Disney Hall’s Resonance Downtown May Be Subtle

In the half-dozen years since it opened, the Frank Gehry- designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, has created thousands of new jobs, pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the local economy and almost single-handedly turned a dying postindustrial city into an international tourist destination. That phenomenon today is widely referred to in cultural circles as “the Bilbao effect.”

The “Los Angeles effect” stemming from Gehry’s $274-million Walt Disney Concert Hall is likely to be much more subtle and indirect. Rather than dollars and cents, the new hall’s benefits may be measurable principally in how Los Angeles is perceived at home and abroad: as a burgeoning cultural center where the fine arts finally have a place beside the popular culture of the Hollywood entertainment industry.

Already, Disney Hall, which officially opens this week, has helped spur commercial development along landmark-studded Grand Avenue. Among the most high-profile of the recent arrivals is celebrity restaurateur-chef Joachim Splichal. He announced last month that he was relocating his flagship Patina restaurant from Melrose Avenue to the new concert hall and was opening another restaurant, Kendall’s Brasserie, replacing Otto’s on the ground level of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion across the street.

“The number of tours and other visitors will increase substantially,” said Jim Thomas, a developer and chairman of the Grand Avenue Committee, a nonprofit group that is promoting and coordinating redevelopment in the area around the concert hall. “So then real estate people, retailers, entertainment, food, people in these businesses will see that the bodies are there, [that] ‘I can make my business work.’ And beyond just the hard cold facts you have the psychological impact, which is tremendous. When you go there and you see this tremendous achievement, you want to be there.”

But the concert hall’s potential value goes beyond these economic effects, solidifying downtown’s growing image as the high-culture heart of Southern California. The building’s completion, Thomas says, represents “a giant leap forward” for the Grand Avenue cultural corridor, the stretch of prime downtown real estate that connects the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Mark Taper Forum, the Ahmanson Theatre, the Colburn School of Performing Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art with Bunker Hill’s high-rise office towers to the south.

Under an ambitious plan, the Grand Avenue Committee, which is co-chaired by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, envisions Grand Avenue as a dynamic urban axis that will unite the city’s civic, business and cultural nerve centers. To accomplish this, the committee has proposed upgraded streetscaping, the conversion of unused parcels of land into housing, retail, entertainment and office space and the development of a large civic park stretching from the Department of Water and Power building at the top of Bunker Hill east to City Hall.

The new concert hall, Thomas said, fills a pivotal role in bringing cohesion to, and focusing attention on, these broader goals.

“We’ve been working on this plan for several years now, and the thing that we were seeing is that once the [concert hall] construction started and you had the shell up, the level of interest increased almost daily as construction progressed,” Thomas said.

Carol Schatz, president and chief executive of the Central City Assn. of Los Angeles, which represents downtown business interests, said that her office had not made “any kind of formal study” of the new hall’s potential economic impact. “It probably would’ve been smart to do that,” she said.

However, Schatz said, that impact will depend not simply on attracting new visitors downtown -- in addition to longtime Los Angeles Philharmonic patrons -- but on whether those visitors can be encouraged to extend their stay and sample downtown’s expanding list of attractions.

“It’s our job to turn the visit into an impact itself. In other words, that you don’t just visit the hall -- you have lunch or you have dinner, you take the Dash [bus] down to the Jewelry District or the Fashion District. That’s what we’ll be doing,” she said.

While some Los Angeles business officials have spoken hopefully of the new hall replicating the Bilbao effect, the comparison is not particularly apt. The Bilbao project was part of a massive, publicly funded urban redevelopment effort augmented by millions of dollars in infrastructure and public works, including a new subway system designed by the acclaimed British architect Norman Foster. No comparable public investment has attended the construction of Disney Hall.

In addition, Bilbao was a cultural blank slate prior to the Guggenheim opening, with virtually no tourist industry whatsoever. Today, the city attracts 1 million visitors a year. By contrast, Los Angeles and the Southern California region hardly need Gehry’s spectacular new edifice to put them on the map.

“Tourism is already big in Los Angeles, so is this going to generate anything more?” asked Jack Keyser, chief economist and director of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. The answer, he suggested, is no. “But it’s definitely going to focus some attention on the resources that we have.”

Keyser said his office has not made any formal study of Disney Hall’s potential economic impact, either. “It’s hard to put a dollar number on it,” he said. Assessing the new venue’s significance to the region, Keyser said, will require “looking at a building in a slightly different way, and it’s not the sheer economics.

“It will generate a lot of news articles, probably all around the world, and especially if the sound is as good as it’s purported to be, so you’ll have all the culture mavens wanting to come in and check it out,” he said. “The question is, how long will it stay in the headlines?”

In status-hungry Los Angeles, that question is worth raising. When the $1-billion Getty Center opened six years ago, some Los Angeles civic, business and arts leaders predicted that Richard Meier’s hilltop complex would finally elevate the city to a world-class cultural hub.

Within the first weeks of the museum’s opening, tourists flocked, black-tie receptions were held, and the international media beat a path to Brentwood. For a while it was practically impossible to get into the Getty without making a reservation months in advance. But the novelty wore off, and the Getty recently announced that reservations were no longer necessary to visit. Its example suggests that no single building, by itself, can turn a city into an arts mecca akin to Paris or New York.

But while the new Disney Hall may not instantly attract the swarms of visitors that descended on Bilbao or the Getty, it will surely be on the itinerary of what Robert Barrett, senior vice president of L.A. Inc., the Convention and Visitors Bureau, calls “the cultural tribe of the world.” Arts officials, journalists, corporate heads, philanthropists and other international taste-makers and opinion-shapers will be drawn to the new building, Barrett said, just as they were in recent years to London’s Tate Modern, Bilbao and the Getty Center.

These types of people “tend to stay longer and spend more money” when checking out the latest must-see cultural monument, Barrett said. “It’s definitely a niche, but it’s a big-wallet niche.”

And because of their disproportionate clout, he said, they’ll motivate others to visit, not only from around the country and overseas, but from suburban areas whose residents may previously have felt they had little reason to venture into the heart of the city. “The Walt Disney Concert Hall is going to bring a bunch of wallets downtown that have never been here,” Barrett said.

However much it attracts East Coast cognoscenti and San Bernardino day-trippers, or creates economic spinoffs, the concert hall is going to alter perceptions of Los Angeles as a city where architectural and design innovation only happens in the private realm, said Richard Koshalek, president of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and chairman of the Disney Hall architectural search committee. For decades, development in sprawling Los Angeles has conformed to an essentially suburban prototype, he said. That’s beginning to change.

“What we’re going to see is a greater centralization with regard to planning and a greater emphasis on public buildings and public spaces,” Koshalek said. “I think Disney Hall is the first very strong indication not only to people living in Los Angeles but to people beyond Los Angeles of the seismic shift that is happening in Los Angeles. We’re moving from a suburban culture to more of an urban culture.”