‘It’s Outrageous’ : Relocation of Sculpture Sparks Furor

For almost three decades, the bronze figure of former U.S. Sen. Stephen White stood on the corner of 1st and Hill streets in downtown Los Angeles, pointing in the direction of the harbor that he helped create in San Pedro.

Now, temporarily repositioned for Metro Rail construction, the sculpture stands in the corner of a utility yard amid trash cans, rolled-up fencing and a portable restroom, pointing toward a sign that says “Public Parking.”

“It’s outrageous,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn said Wednesday. “I’m shocked that they have done this to a great pioneer.”

“Why don’t they move it out to San Pedro?” asked Mary White O’Bar, the senator’s great-granddaughter. “I’m sure the people there would love to have it.”

No disrespect meant, RTD spokeswoman Marilyn Morton said.

‘A Secured Area’

“The statue was moved because we were afraid it might fall during construction,” she said. “We’re doing some excavating underneath that area. We put it there (in the utility yard) because it’s in a secured area.”

Hahn said Wednesday that he will ask to have White relocated next to the statue of pioneer Los Angeles attorney Joseph Scott outside the Los Angeles County Courthouse at the corner of 1st Street and Grand Avenue.

“If the county wants to move it, that’s fine with us,” Morton said.

Engineer Leavitt Crowell, who supervised the move, said: “I’m not sure anyone even knew we did it. . . . But that area is our responsibility during construction.”

The RTD had planned to keep the 80-year-old statue in the yard until construction is finished--1992 is the scheduled date--when it would be returned to its old spot.

Past Assurances Remembered

But Hahn spokesman Dan Wolf said, “We remember promises about Angels Flight, too”--a reference to assurances from the city that the now-defunct historic railway would be back in place five years after its 1969 dismantling.

“Four years is a long time,” added Stephen N. White, 73, the senator’s grandson. “Someone might forget where it (the statue) was stored.”

The grandson said the irony is that, “compared to other cities, downtown Los Angeles has so few statues of notable figures”--a slim roster that includes Scott; Beethoven in Pershing Square; Christopher Columbus and George Washington in the County Mall; Japanese teacher Sontuko (Kinjiro) Ninomiya in Little Tokyo, and Spanish Gov. Felipe de Neve, who helped found Los Angeles, in the Plaza.

While Sen. White (1848-1901) may be unfamiliar to many Southern Californians today, he “was a great hero in the estimate of his fellow citizens,” said Bill Olesen, an assistant curator at the Los Angeles Maritime Museum in San Pedro.

It was White who helped persuade Congress to finance construction of Los Angeles harbor in San Pedro.

“He succeeded in getting the breakwater for us (San Pedro) and made it a year-around harbor,” Olesen said. “We’d love to have him at the entrance to our Cabrillo Marine Museum, overlooking the breakwater.”

The statue, financed by his admirers, was originally installed in 1908 outside the old County Courthouse at the corner of Temple and Broadway. As late as the 1950s, it was scrubbed down by members of the Native Sons of the Golden West, including Municipal and Superior Court judges. One year, in fact, a controversy arose when some sculptors warned that the bath might damage the patina on the statue.

The sculpture was moved to the environs of the County Courthouse in 1959 after the old courthouse was condemned.

The new location helped turn White’s grandson into a Perry Mason fan.

“I became a devotee of the television show,” he said, “because there was usually a scene where Mason would be approaching the courthouse and he’d walk past the statue.”