Opinion: That Federal Courthouse? Guilty!

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There’s a big hole in the ground, one block square, at the more-or-less southwest corner of Broadway and First.

And I like it that way.

This site was to have been a federal courthouse -- the biggest one in the country. The 70-year-old courthouse a few blocks away looks august and severe and all the things a federal courthouse should look like, but it’s as outdated as the iceman.

The feds budgeted a third of a billion to build this new courthouse on the site of a demolished state building. Now, writes my Times colleague Cara Mia DiMassa, it’ll cost three times that -- over a billion bucks. And some judges don’t even like the way the way it would handle the court’s space problems.

So now what? There’s talk of starting the whole courthouse process all over again. Heck, in this real estate market, you could buy every federal judge a McMansion and make it over into a mini-courthouse with all the other necessary functions, and maybe some unnecessary ones (the pool already comes with the house.) Security? What’s more secure than federal courtroom functions scattered all over West L.A., rather than concentrated in one juicy granite and marble target?

Back to that hole where the courthouse was meant to be. They tore down the hideous Junipero Serra State Office Building on that site a few years ago. Maybe it was asbestos problems, maybe it was earthquake damage -- maybe someone just rightly declared it an esthetic hazard and summoned the wrecking ball.

Since it’s been gone, tourists have been loving the view. They stand on Broadway and gaze up, with an unrivaled, unobstructed view, at the Disney Concert Hall. I see them there every day with their still and video cameras.

Just because downtown is hot again doesn’t mean we should cram buildings into every inch of space. The new LAPD headquarters site on Spring Street would have been a great spot for some greenery, but no -- the people at City Hall had to be able to walk no more than one crosswalk away to reach the cops. So there went that potential open space.

Let’s not blow this chance, the way we’ve blown so many. Put the courthouse elsewhere. Fill in the hole. Put in a park. There isn’t a decent-sized one between the Cornfield and Pershing Square. The tourists will love it -- and so will all those downtown residents who moved here believing it would be a great place to live. Show them that they’re right.

Case closed.