Urban Jewel or Height of Folly? : Lavish new transit center and 26-story office tower next to Union Station will become a civic treasure, MTA officials predict. But critics fear a $300-million white elephant instead of an urban oasis.

So which is it?

A crown jewel of Downtown architecture that is destined to become the city’s transportation hub in the 21st Century while reviving a long-neglected neighborhood?

Or a $300-million white elephant featuring Italian granite, English brick and a $300,000 aquarium--a “Taj Mahal,” as one critic put it, a monument to the transit agency’s misplaced priorities?

Love it or hate it, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s lonely 26-story office tower and palm-lined transit center nearing completion by Union Station has altered the city’s skyline and, officials hope, will redefine its view of public transit.

Built in the mold of the great train stations of the past, the project is designed to return the historic site to its glory days as the grand portal to the city--the Grand Central Station of the West.

The glass-domed Gateway Intermodal Transit Center, which will open in October, is projected by next decade to serve more than 100,000 commuters a day arriving and departing by car, bus, train, bike and foot. Next door, MTA employees have begun moving into their new earth-toned headquarters.

Critics fear that the massive transportation palace will trivialize beloved Union Station. But project officials say the new center--with its provocative art, live music and cappuccino carts--will draw more visitors to the old depot.

From the beginning, the tower has been the subject of controversy among architects, politicians and even ordinary folk.

“It’s always dangerous from a public relations point of view for a large public agency to build a monument to itself,” said Bill Fulton, editor of California Planning and Development Report.

But Fulton and others say the project’s location makes a powerful statement about the region’s changing transportation priorities.

“For the first time in a lot of years, we’re building a skyscraper next to the railroad tracks instead of next to the freeway,” Fulton said. “Whether that becomes a lonely white elephant that represents a failed policy remains to be seen.”

Admirers say Gateway will become not only an important transit nexus but a civic treasure--in the tradition of the great public works projects of the 1920s and ‘30s. The project, they say, will revive a forgotten but historically important part of Downtown and create a new public place for a city with many communities but few communal gathering places.

Artwork can be found at almost every turn--from a bench featuring rocks from the Los Angeles River bed unearthed during construction, with water trickling behind seated visitors, to giant murals of the city, past, present and future. The designers even re-created the 1920s-era street lights from the nearby Macy Street viaduct.

“The criticism has been that the MTA is pulling life away from Downtown,” said urban designer and architect Doug Suisman. “It’s certainly pushing activity in directions that it hasn’t tended to go, which is north and east rather than south and west. That is potentially a wonderful thing for Downtown, to recapture its origins and to link these vital ethnic and historic communities.”

“Over the next 50 years, public transportation, with the improvements that are happening right now, will reinforce the importance of transportation hubs as development zones,” said Los Angeles architect Scott Johnson.

“The argument persists that we’ve always had in Los Angeles: Should there be centers?” he added. “My own view is absolutely. We need public symbols. We need places that, no matter what edge of the city we live in, we all pay respect to and we all unify behind. Unity in our diversity is more important than ever.”

The project is part of a grand plan to transform the industrial wasteland around Union Station into an urban oasis that would include several commercial and residential towers and a sports arena over the train sheds, along the lines of Madison Square Garden. Now, only a new 12-story Metropolitan Water District headquarters is assured.

The prime movers behind the Gateway project--longtime transportation official Nick Patsaouras and Eastside Councilman Richard Alatorre--see the development in larger terms.

Patsaouras is a forward thinker who has championed a West Coast Statue of Liberty spanning the Hollywood Freeway as a monument to immigrants. He also has pushed Angel’s Walk, a plan to plant trees, display artwork and make other sidewalk improvements in order to make it more appealing for people to walk between Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Bunker Hill, the Civic Center and Union Station.

Alatorre, the political pragmatist who used his reapportionment skills to add Union Station to his district in 1986, promoted the project as a way to provide economic opportunities for Latino residents east of the Los Angeles River.

“It represents one of the first major urban spaces built in Southern California, possibly since Pershing Square, that really will be utilized by the masses,” said Robert S. Vogel, Gateway project director for Catellus Development Corp. The company hopes that the project will be a catalyst to its plan to develop the land it owns around Union Station.

Critics have objected to the location of the new high-rise, away from the other Downtown skyscrapers.

“It’s going to be the Transamerica of the 21st Century,” said one architect, referring to the lonely high-rise at the southern edge of Downtown.

“It’s unfortunate that we live in a city where you can spend billions of dollars on rebuilding the Downtown and then end up having one of your most important public agencies locate their headquarters in an Edge City,” said one planner.

Margaret Crawford, chairwoman of the history and theory of architecture program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, said: “The scale of Union Station, the Plaza, is really changed by having this gigantic thing in back of it. Is this the beginning of a kind of oozing out of Downtown in that direction? I hope not.”

*

But Nelson Rising, Catellus president and chief executive officer and a longtime civic activist, responded: “We’re talking about a city for the next century and beyond. . . . To look at it at a point in time and say it’s just one tower misses the point of where we’re headed.”

Officials promise that the transit center opening will be as big an event as the 1939 dedication of the $11-million Union Station, which attracted half a million people, including “millionaires and fellows with private railroad cars,” according to an article in The Times.

In its early years, Union Station served 7,000 passengers arriving and departing on 66 trains a day, excluding the crush of soldiers during World War II. With the advent of the jet age and freeways, train use declined. But in recent years, Los Angeles has undergone a rail renaissance. Today, the station serves about 26,000 passengers a day arriving and departing on Amtrak, Metrolink and subway trains.

The transit center will serve more than 120 buses an hour during peak periods, Amtrak and Metrolink trains, the city’s developing subway system, and the planned Downtown-to-Pasadena trolley, scheduled to open in 2002.

Officials believe that the center will increase use of public transit--especially when the subway extension to Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue opens in April, followed by the extension to Hollywood in 1999; the San Fernando Valley in 2000, and the Eastside in 2003.

*

Passengers will enter the new transit center by walking through Union Station--a wall will be knocked down between the old and new terminals--or by way of a new plaza on the east side.

Buses and cars will drop off and pick up passengers on a roadway of patterned English brick. TV monitors will flash arrival and departure times of buses and trains and may feature advertising and news.

In the center of the roadway is a walkway--with “something in bloom and something fragrant every month of the year,” said Vogel.

Project officials envision throngs of people--and not just transit users killing time--relaxing in the gardens, exploring the artwork, listening to live music or enjoying an espresso.

Visitors will walk through a concourse, which features a 7,000-gallon aquarium--an 18-foot-long undulating wall. Patsaouras said the aquarium was financed out of the project’s art budget.

“I believe it will enhance our ridership,” he said, contending that the fish will help get schoolchildren interested in public transit.

At the very least, the aquarium will help commuters pass the time while waiting for buses and trains.

Inside the 87-foot-high half dome--known as the East Portal--is a giant mural depicting the multiethnic faces of Los Angeles.

“You’ll be walking on art,” Maya Emsden, director of the MTA’s art program, said, noting that symbols of items of historical importance to the area are embedded in the green stone floor.

Next to the new transit center is the new MTA headquarters, with its mix of Moorish-Spanish, Art Deco and Moderne architecture, its chandeliers, its Italian granite--and a shooting range for the MTA police.

Critics questioned whether the MTA should have built a new building, given the glut of Downtown office space.

A few years ago, the county’s two transit agencies were planning to build separate offices. But the plan was scotched after the agencies were merged into the MTA.

Officials contend that the MTA-owned headquarters will save money by bringing together 2,100 workers scattered around town at leased quarters, including an unpopular Skid Row building. Once the bonds are paid off in 30 years, the MTA will own its own headquarters and can divert the money previously spent on rent for public transit, they say.

Officials say the new building--built under budget and on time--also will help put an end to the rivalries between staffs of the old transit agencies by bringing them together under the same roof.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), the leading critic of the project, said, “What got Quentin Kopp [the Senate Transportation Committee chairman] into a state of anger about the MTA is when he saw this building.”

Said Kopp: “I was flabbergasted. I was in awe of such conspicuous consumption.”

Assemblyman Richard Katz, chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee, said the new MTA headquarters will become a “monument to wasted transit dollars.”

Hayden also said the MTA “presumes things that are just not likely to happen. It presumes that the existence of a rail system by itself will turn around the sprawling nature of Los Angeles County. . . . They’re trying to change history.”

Much has been said about the Italian granite, but officials say it represents a small portion of the project--about $500,000. Officials say that 87% of the stone used on the building is American--including 2,000 blocks of Minnesota limestone. Patsaouras said the Italian granite was cheaper than the domestic variety, and the English brick was more durable.

Officials also said the cost per square foot of the headquarters is comparable to other public and private office buildings Downtown.

Said Patsaouras: “The MTA as a public institution owes it to the citizens of Los Angeles and the generations to come to create a building and a public space that we can all be proud of and enjoy.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

New Transit Center

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is nearing completion of a new 26-story headquarters and the Gateway Intermodal Transit Center alongside historic Union Station. The transit center is designed to be the major transportation hub for Los Angeles in the 21st Century. Workers have already begun moving into the new headquarters, and the transit center will open early next month. It is envisioned as the first phase of the development of the Alameda neighborhood, which over time would include a hotel, offices and housing between Union Station and the transit center.