Southern California Voices / A FORUM FOR COMMUNITY ISSUES : Public Places : The <i> Piazza </i> of Miracle Mile : Friday nights at LACMA--’a vitality that would be the envy of any city.’

On Friday nights, the Central Court at Los Angeles County Museum of Art is transformed into an extraordinary happening. Tables and chairs are laid out, and food and drink. The museum and its shop stay open, and a free jazz concert is open to all. People come to listen, shop, dine or stroll through the sculpture garden, soon to be expanded to connect with the adjacent grounds of Hancock Park.

The Friday Evening Program illustrates how good programming and a good space combine to make a special place which has become a meeting place and outdoor living room for the Miracle Mile district of Wilshire Boulevard.

“Museum Row” itself--two blocks along Wilshire from Fairfax to Curson Avenues--has grown into the name. Three new or remodeled museums--the Craft and Folk Art Museum, the Petersen Automotive Museum, and the Museum of Miniatures--have opened, in addition to LACMA and the George C. Page Museum. Otis Art Institute will move its faculty and students into the historic May Company building when remodeling is completed in February, 1997.

The first major coordinated event on Museum Row occurs on Saturday, Oct. 7, when all five museums will be open to the public free of charge from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

DOUG SUISMAN is the author of “Los Angeles Boulevard” (Princeton Architectural Press) and an urban designer/architect with expertise in public spaces. JANE SPILLER talked with him during a recent Friday evening program at LACMA.

Question: What’s been the progress of the Friday programs at LACMA?

Answer: The Program started out with just the museum remaining open. I went with great optimism and I believe I was the only person in the museum. Three months later when I came back they had added the music. Suddenly there were people and it’s been growing by leaps and bounds ever since.

It’s become the piazza of the Miracle Mile on Friday nights. There are regulars who come back again and again, and sometimes you’ll see three generations of a family together, which is reminiscent of Italian piazzas. Parents feel it’s safe enough to let children play, which is something I’ve noticed in plazas in Mexico and Italy.

It’s the most remarkable, diverse public space in Los Angeles in terms of age, ethnicity, residents and tourists, art aficionados and jazz buffs. It’s extraordinary.

From a design point of view I’m disappointed it’s visually cut off from Wilshire because I usually advocate activating existing public space and not hiding it in the interior of blocks, in effect privatizing it like a shopping mall. But the key for me is that it’s public property and anybody has the right to walk into that space and sit. That is remarkable given that the social upheaval in the last five years has made people feel that public space was a dead letter in L.A. This has got a vitality that would be the envy of any city.

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Q: How can Museum Row capitalize on the vitality that’s happening at LACMA?

A: The problem is--like so many things in L.A.--it’s isolated. It’s important to take this unbelievable energy and spread it along Wilshire by connecting to these other museums. If LACMA is open on Friday nights, why not open all of the museums on Friday night?

Along Museum Mile in New York, on Fifth Avenue, people do walk from museum to museum. But there aren’t too many people walking back and forth between the museums here partly because it’s not a very nice street to walk. One reason is the speed of the traffic on Wilshire--it’s very hard to cross and it’s a noisy street.

My vision would be that on Friday nights you could close one or two traffic lanes--really calm the traffic down. When traffic is slower, it’s sharply quieter.

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Q: Some people might object. After all, the Petersen Museum is a museum of cars, the embodiment of L.A. culture, and Wilshire is the great driving street. How do you respond to that?

A: In my vision of L.A., a great driving street means going by in a convertible and looking at what’s going on. It’s not barreling along Wilshire at 45 m.p.h. State Street in downtown Santa Barbara is a great driving street because you go slow and there’s an interaction between drivers and pedestrians. On Museum Row there’s just not that much traffic. On Friday nights there’s hardly any. Let the cars go through but at the legal speed limit.

They should also allow on-street parking through that section, which is good for pedestrians, creating a protective wall of parked cars. There are many things you could do to make it better that would hardly cost anything and could be done in a week.

Then you encourage sidewalk uses such as cafes, newsstands, bus stops that are more than just an ad bench along with limited, licensed sidewalk vending and just places to sit. The more that there are people there, the more that will attract other people. The area needs to be planned as a pedestrian promenade connecting these major institutions along Museum Row.

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Public Places: The Piazza of Miracle Mile / Los Angeles Times

1. Otis Art Institute (planned)

2. LA County Museum of Art

3. Page Museum / La Brea Tar Pits

4. Folk Art Museum

5. Museum of Miniatures

6. Petersen Museum