Los Angeles Reflects on Legacy of the Olympics : City Sees Itself in New Light a Year After Flame Is Extinguished at Coliseum

Once upon a time, before the 1984 Summer Olympics, putting down Los Angeles was in itself an international competition. The air and the freeway jams and what were widely viewed as cultural pretensions made whole populations snigger.

It was, perhaps, the inevitable legacy of a place too far from New York, London or Paris to be taken seriously. Then, in competition with only one other bidder, Tehran, Los Angeles landed the Games. A legacy of quite a different kind was part of the payoff.

On “Olympic Legacy Day,” last week’s organized day of reminiscing at the Sheraton Grande, traffic planners and communications experts and keepers of the arts and elected officials and others got together to talk about building on that legacy to validate what keynoter Dr. Franklin D. Murphy called “the evolution of a great big city into a world-class city.”

At a series of workshops and a red-white-and-blue luncheon sponsored by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the Regional Institute of Southern California, the message that came through was that the “miracle” of the Olympics was no miracle but just good planning and unprecedented citizen cooperation. And there’s a lesson to be learned.

Or, as City Council President Pat Russell said: “It was not divine intervention.” It was, rather, she said, two years of planning and a spirit of community that combined to avert the disasters that had been predicted by the doomsayers.

And, Olympic Legacy Day participants were told, the Olympics were more than 16 days that blanketed the city in glory. They were solid evidence that the keys to coping with a burgeoning population include decentralization, state-of-the-art telecommunications and such workplace changes as flextime and staggered shifts.

Perhaps just as important, suggested Joseph Woodard, president of the Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau board, until Olympics ’84 many of those who chose to live here took “a perverse glee” in putting down their city. Today, he said, “Our impression is the state-of-mind of Los Angeles was visibly altered by those Games.”

Panelist Bella Lewitzky, who was co-producer of the Olympic Arts Festival, put it another way: “If you call a child a naughty child and you ask the child his name he’ll say, ‘naughty child’ . . . you begin to adopt the kind of image which is presented to you.”

It was apparent Tuesday that, even 12 months later, people simply hadn’t had their fill of Olympiana. There was more than one pair of misty eyes in the room when, after lunch, the lights went down for an ABC film replay of Mary Lou and Greg and the others going for their gold.

And when Vickie McClure, in person, stood in the spotlight and, once more, belted out “Reach Out and Touch Someone,” as she had at Olympic opening ceremonies, guests stood, 10 to a table, linked hands and swayed to the rhythm. “You’re beautiful,” said McClure, one Angeleno whose life certainly was changed by the Olympics.

In the last year, she estimated, she has sung “Reach Out” at 70 events and, she added, “I’m anxious to sing other songs.” But, she said, “I haven’t quite broken into the market as a serious artist. And I am a serious artist. I don’t want to sing cruise ships and clubs.”

Meanwhile, McClure still works two days a week as a checker at a Hughes Market in the Valley “to keep a steady paycheck coming in.” And, if she hasn’t hit the big time as a singer, it has been a very good year. She has moved from Van Nuys to Santa Monica and has a new and “serious” boyfriend. He’s a pianist, Eric Doney, whom she met on the opening day of the Olympics when he was in the Gershwin piano extravaganza.

Tuesday was a day for basking in what several speakers termed the “afterglow” of the Games. Attorney John Argue, luncheon emcee, called the event the “Peter, Paul and Harry” show (Olympic Organizing Committee President Peter Ueberroth, Chairman of the Board Paul Ziffren and Executive Vice President Harry Usher), minus Peter, Paul and Harry. Argue noted that all three had valid excuses: “(Baseball Commissioner) Peter is trying to avert a strike, Harry is trying to save a league (United States Football League, of which he is commissioner) and Paul is in the hospital (and, he added, on the mend).”

But the day wasn’t all nostalgia. Participants were bombarded during workshops with reminders that there is much to be done to solve traffic congestion, smog and other urban problems. “We’re not here just to reminisce,” said Mayor Tom Bradley, but to reaffirm that “the best days of this city lie ahead of us.”

Keynoter Murphy, former UCLA chancellor and now chairman of the executive committee of the board of directors of the Times Mirror Co., said that, when he arrived in Los Angeles 25 years ago, it was “a very large but not a very great city.” In the years since, he said, there has been an “explosion” that has given Los Angeles a strong economic base, professional sports teams and first-rate art, music and theater. Its educational institutions, Murphy said, are now “second really to none in terms of intellectual strength and vitality.”

By happy circumstance, he said, the Olympics came to Los Angeles at precisely the right time to “epitomize” this transformation. At last, he said, “All of these snide comments about Southern California could be laid to rest.”

But, Murphy said, it is not enough to look back with satisfaction: Los Angeles has another distinction, that of being “the Ellis Island of the 20th Century” and, with it, an obligation to educate its immigrant populations so that they will become contributing citizens.

The public schools, he said, “are not at this moment up to the task” and schools in the nation’s inner cities, including Los Angeles, are “almost a scandal and a crisis.”

“The Olympic Games personified what this city can do . . . if it makes up its mind collectively to do it,” Murphy said, adding what is needed is a commitment from each of its citizens.

“Now’s the time to ring Los Angeles’ bell,” said the Visitors and Convention Bureau’s Woodard. He said the Olympics, and the worldwide television coverage, have made the city a prime visitor destination. But, he said, “Time and complacency are not on our side. We can’t sit back and wait” for the tourists to come. Within the next month, he said, the bureau will spend $500,000 on an international media campaign to lure visitors.

Even though tourism continues to be California’s number one industry, Woodard said, it has been on the decline since 1979 and the state today ranks last in tourism growth. Even so, he said, 1984 was a record year for California with 43 million visitors, up 43.2% from 1983, and those visitors spent $9 billion, a big chunk of that Olympics-related.

“Go down to the Coliseum now and see the tour buses,” he said. “It was not before the number one tourist attraction in Los Angeles.” (Since the Games, the bureau has sent delegations to 25 major world cities talking up Los Angeles as the city that gave the world a memorable Olympics).

For tourism, he said, the legacy of the Olympics includes new facilities and renovation and expansion of existing ones. What is needed now, he said, to compete in the “global arena” for visitor dollars and the jobs they create are multilingual translation facilities, good transportation, high-tech visitor centers and an expanded Convention Center. (The present facility has 300,000 square feet of exhibit space, compared with 1 million at the Las Vegas center.)

Mayor Bradley, speaking earlier, said, “We have to expand our Convention Center, and we’re going to” (studies are under way) in order to take advantage of the effect of the Games.

At a workshop on the legacy of the Olympic Arts Festival, a 10-week event that drew an audience of 1.3 million to arts performances and museums, panelists were asked by moderator Caroline Leonetti Ahmanson to state “the single most important effect of the Olympic Arts Festival on the Los Angeles cultural community.”

Festival director Robert J. Fitzpatrick said it was a refutation of the belief that “audiences were not willing to take risks” and that the festival succeeded with “no compromise, no attempt to speak down to the audience . . . it was an enormous gamble. Most of us were rather terrified.”

It was a pleasant surprise, he said, to learn that “the audience would sit through five hours of Shakespeare in Japanese style in French,” even though many in that audience probably came to the festival because “they thought it was going to be safe, I mean, the Olympics are doing it. It can’t be that outrageous. . . . “

An even more pleasant surprise, Fitzpatrick said, was to hear a car salesman he knows in Van Nuys “rhapsodizing about Merce Cunningham (the innovative dance choreographer and performer). The man is turned on to dance.”

Fitzpatrick called it the “democratization” of the arts, the discarding of the notion that “it’s just black tie, just for the elite.”

Bella Lewitzky, who organized the festival’s dance programs, said that as an Angeleno she has heard the city called “everything from cultural wasteland to Sodom and Gomorrah” and the festival’s international acclaim had changed all that. It also brought people into the Center City, she said, and took important steps toward building future audiences through its children’s events.

Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Center Theatre Group-Mark Taper Forum, acknowledging that he still was experiencing “withdrawal symptoms,” spoke of “positive legacies and negative legacies” from the festival. He mentioned seven international arts festivals planned in major cities over the next three years, another in Los Angeles in 1987, and of the danger that, without an Olympics, these might not be as successful.

And, Davidson warned, “We musn’t ever forget that there is an extraordinary, vital talent pool right here living and working in this city, some not working for a living wage, but working, or trying to.” He spoke of a “postpartum” effect from the festival that resulted in a degree of “audience inertia” for the arts.

Earl A. Powell III, director of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, spoke of the effect of “new audiences,” of the growth in museum

membership from 42,000 to 70,000-plus, many of them lured by the French Impressionist exhibit, “A Day in the Country,” which drew 460,000 visitors during its June-September run.

Further, he said, the festival made possible an international dialogue among directors of art museums. Only last week, he said, he had received a letter from the director of the Louvre reporting 462,000 visitors for the French Impressionists exhibit. Powell added, “I don’t know whether that was French chauvinism or the truth.”

For the first time, Powell said, those in the visual arts in Los Angeles are finding that “people want to do business with us, cultural business” nationally and internationally. The festival, Fitzpatrick said, earned Los Angeles a reputation as “perhaps the most interesting and open city for the arts in the world.”

Powell said county museum plans two more joint endeavors with the Louvre, these initiated by the Paris museum. At last, he said, Los Angeles is not “simply a parking lot for other institutions’ programs” but an organizer of major exhibits.

The Olympics went off without major traffic disasters and, Pat Russell said, “What saved us was the fact that we weren’t all of us out there at the same time, the way we usually are.” (It is a myth, she said, that everyone left town or took stay-at-home vacations from work; there was no “mass exodus.”)

What was way down, Russell said, was peak hour (6-9 a.m.) traffic and that, she said, was no fluke but resulted to a large degree from employer policies during the Games (23% of major employers surveyed used staggered shifts; 33% permitted flextime).

“It would be a pity,” she said, “to sacrifice the benefits we gained just because the Games are over . . . we can keep it going.”

The challenge now, Russell said, is to communicate to the public the problems and the options and to promote cooperation between private citizens, law enforcement agencies and transit operators to find answers. Some of the answers she suggested were computer-controlled traffic signaling, preferential bus lanes and expanded park-and-ride facilities.

Above all, Russell said, “We’ve just got to get out of our Monday-to-Friday 9-to-5” and reduce the amount of drive-alone trips.

Gerald D. Foster, regional vice president, Pacific Bell, said that partially as a result of the Olympics the city has in place a communications infrastructure “not matched by any other metropolitan area in the country.” Downtown alone, he said, there is more fiber optics cable than in the entire metropolitan New York area, giving “a competitive edge” to the Los Angeles economy.

(Fiber optics are thin glass strands that turn information into streams of light bursts, using lasers. They are superior to traditional copper wire in capacity and transmission quality.)

To put the potential in perspective, Foster said the contents of the Guttenberg Bible, which required five years to typeset, could be transmitted by copper wire in 30 minutes, but by fiber optics in less than a second. Fiber optics embedded in the ground are virtually earthquakeproof.

He stressed the importance telecommuting will play in the city’s future (concepts such as work at home, satellite work centers and neighborhood work centers that sell space to a number of companies). About 60% of the city’s work force, he said, are “information workers. You can take the job to them . . . we need to tell businesses this is the way you ought to operate.”

With downtown as the heart of the business community and the site of executive offices, he said, the ideal will be to locate support people closer to their homes, which is not only more economical but will “improve the total quality of life for all of us.”

Joseph A. Stuart, executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, said concerns about a “smog siege” during the Olympics were unfounded and pointed out that levels of ozone, produced by industry and automobiles, have decreased 50% in the basin in the last 30 years while the population doubled to about 12 million.

Now, Stuart said, “All of the easy things to do have been done. All of the socially acceptable things have been done.” Like Russell, he concluded, “We’ve got to reduce the number of vehicles on the freeway from 6 to 9 (a.m.).” That means new ways of thinking about work hours and workplaces, he said.

Lingering economic benefits from the Games were outlined by Harold J. Meyerman, executive vice president of First Interstate Bank and an expert in international finance.

The city’s positive image from the Olympics, he said, puts it in a very competitive position in international trade when combined with its other “major advantages,” among them opportunities for trade in the Pacific Rim and America’s growing export market to Asia, the nation’s only expanding export market.

Further, Meyerman said, “The business community in Los Angeles understands the Pacific Rim and understands Asia. . . . We have, generally speaking, labor peace.”

Meyerman said the fact of the strong dollar is not necessarily a negative for U.S. trade. It means, he said, that “the world thinks we’re doing well” and this is a good place to invest. Capital from abroad means lowered interest rates and a boost to the economy, he said.

Mayor Bradley seemed to sum up the sentiments of the day’s panelists when he said, “We’re still on a high from the Games and if we don’t OD on them we’ll be in great shape.”