Criticism Blurs Memorial to Lindsay : Tribute: A $100,000 artwork dedicated to late councilman is planned for Convention Center. But objections have been raised to its design, cost and appropriateness.

Gilbert W. Lindsay’s grave is a modest affair at Evergreen Cemetery on the Eastside. Only a simple, four-foot-high stone in a crowded plot marks the final resting place of the first African American on the Los Angeles City Council and Downtown’s representative for 27 years until his death in 1990 at age 90.

Soon, however, Councilman Lindsay will be memorialized in a public manner that his supporters and critics agree better fits his reputation as “The Emperor of the Great 9th District.” A product of traditional politics and avant-garde art, the monument may be as controversial as Lindsay was.

Plans are well under way for a $100,000 memorial artwork on a plaza, already named for Lindsay, in front of the newly expanded Los Angeles Convention Center in Downtown. Paid for with public bond money, the monument is to be comprised of three 10-foot-high pillars covered with large and small photo-based images of Lindsay in his private life and long public career.

Some Lindsay associates wanted a traditional bust or statue in recognition of his long civic service and efforts to get the center built. But art experts praise the unusual sculpture designed by Pat Ward Williams as an imaginative way to reflect a career that could not be summed up in a single pose. Moreover, the use of technology-enhanced art and optical tricks match the Convention Center’s modern glass-and-metal architecture, they say.

“I think it is a marvelous way of giving people back the man, rather than having a stiff bronze of some kind. This, I think, is full of life, which he was,” said Mickey Gustin, an arts planner for the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.

Yet beyond aesthetic judgment, there remain disagreements over whether Lindsay should be honored at all and how much should have been spent.

Some colleagues on the City Council wanted the entire Convention Center named after Lindsay and begrudgingly accepted the plaza memorial as a compromise. Admirers remember him as a black pioneer and an important figure in California history; they see him as someone who fought racism, rising from a janitorial job to become a crucial shaper of Downtown’s towering skyline and revived economy while never losing his charisma.

Critics of the monument, which is to be completed by the fall, point out that there is a pedestrian mall named after Lindsay in Little Tokyo, a plaque of his face in the courtyard of a Figueroa Street office complex, and there is a senior housing project and a city park in his name. They characterize Lindsay as a self-aggrandizing politician who favored corporate backers over low-income constituents who were the majority in his district; they complain he refused to acknowledge old age’s infirmities and wound up napping through council meetings and being manipulated by an unscrupulous girlfriend.

“The thing is, people are so forgetful of reality anyway,” said a high-ranking city official who requested anonymity for his criticism of Lindsay and the memorial. “But there’s going to be a crowd of people in the know who will find this the last egotistical irony in his career.”

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On the other hand, Councilman Nate Holden says he feels strongly that “it’s worthwhile to do what they’ve done in recognition of Gil Lindsay’s contributions to this city. There won’t ever be another Gil Lindsay.”

The monument should be viewed more as a motivator to young people than as a favor to Lindsay, Holden stressed. “It’s for the generations who are here and to come, to remind them never to take no for an answer, to keep on working hard like Gil Lindsay.”

Shortly after Lindsay’s death, Holden and Council President John Ferraro introduced a motion to have the Convention Center named after him, according to city records. But the center’s managers said they feared that such a name would confuse out-of-town conventioneers and hurt in marketing the $500-million expansion.

“The need for the name to immediately and conspicuously identify the city is . . . a blunt necessity,” George Kirkland, president of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, wrote to city officials in April, 1991.

Another center official recalled that “everyone went nuts” at the suggestion of a Lindsay Center even though the complex is in Lindsay’s former district. Beyond potential confusion with former New York Mayor John V. Lindsay, center officials did not want it to be fully associated with Gilbert Lindsay’s image as a deal maker. Besides, this official emphasized, while Lindsay was crucial to construction of the original building in 1971, he was too frail to be a driving force behind the expansion, which was approved in 1985 and completed in November.

In the compromise, the outdoor plaza at the northwest corner of Figueroa Street and Pico Boulevard was named after Lindsay and two large meeting halls inside were named for former Los Angeles Mayors Tom Bradley and Sam Yorty. On June 14, 1991, the City Council approved a Holden motion requiring “that suitable recognition, whether in form of a bust, plaque or artwork” be placed in the plaza. No price was mentioned.

The arguments against naming the center for Lindsay aggravated Bob Gay, a former aide to the councilman. Travelers are not befuddled by the Tom Bradley Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport, Gay said recently. Nor are they confused by New York’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, named after the late U.S. senator, he added.

The naming of the center and a modest bust would have cost much less than the planned $100,000 monument, Gay contended. But he now supports the idea of the Lindsay memorial and suggests that people should not be influenced by an embarrassing legal battle after the councilman’s death. If people expect human perfection, “we’d never honor a single politician, a single entertainer or athlete,” Gay said. “No one is perfect. Everyone has something in their lives they don’t want known.”

In a 1992 trial pitting Lindsay’s family against a former girlfriend over his estate, the councilman’s friends testified that he had become senile and incompetent while in office. A Superior Court jury ruled that the 40-year-old girlfriend had used undue influence to obtain money and property from Lindsay.

Long before the Lindsay memorial was first mentioned, some kind of outdoor art was planned for the plaza. “It will be nice, frankly, to have something of historical basis to it,” Chris Simons, senior coordinator for the expansion, said of the sculpture.

The $100,000 comes from a $2.6-million fund for art at the center, Simons said. All that comes from city-backed bond issues that are to be paid off through hotel room occupancy taxes.

The Convention Center authority sent the council mandate to an advisory art committee working on the building. Merry Norris, one of the art panel’s five members, said she is a fan of artist Williams’ final design, but recalled being uncomfortable with any Lindsay memorial at the center.

“This was odd and it still feels odd that one councilman was being singled out for honor,” said Norris, former president of the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission.

Committee Chairman Richard Koshalek, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, said he had no such misgivings. Lindsay “had a genuine interest in seeing what he thought was best for Los Angeles,” Koshalek said.

Some participants recall half-serious discussions of a statue of Lindsay on horseback, reflecting his youthful service in the Army Cavalry in Arizona.

In a more serious vein, Koshalek’s committee reviewed artists’ portfolios, looking for work sensitive to Los Angeles life and African American heritage. Williams, a Venice-based artist, won and came up with various proposals before one was settled on by the Koshalek panel and then unanimously approved by the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission in June.

In her plan, a photo of Lindsay at his City Hall desk will be hugely enlarged and reconstructed in three formats--big dots, lines and random squiggles. Those images will be placed on the three three-sided monoliths so that Lindsay’s face comes into focus when a viewer is about 20 feet away and the pillars are in the right visual alignment; otherwise it will appear to be abstract. Close-up viewers will see 96 foot-long tiles bearing reproduced photographs of Lindsay at various stages in his life.

In her research, Williams found that Lindsay was controversial but even his political opponents wanted to share amusing or affectionate anecdotes about him. “It was obvious he was a powerful person in the city who got things done with a flair,” said Williams, who noted that she was unaware of any criticism of the memorial.

Born in Mississippi, where he worked in the cotton fields, Lindsay came to Los Angeles in the late 1920s and took a job as a Department of Water and Power janitor. He passed the Civil Service exam and became a clerk, only to find himself segregated from whites. Lindsay got involved in grass-roots Democratic politics, becoming a key aide to Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn.

Lindsay was appointed to a vacant council seat in January, 1963, and he went on to be elected to eight terms.

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But Lindsay’s longevity and pro-development stance were not enough to merit the prominent memorial, contends Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias del Pueblo, an agency that aids low-income residents of Downtown.

“He certainly was not a friend of the poor,” said Callaghan, whose agency is in the 9th District. “And there is a way to care about the poor and have development.”

No matter its artistic merits, a Lindsay memorial will just “remind people of the old politics of the noncommittal,” she added.

Yet Arden Siemers, a city senior administrative analyst who worked on the original Convention Center plan, said many people will be happy to see the sculpture. Its cost, he said, “is nothing compared to the untold hundreds of millions of dollars and jobs he brought to this community over the years. It’s a minor token of appreciation.”