Bridging L.A.’s Cultural Divide

In the landscape of the American imagination, highways are the central symbol of escape and renewal, of the outsider’s mythological ability to flee historical and personal baggage. But freeways also evoke more sinister images of isolation. By carving paths through the landscape, they form physical barriers that cut us off from one another. They are emblems of both liberation and social indifference.

The mile-long section of the Hollywood Freeway that divides downtown’s government district from the ethnic enclaves of Olvera Street and Chinatown is just such a barrier. Practically, this segment of freeway is an urban planner’s nightmare: It is the rare Angeleno who would willingly cross the freeway overpass from downtown to Olvera Street. The walk to Union Station from downtown is a maze of off-ramps and dead urban spaces. But the barriers created by the Hollywood Freeway at downtown’s northern edge also signify a symbolic divide: between the city’s civic core and its older historic center, between government power-brokers and their ethnic constituents.

A recent competition sponsored by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to strengthen the pedestrian connection between the two sides of the freeway here seeks to repair that urban fault line. The winning design, by Thom Mayne of Santa Monica-based Morphosis, both widens the Main Street overpass and creates a collection of signs and rest stops that could visually link two parts of the city.

Marked by LED readouts, flickering video screens and a restaurant that hovers precariously above eight lanes of speeding cars, the design aims to bombard the surrounding neighborhoods with a mixed array of cultural images. If it is built--at a projected cost of $5 million, half from private funds--it will accomplish what more ambitious civic plans have not: It will transform what was once a vision of urban blight into a lively civic forum.

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To those with a healthy memory, the design may seem oddly familiar. More than a decade ago, then-Mayor Tom Bradley and the MTA sponsored a similar competition on the same site. Wildly more ambitious, that competition sought to create a symbol for the city’s immigrants that would rival New York’s Statue of Liberty. The dazzling design by New York architecture firm Asymptote, with a projected cost in excess of $40 million, included gigantic fish tanks, a museum of immigrant life and massive film screens, all supported within a 4-block-long steel frame whose dynamic, open form seemed to float above the freeway.

Despite its genuine originality, Asymptote’s design also harked back to a long tradition of urban structures whose muscular forms and structural virtuosity were meant to celebrate notions of progress and mass culture. Think of Vladimir Tatlin’s unbuilt 1920 Monument to the Third International--made of spiraling bands of steel--and Paris’ playful, machine-like Pompidou Center. Each continues to evoke images of cultural renewal long after its design.

Any hope of the Asymptote design being built, however, withered in the face of public ridicule. Like so many original public projects, “Steel Cloud” was perceived as chaotic, ugly and--perhaps worst of all to some--it looked like nothing ever seen before. So it is not surprising that Morphosis’ new design is less heroic in scale. Moreover, in seeking to forge a pedestrian connection between civic downtown and its adjacent communities, its ambitions are more local.

Yet there remain striking similarities between the two designs. Like its predecessor, Morphosis’ scheme is supported on a scaffolding-like frame that would rise from the freeway median. Layers of flickering signs and displays, set parallel to the car lanes below, would overlook the city on both sides of the freeway. Among the proposed signs is a “Tri-Action” billboard that will include flashing slogans by artist Jenny Holzer as well as a mirror that will reflect cars speeding by below. Other displays could provide commuters with more mundane information: weather updates, traffic reports and train schedules.

But the two sides of the 95-foot, billboard-like frame will also subtly reflect the economic realities of the different communities. While the images facing City Hall evoke a slicker ethos--the signage facing north is intentionally more low-tech. There, historical texts are carved out of an oblong-shaped Cor-ten steel panel and long, flowing banners announce community events. By placing two opposing aesthetics back to back, the design subtly alludes to the friction inherent in bringing the two communities together.

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In case some might see such gestures as nothing more than the typical musings of a clever art project, Morphosis intends to give the design a practical bent as well. By widening the Main Street overpass, it would ensure a more generous pedestrian connection between the two sides of the freeway. A slender, concrete trellis--planted with bougainvillea--will shade the walkway from summer heat. Glass display cases will line one side of the walkway, their function still undefined.

The restaurant, however, a bulbous form perched at the site’s southwest corner like a zeppelin that has drifted off course, is more original. The structure looms over the freeway below, its exterior skin seemingly sliced open so that diners can peer down at passing traffic while they eat. Here, visitors will be suspended between two worlds, a not-too-subtle metaphor for the dislocation of immigrant life. But that sense of imbalance--of a society in perpetual motion--also evokes the urban anonymity and subsequent freedom that draw us to the city.

Mayne conceived these elements as part of a broader urban scheme. The restaurant’s concrete structure, for instance, spans Aliso Street, suggesting potential future connections back to the Los Angeles Mall.

Meanwhile, one of the keys to the project’s short-term success will be the use of the giant display screens. Who will control the images they project--City Hall, community activists or museum curators? Will the screens comment on civic issues or push Coca-Cola? Will they be in English, Spanish or Cantonese? The potential for imaginative discourse is unlimited, but not guaranteed. What the project reminds us is that the exchange of ideas--that debate, play and seduction--can bind as closely as roads and freeways.