Plans Taking Shape to Help Grand Ave. Match Its Name

Prominent names in architecture, real estate and religion gathered in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday to ponder this question: How can Grand Avenue live up to its name?

Such important new landmarks as the Disney Concert Hall and the Roman Catholic cathedral are planned to be built on Bunker Hill along Grand Avenue over the next few years. But the six-block stretch of the street itself, also home to the Music Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, remains a confusing and even hostile environment for visitors, many people complain.

Participants in Saturday’s meeting agreed that they hoped Grand Avenue would be transformed into a thriving, pedestrian-friendly thoroughfare. They included cathedral architect Jose Rafael Moneo, concert hall designer Frank O. Gehry, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, developer Robert Maguire and John E. Molloy, administrator of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, which sponsored the gathering.

With the new Colburn School of Performing Arts under construction next to MOCA and the other Grand Avenue projects on the drawing boards, the participants agreed the time was right to improve the street’s lighting, landscaping, sidewalks and retail shops. Mahony was credited with spurring the idea in recent months.

“This is an opportunity to make strong streetscape changes to enhance Grand Avenue as a cultural spine for downtown,” explained Ayahlushim Hammond, the CRA project manager for Bunker Hill. “It could be an amazing boulevard to walk.”

Moneo, visiting from Madrid, agreed, saying he hoped Grand Avenue would one day turn into a promenade from the cathedral to the Central Library on 5th Street. “A sense of very livable space is what it is all about,” he said.

But as the group of 30 saw during an hourlong walk Saturday, changes will not be easy.

One of the main problems is that a stretch of Grand Avenue south of 1st Street is really a platform bridge above garage roadways. That makes it difficult to grow big trees with deep roots and creates many odd and frightening barriers to pedestrians. A sense of isolation is worsened by the way cross streets, such as 2nd Street, don’t connect with Grand and how parking garages in the Music Center and county mall make walking unpleasant.

Gehry, fresh from the triumph of his new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, pointed out that inflexible Los Angeles regulations for traffic patterns and street plantings have made it difficult to create a nicer atmosphere on Grand Avenue. He and others discussed the idea of a special planning district in the area that might be exempt from some of those rules.

After a public introductory session and the hike, architects and urban planners stayed for a closed-door design meeting.

It was a rare event to have on hand both Moneo and Gehry, past recipients of the Pritzker Prize, considered the Nobel of architecture. Other participants included Norman Pfeiffer, of the Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer firm that designed the Colburn school; James Polshek, who is designing a new master plan for the Music Center; landscape architect Laurie Olin, who worked on Pershing Square; and urban planner Douglas Suisman and landscape architect Lauren Melendrez, who worked together on plans to revive the downtown Civic Center area.

The CRA is expected to cull the resulting ideas and issue a report in a few weeks. The agency has allocated $825,000 for potential streetscape improvements, such as decorative light poles, new trees and more attractive pavements. Other work might be done as the new projects are built, officials said.