Save the Best of the Old
Farmers Market on a weekday morning presents a tableau substantially unchanged in 60 years: The produce vendors polish their fruits and vegetables, butchers carefully stack chicken legs and steaks, the folks at the doughnut shop dip pastries into melted chocolate, and the regulars and tourists in the coffee crowd enjoy a slow cup.
“Open since 1934 and here to stay!” proclaim banners hung around the cluster of brown-and-white wooden buildings. Indeed, following action last week by the Los Angeles City Council, survival of Farmers Market’s core buildings is assured.
After a decade of debate and compromise, the council gave the go-ahead to construction of an open-air shopping complex next to Farmers Market. The project--the Grove at the Farmers Market--will include a movie theater, a Nordstrom department store and other retail outlets, all of which will wrap around the northern and eastern sides of the landmark market. Completion is scheduled for August 2001.
Low-rise, open-air and centered on a so-called authentic destination, the Grove, a project of Caruso Affiliated Holdings, may signal a direction for developers regionwide. With many of the big-box malls struggling and the frenzied construction of high-rise office towers slowing, the most intriguing projects are designed to enhance and capitalize on the city’s past.
Developer Tom Gilmore, for example, is making a career of rehabbing once grand, now dilapidated buildings downtown. In Hollywood, a new entertainment center will incorporate the historic Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard. Not far away, the El Capitan and Egyptian theaters, backdrops for the stars of Hollywood’s glamour days, have come back to life with stunning restorations.
Contrast these with the sweeping plans drawn up in the late 1970s by the Community Redevelopment Agency to rescue suburban North Hollywood from blight and decay by razing the old and building anew. After two decades and the outlay of $117 million in public money, the promised “city within a city” of new offices, stores, housing, a hotel, theaters and more is an expensive bust. No hotel, no commercial movie theater, but many vacant lots and just a fraction of the promised new office space.
The downtown Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project, begun in 1963, is the classic local tale of massive, areawide redevelopment that hinged on bulldozing nearly everything in sight--gracious Queen Anne mansions and rundown boardinghouses in this case--and erecting new condos and office buildings. The Bunker Hill project remade the Los Angeles skyline, and no one would dispute the contribution of the Music Center, the crown jewel of that effort, to this region’s cultural life. But the headlong destruction of everything old and distinctive explains why, nearly 40 years later, downtown remains soulless.
The Farmers Market project, along with other, more modest efforts around the city, represents another paradigm--one that just may work. The trick is to improve on what’s unique about Los Angeles while conserving it.