L.A.’s Spanish Steps

The Times’ brief article (“Stairway Linking Old and New L.A. Opens,” Metro, Oct. 5) underscores our need to have an architecture and urban design critic as a regular member of your editorial staff.

The article fails to put the steps in context. Readers should have been informed about the range of existing cultural, recreational and business destinations that are now accessible to pedestrians. Readers might have been given a diagram showing the immediate linkages to Arco Plaza and other Figueroa destinations and the thousands of employees who might now visit Museum of Contemporary Art at lunchtime, or vice versa, the thousands of employees on Bunker Hill who will be able to use the Central Library with ease, or go to an extraordinarily re-created Pershing Square; or the hundreds of thousands of us who will arrive and leave from a Metro Rail station on the east side of Pershing Square and have access to urban pathways and open space not yet in place, but about to be realized. These open spaces include not only Pershing Square but also a restored west park at the library and, at the top of the steps, Grand Avenue and a new performance plaza at California Plaza. If you add to that the pedestrian walk to be created on Hope Street south of the library, the extent of urban pedestrian pathways about to be available downtown is exciting. The steps are the linkage in that system.

To be informed about such important new events as the opening of the steps requires being informed about what place the steps have in a larger picture of both the downtown now and the downtown that is about to be.

ROBERT S. HARRIS, Dean, USC School of Architecture