Historic Core PUBLIC ART Walking Tour Download free audio tours to your personal MP3 player and explore the public art of Los Angeles like never before. Use the map and tour information on the following pages to help direct you to each stop as you listen to the artist’s stories. The Art Program of the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA) developed these tours to introduce residents and visitors to their collection of public art created by a broad range of artists, in a variety of forms and neighborhood contexts. The Art Program is integral to CRA/ LA’s mission to eliminate blight and to revitalize Los Angeles through focused redevelopment activities in designated project areas. crala.org/art TOUR STATS Length 2.0 hours (self-paced) Togography Generally level Distance 1 mile Parking Pershing Square or various surface lots Transit www.metro.net CRA/LA Public Art in Los Angeles www.ladottransit.com/dash/ Walking Audio Tour Historic Core IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF EARLY PIONEERS Introduction The public artworks and surrounding monumental architecture of the Historic Core highlight key people and places in the early story of the city. There is Mayor Cristobal Aguilar, responsible for the creation of Pershing Square, called La Plaza Abaja when he governed the city in 1866, and now home to a number of public art pieces. And Biddy Mason, who, from her humble beginnings as a slave who came to Los Angeles on foot, rose to become a wealthy landowner and community leader. There is Giovanni Smeraldi, who imbued the Biltmore Hotel with the high style of the Italian renaissance based on techniques learned during his apprenticeship at the Vatican. These individuals as well as others continue to inspire those who live in the city through their art, architecture and stories. This tour will provide you with a sense of where it all started and of the diverse heritage that makes this city what it is today. Stop 1: Pershing Square, between 5th and 6th Streets and Olive and Hill Streets Enter the park on the corner 6th and Olive and to the Historic Core – 03-19-09 right find the quote on the back of the bench created by artist Barbara McCarren in 1994 as part of her work called Hey Day. Famed chronicler of Southern California, Carey McWilliams, was describing Pershing Square in 1946: “…I had spent an extremely active evening in Hollywood and had been deposited toward morning, by some kind soul, in a room at the Biltmore Hotel. Emerging the next day from the hotel into the painfully bright sunlight, I Barbara McCarren started the rocky pilgrimage through Pershing Square to Hey Day, 1994 my office…In front of the hotel newsboys were shouting the headlines of the hour: an awful trunk-murder had just been committed;…; a love-mart had been discovered in the Los Feliz Hills; a motion picture producer had just wired the Egyptian government for permission page 1 to illuminate the pyramids to advertise a forthcoming production; and, in the intervals between these revelations, there was news about another prophet, fresh from the desert, who had predicted the doom of the city… In the center of the park, I stopped to watch a typical Pershing Square divertissement: an aged and frowsy blonde, skirts held high above her knees, cheered by a crowd of …leering old goats, was singing a gospel hymn and dancing around the fountain. Then it suddenly occurred to me that in all the world, there neither was nor would ever be another place like this, the City of the Angels. Here the American people were erupting, like lava from a volcano; here, indeed, was the place for me – a ringside seat at the circus.” Pershing Square Now, fast forward to the park today as it still attracts a diverse crowd. Not surprising, as it serves as a middle ground between the lowlands of Broadway, with its lively mix of immigrant merchants and shoppers, and the gleaming towers of Bunker Hill, now the financial center of Los Angeles. In fact, Pershing Square has always reflected the people and the times in the city. “...a public square for the use and benefit of the citizens of the common.” -Mayor Jose Cristobal Aguilar Situated on five-acres between 5th and 6th Streets, Pershing Square is an apt place to begin our tour of the historic core of downtown. When it was founded in 1866, a dusty vacant parcel was transformed into a formal Spanish plaza, La Plaza Abaja, mirroring the growth of Los Angeles from a pueblo to a city. Upon it’s founding, Mayor Jose Cristobal Aguilar, the last Latino to govern the city prior to Antonio Villaraigosa, declared the block “...a public square for the use and benefit of the citizens of the common.” The establishment of what is now Pershing Square during 1866, the same year Aguilar was Historic Core – 03-19-09 elected mayor, was one of his earliest accomplishments. Cristobal Aguilar died in 1883, and not long after his death, in the early 1890’s the park was renamed Central Park following a redesign by Fred Eaton, a city engineer who later became mayor. Eaton’s iteration seemed more of a transitional period as the park was redesigned again in the early part of the 20th century, this time by the father and son team of Parkinson and Parkinson, one of the most influential architecture firms in the city’s history with work to their credit that includes the Coliseum, City Hall, Union Station and Bullocks Wilshire, which is now the Southwestern Law School. The design by the Parkinson brothers maintained the formality of the earlier designs, but took on a more European aesthetic. There were classic walkways within the square, a beautiful central fountain, herb plantings and ornamental corner balustrades.[1] The park gained its current name when in 1918, “in a fit of Armistice Day fever,” the page 2 1 Wallach, Ruth. http://www.publicartinla.com/Downtown/figueroa/Pershing_Square_History/ pershing_history.html. Accessed on 1/8/07. name was changed to Pershing Square, after World War I General John J. Pershing, and hence the statue of the dough boy in the northeast corner.[2] For most of the 20th Century, the park played a prominent role in the life of the city as the central library was located there as was the original home of the L.A. Philharmonic. The current incarnation, designed by Mexican architect Ricardo Legoretta and Philadelphia-based landscape “Orange” from architect Laurie Olin in 1994, is a postmodernist rendering McCarren’s Hey Day of Los Angeles in a single block, with, in a nod to Pershing’s Square’s past, a stop on the city’s modern era subway line. Referencing both the evolution of the park over time and its current location downtown, the design relies on both Latino and Anglo influences with an open plaza, or zocalo, in the Southern half of the park, as one might find in an English garden, and an amphitheater taking up the rest of the space.[3] At the center stands the 125-foot purple Campanile or “bell tower” heralding the presence of the park to the citizens working in the surrounding office complexes and shops. Within these two general areas, Earthquake “fault line” there is a series of ramps, terraces and steps, which divide from McCarren’s the park into outdoor rooms, and which attempts to Hey Day make the park more accessible to passers by. “Underfoot, the park is rich in textures, the pink stamped concrete, the extraordinary river stones for the fountain, and the decomposed granite on the walkways.”[4] Public art created by Barbara McCarren memorializes the city with a grove of huge concrete “oranges,” an earthquake “fault line” rendered in tile and concrete, and a walk, for the famous and infamous, of blue terrazzo stars. The fault line and the star walk are both integrated into the ground of the plaza. Follow the fault line to its terminus at the Historic Core – 03-19-09 “tidal fountain” which pours out of one of the purple walls. Large orange-colored spheres around the fountain are McCarren’s nod to the orange groves found throughout the region prior to urbanization. A further reminder of the city’s past can be found in the postcards of historic Los Angeles affixed to plaza benches. In an interview, Barbara McCarren says this about her work: Constellations from McCarren’s Hey Day “In the end, I think I proposed 13 things including an abalone shell fountain at one corner, and there was going to be fiber optic lighting that looked like the freeway up from say the Getty Center when you are looking down on the 405. But for budgetary reasons and other reasons, I think we whittled it down to about six items that I did. A couple of those page 3 2 ibid. 3 Newman, Morris, Pershing Returns, pg 1 and 4, Downtown News, January 14, 1994. 4 ibid. included heavy collaboration with the landscape architect and architect. The primary visual work there, I would say, is the fault line. I had originally wanted to do an actual fault line where the paving was offset, so that the earth actually shifted up as it does in a fault line. But it was 1991 and the American with Disabilities Act had just gone into effect and it was much, much, much more strictly interpreted then than it is now. Grass is in fact considered a non handicap accessible element in the environment so they didn’t want any grass in the park whatsoever.