Hawthorne, CA Historic Preservation: Historic-Cultural Monuments (2026)

010 makes it unlawful for anyone other than a duly authorized city employee performing official duties to cut, break, injure, deface, sit or stand upon, or otherwise disturb any landmark or monument located on the city right-of-way. The section separately bars marking, etching, writing or printing on a landmark, and bars attaching any sign, card, display or other device to it unless the city has authorized that display. Subsection D supplies the operative definition: a "landmark" is any improvement with special character or special historical or aesthetic value as part of the city's, the state's, or the nation's development, heritage or cultural characteristics, but only once it "has been designated as an official landmark"; the definition also reaches the improvement parcel, or part of it, on which the landmark sits.

The chapter dates to Ordinance 1820, adopted in 2005, and sits in Title 9's offenses-against-property division alongside the city's general injury-to-property and encroachment chapters. Because the ordinance protects designated landmarks rather than creating a citywide historic-district review process, Hawthorne's code does not describe a separate landmark-designation application procedure, commission, or certificate-of-appropriateness review within this chapter; the protection is a use-and-conduct restriction that attaches once an improvement carries the official designation.