LA's New Downtown by John Weich

When the Southern Californian sunshine reflects off the stainless steel skin of the nearly complete 293,000 square foot Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the viewer, in this case me, can be excused for momentarily confusing his whereabouts. The nautical curvature of the structure’s façade, the sweeping roof trusses, the iridescent glow of the stainless steel panels – it all seems vaguely familiar. For a single, murky moment I envision myself in Bilbao, Spain. This is because the Disney Concert Hall, set to open this October, bears all the trademark tweaks and curves of its designer, Frank Gehry. In fact, the Concert Hall’s resemblance to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the architect’s greatest claim to fame, is, extremely canny, to say the least.

There’s another similarity between the two Gehry structures that is not accidental. The Disney Concert Hall, perched atop Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, is expected to help rejuvenate downtown LA like his Guggenheim Museum did Bilbao. It’s also very likely that, like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Disney Concert Hall will become LA’s most ubiquitous postcard image.

One of the most common complaints about Los Angeles is that it lacks a lively city center of the European variety. In its stead, there are mini-centers spread across a vast urban area, each neighborhood with its own cafes, restaurants, entertainment venues and mall. It wasn’t always so. In the beginning of the 20th century, LA was constructed around a single downtown area that housed all the city’s major corporations, banks, doctors, lawyers, its best restaurants and first-run movie houses as well as the majority of its residents. It was a compact city with high-density housing, onerous traffic congestion and some of the largest shopping emporia in the country, most of which are still standing today, though are being utilized for different purposes.

LA’s downtown thrived up until the 1930s, at which point cheap land, the automobile and in some cases prospects of oil lured the rapid influx of residents even further west to freestanding homes in new towns by the sea. Downtowns land prices, every bit as roaring as the 1920s, encouraged residents to the cheap tracts of land in Hollywood, Santa Monica and the San Fernando Valley where there was room to maneuver and garage in which to park the car. A bourgeoning tangle of avenues and freeways expedited the process. Eventually, these outlying areas effectively became cities in their own right, and by the 1950s the downtown area had fallen into disrepair. Only now is downtown showing signs of recovering. Over the past three decades the city has invested approximately $750 million dollars to erase much of the area’s blight and erect the appropriate municipal and cultural institutions to attract both residents and tourists. The 35-year-long project, launched in 1975, is now nearing its end, with palpable results.

The first truly visible changes to downtown came in the 1980s, when LA finally joined other global capitals, both in America and abroad, by building high. Up until the early 1957, a city ordinance restricting building heights to 13 storeys kept the city low and encouraged lateral expansion (the only exception was City Hall). Today downtown is an imposing mélange of 700-foot towers that contrast greatly to the metropolis’s monotone horizontal cityscape. On a clear day downtown’s enormous towers, sprouting up like desert palm trees above scorched brush, are visible from as far away as Century City. There sheer number of Starbucks and Coffee Bean boutiques situated on downtown corners is as clear an indication as any of the area’s gradual gentrification.

The skyscrapers and the enormous Los Angeles Convention Center, built by world renowned architect IM Pei in 1993, gave downtown a business profile; the cultural and sports institutions that followed have provided tourist appeal. The opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in 1986 enticed many of the city’s most discerning individuals to visit downtown on a more habitual basis. While today overshadowed by the Getty Museum in Santa Monica, it is still an important pillar of the downtown revival, and, together with the nearby Music Center, which houses the LA Opera and Philharmonic, continues to determine not only downtown’s but also much of the city’s cultural agenda.

In 1999 came the postmodern sports temple Staples Center, an enormous arena that centralized the city’s top sporting teams (Lakers, Clippers and Kings), which up to that point had competed in different venues spread across the city. The Staples Center is only a mile down the road from the 56,000-seat Dodger Stadium and three miles North of the 105,000-seat Memorial Coliseum. It is not quite as compact as New Jersey/New York’s Meadowlands, but is as compact as LA’s sprawl will allow.

Last year, downtown unveiled the $195 million, 70,000 square foot Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels at Grand Avenue and Temple Street. Built by the Pritzker Prize winning Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo, the enormous cathedral replaces the historic St. Vibiana’s, which was condemned due to damaged by the 1996 Northridge Earthquake. The cathedral can accommodate up to 3,000 worshipers inside and a few more hundred on its sun-drenched piazza outside. Its façade adorns a 50-foot concrete cross and its location next to the Hollywood freeway is as functional a billboard of the revitalized downtown as the city could have ever hoped for.

But it is Gehry’s US$ 274,000 million superstructure that is expected to reel in the numbers downtown is hoping to attract. Once open, the Concert Hall will be an integral part of the Music Center of Los Angeles County’s ambition to become one of the world’s great cultural venues. Once open, it will function alongside the Center’s other theatres, namely the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre, and, according to the Music Center, will increase the number of visitors from 1.3 to 2 million annually and ticket revenues by US$30.9 million. In addition to the 2,265 seating capacity, the Concert Hall will feature outdoor amphitheaters, performance space, public gardens and entertaining cafes. All so very, er, Disney.

For downtown boosters, changing the area’s image won’t be easy. More than any other LA borough, downtown has born the brunt of the city’s culture cleft, and Hollywood (historically downtown’s greatest rival) and mass media have demonized the area’s dystopic unravelings like a real-time soap. Some of Hollywood’s grimmest renderings of both present and future society were filmed downtown, including Chinatown and Blade Runner. Granted, downtown has mostly itself to blame for its tainted reputation. If it wasn’t the Watts riots in 1965, then it was the Rodney King riots of 1992. There are still cardboard box communities on its sidewalks, flophouses in its historic hotels and stripped Honda preludes cluttered in front yards leading up to homes with iron security bars spanning on all the windows. But there are less of them.

Admittedly, the city has cleaned up much of this blight. In the past thirty years, it has created over 6 million square meters of office space (the equivalent of 1.5 World Trade Centers), which in turns has encouraged developers to design more attractive parks and squares. On a typical afternoon, Pershing Square, with its well-manicured lawns and fountains, attracts an eclectic crowd with books and take-away. Pedestrian walkways, bus-only lanes and new signage have since helped alleviate traffic congestion, and downtown’s multicultural pearls – Little Tokyo, the Mexican-themed Olvera Street and China Town – have either received or are getting structural facelifts.

Some of the most interesting innovations are targeting a young, hip crowd. The opening of the stylish Standard Downtown hotel on Flower Street last year literally introduced the area to the West side’s trendsetters. In the summer, the hotel’s rooftop pool-cum-bar is so popular that it has to turn away guests and can charge admission. Similarly promising is the Broadway Theatre Study, which intends to rehabilitate the 12 major historic theatres (1,100-1,200 seats) on Broadway into mixed performance centers, exhibition space, dance studios, restaurants and nightclubs.

No one can refute downtown LA’s new sheen, but the question is whether a city that boasts The Walk of Fame in Hollywood and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica and Venice Beach’s hippie chic really needs another tourist attraction. Walking around downtown, the most polished areas are, not surprisingly, those contingent on the Music Center, MOCA and the Cathedral. Venture into the historic core and bank district and the scene of boarded up hotels, soup kitchens and mouthy riffraff still seems a bit too sketchy for your average tourist. Which is too bad, because this is where the historic roots of the city lie. The etched facades of the abandoned office buildings and rundown hotels date back to the early 20th century, and for the hearty soul are worth parrying the constant hassle of vagrants asking you for money to see. It should be one of the city’s priorities to clean this area up as quickly as possible.

Approximately 25,000 residents currently live in the historic core, compared to more than 300,000 that commute in for the day, which makes the area a bit eerie at night. This too is likely to change in the near future, as another 28,000 residents are expected to occupy the area’s lofts (currently occupied by artists) and upscale condominiums by 2010. It is unlikely that downtown will ever succeed in recentralizing Los Angeles around a European-style center, but not since the 1920s has the area been so dynamic. And never has it been this cool.