Landmark’s Luster Fades

Few ever think about the great wars, the soldiers, the turning points of history. The ranks of the heroes are thinning out. The dead of Normandy and Okinawa and Guadalcanal are becoming scarcely more than names on old plaques.

Patriotic Hall is fading, too. It is a dim and musty relic, a monument to veterans that was the tallest building in Los Angeles when it opened in 1926.

The 10-story, neo-Italian Renaissance structure is filled with combat murals and glass cases of memorabilia: a broken Civil War drum, machine guns, bomb shells, helmets, tattered flags recovered from foreign battlefields. Gen. George S. Patton’s uniform is on display here; so is a porthole from the battleship Maine, a ship’s bell from the cruiser Los Angeles.

Since the boom years after World War I, the public hall has housed membership meetings of various American Legion posts, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic/Sons of the Union Army, and other organizations whose rolls are dwindling. Only a couple of dozen holdouts represent the local chapter of the Grand Army, for example. The meeting schedule has been reduced to once every other month.

For many hours of the week, Patriotic Hall sits as still as a tomb--marble foyers without echoes, walnut-trimmed elevators that stand like open cages for the attendants who still operate them by hand. As building manager Jim Meyer notes, borrowing the old military cliche, “You can shoot a cannon and not hit anybody.”

The hall is familiar to most people as a visual landmark--and a curiosity--just east of the Harbor Freeway. With its Spanish tile roof and distinctive colonnade just below it, the building looms like a monolith over the low urban sprawl south of Staples Center.

It is not always so somnolent, however, a fact that rankles some veterans. On nights and weekends the meeting rooms are jammed with thousands of non-military people who don’t necessarily care a whit about Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo or the exploits of Audie Murphy. A Korean church takes over much of the building Sunday mornings and evenings.

Every week there are tremendous parties--wedding receptions and quinceaneras.

These account for an overwhelming share of the income for the county-owned hall, but the veterans--a few, anyway--have reacted like outnumbered troops on a beachhead. How dare these invaders keep coming through, leaving bags and beer bottles, scratching the hardwood floors, even stealing souvenirs and urinating in the halls?

“The people just trash it,” says Jesse “Jay” Morales, a former Marine who serves as adjutant of American Legion Post 8. “It’s a travesty what’s happening. Here you have, literally, an icon. It’s allowed to deteriorate, and it is deteriorating.”

Morales, 58, can barely stand to watch. The veteran of three tours of Vietnam has spent a quarter-century at Patriotic Hall and cares passionately about the building and its bounty of war treasures. In the early 1980s, when there was talk of razing the place, Morales served as chairman of a veterans task force that helped save it.

Stepping onto the eighth-floor balcony, Morales leans over the dizzying railing to point out bottles and paper trapped in the rain gutter. He takes the elevator down to the Gen. Omar Bradley Room, where mementos include a captured Nazi flag, the general’s old wooden desk and a mural depicting the deployment of troops on D-day.

Right here, Morales says, indicating an empty pedestal, stood a bronze bust of Bradley, one of the leaders of the Normandy assault, who dedicated the room himself in 1972.

“It was an heirloom and one of a kind,” Morales says. “We don’t know where it is. It disappeared about eight years ago.” He has looked in every closet and storage room. The statue is the most important of the objects that have been stolen or taken off display for safekeeping. To a lot of party-goers and gang members, “these things become like trophies.”

Though never intended as a museum, the building contains a substantial collection scattered throughout its 80,000 square feet. The huge number of veterans settling in Los Angeles during the 1920s accounts for the scale of the structure, which has a 660-seat auditorium, a basement banquet room and an assortment of high-ceilinged meeting rooms adequate for dozens or hundreds of guests.

Offices are scattered throughout. The top floor contains a gymnasium and basketball court, its hardwood floor now badly faded.

Los Angeles still has one of the nation’s largest veterans communities, but it generates too little revenue to keep the hall operating. Parties bring in up to $1,200 a night, but even with that there is not enough money for needed roof work and elevator maintenance, according to county officials.

“The building is in the red,” says retired Marine Col. Joseph N. Smith, director of the county’s Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. Smith says outside users now outnumber the veterans 15 to 1. And, if the county has its way, that disparity will grow. A new parking structure is planned to attract additional outside groups.

Smith acknowledges a few past incidents of theft but insists that the problem is insignificant. Rooms are inspected nightly. Cameras have been installed. Groups supply security guards. The allegedly stolen Bradley bust was never stolen at all, he says, merely returned to Army historians in Carlisle, Pa.

“Some of those things were on loan,” Smith says. “It’s a dynamic building.”

Some veterans understand. Lou Burg, 80, an ex-Marine who participated in the invasion of Iwo Jima during Wold War II, is not against others using the hall. It does bother him, though, to see the glories of the past receding, to see veterans becoming second-class users of their own building.

Not long ago, he attended an executive meeting for American Legion Post 17. The directors were relegated to the basement because competing groups had already booked other rooms.

Having this building has always been something very special to the men who marched into battle, Burg says. “I walk in here, I see the uniforms, see the people, and it’s a vivid reminder,” he says. “There is a camaraderie. This is supposed to be not a museum, but a meeting hall, a place you can go to meet with your fellows.”