For Grand Ave. ‘Cultural Corridor’ to Work, It Needs a Few More Diversions

Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff has weighed in on the latest plan to enhance the emerging “cultural corridor” of Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles (“A Grand Idea in Theory,” Dec. 13). Unfortunately, the plan is lacking in a key area that Ouroussoff’s commentary failed to notice.

The proposal to remake Grand Avenue, the Music Center and the county mall neglects the need to revisit the entire concept of arts programming and its intersection with urban planning.

Only when an expanded definition of culture is designed into Bunker Hill will Grand Avenue and the Walt Disney Concert Hall--at the core of the corridor--realize their potential for revitalizing downtown Los Angeles.

Readers should be excused for asking, “Which Grand Avenue plan?” One after another, street-scape redesigns have flown off the drawing board, struggling to keep pace with architectural landmarks. The corridor includes Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Jose Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (opening in 2002), with Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall set to open during the 2002-03 L.A. Philharmonic season.

Anxious civic leaders and Music Center officials realize the city will soon have a crop of world-class monuments on an avenue with zero pedestrian vitality.

In commending the latest plan, Ouroussoff exhibits refined taste in architecture but fails to grasp the economic realities of urban planning.

Yes, the proposal admirably breaks open the fortress-like Music Center campus to better connect to Grand. Likewise, the vision of turning the county mall east of Grand into a promenade linking the Music Center with the Civic Center would improve this forbidding pit of a park.

But what’s the use in making Grand more elegant and pedestrian-friendly if more pedestrians don’t have a reason to be there? The city will not squeeze real economic juice out of Bunker Hill as long as its cultural venues remain programmed as elite and isolated components, as they have been since the 1960s.

Currently the street is a single-use destination: Patrons drive into gaping-mouth garages, scuttle aboveground to make curtain and rush home again. But Bunker Hill could achieve the synergy that other cities’ arts districts enjoy if it complemented the highbrow offerings of Disney Hall, the Music Center and MOCA with other diversions.

This requires thinking contrary to the Music Center’s present approach. It means expanding beyond dwindling subscribers to people who want not only to buy a balcony seat in a theater, but to catch a show at MOCA, take in a movie, check out a book at the Central Library or buy a CD late at night, all of which would have them filtering up and down Grand.

Only in Los Angeles, which seems to center every planning decision on the automobile, does this appear to be a radical concept. Other cities have been doing smart pedestrian planning for centuries. And yet perhaps no city more than Los Angeles needs to expand culture beyond high culture alone.

There is space available to expand. Los Angeles County’s long-neglected Parcel Q is directly across the Disney Hall site at Grand and 1st Street. It could become ground zero for an explosive arts district with a dynamic mix of uses--from restaurants, cinemas and bookstores to apartments and condos joining downtown’s growing residential base.

For years, this corner has cradled a rickety-looking “temporary” parking structure for county employees. The Downtown Breakfast Club, a group of urban planners, bestowed this eyesore with a 1999 Lemon award, deeming it “the terrible, temporary, Tinker-Toy Tower” and chiding the county for blighting the neighborhood.

Until the county gives up some free parking and puts Parcel Q out to bid, Disney Hall will face one of the ugliest lots in the city.

Of course, there has been endless talk about Parcel Q. But as John Edmisten, head of capital projects for the county, told me recently, “It depends on who you talk to. People not part of the county talk about it, and Parcel Q always comes up as an alternative. But there is no real focused thought about what will happen with Parcel Q.”

Until there is, and Grand Avenue evolves from a mere performing arts offramp to a cultural district in the broadest sense, Disney Hall will become one more golden opportunity gone to waste in Los Angeles.