Joanne Kozberg

When Joanne Kozberg gazes down on Grand Avenue from her office at the Music Center, she doesn’t just see cars darting past vacant sidewalks, concrete fortresses and isolated landmarks.

She envisions a thriving cultural and civic corridor with people-friendly attractions, including street-level greenery and good restaurants. And she considers the Music Center, of which she is president, the hub of an ambitious proposal for downtown’s renaissance.

The potential is there. Rising at the north end of Grand is Los Angeles’ new Roman Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo. Under construction at the south end is Disney Concert Hall, the future home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, designed by Frank O. Gehry. Just beyond is the Arata Isozaki-designed Museum of Contemporary Art and the restored and expanded Central Library.

In the middle is the Music Center, a circa-1964 complex of three theaters--the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre--whose identity long has been in flux.

Briefly renamed the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, the Music Center returned to its original name in December. That move coincided with an announcement by Mayor Richard Riordan and other civic leaders of plans to transform the city’s center into a pedestrian-friendly plaza surrounded by cultural and governmental buildings and residences.

The Music Center would undergo a massive face-lift aimed at bringing it closer, literally, to the public. Just the initial phase of its overhaul is expected to cost about $50 million and faces a host of bureaucratic and political hurdles, but Kozberg believes the Music Center can be the catalyst that finally sparks urban rebirth.

As a former executive director and chairwoman of the California Arts Council, she comes to the project with considerable experience at the intersection of politics and the arts. The Canadian native, who grew up in Beverly Hills and graduated from UC Berkeley during the 1960s, also served in Gov. Pete Wilson’s Cabinet from 1993 to 1998 as secretary of the State and Consumer Services Agency. Before that she was a senior policy advisor to Wilson when he was in the U.S. Senate. Kozberg became president of the Music Center in 1999.

Married to insurance executive Roger A. Kozberg, she has two children, Lindsey, a Los Angeles attorney, and Anthony, a doctoral candidate in accounting at New York University.

She was interviewed in her office.

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Question: How did the discussions about the overhaul of the Music Center evolve?

Answer: It really began with our chairman, Andrea Van de Kamp, who went to Bilbao, Spain, and saw the opening of the Guggenheim Museum with Frank Gehry [who designed it] and saw the amount of tourism and excitement that was generated by the opening of that building. Coming back, she said we have a 1960s infrastructure in our campus, and we have this new, extraordinary 21st-century building [Disney Hall] being built. How do we bring them together, since the Walt Disney Concert Hall is the fourth venue at the Performing Arts Center? . . . How do pedestrians find their way from the old campus to the new campus?

So there was a dialogue that she began with the resident companies, looking at what do they want in the 21st century. She asked them, “How could you become the destination point for the 21st century?”

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Q: Did earlier, unsuccessful plans to revive downtown figure in your discussions?

A: We had an extraordinary group of minds come together for a workshop in this planning process. It was Arata Isozaki, who designed MOCA, landscape architect Laurie Olin from Philadelphia, Gehry and his team, Jose Rafael Moneo . . . and others. They all have buildings along this street, so they want to tie it very much together. What we did is we looked at the Civic Center plan . . . the Esplanade plan [a pedestrian strip on Grand Avenue] . . . the 10-minute Diamond plan [to combine cultural amenities and government offices in the Civic Center area]. Many of them identified similar issues. The solution that Gehry and the others came up with I think was a bold and different vision. But it built on all the other plans that had been proposed.

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Q: So the first conclusion reached was you have to move the Music Center’s “front door” so that people can find it more easily?

A: Yes. I think initially when the center was envisioned, [the founders] saw Hope Street as the front door of the center. As the city has grown up, it’s really Grand that offers the pedestrian the greatest opportunity to meander through downtown.

What we would initially be doing is “calming” the street, as Gehry describes it. Knowing that we are a major entry point for the freeway system, what can we do to take some of the traffic off Grand and put it onto the Hope Street side? And widen Grand so that it serpentines in the direction of an extraordinary park that we have between the two county buildings--the Hall of Administration and the court buildings--that the people of the city don’t even know exists? It’s a beautiful paseo in the middle of our community, and yet it’s very underutilized.

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Q: What do you envision coming next, after you complete the physical overhaul?

A: We need to sit down with our family of resident companies and . . . see what their needs are--the square footage they need for rehearsal rooms, and what the opera needs as we convert the Dorothy Chandler into an opera house. . . .

We’ve [also] heard from employees in the downtown, subscribers and the public at large that they would really like to see a lot more choice in restaurants here.

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Q: How are you going to forge a connection between Disney Hall and the rest of the Music Center? They’re separated by 1st Street, so they don’t seem part of the same complex.

A: One of the . . . decisions that our architects made was to connect it at street level. So we will be linking it through the streetscape. But we will not be having a bridge over Grand, because people tend to want to be where other people are.

We want the feeling that this is an activity center. So it will be connected at grade [level], at Grand. We would take away the loading dock, which sits like a gaping open hole at 1st and Grand, and move that to the Hope Street side. . . . We would treat the intersection in a way that would tie it together, through paving . . . and landscape.

As we build out the back of the Dorothy Chandler to better accommodate opera sets, there is a concept that we would put a screen on the back of the Dorothy Chandler so that you could view the interior performance that is either at the Dorothy Chandler or at the Walt Disney from the park that sits next to the Walt Disney Concert Hall. So it’s really taking advantage of cutting-edge technology and creating a place where you can have free activities, as well as enter the theaters.

I think what we would like to see with the expansion of the center is a lot more free activities on our plazas so that the public can come, not just to enter a theater for a paid performance, but to sit and enjoy a bag lunch and see a free performance after work.

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Q: Is patronage at the Music Center as diverse as you would like it to be?

A: I think we can always improve in our outreach, and it is a high priority for us. I think my favorite thing is when I walk through the garage and I see people completely lost because it’s their first time at the center. I think we found, certainly with the Alvin Ailey Company coming in, that we had a very different audience. [Playwright] August Wilson has brought us, again, a very diverse audience. . . . We want to be where our publics are. And we would like to be responsive to the art forms that all of our publics want to see. Jazz is a high priority for us.

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Q: So you will also be considering a content overhaul, as well as a physical one?

A: What we will do is look at the art forms that are not being represented well at the center and work with our resident companies to see in partnership what we should--and could--be bringing in to the center. Until we get the Walt Disney Concert Hall, most of our theaters are very heavily booked. But we need to prepare for the Walt Disney Concert Hall’s opening and the fact that we will have more free time in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Dance, for example, has largely had to bypass the Los Angeles community, except for smaller companies, because the Dorothy Chandler was so heavily booked.

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Q: What will a visitor to downtown see in a few years, if and when these great plans are realized?

A: A garland of community jewels, all strung together, so that you move from the cathedral to the Music Center to the park, to MOCA, to the Colburn School. And I’d like it to swing outward to the Japanese American National Museum [in Little Tokyo], to the Central Library. . . . These are extraordinary cultural resources that just need to be strung together. We want to create a welcoming environment so that people feel it is their downtown. If they need government services, if they want to attend a performance, if they want to read a book, sit in a park, it’s all there.

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Q: Downtown L.A’s rebirth has been heralded and eulogized many times over the decades. Why do you think that the arts are going to be the catalyst for a real downtown comeback?

A: It’s the arts that have really brought people here, after 5 [p.m.] and on the weekends, for decades. We’ve recently been joined by Staples Center, an entertainment/sports arena. So I think that there is a lot of promise, especially with the new Walt Disney Concert Hall to be completed in the fall of 2003. And the cathedral, being completed in 2002. These are extraordinary buildings, built by two Pritzker award-winning architects. If we can consider the pattern that happened in Bilbao, Spain, where you had over a million people flood into Bilbao to see the Guggenheim museum built by Gehry, we know that our tourism will well exceed that. . . . So I see this as a very special time that we can build toward.

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Q: You have held prominent positions in the arts in California and have been through some rocky times, especially during the cutbacks on the California Arts Council in the early 1990s. How would you compare the climate for the arts in L.A. and in California now compared with then?

A: There is a tremendous opportunity in California now with the arts. There is a recognition that the arts are important for their own sake. But in addition to art for art’s sake, the arts are an economic catalyst in this community, where arts and entertainment are so intertwined. A studio musician during the day is a symphony musician at night. The animator is an artist first. So here is a great deal of recognition that the not-for-profit arts and the for-profit arts have a lot in common, and that you need a healthy environment for both.

The other piece . . . is a recognition on the part of the technology community that we need creative thinkers and that the arts are all about creativity. We’ve seen in education a tremendous recognition of the role of the arts for the nontraditional learner, as well as the link between science and the arts, and mathematics and the arts. It is what moved us out of our last recession--our creativity and ingenuity. I hear this from Silicon Valley to San Diego.

So it’s an extremely good time for the arts to step forward. More and more people are looking at the arts . . . as a part of the solution. It wasn’t always the case.