The Upside of the Downtown Money Pit
I pledge allegiance to the downtown of the far-flung boroughs of Los Angeles, and to the metropolis for which it stands, one city, under smog, indivisible (unless somebody in the Valley or San Pedro gets in a snit about potholes), with transit and Rampart-free justice for all.
That’s it--the pledge of downtown allegiance, to and for the central cityhood of L.A.
Some very rich men took the pledge this week, with a notion to do a billion-dollar make-over on about 30 acres of downtown turf.
At its core would stand Staples Center. Around it, acres now given over to lost tourists and cyclone fencing and by-the-hour parking lots would be made over with the standard ingredients in any downtown revival recipe: a swanky hotel and some middling-swanky apartments, restaurants, movie theaters, shops. (Exactly when did Barnes & Noble become the alpha and omega of thriving urbanity?)
In cities like L.A., Detroit and St. Louis, downtown revival is the grail, the quest, the 13th labor of Hercules. Many men of brawn and bucks have tried, and many have failed. Over the last two decades, about $750 million in Community Redevelopment Agency money was mainlined into the prone carcass of downtown L.A. Results: flatline.
Now, with this Super Staples proposal--which looks terrific in its little scale-model version, just as Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall still does--a new set of rich guys with a hankering for rehab will be getting out their favorite carpenter’s tool, the checkbook.
But as a malaprop master named Yogi Berra once observed, “it’s deja vu all over again.” They’ll show us their money if we show them ours.
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If I didn’t know otherwise, I’d suspect that this project was been dreamed up by someone who was working as a mole for the Let’s Make Joel Wachs Mayor campaign.
The last time the billionaires passed the hat among We the People, to get public dough for Staples Center itself, Councilman Wachs handled it like the political pop fly it was.
In that game of Billionaires’ Chicken--if you don’t help to pay for it, we won’t build it--Wachs scored the game-winning runs by calling their bluff, threatening to put the question of public financing to a public vote.
Three years later, the money men are asking humbly for a subsidy instead of demanding one. The tone they take may affect the answer they get.
A good hotel complex would almost certainly bring more conventions, more tourists, therefore more money to a city whose convention center’s bottom line annually winds up redder than the Lenin Library. And hotel and tourism taxes would add up to a nice bit of civic change--but against what expenditure of public money?
Almost any business venture could make the same pitch for public subsidies. Smaller, less glamorous companies are still rankled by the memory of the windfall tax breaks extended to the DreamWorks/Playa Vista project.
Maybe the billionaires can cobble together an investment pitch to a different set of deep pockets: Rampart’s wrongfully convicted victims, who stand to collect tens of millions from the city.
“Wondering what to do with those millions from your lawsuits? Invest in the city that beat you black and blue, then paid you in green! Invest in Super Staples!”
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Persuading the nation and the city of the merit, even the existence, of downtown L.A. has been almost as hard as swimming upstream in the Los Angeles River. There are people, most of them living on the Westside but quite a few in the San Fernando Valley, who have visited New York more often than they have visited downtown.
I like downtown. I like the absurdly cool subways, with floors so clean you could eat off them, which the homeless sometimes do. I like Grand Central Market and the reconstituted Angels Flight. I like streets fronted by gorgeous Beaux Arts buildings which survived pristine because the centrifuge of suburban flight was like a neutron bomb downtown.
I like the Oviatt and the Bradbury and the fragrant boticas and the jukebox in Hank’s Bar at the Stillwell Hotel. (I detest the Sunbelt Stalinism of Pershing Square, but then, who doesn’t?)
And I appreciate the money men’s interest in downtown. But rather than tie up public funds, the lingo of corporate America presents an alternative: the naming opportunity. Think Qualcomm Stadium, Edison Field, the Nokia Sugar Bowl. Buy a big-name space, on a baseball stadium or an entire chunk of a city.
Imagine it, gentlemen. The Rupert Murdoch City Center. The Phil Anschutz Downtown. Centro Ed Roski. Act now, before the city becomes the Wachsworks.
Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com
