White-Collar Blues : The Best-Laid Capitalist Plans Are Tested by the Economic Malaise

Remember Crocker Bank? Tony DiCarlo does. That’s where he worked when Crocker’s simple hexagonal logo punctuated the skyline of downtown Los Angeles. When Wells Fargo gobbled up Crocker back in 1986, it spit out DiCarlo and 1,600 other workers. Then it took down the dead bank’s logo and put up the blocky sign: WELLS FARGO.

DiCarlo, as it happens, is now about 45 floors beneath those words, sipping coffee inside Los Angeles’ most urbane and elegant fast-food joint--a McDonald’s that looks out on an atrium courtyard graced with fountains, palms and sculpture. DiCarlo, who now works across Hope Street at Security Pacific, is once again worrying about where he fits into the corporate food chain.

Since April, DiCarlo explains, the staff he supervises has shriveled from 31 to 15 as Sec Pac merges with Bank of America. Eventually, he says, his department will become obsolete.

“I may be unemployed in five or six months,” the 51-year-old Torrance resident says matter-of-factly. “They may or may not have a job for me.”

It is not unusual to hear the white-collar blues these days, but the notes sound a little odd, almost impertinent, in a realm where polished granite and public artwork suggest a more classical theme. Here on Bunker Hill, along avenues aptly named Grand and Hope, the best-laid plans of the city’s capitalist mandarins and urban designers are being tested by the economic malaise.

The gleaming skyscrapers that symbolize Los Angeles’ towering ambitions now belie the tense mood among Bunker Hill’s bankers, lawyers and accountants. The pinch is felt by everyone from developers anxiously trying to market office space inside their overbuilt monuments to the waitresses and carwash attendants who measure the recession in dwindling tips.

“People just are reluctant to spend as much money as they were three or four months ago,” says Erin Eger, a waitress at the trendy Kachina Grill.

The merger of B of A and Sec Pac and the downsizing of IBM--which also has offices on Bunker Hill--have put people out of work and made headlines in the process. Less evident is the more genteel methods used by major law firms and accounting giants, reducing payroll by attrition or encouraging targeted employees that it is time to move on.

The term layoff is avoided. But the effect is much the same.

Stress is high and the atmosphere has become more and more Darwinian, suggests a CPA with the Arthur Andersen & Co. accounting firm. “There’s a lot of competition at the firm among people at the same level,” she explains, requesting anonymity. “People are willing to take on more work, and they’re working longer.”

Just the other night, she worked until 3:30 a.m. to meet a deadline.

“It’s like that old joke: If you and your friend are in the woods with a bear, you don’t have to outrun the bear. Just your friend.”

A telling barometer is the Downtown YMCA on Hope, a facility so modern and sleek that it became known as “the yuppie Y” because of the nature of its clientele. Since the start of 1990, when dues-paying memberships peaked at 5,400, enrollment has dropped to about 4,700, says associate executive director Robert Wilkins.

Downtown restaurants are also struggling. At Kachina Grill, a restaurant in Wells Fargo Court that opened in February to large crowds, appearances can be misleading. “We’ve had quite a few goodby parties,” manager Harold Herrmann says.

Even the BMWs and Infinitis do not seem so shiny. The operator of three hand carwashes in downtown buildings says young hotshot lawyers may still be able to afford the luxury of $10 weekly washes to keep up appearances. But others with families to support are more apt to put them off.

All of which makes Bunker Hill a tougher sell for the developers and planners who market the place. Not to worry, they say. The recession, not to mention the riots, are only temporary setbacks in their upbeat sales pitches. An office tower that is 50% leased is half full, not half empty.

Despite the gathering gloom, Bunker Hill boosters say, the grand city redevelopment scheme that started in the district in 1959 is on track. Civic powers succeeded in razing the old, run-down neighborhood dotted with Victorian architecture and transformed it into a launching pad for the new, improved Los Angeles.

The city’s suburbs, it was predicted, would finally have a lively, sophisticated downtown populated by well-dressed professionals and office workers who could walk or take public transit from home to the office. A favored term is synergy --a reference to all the ingredients that would fall into place to make the modern Bunker Hill work.

Thirty-three years later, Bunker Hill is home to the Music Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art and apartments housing 5,000 people. The project remains a favorite target of social critics who complain that it was designed with a bunker mentality--insulating the briefcase crowd from the predominantly minority masses who live, work and shop in downtown’s historic core to the east.

But from a 45th-floor window above the district, Nelson Rising takes a different view.

The managing partner of Maguire Thomas Partners--developers of Wells Fargo Center, The Gas Company Building, and the First Interstate Building, the city’s tallest structure--gazes down on construction crews restoring and expanding the historic Central Library at the southern foot of Bunker Hill. It is just one of the missing elements that, in time, will join the forces of synergy.

Rising points to the east: Pershing Square is also boarded up and undergoing renovation. Beneath Hill Street, the Metro Red Line subway is nearing completion. The restoration of Bunker Hill’s historic Angel’s Flight funicular railway will lift commuters from the subway to California Plaza--a Metropolitan Structures development distinguished by look-a-like towers of reflective glass and a 1 1/2-acre outdoor performance space called the Watercourt. An event dubbed “A Grand Evening on Grand Avenue” is scheduled Wednesday to celebrate California Plaza’s progress.

A few blocks north, the new Intercontinental Hotel and the Museum Square condominium project, now leasing, rise next door to MOCA. And a few blocks north, perhaps five years into the future, the much-awaited Walt Disney Symphony Hall will rise south of 1st Street between Grand and Hope, bringing the Music Center that much closer.

“People are still dealing with images of the past and the half-completed,” Rising complains of skeptics who suggest that Los Angeles, with its suburban ways, simply will not take to citified living.

The 24-hour downtown, Rising insists, is already here--and what is to come will only make it richer.

City planner Jeffrey Skorneck, who oversees Bunker Hill for the Community Redevelopment Agency, predicts that major public investments, such as Metro Rail, will “prime the pump once again.”

“Bunker Hill is starting to achieve a critical mass that is only going to get stronger,” Skorneck says. “There’s no question it’s been a desirable place to work and live for several years, but the notion that it’s an isolated pocket in downtown will be put to rest when these improvements are completed.”

Bunker Hill also gets a thumbs-up from C.J., who on this day is positioned outside the YMCA holding a polystyrene cup containing a few coins.

Perhaps it was C.J. or perhaps another panhandler who, on a recent evening, was spotted greeting prospective donors with a friendly, “Did you have a nice workout, sir?” Some people familiar with downtown say Bunker Hill attracts a better class of panhandler. Less confrontational. More polite.

It’s a good place to beg, C.J. says.

“I do all right. People are nice. I like them.”

He has been on the streets since June, he says, spending his nights most recently at the Union Rescue Mission. It is a nine-block stroll from what passes for home to what passes for work. Not that anybody planned it that way.