Commentary: On RFK's 100th birthday, the Koreatown memorial honoring his legacy is a neglected mess
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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.California As a skinny teenage busboy, Juan Romero knelt beside a mortally wounded Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel.
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 a...