Acropolis Now!

The Grand Avenue Project in Downtown Los Angeles

Fred Cowett Architecture 638 15 May 2006

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Background

The “Grand Avenue Project” is an ambitious attempt to re-configure and re-

imagine the Civic Center district in downtown Los Angeles. First proposed formally in

2000 by the Grand Avenue Committee, a “public/private partnership” chaired by

billionaire developer Eli Broad, the $1.8 billion project consists of high-rise office

buildings and apartments, a boutique hotel, supermarket, and cinema, bookstores,

restaurants, and a sixteen acre park. The new buildings would replace parking and

vacant lots mostly owned by the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County since

the 1950s when the downtown neighborhood of Bunker Hill was razed for urban

renewal. The park, budgeted for $51 million, is essentially a reworked version of the

existing Civic Center Mall, a three block long succession of plazas intersected by

several streets that was built in the late 1960s. Adjacent to the project site are

clusters of cultural and government buildings that include the recently constructed

Walt Disney Concert Hall and Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the Museum of

Contemporary Art, the Music Center, the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration,

and Los Angeles City Hall.

Completely privately financed – one of the project’s principal selling points was

its lack of need for public funding -- the project, according to Broad, constitutes an

economic windfall, generating 25,000 full-time construction jobs, 5,300 jobs after

build-out, more than $565 million annually in direct and indirect business revenues,

and $95 million in annual incremental government revenue. Perhaps not too

surprisingly considering his personal clout, the huge economic stakes, and the

historically cozy relationship between municipal boosterism and local government in

Los Angeles, Broad has propelled the project forward at lightning speed by enlisting

as his allies the city and county political establishment. The Los Angeles Grand

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LA River

Downtown’s location was initially based on its proximity with the LA River from which the nineteenth settlement drew its drinking and irrigation water. It has since become more recognizably defined by the web of interconnecting freeways which encircle it. Grand Avenue (turquoise) runs SW to NE, and ties the Grand Avenue Project parcels (orange) to the Civic Center Mall (bright green). Broadway (purple) is downtown’s principal commercial street and is very much its “heart.”

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LA County Courthouse LA County Hall of Administration Both are earthquake damaged and may be demolished.

The Grand Avenue Project’s park is fundamentally a redesign of the existing Civic Center Mall (top row). Built as part of the urban renewal of Bunker Hill, the Mall, bordered by buildings that house the largest concentration of government employees outside of Washington D.C., has several water features and some luxuriant plantings, and covers a series of parking garages with nearly 3000 parking spaces. It is busiest during workweek days thanks to the employees in the adjacent buildings, but often deserted at nights and on weekends, due primarily to a lack of residents living nearby.

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Avenue Authority, a joint powers authority uniting the County of Los Angeles and the

Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), was created

in 2003 to implement the project. Five development teams were invited to submit

proposed master plans for the entire project including the park. Pursuant to the

Grand Avenue Committee’s recommendation, in 2004 the Authority selected the

Related Companies, a New York City development firm that built the Time Warner

Center there, to both create and implement a master plan. Preliminary concept

drawings and images of a site model were posted on the Committee’s website in July

2005.1 Although more comprehensive drawings have not yet been furnished,

groundbreaking for the project’s inaugural development, a three acre parcel across

Grand Avenue from the Disney Concert Hall presently occupied by a parking lot, has

been set for November 2006 with Frank Gehry as architect, replacing Thom Mayne

who was initially associated with the project. This parcel includes the supermarket,

bookstore, galleries, “several signature retailers and a series of small shops,” not to

mention “a distinctive 40-50-story iconic tower” that combines a 275 room boutique

hotel with 200 condominiums on its upper floors. The first phase of development and

the sixteen acre park are both scheduled to open by November 30, 2009.

Controversy

Despite the many benefits enumerated by Broad and other proponents, the

Grand Avenue Project has generated criticism, much of it focused on the park. Its

most vocal and persistent critic has been Martin Kaplan, associate dean of USC’s

Annenberg School for Communication and director of its Norman Lear Center which

1 Master Plan (2005) Grand Avenue Committee, posted July 6, 2005, http://www.grandavenuecommittee.org/masterplan.html, website accessed March 1, 2006.

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studies the effect of entertainment on society. Kaplan is not opposed to the park in

principle – Los Angeles is infamous for its lack of green space (acreage per capita)

compared to other American cities, especially grievous in less affluent and minority

communities, and one would be hard pressed to find many Angelinos opposed to

creating new parks – but he has been extremely critical about the design process.

More specifically, he has complained about its opacity and lack of public input, and

has called for opening up the park design to a professional competition in the vein of

the High Line in New York and Downsview Park in Toronto. Seeking to instigate

public debate and pressure the Authority to hold a competition, Kaplan, in 2005,

aided by the Los Angeles Times, the city’s pre-eminent newspaper, began soliciting

ideas from the public for conceptualizing and designing the park. Called the “Grand

Avenue Intervention” and given its own website, Kaplan’s solicitation has generated

over three hundred concepts and designs. More than thirty of these designs have

been posted on the Intervention’s website where anyone can peruse them.2

One recent event suggests that the Intervention may be having an impact. Los

Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry, who represents Downtown while also doubling

as Vice Chair of the Grand Avenue Authority, suggested in January, 2006 there was a

“strong possibility” that the Authority would hold a “charette” for the park’s design

once a final deal for the project had been reached with the developer (KPPC, 2006).

In addition, the Intervention has sparked and facilitated a lively civic discussion in a

city whose residents are reputedly so blasé and apathetic that they aren’t expected

to engage in such a thing. The answer to the rhetorical queries recently posed by

Kaplan – “Who cares what this new park will look like? Who cares who gets to decide

2 The website can be accessed at http://www.learcenter.org/html/projects/?cm=grand.

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Preliminary plans for the overall Grand Avenue Project (top) and the project’s Phase 1 (bottom). These plans along with images of a model of the site were posted on the Grand Avenue Committee’s website in July 2005 prior to Frank Gehry’s appointment as Phase 1 architect. Concerns have been raised based on these plans about Phase 1’s interior pathways and plazas which would appear to prioritize space between the buildings at the expense of the adjacent streets. Such a design might be appreciated by prospective residents of the condominiums skedded for Phase 1, but they do not seem consistent with the Grand Avenue Committee’s goal to transform Grand Avenue into the Champs d’Elyssee of Los Angeles.

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Negative reaction to the preliminary plan for the Grand Avenue Project park (top left) provoked the Norman Lear Center at USC to organize the “Grand Avenue Intervention,” an unofficial and unpaid competition for alternative park designs. The results (top right and above) have been posted on the Intervention website, creating an electronic community vested in the future of the park. If LA County decides to raze two earthquake damaged buildings on the Civic Center Mall, not only would park size increase from 16 to 25 acres, but a more innovative design that deviates from downtown’s gridded street network might be facilitated.

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that and to design it?”3 – is that clearly some people do care. While the response to

Kaplan’s solicitation for park concepts might not quite measure up to the “explosion”

that he suggests, it does represent a significant level of public discourse, and the

designs on the Intervention’s website have given a face to civic engagement

Southern California style. By raising the park ante, Kaplan has fomented a debate

where none might have otherwise existed. Whether or not this debate produces a

design charette or instigates changes in the park’s concept – at the very least it is

likely to heighten the value of the space ultimately created – it has also been

exceedingly helpful in revealing and giving expression to some pre-existing factors

and forces lurking beneath the surface of downtown Los Angeles. After examining

these factors and forces – in particular downtown’s historic past and its evolving role

within the city – a more sophisticated understanding of the project and its potential

impact on Los Angeles will hopefully begin to emerge.

So, what really is going on here?

A New “Center” For Los Angeles

Dorothy Parker famously quipped that Los Angeles is "seventy-two suburbs in

search of a city,”4 and Herb Caen somewhat less notably that "I went down to L.A.,

but I couldn't find it."5 Leaving the humor aside, inherent in these characterizations

is the notion that Los Angeles is an abnormal urban formation that contravenes the

way that cities should be conceived, built, and structured. They imply in particular

that Los Angeles lacks an identifiable center that gives it legibility and coherence, and

3 Kaplan, M., “When a riot is a good thing,” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 2005. 4 In some quarters, notably the tourist industry, the “seventy-two” is often found to have been

revised to “a hundred” perhaps for greater convenience and/or impact. 5 Caen was a well-known columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle who has been given credit for

coining the terms “beatnik” and “hippie”.

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readily facilitates wayfinding. This “take” owes a considerable debt to Kevin Lynch

(1960) and his theory of imageability which prioritized visual environmental images

and cognitive mapping as critical to inhabiting urban space. It also derives

significantly from the “Chicago School” of urbanism (Dear, 2003) in which the city

was seen as “a unified whole” with a central core and that this core would organize

“its hinterland.” According to a model offered by E.W. Burgess, urban development

would radiate outward from a city’s central core to form a series of concentric rings

or zones (Dear and Flusty, 1998).

Los Angeles, as Parker and Caen recognized, departs considerably as an urban

formation from the Chicago School model. In the past twenty years, however, this

departure has been proposed to constitute not a deviation from a norm, but instead

an entirely new model in which the “peripheries are organizing what remains of the

center” (Dear, 2000). According to Dear (2000), in this new urban prototype which

he calls Los Angeles School:

“Conventional city form, Chicago-style, is sacrificed in favor of a noncontiguous collage of parcelized, consumption-oriented landscapes devoid of conventional centers yet wired into electronic propinquity and nominally unified by the mythologies of the (dis)information superhighway. In such landscapes, “city centers” become almost an externality of fragmented urbanism; they are frequently grafted onto the landscape as a (much later) afterthought by developers and politicians concerned with identity and tradition.”

The Los Angeles School model, which does not deny suburbanization and sprawl, but

in fact acknowledges them, resists representation as a hierarchical sequence of

gradated rings and is instead better imagined as an interwoven archipelagic matrix of

nodes, accretions, and flows. Such a representation has difficulty competing for

acceptance, however, with the more familiar ringed model likely inherited from the

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medieval walled European city.6 The archipelagic model, in addition, connotes

decentralization and localization, politically, socially, and economically, which are not

always synonymous with the aims of urban political, social, and economic elites.

Such would appear to be the case with the Grand Avenue Project.

In a brief essay published last year in a Los Angeles business newspaper, Eli

Broad stated his rationale for the project:

“All great cities have a heart, a central place where people from all walks of life can go to celebrate and to share. They are places made meaningful by history, event or geography. Or they are places that draw from the energy, commerce, creativity and diversity of the people who live, work and play there. And they are places people can use and enjoy, not simply monuments to design. Grand Avenue can be that place.” 7

He then proceeded to conceptualize the park as:

“an urban oasis … [that could be a] gathering place for New Year's Eve, Cinco de Mayo or Fourth of July, as well as a public commons for free concerts or spirited debates, a destination for families, or just a spot for lunch or a midday reprieve.”

Broad’s essay concluded with an appeal to civic unity:

“Los Angeles has been a divided city for years. People from the Eastside don't go to the Westside and visa versa. People from the San Fernando Valley don't come downtown. This Grand Avenue plan is real, and it can change the paradigm for how we interact as a city and where.”

Leaving aside for the moment whether the Grand Avenue Project or its park can

change L.A.’s “paradigm of interaction” or truly be a place of “civic engagement,” is

Los Angeles, the quintessentially sprawling, transurbanist “edge city,” really in need

of a “heart”? Has Broad’s emphasis on a “central place” been based on an outdated

model of urban form that no longer is operational, if indeed it ever was?

6 Dante’s “nine rings of hell” situated beneath Jerusalem and extending to the center of the Earth is

one example. 7 Broad, E., “Where will the City's heart beat,” Los Angeles Business Journal, 05/30/05,

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m5072/is_22_27/ai_n13817836.

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Downtown Palimpsest

While its history may not be as lengthy or “rich” as that of Paris or Prague,

downtown L.A. has history – lots of history in fact, especially in comparison to the

rest of the city.8 That history can be attributed almost entirely to the proximity of

the Los Angeles River whose water facilitated the establishment of the Los Angeles

Pueblo by the Spanish in 1781 just a few blocks to the north of where Los Angeles

City Hall, built in the late 1920s, presently stands. Incorporated as a United States

city in 1850, Los Angeles depended on the river for its drinking and irrigation water

until the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913. So long as the river was

the city’s sole supply of water, growth was concentrated in the compact downtown

area that was oriented north-south and running beside it to the west. Commercial

development occurred close to the river, filling in what once had been agricultural

fields (mostly vineyards). Street patterns here were not gridded, but ran at odd

angles, following the field divisions of the pueblo’s earliest settlement. Residential

development occurred further away and uphill from the river including the Victorian

mansions of the city’s elite atop Bunker Hill. Street patterns here were gridded and

dutifully followed the Hancock survey of 1857. The city’s early municipal buildings,

the Post Office, Courthouse, and Hall of Records, were built relatively near the river

along an angled street adjacent to the juncture of the two street pattern networks.

Together with Pershing Square (at the time called Central Park), these municipal

buildings constituted the “face” of downtown, and the city’s social and economic

center can be said to have been located there.

8 Reyner Banham, who did not like Downtown L.A., did at least acknowledge that it was one of the

few “pockets of ancientry” to be found in the city (2000).

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Aerial, 2002

Hancock Survey, 1857

1925

The “Old” Hall of Records and Court House (above right) were among the several municipal buildings located along New High Street, a remnant of the early settlement road to Santa Monica. Situated at the interface between gridded and angled street networks, these buildings served as the “public face” for downtown Los Angeles until the construction of City Hall (1928) and the adoption of plans for the Los Angeles Civic Center. While New High Street and its buildings ultimately disappeared with the rationalization of street layout facilitated by the extension of the grid, it is interesting to note from the 2002 aerial how closely development after 1857 followed the template set out in the Hancock Survey, and how persistent the angled street pattern, whose geometry derives from the old agricultural field boundaries, has been.

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Downtown’s trajectory was transformed by the completion of the Los Angeles

Aqueduct coupled with the construction of a street car network and the building of

boulevards such as Pico, Sunset, and Wilshire heading westward from downtown.

These infrastructural additions facilitated the city’s expansion west, empowering the

newly created peripheries first to compete with downtown and then to overwhelm it

(Suisman, 1989). As downtown’s social and economic importance diminished, the

city’s elite, vacating their Bunker Hill mansions, moved west and were replaced by an

influx of poor immigrants, many of them not Anglo. Amidst these changes, and

perhaps in panicked reaction to them, a succession of plans was developed by city

elders beginning in the 1920s to create a formal “Civic Center” in downtown L.A.9

Clearly, downtown retained enough of a hold on the memory and identity of the city

that it was not simply written off, but instead an effort was made to rehabilitate it.

Fundamental to its rehabilitation, however, was reorientation and reconstruction.

As stated above, downtown’s orientation was originally north-south running

parallel to river. To a great extent, this orientation was based on topography since it

followed the routing of the irrigation zanjas and because the steepness of Bunker Hill

to the west initially discouraged development. The westward expansion of the city

encouraged a change in orientation that, nevertheless, took several decades to

complete. Thus, proposals for the new Civic Center that were drafted in the 1920s

and 30s vary in their orientation suggesting a lack of consensus in that regard, and

indeed City Hall has a small formal square to its south while its main entrance faces

the west. This dichotomy in orientation was resolved when the Hollywood Freeway

9 The impetus for these plans is frequently ascribed to the influence of Charles Mulford Robinson of

the City Beautiful movement which extolled city planning as an antidote to “haphazard growth.” Robinson was hired by the city to author an early plan for creating a Civic Center.

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opened in 1955 creating a boundary for downtown north of Temple Street and

leaving the Civic Center’s development little choice but to go west. This resolution

seemed so apropos to Banham (2000) that he was able to report unequivocally that

“Los Angeles looks naturally to the Sunset.” The reconstruction of downtown has

been far more problematic.

With the westward flight of the city’s prosperous elite and the influx of poor

immigrants, the tenor of Bunker Hill changed dramatically. The Victorian mansions

either fell into ruin or were converted into rooming houses, and Bunker Hill, “the

oldest cityscape in Los Angeles” (Klein, 1998), became “a conspicuous and

uncomfortable symbol of urban decay” (McClung, 2000). Mythologized by John Fante

for the hard-scrabble struggles of its residents, and by Raymond Chandler as the

crime-riddled nexus of film noir, it became a primary target for urban planners with

little sympathy for mystique. Whether or not conditions on Bunker Hill were as

blighted as urban renewal proponents were to assert – Klein (1998) maintains that

Bunker Hill was a poor, but stable community and that its blight was intentionally

exaggerated – it wound up in the planners’ crosshairs because it was “dangerously

conspicuous” (McClung, 2000), literally almost in the shadow of City Hall, and

projected an environmental image embarrassingly at odds with the prosperous,

tourist-friendly, sun-splashed paradise the city’s economy seemingly depended on.

It took nearly forty years before the city got around to remaking Bunker Hill,

and when it finally did, it did so with a vengeance. Under the auspices of the Los

Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency,10 Bunker Hill, in the late 1950s and

10 “Activated” in 1948, the CRA’s current mission is “to attract private investment into unsafe

properties, and blight throughout Los Angeles, revitalize older housing for all income levels, encourage economic development, create and retain employment opportunities, support the best in urban design, architecture and the art, and ensure the broadest possible citizen participation in its activities.” http://www.experiencela.com/craprofile.htm, April 23, 2006.

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Bunker Hill, prior to urban renewal, presented different images, on the one hand a symbol of decay and blight (upper right), on the other a stable if poor community (bottom row), a majority of whose residents were either elderly or immigrant. For a reputedly crime ridden place, memorialized on screen and in fiction, the most heinous crime to occur there might have been its location, almost in the shadow of City Hall, conspicuously projecting an environmental image that power brokers and civic boosters did not want for Los Angeles.

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“The Old Hall of Records [below] in the Los Angeles Civic Center is a narrow, dirty structure, set at an angle to the orientation of all the other civic buildings, and with an entirely different scale of fenestration and detail. Despite its minor functional or symbolic importance, this contrast of siting, age, and scale, makes it a relatively well-identified image, sometimes pleasant, sometimes irritating.” Kevin Lynch, Image of the City

Urban renewal in the late 1950s and early 1960s entailed the demolition and physical erasure of most of Bunker Hill. A few old Victorian homes were moved to a site north of downtown within view of the Pasadena Freeway. Once cleared, the site accommodated both the construction of the Civic Center Mall and the erection of skyscraping office towers along Figueroa and Grand. While this construction created a new skyline and a postcard ready image of modernity suitable for global consumption, it did not replace the residents who had lived there and became a district inhabited mostly by commuters, tourists, and the homeless. The Grand Avenue Project, together with the establishment of several prominent cultural institutions there, is the latest attempt to rescue and revive the district.

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early 1960s, was physically made over, its hills cut down and smoothed out, its

houses removed or demolished,11 and its residents relocated to make way for the

construction, first, of the long-planned Civic Center and, second, for an assemblage

of high-rise office and apartment buildings that have given downtown and the city a

spanking new skyline and environmental image. Both Banham (2000) and McClung

(2000) have analogized this transformation of Bunker Hill to creating an “acropolis”

since its terrain is still topographically, even after its partial leveling, the summit of

downtown. This topographic prominence, however, has not translated into psychic

primacy for downtown – to paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield, it still doesn’t get any

respect – and hence in part the expressed need for the Grand Avenue Project. In

addition, for many citizens and academics, the “erasure” of Bunker Hill has created a

psychosocial emptiness that they angrily mourn. To some extent, this mourning

verges on nostalgia that diminishes Bunker Hill’s objective history and the lessons to

be learned from it, especially with regard to the Grand Avenue Project. Much of the

venom in the controversy surrounding the project and its park can be ascribed in fact

to hard feelings remaining from Bunker Hill’s demolition. Even if the houses and

residents are gone, memories of them persist as downtown continues to yearn for a

soul most people feel it lacks and which Bunker Hill clearly possessed.

Site Seeing

Of what value is downtown’s history to assessing the Grand Avenue Project?

Norburg-Schulz (1980) has argued that the historical city is particularly relevant to

understanding the contemporary city when form and order are hard to find, and, as

11 Several Victorian mansions were moved to a site a few miles north from downtown, across the

Arroyo Seco from the Pasadena Freeway; looking like old mothballed sets on a studio backlot, they create a fleeting “What was that?” moment for freeway motorists as they speed by.

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witnessed by Broad’s manifesto and the quips of Parker and Caen, finding form a

order in Los Angeles is problematic for many people. In addition, according to

Lowenthal (1985), an awareness of the past is critical to the identity of individuals

and communities. This awareness can be obtained through the “artefacts, physical

traces, and objects … [discernible] in the landscape” (Lowenthal, 1979). It can also

be embedded in the memories of a place created by dwelling there (Ingold, 1993).

The Grand Avenue Project, notwithstanding its proponents’ grandiose ideals,

should be essentially seen as the continuation and culmination of the urban renewal

process which commenced with the building of City Hall in the late 1920s, but which

reached a crescendo with the physical “erasure” of Bunker Hill three decades later.

Nearly eighty years in the making, this process has obliterated much of downtown’s

physical and psychic connections with its past, connections whose appeal to identi

and memory might have legitimately given it a claim to pre-eminence in the city.

Stripped of physical historicity, downtown has largely depended for its significance on

the perception of concentrated activity there, principally through the image of its

skyscraper skyline. This image has some authenticity since it signifies a substant

locus of economic power.

nd

ty

ial

rtant

cultural and governmental institutions.13 This convergence of economic, cultural, and

activity is impressive at face value, yet it has a Trojan horse like

quali

12 In addition, downtown contains a considerable number

of buildings more modest in height than the skyscrapers that house impo

governmental

ty, ringing particularly hollow once the sun goes down. One of urban renewal’s

worst impacts was to remove from downtown most of its residents, especially those

12 Much of this economic power originates in Asia which has earned Los Angeles the moniker of

13easternmost city of the Pacific Rim. With city, county, and federal agencies all located there, downtown reputedly has the largest single concentration of government employees outside of Washington D.C.

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who lived in the area most immediate to the Grand Avenue Project. Consequently,

after the workday is finished and on weekends, the Civic Center and its mall, th

proposed location of the project’s park, are typically deserted except for homeless

people. To some extent this “emptiness” has been mitigated by the construction in

recent years of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Disney Concert Hall, and the

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. The Cathedral is potentially the most essential

e

of th of

significant degree, use different resources, provide different benefits,

he

ity”

Sympatry and diversity depend in large part on accessibility, which Hansen (1959)

d

ese buildings to re-invigorating downtown since it attracts a greater diversity

patrons than either the Museum or Concert Hall, although the Concert Hall has had a

minor Bilbao-effect, giving downtown a “monument” and destination capable of

attracting both Angelinos and tourists. Nevertheless, it is the absence of residents in

close proximity to the project and its park that raises some of the most serious

questions about their present conceptualization and design.

Anderson (1978) has argued that a city draws its “strength” from:

“an organized society of structurally specialized individuals who, to a

and appreciate different goods.”

This society is based in turn on the “inclusive, sympatric relations of people.” By

sympatric, a concept borrowed from ecology and entomology, Anderson meant the

sharing of the same region or area by different classes of organisms (which in t

city generally implies diverse classes of people), thereby creating a complex set of

overlapping networks. The antithesis of sympatry and diversity is “niche specific

in which competing organisms create a mosaic of spatially separated and defended

territories, resulting in what Sibley (1995) has called “geographies of exclusion.”

has described as the “intensity of the possibility of interaction,” which is in turn

ependent heavily, but not entirely, on proximity and the "desire of people … to

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overcome spatial separation.” This “desire” can be facilitated or discouraged by the

morphology of the city and the design of public space which, Anderson wrote, is

where city dwellers fulfill their “need … to be whole and to participate in a genuine

and shared humanity” (1978). These are the type of sentiments which Eli Broad,

based on his business newspaper manifesto, could be expected to support, and yet

the plans for the project and park, vague though they currently are, suggest that

participation in a “genuine and shared humanity” is unlikely to happen there.

Mitchell and Van Deusen (2001) have pointed out, with respect to “the public”

and public space, that “inclusion is never freely given,” but must be struggled for

a significant extent, the Grand Avenue Intervention constitutes such a struggle.

Unfortunately, however, the inclusion being contemplated is somewhat imaginar

since it has taken place electronically over the Internet. While

. To

y

such participation

shou ted some

mome mputer

which ions, and such access does not equate with

y

d

nd

ld not be discounted – as mentioned above, it seems to have genera

ntum for a design charette for the park – the medium of access is a co

has obvious socioeconomic limitat

or necessarily lead to physical occupation and dwelling. An area or region can onl

truly become sympatric when it is physically occupied and dwelled in. Dwelling is

also important because, as “an enduring record of - and testimony to - the lives an

works of past generations,” it creates identity (Ingold, 1993).

With the “lives and works of past generations” wiped out by urban renewal, the

Grand Avenue Project site lost most of its accreted, historic identity, and project

organizers have been obsessed with trying to fashion a modern new one. The new

identity they have in mind, however, one based in large part on unity and inclusion,

is not likely to be realized given city morphology and social relations in and arou

the site. Demographic maps of downtown and its environs illustrate much of why

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this is so. Downtown is sparsely populated; relatively few people actually live there

and those who do are predominantly affluent Anglos. It is surrounded to the west

and east by impoverished and densely populated Hispanic neighborhoods, to the

south by the blighted, gang-infested African-American area of South Central LA, an

to the north by Chinatown. Downtown reads, therefore, like a socioeconomic Fort

Apache, an affluent Anglo enclave in the city which invented and popularized the

“gated community” concept.

d

small

to su

r

e which, even with the

signi

14 The size of this enclave, however, has been too

stain a supermarket and other retail establishments. Enter the Grand Avenue

Project which recognized and ostensibly dealt with these “problems”, first by

including housing in the project mix and, second, by promising that some of this

housing would be “affordable.” As project plans begin to take shape, though, it is

becoming apparent that, while the Grand Avenue Project may augment the numbe

of people living downtown, the promise of affordable housing seems little more than

lip service and that little will be done to promote socioeconomic diversity.15

This bias against diversity is buttressed by site morphology. If proximity, or its

lack, significantly impacts accessibility, Suisman (2000) has shown convincingly that

the Grand Avenue Project site is less accessible in terms of distance than other

walking streets in Los Angeles. This “spatial separation” and the desire of people to

overcome it will also be weakened by the site’s significant slop

ficant earth-moving that occurred with urban renewal, still runs over seven

Project is not slated to be a gated community, that does not mean, however, that it will not

would also seem to reflect the L.A. School of Urbanism process articulated by Dear (2000) of the

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14 Davis (1992), Low (2001), and Le Goix (2005) have articulated the culture of exclusion and social segregation signified by the gated community in Southern California. Although the Grand Avenue

function as one with alternative, more subtle means of control replacing the need for walls. It

peripheries organizing the center since it would appear that the gated community logic has been exported from the hinterlands back to downtown LA. In fact, it can be argued that, as affordable housing fades into the sunset, increasing emphasis has and will be given to the project’s park, to be pitched as compensation.

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The m a high point anham and McClu tle. Urban ay not be vis it. In add LA River, the so veral Civic Center buildings, including City Hall, suffered serious structural damage from the 1994 Northridge Earthquake.

orphology of the Grand Avenue Project’s site is dominated by its topography. Located atin the northwest corner of an area hemmed in by freeways, it has been likened by Bng to an acropolis, and Grand Avenue runs along the ridgeline like an approach to a cas renewal reshaped and partially leveled Bunker Hill, but plenty of slope remains, which mible from an aerial, but is very noticeable to pedestrians and limits their accessibility to

ition, due to all the cut and fill, as well as sediments historically deposited by the nearby ils have been vulnerable to liquefaction from seismic events, and se

7%

Aerial, 2004

1925 Areas Prone to Liquefaction in Green Source: LA City Bureau of Engineering

5%

5%

23

Map: Zonta and Ong, Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, UCLA

Percent Below Poverty Line

Data Source: US Census Bureau ¼ and ½ Mile Radius from Intersection of Map: Cowett Grand Avenue and Civic Center Mall

Based on the demography of downtown, the city of Los Angeles, and Los Angeles County, the Grand Avenue Project as presently conceived is likely to operate as an affluent Anglo enclave surrounded by much less affluent, minority communities. Such a scenario would seem inconsistent with one of thproject’s avowed goals, to create a “new paradigm of civic interaction.” Preliminary plans for the project which appear to prioritize interior and roof top space at the expense of streetscapes, confirmthis assessment. Civic interaction may be limited still further by the project’s lack of proximity to the surrounding neighborhoods which would tend to discourage pedestrian traffic.

e

24

In the sum or to the launching of the Grand Avenue Project, Doug Suisman was asked bGpbreaa

mer of 2000, priy the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency to suggest possible strategies for revitalizing rand Avenue. His analysis was significant in that, while recognizing that an increased residential opulation nearby would probably be the most helpful factor in doing so, it also focused on potential arriers and affordances to pedestrian activity. The length of Grand Avenue and its distance from the st of downtown were seen as most significant in this regard, and Suisman envisioned Grand Avenue

s a well vegetated esplanade that placed pedestrians on at least an equal footing with automobiles, novel proposition in Los Angeles.

25 25

d

square:

ape. The predominantly Hispanic protesters marched to

percent within the Civic Center Mall. Finally, while the freeways which circumscribe

downtown provide vehicular access to people working there, they are also physical

and visual barriers to walking or biking from adjacent neighborhoods. When all are

considered together, distance, slope, and freeways combine to reduce the potential

for interaction between downtown’s residents (present and future) and their fellow

Angelinos. They add to the site’s perception as an “acropolis,” diminish its

“interconnectedness” with the rest of the city, especially its immediate environs, an

contribute to what Mitchell (2002) has called a “landscape of defense.”

This restrictive nexus of morphology and demography has been additionally

influenced by the comparatively recent history of the project’s site, and specifically

the Civic Center. Catalyzed by City Hall’s construction in the late 1920s, the Civic

Center as realized nearly forty years later signified the convergence of city, county,

state, and federal governmental machinery. The judicial apparatus is particularly

prominent with its buildings (e.g. courthouses and offices) ringing the Civic Center

Mall, although Parker Center, the LAPD’s headquarters, is located two blocks east. At

first glance, the buildings and the Mall evoke a modern hortus conclusus due to the

sense of enclosure that directs eyes skywards and encourages thoughts of the

landscape beyond. The Mall, however, can be compared more aptly to a Southern

courthouse square (albeit a large rectangular one with a seven percent grade

intersected by three streets). Schein (1999) has described how the courthouse

“captures and formalizes racial and class boundaries, both physical and social, makes them normal, and perpetuates them for yet another generation.”

While Los Angeles is not Dixie, the May 1, 2006 immigration protests revealed

downtown’s racialized landsc

26

City Hall by way of Broadway, downtown’s most important (and mostly Hispanic)

commercial street. The Civic Center Mall, proposed by Broad for “celebrations” and

other civic gatherings, was virtually ignored. It would be tempting to attribute the

Mall’s “emptiness” that day to lackluster design, but such an analysis would neglect

the site’s accreted racialized identity. For prosperous Anglo Angelinos, the great

majority of whom have probably had few if any experiences with law enforc

perhaps are employed to operate its judicial apparatus, the Civic Center Mall is likely

not imbued with negative memories. For Hispanics and African-American

ement, or

s, however,

muc f

ave

rse,

f the

ell as prioritizing inclusion. The project’s preliminary plans, however, appear

to refle

h more likely to have experienced law enforcement, or especially in the case o

illegal Hispanic immigrants, fear potential law enforcement, memories and

potentialities embedded in the Mall are much more likely to be negative and

challenge attempts to re-invent it as a “place of celebration.” 16

Streetscape and Project Design

Given the restrictive nexus of morphology and demography, coupled with

negative memories for a racialized site associated with governmental function, it

would have seemed incumbent on Eli Broad and his fellow project partners to h

better addressed existing social relations if they truly wanted to create a gathering

place that could effectively “change the paradigm” for civic interaction. Of cou

adequately addressing such concerns presumes both a sufficient understanding o

site as w

ct neither.

16 Marti McCann, and Purcell (2003) have described an important distinction between government

(cemult

n,ntralized decision-making) and governance (overlapping webs of decision-making at varied and

iple scales) that seems especially apt, both literally and symbolically, to the Civic Center Mall. The Grand Avenue Project reeks of government, but would greatly benefit from governance in order to generate true “civic interaction” and a depth of engagement by the public.

27

An April 24, 2006 Grand Avenue Committee press release17 for the unveiling of

Frank Gehry’s (very) preliminary design for Phase 1 of the project announced that:

“Gehry's design for this large urban site is influenced by its context. It

and walkways with expansive view corridors and pedestrian connections

Avenue, First, Second, and Olive Streets. The form and scale of the

a striking new destination.”

The press release goes on to state that:

“A collection of local, regional and nationally recognized restaurants and

ambiance and appeal of this new downtown destination. Restaurants,

options and spectacular views from the many landscaped terraces an

weaves the space into the neighborhood with street-front retail, plazas

to downtown's cultural center, the new civic park and adjoining Grand

buildings respect Disney Hall and other nearby landmarks while creating

associated art galleries will play a major role in establishing the

located throughout the complex, will offer abundant outdoor dining d

roof decks.”

While articulated for the hoped-for transformation of Grand Avenue and the Civic

Center district, these descriptions could as easily apply, and in fact apply far better,

to such Westside upscale streets as Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Hilgard Avenue in

Westwood, or Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. Were Grand Avenue and the Civic

Center being re-imagined as any of these streets, the project as presently planned,

socially regressive as that would be, might make better sense. By attaching to it

such loaded phrases as “heart,” “civic engagement,” and “paradigm of interaction,”

however, as well as suggesting that Grand Avenue could be Los Angeles’s Champs

d’Elyssee and the Civic Center Mall its Central Park, Broad and his allies have only

succeeded in hoisting the project atop the petard of their own pretensions.

Susiman (1989) has argued that:

“Public space by definition must allow for the widest range of activities and behavior for the widest group of people; anything short of this

Grand Avenue Committee press release, http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=260424006058&newsLang=en, website accessed May 1, 2006.

17

00

28

means that some authority is restricting the use of the space in ways

that strip it of its liberating and revelatory function.”

The project as presently designed, with its emphasis on restaurants, art galleries,

and co le,”

nor is able to

the res f less

an $10,000. In addition, preliminary plans reveal the project’s plazas and

alkways to be spatially removed from the adjacent streets and “inward-oriented”

with re proximates

the en han the

animated spontaneity of a Champs d’Elyssee. While it may be sensitive to market

s

and accessible spaces and normatively public spaces. Indeed, most of

shopping malls, arcades – is decidedly not public: its purpose is to

stage on which various publics can come together in all their often

social interaction. In fact, much contemporary open space design

The ith respect to Central Park, that a socially

produc very

applicable here. While plans for the park are so far extremely vague, the proposed

t o

ndominiums, would appear unlikely to engage “the widest group of peop

it probable that the “street-front retail” being envisaged would be afford

idents of adjacent neighborhoods, many of whom have annual incomes o

th

w

spect to the surrounding buildings. Such design more closely ap

closed, sanitized, and controlled environment of the suburban mall t

demands and perceptions of crime and safety, it does little to facilitate a vibrant or

democratic public street life.

A similar approach appears to be operating in the putative design of the park. A

Mitchell and Van Deusen (2001) have observed, open space does not necessarily

translate into public space:

“One can make a case that there is no direct correlation between open

the open space that is planned in modern Western cities – parks, plazas,

control and direct social interaction, to police it, rather than to provide a

contentious differences and spark a conflagration of public, political, and

stands opposed to public space.”

argument made by Gandy (2002) w

ed representation of nature can modulate and control behavior, seems

ypology of terrace, lawn, garden, and plaza can be called banal at best, unlikely t

29

offend ar the

recent pronouncement by Authority Vice Chair Perry that the park will be “the most

dramatic public space in all of Los Angeles.”18 Additionally, the institutional power

signified by the surrounding judicial buildings, bookended by DWP and City Hall, is

primed to have a more chilling, than liberating function.

Eli Broad and LA County officials are reported to have recently discussed a land

swap for two buildings abutting the Civic Center Mall, the County Courthouse and Hall

of Administration, both of which sustained serious structural damage in the 1994

Northridge earthquake. In return for building sites elsewhere downtown, the County

would demolish these two buildings and deed the land to the park, thereby giving it

an additional ten acres. Such a swap could be immensely beneficial to the park, not

only nearly doubling its size, but also freeing it somewhat from its gridded

configuration that looks to have limited the possibilities for imagining it.19 It would

be hoped that the added size might inspire the park’s designer(s) to devise a plan

sufficiently innovative that the park would in fact become “the most dramatic public

space in all of Los Angeles,” and, perhaps as importantly, that it would be flexible

enoug “the

widest ignificant

consid d Moore

anyone, but equally unlikely to inspire either, and coming nowhere ne

h to accommodate multiple uses. Such flexibility is critical to facilitating

range of activities and behavior for the widest group of people,” a s

eration in creating inclusive public space since, as Hester, Blazej, an

Avenue Committee press release, /home.businesswire.com/portal/site/goog

18 Grandhttp:/ le/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060424006058&newsLang=en, website accessed May 1, 2006.

s, the gridded template inherited from the Hancock survey of 1857 has retained sufficient force that all

e

further accelerated. Smets (2002) has argued that the grid allows “for flexibility within the limits of a

been more restrictive than neutral. In any event, the preliminary Gehry plan and subsequent

19 Since plans were first hatched to raze and remake Bunker Hill in the urban renewal of the late 1950

subsequent plans have retained it. The preliminary Gehry plan for Phase 1, however, displays somebreaking down of the grid which, if the County Courthouse and Hall of Records are torn down, may b

pre-set configuration,” but it might be more persuasively stated that the grid in downtown LA has

iterations may well replicate the “investigations” in Paris and Barcelona referenced by Smets where the grid is retained as a “loose weave” without predetermining development.

30

(1996) and Gobster (2002) have documented, different ethnic and racial groups use

park space differently.

Even if the land swap transpires and the park’s design becomes more inclusive

and truly public, the rest of the project is still likely to suffer from its limited appeal

and availability to the daily existence of most Los Angeles

residents. As the May 1,

2006

engineer. Its character has come from layers of time. It wouldn’t be

smells and the sights, which aren’t all pretty and aren’t all nice, but

day lives

munity, but it is also part of a larger strategy to

re ptualize the river as the city’s

“h

ri

immigration protests confirmed, Broadway is the true “heart” of downtown,

albeit a decidedly lower income one than Grand Avenue. As Sandmeier (Kamp,

2005) has noted:

“Broadway is a multi-textured, multi-cultural space, which you can’t

the same place if it didn’t have this sort of visceral appeal to it, the

there’s a beauty there.”

In contrast to bustling Broadway which is a big part of many people’s every

as they make their way through the city, Grand Avenue has been and is likely to

remain, irrespective of its two new subway stops, a sparsely occupied and tourist

oriented destination whose visitation is the exception, not the rule.

A solution to this predicament which project proponents show no indication of

recognizing may have been offered by the First Street Project, an unrelated scheme

which strives to link downtown east to Boyle Heights across the Los Angeles River.20

Not only is the eastward orientation of the plan significant in valorizing a connection

to a largely Hispanic residential com

connect the city to the Los Angeles River and conce

eart.” Such a strategy, which has as its foundation the ecological recovery of the

ver from a concrete storm water channel, employs a linear model for Los Angeles

20 bsite accessed

05/08/06. http://www.lacity.org/restore/index/restoreindex76633156_10272005.pdf, we

31

Thenot surprisingly he is one of its architects). It differs importantly, however, in that orientation has shif the Civic Center Mall (and by implication the Grand Avenue Project) to the LA River and communities east of it. This represents a major departure from LA’s westward looking orientation identified by Banham and also ties into the regional strategy associated with the county’s LA River revitalization plan. Such a ch ualize it as its “li r,” an idea that would seem far more in keeping with an archipelagic urbanism model than the “central core” which the Grand Avenue Project has been espousing.

First Street Project is cut from much the same cloth as Suisman’s Grand Avenue strategy (and

ted from the north-south Grand Avenue axis to an east-west one. The effect has been to link

ange could help to recover the city’s historic relationship with the River and to conceptnear cente

32

that seems much more appropriate to it than the “central core” model expressed in

the Grand Avenue Project. In addition, by linking it to a real residential community

and giving it a regional context, the First Street Project may offer the best hope yet

of breathing life into Grand Avenue and saving it from becoming an “acropolis.”

Conclusion

Burdened from the start with a hackneyed and outdated “central core” model of

urbanism that seems unsuitable for Los Angeles, the Grand Avenue Project has been

further compromised by its emphasis on private, not public financing which has

effectively prioritized homogeneity over diversity and exclusion over inclusion for the

sake of commercial viability.21 The appointment of Frank Gehry as uber architect has

further confirmed the project’s trajectory, investing it with a monumentality that will,

in the words of L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa, raise the city’s “international stature.”22,23

Viewed in this context, its park is primed to operate less as a paradigm busting civic

gathering place such as Amsterdam’s Bos Park, and more like a neo-traditional

21 If Los Angeles were more Barcelona-like in having a Maragall, it would be easy to imagine a much

different scenario for downtown with public emphasized over private and inclusion over exclusion. The political, social, and economic structure and culture of the city, however, would seem to militate against a Maragall-like figure emerging in L.A.

22 Grand Avenue Committee press release, http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060424006058&newsLang=en, website accessed May 1, 2006.

23 Jencks (1993) has characterized Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall as hetero-architecture that encourages “marginalized groups to move more freely in space and identify momentarily with new images of otherness,” and in so doing “condones pluralist behavior, even if it does not promote, or represent, minoritization.” It follows then that he might likely argue that Gehry’s “iconic” Grand Avenue Project buildings will do more of the same. Such an analysis, however, might be guilty of the old Southern California foible of confusing style with substance. In hetero-architecture, the cultural homogenizing center supposedly disappears and diversity (i.e. the peripheral) emerges, but one wonders if the Gehry buildings in their stylized high-tech monumentality have not become the very center that in Jencks’ proposition they are meant to subvert. In any event, the buildings’ apparent emphasis on interior plazas and rooftop decked restaurants at the expense of promoting streetscapes would appear to discourage pluralist behavior rather than encourage it and is unlikely to truly resolve what Jencks sees as the city’s great dilemma due to its ethnic diversity, to either become a “self-conscious heteropolitan city or … die from social strife.”

33

“place-holding” amenity for a speculative real estate enterprise such as London’s

squares. In addition, with hotels already a conspicuous part of the downtown scene

and with this project adding still another, downtown is apt to become more tourist-

created and visited than resident-created and dwelled. An urban landscape thus

created, detached from past experience, lacking in local character, beholden to

peratives, and likely to be only superficially engaged by most of its

citize

al'

lities.

It even begs the question as to whether declaring that the project and park would be

a

d the public with the park

se

n it

w

commercial im

nry, essentially becomes a “product, produced for the purpose of its wholesale

consumption in all of its dimensions: visual/aesthetic, experiential/functional and

symbolic” (Terkenli, 2002). In such a landscape, “the distinction between the 're

and the make-believe, the local and the Disneyfied, the 'authentic' and the

'inauthentic’” is lost (Terkenli, 2002), and what remains is the banalization and

Disneyfication of the tourist gaze. Given that Los Angeles is the American capital of

cultural production, this scenario might appear predestined. It does not square,

however, with the lofty ideals stated by Eli Broad on behalf of the Grand Avenue

Committee and seems to better express a myopic Anglo insensitivity to local rea

unifying force in the city was a sincere statement of intention or more of a

the politicians anmarketing ploy to sell the project to

rving as the project’s fig leaf.

So how will a space produced like this become the “heart” of Los Angeles and a

ew paradigm for “civic interaction”? Very simply, based on its current glide path,

ould seem to have little chance.

34

Los Angeles’s downtown skyline (top left) and the Gehry designed Phase 1 (above and above left) are environm tal images with which Los Angeles would like to be linked. Rodney King and homelessness are less favorable images that resonate with many residents much more viscerally. The Grand Avenue Project in theory attempts to deal with them both and in effect answer the question, “Can’t we all get along?” That jury is still out.

en

35

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