Disney Hall Drive: Back on Track?

While leaders of the troubled Walt Disney Concert Hall project acknowledge they have not yet secured a mega-gift that will eliminate a $150-million fund-raising gap, officials said this week that recent donations and pledges, totaling $22.5 million, plus strong interest from charitable foundations, are fueling greater confidence in the project than ever before.

Though he would not reveal any names, real estate developer Eli Broad, who six months ago assumed a volunteer leadership role with Mayor Richard Riordan in the fund-raising effort, said “a number of corporations” have shown new willingness to donate in the $5-million to $10-million range, one has expressed interest in a $15-million “naming opportunity” for a portion of the hall and one charitable foundation has shown strong intentions to offer a gift “in the $25-million range.”

Disney Hall fund-raisers and Los Angeles County officials attribute the stepped-up activity to the example set by recent donations of $5 million from the Times Mirror Foundation, a $7.5-million anonymous gift, and promised personal gifts of $5 million or more from Riordan and Broad. These, along with an earlier $2-million donation from the Parsons Foundation, add up to nearly half the amount needed to meet the $50-million goal by June 30, the deadline set by the county, which provided the land at 1st Street and Grand Avenue and has financed and already built an underground parking garage on the site.

Sources close to the project confirm that California’s Ahmanson and Keck foundations are among five organizations that have been solicited for donations. However, Ahmanson Foundation President Robert H. Ahmanson strongly denied persistent rumors that his foundation has committed to a gift.

A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Philharmonic--the tenant for Disney Hall if it is built--also confirmed that the orchestra’s music director Esa-Pekka Salonen and Philharmonic executive vice president and managing director Ernest Fleischmann have made personal donations, although they declined to reveal the amounts.

While Harry Hufford, a former county chief administrative officer and investment executive, remains chief executive officer of Disney 1, the official oversight committee for the Disney Hall project, Broad is heading up the committee in charge of meeting the fund-raising goals. Broad says that committee includes Mark Willes, chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer of Times Mirror Corp., parent company of The Times; Arco president and chief executive officer Mike R. Bowlin; and Los Angeles attorney Dan Belin. The group meets every few weeks with Music Center Chairman Andrea Van de Kamp, Music Center executive vice president and chief operating officer Nicholas Goldsborough, the mayor and County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

Expressing optimism, Broad said this week that the fund-raising effort may even extend beyond the $150 million to the sum of $200 million, with the extra funds targeted for sprucing up the existing Music Center complex of theaters on downtown’s Bunker Hill, as well as establishing endowments for new programming and the Music Center’s resident companies. He said one plan for improving the complex would extend the Music Center site by closing 1st Street to traffic, creating a larger public plaza.

“Just building Disney Hall is not the answer,” Broad said. “The Music Center is a great institution, but one that is over 30 years old and showing its age in many ways. Plus we need new programming to reach out to new communities.”

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Even the county’s deadline seems to be loosening up, according to Yaroslavsky. “There is a deadline . . . but if momentum appears to be moving in the direction of funding the hall, then the last thing the county wants to do is frustrate a work in progress. The difference [now] is, when the county set the deadline a year and a half ago, nothing was happening.”

“I can’t honestly report to you that there is a commitment of $50 million or $100 million at this point in time, and I think that if there is none by July 1 there’s going to be a problem,” Yaroslavsky continued. ‘But Eli [Broad] is visiting with a lot of people, and the mayor is visiting with a lot of people, and there is a new ambience, a new atmosphere within the very same community that was very pessimistic a year and a half ago.”

The deadline was set in 1995 by then-county chief administrative officer Sally Reed. Her successor, David Janssen, could not be reached for comment.

Yaroslavsky acknowledged that any fund-raising delay that results in postponing construction could increase cost estimates, but added: “The one good thing about Eli is, he used to build homes, he knows how to build and knows the constraints under which we are operating in terms of time and value of money.” Broad claims a minor delay in light of current inflation rates should not cause any large jump in current cost estimates.

Yaroslavsky noted that architect Frank Gehry’s scale models of the interior and exterior of Disney Hall, currently on display at downtown’s Museum of Contemporary Art, have helped improve public perception of Gehry’s unorthodox design. MOCA director Richard Koshalek concurs.

“What I’ve heard from talking to the public is that this is the first time they’ve seen it beyond sketchy photographs in the newspaper,” Koshalek said. “I think it’s changed people’s perception of the value of this project. We know at MOCA that any time we introduce the public to the artist . . . the public more deeply believes there is something here of artistic merit.”

Added Koshalek: “We’ve been through this once before, and everyone’s expectations have gotten very high--and it’s crashed. We can’t let this thing crash once more. If it does, I think it’s over for downtown L.A. for a long period of time.

“Not forever--but for a long period of time.”