A 29-Foot Cross Fought a 26-Year Legal War to Stay Standing

The memorial atop Mount Soledad looks permanent, but it spent more than a quarter-century fighting for its right to exist there. A 1989 lawsuit argued that a Christian cross on city-owned public land violated the constitutional separation of church and state, and a federal judge agreed two years later. Rather than remove it, Congress stepped in: in 2006 it passed a law seizing the summit by eminent domain and transferring it to federal ownership so the cross could stand as a war memorial instead of a religious symbol. Appeals courts kept splitting on whether that fix actually solved the constitutional problem, and the case only ended in 2015, when a private veterans association bought the underlying land outright — taking the site out of government hands entirely and, with it, out of court.

Down the hill at the Salk Institute, Jonas Salk gave his architect an unusually lofty brief: design a laboratory "worthy of a visit by Picasso." Louis Kahn's twin concrete towers delivered the labs, but the plaza between them almost became a conventional garden. Kahn had trees and lawn sketched in until he consulted the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, who told him bluntly: "I would not put a tree or a blade of grass in this space... If you make this a plaza, you will gain a façade to the sky." Kahn tore up the planting plan, and the bare travertine courtyard with its single water channel aimed at the Pacific horizon became the most photographed room in American architecture.