Getting to the future is a tough commute

From the 32nd floor of the Transamerica building, one can look eastward toward a downtown Los Angeles that was, is and perhaps will be.

In the foreground are the low buildings and the old hotels that once characterized the center of the city, back in the days when L.A. was flat and gray. But farther away are the varied towers of commerce that have been added in recent years, spiking the powdery blue skies like scepters of royalty.

As I stared at the scene from a restaurant called Windows, I realized how far the city had come since I moved here 34 years ago. Back then, the tallest building in town was the 28-story City Hall, which squatted like an old lady basking in the sunlight and going nowhere.

Up until 1956, no building in L.A. was allowed to exceed 13 stories, except for City Hall, because of the constant danger of earthquakes. One can’t help but wonder if, in the rationale of those who set the limit, the occupants of municipal government buildings were considered to be expendable, and therefore not worthy of seismic safety. Or was it that those who fell from a toppled 13-story building were less prone to death or injury because they didn’t have that far to fall? Who knows.

Once the height limit was lifted, architects began hunching over their drawing boards and designing the downtown that exists today, beginning with the 73-story First Interstate World Center and then a dozen other buildings that top 40 floors. There was talk back then that someone wanted to erect the world’s tallest tower, something like 122 stories, but that concept slowly disappeared into the all-embracing smog.

So the buildings went up and, illuminated at night, resembled a small corner of Manhattan, but there the comparison ended. The lights shone down on almost empty streets because, except for daytime commerce, there was nowhere to go in downtown L.A. But things are changing.

In the year 2000, Carol Schatz, president of the Central City Assn. and a tough, pragmatic woman, promised that within five years the downtown area would come alive with new shops, restaurants and living quarters. I took it as the twisted equivalent of the ship’s band playing “Happy Days Are Here Again” as the Titanic went down. This was L.A., after all, laid back and snoozy, hardly able to roll over and consider the future.

But what have we here now, in addition to those impressive towers of commerce? Well, there are Staples Center and Disney Hall and the cathedral, all of which, whether you like them or not, add to the cosmetic density of the core that once resembled a back-lot ghost town. But, I said to myself in defense of my pessimism, where are the people?

Well, bless my rancid soul, they’re coming too. Schatz talked about downtown residential lofts and condos four years ago and now I learn that, according to the Downtown Center Business Improvement District, there are 25 new residential developments going up and an additional 15 to 20 in the works. And that isn’t all. A 50,000-square-foot Ralphs supermarket is scheduled to open in the central city in 2005. While developers and dreamers can get a little airy about the future of downtown, supermarkets are not about to locate in an area where they can’t sell a lot of pork chops and raisin bread.

Multi-starred restaurants are opening in areas that were once occupied by tattoo parlors and pawn shops, adding to at least a trickle of traffic going to Ciudad or Cicada or the Palm, among others. But one of the problems is getting there.

Famous for its inability to imagine any means of transportation beyond cars, buses and freeways, L.A. bumbles along with little official guidance in the field of getting the public from one place to another. Well, yes, there are the multicolored subway systems, but they hardly go anywhere. Once that changes and we adopt the attitude that Billy Stokes had when he elbowed BART into existence up north, we’ll be victims of rush-hour traffic that is, alas, no longer confined to rush hours.

I used to be able to drive to the Music Center in 45 minutes. That’s grown close to two hours, and sometimes more. By the time I get there, Frank Sinatra could have arisen from his grave to perform in concert and I wouldn’t give a diddly-dang.

But in view of the other elements coming together downtown, I’m optimistic that, once the mayor is stranded for hours on the Santa Monica or the San Diego or the Ventura freeway and misses an important meeting with big-money campaign contributors, his consciousness will be lit by the epiphany that L.A. needs more and better public transportation, and that doesn’t mean buses that clog the roads or subways that go nowhere.

Then, I’m sure, at some future date I will be sipping a martini at Windows and looking down on a busy, happy, singing, shopping, mugging, begging mass of people enjoying a brand-new downtown. I can hardly wait.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.