Grand Change for the Avenue?

Following the groundbreaking for the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall last week, anyone who believes that a city’s values are measured by the quality of its civic buildings must have breathed a sigh of relief. The concert hall will become one of the most important landmarks in the city’s architectural history. Its presence downtown, on Grand Avenue, will have a far greater effect on the civic landscape than the Getty Center in Brentwood, which peers down on our sprawling city with regal detachment. And the concert hall will almost certainly be more eloquent as a work of architecture.

But to those who wonder about the future of Grand Avenue, the concert hall’s resurrection will probably elicit equal measures of hope and despair. Despite years of rhetoric about transforming Grand Avenue into a lively cultural hub, this crucial cultural center remains a muddle of isolated landmarks mixed with sterile corporate towers. Its sidewalks remain empty and can’t begin to compete with the urban complexity and pedestrian energy of banal developments like Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. Under the circumstances, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that board members at the Museum of Contemporary Art have talked of packing up their museum and moving west.

If Grand Avenue is ever to shed its image as another failed urban wasteland, it will have to offer more than a smattering of disconnected cultural institutions. Future development will have to aspire to the architectural standards set by Gehry and Rafael Moneo, architect of the nearby Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, also under construction. And any new plan for the area must reflect a more sweeping understanding of downtown’s urban identity. In a city that continues to evolve into a collection of loosely related enclaves, that identity will have to have the power and complexity to attract those who already occupy downtown, as well as Los Angeles’ more far-flung inhabitants.

As a growing sense of urgency rises about the fate of the street, some plans are being laid. Several months ago, for instance, officials of the Performing Arts Center (formerly the Music Center) hired Bauer and Wiley Architects to see if the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s drab central plaza could be made more appealing to pedestrians. Meanwhile, the Community Redevelopment Agency and Suisman Urban Design have revived a proposal to build a pedestrian and retail esplanade along Grand Avenue that would extend between 5th and Temple Streets. Equally important, city officials have been quietly soliciting proposals for the development of what is currently two parking lots immediately south of Disney Hall and a third across the street.

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Of these, the CRA-sponsored scheme is by far the most advanced--and also the most troubling. The plan strives to link Grand Avenue’s various cultural landmarks with pedestrian traffic. Anchored at one end by a statue of former Mayor Tom Bradley and at the other by a cluster of restaurants, the design’s main feature is a three-block esplanade modeled on Barcelona’s Las Ramblas. On the famous Spanish boulevard, the esplanade is a broad pedestrian strip that runs down the middle of the avenue, sprinkled with flower shops, cafes and newspaper stands. Suisman’s design houses similar functions inside a series of small kiosks--simple skeletal frames that support a canopy, lighting and electrical outlets--and surrounds them with rows of date palms.

But the esplanade scheme, projected to cost a mere $2 million, reinforces some fundamental mistakes already inherent to the development of the street. Pushing pedestrian activity into the middle of the street will only drain the existing sidewalks of the basic elements of a pedestrian city--shops, restaurants, groceries and newsstands. And, like the original 1983 California Plaza scheme, Suisman’s plan sets the cultural landmarks along a ceremonial axis, rather than envisioning the avenue as part of a larger organic whole.

By contrast, the Performing Arts Center plan--although only in the embryonic stages of development--works to foster some key urban links to the surrounding civic fabric. There are some muddled ideas here: Performing Arts Center officials, for instance, are considering straightening a slight bend in the avenue that runs between 1st and Temple Streets so that a strip of retail shops and restaurants could be embedded along the base of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, even though placing the restaurants across the street would do more to draw pedestrian traffic into the neighborhood and off the plaza. But they are also searching for ways to link the plaza to the courthouse plaza across the street, which would begin to strengthen the main east-west axis that extends from Albert C. Martin’s exquisite 1964 Department of Water and Power building on Hope Street down the hill to City Hall--creating a potentially powerful civic corridor.

Neither the CRA nor the Performing Arts Center’s plan, however, reflects a broad understanding of downtown’s urban patterns. The completion of the missing segment of 2nd Street that connects Grand Avenue and Olive Street, for instance, will do more to revive the avenue than any repairs to the avenue. That simple gesture would begin to link the avenue’s emerging cultural pieces with the thriving activity of Broadway, historic landmarks such as the Million Dollar Theater and St. Vibiana’s Cathedral--and even Little Tokyo.

Even simpler moves could have equal significance to the avenue’s future. Gehry once suggested transforming the Founder’s Room of Disney Hall--one of the building’s most magnificent spaces--into a public restaurant, a generous gesture that could draw the public up into the site’s luscious gardens and enliven 1st Street.

Such gestures begin to suggest how downtown’s various ethnic communities--the Latino culture that thrives on Broadway; Little Tokyo; and Chinatown--could become part of a more inclusive, complex urban vision, something that the avenue’s planners have so far rejected. Part of the problem stems from the notion that Grand Avenue should be an enclave for high art--and the related belief that its constituents should come from the supposedly cultured living rooms of Santa Monica and Pasadena, not the ethnic enclaves of downtown.

Whatever the cause, that fortress-like mentality has already contributed to a series of missteps along the avenue. In the design for the Colburn School of Music, for instance, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer and their clients neglected to include any commercial space, a stunning omission because practically everyone admits the avenue is desperately in need of pedestrian life. Even Disney Hall suffers from a degree of urban paranoia: Its gorgeous garden is barely accessible from Grand Avenue, because in the early stages of the design Music Center officials worried it would become a refuge for criminals and derelicts. The recent addition of Philharmonic offices along the site’s southern edge only adds to that sense of detachment.

The concert hall’s main facade, on the other hand, is a model of how to make strong urban connections. Flanked by a cafe and bookshop, the hall’s elegant entry foyer is sheathed entirely in glass, transforming it into an enormous public room. Above, the building’s ribbon-like, stainless-steel facade bows gently outward to form a canopy over the sidewalk.

City officials will need even more aggressive planning if they expect the avenue to thrive as a cultural center. In a hopeful sign, the mayor’s office has asked Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design to consider moving to the avenue, even though officials will not officially be soliciting proposals for the two parking lot sites until February. Art students could serve as the human glue that would bind the various cultural elements of the street to the rest of downtown. And with a faculty and student population of nearly 2,000, the move would reinforce the street’s identity as a place where art and culture are produced as well as consumed.

The completion of Disney Hall and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels will reinforce Los Angeles’ growing stature as a place of genuine cultural depth. But the city needs to continue tapping into the best creative minds if Grand Avenue is to succeed. It must build a landscape of architectural landmarks that reflects the city’s increasingly complex cultural identity--its mix of social and ethnic backgrounds, high and low culture, symphonies and action films. The alternative is to try to impose a conventional downtown on a city that is not at all conventional, a hard blow to its cultural legacy.