Acropolis Now!

Home , Grand Avenue Project, Los Angeles City Hall

Acropolis Now!

The Grand Avenue Project in Downtown Los Angeles

Fred Cowett Architecture 638 15 May 2006

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 2

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.” 3

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. 4

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. 5 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. 6

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. 7

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. 8

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”. 9 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 10 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.

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). 12

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. 13

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.

14 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. 15

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. 16

“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. 17 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. 18 witnessed by Broad’s manifesto and the quips of Parker and Caen, finding form and 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 identity 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 substantial locus of economic power.12 In addition, downtown contains a considerable number of buildings more modest in height than the skyscrapers that house important cultural and governmental institutions.13 This convergence of economic, cultural, and governmental activity is impressive at face value, yet it has a Trojan horse like quality, 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 easternmost city of the Pacific Rim. 13 With city, county, and federal agencies all located there, downtown reputedly has the largest single concentration of government employees outside of Washington D.C. 19 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, the 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 of these buildings to re-invigorating downtown since it attracts a greater diversity of 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 significant degree, use different resources, provide different benefits, 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 the city generally implies diverse classes of people), thereby creating a complex set of overlapping networks. The antithesis of sympatry and diversity is “niche specificity” in which competing organisms create a mosaic of spatially separated and defended territories, resulting in what Sibley (1995) has called “geographies of exclusion.”

Sympatry and diversity depend in large part on accessibility, which Hansen (1959) has described as the “intensity of the possibility of interaction,” which is in turn dependent heavily, but not entirely, on proximity and the "desire of people … to 20 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. To a significant extent, the Grand Avenue Intervention constitutes such a struggle.

Unfortunately, however, the inclusion being contemplated is somewhat imaginary since it has taken place electronically over the Internet. While such participation should not be discounted – as mentioned above, it seems to have generated some momentum for a design charette for the park – the medium of access is a computer which has obvious socioeconomic limitations, and such access does not equate with or necessarily lead to physical occupation and dwelling. An area or region can only 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 and 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 around the site. Demographic maps of downtown and its environs illustrate much of why 21 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, and 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.14 The size of this enclave, however, has been too small to sustain 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 number 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 slope which, even with the significant earth-moving that occurred with urban renewal, still runs over seven

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 Project is not slated to be a gated community, that does not mean, however, that it will not function as one with alternative, more subtle means of control replacing the need for walls. It would also seem to reflect the L.A. School of Urbanism process articulated by Dear (2000) of the peripheries organizing the center since it would appear that the gated community logic has been exported from the hinterlands back to downtown LA. 15 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. 22

Aerial, 2004

1925 Areas Prone to Liquefaction in Green Source: LA City Bureau of Engineering The morphology of the Grand Avenue Project’s site is dominated by its topography. Located at a high point in the northwest corner of an area hemmed in by freeways, it has been likened by Banham and McClung to an acropolis, and Grand Avenue runs along the ridgeline like an approach to a castle. Urban renewal reshaped and partially leveled Bunker Hill, but plenty of slope remains, which may not be visible from an aerial, but is very noticeable to pedestrians and limits their accessibility to it. In addition, due to all the cut and fill, as well as sediments historically deposited by the nearby LA River, the soils have been vulnerable to liquefaction from seismic events, and several Civic Center buildings, including City Hall, suffered serious structural damage from the 1994 Northridge Earthquake.

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 the project’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, confirm this 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. 24

In the summer of 2000, prior to the launching of the Grand Avenue Project, Doug Suisman was asked by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency to suggest possible strategies for revitalizing Grand Avenue. His analysis was significant in that, while recognizing that an increased residential population nearby would probably be the most helpful factor in doing so, it also focused on potential barriers and affordances to pedestrian activity. The length of Grand Avenue and its distance from the rest of downtown were seen as most significant in this regard, and Suisman envisioned Grand Avenue as a well vegetated esplanade that placed pedestrians on at least an equal footing with automobiles, a novel proposition in Los Angeles.

25 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, and 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 square:

“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 landscape. The predominantly Hispanic protesters marched to 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 enforcement, or perhaps are employed to operate its judicial apparatus, the Civic Center Mall is likely not imbued with negative memories. For Hispanics and African-Americans, however, much more likely to have experienced law enforcement, or especially in the case of 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 have better addressed existing social relations if they truly wanted to create a gathering place that could effectively “change the paradigm” for civic interaction. Of course, adequately addressing such concerns presumes both a sufficient understanding of the site as well as prioritizing inclusion. The project’s preliminary plans, however, appear to reflect neither.

16 Martin, McCann, and Purcell (2003) have described an important distinction between government (centralized decision-making) and governance (overlapping webs of decision-making at varied and multiple 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 weaves the space into the neighborhood with street-front retail, plazas and walkways with expansive view corridors and pedestrian connections to downtown's cultural center, the new civic park and adjoining Grand Avenue, First, Second, and Olive Streets. The form and scale of the buildings respect Disney Hall and other nearby landmarks while creating a striking new destination.”

The press release goes on to state that:

“A collection of local, regional and nationally recognized restaurants and associated art galleries will play a major role in establishing the ambiance and appeal of this new downtown destination. Restaurants, located throughout the complex, will offer abundant outdoor dining options and spectacular views from the many landscaped terraces and 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

17 Grand Avenue Committee press release, http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=200 60424006058&newsLang=en, website accessed May 1, 2006. 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 condominiums, would appear unlikely to engage “the widest group of people,” nor is it probable that the “street-front retail” being envisaged would be affordable to the residents of adjacent neighborhoods, many of whom have annual incomes of less than $10,000. In addition, preliminary plans reveal the project’s plazas and walkways to be spatially removed from the adjacent streets and “inward-oriented” with respect to the surrounding buildings. Such design more closely approximates the enclosed, sanitized, and controlled environment of the suburban mall than the animated spontaneity of a Champs d’Elyssee. While it may be sensitive to market 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. As

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 and accessible spaces and normatively public spaces. Indeed, most of the open space that is planned in modern Western cities – parks, plazas, shopping malls, arcades – is decidedly not public: its purpose is to control and direct social interaction, to police it, rather than to provide a stage on which various publics can come together in all their often contentious differences and spark a conflagration of public, political, and social interaction. In fact, much contemporary open space design stands opposed to public space.”

The argument made by Gandy (2002) with respect to Central Park, that a socially produced representation of nature can modulate and control behavior, seems very applicable here. While plans for the park are so far extremely vague, the proposed typology of terrace, lawn, garden, and plaza can be called banal at best, unlikely to 29 offend anyone, but equally unlikely to inspire either, and coming nowhere near 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 enough to accommodate multiple uses. Such flexibility is critical to facilitating “the widest range of activities and behavior for the widest group of people,” a significant consideration in creating inclusive public space since, as Hester, Blazej, and Moore

18 Grand Avenue Committee press release, http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=200 60424006058&newsLang=en, website accessed May 1, 2006. 19 Since plans were first hatched to raze and remake Bunker Hill in the urban renewal of the late 1950s, the gridded template inherited from the Hancock survey of 1857 has retained sufficient force that all subsequent plans have retained it. The preliminary Gehry plan for Phase 1, however, displays some breaking down of the grid which, if the County Courthouse and Hall of Records are torn down, may be further accelerated. Smets (2002) has argued that the grid allows “for flexibility within the limits of a pre-set configuration,” but it might be more persuasively stated that the grid in downtown LA has been more restrictive than neutral. In any event, the preliminary Gehry plan and subsequent 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.

(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 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 engineer. Its character has come from layers of time. It wouldn’t be the same place if it didn’t have this sort of visceral appeal to it, the smells and the sights, which aren’t all pretty and aren’t all nice, but there’s a beauty there.”

In contrast to bustling Broadway which is a big part of many people’s everyday lives 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 community, but it is also part of a larger strategy to reconnect the city to the Los Angeles River and conceptualize the river as the city’s

“heart.” Such a strategy, which has as its foundation the ecological recovery of the river from a concrete storm water channel, employs a linear model for Los Angeles

20 http://www.lacity.org/restore/index/restoreindex76633156_10272005.pdf, website accessed 05/08/06. 31

The First Street Project is cut from much the same cloth as Suisman’s Grand Avenue strategy (and not surprisingly he is one of its architects). It differs importantly, however, in that orientation has shifted from the north-south Grand Avenue axis to an east-west one. The effect has been to link 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 change could help to recover the city’s historic relationship with the River and to conceptualize it as its “linear center,” 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. 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=200 60424006058&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.”

“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 commercial imperatives, and likely to be only superficially engaged by most of its citizenry, 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 'real' 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 realities.

It even begs the question as to whether declaring that the project and park would be a unifying force in the city was a sincere statement of intention or more of a marketing ploy to sell the project to the politicians and the public with the park serving as the project’s fig leaf.

So how will a space produced like this become the “heart” of Los Angeles and a new paradigm for “civic interaction”? Very simply, based on its current glide path, it would seem to have little chance.

Los Angeles’s downtown skyline (top left) and the Gehry designed Phase 1 (above and above left) are environmen 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. 35

References

Anderson, S. (1978) “People in the physical environment: The urban ecology of streets,” in S. Anderson, ed., On Streets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Banham, R. (2000) Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Davis, M. (1992) “Fortress Los Angeles: The militarization of urban space,” in Sorkin, M., ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: Noonday Press.

Dear, M. and Flusty, S. (1998) Postmodern urbanism. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 88(1): 50-72.

Dear, M. (2003) The Los Angeles school of urbanism: An intellectual history. Urban Geography, 24(6): 493-509.

Hester, R.T., Blazej, N.J., and Moore, I.S. (1996) Whose wild? resolving cultural and biological diversity conflicts in urban wilderness. Landscape Journal, 18(2): 137-146.

Gandy, M. (2002) Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gobster, P.H. (2002) Managing Urban Parks for a Racially and Ethnically Diverse Clientele. Leisure Sciences, 24: 143–159.

Hansen, W.G. (1959) How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 15:73-76.

Ingold, T. (1993) Temporality of the Landscape. World Archaeology, 25(2): 152- 174.

Jencks, C. (1993) Heteropolis: Los Angeles, the Riots, and the Strange Beauty of Hetero-Architecture. London: Ernst & Sohn.

Kamp, J. (2005) Making it real: Redesigning Grand Avenue in L.A. The Next American City, Issue 8, http://www.americancity.org/article.php?id_article=118, website accessed 01/31/06.

Le Goix, R. (2005) Gated communities: Sprawl and social segregation in Southern California. Housing Studies, 20(2): 323-343.

Low, S.M. (2001) The edge and the center: Gated communities and the discourse of urban fear. American Anthropologist, 103(1): 45-58.

Lowenthal, D. (1979) “Age and artefact,” in D.W. Meining, ed., Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lowenthal, D. (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Lynch, K. (1960) Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Klein, N.M. (1998) History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. London: Verso.

Martin, D., McCann, E., and Purcell, M. (2003) Space, scale, governance, and representation: Contemporary geographical perspectives on urban politics and policy. Urban Affairs, 25(2): 113-121.

McClung. W.A. (2000) Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles. Berekely: University of California Press.

Mitchell, D. (2002) Cultural landscapes: The dialectical landscape – recent landscape research in human geography. Progress in Human Geography, 26(3): 381-389.

Mitchell, D. and Van Deusen, R. (2001) “Downsview Park: Open space or public space?,” in J. Czerniak, ed., Case: Downsview Park Toronto. Munich: Prestel Verlag.

Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980) Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli.

Schein, R. H. (1999) Teaching “race” and the cultural landscape. Journal of Geography, 98: 188-190.

Sibley, D. (1995) Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. London: Routledge.

Smets, M. (2002) Grid, casco, clearing and montage. Topos, 38: 88-101.

Suisman, D.R. (1989) Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Politic. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.

Terkenli, T.S. (2002) Landscapes of tourism: Towards a global cultural economy of space? Tourism Geographies, 4(3): 227-254.