Faith in the City and in the Future

He works amid ghosts. Downtown ghosts. Buildings and streets that once held a city together. For two decades he has dedicated himself to bringing the downtown ghosts back to life.

Others have written volumes about how Los Angeles lacks a core. But this shy, driven man felt the heart of the city was always there, just waiting to be revealed.

He saw it in the decayed iron lattice of the Bradbury Building, sensed it at the dilapidated Union Station train depot and felt its pull from the shopworn Grand Central Market.

Ira Yellin moved his work from Beverly Hills to be among these buildings. He restored them, helped make them whole again, and then, ever the dreamer, he asked the rest of the city to embrace his vision.

It has happened slowly. Too slowly, some complain, and at too great a cost in public money. But years after he first arrived there, downtown stirs.

Every day, the 61-year-old Yellin reminds himself how far downtown has come. And every day, as he fights through anxiety and incessant fatigue, he is reminded of life’s uncertainties--that he might not be able to see his vision through.

“It’s more than a little ironic. It feels like I’m hitting my stride . . .”

His voice trails. A moment later, he coughs.

He is not widely known. His trademark buildings are relatively small in scale, particularly compared with the skyscrapers many hoped would revitalize a listless downtown.

Yet Yellin--Jewish community leader, champion of culture, political patron--was the first big-shot Westside developer, a builder of shopping malls and business parks, to plant enduring roots in the tattered blocks east of Bunker Hill.

“Los Angeles owes him a debt of gratitude,” says California State Librarian Kevin Starr, who calls Yellin “an urban pioneer.” Yellin is “unique for what he wants for the city, and what he has helped build. . . . For a while, his was a voice in the wilderness.”

Twenty years back, when few entrepreneurs wanted anything to do with the city’s historic core, Yellin began buying landmark buildings: the Bradbury, the Million Dollar Theater, the old Metropolitan Water District headquarters. They were wounded, all crumbled brick and loose foundations and shadows.

Yellin set about to change things. He turned old offices into apartments. He tore at walls that weren’t original, restored murals, gilded interiors with brick and oak and iron. Light came in. The ghosts began breathing.

The rough gem among them was the World War I-vintage Grand Central Market, on Broadway at the base of Bunker Hill. Since his father took him for visits in childhood, he’s coveted the block-long smorgasbord of immigrant-run kiosks.

“It was a love affair,” says Yellin. “With a building.”

Yellin--a short urbane man who walks with shoulders back and jaw jutting--is ambling through the market.

Although he favors designer suits and can command a boardroom, he seems more comfortable here--rubbing shoulders with tattooed homeboys, elderly women from Chinatown and financial district yuppies.

Maybe that’s because the Grand Central is the synthesis of his vision--a place unusual for Los Angeles, a place binding the city’s multitudes.

“You see the colors, smell the smells . . . I mean look, look at that,” he says, pointing at bins full of red beans, dried white fish and green peppers. “You can just stand here and almost taste how special this place is.”

But where Yellin sees human and cultural fusion, some others see the government bankrolling another wealthy developer.

In 1993, two public agencies--the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority--teamed up to provide a $44-million bond package to help make Yellin’s dream real. The deal allowed him to restore not only the Grand Central Market, but also the adjoining theater and old water district offices.

For a variety of reasons--from the lingering effects of the early 1990s recession to the dearth of nearby development to the overly optimistic projections of traffic that could be generated from a nearby subway stop--the deal has been a financial disappointment.

Rents have not met expectations. Some vendors have left. Yellin has never found a full-time tenant for the Million Dollar Theater, which now stands vacant.

Five years ago, the CRA and MTA were forced to bail the developer out by restructuring the deal to lessen his payments. This March, with Yellin behind on his payments and the MTA having spent more than $4 million to help close the shortfall, the agencies chose to refinance.

Today, the subject brings groans and grim faces from MTA officials, who say they’ll never form such a partnership again.

Yellin and his supporters argue that the deal was a good one for the city, that the market has been a catalyst for construction and planning for the rest of downtown.

“The market is one of the city’s best places, it should be cherished, propped up,” says former Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Feuer. “If Ira didn’t show the beauty that could be uncovered, the activity that we are seeing in that area, it wouldn’t have happened.”

Two weeks ago saw the groundbreaking of an avant-garde, $171-million Caltrans building that Yellin’s firm, Urban Partners, is developing next to City Hall. Planners envision a structure swaddled in a thin, perforated sheet of flowing steel, complemented by a civic plaza--designed to be the long-discussed central square the city has lacked.

In September comes the opening of the towering Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, expected to be one of the city’s cultural linchpins. Yellin, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, ran the international design competition to pick its architect.

Couple these with other Yellin projects--including a massive apartment complex alongside a budding light-rail line at Del Mar Boulevard in Pasadena--and it would be easy to think that, for Yellin, these are the best of times.

They would be, if his body hadn’t recently gone haywire.

For Yellin, it is another long day on the job --stretching now into night.

He is poring over details of one of his projects with a city commission on public art. Few prominent developers, those who have worked with him say, are such careful watchdogs of the finer details as Yellin.

In this meeting, he is riveted by the plans for a single elevator shaft.

“I don’t want to do anything that is going to interfere with the light and the air,” he says. Nothing “corny or pedestrian.”

Looking at a slide show, he worries about who will design a fence. Oh, I love this artist, he gushes, looking at the photo of a metallic canopy. He announces that the work is an example of a creative mind in full bloom. When the artist is picked, Yellin’s favorite gets the nod.

Later, in his black BMW on the way to his home in Santa Monica Canyon, he is fatigued and reflective.

In August, after Yellin complained about a persistent cough, his doctor sent X-rays to a specialist. The doctor rushed to call Yellin back.

Ira, he said, it doesn’t look good.

Lung cancer.

It made no sense. He’d guarded his body all his life, he’d eaten well, worked out fanatically, never smoked. His whole being--from his gleaming blue-gray eyes, to his boyish face, to his taut and slender body--spoke of health. Where was the fairness?

He attacked the disease in his meticulous, optimistic way. First, he gave friends the news straight. Don’t worry, he told them, I can deal with this. If something happens, my family is taken care of, the firm poised to go on. He ended up asking most of them, “Are you OK?”

Spiritual, if not devout, he studied a book about Job. He read every medical text he could get his hands on. He raced though the autobiography of cyclist Lance Armstrong, who chased away the cancer that had invaded his brain, then won the Tour de France three times.

Chemotherapy brought on bone-numbing fatigue, seemed to shrink him, caused his thick, mahogany hair to fall out. Yellin simply shaved his head and went about his days, full tilt.

But the chemo failed. He now pins his hopes on an experimental drug, a single pill, gulped down each morning with water.

So far, the results seem positive. His tumors have shrunk or stopped growing. There’s no pain. His hair is growing, though it’s gone mostly gray. But the fatigue lingers, as does a lump on one of his bronchial tubes--the cause of the coughing.

Yellin holds on to the hope he can be another Armstrong. “What option is there?” he asks. “Other than to keep pushing back?”

Yellin’s friends, and he is a man with many, are not surprised by his determination. They note he still looks well. They remind themselves that Ira Yellin almost always sees his vision through.

In Van Nuys and near Venice, site of his father’s congregation, Yellin was raised to follow the Jewish principle of tikkun olam, repairing the world through good works.

He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1965, spent a year at UC Berkeley . . . and promptly joined the Marines. It was to prove to himself that his ideals of public service weren’t idle thoughts. And that he was tough enough to do it.

By the early 1970s, he had not only made partner at a prestigious Hollywood law firm, but had also helped lead a pro-bono practice focusing on civil and environmental rights.

When he made the leap to building, he became a patron of art, befriended top designers and served on the boards of prominent museums. He immersed himself in politics, epitomizing the Jewish Westsiders who joined with African Americans to help keep Tom Bradley in office for five terms.

His Santa Monica Canyon home became more than a streamlined modern showpiece and home for his wife, Adele, and two children. It was a Westside gathering spot, “a haven,” says Uri Herscher, president of the Skirball Cultural Center, “a place with an open-door policy . . . where strong, important ideas were discussed.”

Over the years, a diverse cast of the informed and the influential visited the Yellin home. From a black police chief to an Asian businessman to architect Frank Gehry and politicos such as Walter Mondale and Hillary Clinton, they were all welcome--for political fund-raisers, cocktail parties, even for Passover Seders.

Many of those who still frequent his home remark that they are struck by the way he shuts the world out to focus on their concerns.

“In a real way, he is a rabbi . . . ,” says Gary Greenebaum, director of the American Jewish Committee and a rabbi, “a man who listens to the stories of others.”

The story Yellin yearns to see finished is the downtown story.

It won’t be easy. “We bring them down here,” says Yellin, speaking of representatives from the grocery stores and restaurants he’s courted for years. “We show them around; they get scared. There’s a lot of work to do still.”

All around, that work continues, as more ghosts wait to be brought back to life.

The opening of the Caltrans building is scheduled for early 2004. A few months later will be a ribbon cutting at the stately Los Angeles County Hall of Justice, yet another building Yellin’s firm is restoring.

For most people, these dates aren’t far off. For Ira Yellin they stand out there, uncertain.

“I want to be part of this,” he says. “I plan on being around for a good long time.”

A moment later, he coughs.