What the Staples Center Could Do for L.A.

“The lights are much brighter there/You can forget all your

troubles, forget all your cares/So go Downtown/Things’ll be great when you’re Downtown.” Petula Clark, songstress and urbanologist, from her 1964 hit “Downtown.”

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Here is the short course on the American downtown at the end of the 20th century: A lot of cities are striving to overcome the Doughnut Syndrome--communities surrounded by nice stuff but hollow in the middle--by turning their urban core into entertainment meccas. Call it the Fun Zone theory: Millions of suburbanites are lured downtown for entertainment, and they return to shop, dine and stroll in areas reborn by their presence. Perhaps some may decide to move there, restoring a residential core to long-dead city streets.

“Except for the last 40 years, cities throughout history have been seen as adult playgrounds, centers of culture and entertainment,” says Michael Beyard, vice president of the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit Washington, D.C., organization. “That’s what cities are trying now to recapture.” So yesterday’s Roxy becomes tomorrow’s 16-screen multiplex, yesterday’s bank becomes artists’ lofts. The doughnut hole fills up, the good stuff returns to the middle, the great restaurants, the movie palaces, the busy hotels, the department stores and, increasingly, big-time sports. At a dizzying pace, owners of professional franchises are committing to new downtown baseball parks, football stadiums and sports arenas.

Los Angeles is late to join in this Fun Zone/urban renaissance dream, but with the opening of the Staples Center, hopes are soaring. Civic leaders are rapturous over the possibility that the pieces are falling into place at last, and that the new arena will prove the catalyst. They are aware that L.A.’s history is fraught with failed hopes for reviving its once glorious downtown. They also know that the arena could be wildly successful as a sports and entertainment center, while doing nothing to invigorate the areas around it. Expert after expert says it is critical for a city to have an overarching plan for downtown and not to rely exclusively on a new arena.

Fearful of another stumble, public officials and private boosters have tried to turn L.A.’s slow entry into the Fun Zone approach to their advantage. They have studied the experiences of other cities, including Cleveland, Phoenix and Denver, looking for lessons for L.A. More recently, a reporter taking a similar tour of those cities found the following:

--An arena or ballpark alone will not redevelop a blighted area. If it worked that way the South Bronx, home of the New York Yankees baseball team, and Inglewood, where the Lakers and Kings have played for years, would be prospering, and the Detroit downtown would be booming.

--To be successful as a redevelopment tool, a ballpark or arena must be part of an overall downtown plan to attract business and industry by granting tax and zoning breaks, improving streets, installing fiber-optic cables and, most importantly, providing a high-performance urban school system. Those are all expensive and take longer to accomplish than predicted in the rosy forecasts of sports facility boosters.

--When a city uses public money to build an arena or ballpark, there will be controversy from start to finish, and beyond. In some notable cases, these projects have encountered fierce opposition from voters. The Staples Center is being built with a relatively small government contribution of $12 million.

--There is a chasm between downtown enthusiasts and skeptics over the value of using any public money to help build a new arena. Skeptics, often armed with academic studies, say taxpayers don’t recoup their investment. Public officials and others say the eggheads who conducted the studies know the cost of everything but the value of nothing, and that many of the benefits are intangible.

--There is a mayoral mountain of stories about how arenas and ballparks help create jobs and attract capital investment to downtowns. But there is precious little hard proof.

--The critical element to revival is new housing that appeals to the middle class and the affluent, making downtown into a real neighborhood, not just a place to visit for fun. “When people start relocating their residences there, a mayor knows he has succeeded with downtown,” says Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza, who became a believer when he bought a food-equipment business across from Camden Yards in Baltimore.

WHICH WAY L.A.

Without doubt, there are promising signs. In recent years, more and more people have moved into apartments and condominiums on Bunker Hill and near the Staples site. The apartment vacancy rate downtown is among the lowest in the city, and there are encouraging efforts underway, such as developer Tom Gilmore’s ambitious plans to put 235 lofts in the Old Bank District on 4th Street. The Walt Disney Concert Hall now under construction will give Angelenos another reason to come downtown.

Also worth noting is the obliteration in recent years of one myth: that Southern Californians shun dense urban environments, preferring to spend their time in shopping malls or suburbia. The emergence of teeming Old Town Pasadena and the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, as well as promising trends in Hollywood, are demonstrating that people here are drawn to vibrant city streets--provided they are safe.

Staples Center owners plan to put an “entertainment zone” on 30 acres across from the arena, offering food, a hotel, shopping and other amenities to attract not only fans but also the waves of conventioneers who come to the adjacent Convention Center.

In the view of downtown enthusiasts, the Staples Center will lure people to an area that is changing for the better. “We believe a lot of people will be coming down for games and concerts that haven’t been in downtown L.A. in 20 years, though they probably live within a 30- to 40-mile radius,” says Carol E. Schatz, president and chief executive officer of the Central City Assn. and the Downtown Center Business Improvement District. “Our intentions are to get them out of their cars and get them to walk around, to get into the habit of coming downtown.”

Michael Dear, director of the Southern California Studies Center at USC, says the new arena can be a major step in improving the corridor from USC/Exposition Park along Figueroa to downtown. “The real multiplier effect of any single center like Staples is what happens around it,” Dear says. “The city needs to create a livable-place atmosphere along the corridor, with retailing, landscaping and transportation.” In other words, if you build it and they come, will they have a reason to stay?

While others may decry the slow pace of Los Angeles’ downtown redevelopment effort, Dear says it has allowed the city to make more careful decisions rather than grab at any privately financed plan put forth. But with Staples completed, the task will be to accelerate the pace to make sure the arena does not become an island surrounded by a sea of parking lots, Dear says. “Staples is a cusp for the downtown, South-Central area. But to make it really happen, it will need someone to give it a shove. It could be [Mayor Richard] Riordan, a private figure like Eli Broad, or even Steven Sample, president of USC.”

Although the neighborhood around the center remains fairly bleak these days, Schatz sees unmistakable signs of a revival: a nearby Holiday Inn undergoing renovation, retailers and restaurant owners showing interest in moving in along Figueroa Street. She foresees increased public transportation shuttling fans and concert-goers. “I think you’re going to see a very different Figueroa in the next few years.”

Or you won’t. Councilman Joel Wachs, an early critic of the city’s dealings with the Staples developers, says that he’s glad “a lot of crummy stuff” is being razed to make way for the center. But he notes that “I’ve never bought into the idea that arenas and stadiums bring the kind of [spinoff] benefits that owners promise.”

QUESTION: WHY SPORTS?

Retort: Have you been living in a cave?

“Who knows about 30 years from now, but right now, sports is the most viable vehicle to use to get people back downtown,” says Jerry Geiger, deputy director of community and economic development in Phoenix. “Unless you’ve got bodies in your downtown, you’re just whistling Dixie in terms of redevelopment.” This year alone, 11 major-league sports arenas, baseball parks and football stadiums are to open, the most since records started being kept in 1912.

The roster stretches from Seattle to Atlanta, Miami to Toronto, with stops at Raleigh (N.C.), Indianapolis and elsewhere. Next year, San Francisco, Detroit, Houston and Milwaukee will open new ballparks. San Diego, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Philadelphia have works in progress. The boom is not exclusive to big sports markets. The Lansing Lugnuts, (Appleton) Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, Tulsa Drillers, Louisville River Bats, Lake Elsinore (Calif.) Storm and dozens of other minor-league teams are enjoying new digs in or near downtown.

“The way your downtown is perceived is the way your entire city is perceived,” says Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, whose downtown has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance in this decade. “You have to dispel the myth that downtowns can’t grow or be vibrant.”

Yet the role a new sports arena can play in a downtown revival is limited. “Sports is not a magic bullet,” Beyard says. “It can be a good component, but if it is done badly, with a bad design or too expensively, it can stunt your downtown.”

As a stand-alone enterprise, or even in conjunction with the restaurants and festive sports bars and souvenir stores, an arena is an engine that creates jobs mostly in the service and tourism economy, where wages are at or slightly above minimum wage. Michael Stepner, who spent more than two decades as a San Diego city planner, supports the drive for a downtown ballpark there but says that if given a choice, he would prefer to see an aerospace firm with three shifts a day and paying upscale manufacturing-style wages. Furthermore, Stepner is concerned that after a ballpark is built, the city won’t keep the area around it from becoming a sea of parking lots or Hooters-esque beer joints, neither of which will attract residential growth. “I just hope San Diego takes the time to do it right,” he says. “It’s very easy to do badly.”

In Cleveland, as in Denver and Phoenix, there is a kind of heliotropic effect, with restaurants and taverns sprouting on the side closest to the most thriving parts of downtown. A block away, however, it can be blight as usual. Just beyond the fan-friendly businesses that have sprouted near Cleveland’s Jacobs Field and Gund Arena, the scene is like a vacant movie lot. On a late summer weekday afternoon, while the baseball team was on a road trip, not a living soul was on the street for 100 yards or more. Within the shadow of Coors Field in Denver stands a block whose major attraction is an ancient-looking establishment offering “beautiful live ladies behind glass.” Not, presumably, the kind of attraction to entice a Fortune 500 company to Denver.

Of course, just what does entice such moves is hard to pinpoint. In any City Hall where sports is part of the city’s redevelopment push, there is talk of the economic benefits: in Phoenix, a new Phelps Dodge corporate building downtown; in Denver, British Airways’ decision to open a London-to-Denver route; in Cleveland, Applied Industrial Technologies’ resolve to stay rather than move to Kentucky. “I don’t think they would have made that decision 20 years ago,” says Ken Silliman, executive assistant to Cleveland Mayor Michael White.

Many analyses have tried to pierce the veil of municipal promises to try to prove whether a new sports franchise or arena leads to economic growth. One problem is that such a hunt leads into an area perhaps even murkier and more difficult to isolate: why corporations make the decisions they do about expansion, relocation and investment. Jack Sylvan, of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at UC Berkeley, studied seven California cities with professional sports teams and found that it is maddeningly difficult to reach a conclusion. To the degree that sports can improve a city’s image and “quality of life,” a new team or arena might play a role in attracting investment and creating jobs, Sylvan says. But he suggests that “the expectation that sports franchises can generate an infusion of new private capital into a local economy should be taken with considerable skepticism.”

Why this matters to anyone who isn’t a sports fan is simple: Most of these arenas are built with at least some tax money, coveted dollars that opponents want used for other civic needs--libraries, schools, police and so on. These opponents usually are in the majority, and they don’t accept the still unproven premise that a new arena leads to new business and therefore more tax revenue, which presumably could then be used for the civic improvements they want.

In city after city, the political dispute is the same--and it cuts across political lines. Democratic mayors in Cleveland and Denver and Republican mayors in San Diego and Phoenix are equally bullish on sports. It is one of the more intriguing phenomena of urban politics that the need for downtown sports is a kind of ruling orthodoxy among urban redevelopment officials even though a good portion of the public actively opposes the idea.

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on a plaque near the elevator leading to the office of Cleveland Mayor Michael White is a quote from that sturdy Ohioan, President William McKinley: “You triumphed over obstacles which would have overcome men less brave and determined.” McKinley was talking to Spanish-American War veterans. He might as well have been talking to the leaders of this once-mighty industrial city, whose post-World War II woes are legend: a middle-class stampede to the suburbs, race riots, failed industries, a river so polluted that it once caught fire, a failing school system and national ridicule as “the mistake on the lake.” Dick Feagler, columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, once called his hometown “the one city in the universe where pain is unavoidable.”

After becoming the first city since the Great Depression to default on its finances, Cleveland began the long road back to respectability, first under Republican Mayor George V. Voinovich and now White, a Democrat. By the early 1990s, much of downtown had returned, almost Lazarus-like, attracting tourists and private investment. The eastern edge of downtown, however, proved a particularly tough case. Forging a private-public partnership with the owners of the baseball Indians and basketball Cavaliers, White and other community leaders persuaded regional voters to impose a “sin” tax on alcohol and cigarettes.

Before Jacobs Field and the adjacent Gund Arena opened in 1994, the area seemed impervious to the ambitious redevelopment drive that had revived the city’s lakefront a mile away, the Playhouse Square theater district, the Tower City Center shopping complex and the night life and beer-and-burger haven called The Flats. From the numbers, it is hard to disagree with the city’s strategy: 3.5 million baseball fans will come to Jacobs Field this year and another 2 million to Gund Arena to watch pro basketball, hockey and events stretching from the circus to pro wrestling.

“Before Jacobs Field opened, the last time I had come downtown after dark was the night Kennedy beat Nixon,” Jim Spilowski said this summer while attending an Indians game with his wife and three sons. Police officer Jim Gnew has the perspective of 30 years on the force. “In the old days you wouldn’t see a family here, or a woman venturing here alone. Now it’s like a party every night the Indians are in town.”

Before and after the Indians’ games, fans crowd into the 15 new restaurants, taverns and souvenir shops that line the blocks directly around the ballpark. Two hotels are set to open by the end of the year. Still, “It’s going to take a lot of courageous investors to save Cleveland,” says David Nev, owner/operator of Colonial Carriage, a two-horse firm that offers carriage rides to tourists.

News on the housing front is encouraging but far from celebratory--and because of that, no conclusions can be drawn about the effect the new sports facilities have had on redevelopment. Clevelanders are moving downtown. Still, the suburbs beckon. Each year the highest-selling issue of Cleveland magazine is its annual rating of suburbs; close-in suburbs are now seeing their own flight to those farther out.

In his recent state-of-the-city address, White put housing on his agenda. In hopes of persuading families to stay in Cleveland, the state Legislature has prevailed on the mayor to take over the crumbling and patronage-beset school system. Call it a fact of urban political life: Solve one problem and your reward is to be given an even more difficult one.

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John Hickenlooper, co-owner of the Wynkoop brew-pub and restaurant in Denver’s bustling LoDo district, leans forward and confides what Coors Field has meant to him. “Baseball,” he says above the din of a crowd eating and drinking in preparation for a Rockies-Dodgers contest, “has been very, very good to me.” So buoyed was Hickenlooper by the Coors Field boom that he decided to invest in a condo project, exactly the kind of urban progression that makes mayors weep with joy.

For decades the 26-square-block LoDo (short for Lower Downtown) wallowed in civic neglect, particularly when Denver, its economy dependent on the energy industry, was laid low by recession and falling prices for oil. But an aggressive push by Mayor Federico Pena and his successor, Wellington Webb, brought the area back to life with restaurants, brew-pubs, galleries and housing as part of an overall revitalization of downtown. “Where there used to be [homeless] shelters, now there are condos,” Webb says.

In Denver, the drive for housing is helped by a “Denver spirit” that attracts singles and DINK couples--dual income, no kids--to live downtown. Webb had a political epiphany when, as a state legislator, he accompanied a civic delegation that failed to persuade the president of May Co. not to close its downtown store. The president pulled out a map showing that the downtown population had dwindled to a mere handful, and Webb understood. “You need people living downtown to create retail jobs and to give your city the sense of being alive. To attract people downtown, you need certain amenities, and sports is one of those.”

LoDo was already going upscale when Coors Field opened in 1995 for the Rockies. Attendance in 1996 hit a high of 3.9 million, every one of them within easy walking distance of dozens of LoDo food-and-drink emporiums and a free shuttle-bus to the rest of downtown. The revitalization is the stuff of urban textbooks: a pedestrian mall, public art, small Georgetown-esque neighborhoods, an outdoor urban mall, a collection of high-end retailers, art museums and police, lots of police--walking, riding horses, motorcycles or bikes--to make tourists and suburbanites feel comfortable.

Although Denver has been spared much of the political upheaval associated with sports projects and downtown revitalization efforts, Webb’s commitment to downtown has been tested. He reallocated funds meant to help get an additional hotel near the convention center into an effort to encourage developers to build housing downtown. And he resisted criticism from outlying neighborhood groups upset that he has proposed a police substation for downtown.

“Downtown,” he says, “is a neighborhood, too.”

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More than any other city, Phoenix can be said to have hitched its economic future to professional sports. Seven major-league baseball teams have their spring training camps in the Phoenix area; football’s St. Louis Cardinals moved to nearby Tempe in 1988; and in 1992, the America West Arena opened in Phoenix, the new home for professional basketball and for hockey, when the Winnipeg Jets relocated in 1996 and became the Phoenix Coyotes. Last year came Bank One Ballpark, cheek by urban jowl with America West Arena. The locals routinely describe it as “the world’s most unique baseball experience.”

How excited are they over the ballpark with its sliding roof, space-age air-conditioning system and four McDonald’s counters? One of the hottest-selling CDs locally is “Sounds of BOB,” crowd noises during the expansion Diamondbacks’ first season.

As an economic investment by the city, Bank One is probably a wash at the moment, says Mayor Rimsza. The park costs the city as much in police protection, other city services and payments on the debt as it contributes in payments and a small ticket tax. Bank One cost $354 million to construct, with $258 million coming from public coffers. But Rimsza insists that it should be evaluated in context of what it is accomplishing. He has a powerful piece of proof to back up his argument: People are moving downtown, and private developers, some with and some without city assistance, are building condos and lofts.

On the other hand, it has taken more than a decade to find a developer to build a third downtown hotel to join the Hyatt Regency and Crowne Plaza--and hopefully boost the city’s attempt to increase its convention business. And not everybody is aboard the sports-as-economic-boost bandwagon. Voters in nearby Mesa turned down a new stadium for the Cardinals.

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For two decades downtown San Diego enjoyed an “intimate” baseball park where fans could look at the city beyond the outfield fence. A day or evening at the ballpark might also include some shopping and dining nearby. Baseball was part of life in a busy downtown. But Lane Field was demolished in 1957, as part of a rush to Mission Valley and the suburbs that, by the early 1970s, had left much of downtown dominated by tattoo parlors, locker clubs, all-night movies, sawdust restaurants and other establishments catering--legally and illegally--to sailors and Marines from local bases.

Then in the mid-1970s, an upstart mayor named Pete Wilson decided that San Diego’s downtown deserved a better fate and convinced the City Council and a reluctant business establishment that the city could not thrive unless its core was rescued. Two decades later, much of San Diego’s downtown has undergone a transformation. Far from the “sleepy Navy town” of legend, visitors find a downtown replete with new high-rises, a gleaming waterfront convention center, a lively Gaslamp Quarter food-and-entertainment zone, the ultimate “festival retail” center (Horton Plaza), public greenbelts and an efficient system of trolleys and buses (one in five San Diegans goes to work downtown on public transportation). Urban planners are even more impressed with San Diego’s success at what is considered the toughest chore of downtown revitalization: encouraging the private sector to build market-rate housing that can attract buyers. “San Diego is the model for all of us,” says Silliman, the Cleveland mayoral aide.

But one section of downtown San Diego has not enjoyed the revival: the eastern edge, dotted with warehouses and empty lots. It is there that city officials think they’ve found the solution: an “intimate” baseball park where fans can look at the city--and enjoy baseball.

“We think the ballpark will play the same role as Horton Plaza and the convention center in serving as a catalyst,” Mayor Susan Golding says. After a campaign in which baseball greats Tony Gwynn and Ted Williams served as spokesmen, San Diego voters endorsed a plan to build a $411-million ballpark. In exchange, the Padre owners are willing to sign a 25-year lease and promise to take the lead in building a hotel-and-retail complex near the park.

Not everyone is pleased. Some object to spending public money for the ballpark. Downtown property owners whose land is being condemned are suing. Book lovers complain that the city should build a new library, not a ballpark. Numbers-crunchers say the revenue projections are unrealistic and that the city will end up cutting public services, which boosters deny.

Asked what advice she would give other mayors considering downtown parks, she laughs. “Gird your loins and put your flak vest on. Understand that any time you attempt something this large, complex and expensive, it will draw enormous opposition, as well as enormous support.”

The road to the Fun Zone, while enticing, is never easy.