Isn’t this just a classic Los Angeles story?
Fighting over land — who had it, who has it now, who’ll get it?
Right now it’s a fight in a courtroom, over who should have the right and the duty to decide the destiny of the hundreds of acres of the federal Veterans Affairs department’s West L.A. campus. For those of you who are new to this place, this is some of the juiciest land in the juicy neighborhood of Westwood.
By L.A.’s yardstick of history, its story goes way back, like Queen-Victoria-and-first-movie-camera far back, to when it was first dedicated to the nation’s suffering soldiery, and then back a century before then.
First, long before that, the Spanish and Mexicans wrested it away from the Native Americans. Then, the Yankees wangled and wooed it away from the Spanish and Mexicans. Then, in 1888, its acres were set aside for disabled and destitute veterans.
The first Civil War soldier to move in was a private from New York, and so anxious was he that he pitched a tent, unwilling to wait for the wooden barracks to be finished. Some of the many fanciful gingerbread buildings that arose there were supposedly designed by the scandalously famous architect Stanford White and bore a resemblance to the Hotel del Coronado, which opened the same year.
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