Does Historic Site Have a Ghost of a Chance?

Memo to the powers in the towers of Universal’s shining studio on a hill:

You want boffo box-office drama? Here’s drama for you:

The true-life saga of a handsome, ambitious Army officer, rogue and swashbuckler, writer and explorer, who embarks on exploits that win for his country the place called California. And it all started right across the street from your offices.

But it can’t be real drama you want. If it were, you wouldn’t insist on paving the drama over and converting it into a couple of left-turn lanes so you can shave a few seconds off your commute and devote more time to perfecting the sequel to “Bride of Chucky.”

The site of this drama verite--the pocket park of Campo de Cahuenga, in the shadow of Universal Studios--is nothing less than the birthplace of modern California, the state whose 150th anniversary we began marking this year.

Here, on a rainy Wednesday morning in January of 1847, a Yankee officer named John C. Fremont and Andres Pico, commander of California’s Mexican forces, signed the document that ended the Mexican War and became the mantra of Manifest Destiny, the keystone to the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which, a few years later, would hand over the half-million square miles that formed the critical mass of the American West.

The place where they gathered, the porch of a long-vanished adobe, is the Appomattox Courthouse of California, one of those rare tangible places where we know to the day and the hour and the color of the buttons on the uniforms what epochal changes came of the wielding of a pen.

Three years ago, MTA archeologists monitoring excavations for a new subway station uncovered the original foundation of the Tomas Feliz adobe, right down to floor tiles that still bore the footprints of pets that had scampered over them while they were still wet.

Preservationists were thrilled; surely now that the actual site was found, the city’s transportation planners wouldn’t go ahead with a street-widening deal that would bury history.

Surely they would now put those traffic lanes across the street, on the Universal Studios side.

Surely studios are only businesses, and businesses come and go, but history is our shared birthright forever.

Surely the historians were hallucinating.

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Twice before, battles of great moment have been waged in the Cahuenga Pass: in 1831, and again in 1845, when “Californios” fought Mexico for home rule.

This present battle is a mismatch: platoons of ghosts and scholars and mossback history buffs, along with the MTA and federal transportation officials, ranged against the battalions of a mega-corporation trading at nearly $58 a share this week and swinging a very big political stick in this town.

Just what kind of dividends do ghosts pay? And if it comes to lawsuits, what kind of lawyers can ghosts send into court?

The city of Los Angeles owns Campo de Cahuenga. The same city’s transportation department also cut a deal with Universal City and the MTA to slice into its own historic site to widen Lankershim Boulevard, which already covers some of the Cahuenga site.

Oh, the foundation would be protected: No vandal could get through the concrete they’d pour over it. And they’ll lay steel markers right in the road to mark the spot, and maybe even write something on the curb about what’s been covered up.

And maybe that writing will be large enough so a driver in one of those big Mercedes idling in the wonderful new left-turn lane waiting for the green arrow can glance over and read it.

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The Red Line station next to Campo de Cahuenga could unite Angelenos and their history, lure them eventually to a restored Feliz adobe foundation, to the two-drawer oak kitchen table dragged out onto the porch for the signing.

If, for once, Hollywood must concede to history, here is history’s counter-offer to Hollywood:

Think of the tourists in the forecourt of the Chinese Theatre, fitting hands and feet into concrete impressions left by actors who only imitate the powerful and pivotal characters of life and legend.

Let them come and stand in the virtual boot prints and spur marks of the real thing: Fremont, the victorious adventurer, Pico the vanquished patriot, here, on these very tiles, where history changed.

Otherwise, what can Universal offer? A tour guide, gesturing reverently toward a cubicle, toward the very desk occupied by the senior accountant who approved the catering cost overruns for “Meet Joe Black”?

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.