What Gives in L.A.? Just About Anything

Shopping for a gift for the city that has everything?

How about samurai warrior headgear? Or a bowie knife? Or a genuine Australian boomerang.

Those are among the thousands of items that have been given to the city of Los Angeles over the years. And, if all goes as planned, many of the gifts will be exhibited in a City Hall museum, built as part of the building’s restoration.

Some of the gifts already are on display, such as an entire tea room given by Los Angeles’ sister city of Nagoya, Japan, and set up in a park in Hollywood. A bell from South Korea sits atop a bluff overlooking Los Angeles Harbor.

“The Netherlands sent us hundreds of thousands of tulips, which were planted by the Recreation and Parks Department all over the city,” said Bee Canterbury Lavery, the city’s chief of protocol. The mayor’s mansion was a gift from Getty Oil Co.

Many other gifts, however, are stuffed away in closets in the office of Mayor Tom Bradley, who usually accepts them on behalf of the city. City officials have no idea how many are stashed away there--and often don’t know now who gave them.

Some gifts are practical and readily used. The Fire Department, for instance, welcomes discarded airplane fuselages, which it sets afire and uses for training.

And, of course, the city welcomes gifts of cash, such as the $3.24 million donated by the Samuel Goldwyn Foundation for rebuilding the Hollywood Library, destroyed by fire. And undoubtedly the most generous gift was a piece of property--the 3,015 acres donated by Col. Griffith J. Griffith in 1896 for use as a park.

But not everything offered is accepted. The Library Department gets calls from people proposing to give back issues of National Geographic “every time somebody cleans out a garage,” but it declines because it has plenty of the magazines, spokesman Robert Reagan said.

The city gives gifts too.

The standard one that Bradley presents to visiting dignitaries is, of course, a key to the city. “We even have a lock that it unlocks,” Lavery said. The part of the key that fits into the lock contains a miniature reproduction of City Hall.