Gentle reader,
Zombie City Council motion alert: Kevin de León’s plan to rename Pershing Square is back from the dead!
And we’re hoping you’ll take a moment to send a written public comment or come to City Hall Tuesday at 8:45 AM to object, and to urge the decision makers to complete and restore the monuments City Hall has already approved.
Exactly two years ago, on International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, we wrote about de León’s effort to rename Pershing Square after Biddy Mason, the formerly enslaved woman who became a notable Los Angeles philanthropist, medical practitioner and real estate developer.
The proposal expired with no action after de León lost his reelection bid. But his successor, Ysabel Jurado, has now revived it, with updated language.
On Tuesday, August 25, the motion comes before the Arts, Parks, Libraries, and Community Enrichment Committee that Jurado chairs.
Here’s the question we’d like the Committee to answer:
Why rename Pershing Square when Los Angeles already has a beautiful, but neglected, Biddy Mason Memorial Park—and voted two years ago to honor Mason with signs along 12 prime blocks of Spring Street, a prominent honor which has not yet been installed?
If you’re able, please attend and make public comment. You can even call your councilmember’s office and ask for free parking in the City Hall garage.
Can’t get Downtown at 8:45 AM on a Tuesday? Submit written public comment.
To upload a comment: visit CF #24-0751, then click the icon that says “NEW.”
A few thoughtful sentences are all you need. Here’s suggested language you can use or adapt to your own thoughts:
I respectfully ask the City Council to pause the proposal to rename Pershing Square as Biddy Mason Park.
Biddy Mason is an extraordinary Angeleno who deserves to be honored and remembered. But Los Angeles already has a beautiful Biddy Mason Memorial Park, a remarkable work of public art and historical interpretation on the site of her former homestead.
Please restore and properly maintain Biddy Mason Memorial Park, respect the artists who created it, and implement the City’s September 2024 action designating the Biddy Mason Legacy Corridor on Spring Street and directing LADOT to install permanent ceremonial signs.
Where are those signs? Please complete the Biddy Mason commemorative projects the City has already approved before undertaking another duplicative renaming effort.
I also ask the City to respect Pershing Square’s history as a war memorial associated with General John J. Pershing and the more than two million soldiers of American Expeditionary Forces.
Finally, please use the City’s commemorative powers to honor important Angelenos who don’t already have a park or other civic place named for them, and ask local historians who they think should be recognized.
This city is blessed with so many talented and driven public historians, people who live half in the present and half in the past, trawling archives to piece together unknown narratives of how Los Angeles happened.
There are countless pioneers and visionaries—and a more than a few rogues—who deserve to be honored through a civic motion, just as Biddy Mason was in 1990.
If City Hall wants to recognize former Angelenos, it should ask the people who know and love them to make suggestions. When politicians try to do this work, they step on a lot of tails and waste public resources that could better spent on, well, pretty much anything.
See you at City Hall… or in the comments section!
We’ve been happy to see people using our new tool for reporting Los Angeles preservation concerns and discovering ways they can better handle the problems in their neighborhoods. This tool will continue to evolve, and we welcome your feedback.
We’re back next Saturday with Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue, a tramp up and over the time capsule Victorian suburb on the edge of the young city for tales of the fascinating characters who got up to such mischief once upon a time.
Plus, new on this edition, you’ll hear about how Sacramento’s war on historic housing has launched a missile to the heart of this dense, diverse mixed-income neighborhood, and what the people who love living here are doing to fight back.
Join us, do!
Yours for Los Angeles,
Kim & Richard
Esotouric
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UPCOMING WALKING TOURS
• Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (8/29) • Franklin Village Old Hollywood (9/12) • Know Your Downtown Los Angeles (9/19) • Westlake Park Time Travel Trip (9/26) • Bunker Noir! True Crime on Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill with Nathan Marsak (10/3) • Charles Bukowski’s Westlake (10/10) • Highland Park Arroyo Time Travel Trip (10/17) • Film Noir / Real Noir (10/24) • Hallowe’en at Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 (10/31) • The Real Black Dahlia (11/7) • Richard’s Birthday Weird West Adams Tour & Elmer McCurdy Museum Visit (11/14) • Angelino Heights & Carroll Avenue (11/21) • Hollywood Noir (11/28)
