May Sun stood on Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown on Tuesday morning, looking through the fence at the memorial she and another artist designed to honor Robert F. Kennedy near the site of his 1968 assassination.
Graffiti smeared the monument. Scattered trash included a potato chip bag, a smashed beer bottle and a sneaker. Weeds poked up from neglected garden beds and dozens of orange sandbags sat on ledges and columns, for no apparent reason.
In years past, people have left candles on Nov. 20, RFK’s birthday. This year marks his 100th, but a temporary fence, with graffiti sprayed on the “no trespassing” signs, now stands in the way of anyone who might be inclined to mark the day here.
The monument and adjacent Inspiration Park, unveiled in 2010 after years of planning, design and careful selection of the right words to honor Kennedy’s legacy, are a mess.
“It’s just been so heartbreaking,” said Sun, who told me that despite the current state of the memorial, it’s been in far worse shape and has served as a homeless encampment. “I’ve been avoiding this area. I can’t drive past it, you know?”
The memorial sits on the edge of the K-12 RFK Community Schools at the site of the former Ambassador Hotel, where an assassin shot and mortally wounded Kennedy on the night of June 5, 1968, after he’d won California’s Democratic presidential primary.
The condition of the memorial is shocking but unsurprising, I told Sun, given the state of disorder and disrepair in many parts of the city. And it represents a kind of surrender.
As the story of the decline was laid out for me by Sun and others, it involves bureaucratic buck-passing between the school district and city, a lack of accountability, and the kind of inertia, ineptitude and tacit acceptance that allow public places — and even historic sites and local treasures — to become tarnished and trampled.
Max and Rory Kennedy, RFK’s son and daughter, share Sun’s frustration and disappointment. Max Kennedy told me that when the monument was unveiled in 2010, it was the most beautiful memorial he’d ever seen, and the Los Angeles Unified School District promised to be its caretaker.
“I think there’s no question at all that it’s the responsibility of LAUSD, and they have broken their promise to our family, to the community,” and to artists Sun and her late collaborator, artist Richard Wyatt, Max Kennedy said.
The “professional services agreement” between the district and the artists, executed in 2006, states that “the district is responsible for the proper care and maintenance of the Artwork.”
The abdication, Max Kennedy said, is a terrible example for students. His sister echoed that.
“It’s upsetting as the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, for sure,” Rory Kennedy said. “But the thing that’s most egregious to me is the message it sends to these children who are in the school that was created in my father’s name, at the site where he was assassinated.”
The campus, divided into six pilot programs, was conceived as an investment in underserved students and an embodiment of RFK’s legacy of social justice and tolerance.
The memorial was meant to amplify that idea, and Sun said the park and benches were designed as a place for visitors to talk and reflect.
“This was very important to us as a family, to have a living memorial that was giving back to the community,” Rory Kennedy said. “And it feels that the treatment of this park, which is part of this school, is a message of negligence and not caring. … And this is the antithesis of everything that my father fought for and what he lived for, and ultimately what he died for.”
One neighbor I spoke to, who asked not to be identified, said he has witnessed the years-long decline of the memorial and the park. He said he has called police and local officials, and sent photos to community leaders, trying to rally support for a restoration.
“The chaos that I saw going on over there was insane,” said the neighbor. “The entire park was full of tents and tarps and people constantly going in and out of there.” He said that the occupants were moved out at one point by teams he believed were from Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program.
Last month, Sun sent an email to LAUSD board member Karla Griego.
“Sadly, despite years of advocacy,” Sun wrote, “this important memorial continues to suffer from repeated vandalism and ongoing use as a homeless encampment. … These conditions not only endanger the safety of nearby residents and school families but also dishonor the memory of [RFK] at the very site of his assassination.”
Sun said she was told the matter had been forwarded to a teacher at the school, who forwarded it to someone in district operations.
As I stood with her, she pointed out a hole in the face of the memorial. Someone had gouged out the two S’s in a Cesar Chavez quote about “drawing the goodne…” out of students.
Sun said Ethel Kennedy, RFK’s late wife, chose the photo of her husband that was used as the central image of the memorial. But Sun said the lights that once illuminated the memorial at night had been out for quite a while, and the image of Kennedy has been dulled over time.
“I think it’s because it was graffitied over so much, and they cleaned it off,” she said. “I don’t know what they used to clean it.”
Graffiti also marred a section of the wall with two RFK quotes: “I believe that we must build an America devoted to the ways of conciliation and peace.” And “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”
I told Sun I got to know Juan Romero, the Ambassador Hotel busboy who cradled the wounded Kennedy, whom he had met earlier while delivering room service. Romero, an LAUSD high school student at the time and now deceased, told me he had tried to live his life in a way he thought honored a Kennedy legacy of tolerance and compassion. I accompanied Romero in Washington in 2010, when he knelt at RFK’s gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery and wept.
“One of the reasons my family was so supportive of both the school and the park,” Rory Kennedy said, “is that it was an opportunity to remind young people about what my father stood for, and having a vision of America that might be very much in contrast to what’s seen in leadership today.”
Max Kennedy said he found the memorial “astonishingly” moving in 2010. “Everything about it was so thoughtfully and carefully planned and so beautifully executed.” I asked what he thought should be done with it now.
“It’s a very simple solution,” he said. “They just have to do what they did for the first few years, when they were taking care of it.”
An LAUSD spokesperson sent me a statement Wednesday afternoon in which the district claimed that until recently, “maintenance of the park was the responsibility” of the city “and during that time suffered from a chronic problem of homeless encampments.”
The district said maintenance responsibilities were transferred back to the district early this year, when temporary fencing was installed “to protect the monument moving forward.”
The statement said the district is “taking inventory of needed repairs, including the artwork, to ensure that the park is a safe place that RFK students can access and enjoy.” The district is also working on “the design of a new permanent wrought iron fence…that will allow for public view of the park, while permanently securing the site.”
The back-and-forth responsibility seems to be part of the problem. But this issue has festered for years, and rather than point fingers, the district or the city, or both, need to do their jobs.
The sad state of the memorial doesn’t dishonor Kennedy, it dishonors local officials.
And as May Sun and the Kennedy family say, it’s a terrible message to send to students, as well as everyone else.
The post On RFK’s 100th birthday, the Koreatown memorial honoring his legacy is a neglected mess appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
