In the Heart of Downtown, a Tranquil Oasis

If Los Angeles can be summed up in a glance--if all its grandeur and despair and history can be distilled into a single urban block--that place might be Pershing Square.

The city’s oldest public park, founded before George Washington took office, now sits bounded by office towers. It’s had eight names and nearly as many looks. The last restyling, nine years ago, gave the park bold colors, cubist lines and a purple carillon that stands 128 feet high, topped by a large pink globe. It is the striking centerpiece of a square with an equally unusual melange of people.

They drift in from the posh hotels and law offices on Bunker Hill. They pour off the crowded sidewalks of Broadway and the jewelry district. They travel south from Chinatown, west from Little Tokyo.

Lyndell Brady spends much of each day at Pershing Square. He arrives on foot from a skid row mission. “This is my spot,” the 50-year-old homeless man said from a shaded bench at the park’s south end. “I come here for my serenity ... my peace. I don’t have anybody bother me. I read the sports--it’s great.”

Brady has a gray-flecked beard, quick eyes and hard-luck stories that come off with little trace of self-pity. A back injury and a crack cocaine habit cost him nearly everything. He inhabits hard streets filled with injustice. While he was showering one morning, someone stole his billfold. “There wasn’t anything in it but my ID,” Brady said, “but now I’ve got to go through the trouble of getting a new ID.”

Pershing Square represents a choice he makes each morning. He could spend his time at one of skid row’s filthy corners, such as 5th and Crocker streets, smoking crack or shooting heroin. But, he said, “I’ve been there ... and it’s not where I want to go. I come here just to get away from what I call the ‘rat race’ down there.”

He avoids it by joining dozens of other homeless men--and a few homeless women--who hang out at the park. Brady’s chosen bench is more than 100 feet long, a gallery of the destitute. Some sit and talk, others sleep, cushioning their heads with bundles of clothes. Most stare mutely at the scene around Pershing Square’s central fountain, a faux pond studded with cobblestones and freshened with a thin waterfall.

Tourists and families go by, pointing their cameras. Men crisscross the courtyard in business suits. Dennis Dibos, a Motorola executive visiting from Washington, D.C., moved more slowly than most on a recent morning. A cigar wedged between his fingers, he strolled past the fountain, seemingly lost in thought.

Dibos was due to address a specially convened board involved in setting technological standards among military-defense systems. It took him a moment to clear those complexities from his mind when asked to assess Pershing Square. He looked around as if seeing it for the first time.

“Well, the architecture’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s a nice place to sit and smoke a cigar. It’s kind of what I expected of downtown L.A.”

The scene is a visual bombardment. Noon summer concerts draw crowds that spill across the manicured main lawn, with people clustering under bright market umbrellas and lining up like birds on long walls and benches. During winter, an ice rink is set up for skating. The ragged skyline extends the park’s abstract design.

Looming over the park from Olive Street on the west is the majestic brick facade of the Biltmore Hotel. Taller brick towers front the square from 6th Street on the south and Hill Street on the east. Their rusted fire escapes hang far above the park’s scattered palms and gardens.

Escalators beneath the carillon carry travelers to and from Pershing Square’s subterranean garage. At one corner of the park, a Metro Rail station feeds the flow of sidewalk traffic. You can come up from the train, cross the street and enter a monument area containing a cannon from the warship Constitution, which fought the British in 1812 and was known as “Old Iron Sides.”

Statues stand above the sleeping homeless. Ludwig van Beethoven is here, placed in honor of William Andrews Clark Jr., founder of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. The Philharmonic Auditorium stood at Pershing Square for 75 years before it closed in 1964. Its long list of entertainers and lecturers includes Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington.

Other figures commemorate the dead of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the veterans of World War I. A plaque placed in 1955 by the “Woodmen of the World of Omaha, Neb.,” whoever they were, honors Pershing himself--Gen. John Joseph Pershing, a captain during the Spanish-American War who became the commander of U.S. forces as World War I raged across Europe.

Pershing’s marker rests on the rectangular base of a six-foot, rust-colored sphere, one of several huge orbs of art that lie around the square like oversized marbles. Law clerk Michael Peffer sat beneath another of those spheres near the fountain, having lunch. Having kicked off his wingtips, he faced the sun and affably greeted a custodian passing on a motorized cart.

“It’s nice to get out of the office,” Peffer said, amused by the park’s weirdness. “You’ve got Chester the molester over there,” picking through the trash bin, he said jokingly. Peffer said he used to think the art work was “pretty cool” until he got used to it. “Now, I see people taking pictures, and I say, ‘What are you taking pictures for?’ ”

Part of the answer may be that Pershing Square is so strikingly L.A. Aldous Huxley must have concluded that. He moved here and published a futuristic novel, “Ape and Essence,” shortly after World War II. It explored the aftermath of an atomic war. Mutant survivors gathered in Pershing Square to warm themselves by burning library books.

Writer Carey McWilliams also found the square strangely compelling. He recalled stepping outside one morning and hearing the news boys crying the day’s headlines. “An awful trunk murder had just been committed; the district attorney had just been indicted for bribery ... a University of Southern California football star had just been caught robbing a bank ... and ... there was news about another prophet, fresh from the desert, who had predicted the doom of the city,” McWilliams wrote in 1946.

At that point, McWilliams said, he stopped to watch “a typical Pershing Square divertissement: an aged and frowsy blond, skirt held high above her knees, cheered by a crowd of grimacing and leering old goats, was singing a gospel hymn as she danced gaily around the fountain. Then it suddenly occurred to me that, in all the world, there neither was nor would ever be another place like this City of Angels. Here the American people were erupting, like lava from a volcano; here, indeed, was the place for me--a ringside seat at the circus.”

The passage is now etched on a wall behind the fountain, where former chef Calmeze Barcus, now homeless, harbors his dreams of opening a restaurant. “This is a place,” he said, “[where] you can come and get hold of your thoughts.”

Barcus sat ringside while Tim Joseph, a poet from Hollywood, unlocked his bike and prepared for a spin on the nearby streets. Joseph said he stops at Pershing Square whenever he is downtown.

“There’s always an extreme mix of people,” he said, a foot propped on the pedal. “I think it has good energy. The energy just kind of brings you here.”