Flag salute

On Thursday, City Hall's forecourt was buzzing with Olympic anticipation. There were Los Angeles officials sporting crisp Team USA Ralph Lauren separates, Paralympians fresh from competing in Paris, cute kids in shirts that read "Games for All," and Greg Louganis, who brought his dog. The Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles played John Williams' "Olympic Fanfare and Theme" as a parade of local restaurants served Olympic-themed cuisine: think Randy's Donuts "rings" in Olympic-colored glazes and "LA '28 Olympics" artfully scrawled in mustard on a Pink's hot dog.

It was, in so many ways, a scaled-back dress rehearsal for LA's opening ceremonies, now just four short years away.

There had been handover ceremonies in Paris and touchdown ceremonies at LAX, but everyone was there Thursday to welcome the official Olympic and Paralympic flags to their homes inside City Hall. (The ones you've seen so far are replicas, these are the real-deal flags, transported and stored like fine artwork.) In small groups, the crowd was instructed, we could go inside the 3rd floor lobby to see the flags encased behind glass, where they will be on public display for the next four years.

And, as I reported July 26, this all cost the city of LA $500,000 that the city of LA doesn't have.

Over the last few weeks, City Hall's 3rd floor lobby became the subject of international headlines — but not in a good way. The news that Japanese and Korean artifacts gifted to the city were being relocated to make way for the flags triggered uproar from local cultural leaders who said they weren't consulted. A press conference was held demanding the city find another place in City Hall for their Olympics display. The mayor's office went into damage control mode, issuing apologies, organizing rounds of meetings with cultural leaders, and even sending letters to sister city mayors to assure them their gifts were destined for an even better home at the Los Angeles Convention Center. (A handful of Mexican artifacts that were also in the lobby are being relocated to El Pueblo in cooperation with the Mexican Consulate.)

One month later, some — not all — of those cultural leaders have come around to the idea. After a meeting with LA Mayor Karen Bass and other city officials Wednesday, the LA-Nagoya Sister City Affiliation's Peter Langenberg told me he was "pleased" with what he called a "thoughtful" plan to move the artifacts to the convention center, including addressing the concerns that the artifacts are being placed in what is, in all likelihood, going to become a construction site in a few short months. "My major concern is not what they’re doing now but what they do five years from now when there’s a different team with different ideas for what should be there," Langenberg said Thursday. "I'm very skeptical about bureaucrats."

The bureaucrats, notably, also tried to convince the cultural leaders that moving the gifts to the convention center meant more visibility. A spokesperson for Councilmember John Lee told the Los Angeles Times that "the relocation of these treasured items to the convention center will allow a new, broader audience to view, enjoy and appreciate them."

But if important city items will find a broader audience outside of City Hall, then why are the flags here at all? Who is this installation for?

What I didn't know until I got there Thursday is that the flags are only one part of what will be on display. Two other corners of the 3rd floor lobby have been turned into an Olympics-in-LA exhibition of 1932 and 1984 memorabilia. Maybe it's not finished — and I really hope that's the case — but it all seemed very hastily put together. Part of the 1932 section is wedged behind a counter that was cluttered with staffers' lunches. The 1984 section is a fairly thin collection of photos and merch. (Come on, at least get a Deborah Sussman-designed sonotube in there!) One problem, of course, is that the 3rd floor lobby, a badly lit and congested space, is just not a great place for an exhibition like this, especially when City Hall has actual galleries elsewhere in the building. The more I walked around, the more I thought the city could have kept all the removed artifacts in place, simply installed the flags in the fourth corner behind the mayor's help desk, and curated a thoughtful, deeply researched Olympics-in-LA exhibition elsewhere in City Hall — or maybe even elsewhere in the city.

But it turns out that the flags and the memorabilia are here as part of a bigger plan aligned with another important milestone for LA: 2028 is also the 100th anniversary of City Hall, says Edward Avila, president of Project Restore, a nonprofit that works on the historic preservation of city-owned properties. "Getting the building ready is what we’re involved in right now," he told me. "100 years is right around the corner." Avila's team has been working hard, recently returning the stunning ceiling murals to their technicolor brilliance, and they also consulted on the installations to make sure the changes didn't damage Project Restore's ongoing preservation work. The entire exhibition is part of an effort to both spiff up City Hall — which Avila thinks is the Eiffel Tower of LA, not the Hollywood sign — and bring more people inside of the building ahead of its centennial.

So maybe this is more useful framing for that $500,000: instead of a temporary display of the flags, let's consider this an actual legacy improvement — a permanent Olympics-in-LA exhibition for the 3rd floor lobby. When the flags have moved on to Brisbane, their display cases get filled with 2028 memorabilia. The exhibition stays up in City Hall — at least, until we get the games a fourth time and need to expand it.

But if the flag installation is a 2028 legacy improvement, it's set a very poor precedent. The city has had seven years to prepare for the flag's arrival; as LA28 chair Casey Wasserman reminded everyone during his remarks at Thursday's event, the games were awarded to LA on September 13, 2017. Giving the Olympic flags a good home in City Hall should have been the most anticipated and least controversial task on the handover checklist. And instead, this detail was rushed through in a few months, without the necessary community input, consuming extra staff hours that overworked employees don't have, and at great expense to a city in crisis.

As I returned to the forecourt after viewing the installation, it was hard not to see Thursday's flag ceremony as foreshadowing for the actual games. LA pulled out every stop for a splashy event so a select few could toast each other with themed donuts — but paid less attention to what the rest of the city is stuck with after the party's over. 🔥