COVER STORY : A Walk on the Mild Side : CityWalk’s critics say it’s a placebo. But tell that to the throngs it’s attracting.

If they had built CityWalk to look like Rome, or a corny version of the Champs Elysees, it might never have caused such a fuss.

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But this elaborate strip of shops and restaurants atop Universal City evokes a locale much closer to home. With its jumbled neon and audacious storefronts, with a giant video screen looming over an artificial beach, CityWalk offers a version of the very city in which it resides.

And that is what started the fire, all the hype and criticism.

A few enthusiastic comments from within the MCA Development Co.--colored by the city’s growing concerns over crime and decay--gave birth to an image of CityWalk as an abracadabra solution to Los Angeles’ woes. “Idealized reality,” MCA President Lawrence Spungin called his tightly planned and controlled complex that sought to act like a new brand of town square.

Hollywood Boulevard with a child-proof cap. A sanitized Venice Beach for a populace grown weary of looking over its shoulder.

The critics howled.

Never mind that a thoroughly contrived “boulevard” seemed Orwellian. CityWalk faced graver charges. It smacked of an elitist enclave, with its private guards shuttling panhandlers and suspected gang members off the premises, the critics said. It offered a tempting placebo at a time when people should be working to revive the real city.

These perceptions ignited such ire that Kevin Starr, a USC professor and local historian, was moved to announce: “This sounds like the end of L.A. history.”

A year has passed since CityWalk’s cacophonous debut, and still the debate smolders, if less publicly. So excuse the complex’s chief project designer, Richard Orne, if he sounds a touch wary when recalling the past 12 months.

“The notion of CityWalk being a new Los Angeles was an unfortunate bent,” said Orne, an associate at the Jerde Partnership, the private firm that served as principal architect. “But there has also been a fearful overreaction--’Oh my God, this is “1984,” and private corporations are going to build fantasy versions of cities and manipulate the population.’

“CityWalk has become,” he says, “a lightning rod for a lot of emotional reaction.”

“Perhaps there are no longer real occasions for social congregation in the square. The larger transactions of business occur at a distance by ‘communication,’ not face to face. Politics is by press, radio, and ballot. Social pleasure is housed in theaters and dance halls. If this is so, it is a grievous and irreparable loss. There is no substitute for the spontaneous social conflux whose atoms unite, precisely, as citizens of the city.”

--from Communitas, by Percival and Paul Goodman. If nothing else, CityWalk has proved successful.

Millions of people have come here after taking the Universal Studios Tour or seeing a film at the adjacent multiscreen cinema. An estimated 2 million more, many of them Los Angeles residents, have come specifically to see the complex. That is twice the number that MCA had hoped for. Executives announce this as if reducing all the criticism to so much theoretical hand-wringing.

On weekend nights, their promenade boasts a carnival atmosphere, bristling with couples and clusters of teen-agers who hurry to dinner or merely stroll from shop to shop. The ethnically and geographically diverse crowd has dispelled predictions that CityWalk would attract only tourists and white suburbanites.

“It’s a good place to hang out and not spend too much money,” said Jansen Granflor, an 18-year-old from Riverside who brought a date on a Saturday night. “There’s a lot to look at.”

An immense, midnight-blue King Kong dangles over the entry. Rows of neon signs, placed there by the Museum of Neon Art, dance above the throng. Street musicians provide a soundtrack.

This sensory texture represents the most obvious distinction between CityWalk and other commercial plazas such as Old Town in Pasadena and downtown’s Olvera Street. The Jerde Partnership sought to distill Los Angeles and its architectural array, from California Mission to ZigZag Moderne, in a way that would seem instantly familiar if not specifically recognizable.

Doug Suisman, an architect whose firm, Public Works Design, is consulting on the RTD’s proposed Electric Trolley Bus Project, said, “When you see people walking around, there is not that look of the dazed, manipulated consumer.” An early critic of the project, he has been partially swayed by recent visits. “People seem to be relaxed and enjoying the place for what it is.”

The central courtyard serves as an unexpected example.

MCA initially fretted over a fountain in that courtyard. Because it was designed like the fountain outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with ground-level jets that spurt water at irregular intervals, the management worried that visitors might wander through and get soaked.

Instead, crowds now gather around, cheering as more adventurous souls take turns sprinting across, dodging the jets.

Such unintended use is a hallmark of successful public spaces, designers say.

James Nelson grins widely. As MCA’s planning director, he is nothing if not exuberant about CityWalk and the ways--both planned and unplanned--in which it has developed.

“That’s what happens in real life.”

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But something seems odd on a blustery Wednesday afternoon as visitors skitter under dark clouds. It takes a moment to realize what is amiss.

It is music. Stereo speakers, mounted above the normal line of sight, broadcast at a volume that creeps gently into the awareness. They are broadcasting television theme songs, which is not the sort of thing you would hear strolling through Westwood.

So it becomes apparent that MCA has gone to exhaustive lengths to create its vision.

The street musicians who will arrive later are being paid a per diem . Many of the stores were brought in not for their merchandise but for their entertainment value. Store windows pop and jitter with colorful gadgets.

“We want people to be able to go in and grab things and see things and watch things move,” said Tom Gilmore, the general manager at CityWalk.

In the process, urban designers say substance has been sacrificed. The bookstore is not as encompassing as those on the Third Street Promenade. The boutiques aren’t as funky as those that line Melrose Avenue. There’s not Hollywood Boulevard’s array of immigrant businesses.

CityWalk offers restaurants and toy stores, a sports memorabilia shop and numerous merchants who peddle various forms of trinkets.

There is, perhaps, less to this place than meets the eye.

“If you look at the great public spaces around the world, there is a range of activity,” Suisman said. “People doing work, people running into friends, people reading or sleeping. Private spaces can be experientially impoverished.”

This criticism, however, is purely aesthetic. What truly concerns designers is that CityWalk could alter public perception of our common areas. Again, it is a matter of the unique design. CityWalk is crafted to look like a Los Angeles street, but that is not how it operates.

Though the visitors are ethnically diverse, they tend to be clean and well-dressed. This place displays a predominantly middle-class image.

“They wanted to censor out the bad realities of our city,” said Mike Davis, an urban theorist who has written extensively about class separation in Los Angeles. “They have censored out people, the rank-and-file and the homeless, by giving subtle signals that they aren’t wanted.”

The signals begin with a $6 parking fee, Davis said. And the giant King Kong that visitors pass under communicates expected behavior.

“Everyone has to pass through a gate,” Suisman explained, offering an analysis that Orne himself supports. “At a very subtle level, that puts you in a more passive role.”

Not so subtle is a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department substation located beside the courtyard. By including this facility in its design, MCA ensured a police presence.

Last fall, the corporation feared that gang members had begun to congregate along the promenade at night. A strict code of conduct was enforced.

Visitors were forbidden to assemble in large groups. Abusive language and “unnecessary staring” were outlawed. Anyone wearing a baseball cap backward was told to turn it around or leave.

The perceived gang problem quickly dissipated. Panhandlers have been similarly warded off.

“We are not making a demographic selection,” Spungin, MCA’s president, said. “We are making sure that people who come here behave in a certain way.”

These are fighting words for a man like Davis, a radical populist who became a Marxist in the 1960s.

“There is a fundamental confusion between safety and people who simply make us uncomfortable because they are poor or they are young minorities,” Davis argued. “Old-fashioned American ideals of democracy are being sacrificed.”

Yet, as the city grows ever more fearful, MCA has gambled that people will sacrifice a little personal freedom for the opportunity to feel safe. So far, it seems, MCA has guessed right.

“It’s a place where you can be comfortable without having to look over your back,” said D’Marc Lee, 23, who visits regularly from downtown. “You know there isn’t going to be any trouble.”

And at a seafood restaurant on the promenade, longtime restaurateur Bob Morris comments that he has never needed so many highchairs.

“Families feel comfortable coming here,” Morris said. “I don’t mean to sound elitist, but I was raised in Los Angeles when it was nice, and we had places that were like CityWalk is now.”

Suisman finds nothing wrong with people wanting to feel safe or with CityWalk providing such security. The problem arises if, bewitched by this experience, the public begins seeking extensive controls on truly public spaces.

“That’s scary when it becomes the daily norm,” the architect said.

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Even if mass perceptions never shift, Davis sees a more immediate threat to the public domain.

“These unreal simulations have become fashionable,” he said. “It’s a radical abandonment of the city.”

His argument goes like this: Tourists often seek out public spaces as a way of sampling the local culture. The same can be said for residents wanting to participate in the life of their city. By providing a safe and fanciful version of Los Angeles, CityWalk may be drawing people away from places like Hollywood Boulevard and Olvera Street, which desperately need the attention and the consumer dollars.

“In that sense,” Davis said, “CityWalk is probably the most insidious kind of theme park.”

This view emanated from all points last summer. But time has swayed some critics, including Starr, the USC professor who uttered particularly dire words.

“I was concerned that the imagined L.A. could be taken as the real thing,” he said. “The fact is, Venice boardwalk still gets crowded. The real L.A. is such a compelling presence that it won’t be swamped.”

And the professor admits to liking CityWalk.

“As an urban resort,” he said, “it’s very successful.”

“For the crowds who’ve flocked to CityWalk since its opening (last) May the answer is clear: They love it. And the reasons why they love it reveal some crucial truths about the nature of urban life in the late 20th Century. These truths will confound the idealists who cry out for less-contrived urban gathering places. They will, however, confirm the instincts of those who believe that people will take to a new kind of city place that entertains them and respects their need to feel safe. CityWalk succeeds brilliantly as a public place that most Angelenos will enjoy.”

--from Leon Whiteson’s October, 1993, critique in The Times. CityWalk arrived amid floods and riots, fires and earthquakes, events of nearly biblical proportion. It was inevitable that some would hail this complex as visionary while others would reject it as a sign that the apocalypse was upon us.

After wrestling with his own conflicting opinions, John Kaliski, a former principal architect for the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, finds himself leaning toward a less ponderous view.

Most of the hype and criticism fall by the wayside, Kaliski said, if you reduce CityWalk to its most basic form.

“It’s not the devil that some people claim it to be,” he said. “And I don’t care what Jim Nelson says, as long as he admits it isn’t a solution or a substitute. It’s a sophisticated marketing formula.”

In other words, CityWalk is a shopping mall.

“And for a shopping mall,” Kaliski said, “it’s pretty good.”

Good enough, at the very least, to join such venerable attractions as the Watts Towers and the Griffith Park Observatory on Los Angeles magazine’s recent list of “300 Reasons Not to Pack Up and Leave L.A.” And good enough to get some urban designers wondering if the rest of the city might learn a thing or two from the complex.

In his critique, Whiteson points out that CityWalk can trace its lineage to Paris’ Palais Royal and London’s Burlington Arcade, both of which were privately owned public spaces. He suggests that modern suburban malls might rip off their roofs and transform their “desolate central circulation spine” into livelier, urbanized scenes.

Suisman concurred: “The retailers at CityWalk have been really inventive with their storefronts and signage. Imagine bringing that to Wilshire or Hollywood boulevards.”

Designers also wonder if the dividing line between public and private spaces may continue to blur. If so, and if CityWalk provides any sort of indicator, the merger will not come easily.

Just ask the people who live down the hill in Studio City. While MCA talks excitedly about expansion--they’ll add country-music and blues clubs to the promenade this summer and a Hard Rock Cafe as part of a larger, future addition--these residents find themselves watching closely. They are tempted to mimic some aspects of CityWalk along their own stretch of Ventura Boulevard but, at the same time, they worry about being too manipulative.

“We’re just sad people can’t find that kind of experience on the outside,” mused Tony Lucente, president of the Studio City Residents Assn. “Is that what Los Angeles is going to become?”

WHERE AND WHEN

Location: Universal CityWalk, Universal City.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Restaurants stay open later.

Price: Parking, $6.

Call: (818) 622-4455.