Imagining Downtown
Los Angeles faces a rarity in urban redevelopment: acres of virtually blank space in its downtown core. The planned $1.8-billion Grand Avenue project, a residential and commercial complex intended to knit together a swath of landmarks from City Hall through Disney Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art, will in the short term displace only an ugly parking structure and some asphalt. That means no contentious fights over what might be torn down. It also means there is little historic template to impart verve and flavor to the new construction.
This grungy tabula rasa could become anything, and the tentative plan made public this week provides a hopeful if still sketchy glimpse of the future. There is a lot to like about the privately funded project, including the inclusion of affordable housing units and a 16-acre park linking Bunker Hill to the Civic Center -- not to mention the fact that the plan is (and must stay) privately funded. Skeptics do worry about the project’s likely middle-of-the-road architects and lack of well-defined street activity. They raise fears that its developer, Related Cos. of California, will go for the easy fix: a string of inward-facing chain stores that could as easily be at the Grove or Century City.
There’s an equally powerful argument that downtown workers and residents would love to have it so good: Barnes & Noble! Nordstrom! The Gap! Whole Foods Market! A multiplex! They may cherish the elegant park running from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to City Hall, but they’ll spend more time at the supermarket. Downtown, with any luck, will get its familiar chain stores. Yet the Grand Avenue project will succeed only if it has a range of commerce -- including, say, unique art galleries and other stores not found in suburbia. It also needs to incorporate public gathering space, a modern-day commons, which the city direly needs. That park space is crucial.
To ensure that the whole of downtown offers an experience unlike any suburban mall, public officials such as county Supervisor Gloria Molina and City Councilwoman Jan Perry, whose districts would be home to the project, need to encourage the eclectic commercial mix and the survival of some attractive public space during any “refinements” of the plan.
It will also be up to the developers to provide opportunities for serendipity and urban sophistication along with a lucrative chain-store-and-restaurant backbone. As for the architecture of the buildings and the space itself, the developer must proceed with care, lest Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall become encircled by mediocrity. Gehry, once part of the Grand Avenue planning, now seems to be receding from it. But the project needs a voice like his, rambunctious and visionary.
Los Angeles is at last valuing its lovely, neglected old commercial buildings and turning them into living and working spaces. The Grand Avenue project can be a powerful catalyst for filling the void of downtown after dark, and advancing the renaissance of adjacent parts of L.A.’s core.