out of USC. He went to high school with Frank Gehry. He met my father and then they became partners. And their partnership lasted for about 10 years. My father said that Art Silvers was the most talented designer he’d ever worked with. There’s not a huge body of his work, though, because after he left my father’s firm, he did some work on his own, some residences, and then he went into teaching.

 CH: Mr. Mitchell, what about Roy Sealey? What do you remember about Roy Sealey?

MM: He was one of the architects mentioned in the Ebony magazine article. I didn’t know him. His specialty was restaurants. I don’t know if you could attribute any of the Googie restaurants to him. He had quite a design flair.03 The term “Googie” dates back to Googie’s Coffee Shop on the Sunset Strip, designed in 1949 by architect John Lautner. It came to synonymize a quintessentially Southern California style of futurist/modernist design that became ubiquitous in the 1950s and 1960s. See Matt Novak, “Googie: Architecture of the Space Age,” Smithsonian, June 15, 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/googie-architecture-of-the-space-age-122837470

WH: He worked for Paul Williams. At one point, I think, Roy Sealey and one of Paul Williams’s daughters had a romantic entanglement, and that didn’t go well. And the Ebony article, I think, probably misquoted Roy Sealey, and the Paul Williams camp accused him of betraying some secrets. That was a very bitter breakup, and then Sealey just sort of became a hermit and he wouldn’t talk to anyone. I tried to contact him to interview him; he wouldn’t talk to me at all. I ended up talking to his one of his nieces. And that’s how I got information on him. He was born in Panama, and then the family moved to Jamaica and then to Texas.

 CH: I want to ask about Black architects and their decisions about how to navigate the profession in L.A. What were the benefits of joining a small firm that might be a really good match in terms of ideals or politics versus a larger or corporate firm, which might offer a larger breadth of opportunities, or at some point working on one’s own or starting one’s own firm? 

WH: Garrott was a sole practitioner, very small firm, though he did do some things in combination with Gregory Ain. Legally, I think they were two separate firms because Ain had a larger firm and a different office. They shared an office building, and so they were working in tandem, but never legally partners. 

GK: My father ultimately started his own firm in 1957, as I mentioned, but that was not his goal. He was very fortunate after the war to be hired by DMJM. And he left DMJM because he didn’t feel like he would have an opportunity to advance. He then went to work for Victor Gruen. Same issue—he left because he didn’t feel he’d have an opportunity to advance. That’s why he started his own firm: because he felt that there was a ceiling and that he wasn’t going to be able to overcome that ceiling. Or think of Norma Sklarek. She, like my father, wasn’t really aspiring to start her own company initially. She was a working mom. She always told me, “I just needed a job. I just needed to work, you know?” And so she went to work for Gruen, and she went to work for Jon Jerde later on. And then she did ultimately start a firm with two other women. But, like my father, that was not the main thrust from the beginning, “Let me have my own thing.” It was just circumstances.

 CH: That ceiling you’re referring to, was it entirely racial? Or was it racial in addition to other things about the firm’s culture? 

GK: It was perceived as racial.

 CH: I want to put L.A. in some broader context here. How would all three of you say that Los Angeles differed, or perhaps did not differ, from other American cities in terms of the opportunities available to Black architects? In what ways would you say it was more or less open, or more or less tolerant? 

GK: Well, it was still America in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s. There was still racism. But I think that because L.A. grew so quickly and there was such a demand for building, there were opportunities. The other issue, too, is that L.A. was made up of a lot of people who didn’t come from here, who were kind of outsiders. The Hollywood crowd—you know, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz—they’re not typical Anglo-Saxon folks. And so they hired Paul Williams. And that didn’t seem to be a problem. Frank Sinatra, he’s kind of a poor boy from Hoboken, New Jersey. So they’re not coming from wealth and were less caught up in the prestige of hiring a quote-unquote name architect. I think that helped. 

MM: And I would also, again, say that it would be hard to separate Los Angeles—and the development of Black architects in Los Angeles—from the politics that were also occurring in cities across the nation at the time, as long as you had a committed mayor who was determined to see to it that they were included. 

WH: I want to amplify and agree with what Gail was saying about L.A. being a relatively open place, especially in terms of the Hollywood elite being “new money” and not being committed to an old-fashioned way of thinking. I also think that because Los Angeles physically was relatively new territory, because there wasn’t much quote-unquote history here—at least obvious history—there was a feeling of doing new things in a new way. So clients here were a little more open to working with those who appeared to be the best architects available.

 CH: In L.A., what about the reaction of, let’s say, the media, critics, photographers, architectural historians, to the work of some of these figures? 

WH: Let me go back to Julius Shulman, who photographed a number of projects by Garrott. Other photographers, Marvin Rand and Wayne Thom, I think they were less interested in this work. But Shulman was. 

GK: Generally, these architects were not considered for coverage, not really on the radar a lot. Julius Shulman did photograph one of my father’s buildings, Carson City Hall, in the 1980s. But in general, the historical record is not there, because it doesn’t get written up in places like the L.A. Times. The L.A. Times didn’t even have any Black reporters until after the riots in 1965.

CH: Could you talk about these architects’ relationships with Paul Williams? I gather it was sometimes competitive, sometimes collaborative or collegial, sometimes supportive. 

GK: As I said earlier, my father would not have had his career had he not known that Paul Williams existed. My father had a high school drafting teacher who showed him a picture of Paul Williams, told him about Paul Williams—and it just totally opened his world. So that was the significance. If Paul Williams could make it, there is an opportunity for me as a Negro, colored architect or whatever. So my father ultimately met Paul Williams. As coincidence would have it, my father’s best friend married [Williams’s] daughter, Marilyn. And so they became more connected socially with the Williams family. And then later, in the ’80s, when Paul Williams was kind of at the end of his career, they did a project together that is still standing—the Jessie L. Terry Manor, which is housing for seniors, on the corner of Jefferson and Vermont, right across from USC. So it was nice, kind of closing the loop. 

MM: Paul Williams himself, some of you may have heard, was very much influenced in his choice of a career based on a picture he saw. He was a paperboy. And what was the picture that he saw in the paper? It was a picture of the Negro building [at the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition in Norfolk, Virginia] by this Tuskegee-trained architect and instructor, William Pittman. So pictures are important. The only other thing about Williams that I want to make sure is on the record is that two of our subsequently most prolific Black architects in the country, Max Bond and Jay Johnson, came out to L.A. during the summer and worked with Paul Williams. I just think that had to have been meaningful interaction and impact.

WH: I saw a [film] on Sammy Davis Jr., I think the title was “I Gotta Be Me.” And the context was that at one point in time, Sammy Davis Jr. was this Rat Pack figure, on the cutting edge, very much working within an integrated context. But then at the end of his career, the Black community saw him as a reactionary political person tied in with Nixon and various other things. And I want to say that Paul Williams had kind of a similar trajectory. That is, Paul Williams was a Republican in his politics and he was rather conservative. And so at some point in the, I don’t know, ’50s, ’60s, he was seen as this champion of Black enterprise. But later on, as Martin Luther King and the mass movements began to take off and Paul Williams’s politics remained rather conservative, then the younger architects began to look at him in a different kind of way.

GK: That’s very true. My father had political differences with him.

CH: Final question for all of you. Given the themes in this report and this working group that we convened last November, what are some of the ways that we might better mark or commemorate these architects and their work? 

MM: These architects we’ve been talking about were trailblazers—real trailblazers. And I can’t think of anything more important to do than to give recognition to that in some really tangible, concrete ways that help really reach architects that are coming up today to be able to get more opportunity to work in their own communities. That means we need to reorganize and restructure policies and processes that will facilitate the substantive start-up and growth of the current corps of Black firms that seek to follow in the trailblazers’ footsteps. And we need to recognize that Black architects are critical instruments of Black community wealth creation. We need to find innovative ways to promote Black-Brown-white joint ventures in Black-Brown L.A. space. 

GK: I think it’s also important that there be something done in the curriculums, starting with elementary school, secondary school, the colleges, so that if you see the name Paul Williams, you’ll know who he was. If you see the name Robert Kennard, you’ll know who he was. If you see the name James Garrott, you’ll know who he was. I’m always astonished when I deal with architecture students at USC who have never heard of Paul Williams. Black students! It’s astounding to me. It’s gotten better, but I think we need to deal with the curriculum early on. Finally, to extend something that Mr. Mitchell said, if my father were alive today, I don’t think he’d be as interested in a plaque as he would be interested in opportunities for Black architects who are alive today to get work. That’s really the problem. I don’t see newer Robert Kennards coming along who could amass the body of work that he did.

1871 Anti-Chinese Massacre

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Los Angeles today is having many community discussions related to race, conflict, and social justice. Tonight marks the 149th anniversary of one of the most significant events in our city’s history. During the 1850s and 1860s, many families in Los Angeles had Chinese household help: people who worked as cooks, servants, and gardeners. Some Chinese residents started their own businesses in the growing downtown of Los Angeles, such as Chun Chick, who opened a store in 1861, and Dr. Chee Long (or Gene) Tong, who started advertising in the local newspaper in 1870. Dr. Tong was a respected herbalist, providing remedies and therapies to support the health of local Americans. The United States Census of 1870 placed 171 Chinese people living in the City of Los Angeles. Most lived in the “Chinese quarter” south and east of the Old Plaza. Los Angeles in 1871 was in transition, economically, socially, and politically. Local government was in place but not well disciplined. Gambling, drinking, fighting, and shootings were common. Vigilante groups would mete out mob “justice,” sometimes breaking into the city jail and hauling off hapless victims—innocent or guilty—to be hanged or beaten. Internal conflicts within and among groups were sometimes settled peacefully, and frequently not. The Chinese were harassed for being labor competitors, for their race and culture, and for being “different.” On the afternoon of October 24, 1871, a shootout between two groups of Chinese residents just south of the plaza drew the attention of the small Los Angeles police force. Officer Jesus Bilderrain was wounded in the crossfire. A local rancher and former saloon owner, Robert Thompson, attempted to intervene, even though he was told to stay away. He shot into a Chinese store in which there was an active shooting scene, got hit by return fire, and died an hour later. In the two hours that followed, an angry mob killed a total of 18 Chinese people who were pulled from the Chinese quarter and shot, beaten, or hanged. One of the victims was Dr. Tong; one was a teenage boy. Other victims included cooks, a storekeeper, and a laundryman. None were involved in the earlier shooting. This event of terror hit newspapers across the nation. Los Angeles dutifully called a coroner’s inquest. Indictments followed, and then a trial by jury, and nine men were convicted of manslaughter. All were sentenced—for terms of two to six years—and sent to San Quentin State Prison. A year later, all were released due to an alleged technical flaw in the indictments. Tonight, 149 years later, we ask if justice was served. Our city continues to grapple with how to resolve race and class conflicts and social imbalances. Obviously, a lot of public dialogue and negotiation is needed. We must honor the people, the early Angelenos, who lived and worked in our community, and whose names should not— and must not—be forgotten. 

Excerpted from remarks made by Eugene W. Moy at the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles on October 24, 2020. Moy is a native of L.A.’s Chinatown and a fourth-generation Californian and has been an active member of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, the Chinese American Museum, and other organizations. October of 2021 will mark 150 years since the massacre.

Looking east down Calle de los Negros toward the plaza, Los Angeles, 1882. Security Pacific National Bank Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

Massacre Victims (list may be incomplete)

+ Johnny Burrow, shot to death in Coronel Building

+ Wing Chee, cook, shot and hanged from a wagon on Commercial Street

+ Wong Chin, storekeeper, hanged from a wagon on Commercial Street

+ Ah Cut, liquor maker, shot to death on Calle de Los Negros

+ Wan Foo, cook, hanged at Goller’s wagon shop

+ Lo Hey, cook, hanged at Goller’s wagon shop

+ Ho Hing, cook, hanged at Goller’s wagon shop

+ Day Kee, cook, hanged at Goller’s wagon shop

+ Ah Long, cigar maker, hanged at Tomlinson’s Corral

+ Ah Loo, teenager, hanged at Goller’s wagon shop

+ Leong Quai, laundryman, hanged at Tomlinson’s Corral

+ Wa Sin Quai, shot to death in Coronel Building

+ Dr. Chee Long Tong, herbalist and physician, shot and hanged at Tomlinson’s Corral, body mutilated

+ Ah Waa, cook, hanged at Goller’s wagon shop

+ Chang Wan, housemate of Dr. Chee Long Tong, hanged at Tomlinson’s Corral

+ Tong Wan, cook and musician, beaten, hanged, and shot at Goller’s wagon shop

+ Ah Wing, worked in Pico House Hotel, beaten and hanged at Tomlinson’s Corral

+ Ah Won, cook, hanged from a wagon on Commercial Street 

Anti-Chinese Massacre Trial Results and Timeline

February 14, 1872 Quong Wong, Ah Ying Acquitted of murder of Ah Choy, San Francisco tong fighter

February 17, 1872 L. F. “Curly” Crenshaw Convicted of manslaughter

March 27, 1872 Adolfo Celis, Dan W. Moody Acquitted of manslaughter

March 27, 1872 Esteban A. Alvarado, Charles Austin, Refugio Botello, A. R. Johnston, Jesus Martinez, Patrick M. McDonald, Louis Mendel Convicted of manslaughter

May 21, 1872 California Supreme Court reverses convictions, killers released from San Quentin State Prison Reversal order signed by Judge Robert Widney June 10, 1873

November 1872 Sam Yuen Acquitted in death of Robert Thompson 

Fatalities and trial results compiled from Scott Zesch, The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Process

This subcommittee was chaired by Danielle Brazell, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and Rosten Woo, an artist and cofounder and former executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy in Brooklyn, New York. Its other members were Nora Chin, deputy chief design officer in the Office of Mayor Eric Garcetti; A. P Diaz, executive officer and chief of staff for the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks; Laura Dominguez, a doctoral candidate in history at USC; Taj Frazier, professor of communication and director of the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism; Catherine Gudis, director of the Public History Program at UC Riverside; Leslie Ito, executive director of the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena; Shannon Ryan, senior planner with the Los Angeles Department of City Planning; and David Torres-Rouff, chair of history in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Merced.
Show Footnotes

Throughout the United States and Europe, historical landmarks and monuments are being torn down; defaced and remade with graffiti, street art, and public performance; and identified as vestiges and public reminders of state violence, white supremacy, and Euro-American empire. These monuments were shaped to reflect the achievements of predominantly white, middle- to upper-class, landholding men. Through such places, landmarks, and symbols, the state and segments of the public perpetuate a very particular relationship to the past, present, and future.

We are currently living through a worldwide movement, or collection of movements, seeking to confront such legacies of power and historical erasure. Popular demands for change and a massive redistribution of power represents a powerful inflection point—a radical shift in collective mood and expression, a significant modulation in the pitch of calls and demands for sweeping changes to the existing economic, racial, political, and cultural status quo.

Reconstituting civic memory and civic imagination is an integral part of this growing effort. The collective demand for structural transformation will not be fully answered without a process of revisiting and reimagining city, state, and national histories, objects, narratives, and places. None of these should be perceived as fixed, static sites of history and memorial. Instead, they represent an opportunity to understand and reveal the dynamics and multifaceted strategies of power, as well as strategies of resistance, survival, and resilience. An effort to embrace civic memory will be most effective if it grows carefully from processes with the capacity to activate serious and frank discussion, truth-telling, and reconciliation.

The process of reconstituting civic memory should begin with an acknowledgement that there is no singular or agreed-upon past. We can accomplish this by bringing people together and facilitating practices and encounters where they are able to freely express their stories, as well as listen to and learn from the stories and memories of other groups—especially those whose experiences and stories have been systematically ignored, erased, and marginalized. Doing so means rethinking and troubling dominant histories, landmarks, names, events, and more.

Activating people’s civic imaginations—that is, their ideas, perspectives, and practices of civic engagement, action, and hope—is key. Sites, practices, and activations of civic memory should not be premised merely on offering a succinct, top-down narrative of what has transpired, but on new spaces to position different historical people, groups, and events alongside (that is to say, in relation to) one another, in order to critically consider differences as well as intersections and ways forward.

Reframing the City’s Role from Gatekeeper to Resource

To better serve residents, the City should consider a change in perspective and approach in identifying and officializing monuments. The process governing Historic-Cultural Monument designation (hereafter HCMD, covered by 22.171, Article 1, Chapter 9, Division 22 and amended most recently under Ordinance 185472) is one example. Currently, the City operates as a gatekeeper: private citizens, community groups, or City Council members must first invest considerable time, expertise, and financial resources to make an HCMD application, which then faces a gauntlet of four different municipal bodies (the Office of Historic Resources, the Cultural Heritage Commission, the Planning and Use Management Committee, and finally the full City Council) over a period of several months. To the average citizen, this process may seem at the very least not worth the effort, and at worst adversarial; it may discourage individuals and communities from working to commemorate their histories, their struggles, and their successes. Moreover, these barriers are especially acute for communities that are underrepresented, either in existing monuments to civic memory or by way of contemporary political, economic, or social status. Communities are usually underrepresented because they lack financial resources, political capital, and, frankly, time. The current process, in our view, requires an excess of all three.

We see an opportunity for the City to reimagine its role in granting HCMD status as part of a larger reframing of what it means to commemorate significant historical-cultural elements in the fabric of Los Angeles. Specifically, we encourage the City to transform itself from being a gatekeeper to being a proactive, resident-friendly facilitator. Rather than establishing checkpoints, the City has an opportunity to incubate communication and enable the HCMD process by serving as a clearinghouse for the different kinds of knowledge (historical, architectural, social, etc.) and a partner to help communities navigate municipal systems. A parallel shift to a workflow modeled on best practices in civic engagement and community-based research would have the City actively reaching out to communities and asking how they would like to be supported, empowering individuals and communities to take leading roles in pursuing an HCMD and opening the city more generally to be shaped by its citizens. This new approach would also de-emphasize the ultimate designation as the singular goal of the HCMD process and privilege instead dialogue, conversation, and creativity around remembering the past, commemorating place, or recognizing achievements.

A Few Lessons from Here and Elsewhere

As a group, our subcommittee looked at and discussed models from Los Angeles and elsewhere, including Biddy Mason Memorial Park, the Sei Fujii Memorial Lantern, the Bracero Monument, the Pan Pacific Park, Manilatown in San Francisco, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, the Equal Justice Initiative, commemorations of the 1871 Anti-Chinese Massacre, and Monument Lab. Some lessons we drew from those investigations include the following:

  • Most physical markers in L.A. happen because of interest or permission from a private developer (or, in earlier decades, a municipal arm like the Community Redevelopment Agency). Although this sometimes has fine results, it is not a good model for ensuring that representative or difficult stories are told.
  • Truly successful civic memory projects and monuments emerge from longer processes and engagements and happen in concert with other work, like legal restitution, community development, and cultural programming.
  • Considerable power over creation and naming of public markers rests with elected city officials in a way that can make the process seem capricious or unfair.
  • In some cases, routine maintenance of parks (for example, after recent Black Lives Matter actions) can result in lost assets. This situation could be avoided with expanded staff training.

Improving Existing City Processes that Address Civic Memory

Los Angeles has several existing programs intended to commemorate, celebrate, and honor events, people, and places found to be of importance to the city. These programs include:

  • The Historic-Cultural Monument designation program, under the City Planning Department’s Office of Historic Resources
  • The Citywide Mural Program, administered by the Department of Cultural Affairs
  • SurveyLA, Citywide Historic Context Statements, and HistoricPlacesLA, administered by the Office of Historic Resources
  • Neighborhood identification/naming signs through the Office of the City Clerk
  • Park-naming through Department of Recreation and Parks sponsorship
  • Public art commissioned by the Department of Cultural Affairs as part of the Percent for Art Programs

Each of these programs evolved in a particular period of L.A.’s history and address the concept of civic memory in varying formats. Each of their processes could be more transparent: at the very least, the average citizen should be able to easily learn what each program entails and how its works are initiated. At best, these programs could all be reconfigured to be generative, inclusive, and even joyful. Programs like HCMD should explore ways to further prioritize nominations for underrepresented property types and neighborhoods, as well as properties with significant cultural or ethnic association. These programs should also create grant programs to help communities with on-site plaques, markers, or other interpretive displays at designated Historic-Cultural Monuments, prioritizing properties associated with underrepresented groups, stories, or themes. They should also create online educational resources that allow members of the general public to see the designations that do exist. And the City should better use its existing platforms to promote public participation.

Further, the designation process should be redesigned to collect and store the testimony and research that it produces so that others can easily access it. The naming of streets, squares, and parks, too, should be more transparent and broader based. The City should establish a standard accession period for public art (this subcommittee suggests 30 years), after which a work is reevaluated or deaccessioned—especially works that are “gifted” to the city.

Civic memory is also negotiated in many spaces beyond formal cultural recognition. Thoughtful recognition of history should be incorporated into staff trainings, land use permits, and legal restitution; it should not be confined to a cultural sphere or naming. The City should create cultural competency and racial bias trainings to better prepare staff to recognize significant assets when they encounter them. Civic memory work should be introduced into land use review processes and community benefits agreements (beyond archeological reports). Land acknowledgement should be added to official city title and land-use structures, not just in official events.

New Modes and New Models

More significant than creating additional pathways for naming, signage, and building markers, we recommend that the City also explore alternate models of fostering civic memory. The guiding principles behind all such models should be to challenge conventional notions of monumentality; to counter dominant traditions that fortify white supremacy and condone misrepresentation and cultural erasure; and to avoid top-down interpretations that are “fixed and fearful” (a phrase used by historians to describe how national parks have often watered down interpretation and been reluctant to change narratives once in place). Among the challenges is to question what constitutes the heroic—the typical motif of monuments—in order to defy the idea that historical change is brought about by the heroics of individuals; and to recognize that quotidian as well as ephemeral cultural practices (such as music and sound, oral history, movement and performance, and parade, among others) are also significant means of recall, memory marking, and placemaking. Cultural asset mapping—identifying cultural resources that are living as well as those that are markers of the past—is one way to begin to meet the abovementioned challenges. Such studies need to be extremely localized, on the ground, and community-based in order to identify layers of memory embedded in practices and in place (from parades, rallies, and cruising to legacy businesses, ethnically specific markets, and restaurants to informal or quasi-private places of congregation like cafes, front yards, barbershops, etc.). Such places can be fixed in memory based on a cartography of pain or violence (for instance, photos and memories of the intersection of Florence and Normandie, a key site in the 1992 unrest in Los Angeles). They can even be considered means of fostering civic memory unto themselves. The Pico-Union project of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts and other asset mappings expand the definition of living treasures and living traditions. The social and cultural ethnography and critical cartography involved in such projects can contribute to planning efforts as well as public art and other means of expressing findings in other public settings, materials, and forms.

It is also important to embed processes of community archiving into every project. By this, we mean ensuring that oral histories and community collections are both process and end product—a means of discovering a “people’s history” and also archiving it. Again, the goal should be both to foster civic memory and to activate community-based processes, not as boxes to check off in planning a project but always as a starting point. Importantly, such collecting might restore voices typically unheard or underrepresented in traditional archives. For instance, a recent L.A. Times op-ed calling out freeways as the most racist of California monuments begs the question of what to do with this and other similarly massive works of infrastructure.01 Matthew Fleischer, “Want to Tear Down Insidious Monuments to Racism and Segregation? Bulldoze L.A. Freeways,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 2020; Steve Chiotakis, “LA Freeways: The Infrastructure of Racism,” Greater LA podcast, KCRW, June 30, 2020, https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/robert-fuller-freeways-urbanism-race/la-freeways. Short of literally bringing down freeways, we might be resolute in collecting stories of displacement and containment, and then create markers and memorial spaces—including the spaces beneath, alongside, or above, as with Chicano Park in San Diego and Underpass Park in Toronto—to repair rifts and seek other forms of reparation.

The truth and reconciliation model advocated by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience might inform such measures. At the Tenement Museum in New York City, immigrant stories are tools to connect past and present. That and other Sites of Conscience suggest actionable ways to define civic memory in our city so that it is useful and equitable.

The Equal Justice Initiative’s iterative approach also offers lessons: one is to partner with nonprofit organizations that take human rights as a fundamental objective; another is to validate new data collection that enriches knowledge production, and then use it to put counter-narratives in place with otherwise traditional plaques, followed by monuments that foster a retaking of space and history—museum exhibitions, archives, and public art, to name a few. The Community Remembrance Project in Alabama, through which communities collect soil from lynching sites for display in exhibits bearing lynching victims’ names, is one of many Equal Justice Initiatives worthy of emulation.

Modeling both Monument Lab in Philadelphia and its offshoot in New Orleans, Paper Monuments, the City should look to incorporate a range of grassroots and public-private collaborations that can be intensely working-class and multiracial in focus. Such was a central goal of Paper Monuments, which in one phase collected 1,500 proposals from people of all ages, then distilled the themes and site suggestions, and finally brought artists in to create a selected few. A lesson from Monument Lab is to embrace temporary installations as a way to spur conversations and let the ideas that gain a constituency pursue permanence.

Recommendations

Civic memory is more than statues and commemoration. It is most powerful when connected to other systems—mechanisms of redress and restitution, institutions of community and culture, and present-day conversations. The City should shift its role from that of gatekeeper to facilitator and focus on developing capacity and resources to serve the ends of civic engagement and civic memory. The City should look at ways to proactively engage communities in identifying assets, interpreting them, and using them as resources. A city is likely always to be risk-averse—a position that does not serve marginalized communities in their pursuit of honest stories about past injustice. The City should partner with other groups that may have a freer hand and deeper community connections. “Historic designation” should not be seen as the end goal; it leaves much of what is valuable about civic memory to the side. The process of formal recognition can feel like a series of barriers to the average person. Communities without access to power and political sway will always be under-resourced and therefore underrepresented in clearing a “standard” set of hurdles to official designation. The City should work to facilitate more civic memory, not less.

Existing processes for designation, naming, and public marking should be made more transparent. The City should shift resources, navigating them toward underrepresented communities; help underrepresented groups organize and develop nominations; and find ways to collect, preserve, and share the material generated in these processes. The naming of sites and commissioning of monuments should not fall to individual elected officials.

The city should also look for ways to partner with NGOs, educational organizations and specialists, and community-based organizations to create longer-term engagements with history, asset mapping, and education that will build genuine engagements with the past and real constituencies for monuments and markers.

Finally, this subcommittee has a recommendation for the larger Civic Memory Working Group of which it is a part: the Working Group should work to incorporate the kinds of stakeholders named above into the process of evaluating, shaping, and discussing the proposals and ideas of this initiative. Doing so will create new insights, generate greater legitimacy around the eventual findings of the work, and perhaps most importantly, generate public momentum around this work such that the report’s recommendations have a better chance of being implemented. We imagine this as a series of public discussions, talks, and listening sessions hosted by small and large institutions and community-based organizations across greater Los Angeles.

“LO”: The Birthplace of the internet

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On October 29, 1969, a group of UCLA researchers led by the young professor Leonard Kleinrock used a bulky machine called an Interface Message Processor, or IMP, to communicate with the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto. They sent the message via the Arpanet, a precursor of the Internet. The researchers meant to begin by typing “LOGIN,” but the system crashed before they could get to the third letter. So the very first Internet message turned out to be “LO,” as in “Lo and behold.” The room on campus from which Kleinrock and his colleagues sent the message, 3420 Boelter Hall, had been modified a fair amount in the intervening decades, but a few years ago a graduate student in history at UCLA, Brad Fidler, suggested to the engineering department that it consider re-creating it as it looked in 1969. The university gave him the go-ahead, and after landing contributions from Mark Cuban and Google’s Eric Schmidt, among others, and consulting with Sebastian Clough, director of exhibitions at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, Fidler restored a wall on one side of the room that had been taken down and decorated the space to match photographs from the 1960s. He set the IMP in one corner and, in another, placed a period desk topped by a rotary phone. UCLA now promotes the room as “the birthplace of the Internet.” In 2019, on the 50th anniversary of the communication with Palo Alto, Mayor Eric Garcetti presented Kleinrock with a key to the city. Kleinrock is shown during a visit to the room in early 2021. Photograph by Robert Park.

Kobe Bryant (1978–2020)

Photographs by Alex Welsh

After Kobe Bryant was killed in a helicopter crash in the Santa Monica Mountains on January 26, 2020, along with his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and seven others, memorials to the retired Lakers star emerged across Los Angeles. The largest was located in the plaza around Staples Center, the arena where the Lakers (along with several other professional sports franchises) have played since 1999; it included heaps of flowers, balloons, handwritten notes, signed basketballs, framed posters of Bryant taken from mourners’ walls and left in the plaza, photographs, and other mementos and ephemera, much of it in the Laker colors of purple and gold. The result was the largest organic and ad hoc memorial in Los Angeles in recent memory, a genuinely spontaneous spectacle that overwhelmed even diehard Laker fans with its sheer scale. Bryant, who was 41 when he died, was a complicated figure. In 2003, a 19-year-old hotel employee in Eagle, Colorado, accused him of rape; the charges were dropped when the accuser chose not to testify in court, and Bryant subsequently settled a related civil lawsuit. This case will always be part of his legacy alongside the five championships he won as a Laker. The memorial, for its part, came up as a subject in several full meetings and subcommittee sessions of the Civic Memory Working Group, with members discussing it as an ephemeral and populist monument to Bryant’s career; marveling at the informal economy of vendors selling T-shirts, flowers, and food that materialized to serve its crowds; and noting the precise extent to which the mourners who came to Staples Center to see or contribute to it seemed to reflect the demographics of Los Angeles and Southern California.●

The River, the Freeway, and the Garden

Christopher Hawthorne

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Dr. Bartlett handed me a paper to-day, desiring me to subscribe for a statue to Horace Mann. I declined, and said that I thought a man ought not any more to take up room in the world after he was dead. We shall lose one advantage of a man’s dying if we are to have a statue of him forthwith.
—Henry David Thoreau

Most of the messages sent west to east get jumbled at the Rockies.
—Esther McCoy

This is not a report about monuments and memorials.

Not strictly speaking, anyway. It is true that the Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group, which gathered for the first time at City Hall in November of 2019 and then, in person as well on Zoom, across most of 2020, was inspired by debates happening around the country about Confederate statues and other fraught examples of American commemoration. Yet the goals of this Working Group were always distinct from those conversations in at least two important ways.

First, we set out to ground the larger debate firmly and unmistakably in Los Angeles, a city whose relationship with the past and the broader notion of civic memory has long been particular, even peculiar. As the headquarters of the Hollywood dream factory, as a city long in thrall to its reputation as a city of the future, and as a place heavily reliant on boosterism and mythmaking in building its civic identity, Los Angeles has never been particularly interested in pursuing a thorough, warts-and-all investigation of its evolution. As other sections of this report point out, L.A. has been more aggressive in its campaigns of erasure or strategic amnesia than other big American cities. In a city that, as historian and Working Group member David Torres-Rouff puts it, was “born global,” we also have perhaps had more layers of non-white history to erase.

Second, the chief lesson offered by other cities that have re-examined their approach to the production of monuments and memorials over the last five years or so is that careful attention to process and equity is paramount. It pays more dividends to focus on the how and why instead of the what or where, at least to begin with. Proposals to create, remove, or rename statues, buildings, or streets have a greater chance of success if they are preceded by broad-based discussions about memorialization and commemoration. We have been guided by the idea that Los Angeles has not yet engaged in that conversation to the degree it needs to, especially when it comes to initiatives launched from City Hall.

So you will not find, in the pages that follow, a definitive list of ten statues that should be removed from the public realm in Los Angeles, twenty Angelenos who deserve to be memorialized over the coming decade, or fifty library branches soon to be renamed. Instead the focus has been more on raising the questions and thematic concerns that should guide any effort to reconsider civic memory, whether the topic is monuments, fraught anniversaries, or historic preservation.

Take the uprising and unrest that roiled Los Angeles in 1992 as an example. The events that followed the acquittal by a Simi Valley jury of the police officers who beat Rodney King will mark their 30th anniversary next year. We hope this report will be a useful guide in helping shape any commemoration of those events the City decides to take on—but not, importantly, in terms of what material any monument should be made of or where events marking the milestone should be held. Instead we offer this report to suggest strategies to help any City-led commemorations of 1992 or similar anniversaries—whatever form they take—feel authentic, equitable, and productive to the citizens of Los Angeles, while also ceding pride of place to community-directed events and remembrances.

This report begins by listing 18 key policy recommendations. Other recommendations pop up throughout the rest of the report. These are meant to begin, not end, the conversation: The next step will be to discuss these ideas with a broad-based set of communities in Los Angeles. We also felt it was important to complement those recommendations in a range of ways meant to reflect the full complexity of Los Angeles and its formal and informal histories. And so alongside (and in between) reports from the Working Group’s various subcommittees, whose members were asked to focus on specific topics including labor, process, and historic preservation, among others, you will find in the pages that follow a number of other editorial features. These include roundtable discussions on topics including the complex legacy of Junípero Serra and constructions of whiteness across Los Angeles history; case studies of effective and creative means of supporting civic memory in public and institutional spaces; excerpts from longer essays as well as newly commissioned pieces of writing; and photographs and photo essays on related topics, including ad hoc memorials and what might be charitably called unresolved episodes in the civic history of Los Angeles.

Our central aim has been to support and explore ways of telling the story of Los Angeles history on its own terms while connecting this effort to the broader national conversation on reckoning and commemoration, drawing from it the most useful and relevant lessons we can. We have leaned heavily on historians—the Working Group from its first meeting has included many of the leading scholars on Los Angeles, Southern California, and the American West—and engaged Indigenous leaders and community members, visual and performing artists, architects, designers, curators, musicians, journalists, and others.

A Moment to Ask Ourselves Key Questions

We decided early on that our report shouldn’t aim for a kind of illusory consensus. If you read the various subcommittee reports carefully, for example, you’ll find that they sometimes disagree with one another or take issue with policies crafted by the City or that other members of the group have developed or worked on. We feel that this diversity of opinion reflects not division or weakness but strength.

It is also true that the timing of the Working Group’s investigations, which continued across one of the most tumultuous years in Los Angeles, American, and world history, hardly lent itself to a genial consistency of purpose. In our first meeting at City Hall, Mayor Garcetti referred to the sense that a groundswell was building as cities around the country began to critically examine their approach to commemoration, memorialization, and civic memory. “This is a moment for us to ask ourselves what we want to say, who we want to be, and whose histories we want to tell,” he told the group. But we had no idea how much, and in how many different ways, the world was about to change.

When we reconvened for our second full meeting at City Hall in early February of 2020, stories about an opportunistic and deadly virus stalking the Chinese city of Wuhan were already beginning to appear in the American press. Within a few weeks, as we began to make plans for the first meetings of our various subcommittees, the mayor who had spoken to us about the potential of the moment was issuing a lockdown order for the residents of Los Angeles, requiring that they stay home save for the most necessary trips. By May, the press room where our group had twice gathered was becoming the familiar backdrop for that same mayor’s daily coronavirus briefings. Our Civic Memory subcommittees, for their part, proceeded to gather virtually, as the world was learning to do.

It was in this fragile context, hearing daily updates about the spread of the virus and trying nonetheless to keep to our regular daily family and professional tasks, that we learned about and then, horrified, watched the video of the Minneapolis police officer Derek Shauvin kneeling on one shoulder and the neck of George Floyd as he lay in the parking lane along Chicago Avenue for more than eight minutes. The marches of protest that followed, reacting not only to Floyd’s death but those of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others, filled the streets of Los Angeles for several weeks. Many of us joined them. I can’t speak for the other members of this group, but for me our discussions on L.A.’s relationship to the most fraught aspects of our past began to seem inchoate compared to the highly focused energy pulsing down the city’s boulevards.

Three Unifying Themes

And yet when the chairs of those subcommittees began sending me summaries of their discussions, in late summer of 2020, certain patterns were almost instantly recognizable, as were paths toward progress. This was less true of specific policy ideas, sites or historical figures—although commonalities emerged there too—than of guiding metaphors and themes. Three stood out, emerging, disappearing, and reappearing in several of those emailed summaries like buoys. It is to those three that I would like to turn for the rest of this essay, for they seem equally capable of marking the ways in which Los Angeles has systematically obliterated difficult aspects of its history and suggesting a productive, if tentative, way forward.

The first is the Los Angeles River. It is fair to say that our city owes its existence and much of its physical shape to the river that shares its name. Downtown Los Angeles is located in the somewhat odd spot it occupies in the larger geography of Southern California, a full 15 miles in from the ocean, because of the river: because Indigenous communities organized themselves near it and, in the late 18th century, Spanish colonists established their central plaza a short walk from its banks. The river then served as the primary source of drinking water in the growing city until 1913, when the Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed. Life in Los Angeles until that year was organized in nearly every way around proximity to the river.

But the river in this period—in addition to being seasonal, going largely dry in the summer and into the fall—was also mobile, even fickle. The built form and scale of Los Angeles developed in response to the river and existed at the river’s mercy. When heavy rains caused it to overflow its banks or even drastically change its course, the young city around it was forced to rebuild or otherwise adapt. As those floods became deadlier and more destructive across the 1920s and 1930s, the city responded in a way typical of the era: by relying on the expertise of engineers and on a kind of technocratic optimism about the ability of giant public-works projects to tame, or at least bring under some kind of control, the natural world. The result was a channelized river from the upper reaches of the northwestern San Fernando Valley to the ocean in Long Beach: 51 miles of concrete wrestling the unpredictable river into something like submission.

There have been encouraging efforts to revitalize or even “re-green” that engineered river organized at the community, city, and county levels, and with the help of the state and federal governments. These are ongoing, and several members of our Working Group have contributed to them in one way or another. And yet when the river came up in the discussions of the larger group and its subcommittees, the focus was not for the most part on these contemporary projects. It was instead on what the concretized river has to say about this city’s relationship to buried truths or unruly histories. For too long we have responded to that kind of uncertainty or fraught material in the civic conversation by keeping it fully and sometimes aggressively contained and out of sight, in much the same way we shoehorned miles of river into a form that is frequently compared to a concrete straitjacket, leaving many Angelenos unaware of its existence. It is no coincidence that the river came up in this regard in so many disparate conversations conducted as part of the Civic Memory effort. It is a kind of infrastructural map, written at macro scale across the city’s landscape, of the ways in which the efficient march of growth and progress has manhandled the more nuanced or unpredictable elements of civic culture in Los Angeles.

Something similar might be said of another network of concretized ambition—the Los Angeles freeway system—that emerged as the second major theme in the subcommittee reports.

David Brodlsy, in his remarkable 1981 book L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay, sums up the symbolic role of this landscape. “The freeway system supplies Los Angeles with one of its principal metaphors,” he writes. “Employed to represent the totality of metropolitan Los Angeles, it is the city’s great synecdoche, one of the few parts capable of standing for the whole.” Meanwhile it is UCLA’s Eric Avila, a member of our Working Group, who has best chronicled the impact that synecdoche has had at ground level. His 2014 book The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City considers the role freeways have played in both dividing and galvanizing the L.A. communities through which they have been constructed (or, in some cases, rammed).

What the freeway means now, nearly eight decades after its debut in Los Angeles, remains ripe for examination. Is it a symbol, like the concretized river, of the ways in which the growth machine in Los Angeles has run roughshod over community history, devaluing the particular and local at the expense of the expansive and new? It is an eyesore whose external sound walls communities have remade in their own image, covering them with murals and even religious shrines, as a protest against its dehumanizing force? Is it something that we can now, realistically, begin planning to remove or reimagine, at least in certain corridors, as part of a larger effort to dismantle the overreach of 20th-century L.A. urbanism and chip away at the dominance of the car?

The material that follows in this report suggests it may well be all three of those things. The freeway has disfigured not just neighborhoods like Sugar Hill, the Black community bisected by the construction of the Santa Monica Freeway (also known as Interstate 10) in the 1960s, but many examples of community history in Los Angeles and for decades the notion of shared local culture. Any movement to recover civic memory at a fine-grained level will need to confront the freeway system—perhaps even as an occupying force, and one that gained its foothold through a kind of violence at that. If you have glided over freeway overpasses or sat in traffic on freeways but never spent significant time in communities split, fractured, or otherwise pummeled by their construction—or abused by their noise and pollution on an ongoing basis—it may come as a surprise to hear Avila and Torres-Rouff, in one of the roundtable discussions in these pages, describe the Los Angeles freeway as a monument to whiteness and the prerogatives of wealth and power. If you have spent time in those neighborhoods, it may not.

Moving Past a Top-Down Approach

So how can Los Angeles move past the ways in which its infrastructural ambition, mirroring its civic one, tended to seek the regional, macro scale at the expense of the local? How can the city that so often trampled on community memory reconnect with histories of Los Angeles that are smaller, less predictable, and less subject to top-down or official control?

One possible answer can be found in the third theme that emerged as a connecting thread in the reflections of the full Civic Memory Working Group and its subcommittees: the garden. For all of L.A.’s reputation for lushness—and even as a kind of paradise that, as the British architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham put it, “will carry almost any kind of vegetation that horticultural fantasy might conceive,” as long as it’s given enough water—the city’s most impressive and most meaningful gardens have tended to occupy private space, mostly residential enclaves of all scales, complementing and often lending privacy to residential architecture of all types.

The idea of public gardens in every corner of the city—and memorial gardens, in particular—has gained less traction here, at least in official circles. Yet several of the Civic Memory subcommittees raised it to one degree or another. There are proposals in these pages for a garden dedicated to the workers of Los Angeles and, more specifically, to the “essential workers” who have faced the gravest challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Elsewhere in our discussions we raised the potential of expanded or reimagined gardens ringing public library branches and public schools. As a way to reimagine the idea of a memorial or strengthen the links between civic memory and community life, these proposals strike me as having tremendous potential.

Because gardens evolve significantly over time and require thoughtful and regular upkeep—neither of which is true for a traditional statue on a pedestal—they also point to the ways, both literally and symbolically, that we might reconnect civic memory with notions of maintenance, fidelity, and care. They are the opposite of the channelized river or the freeway system, whose effectiveness and power rely on their dominance over wide swaths of the city. Those two landscapes are able to operate only at the macro level, and indeed they repel neighborhood scale as a result.

The garden is different. It is changeable. It is local. It depends on human contact. The garden might be an ideal spot, in other words, from which to watch the emergence of new forms of civic memory in Los Angeles—and watch the old ones die. When it’s time to produce a new generation of memorials and monuments appropriate to 21st-century Los Angeles and its communities, maybe we shouldn’t aim to build them at all. Maybe we should plant them instead. Something similar is true for the report as a whole. What follows is not a stack of blueprints but a packet of seeds.

In Search of New Metaphors

These are the twin questions facing us as we move to a re-conception of commemoration and civic memory in Los Angeles: how to approach the task of producing a new batch of memorials and what to do with the existing ones, especially if they remind some of us not of triumph but of pain. We should not be naive enough to think that any of our new monuments will be impervious to the flaws that always attend memorial design, beginning with a tendency to reflect our present when we think we are mining or celebrating our past. Better to seek meaning in the absence left behind when statues come down and the openness and freedom opened up by new ways of thinking about memory and civic life.

I like what Paul B. Preciado wrote in the Dec. 2020 issue of Artforum, in a remarkable essay on monuments translated from the Spanish by Michele Faguet: “We do not suffer from a forgetting of normative history but from a systematic erasure of the history of oppression and resistance. We do not need any more statues. Let’s not ask for marble or metal to fill those pedestals. Let’s climb up on them and tell our own stories of survival and liberation.”

There is a book on a shelf in my home office, published in 1960 and written by the architectural historian Harold Kirker, called California’s Architectural Frontier. It opens with a quote from the Las Sergas de Esplandian, a best-selling Spanish novel from 1510 by Garci Ordóñez Rodríguez de Montalvo, describing California as a paradise, a land where “there was no metal but gold.” A couple of paragraphs later, Kirker defines the state as “the outermost edge of a more rooted culture.”

More than six decades after that book appeared, California and Los Angeles in particular are still struggling to shake off the destructive power of this trope, which has its benign forms to be sure but so often tends toward the exploitative. In my own work as the architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, a post I held from 2004 to 2018, I did what I could, which in the scheme of things was not much, to undermine it. I wrote a kind of biography of Sunset Boulevard that began at the ocean and traveled east, back in time, across the Los Angeles River and into Boyle Heights, reversing the typical journey along Sunset Boulevard that seems so often and so automatically to recreate a Manifest Destiny trajectory, moving inexorably west toward the edge of the continent and the setting sun. I quoted Mayor Garcetti’s observation that Los Angeles, instead of solely occupying the western edge of the American continent, is “arguably the northern capital of Latin America and the eastern capital of the Pacific Rim.” Still the metaphor persists.

The truth, of course, is that Los Angeles is neither a frontier—ask any of the many Indigenous leaders who contributed to this volume how that metaphor strikes them—nor, these days, a place that could be accurately called unrooted. Population growth has fully leveled off here and even begun to reverse itself, in part because of sky-high housing prices. Immigration to Los Angeles County peaked a full three decades ago. Angelenos move less often now than they have for most of the city’s modern history, and they live in an aging housing stock. In fact, by some measures, Los Angeles and its built form are changing less quickly than at any point since the 1880s.

The second full meeting of the Civic Memory Working Group at City Hall, with William Deverell foreground left and Taj Frazier foreground right, February 3, 2020. Photograph by Gary Leonard
From left, Wendy Cheng, Julia Bogany, and Leila Hamidi, with Mark Wild seated behind, at the second full meeting of the Civic Memory Working Group at City Hall, February 3, 2020. Photograph by Gary Leonard.

That, paradoxically enough, means that the change that does come to any particular neighborhood is more noticeable and all the more deeply felt. At the same time, the impact of larger forces separate from architecture or demography threatens to make that local stability irrelevant. COVID-19 and climate change are only the two most obvious examples.

Those facts complicate the efforts of the Civic Memory Working Group in some fascinating and significant ways, none of which we should ignore or gloss over. For all the attention we pay in the following pages to the importance of reconnecting with community and neighborhood history and guarding against displacement, this volume should not be understood as an implicit endorsement of the offensive idea that Los Angeles was somehow better or more itself back then, whatever period “then” might refer to.

There remains a risk in some parts of the city of stagnation or self-satisfaction, particularly as populations in some of the city’s wealthier single-family neighborhoods stop growing or even shrink. We are also aware of the extent to which support for historic preservation or paeans to “neighborhood character” can be weaponized to protect wealth and (typically white) prerogative. We want to stress that the various efforts in these pages to reconnect with buried histories of Los Angeles and set the stage for confronting difficult episodes in the city’s past should not be understood as endorsements of the idea that Los Angeles should stop changing, or even, necessarily, that it is changing too fast.

But change and whitewashing are two different things. So are evolution and erasure. Supporting civic memory is in our view a creative act, not a conservative and certainly not a reactionary one. Commemoration should lead to conversation and even reckoning—to action, not embalming. We can encourage Los Angeles to hold on to its reputation as a place where innovation, even flux, are prized while also insisting that the skeletons in many of our closets, official and otherwise, have been left undisturbed for too long. The Los Angeles most worth celebrating will figure out how to keep both horizon and wake in view, and in some kind of symbolic balance, at the same time. It will abandon the frontier rhetoric for good and invite new conceptions of the city that build on what we have in place, what we prize, what we need to dispense with, what we need to recover, and perhaps most important of all what might allow us to treat one another with more compassion and consideration.

Discuss

7.27.2020

D R A F T

 

Introductory Subcommittee

Sharon, Bill, Marisa, Kelly, Chris, Richard, Eric

Los Angeles has long been celebrated as well as caricatured as the “city of the future.” Perhaps it follows that this sensibility invites or even requires minimal attention to the past. Given contemporary upheavals across the nation regarding commemorative monuments, statues, and the like, the work of the Civic Memory Working Committee may perhaps act as a corrective to metropolitan amnesia, as well as a guide to contemplating public memorialization endeavors moving forward.  

The work of the committee and its sub-committees has proceeded with shared awareness of these opportunities and obligations. This report is but a starting point in what is fervently hoped will be a deeper, wider, and on-going public conversation about the past in our city and region.  What might it mean to community, history, and memory if the city of the future could simultaneously be lauded for its regard for the past?

The many stages of a region-wide growth juggernaut of industrial, metropolitan, and suburban development, ca. 1880-forward, arrived with concomitant campaigns and reflexes to elide and destroy signs of the past. Though relatively recent initiatives – including the Getty Foundation-funded Survey L.A. – suggest an encouraging turn toward cataloging and protecting architectural and cultural heritage, it is fair to say that in Los Angeles there has traditionally been insufficient thought given to the protection of older buildings and neighborhoods and the memories they contain. What has been lost in the top-down drive towards progress and modernity that accelerated in the middle decades of the last century is a long list of sites and places and all that they meant to the people who knew them well. The 10 freeway bulldozed the historic Sugar Hill neighborhood. A rush to the future seems, as well, to have narrowed possibilities for commemorative reckoning.  Triumphalism – leached of any acknowledgment of history’s crimes and wounds – has been a powerful tool and motivator of commemoration. But it is a blunt, insensitive instrument of historic acknowledgment. Grief and rage, as well as attempts at atonement, as dozens of galvanizing nationwide actions in the past months clearly demonstrate, have roles to play in how the present shares views of the past. What if Los Angeles acknowledged both regret and triumph in its past and, in so doing, in its present?

Modern Los Angeles has a record of efforts, many of them violent or otherwise brutal, to establish Anglo or European-American prerogatives by directly whitewashing not just indigenous, African-American, Asian, Latino and other communities but successive periods of Spanish and Mexican rule. Los Angeles has been more stalwart in successive erasures – and perhaps had more historical layers of non-Anglo history to erase – than is the case in other major cities. 

There is an important caveat or coda that we should add to that set of observations about erasure: In certain ways, it is precisely this amnesia — or freedom from the weight of history or community expectation — that has made Los Angeles so attractive to successive waves of newcomers from around the country and the world, especially those working in creative fields including Hollywood but also architecture, literature, music and art. One unifying strand of Los Angeles history – perhaps even central to the city’s sense of itself – is the degree to which it has been an attractive destination exactly because, for many, it represents the idea of leaving behind, forgetting and creating anew. This has been as true for the aspiring actor or architect as for many generations of immigrants from across the country and the world.

We sense an opportunity to recognize some essential qualities that make Los Angeles what it is and to, in turn, distinguish its history and culture from other metropoles.

National upheavals and conversations over the last five years or so about the fate of Confederate monuments and memorials, and increasingly about others (the Fr. Junipero Serra statues and other commemorations are fundamental regional case examples) have prompted a painful, overdue reckoning with the ways in which American cities have chosen to mark and commemorate their own histories and what stories have been rendered invisible or buried in the process.  

When viewed alongside such protests as those launched by Black Lives Matter activism, for instance, it is clear that history – and various attempts to bury or distort it – lies at the heart of much that is happening. What voices of protest and anger often say is that this is not new; instead it is systematic and how we have had to live (and die) for far too long. So whether rage is focused on the name of a U.S. military base or patterns of racialized killings, our moment looks to be linked organically to the past. Any attempt at energizing civic memory must listen to those voices that have been repeating the same finding for years: our shared past is grim. A city’s healthy regard for civic memory cannot assume that such memory must soothe.

Civic memory is a slippery construction, as the definition of each of the two words is already difficult before we expect civic to serve as adjective to memory.  Our aim is to encourage the public installation of structures, performances, or other creative works which address this region’s past in ways and forms that challenge myths, languid triumphalism, or the mere comfort of forgetting. Our hope is that civic memory installations in Los Angeles– of whatever form they take – address history and memory fearlessly, in public, and without suggestion or taint of authoritative origin or impulse. 

The moment is now. Los Angeles has an opportunity to broaden and enrich a national discussion by confronting its own peculiar and fraught relationship with civic memory. Our city finds itself with both significant anniversaries (30 years since the civil unrest of 1992) and major civic events (the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics) on the horizon – milestones that will be more equitable, more inclusive and ultimately more productive if they are grounded in efforts to grapple forthrightly with the forgotten or erased histories of this city and its tendency toward civic amnesia.

One of the many challenges we face is in finding – through collective dialogue – a balance between immediate policy recommendations and broader reflections on how to enrich and encourage a culture of civic memory in Los Angeles.

Pitfalls and obstacles are many.  

To begin with, any commemorative effort can pose a trap. The danger of memory is its seductive and false clarity. It pretends to be only about the past, but memory in civic or personal form is undoubtedly also – and perhaps primarily – a reflection or confirmation of the present moment. That is why, as we now recognize, statues and memorials are less about the person or event they commemorate than the moment in which a particularly commemoration took or takes place.  

Our city must guard against hubris and against any assumption that our moment’s perspective on the past is immutable or that we have gained clarity or wisdom about history that earlier generations have lacked. There are many reasons to be wary of any act of memorialization that “foreverizes” any one perspective or one that cloaks any given memorial with the figurative amber of permanence. The future deserves to find our era’s monuments – if they find them at all — as malleable or elastic, able to be re-imagined and re-thought as perspectives upon the past inevitably evolve.

Might we embrace or invite or encourage ephemeral commemorations which do not have the “fixed” problem built in and which do not unduly fetishize permanence or suggest that our time has, by way of fixity, bronze, concrete, or iron, answered the questions of what parts of the past belong in public prominence in our present and future? Or can our design of new commemorative installations engage across multiple and dynamic scales and meanings – functioning beyond any singular and didactic narrative? 

We think such an approach might be particularly well suited to Los Angeles, a polycentric, dynamic and unfinished city that has tended to distrust tidy narratives about its origins or its contemporary meanings.

Ideas in regard to more specific recommendations:

Public commemorations are political, and politics always change as the imagined future becomes the lived present. What we commemorate now will – sometimes quickly and sometimes gradually – grow irrelevant or even offensive, as we have seen so clearly in 2020.  In deeply divided moments like our own, the politics are going to be fraught. We must recognize this honestly and understand that we cannot expect otherwise.

There is no escaping these dilemmas, but we might be able to mitigate them. Who speaks for any given community is not at all clear. We need to be careful to have the city anoint one part of a community over another. So, too: people might commemorate what is important to them or they might commemorate what they have been told should be important to them. All proposals should be open to some kind of critique. From the start this Working Group has been careful to focus not on conclusions about what new monuments or memorials should look like or even whom they should honor but instead on thoughtful, equitable and community-based processes for developing such historically minded initiatives.

Consider the Los Angeles City Archives, a less-than-well-known trove of civic memory in documents and images. Professionally curated and archived, its vast collections ought to be better known. How can the Archives staff and holdings be assisted so as to play a bigger role in encouraging and supporting civic memory efforts and programs? How can the holdings and expertise of those who care for them be imagined in more distributive ways across neighborhoods and communities? Creative engagement with artists drawn from multiple communities, for instance, could highlight the Archives as a key site by which to enhance civic memory and pay dividends in terms of collection development for new acquisitions. This rich archive is itself a kind of monument to Los Angeles history its importance to the both scholars and a wider public could be underscored in a range of creative ways.

In a related fashion, Los Angeles civic memory is served by continual and widespread encouragement to archive and otherwise collect (and interpret and distribute) stories and memories. Finding ways to interact with grassroots efforts which celebrate individual narratives offer some examples of this, as would weaving institutional partnerships from libraries, archive outposts, churches, and community centers. Perhaps a larger arc of a renewed commitment to civic memory could be ambitious efforts at enhancing the Los Angeles content of K-12 education in the region. To be sure, a diverse and deep network of historical engagement can encourage the region’s residents to engage civic histories beyond statues and built memorials.

Not all enhancements of civic memory need be new creations, captures of memory, or events.  Part of what this report is about is its attempt to determine what memorials and commemorative installations are already out there, why they came to be, and where they reside. (Or, for that matter, when and under what circumstances they disappeared.) But moving beyond “this is at this location, go see it” is a fundamental obligation of this effort. It is step one to note those sites/memorials/installations extant all over the city.  

Cataloging and publicizing them might be followed efforts to understand them anew. Might we refresh some/most/all of them, and in so doing ask them to teach us about matters that are not decided, about interpretations which have changed or must be challenged?  

Sometimes it will be right to make something new. Sometimes it will be right to change, remove or add to something old. Sometimes it will be right to foster partnerships between the city and community members or institutions. Sometimes it will be right for the city to stay out of the way and do nothing.  

As to that last point, the “get out of the way” choice: how well does the city and its structures of power and policy balance listening with action?  Is the City of Los Angeles listening long and deeply enough to the needs coming from its communities and understanding well enough the way they understand and make use of civic memory? What good is accomplished if policy fights spontaneity or if centralized memorialization inhibits eruptions of grassroots emotion and power? Policies and procedures for initiating memorials, re-visiting them, and taking them down are important. But so too is knowing that memorialization must always be encouraged with no municipal oversight. The recent and remarkable memorialization of Kobe Bryant (as well as his daughter and the others who perished in a January, 2020 helicopter crash) is a powerful case in point. It would be a grave mistake, we believe, to overly bureaucratize memorialization protocols and approvals such that the passion, spontaneity, grief, and ephemerality of a moment in history is lost, avoided, or otherwise diluted. Better yet to encourage or at least not trammel such moments and, once they have been enacted, to find ways to mark, remember, and call attention to them

Our approach to memorials – new and older – might also include a broader embrace of places – plazas, parks, open space – that invite reflection and may more subtly acknowledge people or moments from the past. As sites of gathering, such spaces can be embraced and engaged in the present, support everyday life in an ongoing manner, and intertwine with and scaffold the future while simultaneously inviting thoughts on the past. Similarly, marches, festivals, and performances/storytelling (or spontaneous displays of citywide grief) can also be valid markers of an historical event, person or place. The cycle of rituals could pull out different aspects of a memorialization over time. Protests, as noted above, are key moments of remembering and memorialization (every bit as much as parades and festivals) and deserve to be recognized as such.

One way to escape the presentist tendencies of memorialization would be to layer memorialization across time in space. For each set of acknowledged community memories in a given Los Angeles neighborhood, for example, a second set of simple memorials could note the people who lived there before the present community became established. As a palimpsest, then, it would be fairly simple to acknowledge the Native American past all across the Los Angeles Basin. (And, indeed, any Indigenous Land Acknowledgement Policy of the type being considered by one of the subcommittees of this Working Group might be strengthened by an insistence that we recognize Native histories and placemaking not merely as part of public ceremonies but in the framing of public spaces.) But the recognition can go deeper in time and demography.  The diversity of community in Los Angeles invites us to consider additional layers (the east side and Boyle Heights, for example).  

Consider the Breed St. Shul in Boyle Heights.  After decades of abandonment there is a now a movement to rehabilitate the structure to preserve the memory of the largely and mostly forgotten Boyle Heights Jewish community. What one generation seeks to forget and leave behind, another is trying to rescue from oblivion of amnesia. How can we acknowledge both practices of forgetting and remembering? How can memorials be powerful reminders of the past and interpreters of it at once? To underscore an earlier point, Los Angeles is unusual among American cities in its embrace — a civic paradox to be sure — of a certain tradition of productive forgetting; its arts and culture, in particular, have benefited directly from a refusal to be weighed down by tradition or restricted by traditional ideas about patronage, lineage, influence and the like.

All this relates to another challenge: how do we remember events that may have no constituency in the present?

At the level of policy and staffing, could we imagine historical context and perspective being required at municipal policy-level discussions and creation? At municipal speeches? Might the city have a municipal officer serving as historian? Or a rotation of terms for same? Might we consider partnerships with local educational and cultural institutions (in part to sidestep possible politicization of the position) so that this position be taken up seriatim by curators, archivists, historians?  

Finally, we should create mechanisms for retiring as well as establishing sites of memory and memorialization. Creating memorials is a political act, so is taking them down. We need a way to make sure this does not become a contest of force, a competition in defacement. On a related note, when decisions are made to remove X or Y, should the city consider, for a variety of reasons, allowing for partial removal: might memorial ruins become sites for a different kind of contemplation from when this or that commemorative piece was erected or enacted? How might we retire monuments that have, for one reason or another, stood beyond their meaning, purpose, or appropriateness?

Anything done will be judged and critiqued. We should hope as much. We ought to lay ourselves bare in our ideas and obligations, though allowing for the revision of our ideas and claims to evolve. The aim should be that the report, and the commemorations which follow, will be discussed and debated widely, a new beginning to an unending dialogue.