Architects and Artists Have Designs on New Pershing Square

An Eiffel Tower in downtown Los Angeles’ Pershing Square?

Or a glass mountain symbolizing Southern California’s desert and mountain landscape?

The fate of Pershing Square, one of the few open spaces downtown, rests with a 12-member design jury that will choose between these schemes and 234 other proposals submitted for the revitalization of the park.

Plans for the park--submitted by architects, landscapers and artists from all over the world--are on display through June 28 in a circus tent in the square.

The design competition, financed by a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, carries a first prize of $10,000 and four finalist prizes of $7,500. The winner will also get a chance to bid on an $11-million contract, the estimated cost of capital improvements to the park.

“It’s like winning a gold medal at the Olympics,” said Dan George, a job captain with Walker Associates, an interior architecture and planning firm that submitted a plan.

The entries are displayed without the names of their creators and will be judged anonymously, said Janet Marie Smith, president of Pershing Square Management Assn., a nonprofit business organization that operates the park under a lease from the city. The jury is scheduled to announce five finalists next week.

Public comment is welcome, Smith said, and a suggestion box has been placed near the door to the tent.

“We’ve had entries from people who live in the welfare hotels to the best design firms in the world,” she said.

Smith said the association’s goal is to attract more of the downtown work force than now visits the 121-year-old park, which is bounded by 5th, 6th, Olive and Hill streets.

Among the various design constraints mandated by the association and reflected in the drawings are the retention of the underground parking garage and a restaurant with seating for 200 to 500 people.

The Eiffel Tower and the glass mountain are optional, although a change in the park’s name was solicited.

“The Cinco de Mayo people who took their festival somewhere else because of the park’s name are the kind of people we’d like to welcome back if the name is changed,” Smith said. Pershing was an American general who led an expeditionary force into Mexico against legendary bandit Pancho Villa in 1916.

An attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, Gary Blasi, said two elements are missing from the drawings--poor people and places to lie down.

“The drawings are beautiful, but the one unifying theme seems to be that this is a place to walk through from somewhere else or to view a spectacle, not a place to hang out, which is what a city park should be all about,” Blasi said.

But Roy Shelton, an attorney who works in one of the skyscrapers bordering the square, said he welcomes the proposed improvements.

‘It’s Distasteful’

“Frankly, I don’t consider this place to be a park now,” he said. “It’s distasteful with all the bums here. I don’t walk through because I hate being hassled for money.”

Darrell Johnson, who with his companions was lounging on a blanket in the park, said he is worried about restrictions that might be instituted if more business people are attracted to the square as a result of revitalization.

“There are enough restaurants here as it is,” Johnson said. “I hope they leave some greenery for the people.”