If you haven’t heard about putting the...

If you haven’t heard about putting the lawn back in Lawndale, you haven’t been around the South Bay very long.

This perennial refrain dates back nearly 20 years to the time the city installed Astroturf in the 66-foot-wide median of Hawthorne Boulevard.

The polyethylene ground cover, which won Lawndale a Monsanto Co. plaque for the “World’s Finest Astro Grass Traffic Median Installation,” was supposed to save the city maintenance costs while remaining evergreen.

But a scorned Mother Nature got her revenge.

First, the plastic grass trapped cigarette butts and bits of trash, becoming such a mess that “we had to invest in vacuum cleaners instead of lawn mowers,” said one city official.

“Let’s keep the lawn in Lawndale” became a winning political slogan in the mid-1970s, but the plastic grass was still there in the mid-1980s.

The sun eventually exacted a toll, bleaching the color from the fake grass. So for the 1984 Olympics, the city painted the plastic turf green. The plastic and the paint didn’t like each other, and the result was a murky aquamarine.

Last fall, the Lawndale City Council and Planning Commission decided to “revitalize” Hawthorne Boulevard. Plans called for removing the aging plastic, which had curled up at the edges because of all the vacuuming.

Last week, with little progress evident on the boulevard, the council voted to spend up to $1,500 to replace the plastic with genuine grass at the intersection of Marine Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard.

That sounds nice, but some old-timers think the Astroturf will outlive us all.