Civic Center a Diamond in the Rough for Planners

In considering how to beautify and invigorate the Civic Center neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles, city planners decided that “even the laziest bureaucrat” will walk 10 minutes rather than drive.

Such 10-minute walks form the basis of a new plan that proposes to convert the struggling district of government buildings into a pleasure spot for pedestrians. The study defines the Civic Center as a diamond-shape area formed by 10-minute, or half-mile, walks in four directions from the rotunda of City Hall.

Most new or restored government buildings should be located within that diamond while city, county, state and federal agencies should share such facilities as heating plants and cafeterias, the plan urges. Continued exodus of government functions “will ultimately be devastating to the Civic Center and the heart of our city,” the study says.

The plan’s authors also suggest the district can be made pedestrian-friendly with better plantings, lighting and signs. In a mixture of fresh and borrowed ideas, they advocate a new square-block park south of City Hall, a Main Street bridge lined with a Mexican-style arcade of cafes and shops over the Santa Ana Freeway to Olvera Street and a series of pleasant walkways between Little Tokyo and the federal complex.

The goal “is to create a Civic Center that is active and vital, something we can all be proud of,” said Lauren Melendrez, the landscape architect who led a group of five consulting firms on the $175,000 study.

Too often, she added, visitors and the area’s 30,000 employees find the Civic Center disorienting and even scary. They face monumental buildings, vast parking garages and difficult uphill hikes.

Now in draft form, the Los Angeles Civic Center Shared Facilities and Enhancement Plan is to be submitted Sept. 24 to the Civic Center Authority, a city-county agency that commissioned it last March. Backers hope its ideas will be adopted later in formal city rules and remain a guide for the next 20 years.

The plan does not offer price-tags for its recommendations and concedes that unusual cooperation among governments will be needed. But the report stresses that change can come block-by-block as new projects are possibly built, such as new headquarters for the police department or the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Furthermore, it suggests formation of a joint powers authority with increased powers to issue bonds and supervise improvements.

“It is not going to be a wholesale leveling or a wholesale transformation overnight. It will be incremental, but incremental based on the backbone of what is already here,” said Los Angeles City Council member Rita Walters, co-chairwoman of the authority along with County Supervisor Gloria Molina.

Coordination among various agencies “will be a test of the maturity of these governments,” said Daniel Rosenfeld, the city Department of General Services official who was an influential voice in the study.

Some proposals in the report are intended to be relatively easy and inexpensive.

For example, the enclosed pedestrian bridge over Main Street between City Hall and City Hall East should be opened to sunlight and mountain views with balconies and connected to the street with escalators, according to the plan. Work could be done as part of the expected seismic repairs at City Hall.

“That would be a perfect time to convert that bridge to a public amenity instead of an inaccessible, bland tube,” said architect Douglas Suisman, whose Public Works Design firm was part of the study team.

More ambitious and expensive are two items that have been discussed for years as part of other reports.

One is to move the shops from the underground mall beneath City Hall East onto street locations and to use their former spaces for a municipal permit center and for children’s oriented services near the Children’s Museum. Another would line a Main Street freeway bridge with shops and turn what now is a nasty walk to El Pueblo into a pleasant experience.

Perhaps the most radical proposal is to create a new Civic Square park on the block between 1st, 2nd, Spring and Main streets now containing an aging Caltrans building. The plan calls for the new Roman Catholic cathedral, currently shopping for a location, to be built just to the south. With City Hall to the north and the Los Angeles Times headquarters to the west, the new park could host political rallies and ceremonies swearing in new citizens, said plan consultant William Fain, of the Johnson Fain Pereira architecture firm.

Such ideas are a revolt against the 1960s plan that created much of the neighborhood going uphill to the Music Center. The new report contends that the past effort did not succeed because it stressed cars and ignored how hills isolate people.

For 30 years, the Civic Center’s soul was supposed to be open spaces running on the hillside (east to west) from the Department of Water and Power, through the Music Center, the county courthouse and administration complex, down to City Hall. The idea was only partly realized, and the new plan calls for lush gardens in those spaces and an extension across what is now a parking lot in front of City Hall.

The new report stresses the need for north-south corridors, returning to the city’s original growth patterns along the river flood plain. It would restore meaning to the name of Main Street.

The proposed diamond reaches to El Pueblo and Union Station on the north, the DWP to the west, the state Reagan Building to the south, and the Japanese American National Museum and Geffen Museum of Contemporary Art to the east.

Also written by the RAW Architecture firm and the Landmark Partners economic analysis company, the report proposes many other improvements. Among them are:

* A so-called civic commons building on the vacant site along First Street between Broadway and Spring Street. That structure could contain meeting rooms, a health club, adult education classes and child care for area employees.

* Turn 1st Street into a shaded boulevard with landscaped medians.

* Return city departments on Figueroa Street and southern portions of Spring to the core, possibly in rehabilitated historic structures.

* More housing along 2nd and 3rd streets.

* A new police headquarters on the existing Parker Center site, but ensuring walkways to Little Tokyo. New federal courts in the old County Hall of Justice and a school district headquarters replacing a state building at Broadway and 1st.