The Dream of a Central City : The Gateway project seeks to re-energize Downtown Los Angeles as a commercial and transportation hub for the next century. But will the city rediscover its center?

To stand beneath the 87-foot-high half dome of the East Portal of the Union Station Gateway Intermodal Transit Center is to stand at ground zero of a compelling vision of metro-regional Los Angeles, to which has been com mitted, almost stealthily, nearly $140 million in public funds. When completed in September, Los Angeles will have a major public-work and civic space about which there has been little public discussion. Count on it, however: When the Gateway opens, it will be hailed as the most powerful possible enabler of the metro-Los Angeles future--or as a monument to delusion and doomed hopes, an egregious instance of multimillion-dollar folly.

Proponents of this undertaking--most notably Nick Patsaouras, chairman of the board of the Union Station Gateway Project, the nonprofit corporation spearheading and supervising construction, and Nelson C. Rising, chief executive officer of the Catellus Development Corp., partners with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in the Gateway venture--see themselves as laying down the fundamental urban/regional public-transit structure for the next 100 years. By 2015, Patsaouras and Rising predict, some 250,000 passengers a work day will come and go through this gigantic complex--which brings together into one terminal: Amtrak; all regional and local bus lines; all light-rail systems, including the Blue Line and planned electric trolley lines; the mega-billion-dollar Red Line subway; all Metrolink commuter trains, and an intricate system of van pools and taxi and shuttle services.

Nearby, a 26-floor high-rise will serve as headquarters to some 1,700 MTA employees, gathered from 13 sites, at a savings, it is claimed, of $13 million a year. An urban center, meanwhile (17 pads for development are being prepared), will grow up around the Gateway complex, linked to Downtown by the landscaping of Alameda and ( mirabile dictu !) a pedestrian plaza across the Santa Ana freeway.

The fundamental assumption behind the Gateway project--the dream, obsession even, that is now rushing this complex to completion well ahead of public notice--is that, for the next 100 years, Downtown Los Angeles will remain the commercial, hence, transportation nexus of the region. Los Angeles, in short, will continue as the hub of the metropolitan Southland, the quintessential there of Southern California.

Critics, by contrast--and there have been surprisingly few, given the vastness of the venture--consider the entire Gateway project a retardaire monument to an era that has passed, or is passing. In the poly-sited future, they argue, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of urban nodes, scattered throughout the Southland, will serve as “Downtown”: a dispersion made even more dramatic by telecommunications technology that will allow an increasingly larger portion of the population to work at home or at conveniently located communication centers, where they will have not a desk, but a hookup.

Thus, even before it is dedicated, the Union Station Gateway Project is emerging as a window on the future. Just exactly what future, however, will remain a matter of opinion. Should the conceivers and creators of the Gateway Project prove correct, Los Angeles will enter a new era re-energized as the transportation and development center of the region. Already, the Metropolitan Water District has committed to the construction of a 4,000-person administrative complex on one of the sites. There are plans for a sports arena to be constructed over the train sheds, on the model of Madison Square Garden.

There are also proposals to develop the “Alameda District”--the 50 acres encircling Union Station--and the 18 acres surrounding the adjacent Terminal Postal Annex into a landscaped complex that would combine Union Station, the annex (scheduled for redevelopment as a government center) and the historic Plaza District into one integrated, pedestrian-oriented downtown zone.

The MTA, meanwhile, is proposing an even bolder integration--known as Angeles Walk--of the El Pueblo-Union Station District, Chinatown, the Little Tokyo-Loft District, the Civic Center and the Bunker Hill historic core into an interconnected, five-district cluster of urban townships ( urban villages is too weak a term) energized and sustained by the economy centered on Union Station.

Downtown Los Angeles, according to the Angels Walk design, will not develop as a dense and continuous procession of high-rises along narrow streets, as in the case of Manhattan. It will emerge, rather, as a stitched fabric of metro-townships, each with its distinctive context and unifying historical prinicple: El Pueblo, where it all began in 1781, the enduring presence of the Chinese American and Japanese American communities, the Bunker Hill core, with its lingering associations to the fin de siecle , symbolized most dramatically in the Angels Flight funicular, scheduled for rehabilitation.

Should the anti-downtown dispersionists prove the more accurate prophets, the Southern California of the 21st Century will continue to grow increasingly privatized, gated and telecommuting. Detached, even fearful of the public realm, the Jetsons of the Southern California to come will, according to this scenario, be reluctant to leave their gated communities for any reason other than absolute necessity, much less commute each day into the central city.

In many ways, the Gateway Project is a commitment to public works that is classical in inspiration. To Patsaouras, whom many cite as the visionary force behind the entire project, the people of the metro-region have few opportunities to experience the public realm in all its democratic grandeur. Television and fear of crime have rendered us increasingly detached, physically and psychologically, from the polis, which is the transcendent community in time, encountered as a moral ideal, a political system, a marketplace for goods and ideas. Toward that end--the deliberate creation of a suitable public realm--Union Station Gateway Project is sparing no expense.

Point by point, in its blend of Moorish-Spanish, Art Deco and Moderne, its chandeliers and tile mosaics, its tension of opulence and restraint, the design and finish of the MTA headquarters echoes Union Station. Built in 1939, opened in 1940, Union Station was the last of the great train stations that announced to the traveling public that the United States of America, as expressed in its cities, had arrived at a point of self-confidence and maturity, even triumph.

Those great train stations expressed their respect for the American public through the highest possible presentation of art and architecture. Patsaouras has insisted that the same be true of the Gateway. Buses will arrive and depart on roadways of patterned English brick. A hundred great palm trees, purchased en masse and trucked, tree by tree, from the Southwest, will stand sentry. The soaring East Portal Pavilion will invite comparisons to Grand Central Station, to Charing Cross, or the great train terminals of Europe. Across the Western wall will sweep a gigantic mural depicting the multiethnic faces of Los Angeles. There will be an indoor aquarium (strictly for the pleasure of it) and a column-fountain of falling water.

Sustaining this Gateway project is the belief that the community--meaning metro-Los Angeles--will see in the public-works complex the best sense of itself in terms of collective identity. Should no such sense exist, the project will, at best, be incomprehensible to a population that has nothing in common or, worse, an object of ridicule and scorn. In either event, the Gateway should prove an intriguing litmus test for metro-Los Angeles.

Come September, the architecture, landscaping and other amenities of the Gateway will, Patsaouras believes, win national and international praise for metro Los Angeles. It will take another decade or two, or even three, when the bonds are paid off, for the more long-range questions to be answered. Will it work? Will the Gateway be vital with the comings and goings of a quarter of a million commuters personally invested in a place called Los Angeles? Or will it stand empty and forlorn, like an opera house built deep within the Amazon?

Is there such a place, after all, such a city as Los Angeles? Has that city cohered as both an identity and a physical place, a vast and sustaining web of life, enduring, triumphant, embraced in the ah!, bright wings of angels?