CURTAIN GOING UP ON NEW DOWNTOWN THEATRE CENTER : DEBUT FOR NEW KID ON THE BLOCK

Among all the things memory is, it is a kind of time-lapse photography, measuring the present against the recollections of what was.

In the week in which the Los Angeles Theatre Center makes its debut--a new jewel shining amid the dark caverns of our financial yesterdays--I keep thinking of the immense changes the city’s center has undergone in the quarter-century since I first saw it. (I was driving in a frenzy, late as usual, along unfamiliar streets--no Santa Monica Freeway yet--trying to find Union Station, park and get aboard the train that was carrying Nikita Khrushchev to San Francisco.)

Those were, although it would not be clear until later, the last days of the postwar downtown Los Angeles, modest and compact, with only City Hall soaring above the earthquake-imposed building limit.

It was a largely daytime downtown, with no more than a handful of effective lures for those suburbanites in search of a city. And as it turned out, many of those lures (among them Bullock’s, the 4th Street Broadway, the Biltmore Theater, the Philharmonic Auditorium, a.k.a. the Temple Baptist Church, and Angel’s Flight) were themselves endangered specimens, and are gone.

A time of huge and remarkable change was at hand, and the brave launching of the Theatre Center confirms that there are surprises and delights awaiting us still.

In its way, the Theatre Center is doubly significant because it represents both new growth for the city’s cultural life and also a resuscitation of a part of town, the old financial district, that progress (always reckless and spendthrift in its ways) had simply dumped.

Twenty-one years ago when the Music Center opened, it became a kind of cultural focus the central city had not had since the quite different days of the ‘20s. After it (with the building ceiling lifted) have come the dazzling towers that make Los Angeles look like a major metropolis instead of just a large place.

The Bunker Hill Towers and the later condominium complexes west and south of the hill have made downtown what it had not recently been, a middle-class and upper-middle-class place to live.

What the Theatre Center invades is some downtown turf that had been almost paradoxically gloomy, embraced as it is by the various and dynamic ethnic enclaves--Chinatown and Olvera Street; the vigorous Latino market center along Broadway to the west; Little Tokyo, with the Japan America Cultural Center and other handsome new structures, just north and east.

What all these changes, including the Temporary Contemporary Art Museum tucked in the heart of Little Tokyo, have only begun to create is a central Los Angeles with an around-the-clock life whose excitements do not ride home with the commuters.

The great promise of the Theatre Center is that it will prosper in its own right, providing theatrical excitements and excellence through the assertive aspirations of Bill Bushnell and his team, and that it could accordingly point the way to the further invigoration of downtown and its life beyond 9 to 5.

The possibilities of a new lease on life for the former financial district have been talked about for years--ateliers, galleries, senior-citizen housing, theaters. Now the Theatre Center has seized the possibilities, along with the risks (chief among them worries about security in the area). Yet there seems every chance that the center can change the street weather, so to speak, enticing new settlers and visitors and creating new memories to lay against the old.