A walk through LA City Hall raises the question: Can’t we do better?

At one time, Frank Putnam Flint’s fountain on the south side of Los Angeles City Hall had three things to do:

A portrait of the former US congressman, a plaque detailing his service, and water.

The source doesn’t have any of those things today, and hasn’t for years.

Dead leaves hang from broken palm trees in Felipe de Neve Plaza, near Los Angeles City Hall East and across the street from City Hall.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The marble structure, however, is still a monument of sorts. Graffiti and all, it’s a reminder of the neglect, failed leadership, and the mentality of altruism that plagues many public spaces in Los Angeles.

This is an election year, and it’s fair for taxpayers to wonder if the upkeep and maintenance of their neighborhoods will ever improve if the people who run the city can’t manage their property.

The well didn’t just dry up yesterday. When I told my editor what I was working on, she dug up a 1997 LA Times story titled: “On the Bad Side.”

Times reporter Paul Dean noted that Flint helped draw the Owens Valley water that fed LA’s growth and prosperity, but the well named after him had not been operational for 30 years. It was later restored, but closed again a decade or so ago. So if we go back almost 60 years, the late Mr.

Dead palm fronds hang from broken palm trees in Felipe de Neve Plaza, near Los Angeles City Hall East and across the street from Los Angeles City Hall.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

A city analysis several years ago identified maintenance costs as one problem and vandalism prevention as another. But with about 50,000 city employees, and the third largest police department on the entire street, why is the security detail such an impossible challenge?

I would like Mayor Karen Bass, or her successor, to do one of two things:

Repair the fountain — perhaps with help from Project Restore LA, a nonprofit that does great preservation work at City Hall — and plan for its permanent maintenance.

Even if you mock it, remove what appears to be nothing more than a sign of cruel indifference.

Plant a tree or something, even though that would be a problem. The park around the fountain has a number of native plants, but more than half of the descriptive plaques are broken or missing.

Across the road, to the west, a two-hectare site has been lying in the ground for years. To the east, the city’s Department of Transportation plaza is a fenced-in sight. Nearby, a municipal pole is rusted, palm trees are dead, hand ropes are covered with stickers and a sign establishing a “Special Enforcement and Cleaning Area” is covered in grime and graffiti.

A person walks past the broken and graffitied Los Angeles Mall sign, across the street from Los Angeles City Hall.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

If you have to go northeast from City Hall, you will enter the “Mad Max” area. A few remnants of a previous civilization can still be seen in the underground hell known as the Los Angeles Mall, where, miraculously, Quiznos and a pita shop cling to life, like barnacles on a sunken ship.

If you change your way to the north, between the closed rows of dead underground shops, you can return to ground level in Fletcher Bowron Square. But in the southwest corner of the square, you might think the plaza is called “le owro squ,” because of all the missing letters.

Going up the street, the “Los Angeles Mall” sign is plastered, with a hole in the face big enough for Mookie Betts to crawl through. Up Main Street, planter boxes are cracking, tree roots are creeping down the wall, tearing up the concrete and being tested in the series “Attack of the Body Snatchers.”

Homeless people and their belongings sit among the landscaping as graffiti marks a wall in Fletcher Brown Square near the Los Angeles Mall.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Hello, City Hall. Can you send a team to clean up the mess?

Fill the mall with trash and open a public garden. Drive food trucks. Ask someone with an imagination to make a model of staff housing.

I am not suggesting that it would be easy to restore a square or a shopping center to prosperity, or to achieve the goal set nearly a decade ago to redevelop the area as part of the Civic Center Master Plan. At that time, Councilor Jose Huizar represented the area. He is currently in prisonsent packing for a host of crimes including but not limited to bribery.

Indeed, the mall was dying even before the pandemic, and attracting new retailers will be difficult because the customer base – government employees – has disappeared into remote workstations.

But here’s the point:

That’s no excuse to let things go to hell, in this place or any other.

In August of 2024, I walked the Himalayan range of Venice Dennis Hathaway and his wife, Laura Silagiwho fell hard on the many roads of the volcano in his hometown. None of those areas of crisis have been addressed, Hathaway tells me.

A pedestrian walks through a bus stop, marked with graffiti and dirty windows in front of Los Angeles City Hall.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“To me, one of the biggest issues in this city election is the state of our infrastructure,” Hathaway said. “I mean, it’s just scary.”

In November, I wrote about the shameful nature of Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park in Koreatown, where the monument and grounds were vandalized, trashed and fenced off. I visited the other day and nothing has changed.

There is now a plan in place for the LA Unified School District to evaluate site restoration, with a timeline of at least two years. But in a place that honors Kennedy, a short distance from where he was assassinated in 1968, is it too much to ask that the county and/or the city clean up the memorial yet?

There is nothing sadder than watching people walk past that monument as if nothing were out of the ordinary, our civic pride and sense of history crushed under the weight of indifference.

In MacArthur Park has had problems for a long timethe city last fall installed two lines of chain-link fence on the once-busy Alvarado street to curb crime. Sharp ones they still exist, as there are many problems in and around the park. As I headed east on 6th Street toward downtown, I saw about a dozen people jamming on Yoshinoya Alley under an endless cloud of fentanyl fumes.

Back downtown on the outskirts of the Civic Center, Little Tokyo resident Steve Nagano says there have been fewer homeless people on the street lately. But quality of life issues persist.

Utility boxes, street signs and maps of Little Tokyo’s attractions are pasted with stickers and drawings. Nagano is one of the organizers of Little Tokyo Sparkleannual neighborhood cleanup scheduled for May 17 this year.

“I think we’ve gotten to the point where we just go out and do it,” Nagano said.

In Los Angeles, there is no stopping the long-running battle between problems and possibilities. A huge, beautiful, aging city is not an easy place to manage and it humbles all its would-be saviors.

But Bass and all council members and all his successors need to be reminded that the public’s sense of control is a dangerous thing.

A person walks through trash at a broken and empty fountain in Felipe de Neve Plaza, near Los Angeles City Hall East.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

We cannot be comfortable with the idea that only upward progress on homelessness is possible, or that it is acceptable LA parks can be well maintained to stay close to the ground in an average of the top 100 metro areas, even trash and damage won’t be cleaned up unless residents do it themselves.

No one wants to hear about budget constraints from the people who helped create them, or that it’s someone else’s responsibility, or that improving is a puzzle.

Fix the big well already, not because the Olympics are coming in two years, but because 4 million citizens deserve better now.

And don’t stop there.

steve.lopez@latimes.com