Before Advancing to the Next Stage ...

No city ever made a future for itself by papering over its past, or allowing its history to crumble into nothing. That’s not a future. That’s amnesia.

We have arrived at a terrific time to keep this in mind. The cultural life of downtown Los Angeles--or rather, the many downtowns within the larger one--finds itself at a busy, perplexing intersection, alive with possibilities.

Now rising at odd angles near the Music Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, on the north end of downtown, Disney Hall serves as a symbol of the new. Another, more sprawling symbol has lately hit the news, at downtown’s southern corner, attached to Staples Center.

Earlier this month, the City Council approved plans for a 27-acre, $1-billion downtown L.A. Sports and Entertainment District. At the outset, at least, developers Rupert Murdoch and Phil Anschutz were throwing around comparisons to Manhattan’s squeaky-cleaned-up Times Square. Others have characterized the plan, not necessarily negatively, as Universal CityWalk II.

The developers seek city funds to finance a new hotel, convenient to Staples and to the Convention Center. The plans also include a $200-million, 7,000-seat theater, initially touted as a potential home for, among other events, touring Broadway shows.

That’s nonsense, for the record. No Broadway show, even the biggest, crassest one you can name, makes sense in a 7,000-seat auditorium. For years, developers have used boilerplate language in their proposals, leaning heavily on the phrase “Broadway-type entertainment.” “Broadway” sounds good. It sounds classy.

The 7,000-seater aside: Let us assume the expansive Staples plan can and will be built. Let us assume it succeeds. Let us also assume that Disney Hall makes its own news, generating buzz for itself as well as for a spruced-up Grand Avenue arts corridor.

In between Staples and Disney is another piece of downtown--the historic piece. It’s called Broadway.

L.A.’s main stem could become downtown’s most dynamic, most authentic, most interesting and most urban cultural element of the next decade. We have here a history lesson in the making. For downtown to flourish, the city must not simply build anew.

From Mayor James Hahn on down, the city must embrace the history embodied in the grand and not-so-grand pleasure palaces along Broadway, our former temples of vaudeville and the movies. It’s stupid not to.

There is something about experiencing a good old theater that can rarely be matched by even a great new one.

High atop 842 S. Broadway, on the roof of the Orpheum Theatre building, a person has an excellent view of L.A.’s various coming attractions. Standing underneath the unlighted, 20,000-watt rooftop sign that says, simply, Orpheum, to the left you see Staples Center and an adjoining parking lot or two. Looking to the right ... well, you can’t see Disney Hall.

“Bunker Hill covers it up,” says the Orpheum building’s owner, Steve Needleman.

Walk into the refurbished Orpheum Theatre lobby, however, and you can see plenty. You see a 1926 vaudeville house’s past, and a bright future. It is a beautiful sight. Needleman has spent $3 million bringing the Orpheum back from frumpdom. The gold-and-copper-leaf ceiling; the 12-foot copper-and-brass chandeliers hanging above the theater’s imposing balcony; each dollar and detail is a vote of confidence in the theater’s longevity.

“I’m not Disney,” Needleman says, heading down a newly carpeted aisle, “and I don’t have ‘The Lion King’ booked.” He refers to the $10-million make-over of Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre, actually paid for by the theater producer Nederlander Corp., the theater’s owner. But Needleman believes in downtown--he owns several buildings there--and in his theater. It may turn out to be primarily a concert venue, but Needleman believes live theater can be a component, along with movie and commercial shoots, corporate events and the like.

The Orpheum’s official grand opening will be an Oct. 20 fund-raiser for the Los Angeles Conservancy, the nonprofit group charged with preserving L.A.’s physical history. One of the conservancy’s pushes, says preservation issues director Ken Bernstein, is the so-called Broadway Initiative, designed to encourage city and private interest in the street.

The Broadway theaters are “irreplaceable. They are unmatched assets,” Bernstein says.

The Orpheum seats 2,196. Two blocks north on Broadway sits the funky 1911 Palace Theatre, owned by Tom Gilmore. With 1,167 seats, it’s one of the most intimate of the Broadway houses.

In August, the Palace--which also is focusing on live concert bookings--dipped its toe in live performance with a low-key variety show, a nod to the old days. More such ventures are coming, Palace manager Dawn Garcia says.

Touring the Palace, you see a theater very different from the Orpheum. You see a ghost-ridden place, in the best sense--moody, dripping with fake-Florentine atmosphere. Owner Gilmore plans to spend $2 million to $3 million in the next few years.

Gilmore is sitting on a remarkable prospect. He’d be smart not to copy the Orpheum in terms of ambience. With the right, attractive but “rough” make-over--and the right programming--the Palace could very well become L.A.’s answer to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, one of America’s finest multiuse performance venues.

The Broadway theaters are all privately owned, but already the owners have an advocate in Department of Cultural Affairs general manager Margie J. Reese. “I’m still salivating,” she said, regarding the Broadway theaters’ possibilities, both individually and as a collective part of downtown revitalization.

So what’s next? Well, interested parties, for one thing--if not a sole nonprofit arts organization, then a consortium of several.

Inspired city leadership wouldn’t hurt, either.

“I do think the city’s going to have to help leverage some activity,” Reese says of the theaters on Broadway. “The conservancy has been a leader in protecting the buildings. But there has to be a leadership voice in terms of programming.”

“As Mayor Hahn puts together his business and development team, working on attracting businesses back to downtown L.A.,” she says, “we have to have something to offer them. They’re not going to come back because the stripes in the parking lot are freshly painted.”

Wending its way through various meetings is an initiative called Nighttime Broadway. Proposed by housing commissioner Roger Landau, it’s designed to attract club and restaurant developers and encourage revitalization and refurbishment of Broadway’s theaters.

It’s a hot idea. From 7 p.m. on, Broadway between 5th and 7th streets would be closed to vehicles. Live entertainment would be offered in the official Broadway theaters, and perhaps above them, in wholly nontraditional spaces. Who knows what sort of entertainment might sprout here? It could be a cultural Third Street Promenade, but with something akin to soul.

Downtown L.A. can never be made “whole,” no matter how many development projects come through. In that regard, downtown is like the rest of L.A. It’s insanely inorganic, in an organic sort of way.

Still: It’s possible to make more of downtown, without ignoring what has been too long ignored. And without gentrifying and Gap-ing and Starbuck-ing it to death.

So many of downtown’s individual pieces are alive, or nearly. Broadway is one of those pieces. The area is alive during the day, with many voices, many cultures, a sense of street commerce and street theater.

It is waiting for a nightlife.

Theater should be a part of it. So can historic theaters. We have them. They’re there, waiting, alive with the past and ready for the future.