Commentary: On the blight side, a stroll around City Hall provokes the question: Can’t we do better?

At one time, the Frank Putnam Flint fountain on the south side of Los Angeles City Hall had three things going for it:

A likeness of the former U.S. senator, a plaque detailing his service, and, of course, water.

The fountain has none of those things today, and hasn’t for years.

While some of the light globes are broken, one remains with graffiti as a person walks at the Los Angeles Mall, across the street from Los Angeles City Hall.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Dead fronds hang from broken palm trees at the Felipe de Neve Plaza.

The marble structure is, however, still a monument of sorts. Graffiti and all, it’s a monument to neglect, to failed leadership, and to the sense of surrender that afflicts so many public spaces in Los Angeles.

This is an election year, and it’s fair for taxpayers to wonder whether the care and maintenance of their neighborhoods will ever improve if the people who run the city can’t manage their own property.

The fountain, by the way, didn’t just dry up yesterday. When I told my editor what I was working on, he dug up an L.A. Times story from 1997 that was titled: “On the blight side.”

Times reporter Paul Dean noted that Flint helped tap the Owens Valley water that irrigated L.A.’s growth and prosperity, but the fountain named for him had not been in operation for 30 years. It was later restored, but shut down again a decade or so ago. So going back nearly 60 years, the late Mr. Flint has been left to quietly suffer the indignities of desecration and abandonment, but for temporary intervention.

Dead palm tree fronds hang from broken palm trees at the Felipe de Neve Plaza.

A city analysis a couple of years ago cited repair costs as one issue and vandalism prevention as another. But with roughly 50,000 city employees, and the nation’s third-largest police department across the street, why is a simple security detail such an impossible challenge?

I would like for Mayor Karen Bass, or her successor, to do one of two things:

Fix the fountain — perhaps with help from Project Restore L.A., a nonprofit doing good preservation work at City Hall — and arrange for its permanent upkeep.

Or bulldoze it, removing what stands as nothing more than a symbol of felonious indifference.

Plant a tree or something, although that could be problematic. The park surrounding the fountain has a number of native plants, but more than half the plaques identifying them are broken or missing.

Across the street, to the west, a two-acre plot has been a dirt patch for years. To the east, the city’s Department of Transportation plaza is a fenced-off eyesore. Nearby, a municipal flagpole is rusted, palm trees are dead, handrails are covered with stickers and a sign establishing a “Special Enforcement and Cleaning Zone” is covered with grime and graffiti.

A person walks by a broken and graffiti-marked Los Angeles Mall sign, across the street from Los Angeles City Hall.

If you should travel northeast from City Hall, you’ll be entering “Mad Max” territory. A few remnants of a previous civilization can still be seen in the subterranean hellscape known as the Los Angeles Mall, where, miraculously, a Quiznos and a pita shop cling to life, like barnacles on a sunken ship.

If you tunnel your way north, through the long-shuttered rows of dead underground storefronts, you can pop back up to ground level at Fletcher Bowron Square. But at the southwest corner of the square, you might think the plaza is called “le owro squ,” because of all the missing letters.

Just up the street, the “Los Angeles Mall” sign is tagged, with a hole in the facing that’s big enough for Mookie Betts to crawl through. Farther up Main Street, planter boxes are falling apart, with tree roots snaking down the wall, uprooting concrete and auditioning for roles in a sequel to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

Homess people and their belongings sit amid landscaping at Fletcher Brown Square near the Los Angeles Mall.

Hello, City Hall. Can you send a crew over to clean up the mess?

Fill the mall with dirt and open a community garden. Call in food trucks. Ask someone with imagination to draw up a workforce housing model.

I’m not suggesting it would be easy to bring the square or the mall back to prosperity, or to realize the goal set roughly a decade ago to redevelop the area as part of the Civic Center Master Plan. Back then, by the way, Councilman Jose Huizar represented the area. He currently resides in prison, sent packing for a host of crimes including but not limited to bribery.

Sure, the mall was dying even before the pandemic, and attracting new commerce would be difficult because the customer base — public employees — has disappeared to remote work stations.

But here’s the point:

That is no excuse for letting things go to hell, in this neighborhood or any other.

In August of 2024, I walked the Himalayan ranges of Venice with Dennis Hathaway and his wife, Laura Silagi, who had taken a hard fall on one of their neighborhood’s countless volcanic sidewalks. Not a single one of those disaster zones has been addressed, Hathaway tells me.

A pedestrian walks by a bus stop, marked by graffiti and dirty windows in front of Los Angeles City Hall.

“For me, one of the single biggest issues in these city elections is the condition of our infrastructure,” Hathaway said. “I mean, it’s just dreadful.”

In November, I wrote about the shameful condition of Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park in Koreatown, where the monument and grounds had been vandalized, trashed and fenced off. I visited the other day and nothing had changed.

There is now an L.A. Unified School District plan to explore the restoration of the space, with a timeline of at least two years. But on a site that pays tribute to Kennedy, a short distance from where he was assassinated in 1968, is it too much to ask that the district and/or the city clean up the memorial in the meantime?

Nothing is sadder than to watch people stroll past that memorial as if nothing is out of the ordinary, our civic pride and historical perspective crushed under the weight of indifference.

In long-troubled MacArthur Park, the city last fall installed two rows of chain-link fences along once-bustling Alvarado Street to deter crime. The fences are still there, as are many of the problems in and around the park. As I headed east on 6th Street toward downtown, I saw roughly a dozen people taking hits in Yoshinoya Alley under a permanent cloud of fentanyl smoke.

Back downtown on the edge of the Civic Center, Little Tokyo resident Steve Nagano says there have been fewer homeless people on the street in recent times. But quality-of-life issues persist.

Utility boxes, street signs and maps of Little Tokyo attractions are plastered with stickers and graffiti. Nagano is one of the organizers of Little Tokyo Sparkle, an annual neighborhood cleanup scheduled for May 17 this year.

“I think we’ve gotten to the point where we just go out ourselves and do it,” Nagano said.

In Los Angeles, there is no ceasefire in the long-running war between problems and potential. The sprawling, splendiferous, aging metropolis is not an easy place to manage and it humbles all its would-be saviors.

But Bass and every council member and all their successors need to be reminded that a civic sense of intractability is a dangerous thing.

A person walks by trash in a broken and empty fountain at Felipe de Neve Plaza, next to Los Angeles City Hall East.

We can’t get comfortable with the idea that only incremental progress on homelessness is possible, or that it’s acceptable for L.A.’s under-maintained parks to sit near the bottom in a ranking of the top 100 metro regions, or that trash and blight won’t be cleaned up unless residents do it themselves.

Nobody wants to hear about budget constraints from people who helped create them, or that’s it’s someone else’s responsibility, or that making improvements is complicated.

Fix the damn fountain already, not because the Olympics are coming in two years, but because 4 million residents deserve better right now.

And don’t stop there.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

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