Digging In Deep : HEARTS OF THE CITY / Where dilemmas are aired and unsung heros and resiliency are celebrated.

Today, like most days, the big hole in the ground just sits there. Up on Bunker Hill. Don’t say much, don’t do much, this hole in the ground. Just sits. Waits.

Maybe the Walt Disney Concert Hall will rise from that spot next to the Music Center. Or maybe not. Right now, work has been stopped and nobody knows if it will start again. And that’s why I would put the big hole’s fate on the Top 10 list of civic dramas to watch in L.A. Because this project has taken on meaning in the grandest sense.

If actually built, the Frank Gehry-designed concert hall would stand as the first major addition to the Music Center in more than 25 years. And it would prove that L.A. can still gather itself to erect a grand, pooh-bah gesture to the performing arts. Put aside for a moment the question of whether it “should” do this. The city is going to try. Some mysterious law seems to say that cities need these monument-building exercises from time to time as proof of their continued muscularity.

Right now, the big hole has put L.A.’s civic muscularity very much in doubt. For those who haven’t followed the blow-by-blow, here’s some of the highlights:

* 1987: Walt Disney’s widow, Lillian B. Disney, offers $50 to build a hall for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She specifies that ground-breaking must begin by 1992.

* 1988: Los Angeles architect Frank O. Gehry wins the design competition for the building. The design, which resembles a pile of cardboard boxes collapsing in a rainstorm, comes without a price tag.

* 1992: Organizers decide to proceed even though they still don’t know the final cost. They hold a “symbolic” groundbreaking to satisfy Disney and dig the big hole. The county partially fills the hole with an underground parking garage.

* 1995: The formal cost projection finally arrives. Price tag: $200 million. Breathing stops in the Music Center executive offices. No one has that kind of money. Project grinds to halt.

And that’s where it stands today as the city tries to muster its wherewithal. Everything and everyone has been blamed for the fiasco, from Gehry’s complex design to the organizers’ screw-ups.

But the real issue is otherwise. Because, hey, every civic monument comes with costs overruns. In fact, if L.A. manages to build a new concert hall with a breakthrough design for only $200 million, that would amount to an accomplishment.

No, the fascinating part of the Disney Hall story is not the cost overrun, it’s the virtual collapse that came in its wake. Once upon a time, L.A. rose easily to this kind of challenge. Now, it’s being brought to its knees.

You need only look across the street from the Disney Hall shutdown to understand the contrast. Thirty-five years ago, the Music Center was conceived in all its ‘50s Roman grandeur, then expanded twice, and built. The budgets went up, and still it was built.

At one amazing luncheon of the time, Dorothy Buffum Chandler, wife of then-publisher of The Times and general rainmaker for the drive, announced expansions of the design while her co-chairman rose to say that “whatever these magnificent facilities may cost is of no consequence.”

The chief administrator for the county then stood to beam his approbation of the expansions and said, “It must be the biggest thing of its kind on the earth, unequaled anywhere.”

Today, the oratory sounds almost grotesque but it measures the huge difference between then and now. What happened in the interim? Stuart Ketchum, longtime board member at the Music Center and a real estate developer, says we are seeing the results of two decades of dismemberment of the old, ruling elite here.

“Twenty five years ago it was easy to identify the movers and shakers,” he says. “Any of us could name the 10 people around town who ran things. They were the Chandlers, Asa Call, the Ahmansons, and a few others.

“At the movie studios you had a half-dozen people who ran things. And they were all local to L.A. We had Security Pacific and Carter Hawley Hale and Union Bank and Lockheed.”

Needless to say, all gone now. The Pasadena-San Marino axis has slipped into retreat. Hollywood has been absorbed by multinationals. Many of the old corporations have gone to seed or been eaten by bigger fish.

“L.A. has plenty of money around but it’s new money and who knows how to get it anymore?” Ketchum asks. “Spielberg could fund the symphony hall with his pocket change but that doesn’t seem to interest him. The same with someone like Geffen. The Roseannes of the world are not the same as the Lew Wassermans.”

*

And that’s why the big hole sits at the top of Bunker Hill, partially filled with a partially finished parking garage. The organizers have put together a new group called Disney I that will attempt to rescue the project. In December they will submit their plan to the county Board of Supervisors and it will project that they need another $150 million or so to complete the job.

Several of those involved seem to believe that success will require an initial contribution of $50 million just to get the ball rolling.

From who? Nobody knows. As one organizer said, do you get 10 people to pledge $5 million apiece or two people to pledge $25 million? Then he laughed.

In any case, it will be a drama worth watching. If they succeed we will get a flashy new symphony hall. If they don’t, the county will finish the parking garage, plant a few palms on the top floor--which is to say, the street level--and open it for business.

And there it will stand for the next decades, a strange facility missing its higher, better half. Not the monument that was intended, surely, but a monument nonetheless to a uncertain time with an uncertain future.