Good Idea, Bad Location . . .

We are not surprised that “Clouds of Steel” has emerged as the winner of the competition for a design for the West Coast Gateway Committee, even if we have serious reservations about the location that the committee has proposed and the constraints that this location has imposed on the plan.

Hani Rashid of New York City and his associate, Lise Anne Couture, have offered innovative concepts celebrating the ethnic diversity of the nation, the cultural roots of the community that has been enriched by that diversity, and the need to bring into the Civic Center an exciting focal point that bears witness to this heritage as well as the vitality of contemporary life.

Our disappointment flows from the requirement of the West Coast Gateway Committee that the monument be above the freeway in that miserable four-block stretch from Alameda to Broadway.In hanging this colossus of diversified uses over the freeway median, the architects have been forced to squeeze public areas into elongated space little better than walkways.

There is, however, a solution: Get the monument off the back of the freeway.

Better bridging of the freeway would be welcome, and that could be accomplished with an elaboration of the kind of additional structures that already are part of the plan, offering alternatives to pedestrians now restricted to sidewalks on the existing bridges.

We would then take Rashid’s innovative ideas and deploy them where, for many years, there has been a creative confluence of Latin, European and Asian cultures--in and around El Pueblo. Much of that space already is owned by the public, including numerous buildings of historical interest. City and county officials are moving rapidly to lease them out for commercial use at the very moment when they could be converted to public applications consistent with the Gateway Monument.

The $33 million in private funds intended for the freeway-oriented monument would buy far more in El Pueblo. And this could be more than a restoration: There is space to the west of El Pueblo for new structures to complete the complex that has been offered in this plan, a contemporary background to the old buildings that could house the Library of Genealogy, Immigration Museum, Time Museum, painting gallery and other elements of the winning proposal.

This may not satisfy those who are fascinated by the daring gambit of structuring a living monument over the hurtling traffic of a crowded freeway. But somehow it seems daring enoughfor this community, and perhaps more worthy of the tradition already set by that other national gateway, New York’s Statue of Liberty.