Two white elephants, a connection to the early days of filmmaking at the Hollywood & Highland Center in Los Angeles, have finally been removed by the city as part of a timely $100 million makeover that began earlier this year.

Variety is reporting that new owners of the center have decided to remove the statues this week over their explicit connections to one of the more notorious figures of Old Hollywood’s racist past. 

The elephant sculptures were originally meant as a tribute to the set design for D.W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance, which was meant as a rebuttal to criticism of his earlier film The Birth of a Nation. A large arch with Babylonian-themed reliefs will be given an art deco upgrade while a fiberglass daybed sculpture by the artist Erika Rothenberg will also be permanently removed after being taken down in 2017 in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. 

Gensler is leading the redevelopment aimed at transitioning the center from a tourist-laden shopping district to a bustling mixed-use office center geared toward creative industries that are endemic to the media and entertainment capital. Ownership has expressed interest in reshaping the center in a way that celebrates the achievements of Hollywood while at the same time remaining inclusive to new generations. “It’s time to create new monuments for the town,” Chad Cress, chief creative officer for the property's co-owner DJM Capital Partners Inc., told the LA Times. 

Griffith’s name has always been synonymous with racism, though his deep ties and influence in the industry (Griffith was a founding partner in United Artists) are often overlooked. The set for Intolerance, for example, stood at what is now the site of the newly Quentin Tarantino-owned Vista Theatre for about four years. It was an early precursor to the popular studio tours which draws in tourists today, and the widely-seen nature of the site helped create an iconography around Hollywood that remained popular enough for the elephants to be commissioned in the year 2001. 

A public middle school in East Los Angeles is still named after Griffth despite a 2015 petition drive. 

Hollywood & Highland installed a permanent Black Lives Matter mural at the center last year. The renamed Ovation Hollywood is set to open next summer. The LA Times has more on the redevelopment project here.