The Ft. Moore Pioneer Memorial on Hill Street is my favorite neglected corner of the downtown Los Angeles Civic Center. As far as I know, it's the biggest monument to the United States' conquest of California.
I go there to feel the history. I stand under the terra-cotta soldiers and read the inscriptions honoring the troops who "helped win the Southwest" and who raised the Stars and Stripes at "the first Independence Day in Los Angeles."
My wife thinks my obsession with this monument is bizarre. After all, I'm the son of Latin American immigrants, and the memorial indirectly celebrates the defeat of Mexico's armed forces.
But I'm an incurable history geek. And besides, the Ft. Moore memorial isn't just a tribute to military victory; it's a testament to the prosperity and hope of the era when it was built and when people gathered there to enjoy its fountains and pools of water, the 1950s and '60s.
My father, a Guatemalan immigrant, believed this land of milk and honey would make his children taller. We Californians were dreaming big back then. We were busy building new freeways, suburbs, university campuses and aqueducts that brought water southward and made all that growth possible.
So when our city fathers and mothers (including the legendary Dorothy Chandler) completed this monument in 1957, they put a big waterfall in it, some 80 feet wide and 45 feet high.
I wandered over to the Ft. Moore Memorial last week, about the same time our lawmakers agreed to a disastrous new state budget. I wanted to soak up some of that old self-confidence and can-do spirit.
What did I find? An empty flagpole. No Stars and Stripes, no California Bear Flag, nada. And the waterfall and fountains were bone dry; the water's been turned off for a generation now.
Standing there, I thought: Oh, California, how you have fallen! Today your schools are being decimated, your universities furloughed and even your prisons drained of money. And this monument that celebrates the beginning of your proud English-speaking modern history is a dusty, forgotten wreck.
I called Kevin Starr, the legendary California historian, to tell him about this municipal embarrassment. Starr has a new book about the boom time when the memorial was built: "Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963."
I figured he would be upset. He wasn't exactly.
