Cleaning Up Downtown L.A.

* Your May 28 editorial, “Clean the House Before the Party,” left me slightly bemused. Concerning the sprucing-up suggested for the Democratic National Convention, hanging banners and festooning trees with lights would be lovely. However, your other ideas don’t fit your “wait until 20,000 people come calling” criteria and certainly not “creating a city that wouldn’t exist after the convention left town.”

The other “obvious, simple and relatively inexpensive changes” (later referred to as “cheap”) are all things that should be routine maintenance: trimming city trees, fixing broken street lights, painting unsightly construction walls and covering up the graffiti. Why are these things not done for the people who see downtown every day rather than to impress delegates here for only three days? Planting flowers is nice too. I’ll bet you could get citizens to volunteer to do this year round. If the city did its job, the money to be spent to impress could be used for something more dramatic and permanent.

DIANE MACFARLAND

San Marino

* We’re having company in August, so let’s plan to be gracious hosts. Let’s show the Democratic convention delegates, and through them the nation, that we are a diverse and vibrant community, a center of culture. As welcoming hosts, we can:

Offer our visitors a map of downtown’s fascinating sites, all within DASH-bus or walking distance of their hotels.

Provide guides to point out our museums, parks and historic venues such as Union Station, the Bradbury Building and our main library. Show off our art and architectural history. Within and around the buildings there are works for every taste, for every Democratic persuasion, from a miniature bronze Statue of Liberty by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi to a block-long mural by Frank Stella. One great big art gallery. A great opportunity to demonstrate our pride in downtown L.A.!

ELINOR OSWALD

Pacific Palisades