Machines vs. Humans: The Downtown Dilemma
It’s comeback season again in downtown Los Angeles, a condition that afflicts the place every decade or so. So far, the comebacks haven’t come to much, but the excitement is catchy. Say it with me, people: Cathedral! Staples Center! Disney Hall!
Nothing like a mantra of big-ticket venues to move a Southern Californian to the point of standing ovations. Between the applause lines, though, there is always this wistful inquiry: Other downtowns get resurrected, and not just as spasms of monument building. Why then, oh why, not ours?
A good question, actually. And a good place to ask it today might be along this lazy stretch of 7th Street, four blocks from the Staples Center, this week’s comeback monument. It is midday in mid-workweek. The sidewalk shimmers. Office people wait at crosswalks, but, considering the season, the place hardly teems with them.
This is the section of 7th Street between, roughly, Grand and Figueroa, a place that once was thick with law firms, offices and department stores. Come. Step inside the old Barker Bros. building at 818 W. 7th St., a Beaux Arts gem built in 1925 to house “the most beautiful furniture store in America,” as old Angelenos once knew it. See the soaring ceilings and the decorous arched doorways. Touch the walnut paneling. Hear the click of your footsteps on the marble floor.
Last decade, this building was restored in the hopes that it would again draw throngs and commerce. It was all but empty then. Today it is empty no longer--say it with me, people!--but the cheering is muted, perhaps because this side of the comeback is all but devoid of human beings.
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“This is it.” The door to the antique elevator swishes open, and Eric Bender leads the way down the mezzanine to an office door. From this balcony, the view of the lobby evokes barristers with handlebar mustaches, harrumphing. Bender, a young, clean-shaven property manager with a crisp white shirt and a pale green tie, picks up a discreet, in-house phone, gets clearance, and leads the way into the resurrected downtown.
Another door and--actually, you hear it first, humming. A white, white room. Filled with rows upon row of cables and circuitry. This building is so far 30% telecom, but there are whole skyscrapers like this on 7th Street now, former offices that are now very sterile--and very lucrative. Feel the refrigeration. See the backup generators, big as rhinos. Note the muffled efficiency of the half-dozen or so techies, hanging around the Mr. Coffee. Where once there was bustle, there is now the other mantra of downtown’s comeback: the ohmmm of telecommunications machinery.
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There is history here, and it involves an alabaster high-rise a block over from 7th called the One Wilshire Building, which became popular in the mid-1980s after the breakup of AT&T.; The newly deregulated long distance market loved it because its roof was the perfect height for satellite dishes, and it was only two blocks from one of the largest phone signal routing stations in the nation. When local phone service was deregulated in 1996, all the new telecom companies wanted space there.
One Wilshire filled up; overnight, any nearby building with floor space for machinery was being retrofitted with fiber-optic lines. Unlike the rehab work necessary for, say, apartments or offices, this penciled out because these telecom companies were willing to outbid all comers and pay for most improvements. No, it didn’t generate much street life, but these were virtually empty buildings, and nobody was anteing up big subsidies to change the equation. At last count, eight high-rises on or near 7th Street have been leased partially or entirely to telecom, including the old Robinsons and Bullock’s buildings. Half of the nation’s phone, fax and Internet calls are now said to be routed through downtown.
Thus, the frustration. Downtown is getting new monuments, but those alone don’t do it. Any real comeback needs the human contact and chaos that give a city a pulse. No matter how many cars stream into the Staples Center when it opens this weekend, they’ll stream right out again if there aren’t places to go and locals to gape at. You can’t fake local color, and these economics are crowding it out.
The temptation is to blame it on business, but it’s not that simple: Guys like Bender are heroes--they filled derelict buildings with clean, high-paying industry. From cobwebs and echoes, they conjured the hum of technology. Less clear-cut, though, is why, oh why, this City Hall--with such pep when it comes to big-ticket venues--has “no definitive policy,” as one mayoral aide put it, on this 7th Street question of machines versus humans. Last time I checked, a city required people. Though to attempt a comeback without them would be so L.A.
Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.
