A Core Dilemma

There are two faces of culture in downtown Los Angeles. One is the soaring cluster of civic monuments and forbidding towers at the top of Bunker Hill. The other is the loose-knit collection of cultural enclaves scattered amid the various ethnic neighborhoods and aging movie palaces to the east, at the bottom of the hill.

Over the next year or so, most of the city’s aspirations for downtown will be focused on the top of the hill: the short stretch of Grand Avenue, barely a quarter-mile long, that civic boosters have dubbed L.A.’s “Cultural Corridor.” On Sept. 2, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony will dedicate the $163-million Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, designed by the celebrated Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo, at the corner of Grand Avenue and Temple Street. A block away, the billowing, stainless steel forms of Frank Gehry’s $275-million Walt Disney Concert Hall are taking final shape. And sometime next year, a team led by developer Jim Thomas and billionaire Eli Broad is hoping to unveil a proposal for a $1.2-billion entertainment, retail and hotel complex on the avenue’s three remaining empty lots between 1st and 2nd streets.

But if Grand Avenue is the symbol of downtown’s cultural resurgence, it can also be seen as a cabinet of architectural curiosities, a sometimes beautiful distraction from the real city below. That city includes the grittier immigrant shopping district along Broadway, the ethnic enclave of Little Tokyo and the partially abandoned manufacturing and warehouse district that stretches south along the rail yards that divide downtown and East L.A.

Bounded by the 101 Freeway to the north, the L.A. River to the east, and Olympic Boulevard to the south, these neighborhoods are percolating with a different kind of cultural activity. Among the projects being proposed here are a new Children’s Museum and art park near the Geffen Contemporary, a planned expansion and renovation of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, a 1,000-seat performance hall in the former St. Vibiana’s Cathedral and the renovation of a number of Broadway’s historic 1920s-era theaters.

Meanwhile, several developers are busily transforming many of downtown’s historic buildings into housing for the young architects, artists, designers and other urban pioneers who are fueling this cultural shift.

To architects, this transformation suggests a more nuanced urban experience than the one taking place along Grand Avenue. Its diverse ethnic and cultural communities represent a traditional idea of the metropolis as a place of creative friction. Its relatively porous urban fabric, embedded with historical memory, is ideal for architectural experimentation.

The revived interest may surprise those who have long considered downtown L.A. irredeemable, a place that, as the late British architecture critic Reyner Banham put it, “began to disintegrate long ago--out of a sheer irrelevance.”

Indeed, if Grand Avenue is emerging as an emblem of the post-Industrial Imperial City, its future may be determined by the neighborhoods to the east. These areas may rely on Grand for a sense of identity. But without the greater degree of social complexity, Grand Avenue will continue to exist in an urban vacuum, a prominent but lifeless symbol of the city’s cultural aspirations.

“I’m concerned that this city will never really be a city,” Broad says. “And for L.A. to be a great city, it has to have a vital center.”

The division of downtown into two rival visions is rooted in its peculiar history. In the 1920s, downtown Los Angeles was pulsing with life. An extensive light-rail system crisscrossed its dense street grid, its tentacles drawing people in from the surrounding suburbs. Shoppers spilled out of Beaux Arts office buildings and department stores.

But by the end of the decade, it was clear that the future of Los Angeles lay elsewhere, in a growing constellation of suburban enclaves. Downtown’s historic structures fell into decay, and its parks and streets were abandoned to vagrants, immigrants and other social outcasts.

It wasn’t until the late 1950s that the city’s political and business elites began clamoring for renewal. Their aim was to make downtown palatable again for the city’s affluent classes, and they set out to cleanse downtown of the human and physical debris that lay in the path of progress.

The result was one of Los Angeles’ great urban atrocities: the bulldozing of 136 acres of Bunker Hill, a once-bucolic neighborhood of Victorian homes and hotels that had decayed into a string of run-down rooming houses. As if to underline their intent, city planners renamed the strip, from Charity Street to Grand Avenue.

What rose in its place were the kind of imposing, isolated mega-structures then the norm in urban planning circles. In 1964, the Music Center opened at Grand Avenue between 1st and Temple. It was touted as evidence of the city’s cultural arrival. But as architecture, the center was an undistinguished complex of brooding concrete structures whose sterile plaza seemed to float above the avenue like the deck of an aircraft carrier. That was followed by billion-dollar corporate mega-developments, such as Arco Center, the World Trade Center and California Plaza, with the Arata Isozaki-designed Museum of Contemporary Art partially buried underneath its cast-concrete plaza.

Together, these structures had the feel of a sterile corporate acropolis--an isolated world linked by internal courtyards and elevated walkways. More chilling still, they created two parallel worlds, what urban critic Mike Davis once dubbed downtown’s unique “spatial apartheid.” At the top was a barely functioning business and cultural district that stood as a cliche of urban alienation. At the bottom, across Hope Street to the east, the historic fabric of downtown was abandoned to a mix of immigrant communities and homeless people.

The focus on Grand Avenue, however, had unexpected benefits. The relative economic neglect that defined the rest of downtown meant that most of its older buildings were left intact. Latino immigrants reclaimed Broadway as a major shopping corridor. And neighborhoods such as Little Tokyo and Chinatown were able to preserve their distinct identities.

The result represented an urban experience of remarkable social complexity, one that inevitably sparked the imaginations of L.A.’s bohemian scene. The first wave of artists arrived in the early 1980s, setting up shop in abandoned buildings scattered throughout the manufacturing district to the south of Little Tokyo. Soon, dozens of small underground galleries and performance spaces began appearing, including the LACE and LEICA galleries and the L.A. Theatre Center, which were then at the forefront of the city’s budding art scene.

In 1983, the nascent Museum of Contemporary Art opened the Gehry-designed Temporary Contemporary (later renamed the Geffen Contemporary) in Little Tokyo. Housed in two existing warehouses, the museum’s popular success made it an instant landmark. The structure’s industrial aesthetic evoked the loft spaces where many artists were then working. Its raw, cavernous interior had a grandeur that seemed comforting and accessible.

“Downtown was a very underground scene then,” recalls artist Roger Herman, one of the first of these urban pioneers. “There were none of the elegant lofts you see now. Artists were living in places like the American Hotel [a former boardinghouse] paying very little rent. There were a lot of punk concerts and performance art shows. Artists were working on crazy stuff. One built these ‘bum shelters’ out of molded plastic that a homeless person could sleep in. He scattered them all around the area.”

By contrast, Grand Avenue was still struggling to live up to its promise, and developers began promoting schemes to “humanize” the street. The first of these, unveiled in 1980, was a proposal by developers Robert Maguire and Jim Thomas that would have blended commercial, retail and cultural buildings with a high dose of housing on 11 acres of undeveloped land that later became California Plaza. But the proposal never got off the ground. A more accurate expression of the avenue’s cultural identity was Isozaki’s MOCA, whose partially sunken plaza and underground galleries seemed to cringe under the surrounding skyline of corporate towers.

Soon after, most of the art scene fled back to the Westside, the victim of economic downturn, a rise in the homeless population and the inability of galleries to draw rich collectors to the inner city.

The ideological split that divided the top and bottom of the hill became etched into downtown’s identity, and it only deepened over time. When Mahony chose to move the cathedral from its Main Street site to Grand and Temple, for example, many saw that as a sign of the church’s increasing detachment from the painful realities of everyday life. St. Vibiana’s, a Romanesque structure of little architectural stature, stood at a symbolic crossroad between Little Tokyo, the Latino shopping district of Broadway and skid row. The new cathedral, more monumental in scale, aligned the church with the city’s most powerful cultural and civic institutions.

Mahony initially planned to demolish the old cathedral, but the L.A. Conservancy intervened, and in 1999 the property was sold to developer Thomas Gilmore. Gilmore envisions the cathedral as a sort of safe house for the cultural avant-garde--what the late Italian leftist Antonio Gramsci once referred to as “enclaves of resistance.” The developer is negotiating with Cal State L.A. to transform the cathedral’s main space into a performing arts center, designed by Brenda Levin & Associates. The rectory, designed in 1933, would house classrooms and a cafe, centered on an internal court.

“We are toying with the idea of making the cathedral garden into a place for an outdoor film series,” Levin says, “like the plaza in ‘Cinema Paradiso.’ ”

But culture is only one component of Gilmore’s scheme. The developer is negotiating with the city to purchase an adjacent lot along Main Street, where he hopes to build a new loft building. Just to the east, the city is about to break ground on a new Little Tokyo branch library, designed by A.J. Lumsden & Associates.

In effect, the complex would become a sort of social hinge, linking Little Tokyo to the increasingly gentrified Latino shopping district along Broadway. Gilmore, in fact, has already snatched up a number of Beaux Arts buildings along 4th Street between Main and Broadway, which he is transforming into lofts. He is also in the process of restoring the Palace Theater, an ornately gilded 1920s-era structure that is being used as an independent performance space. Another developer, Steve Needleman, has recently completed a $3-million restoration of the 1926 Orpheum Theatre.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles City Council set up a new 879-acre development zone in and around downtown in May with the intent of spurring new housing development. The plan would allow the Community Redevelopment Agency to use local property taxes to create up to 12,900 residences over the next 45 years, some of which would be used to house downtown’s homeless population.

“There’s an anarchy here that I love,” Gilmore says, surveying Broadway from his office window above the Palace. “And I think that will always be part of the scene here. The question is whether places like Broadway will become Starbucks and Gaps. But I think the [1-mile] strip of the street will prevent that from happening. There’ll always be room for variety.”

To architects, such talk suggests a rare opportunity--a chance to reinvent the traditional urban model. Last year, the Southern California Institute of Architecture moved from its more pristine home near Marina del Rey to an abandoned 1907 freight depot near the L.A. River. Since then, the school has sought to nurture its relationship with local developers and politicians. Eric Owen Moss, the school’s recently appointed director, has inaugurated a series of panel discussions on a variety of development plans. More recently, the Metropolitan Transit Authority persuaded SCI-Arc’s Roger Sherman to devote a yearlong class to study how best to develop the barren parcel of land between Chinatown and the 101 Freeway. An urban no-man’s land, the four-block-long parcel is an opportunity to stitch together a number of unrelated areas, including the Civic Center that extends north from City Hall, Chinatown and Olvera Street. The student proposal, still in the early stages, includes a retail corridor, interspersed with cultural and educational institutions, that would spill across the 101 Freeway and eventually link to Broadway’s shopping district.

Moss, meanwhile, is working with Gilmore on a proposal for a housing, office and retail complex that would stand on a large empty lot across from SCI-Arc. At one end, a blob-shaped office block would be sliced into four roughly equivalent segments to create an internal court.

At the other, a series of dramatically canted housing towers would frame a grass lawn. The lawn would act as a dreamy, communal oasis set off from the hard-edged city around it.

Not to be outdone, Thom Mayne, one of the city’s established architectural luminaries, recently taught a two-year workshop at UCLA on the future of downtown Los Angeles. The results have been published in “L.A. Now.” One of the book’s most compelling proposals calls for the creation of a series of interweaving bands--industrial park, green space, pedestrian walkways and high-speed trains--that would crisscross the L.A. River. The idea would be to break down the psychological wall that divides downtown from the Latino communities across the river in Boyle Heights.

Such schemes are an attempt to come to terms with the deep contradictions embodied in downtown’s shifting identity. It is a place haunted by historical memory and largely out of keeping with the city’s image as a place of suburban sprawl. Its communities, despite their relatively strong identities, remain divided by rigid social and physical boundaries.

“The trick is to not give in to the typical development formulas, to resist being co-opted just to get a job,” SCI-Arc’s Sherman says of such proposals. “There’s a possibility to develop something that hasn’t been seen before.”

Not all of these visions, however, are hypothetical academic exercises. Mayne, for example, has landed two major commissions downtown. His design for the Caltrans District 2 Headquarters Building at 1st and Main streets--a slim, horizontal office block sheathed in a shimmering skin of perforated metal--is under construction. The other, a design for a new Children’s Museum near the Geffen Contemporary, is in the planning stages. Its bulbous, anthropomorphic form, propped up at one end on slender, leg-like columns, evokes the theoretical proposals of Archigram, a 1960s-era British group that dreamed of building mechanized “Walking Cities” to express society’s increasingly nomadic existence.

A few blocks away, an equally intriguing project is the proposed $15-million renovation and addition for Little Tokyo’s Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. Designed by the celebrated Japanese architect Toyo Ito, the plan calls for the creation of an elevated terrace bridge that would connect the existing theater and community center. A shimmering, cylindrical entry tower would lead up to the bridge, its internal structure rising out of the landscape like some otherworldly plant vine. The center has yet to launch its capital campaign to pay for the addition.

If they are built, projects like these would begin to give Little Tokyo a more layered visual identity, one more rooted in the present than a themed version of the past.

This kind of gentrification, of course, can have negative implications. Cultural types have long functioned as the spearhead for real estate speculators. In the 1970s, for example, the largely abandoned manufacturing buildings of New York’s SoHo district, nestled between Little Italy and Chinatown, became a haven for young artists who cherished its large, open lofts and cheap rents. Soon, SoHo’s aura of bohemian chic attracted a slew of trendy hangers-on and real estate speculators. Rents soared. Today, Little Italy is a virtual theme park. And most artists have fled to more affordable, outlying boroughs.

Similarly, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, young artists flocked to the Mitte district in the city’s former eastern sector. Within a few years, the artists and their East Berliner neighbors were complaining about a yuppie invasion, and the buildings’ soot-covered, pockmarked facades were being sandblasted clean, their ground floors gutted to make room for luxury boutiques.

Such complaints recently erupted in downtown L.A., over a proposal to create a cultural district around the Geffen Contemporary, which would include a 3.3-acre Art Park between the proposed Children’s Museum and the Geffen Contemporary. Designed by Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan, the park is an attempt to address the scale both of the city and of the local community. Rows of traditional Japanese cherry trees, for example, would frame a pedestrian boulevard in front of the Geffen. Just behind it, a sloping grass lawn would sweep up into the air at one end, offering a distant view of the downtown skyline.

But local activists want to use the site to build a gymnasium for a Japanese American basketball league. To them, the Art Park is indicative of the city’s willingness to place the values of outside interests above those of the existing community. The invasion of cultural institutions represents the erasure of history.

In fact, L.A.’s downtown may be more resistant to that kind of colonization. Unlike a traditional metropolis, it has no strong gravitational pull. Its landscape, strewn with empty lots, remains largely unformed. Many young artists who live downtown today will probably leave once they reach middle age, lured by the dream of the single-family home and suburbia’s blend of man-made and natural landscapes. Most new immigrants avoid the inner city entirely, choosing to pursue the American dream in places like Torrance, Pacoima and Little Saigon.

As such, downtown may retain its counterculture ethos better than that of other cities. The result could be a bohemia of the future, a lasting community of competing ethnicities, students and urban pioneers, an affordable place to live for self-fashioned outsiders.

“Culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” says the Japanese community center’s chief executive, Cora Mirikitani, who is a supporter of the Art Park plan. “It is a messy process. The question is how we preserve the integrity of our cultural history and become a modern, vital place.

“Downtown is also about rethinking what L.A. can be, which is a diverse cultural center.”

It is exactly that complex, human dimension that Grand Avenue’s backers are trying to achieve. To some degree, their efforts are paying off. An important feature of Disney Hall, for example, is its ability to embrace its immediate surroundings. The glass-enclosed lobby is intended to draw the street’s energy directly into the building. Above, the facade’s exuberant forms sweep down toward the sidewalk in a conscious attempt to bridge the gap between the hall’s heroic scale and the scale of the solitary individual. Those forms echo the curved exterior of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion across 1st Street, a gesture that makes the pavilion seem more graceful.

Similarly, the abstract, monumental form of Moneo’s cathedral is anchored by a vast public plaza. The plaza’s aim is to provide the kind of communal glue that downtown so sorely lacks.

But architecture, on its own, cannot reverse a half-century of cynical or misguided urban planning projects. Nor can two buildings, however well-conceived, knit together an entire segment of a city.

At Grand Avenue, that task has mainly been left to the Grand Avenue Committee, a coalition of developers, Music Center board members and local stakeholders led by Broad and Thomas. Earlier this year, the committee hired A.C. Martin & Associates to develop guidelines for the site, which would include office and residential towers, cinemas, restaurants and bars set along the avenue on two large county-owned parcels facing Disney Hall and two city-owned parcels just to its south. A 20-acre park would extend east down Bunker Hill from the Music Center Plaza to City Hall, replacing the existing Civic Center Mall.

The committee is negotiating with the county and city to create a “joint powers” agreement that would allow it to oversee the entire site. It then plans to seek out a team of investors that would submit more detailed proposals for the various buildings along the avenue. The entire cost of the project would be about $1.2 billion. About $300 million would be paid for by public funds; the rest would come from the development group.

The plan is the latest in a number of efforts to humanize Bunker Hill. Its cinemas and restaurants are intended to transform the avenue into a late-night destination point. The park is the kind of generous public gesture that could serve as a social mixing zone for the area’s various communities. Flanked by county buildings on either side and punctuated by City Hall, it would also give the Civic Center a formal elegance. “The key is to get people down there,” Broad says during an interview at his Richard Meier-designed beach house in Malibu. “And then you want them to stay and you want them to spend money. And for that, you need people to feel safe.”

But in other ways, the plan’s enormous scale is in keeping with the kind of conventional planning formulas that have become the norm among developers. Broad often compares the proposal to standard retail-entertainment complexes like San Francisco’s Metreon or New York’s South Street Seaport. Though the Grand Avenue plan would include housing, such complexes are generic consumption machines that may be packed with out-of-town tourists but add little to the city’s civic life. In a broader sense, the new Grand Avenue is an extension of the retail-entertainment development already being planned for the area around Staples Center. In that plan, a 7,000-seat theater and several blocks of retail shops would face Staples across a large plaza, creating a themed, CityWalk-like experience that is only slightly more open to the surrounding urban fabric.

The highbrow arts corridor and the lowbrow sports oasis essentially form two anchors of the same vision of downtown, with the business district loosely strung out over 1.2 miles between them. “The city is the locus of the collective memory,” the late Italian architect Aldo Rossi once wrote. “They are great encampments of the living and the dead where a few elements remain like signals, symbols, warnings.”

Grand Avenue, too, has become a place of memory. Its buildings embody a range of contrary values, from the utopian to the sinister. They include the corporate paranoia of its towers, the messy democratic idealism of Disney Hall and the cathedral’s atavistic spiritualism. It is the tension between such visions that begins to give the avenue its identity.

The rest of downtown, meanwhile, may flourish out of necessity. The central city population has already increased 12.7% between 1990 and 2000 to 25,208. Los Angeles County’s population is expected to grow by about 1 million during the next decade. The city is becoming more dense, more urban. Areas that were once thought of as irrelevant dead zones--as Banham claimed of downtown--will necessarily fill up.

For Grand Avenue to succeed, it will have to become more than an isolated urban fragment. It will have to tap into that life force at the bottom of the hill. It is here that the cycles of death and renewal are taking place, as older communities begin to wither and new ones take their place.

And it is here that the subtler, less visible patterns of daily life are apt to be played out. The blending of these two worlds--one symbolic, the other real--could finally make downtown something it has never been: a relevant piece of Los Angeles’ deepening cultural matrix.

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Nicolai Ouroussoff is The Times’ architecture critic.