Grist for a Man on the Street

Paris has the Eiffel Tower, New York the Statue of Liberty, St. Louis the Arch, Seattle the Space Needle and Rome the Colosseum. And now at last Los Angeles will have an identifiable symbol of its own. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I give you the Gateway Monument. It’s the best we could do with toothpicks and Popsicle sticks.

For those unable to suspend disbelief long enough to accept what is being called “Clouds of Steel” as the symbol of L.A., I say, sadly, it’s true. That . . . thing . . . unveiled Monday will indeed grow up to become the metaphorical structure by which we will be recognized in every corner of the Earth.

You think we’re a joke now, wait until the rest of the country gets a load of the $33-million aberrant Tinker Toy that will, fittingly, rise over the Hollywood Freeway sometime in 1992. They’ll never stop laughing.

The idea of the Gateway Monument is . . . well . . . noble, intending as it does to celebrate L.A.’s ethnic diversity. One will be able to stroll through and under the visual calamity and visit a museum, a park and an aquarium situated therein.

Exactly why it is being called a monument to our ethnic diversity seems a little obscure, but then the whole thing is pretty obscure to begin with. Someone said it represents urban chaos, and that may be as close to its meaning as we’ll ever get.

The Gateway, selected over 150 other designs, was created by a pair of New Yorkers--which may be the ultimate joke--and named the winning entry by an international panel of judges, many of whom have never been to L.A. Some of the other entries included a giant dollar bill and an oversized television screen.

Nick Patsaouras, chairman of the Gateway committee, told reporters at the unveiling that the Popsicle and toothpick monument was not meant to please the man on the street, adding: “It would be easy to get a nice arch that people can understand. That’s not what they were trying to do.” Obviously.

Well, OK. As a man on the street, I am definitely not an art or an architectural critic and am therefore too ignorant to know what it is I ought to be pleased with.

Realizing my limitations, when the Gateway Monument was presented to an astonished gathering of media representatives for the first time, I held my tongue. I mean, what’s a guy from East Oakland know about grandeur? When the Oakland Museum opened years ago I was asked to select my favorite sculpture in a display by modern artists. I did, but it turned out to be a fire extinguisher.

Ever since then, I have remained reasonably quiet when it came to art, which Dorothy Parker called a form of catharsis, and which in its most evocative physical form often doe s resemble a fire extinguisher. I like what everyone else likes at the art galleries and at worst employ the old Gomer Pyle trick by saying “Shazam!” when I cannot bring myself to utter even token appreciation for what I am viewing.

However, after a reasonable period of silence after the Gateway presentation, I began to wonder how others perceived the edifice that will someday identify the, er, city of the future. I asked a lot of men on the street, some of whom were women, what they thought of “Clouds of Steel,” and felt you might benefit from the answers.

My favorite was the observation that “it looks like L.A. after the Big One,” which gives social credibility to the structure that it probably doesn’t deserve.

Another describes it as “a bold, daring, innovative design that has been stepped on by a very fat person.”

Others:

“A hang glider crash.”

“Something to trip over in the living room.”

“The new stealth fighter, ultimately undetectable on radar.”

“Something broken.”

“Something under construction.”

“Something condemned.”

“The remains of a 15-car pileup.”

One felt that a more fitting symbol of Los Angeles ought to resemble a minimall. Another suggested a giant statue fashioned after the poster of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt blowing up.

I’m afraid, however, we’re stuck with what has been thrust upon us by a distant assemblage of experts who ultimately define what us people on the street ought to like.

“Clouds,” I fear, will become more a symbol of controversy than a symbol of ethnic harmony, but I have a way out of that too. Build the damned thing then instantly tear it down. No one will notice the difference either way. Junk is junk to the man on the street.