DOWNTOWN : Back to the Future

Next Saturday at 10 a.m., after a shutdown of 27 years, the Olivet and the Sinai will carry passengers from Third and Hill streets to the top of Bunker Hill and return. The revival of the Angels Flight Railway, two funiculars ascending and descending an incline 315 feet in length, is not, at first glance, an Earth-shaking event. Yet, the revival of this historic structure, the shortest railway in the world, Los Angeles Landmark No. 4, has a message for the embattled downtown. Only by becoming more urban and less modernist-corporate can it survive.

These days, downtown Los Angeles is suffering a crisis of identity and expectation. To paraphrase Matthew Arnold in “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse,” downtown seems caught powerless between two worlds, the one dead (or dying), the other unable to be born. Everywhere one looks--City Hall, Parker Center, the subway project, Disney Hall, the acquisition and downsizing of First Interstate, high-rises with a vacancy rate of 22%--symbols of Los Angeles as modernist downtown, unified, commanding and corporate are under stress. One era seems to be ending, and the next is not in sight.The primary symbol of modern Los Angeles--indeed, the first modernist icon of its arrival as a metropolis in the 1920s--is City Hall. Designed by John C. Austin, John Parkinson and Albert C. Martin, it rises 28 stories above its four-story base, an Art Deco assertion of civic well-being surmounted by a Halicarnassan ziggurat linking Los Angeles with the cities of the ancient world. Few, if any, city halls in the nation have expressed the aspirations of a city for modernity and prosperity on an almost Babylonian scale, an assertion made even more dramatic given the 150-foot height limit in force for most of the existence of the building.

Now, the very survival of City Hall is open to question, as a seismic retrofitting project--initially authorized at $153 million and threatening to reach $300 million--halts. Now, with 24 stories vacant, debate centers on a $165-million recommendation announced earlier this month by an advisory panel. Many contend that the building has served its purpose and should be razed in favor of a more efficient and cost-effective structure. A less draconian proposal has the building remaining vacant above the 4th floor for an indefinite period--just another addendum to the downtown’s vacancy rate.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s tunneling project under Hollywood Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, meanwhile, the linchpin of the mega-billion-dollar subway project, is in equally perilous condition. Even as 250 workers address the 21 tons of debris in a sinkhole it created, the realization pervades the MTA that the unthinkable is being thought. It can now be imagined that the county would halt, for a generation or two, a subway project that, like City Hall in 1928, embodies a modern and modernist downtown as the hub of the metro region.

If all this were not enough, a report by Kosmont & Associates declares that the eight-story, 250,000-square-foot Parker Center, headquarters of the LAPD, is a disaster and should be demolished. But wasn’t the center, gleaming in modernist glass and geometry, only opened in 1955? Didn’t Chief William H. Parker, after whom the building was named in 1967, see in this structure the embodiment of the streamlined, austere, modernist police department he was creating for Los Angeles?

The continuing non-construction of the Frank O. Gehry-designed Disney Hall, stalled because of a $150-million funding gap, is yet another symbol of an embattled downtown. As is First Interstate, which, instead of soaring over the metropolis-like City Hall of old, a symbol of Los Angeles as a world banking center, succumbs to a $11.5-billion takeover by San Francisco-based Wells Fargo.

But the Olivet and the Sinai will soon be rising and descending Angels Flight. And what does this suggest? Nothing less than an opposing scenario: one in which the downtown, shaken in its corporate modernist identity, goes back to the future with a post-modernist repossession of the downtown not as modernist monolith, but as a diversified urban village (albeit a village of astonishing proportions) integrating housing, entertainment, commerce, governmental administration, a diversity of retail and pedestrian values everywhere.

Col. J. W. Eddy, we must remember, built Angels Flight in 1901 to join a residential district, Bunker Hill, with the flourishing retail and commercial streets below. The downtown of Eddy’s era was a city not yet in search of metropolitan status. Not surprisingly, it took a multigenerational Los Angeleno, attorney and civic activist John H. Welborne, president of the Angels Flight Railway Foundation, to spearhead the revival of the funicular. As a child, Welborne rode the Olivet and the Sinai with his parents, hearing from them tales of how his grandmother, who lived on Bunker Hill from 1895 to 1900, would shop on Spring, Broadway and Los Angeles streets. After Angels Flight opened in 1901, the trip was so much easier.

The revived Angels Flight, in short, can be taken as a symbol of another scenario for downtown, just as City Hall, Parker Center, Disney Hall, and First Interstate bespeak the embattlements of transition. The downtown plan, released a few years ago, does not call for modernist corporate structure. It calls, rather, for a patchwork quilt of thriving identities within the larger alembic of the downtown. That is what the revived Angels Flight points toward. That is what is happening.

The Bonaventure may be having its difficulties, but the restored, Spanish-Romanesque Biltmore, facing a similarly restored Pershing Square and adjacent to an elegantly restored Central Library, is doing just fine. The state of California has bought the long-vacant Robinsons Department Store on Broadway and will be converting it to a major governmental center. Ira Yellin, who restored the Bradbury building on Broadway, has even more ambitious plans for Grand Central Market and adjacent properties. Peter O’Malley is seriously exploring the possibility of building a football stadium adjacent to Dodger Stadium. The MTA Gateway Center has opened, reinforcing the hub identity of the downtown.

Efforts are underway to develop hotels along the Figueroa Corridor to serve the Convention Center and to link the Convention Center by tramway and para-transit with the hotels of the downtown. The University of Southern California, meanwhile, is rapidly becoming a downtown institution as it looks north for a connection along the Figueroa Corridor that would, at long last, see some town- and-gown development linking the university and the city.

Jobs and development, in other words, have not abandoned the downtown. What has abandoned the downtown is something more subtle, something related to cultural self-perception. Metro L.A. is too vast, too diverse and diversified, too much a mini-nation in urban circumstances to allow even the thought of one downtown to dominate its business, culture or social identity. Electronic technology, furthermore, is rapidly restructuring the spatialization of the modern city. The Information City of the future will not need to materialize its spatial center, having already possessed itself of numerous cyber-centers of electronic contact and communication.

Still, human beings have to be somewhere; and for the past 5,000 years or more, the most creative and energetic of them have preferred to be in cities. Nothing can replace the thrill, the anthropological rush if you will, of being in contact with one’s fellow human beings in that symphonic arrangement of space and time and human life called the city. Society, furthermore, needs to center itself on cities, lest the body politic dilate into solipsism and indifference. A purely suburban civilization runs the risk of producing a detached and self-preoccupied citizenry. Cities, by contrast, in both their achievements and their disasters, remind us constantly that we rise or fall together and must, therefore, seek community.

The new downtown is re-envisioning itself not as the commanding center of the metropolitan region, but as one of its most important constituents: a part that contains within itself all the elements of the whole, every aspect of urbanism brought together into that synergy called a city.

Some modernist structures, relics of an earlier identity, will survive the transition. City Hall will make it, I hope. Parker Center will have few mourners. But such modernist icons will survive in a downtown that is increasingly residential, increasingly pedestrian, increasingly diversified as to large-scale and small-scale enterprises, increasingly willing to see itself as one of the dozen or more metro-centers in the region.

Yet, the downtown will remain the historic core of the region. Here Los Angeles was founded. Here rose up the first residential districts, the first parks, the first synagogues, churches and cathedrals, the first great hotels. Let Los Angeles as Information City diversify itself into a thousand cyber-centers, it can never forget where it came from or what its aspirations were in those long-lost golden years when the Great Gatsby generation thrust City Hall skyward and surmounted it with a replica of one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world as if to say, “Here, in this City of Angels, if you are seeking wonders, behold now the Eighth.