CRITIQUE : CREATING COMMON GROUND : New Design of Pershing Square Seeks to Create an Urban Oasis

Throughout its 125-year history, Pershing Square has mirrored the true condition of downtown Los Angeles. Its status reflects the social vitality of our downtown, unclouded by civic pretension or commercial hype.

Right now, that mirror is cracked, and it has been for decades. The image that Pershing Square reflects is distorted by years of bad planning and unresolved human tensions.

Some recent attempts to restore the park have failed miserably, largely because they sought purely physical remedies for stubborn social realities that few planners know how to cope with or care to acknowledge.

Now a promising fresh initiative is under way.

The Pershing Square Property Owners Assn., an organization representing the landholders surrounding the park, led by developer Maguire Thomas Partners, has sponsored a new plan that has drawn the support of a wide range of community groups, including those who have a stake in the humanity and long-term social and economic health of our central city.

If the proposal wins final approval by the City Council, a start on Pershing Square’s revitalization could begin next spring.

Will this new design, crafted by famed Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta and Philadelphia-based landscape architect Laurie Olin, succeed where others have failed?

Before the quality of the new proposal can be properly evaluated, however, one needs to understand the complex history of this intensely urban park.

Pershing Square first became an official city park in 1866. Originally named Los Angeles Park, the single city block was “declared to be a Public Square or Plaza for the use and benefit of the Citizens in common.”

At the time of its creation, Los Angeles Park was beyond the bounds of the city’s commercial hub, which was centered around Main, Temple and Spring streets. But soon after it was established, shops and businesses began to spring up among the houses surrounding the square.

“Pershing Square in its youth was most casual in plan,” W. W. Robinson wrote in his 1931 account titled “The Story of Pershing Square.”

“Trees and shrubs had been set out in random fashion by well-meaning donors. . . . Grass was not planted until the municipal zanja (aqueduct) had been extended to the vicinity.”

After several name changes, the park was dedicated on Armistice Day, 1918, to Gen. John J. Pershing, World War I commander of the U.S. Army in France.

In the 1920s the Biltmore Hotel’s massive Italianate facade replaced St. Paul’s School church, whose spire had been a local landmark. A host of other new commercial and cultural buildings, including the now-demolished Philharmonic Auditorium, ringed the square.

In this upbeat era Pershing Square was the heart of the vigorous young city of Los Angeles. Splendid picture palaces crowded Broadway; Spring Street was the “Wall Street of the West,” and Bunker Hill was lined with mansions and row houses.

In Pershing Square the middle classes mixed with radical agitators and with those less fortunate citizens who had colonized the park from its beginnings and stubbornly refused to retreat. In one contemporary account the local well-to-do shared the park’s benches with “discouraged, ragged, jobless, sick people, bums, lonely tourists who want someone to talk to, Reds breathing communism.”

The period between the two world wars was the high point of Pershing Square’s history, from which it was soon to plummet.

After World War II the park shared the fate of the central city. It was abandoned by its more affluent, mostly Anglo citizens, who fled to the suburbs in that great national internal emigration known as White Flight. Bunker Hill was flattened under the brutal banner of “urban renewal.”

Pershing Square was no longer at the core of the postwar downtown business community, which had shifted west to the Central Library district. In 1952 the park was brutally excavated for the construction of a multilevel underground parking garage. Its edges were ringed with auto ramps and its surface was covered over with concrete topped by a thin layer of lawn and a few disconsolate trees.

In 1983 a report by the Central City Assn. declared that the park “has come to be dominated by the poor and the homeless, the so-called Skid Row element.”

Pershing Square enjoyed a brief spasm of splendor during the 1984 Olympics as the center of the city’s celebration of its rising importance as a major metropolis on the Pacific Rim. Bunker Hill and Grand Avenue were undergoing massive commercial redevelopment, and the Central City Assn. urged that the park should be “reshaped and reanimated to capture the increasing vitality of downtown.”

The square’s Olympic moment in the sun spurred an international competition for its redesign in 1985. Sponsored by the newly created Pershing Square Management Assn., bolstered by the promise of a $6-million contribution from the Community Redevelopment Agency, the well-publicized competition drew more than 200 entries from all over the world.

The jury chose a winning scheme by New York-based SITE Projects Inc. that was brilliant but quirky.

Dubbed “The Magic Carpet,” SITE’s design envisioned an undulating concrete canopy covering the underground garage, divided into a grid pattern populated with kiosks and gazebos. A major performance space and restaurant at opposite ends of the square were linked by a spine of shady trellises.

For several reasons, SITE’s imaginative concept failed to fly.

The city’s powerful downtown commercial establishment did not support it. Pershing Square was seen as marginal to the development of Bunker Hill, and even the venerable Biltmore Hotel turned its back on the park after a major remodeling created a new entry for the hotel on Grand Avenue.

And, at an estimated $20 million-plus, the SITE plan was considered too expensive.

More fundamentally, the SITE design, with its reaching for a brilliant architectural solution, failed to address the crucial social question that must be answered if Pershing Square is to have a vital future.

That question is: Whose park is it?

Does it belong, as it has historically, to the largely Anglo Bunker Hill-Grand Avenue commercial establishment? Can it connect with the Latino population of Broadway? And what about the rights of those urban casualties who find some measure of refuge from the dangers of Skid Row in its open lawns?

Perhaps most crucially of all, the new plan must be judged by the likelihood of its success in breaching the urban apartheid that divides our central city into a series of segregated enclaves.

To create a common meeting ground between Anglo and Latino downtowns, between Broadway and Grand Avenue, is one of the new Pershing Square plan’s central ambitions.

“We recognize that making a connection between the two main constituencies that border the park is crucial to its success,” said Maguire Thomas senior partner Nelson Rising, who has helped lead the development of the new plan.

“This connection matters as much as revitalizing Pershing Square for its own sake, since it will lead the way in countering downtown’s present social fragmentation.”

In a seemingly symbolic representation of the Anglo-Latino split that shapes the character of the square’s environs, the Legorreta-Olin plan divides the five-acre park into two main sections.

The northern section, bordering 5th Street, features a grassy area ringed with concrete benches. This seating area is also intended to function as an informal outdoor amphitheater, facing a raised “stage” shaded by a grove of cedars.

The southern section, along 6th Street, is focused upon a shallow round pond. The pond is linked by a dramatic waterfall and free-standing screen wall to a 120-foot purple campanile, or tower, that marks the division between the park’s two territories.

This L-shaped campanile, which conjures up memories of the church spires or bell towers that dominate many traditional Mexican plazas, is the new Pershing Square’s main visual marker. Strong and simple enough to stand out against the background of the facades that surround the park, the purple stucco tower proclaims the presence of an urban oasis amid downtown’s ever more hectic traffic.

To add to the drama, water will cascade down one of the tower’s sloping sides and flow in a channel along the top of the screen wall that runs into the park’s round pool. The channel ends in a spouting waterfall whose soothing sound is designed to mute the hoarse rumble of the traffic in the streets outside.

Pershing Square’s designers say that the main reason for dividing the park in two is to create areas that are intimate in scale.

“The architects felt that Pershing Square, as it’s now laid out, is too big to function as an intimate piazza and yet too small to be a major park,” said Property Owners Assn. President John McAlister. “By planning two small parks side by side they sought to create Mexican-style plazas, or zocalos , of a scale that encourages mingling in a secure and enclosed environment.”

The 10-foot drop in elevation across the length of the park between 5th and 6th streets is handled by gentle slopes and wide steps between the northern and southern sections.

Six entrances provide a controlled access into the new park. There will be one at each corner, plus two in mid-block along Olive and Hill streets, linked to the existing small lobbies that house the stairs and escalators leading down to the underground garage.

The ramps that serve the garage will be screened from the main body of the park by banks of palms, cedars and jacaranda trees. The existing inclined car entries along Hill and Olive, currently double-ramped, will be reduced to single lanes to add more area to the park itself.

Pedestrian traffic into Pershing Square will be considerably increased when the new underground Metro Rail station, under construction on Hill Street across from the square, is completed in 1993. The new Hill Street Station, which officials estimate will become the busiest access point in the Metro Rail system, could pour thousands of office workers and visitors into the park in the course of an average day.

Dense groves of trees will screen the park from the surrounding streets. Within the park the trees create shady view corridors where visitors may stroll or sit.

A small, bright yellow cafeteria pavilion beside the Olive Street parking garage lobby is the only retail presence currently planned for the park, apart from informal kiosks selling food, drinks and souvenirs at each corner entry. Revenues from these retail outlets will, it is hoped, help offset the cost of operating and maintaining the park.

The plan’s estimated $14-million construction cost would be covered by the CRA’s still-committed $6 million subsidy, plus $8 million raised from the surrounding property owners.

It is clear that the park’s planners and designers have thought deeply about the need to develop a physical environment they hope will encourage the social revitalization of Pershing Square.

The new plan’s architecture and landscaping rely on the strength of a few simple gestures to create this encouraging ambience. The bold shaft of the purple campanile, the shady, ordered groves, the beds of flowering perennials and the intimate scale of the park’s two sections all conjure up the sure sense of a humane urban oasis.

“We want the park to be a family place,” Rising said. “A place where people will gather to see jugglers and magicians and musicians, maybe on their way to visit downtown’s new art museums.”

One could carp that making the park safe for families implies the exclusion of the homeless.

And the decision to screen the square from its surroundings behind trees and fences has the advantage of providing security and control, and also offers a refuge from the traffic swirling around its edges. But it has the disadvantage of psychologically isolating the park from the city’s urban fabric. Only Legorreta’s purple campanile will be visible above the groves that will border the redesigned square.

This vivid tower is typical of the Mexican architect’s brand of stripped down, highly colored postmodern “Latinismo.” Used here, the style seems to be the Anglo establishment’s sophisticated gesture to Latino sensibilities. But its mannerisms may be too artful and abstract to attract the populist Broadway crowds.

As a further gesture to Latino sensibilities, it has been suggested that the redesigned Pershing Square might be renamed “Plaza de Los Angeles.”

But these are minor caveats. The basic questions that will haunt the new design are:

Will it dissolve the stubborn social membrane that isolates Latinos from Anglos, Broadway from Bunker Hill? And will it help heal the widening metropolitan rift between haves and have-nots made blatant in the contrast between spruce downtown office workers and their homeless and desperate fellow citizens?

The blunt fact is that the harsh realities of downtown Los Angeles, mirrored in the park’s current sad condition, won’t be easily tamed by an act of architecture alone, however graceful and considered.

Physical solutions can only go so far toward altering complex social tensions. Something has to change in the basic human structure of our increasingly fragmented metropolis before Pershing Square can once again reflect the city’s honest pride.