L.A. Does It Right With Redesign of Central Library

If you don’t work Downtown, this adventure may seem far afield. But give it a try if you can. On any working day, walk about halfway up the so-called “Spanish Steps” across from Downtown’s new Central Library. Then turn around and gaze at the scene surrounding you.

You will find yourself staring at the rarest of phenomena in Los Angeles: a big city landscape that breathes life, that invites you to hang around. You’ll see people eating at the sidewalk cafes, reading, or strolling in that languid manner that suggests summer in the city. Most crucial of all, you’ll see a steady stream of students, tourists, researchers and pensioners going in and out of our renovated library.

I emphasize the renovated part because this entire scene has been created by design. Wandering around the rest of Los Angeles, you would conclude that our city simply cannot pull off this kind of redevelopment success. Failures can be found everywhere, from the hideous, purple-and-gold redesign of Pershing Square just a couple blocks away to the bleak government center in Van Nuys.

My own favorite urban horror in Los Angeles happens to be the county complex Downtown, especially the sadly named Kenneth J. Hahn Hall of Administration. Admittedly, this development took place several decades ago but I believe it still reigns as the most soul-deadening government edifice in the city, a place whose very design suggests that all inquiries have two answers: “Get in line,” and then, “No.” The Kremlin could not have done better.

That’s why the renovated library and its small corner of Downtown comes as such a shock. The secret of the success, of course, lies with the library itself. The renovation, completed in 1993, consumed $214 million, a prodigious sum considering that it included no land costs. As a small side bet, I’ll wager that in our lifetimes we will never again see that kind of money poured into a city facility.

The money shows everywhere, from the wood-paneled carrels to the outside gardens, and it transformed the library. Before the fire in 1986 that gutted its interior, the old library had fallen from grace. It had, in fact, met that peculiar and familiar fate of so many public buildings in L.A., the fate of neglect and decline. The reading rooms served largely as day shelters for claques of bums, who became the major clientele. Grime showed everywhere. One of the Downtown librarians told me that when he arrived for his first day of work in 1984, he noticed that one of the exterior walls was covered with graffiti. It was still covered with the same graffiti when the fire hit two years later.

Maybe you knew the old place. If you did, and if you haven’t been back, check out the results of the remake. A small miracle has occurred. First, the bums are gone. No, not gone, exactly. They have just lost their visibility in the crowds. People are everywhere now, using the library in all the ways a great library gets used. An air of respect and purpose permeates the place.

I have a friend who takes her 7-year-old daughter to the library on the weekends and lets her explore the kids’ section. She drives all the way Downtown, she says, because she wants her daughter to love libraries like she does, and this one has the dignity, the sense of quiet escape and sheer fun it takes to cultivate that kind of love.

During the day, the crowds spill out onto the gardens, where the library has its own bistro at one end, or across the street to the other cafes. The steps themselves, which lead to Bunker Hill, become a place to loll about. Other big cities have many places like this one, places that serve as meetings points and refuges amid the great hubbub, and they are one of the reasons people love cities. We only have this one.

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But why did it happen here and not at Pershing Square or the Triforium--that’s the breathtakingly ugly, Muzak-spouting sculpture next to City Hall--or with any of the other sad attempts to create city environments with public money?

Mainly, I think, it’s the money. The city wrote big, big checks for the library. It could have rebuilt the library on the cheap, producing a trash facility. Usually, that’s what happens with public facilities in L.A. The new Pershing Square, for example, exudes trashiness, and its atmosphere has hardly changed from the old feeling of threat and tension. But the city didn’t go cheap with the library, and people have recognized they got something special for their money. They treat it with respect and honor. Even the bums.

Of course, the library represented a special case. The old library happened to own the high-rise development rights over its site on 5th Street; those rights were sold to developers across the street for many millions.

For whatever reason, the money got spent, and it poses an intriguing question: In the end, do we get more value for our public dollars if we spend more rather than less? Certainly, in the case of the library, it would seem so.

Actually, it may be a question hardly worth asking. For now, and the foreseeable future, we will spend less, not more. And no one will ask about ultimate value. But we did get the library, no? And we got one small corner of Downtown that proves even Los Angeles, every once in a while, can do it right.