L.A. County Seal In Light Of Original Design Intent

Under pressure from the ever-vigilant American Civil Liberties Union, Los Angeles's political leaders have agreed to remove a Christian cross from the county seal and, in the process, tangled with traditionalists promising a fight to keep the emblem as it has been since 1957.

A new design, commissioned after the ACLU threatened legal action against"an impermissible endorsement of Christianity", will be considered by regional leaders next week.

The cross, squeezed into one corner of the seal also occupied by a representation of the Hollywood Bowl and a couple of stars - one for film and one for television - has disappeared from the proposed replacement.

But its defenders, who previously appeared ready to accept legal advice that the ACLU would most likely win any court case, are agitated by the disappearance of the centrepiece: Pomona, pagan goddess of orchards, and her armload of horticultural goodies.

She has been replaced by a representation of a Native American woman, apparently dressed by Pomona's fashion designer and bearing a large bowl.

Gone, too, are the three oil derricks that represent one of southern California's original sources of cash wealth, displaced by a drawing of a building, said by Janice Hahn, a city councillor, to resemble nothing so much as a Wal-Mart store.

It is intended to represent the San Gabriel Mission, one of a chain stretching through the state and built by the same Spanish missionaries who, historians allege, reduced the status of the Indians to virtual slavery. However, lacking a cross to confirm its identity, it could be a cinema.

Ms Hahn, whose father, Kenneth Hahn doodled the original design as a guide for a professional artist, is expected to lead the charge against the new look on the grounds, as she told the Los Angeles Times, that its proponents did not have a mandate to undertake such a radical revamp.

The other principal elements are intended to honour the industries that built the regional economy, including fisheries, which are represented by a tuna fish. Pearlette, a champion dairy cow, retains her place, but her successors are being pushed far into the hinterland under pressure from housing developments.

Also untouched is the San Salvador, a Spanish galleon sailed into the city harbour in the 16th century by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, and callipers and set-square honouring designers, builders and engineers, today best represented by the architect Frank Gehry.