When Cultural Heritage Is Scrapped for Cash

Anne-Lise Desmas, senior curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Getty Museum, was heading to the opera downtown last April when she decided to swing by MacArthur Park.

She wanted to show her guests, one of whom was a curator from the Louvre, a monumental 1920 work by Italian sculptor Paul Troubetzkoy.

Troubetzkoy was commissioned by prominent Angelenos to create a memorial to General Harrison Gray Otis, a Civil War and Philippine-American War veteran, civic booster, and founding publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Visible from Wilshire Boulevard, it featured three statues: Otis, a soldier, and a newsboy. All were made of bronze.

Although the soldier had been removed from its stone pedestal after a car crashed into it decades ago, Desmas, an authority on Troubetzkoy, was excited to show off the other figures. What she found left her in shock: all that remained was Otis and the newsboy’s shoes. Surveillance video obtained by police showed that after midnight a few weeks before her visit, men in reflective vests—presumably posing as city workers—carted away the newsboy after sawing it off at the ankles.

“The newsboy had such a lively facial expression and dynamic movement of the body,” Desmas says. “It was the best part of the whole monument.”

And what happened at MacArthur Park was not an isolated incident.

Driven by demand for scrap metal, thefts of materials like copper and bronze began to spike in the city in 2023. A special task force within the Los Angeles Police Department, created by the Los Angeles City Council, made more than 80 arrests last year and recovered tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stolen metal. Copper wire, which fetches $2 to $3 a pound at scrapyards, made up most of the haul.

Public infrastructure—cable lines, manhole covers, utility boxes, sewer grates, and fire hydrants—has not been the only target. Cultural property made of valuable metals, including outdoor sculptures and historical markers from cemeteries, parks, bridges, and buildings, has also been stolen, creating wounds that go deeper than cracks from a crowbar.

“It’s harder to remember something you can’t sense,” says Felicia Filer, who manages the public art division of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. “The tangibility of public artwork and commemorative or informational plaques reinforces our cultural memory. It reminds us of our past, present, and future. If it’s stolen, you’ve effectively stolen people’s cultural memory.”

The full crime report

Blank spaces once graced by bronze plaques abound. At El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, a 44-acre district in the oldest of part of LA, 12 markers were stolen over a weekend in late 2023. In nearby Elysian Park, thieves filched a plaque for the Portolá Trail, the path Spanish colonizers took in 1769. At Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery in Carson, more than 100 bronze nameplates disappeared from the mausoleum, as well as a 1944 bronze plaque dedicated by heavyweight champion Joe Louis to Black World War II veterans.

Along Pasadena’s historic Orange Grove Boulevard, thieves dislodged 11 bronze lampposts dating to the 1920s by ramming them with vehicles. “Those poles are iconic because they are shown every year during the Rose Parade,” Garrett Crawford, Pasadena’s public works administrator for street maintenance, says of the elegant fixtures topped with a glass globe.

In Manhattan Beach, a bronze plaque that detailed the city’s Black pioneer and racist histories at a neighborhood called Bruce’s Beach was stolen in January 2024, less than a year after it had been dedicated. It represented the culmination of a long, contentious process to reckon with the destruction of a tight-knit Black community formed when Willa and Charles Bruce bought two oceanfront lots in the early 1900s and built a lodge that attracted other Black families. They were driven out of town after the city confiscated their property through eminent domain in 1924.

The centerpiece of a monument that cost the city $20,000, the plaque conveyed “an invaluable piece of civic memory,” says Alison Rose Jefferson, a historian who chronicled the rise and fall of Bruce’s Beach in her book Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era. “The theft was sad because Black folks have to work so hard to get our stories told,” she says. “And for the white people in the community and the city government who had to educate themselves about this historical incident, it was a shock. It hurt everybody.”

Unlike other locales, Manhattan Beach had the resources to quickly install a new plaque. The replacement is bronze, like the original, but has been secured in a way that will deter thieves, a spokesperson for the city told the Manhattan Beach News.

Few of the stolen markers are ever found. They are cut into pieces or melted down and sold to unscrupulous scrap dealers.

“It’s just rampant, an attack on anything with commodity value,” Robert Combs, Getty’s director of security and visitor services, says of the recent surge in metal thefts. “We need more regulation or inspection of these scrap dealers because there is very little fear of consequences.”

Combs has been tracking metal thefts from cultural properties since at least 2009, when thieves stole a two-ton Henry Moore sculpture, valued at more than $4 million, from the grounds of the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire, England. Police said the artwork was melted down and sold to scrapyards for a fraction of its worth.

Here in the United States, a statue of baseball great Jackie Robinson was stolen from a park in Wichita, Kansas, and several bronze pieces were ripped from a Martin Luther King Jr. monument in Denver.

Foiling future thefts

On a recent Friday morning at El Pueblo, tour guide Marilyn Lee greeted a group of fourth graders from El Rio Community School in Lincoln Heights, some of the two million visitors drawn to the historic district every year.

As Lee led them around the plaza, she shared tidbits of early LA history, naming the Tongva, who populated the area for thousands of years, and the Spaniards, who founded El Pueblo in 1781. She did not mention the recent thefts of plaques that recognized historic figures and places, including Olvera Street founder Christine Sterling and Casa Avila, the oldest house in LA, built in 1818.

El Pueblo’s most important plaque was not stolen, but it is missing from public view. Dedicated to Los Pobladores, the 11 families recruited by Spain from what is now Mexico to settle El Pueblo 243 years ago, it was removed for safekeeping after officials noticed chisel marks left by would-be thieves. It will be reinstalled after a decision is made on how best to secure it.

Until then, visitors see a large sheet of orange vinyl on which the settlers’ names, ages, genders, and ethnicities are listed exactly as they appear on the plaque. Miriam Matthews, the city’s first Black librarian, had pushed for the marker so as to broaden public awareness of the ethnic diversity of LA’s founding families. According to the 1781 Spanish census, almost half of the settlers were people of Black and Spanish heritage. The plaque was installed during the city’s bicentennial celebration in 1981 under Tom Bradley, LA’s first Black mayor. Another panel commemorating Matthews was among those stolen.

During a break in the tour, El Rio Community School teacher Jessica Charlene Fitzgerald-Ruvalcaba said she was sad her students did not have the opportunity to see and touch such a meaningful part of El Pueblo’s story. It also caused her to reflect on income inequality, which she said was “an intense reality” for the families of El Rio students. “It feels bad that we can’t take care of people well enough, so they steal our history.”

Less than a mile away, at Chinatown’s Central Plaza, a gaping hole marks the spot where a bronze plaque long recognized Peter Soo Hoo Sr. and Herbert Lapham as the cofounders of the first Chinatown built by and for the local Chinese community. The marker, which weighed several hundred pounds, disappeared in November 2023, according to George Yu, executive director of the Chinatown Business Improvement District. He says the organization’s security patrols have witnessed a number of thefts in the area, including plaques from the building of the Kow Kong Benevolent Association, a charitable organization founded in 1950, and from the Bracero Monument at Spring Street and Cesar Chavez Avenue.

A new founders memorial at Central Plaza will cost more than $20,000, but Yu said it makes no sense to proceed with a replacement while metal thieves continue to plunder the city. That pains him. “I think the city should look the way it was meant to look, with these bronze plaques that our forefathers spent some significant time and resources to leave for future Americans,” he says.

Until the crimes abate, Yu and others concerned about heritage preservation have limited options. Filer said the city is considering etched concrete as a replacement for bronze. At El Pueblo, the stolen pieces have been replicated in plastic resin as a temporary measure “so that at least some of the story of the founding of the city is out there for our visitors,” Assistant General Manager Edgar Garcia says.

In some cases officials are pondering whether technology offers a more sustainable way to convey historical information. Displaying a QR code linked to information online, for example, could provide “new opportunities to tell stories and allow deeper exploration of a subject,” says Sally Unsworth, cultural affairs manager for Culver City, where concern about theft led to at least a dozen historical plaques going into storage while officials consider next steps.

Artists wish they didn’t have to think about crime or vandalism when designing works for public spaces. “Unfortunately, it has become a very important consideration,” says artist Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong, who, with his collaborator, writer Judy Chui-Hua Chung, is working with the city to develop a multisite memorial to the victims of the 1871 LA Chinese massacre. The main installation—a grove of tree trunks sculpted from stone, not valuable metals, to represent each of the 18 immigrants killed—will be built outside the Chinese American Museum at El Pueblo, near the spot where the violence erupted.

It will join what for decades has been the only physical reminder of this grim chapter of LA history: a bronze plaque, inscribed in English and Chinese, embedded in the sidewalk in front of the museum. It was almost stolen; after the 2023 thefts at El Pueblo, officials found chisel marks in the cement holding it in place.

“There’s so much history on every street corner,” Chung says. “If we don’t mark these places with artwork or a memorial, you can just walk by and not know.”