Visualizing Revitalized Wilshire Center

Wilshire Boulevard in the 1920s and ‘30s was the city’s grand avenue, lined with elegant shops and stores, imposing churches and prestigious office buildings from MacArthur Park to Wilton Place.

On nearby streets was the city’s most diverse choice of desirable housing, from substantial single-family residences to luxury apartment houses.

In sum, the area known then as Los Angeles’ Champs Elysees and now as Wilshire Center was a caldron of hot properties.

Although continuing as a vigorous commercial strip, attracting sporadic office and residential construction, the boulevard and adjacent streets no longer are such a desirable area.

Traffic is a mess, crime a constant annoyance, many stores and much of the older housing have deteriorated and the newer developments tend to be haphazardly sited and poorly designed.

Yet Wilshire Center has the potential to be one of the city’s more urbane areas.

Besides being exceptionally well located--near downtown, Hollywood and the Westside--the area offers its own array of attractions and conveniences.

These include the landmark Bullocks Wilshire and I. Magnin department stores, a sparkingly restored Wiltern Theatre, a range of competitively priced office space, enduring neighborhood stores and services and a variety of housing prices and opportunities.

The district also is well served by buses, and should be better served when the three Metro Rail stations planned for the area are operating. And while its two major parks, Lafayette and MacArthur, need more tender loving care, they do provide a recreational focus. Sites for more parks, playgrounds and plazas dot the district.

Aided by its diversity and density, Wilshire Center, of all the city’s scattered communities, has the ingredients to best satisfy the elusive regional growth-management goal of a proper jobs-housing balance. That balance, simply put, calls for moving work and housing opportunities closer together to reduce traffic, air pollution and time wasted commuting.

These and other aspects of the Wilshire Center were noted in a recently released study that UCLA’s Urban Innovations Group completed for a consortium of local real estate interests and community groups through a process labeled “consensus planning.”

The process was welcomed, reaching out as it did to entice the community-at-large to participate in a series of frank discussions and design workshops focusing on the future development of the area.

The citizen participation and its healthy dose of reality obviously helped the study, which I hope will not just be filed away by the city in some dusty cabinet, as have so many other planning efforts. This one deserves to be embraced and implemented.

More than just a recitation of the area’s present and potential, the study recommends a series of reasonable strategies in pursuit of a revitalized Wilshire Center.

The recommendations include the development of new housing in the air rights of parking lots, encouraging commercial and residential rehabilitation programs, aiding in the siting of new school facilities, mitigating traffic, closing select streets to create a “festival marketplace,” improving landscaping to encourage pedestrian use and lobbying for a variety of social services.

To carry out these recommendations, the study urges the formation of a community development corporation.

On a more technical level, particularly innovative is the proposal for “flex density,” which would use zoning controls to link the amount of commercial development allowed to local traffic conditions and housing opportunities.

The concept is an interesting if complicated attempt to encourage a jobs-housing balance by providing incentives that would actually increase density while decreasing traffic. It is a concept that could mark a new path in the awkward growth of Los Angeles from a collection of scattered suburbs into a city.

To its credit, the study also tackled the controversy over the future of the former Ambassador Hotel. It declared that the best rescue of the 23.5-acre property would be a “a major commercial/retail component fronting Wilshire Boulevard and a large housing component creating a distinctive residential neighborhood on the south part of the site.”

I hope this means that the historic hotel can be saved and converted into a housing complex, perhaps combined in some imaginative way with needed community facilities.

The recommendation runs counter to a Los Angeles Unified School District proposal to demolish the landmark and use the site for a new 2,000-student high school. That proposal has drawn the ire of both preservationists and nearby residential and commercial communities, as well it should. The Ambassador and Wilshire Boulevard deserve a better fate.

Once again we have the school district stepping into a buzz saw of opposition over a school site, due in large part to its narrow view of school planning and design dictated by guidelines written by some bureaucrat in Sacramento.

It is time the district begin exploring with other concerned groups how school facilities might be better integrated into such urban communities as Wilshire Center. It is time for another dose of consensus planning.