Our Newest Nightmare: Attack of the 350-Foot Angel

Am I alone in having had it up to the wings with Angeliana? All the heavenly host, the cherubim and seraphim, must have gone to work for Martha Stewart. Angel wallpaper and candleholders and china, angel earrings and gift wrap and bath oil. Give me a demon, please--for variety’s sake, if not for goodness’.

To its credit, this eponymous city of Los Angeles has always been sparing in its use of the celestial mascot. But this may be about to end. Angel excess is on our horizon.

A project called “Angel City,” 3.5 billion dollars’ worth of shops, movie theaters, restaurants, hotels and offices, is being proposed for a downtown hilltop just west of the Harbor Freeway.

As an acolyte of downtown L.A., I welcome anything to enhance it. “Angel City” might be one of those somethings, but for this, its centerpiece and keystone: a sculpture, if that’s not too trivial a term for a 350-foot statue atop a 750-foot tower.

The statue is of a “Baywatch”-type babe in bronze, wings akimbo, holding a light-tipped sword. The Statue of Arts and Entertainment.

As one more foot-tall trophy for some starlet to clutch to her cleavage at yet another Hollywood awards event, the Statue of Arts and Entertainment would be most suitable. As an emblem of the city, it is typical of a tiresome, movie-centric and filmtropic take on the place, ignoring the bulk of what Los Angeles has been for most of its history: the most prosperous agricultural region in the nation, the model, for good or ill, of suburbanity, the forge of democracy during the Cold War, the testing-ground immigrant city.

What message would she bear at her base, this statue standing twice as tall as Lady Liberty: “Give me your treatments, your screen tests, your huddled extras yearning to breathe free”?

And what is with that sword, shooting a beam of light skyward, probably impeding aerial navigators and astronomers?

The only other armed angel I can summon to mind is the one who was posted at the gates of the garden, keeping people out of Eden. Some welcome. Some symbol.

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The sculptor, a former Australian cemetery stonecutter named Brett-Livingstone Strong, has been a figure on the L.A. landscape for a couple of decades, hardly as massive as his Hollywood angel, but persistent.

His statue of John Lennon stood for a time at City Hall. When, in 1979, a 116-ton hunk of sandstone hung like the boulder of Damocles over PCH, Strong took a piece of it and hewed John Wayne’s face out of it. His monument in marble and bronze honored Los Angeles’ sister-city links to Nagoya, Japan.

This angel is on a different order altogether; it is not only its size, a Sunbelt Stalinist rendering of the immense heroic statuary that ornamented the landscape of the old Soviet Union. It is its presumption as well: They build it, we will come to honor it.

You can make it big, but you cannot make it significant. You can make a monument, but you cannot make it into a monument; that is the people’s doing alone. It is first for the folks who live here, not the tourists or the movie makers or the postcard manufacturers, to embrace it.

And if an object lesson is needed, look to the Triforium.

Never heard of it? Well, Q.E.D. This edifice, this artifice, a six-story, three-legged music box in Fletcher Bowron Square downtown, was derided by critics as “a million-dollar jukebox” and a “psychedelic nickelodeon.” It is a computerized synthesizer of multicolored light and sound that was supposed to be the whimsical keystone of the civic center’s urban revival when they threw the switch on it nearly 25 years ago.

As it turned out, the switch they threw might as well have been the one in the gas chamber, for all the interest the Triforium generated.

Although civic and public events were doggedly staged there, it never registered in the civic mindscape. Even eight-track tapes lasted longer; the Triforium would work for a while, its 1,494 lighted glass prisms trilling and speakers blaring, and then fall silent for months, until the city dropped in thousands of dollars to start it up again, the way real jukeboxes require quarters to keep playing.

Unofficially, the Triforium is too expensive to keep up and too expensive to tear down.

And yet, Mayor Sam Yorty, who was an ex-mayor by the time the Triforium opened, envisioned it wistfully ever after as “the Eiffel Tower of Los Angeles.” This angel tower would stand 116 feet taller than the Eiffel, which Parisians ultimately came to accept on their landscape, for it made possible endless and endlessly profitable variants: Eiffel salt-and-pepper shakers, paperweights, pot-metal earrings . . . all as salable as the angels.

The Eiffel Tower’s chief naysayer was a writer who was to be found lunching every day in the restaurant at the foot of the tower. Monsieur, someone finally remarked, you must love this place very much to eat here every day. Nonsense, said the great man. This is the only place where I can eat without having to look at the damn thing.

If one day you find me lunching at the Cafe des Anges at the base of this edifice, that, too, will be my reason.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@ latimes.com