The Pooh-Bahs Save Downtown

Last fall, a friend and I found ourselves on a morbid search through downtown. We had been attracted by the notice of an art show being staged in the ruins of an abandoned bank building.

We weren’t much interested in the art. What intrigued us was the building itself. We wanted to examine the remains of a corporate corpse.

According to the notice, this particular structure was not one of those long-dead buildings along Spring Street that have stood empty and forlorn for more than a decade now.

No, this building was freshly dead, located in the still-functioning zone of downtown, its floors littered with financial memos. A Japanese bank, riding the bubble, had bought the building in the 1980s and then walked away in the 1990s.

So we set out to find it, walking down 6th Street, only to discover that we had lost the address. No problem, we thought. We’d simply look for an abandoned building, and that would be it.

We spotted one--a steel and glass tower from the 1960s or ‘70s--and walked up. But no. Wrong abandoned building. Then we spotted another. Wrong again.

Finally we found the right corpse and enjoyed our necropsy. But the experience of the search had proved unsettling. Neither of us had realized just how many buildings stood empty in a downtown neighborhood we had thought was healthy.

From the outside, some of the empty buildings actually looked splendid physically. Others stood on prime corners or across from the California Club, one of the great temples of California business.

But when we looked closely, we saw the buildings were dead indeed, their doors locked, their windows dark. And they are still dead today.

I think about those buildings every time a government pooh-bah predicts that the latest mega-project is going to “revitalize” downtown. In the past year, by my count, we have been told that the new Staples sports arena will revitalize downtown, that the new Disney Concert Hall will revitalize downtown, that the new Catholic cathedral will revitalize downtown.

Edward Roski, one of the developers of the Staples Center, said at its groundbreaking: “This building will be a focal point of the revitalization of downtown Los Angeles.”

Oh yes. And after a fashion, of course, these statements are true. Can the Staples Center, with the Lakers as a tenant, do anything other than succeed in making great piles of money for somebody?

Likewise, Disney Concert Hall and the cathedral will draw crowds of a certain sort.

But they will not revitalize downtown. Like the now-aging Music Center--itself once predicted to revitalize downtown--they will more likely function as isolated, stand-alone projects having too little effect on the spreading death of downtown’s older neighborhoods.

Possibly, the pooh-bahs make their predictions about revitalization because they do not know downtown themselves and have never walked its streets.

But Nick Patsaouras has. A developer himself, Patsaouras has loved downtown for 25 years and struggled to bring it back to life. Here’s his assessment of the current situation in the older sections:

“Seventh Street is virtually deserted. Only a decade ago it still had stores like Brooks Bros. Now the buildings are boarded up. The same phenomenon has happened to most of the other east-west streets.

“Spring Street, of course, is just tragic. The whole eastern part of downtown is a fiasco.”

Notice that I keep referring to the “old section” of downtown. If you are not familiar with the situation, understand that Los Angeles’ downtown functions like few others.

In other cities--the healthy ones, at least--new development in the 1970s and 1980s got interspersed among older buildings. The older structures gave texture to the neighborhoods and the new buildings kept the economic pulse beating.

In unhealthy cities, the old downtowns were often bulldozed and replaced with modern towers and their chilly plazas. See Long Beach for a prime example of this approach.

But Los Angeles did neither. It simply abandoned its old downtown and built a new one next to it. The new one, known as Bunker Hill, then proceeded to suck the remaining life out of the old section, leaving it as an urban cadaver.

In effect, we created an economic apartheid in downtown. One glittering downtown and another doomed one, divided by an invisible line.

And there we stand today. The death zone spreads outward each year in the old section as more businesses abandon the neighborhood. And each year the decline grows more intractable.

Last week, I strolled through the hallways of the elegant Roosevelt Building at 7th and Flower streets, only a few blocks from Bunker Hill. It has managed to keep its meticulous outward appearance. But inside, whole floors that once housed physicians’ and attorneys’ offices now stand empty and haunted.

Farther down 7th, the old Clifton’s Cafeteria is now boarded up. Once, Clifton’s served customers who shopped at the huge Robinsons and Bullocks department stores along 7th. They are long gone, and concertina wire now coils around Clifton’s front door.

Both Clifton’s and the Roosevelt Building, like dozens of others, suffer this way even after several years of economic boom in Los Angeles. In our downtown, abandoned buildings rarely come back.

The peculiar history of the old section--its abandonment en masse--has left some trenchant ironies. Developer Ira Yellin, another passionate supporter of downtown, points out that Los Angeles’ old district now has the most extensive collection of 1920s and ‘30s-era office buildings of any city in the nation.

“The whole area was frozen in time,” Yellin says. “It’s like a museum. We didn’t tear down the buildings. We didn’t replace them. You’ll also notice that the streets have a feeling of uniformity because Los Angeles had a height limit at the time and everything was built to that limit.”

For Patsaouras and Yellin, this storehouse of vintage buildings represents a huge opportunity for the city. Just this sort of district has been converted by many other cities into thriving zones of apartments, retail commerce and night life.

“The only thing that will save this district is residential development of the old buildings,” says Yellin. “Once you get the residential part going, the rest will come along.”

A pretty dream, of course. You can picture block after block of pre-World War II buildings along Spring Street filled with rehabbed apartments, the residents spilling out onto cafes and theaters.

But it’s an old dream that has been tried before. And each time, Los Angeles has turned it into a nightmare. Yellin himself is the latest case in point.

In the early 1990s, Yellin’s investment company poured tens of millions of dollars, both private and public, into the Million Dollar Theatre building at Broadway and 3rd Street. The idea was to convert the magnificent but idle building into a residential enclave.

The building now stands fully occupied but the rehab costs soared to such heights that the project remains mired in debt, and Yellin admits that some new--and unknown--approach will be required to make such conversions work economically.

What’s clear is that the city fathers of Los Angeles have wasted precious little time or energy in trying to solve the problems of the old downtown. In many ways, the old district is treated like the crazy aunt in the closet, an embarrassment that everyone tiptoes past as quietly as possible.

Like the crazy aunt, though, the old downtown refuses to go away. And one day, perhaps, the ever-rising population of the city and congealing of the freeways will create conditions that will lead to a rebirth of the old section whether or not the city fathers encourage it. It’s happened in other cities and could happen here.

In the meantime, the pooh-bahs of the city could do us all one favor. The next time they feel the urge to predict that the next mega-project is going to bless us with street life, urban energy and a revitalized downtown, just let it rest.