On the Blight Side

Frank Flint's face has been ripped off.

Both faces, in fact.

One that stared with bronze eyes at City Hall where Flint's thoughts held so much power in the teens. The other that gazed across 1st Street for years as the dead center of downtown deteriorated into a daze where people no longer care that bas-relief bronzes are stolen for the cash price of their metal, with no thought for the value of a citizen's memory.

Flint's fountain is in worse shape.

It hasn't gurgled water in 30 years. Not since a wino went face down and drowned in a lower basin, sack and bottle bobbing alongside. In a classic of municipal wisdom, the city decided water was the culprit and turned off the fountain.

Now its white marble is broken and the latest date on initials carved into one rail is 1957 because lovers don't sit here anymore. Flint's memorial--just steps from City Hall and public workers who are paid to tend such public works--has become an open urinal, pigeon cote and dump for lunch wrappings, one dead sock and pages from a porno magazine.

That means perpetual care and undying commemoration lasted just four decades for Frank Putnam Flint, 1862-1929, lawyer, district attorney, U.S. senator, a figure within the shadowy fiddling that sucked Owens Valley water into Los Angeles, and developer of a place called Flintridge.

There, he worked around arroyos, laced his suburb with hiking trails and commissioned architect Paul Williams--designer of the Beverly Hills Hotel--to build Mediterranean and Colonial homes with discreet spacing that would not damage precious foothills.

Today, Flint would weep at sidewalks stained with filth and the acute disrepair of the central downtown Los Angeles that he helped shape.

Blame such denigration, in part, on an exodus of blazers and suits. Indeed, on businessmen such as Flint.

For while we weren't watching, downtown Los Angeles edged west of Grand Avenue to where, maybe symbolically, a restored Angels Flight carries us away from a scabby old town. To a pristine copse of financial towers in black glass and orange marble with boutiques in their basements. To a born-again library, espresso stands, outside music and Cafe Pinot. To where fountains work.

As the power base shifted--to say nothing of lunch spots with tablecloths--government keepers of Los Angeles-left-behind apparently saw no further need to staunch a core decaying into a litter of busted yesterdays, defiled monuments and once attractive things that inexcusably, inexplicably have stayed broken for years.