From Columbus to Chávez: L.A.’s disappearing, disfigured, displaced statues

Try taking a census of the immobilized population of Los Angeles — otherwise known as our civic statues, rendered in metal or stone. Just try.

They’re not as immobile as you’d think. They’re here, they’re there, they move from pedestal to pedestal. Sometimes they disappear altogether.

Right here in L.A., without journeying to Greece or Rome or the Louvre, we’ve seen statues with body parts missing. At one point, unknown someones snapped the nose off the statue honoring silent film lover-boy Rudolph Valentino, and lopped the hands off the Lincoln Park statue of Florence Nightingale, a gift to the city in 1936 from a local hospital support group.

Alongside Lincoln Park, the small Parque de Mexico has what looks like a stubby Stonehenge of empty plinths. Stolen from its pedestals were an array of Mexican heroes: a general, a poet, two iconic presidents, and a bust of the revolutionary hero Pancho Villa. You’d think ICE had swept through and deported them, too.

Anybody would wonder, why? A vandal’s pure cussedness. Maybe a destructive envy: “If I can knock down the statue of a hero, that makes me better than the hero.” Never discount the criminal temptations of the price per pound of metal (and shame on the metal salvage companies that accept for scrap something that is very obviously historic, and stolen).

Once in a rare while, a person who was once heroically famous is demoted to infamous, and his statues disappear. This happened with astonishing speed within the last few weeks, after the New York Times wrote about allegations that farmworkers’ union co-founder César Chávez sexually abused two girls and raped the woman who co-founded the union.

Within 90 minutes of the San Fernando City Council voting to get rid of its Chávez monument, the statuary had been bagged up, hoisted off its plinth and whisked away.

Chávez was not the first.

Sheriff's deputies stand next to a boxed up statue

The explorers in our midst

It took many years longer, years of petitioning and lobbying by Native American groups and others, before a bronze statue of explorer Christopher Columbus was evicted, in 2018, from Los Angeles County’s Grand Park in downtown.

That left us with the last, first explorer standing: Leif Erickson. His bust, in Griffith Park, was donated 90 years ago by the Nordic Civic League, and now stands alone among L.A.’s statuary as the European claimant to having discovered North America. The plaque reads “Landed in America year 1000.”

That beats out by a half-millennium the journey of the Portuguese explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, whose Spanish expedition was the first to lay peepers on Southern California as it sailed by in 1542. His statue in San Pedro is one of dozens of artworks bestowed on L.A. in the 1930s in a great burst of civic artistry created by the Depression-era federal artists’ project, among them the statue at the entrance to the Hollywood Bowl.

No one at the time was on the record about any variant of “antisemitic,” but that’s what I thought when I read about the wanderings of the statue of Haym Salomon. Salomon was a Polish merchant who came to colonial America, and he soon bankrupted himself by putting his sizable fortune at the disposal of the American Revolution and the new American government, which did not repay him.

His statue was installed in Hollenbeck Park in 1944, back when Jewish life revolved around Boyle Heights. Seven years later, after it had been “disfigured by vandals,” as the Los Angeles Daily News put it, it migrated to MacArthur Park, where vandals found it again. In 1984, Jewish groups raised money to move it — this time to the West Wilshire Recreation Center. At last, in 2005, the statuary Salomon made its fourth move, to a prominent spot in Pan Pacific Park. It took four hours, a 200-ton crane and sledgehammers to pry the bronze Salomon loose from its base at the rec center and send it to its new and perhaps last home.

A statue of Haym Salomon is transported along a street

The removal of the Chávez statue and the desecration of so many others raises the questions: Why does L.A.’s statuary feel like a random menagerie, noble clutter tracked in haphazard inventories, and with no single agency apparently responsible for them, and apparently little public money devoted to keeping them looking as good as Angelenos like to keep their own flesh-and-blood bodies?

The haphazard way we add statues in L.A.

For too long, really, L.A. was pretty relaxed about accepting whatever offerings came along. What did it hurt, right? If some civic or interest group raised the money to donate a statue of its hero, it would have been impolitic to refuse it. Anyway, it didn’t cost the taxpayers anything, and it took some of the sting out of the darts flung by East Coast culturati that L.A. was devoid of real culture.

So the politicians said “yes” and showed up for a nice ceremony with photographs and handshakes and the snipping of ribbons, and a whole voting bloc of ethnicity or interest group might show their appreciation at the polls.

These donated statues almost never came with money for their upkeep, usually only promises that loving hands and fans would tend them. Sooner or later, those fans and hands fell away, and the statues remained, growing less and less presentable.

The same federal arts project sculptor who crafted the bust of Leif Erickson, Nina Saemundsson, gave us the MacArthur Park statue of Prometheus, the mythological Greek figure who stole the fire of knowledge from the gods to give to humanity.

Ungrateful humans vandalized his black cement statue. The globe he held in his left hand got filched long ago, and his toes got cut off and carted off.

Prometheus got something of a rehab a few years ago, and a while after that, a couple of guerrilla artists stuck an outsized meth pipe in his hand. The park by then had a deserved reputation as an open-air drug market. The artists added a new plaque, one that declared that Prometheus’ great gift was “for the use of fentanyl, crack cocaine, and methamphetamines.”

Only one left from the Otis trio

Much of the statuary cast of characters in MacArthur Park, once called Westlake Park, has been brutalized. The Otis trio, three bronze statues installed in 1920, were the artistry of the renowned Russian sculptor Paul Troubetzkoy. They were paid for by $50,000 raised by admirers of The Times’ founder, Harrison Gray Otis.

The bronze soldier that once stood to Otis’ left went AWOL long ago. The bronze newsboy on his right was stolen on March 25, 2024, around 1:30 a.m. We know this because security video shows two trucks and a posse of men in reflective vests, presumably trying to look like official civic workers, hanging around the monument then. The thieves left behind only the newsboy’s mangled shoes. Planning and thievery on this scale bespeaks a ring of metal poaching. Only Otis’ statue survives, randomly graffitied.

A bird stands on an index finger of a statue

MacArthur Park’s notable survivor? The bronze monument to General Douglas MacArthur. His 8-foot statue rises from a 10-foot pedestal — harder to reach than the practically ground-level Otis trio.

When thieves and vandals can’t get at a statue itself, they may pry off the explanatory plaque. That happened in Little Tokyo, to the statue of Japan’s 19th century “peasant sage,” Ninomiya Kinjiro, or Ninomiya Sontoku. He reformed Japanese agriculture and exemplified the nation’s virtues and values. He’s been there for more than 40 years, but the plaque telling his story to passersby got pinched a long time ago.

Like just about every other city in the country, L.A.’s statuary roll call comes up short on figures of women. Nightingale’s you already know about. Amelia Earhart stands 7 feet tall atop a 6-foot plinth in North Hollywood Park. Her indignities are nothing compared with Nightingale’s. In 1988, she had to go in for freshening up after 17 years of heat and rain, and so many fingernails scrabbling away at her 24-karat gold surface. Then, in 2021, the statue had a classic L.A. encounter — a car smashed into her, and that was another few years of refurbishing before it was returned. If you’ve ever flown out of the Burbank airport, you’ve probably seen the duplicate of the statue in Terminal A.

The best-known of the statues of women is probably the Lady of the Lake. She stands 14 feet tall at the edge of Echo Park Lake, another legacy of the Depression-era arts project, created by Ada May Sharpless. “La Reina de Los Angeles” was her given name. She was not as famous as the living woman who founded the tabernacle next door — the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson — but La Reina outlasted Sister Aimee. She presided over the lake for more than 50 years before wear and vandalism — and the need to install a water pump — sent her into storage.

It took a three-year campaign by preservationists before La Reina was restored and brought out after about a decade in the storage yard to return to the lake.

She was fortunate; some pieces of public statuary seem to have disappeared into “preservation” as well, and never re-emerged, like the divine artifact in “Raiders of the Lost Arc,” black-holed into an immense government storehouse.

I haven’t been able to find what became of one of L.A.’s boldest civic sculptures. This one was actually chosen and paid for by the city, and was attached to a wall near the entrance to the old LAPD headquarters, Parker Center.

“The Family Group,” from 1955, by Tony Rosenthal, is the elongated 12-foot-high bronze figures of a nuclear family, with small heads and outsized, stylized body silhouettes. Former Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote in 2009 that “the original golden hue of Rosenthal’s relief has gone dark [but] … as a midcentury Modern period piece it’s smashing.”

The year it was installed, one furious councilman denounced it as “faceless, raceless and gutless pinheads,” and wanted to melt the thing down. He was the same councilman who went nuclear over a ship painting at a city art show. He swore that it showed the Commie hammer and sickle symbol. In fact, it was the monogram for the yacht, called the Island Clipper.

A lover and a rebel

For the home of Hollywood, statues of actors are pretty thin on the ground. This is not a bad thing. Stars gleam and fade away fast, but the statues of two heartthrobs who died young and left good-looking corpses have lasted decades after their deaths.

A bust of James Dean stands on the grounds of the Griffith Observatory, where he filmed scenes from his most celebrated film, “Rebel Without a Cause.” From the right POV, you can get Dean, the Hollywood sign and you all in the same selfie.

In De Longpre Park (bonus points if you know who the park was named for), a statue honors the original screen lover, Rudolph Valentino, who died a hundred years ago. It was unveiled in 1930 by actress Dolores del Rio and was paid for by Valentino fans.

Rudolph Valentino's burial at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

It’s a stylized Deco bronze figure entitled “Aspiration,” and looks nothing like the slick sheik of silent cinema, but it was still too much for a snooty city arts commissioner, who worried that there would be no end to movie star statuary, and that it all smacked of “publicity.” It’s been stolen and recovered, had its nose broken off, and for 20 years the city stored it away for safety, which rather defeats the point of public statuary.

Even though President Trump has defiantly installed a 7-foot-tall marble statue of Christopher Columbus on the White House grounds, the tide of taste and even of history has been turning against heroic representational statuary. The heads may be bronze, but the feet can turn out to be clay.

Call it, perhaps, the Chávez effect. Or name it Ozymandias, for that poem you read in high school English class. It’s by Percy Bysshe Shelley, about a traveler across a desert wasteland who encounters the crumbling remains of what had once been an immense statue, and on its base, this hollow boast: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”