Sack the Stadium
So, Mayor James K. Hahn and other L.A. politicians have signed on to the idea of another Death Star in downtown Los Angeles. The powers-that-be want to build a football stadium across the street from Staples Center. Although the stadium won’t be subsidized by public funds, the plan was announced one day after the city created a redevelopment area for the neighborhood.
Death Star Row is getting pretty long in L.A. There are the cathedral, the Music Center, Disney Hall, the vacant office buildings around Pershing Square, Staples Center, the Convention Center and now the possible football stadium. The theory seems to be that if you stick enough of these edifices downtown, people will think downtown is the center of something.
All these institutions operate more or less the same way: People from other parts of the city or county drive into parking garages, travel through walkways and in elevators to the event they’re attending, then depart--leaving behind little trace they were ever there. In other words, these edifices operate like the Death Star in the “Star Wars” movies. But as we’ve learned over and over again in the last 40 years, a successful U.S. downtown has to be something more than a location for big institutions. It also has to be a place--a central location that includes a variety of subtle and varied activities (businesses, institutions, street life) that enable people to view it as a part of their own identity. Because of the city’s decentralized nature, L.A. has always had an uphill battle to create this kind of identity. But other Western cities have managed to succeed.
Take, of all places, Phoenix. In the last 10 years, Phoenix has pumped more than $1billion into downtown cultural and entertainment venues. The result: Downtown Phoenix has become a place that people from all over town go out of their way to visit and identify with.
To truly appreciate this accomplishment, you have to understand just how scruffy downtown Phoenix used to be. Phoenix is often regarded as a mini-Los Angeles--sprawling, low-rise, automobile-oriented, fast-growing. Its downtown also resembled L.A.’s. It had some civic and cultural buildings, a few hotels and leftover retail establishments.
Downtown Phoenix was way too big to be cohesive, and people had long ago left to live their lives elsewhere. The office towers moved north to “Midtown” (the equivalent of the Wilshire Corridor), and the people amused themselves in shopping malls and small, close-in suburban downtowns like Scottsdale and Tempe (respectively the equivalent of Old Town Pasadena and Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade).
To remake itself, Phoenix scrunched virtually all cultural and entertainment edifices into a small area. The list of edifices is familiar: A baseball stadium. An arena. An opera house. A museum. A convention center. And the standard menu of hotels, shopping centers and parking garages, all built with public subsidies that were hotly debated at the time. There is something going on in Phoenix every night of the year. Except that, unlike in Los Angeles, all this stuff is within about a three-block radius, connected with beautifully landscaped pedestrian walkways. In a metro area with little variation, the cultural and entertainment district in downtown Phoenix is not just small but compelling.
And there’s no football stadium. There are a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which is that Arizona State University’s Sun Devils Stadium--where the National Football League’s Arizona Cardinals also play--is less than 15 minutes away, adjacent to downtown Tempe (kind of like the Coliseum). But another reason is that a football stadium is the one kind of edifice that doesn’t fit comfortably into the context of a downtown as a place. Arenas can be used almost every night. Baseball stadiums are used 80 times a year, and the best ones provide an intimate experience that whets people’s appetite for walking and hanging around in local establishments.
Even under the best of circumstances, football stadiums are used a couple of days a week in the fall--and an equivalent number in the spring and summer for soccer or some other complementary sport. They’re cavernous, and the experience they provide is far from intimate. In short, football stadiums don’t stimulate urban life.
That’s why big, confident, prosperous cities don’t care much about football stadiums and focus, instead, on other types of venues more conducive to city living. Why do you think the San Francisco Giants get to play in beautiful PacBell Park in downtown San Francisco, while the San Francisco 49ers are still relegated to a blustery venue seven miles away, now referred to as “San Francisco Stadium at Candlestick Point”?
By contrast, the cities that shell out big bucks for football teams are not the big guys, but the smaller cities desperate to create or reignite a sense of identity. That’s why the Rams moved from Los Angeles (No.2 metro area in the country) to Anaheim (No.56) to St. Louis (No.49), and the Oilers, now the Tennessee Titans, from Houston (No.4) to Memphis (No.18) to Nashville (No.22).
Los Angeles should forget about a football stadium across from Staples. Downtown needs housing, liveliness, culture--people who want to live an urban life. It may never be Paris, but that doesn’t mean it has to be Hackensack.
If a football stadium gets built in some other city in Southern California more desperate to have a National Football League team, so what? Indeed, given recent trends, why should the NFL try so hard to make a deal with the second-largest city in the country when the potentially sixth-largest city is waiting in the wings? If the football owners are willing to wait until after Nov. 5, they can surely make a sweet deal for the Van Nuys Chargers.