Downtown as Theme Park Just a Shill Ride
Hate to sound like a party pooper, but I’m not sure I’m loving what I’m hearing about the reinvention of downtown Los Angeles.
It’s a tossup which is more irksome, the comparison of the Grand Avenue redevelopment plan with the Champs Elysees in Paris, or the description of the L.A. Live project near the Staples Center as Times Square West.
Isn’t there already a place in the West that people can visit if they want bad imitations of world destinations? Yeah, it’s called Vegas.
And besides, the once-grand Champs Elysees has been cheapened with fast-food joints and souvenir shops, judging by my last visit. As for Times Square, ever since the makeover, it’s just another tourist trap.
The topper, though, is that taxpayers are forking over subsidies to L.A. Live developer Philip Anschutz, a Denver billionaire seven times over, and I’d like to call attention to this before our fawning city officials give him Griffith Park.
Now, before I continue, I’m going to admit that I seem to hold a minority opinion on the sports-entertainment colossus called L.A. Live. As noted, the City Council couldn’t roll over fast enough, and Chamber of Commerce types are leaping for joy. Even downtown activist and professional curmudgeon Brady Westwater has found something to like about L.A. Live. He favors concentrating all that stuff in one place rather than sprinkling it around and ruining historic neighborhoods, which could later be redeveloped in less crass ways.
As for the subsidies, Westwater said it didn’t look like a hotel would ever get built near the Convention Center any other way, and the Convention Center is a loser without one.
Maybe, but I can’t quit thinking about those subsidies.
Anschutz got $58 million in city bonds and $12 million in redevelopment grants for the land around the Staples Center, and now he’s been promised $290 million in hotel tax rebates over the next 25 years to help finance the $2.5-billion sports-entertainment colossus called L.A. Live.
The project is slated to include two upscale hotels, luxury condos, restaurants, an ESPN broadcasting studio, a Grammy museum, a 7,000-seat theater and 15-screen multiplex.
In other words, it’s a triumphant blow to originality and the natural evolution of city life. While I might be lured to drop by on occasion, I suspect I’ll be avoiding the synthetic fun center as much as possible, just on principle. The name alone is a tipoff to trouble, making it sound as if a visit will be akin to having a walk-on role in a reality show.
“Welcome to L.A. Live!”
And with so many different companies getting in on the act -- from ESPN to the Ritz Carlton -- one has to wonder if Anschutz isn’t setting himself up for more of the kind of legal entanglements that have plagued him in the past.
As my colleague Glenn Bunting pointed out in his Sunday profile of Anschutz:
“Courthouse records in California, Colorado, Wyoming and New York show that during the past three decades Anschutz has paid large cash settlements -- all of them confidential -- to companies that claimed they were denied their fair share of profits or done in by deceptive business practices.”
Would you want the man as your partner?
I strolled the streets around the Staples Center the other day, and I bumped into a guy who watches L.A. Live take shape through the window of his loft. Thomas Clarke seemed like a decent, smart enough fellow, except that he’s all for it.
“Times Square, you’re right, is a tourist place,” the former New Yorker said. “But it’s one of the places that makes New York New York. It’s like the Empire State Building. They’re icons, and Los Angeles could use that. Plus, downtown could use some life 24-7, because after 7, it looks like a ghost town.”
I would argue that a sports-entertainment theme park is the wrong kind of icon to shoot for. But being the fair-minded person I am, I called the L.A. Live people to hear them out.
Anschutz, of course, doesn’t deign to speak to the press, which is pretty arrogant for a guy who doesn’t live here but wants to remake the very skyline of our city.
That’s the scariest kind of power broker, by the way, the guy who never comes out from behind the curtain and has all the politicians in his pocket. If not for all those lawsuits against him, I wouldn’t even be sure he exists.
I did get a callback, however, from his point man.
L.A. Live is not going to be anything like Universal Citywalk, Tim Leiweke assured me. It’s not going to be a place to shop, but a place to light the Christmas tree, host major awards shows and gather our collective pride as Angelenos. And besides, he says, it will plow $20 million to $50 million a year into the city treasury.
We set a lunch date for next week at Liberty Grill, a brand-new downtown restaurant run by his wife, who’s in on the ground floor of the renaissance. Leiweke is then going to sell me on L.A. Live, or at least that’s his assignment.
It got tougher, though, when he told me the Staples Center draws 4 million people a year downtown, and L.A. Live will more than quadruple that number.
And we gave up tax breaks for Anschutz to make our traffic nightmare even worse? He should have been required to build a new subway station, at the very least.
