06/15/04

LC040615

This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City
of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

He's been called Los Angeles's favorite developer, but can Rick
Caruso survive a tough political fight over his latest retail
vision?

Rick Caruso>> They don't want to solve the problem. They want
this project to go away. They don't want the competition and
that's a bad thing. It's a bad thing for Glendale. It's a bad
thing for our industry. It's a bad thing for the economy.

Val>> And then, it's had a major facelift, but will the new
version still bowl over concert-goers at this Southern
California landmark?

All that and more straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> He has put his stamp on Southern California with shopping
centers like The Grove and The Promenade at Westlake, but not
everyone buys into Rick Caruso's vision of retail development.
Caruso has his eye set on downtown Glendale, but Philip Bruce
tells us that building a shopping complex here will take some
political muscle.

Philip Bruce>> In a world of cookie cutter shopping centers and
faceless developers, he's the odd man out. But being different
has been no mistake for Rick Caruso. It's made him very, very
wealthy.

Rick Caruso>> Look at this. It's the stroller brigade
(laughter) and you've got to love that. I mean, right? Where
do you live?

>> Where do we live?

Rick Caruso>> Right.

>> We come from La Cienega.

Rick Caruso>> From where?

Philip Bruce>> From La Cienega.

Rick Caruso>> Good. I mean, that's what it's about.

Philip Bruce>> Caruso's pride and joy has earned him even more
riches. He loves to show how The Grove at Farmers Market has
become a thriving destination in what had been a tired old
neighborhood and it all starts with the concept that unwinds the
notion of going to an indoor mall.

Rick Caruso>> We understand pretty well what people want. What
they want is to go back to a time that was safer, streets were
cleaner, you ran into your neighbors, your kids could run around
with some freedom. There wasn't just sort of this shopping
Mecca in your face. Environmentally, it was pleasant. You
know, you had trees and grass and fountains. And we're finding
areas in urban cores that had for whatever been not abandoned
but maybe passed by and there's a real opportunity in that.

Philip Bruce>> The Grove's success has helped make Caruso
something of a rock star among retail developers, but in Los
Angeles, he's just as well-known as a political figure.
Remember when the city's police commission decided to dump
Bernard Parks as chief of the LAPD? Well, the man in charge of
that commission and the one in the spotlight of the controversy
was, you guessed it, Rick Caruso. Fast forward to a possible
time when Bernard Parks could not be a city councilman, but
possibly the mayor of this city.

Rick Caruso>> I probably won't be a police commissioner
(laughter). That's probably a good bet.

Philip Bruce>> Whatever political muscle Caruso has will soon
be put to the test, but this time he'll be fighting to save his
latest creation, a sweeping new take on what he built at The
Grove, only bigger with more shops, more green space and, for
the first time ever, luxury condos and townhomes thrown into the
mix. It's called the Americana and some claim this one-of-a-
kind shopping complex could revive downtown Glendale the way The
Grove revived the Farmers Market area.

Rick Caruso>> All the things that worked great at The Grove are
going to be included in Glendale and expanded like a bigger
park, more outdoor services. We just cut a deal with Turner
Classic Movies which is really exciting to us. In the park,
we're going to have outdoor movies on summer nights so you can
have a picnic and come and watch a movie at no cost. So all the
community services are going to be expanded because we have more
room to do more things.

Philip Bruce>> But there's just one problem. Glendale already
has one of the biggest malls in Southern California and the
people who own it have launched an all-out war to stop Caruso's
latest vision, the Americana, from getting off the drawing
board.

Carol Jacobs>> But it's really about having a town center that
has streets that are open, adequate parking, really provides a
true connection between Brand to the town center and to
Glendale's Galleria as well.

Philip Bruce>> Meet Carol Jacobs, one of the top managers of
the Glendale Galleria, a place that gets twice as many visitors
as Disneyland. She works for General Growth Properties, the
company that owns the mall. Jacobs insists that General Growth
isn't worried about new competition and she claims the mall
strongly supports the notion of building a town center in the
city-owned vacant lot next door to the Galleria. But there's
just one hitch. Jacobs' company doesn't seem to want Caruso to
be the one who builds that town center. A lot of people may
have backed away from this. He seems to consider it such a
personal fight that he's not going to back away?

Carol Jacobs>> You know, I guess I'd rather focus on how we
approach this. We have really not taken it -- it's not a
personal issue. It's really what makes business sense and
what's the right decision to make for Glendale, for the Glendale
Galleria, and so I don't think it would be fair to comment on
his position in this.

Rick Caruso>> They don't want to solve the problem. They want
this project to go away. They don't want the competition and
that's a bad thing. It's a bad thing for Glendale. It's a bad
thing for our industry. It's a bad thing for the economy.

Philip Bruce>> What started as a commercial venture has now
become a political food fight. In an effort to stop Caruso, the
mall owner bankrolled a controversial petition drive that forced
Glendale to put the town center issue to a public vote, and the
mayor of Glendale is angry. He claims he discovered firsthand
how the mall's signature-gatherers misled the public with half
truths and full-out lies.

Bob Yousefian>> The evidence is me. Just walking to the
signature-gatherers and having to stand there and having them
tell me that I took money under the table, that the city was
faulty in getting this project done, that the city council by
approving this is going to cause the Galleria to shut down and
the city will lose millions of dollars and so on and so forth,
then ask me to sign the petition. I told them I can't sign the
petition and their question was why. I said I'm the mayor of
the city who you accused me of taking all the money.

Philip Bruce>> Mayor Yousefian says the mall has benefited for
decades from the same kinds of concessions Glendale is now
offering Rick Caruso and Yousefian isn't buying the argument
that General Growth, the mall owner, only wants what's best for
the city, not when they've got a lock on business in a downtown
that's otherwise fairly bleak. In the meantime, Caruso is
launching what amounts to his own political machine to win the
vote in Glendale and move forward with his Americana project.
And it's costing him plenty, millions to battle a shopping
center giant whose pockets are much deeper than his.

Rick Caruso>> The only person or group that is sort of ahead of
the game right now is General Growth owning the Galleria.
Because the longer they can avoid having to reinvest in that
mall -- it's a thirty year old tired mall -- they're saving
money. But they need to reinvest in it and I would tell them
that we're going to bring more customers to their front door,
being next to them, and they'll end up having a better mall once
they invest some new dollars and fresh capital and make that
place a little bit more interesting.

Carol Jacobs>> It shouldn't be a political battle. It really
should be what's right for Glendale. And part of what's right
for Glendale is what's right for the Galleria. You know, we're
the largest single taxpaying entity in Glendale and that's one
thing. It should be right for the Galleria, but even taking
that further, it's got to be right for the whole city of
Glendale.

Bob Yousefian>> It's not about design, it's not about the
streets, it's not about the fire station that's dilapidated.
It's not about any of that stuff or the money. They could care
less how much the city spends or whether we give land away or
not, like we gave more land away to them and we spend more money
on their Galleria. But it's more about the control of the big
chain stores. They want to make sure that some new developer
doesn't come in and take them out of their malls.

Philip Bruce>> So far, Southern California is ground zero and,
even as Caruso wages war in Glendale, he's bracing for another
potential fight near Pasadena where he's announced plans for
another Grove-like development next to the historic Santa Anita
Racetrack. There the main opposition is another mall which
operates within sight of the horses. You're really now going
beyond a developer having to get into the business of politics,
like it or not.

Rick Caruso>> Right.

Philip Bruce>> How is that going to affect what you're able to
build? Does that hurt the bottom line eventually?

Rick Caruso>> Well, I think the decision that we're making is,
if we want to be in great urban cores and there is an existing
mall, we know that that mall most likely is going to challenge
us and spend a lot of money to stop us from being there because
they don't want the competition. So we're going to have to
build it into our pro forma not only in terms of money, but in
terms of time, and we're going to have to be experts in
campaigning.

Bob Yousefian>> Well, I think Caruso is a fighter. I think
it's in his blood. He's not one to shy away from a fight and,
to an extent, I think Caruso's probably fighting for other
developers that are his size or a little bit even larger who are
trying to build shopping strips or malls or lifestyle centers.

Val>> Caruso has invested four years in the Glendale project.
It's been the topic of numerous hearings and, at one point when
Caruso threatened to pull out, there was so much public outcry
that he jumped back in again. Now the fate of Americana on
Brand will ultimately be decided in an election.

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Val>> The city of Los Angeles takes great pride in its ethnic
and cultural mix, but one local historian says we owe an
enormous debt to one group in particular. In his book,
"Whitewashed Adobe", William Deverell claims that the city
appropriated Mexican culture and never acknowledged the debt.
Patt Morrison spoke with Deverell on the grounds of the historic
San Gabriel Mission.

Patt Morrison>> The whitewash idea is the way that Anglo Los
Angeles effectively obliterated or altered its past in order to
accommodate what it saw as its future. The idea of the sleepy
Mexican didn't suit a city that wanted to be considered really
an eastern city with a western prospect.

William Deverell>> Precisely. The notion is that coming to
this place, making Los Angeles out of Mexico, which is a process
tied closely, of course, to the Mexican-American War in the
middle of the nineteenth century. My purpose in this book was
to try to imagine and work on the ground of that period as to
how Anglos appropriated, changed, altered, commodified and
obliterated the recent Mexican past and, in doing so, oftentimes
deliberately tend to look beyond or look through the resident
Mexican population.

Patt Morrison>> And that population either became invisible or
was used as a tool to measure the progress of Los Angeles.
Look, we are not like that anymore?

William Deverell>> That's right. And also as a tool to build
Los Angeles because one of the important claims I make in the
book, I think, is that the labor of the resident Mexican
population was so critical to the industrial growth of this
place.

Patt Morrison>> As it is today.

William Deverell>> Precisely. There is a way in which the
people here, as they built the city and, again, the growth is
remarkable, sort of breathtaking growth from the end of the
nineteenth century through the coming of the Depression. One of
the things they tried to do was look past the resident Mexican
population or through them and, in doing so, they looked upon
the Spanish history of the place and they exalted that history.
In many respects, that's the fame of this place we are today.
The San Gabriel Mission is the exalted and even beatified in a
kind of secular sense the Spanish presence here in opposition to
the Mexican presence.

Patt Morrison>> One thing you spend a lot of time on is the
Fiesta, the celebration with the parade and other events. This
was a parade that, as you say, eliminated the Mexican aspect but
exalted the Spanish, even the Chinese, but only in almost a
movie casting way, a stereotype way.

William Deverell>> There's no question. The ways in which the
Fiesta, this important parade that took place at the end of the
nineteenth century for as long as a week on the streets of
downtown Los Angeles, the way it was staged, literally staged as
you put it, was to put ethnic groups in particular containers.
Containers on the landscape in terms of neighborhood
identification and then containers in terms of the places and
the times in which their histories were validated and then
always linked to a notion of inevitable progress which, for
Anglo Americans here, was inherently racialized. That
inevitable progress was, to their eyes, a white progress.

Patt Morrison>> And one of the biggest sales before the mission
pact, the idea of shipping citrus off to the rest of the
country, was the mission. We are here at the San Gabriel
Mission and the "Mission Play" written by an Anglo turned out to
be -- forget the fantastics. You know, forget anything Stephen
Sondheim did. This was the longest running play, most popular
play, in the early twentieth century.

William Deverell>> Yeah. The "Mission Play" began here on the
grounds of the mission itself in 1912. It opened the same week
the Titanic was sunk. John Steven McGroarty, who was
California's poet laureate, a writer, newspaper man, penned this
play to glorify the Spanish presence here in a highly
sentimentalized, highly nostalgic, highly Catholicized way, and
it hit. It became a remarkably popular play. When you came
away from the "Mission Play", you had a packaged, common
sensible, made sense of, edges rounded off of history of
California which showed inevitable progress coming from the
Spanish period and leapfrogging over the Mexican period for all
intents and purposes and then exclamation points at Gold Rush
and California statehood.

Patt Morrison>> And the Mexicans really did not disappear and
they came back, in fact, in greater numbers as laborers. Your
chapter about the Simon's Brickyard Company points this out.

William Deverell>> By the early twentieth century, they start
to return in greater, greater numbers timed not coincidentally
with the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution south of the border.
Well, that migratory stream was perfectly timed for the
industrial ambitions of this place. So those laborers built
modern Los Angeles and the Simon's Brickyard was a way to
encapsulate that history by studying what was essentially a
company town. Somewhat utopian in terms of the notions of how
it would work, but on the ground, a much more maybe more
complicated notion about what your laborers would do, where they
would live and how they would be able to maneuver in and around
the community in which they lived.

Patt Morrison>> They really didn't interact much with Los
Angeles, the laborers. They stayed there, they had schools,
they had shops, they had sports facilities and activities.

William Deverell>> Yes. This is an increasingly segregated
world. By the 1920s, much like the American south with Jim Crow
and as well other parts of the nation, the increasing racial
segregation would happen out here as well and increasingly that
segregation for us became Mexican and Anglo, black and white,
Asian and white.

Patt Morrison>> It was very much a Patron system at the Simon's
Brickyard Company and a benevolent one compared to others.

William Deverell>> It was. Highly paternalized, superintended
by the Simons family, a brick dynasty here in Southern
California that employed an entire Mexican labor force in what
was then the world's largest brickyard.

Patt Morrison>> How does this notion of cultural whitewash
affect us today politically or socially?

William Deverell>> Oh, I think we're entirely heirs to our
history. The history of this place is woven in the DNA, if you
will, a history of remarkable conflict that rises out of the
1830s and 1840s in the manifest destiny period, the Mexican-
American War which amputates half of Mexico and turns it into a
United States possession, and the cycles of segregated labor
forces, segregated neighborhoods, discriminatory practices this
way and the other way. I think we're entirely heir to that
still and part of the reason I'd like this book to be thought
about is that I want people to not exactly atone or do penance
for our history, but to understand it much better. To
understand that, we can start to make some movement toward a
more equitable future.

Patt Morrison>> Bill Deverell, thank you very much.
"Whitewashed Adobe" and for all your other work.

William Deverell>> Thank you, Patt.

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Val>> Concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. They're a staple of
summer entertainment in Southern California and, this year, they
promise to be more spectacular than ever. The Bowl's landmark
shell had a makeover. It's designed to improve the sound as
well as the look. Vicki Curry traces the Bowl's evolution from
pastoral arena to state of the art performance venue.

Vicki Curry>> It's as much a part of Los Angeles summers as
surf and sand. The Hollywood Bowl has been a local favorite for
over eighty years, offering world-class performances under the
stars.

Deborah Borda>> The Hollywood Bowl is one of the legendary
musical venues of the world. When you say the Hollywood Bowl,
really what you're talking about is this entire canyon, Bolton
Canyon.

Vicki Curry>> Bolton Canyon may be in the heart of Hollywood,
but going to the Hollywood Bowl is like entering another world.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> In 1918, local arts patrons wanted to build an
outdoor amphitheater. They chose a canyon in the Cahuenga Pass,
then known as Daisy Dell, for its great natural acoustics.
Christine Wetherell Stevenson, heiress to the Pittsburgh Paint
fortune, helped purchase the land and it was soon home to
community concerts and religious events including the first
Easter Sunrise Service in 1921.

But another community activist, Arty Mason Carter, had a much
bigger vision for the Bowl as the summer home for the new Los
Angeles Philharmonic. On July 11, 1922, conductor Alfred Hertz
inaugurated the first season of summer concerts.

[Film Clip]

Deborah Borda>> The greatest artists in the world have appeared
on the many stages of the Hollywood Bowl. In the old days when
they built the first shell, it was actually used and constructed
of leftovers from movie sets.

Vicki Curry>> In 1926, permanent benches and boxes were built
and, with them, the arched shell that came to be associated with
the Hollywood Bowl.

Craig Hodgetts>> If you look at the history of the various
shells which were built at the Bowl, you immediately realize
that most of them were built as one-season stage sets.

Vicki Curry>> Pasadena architect, Myron Hunt, designed the
first shell. The next two versions were designed by Lloyd
Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Craig Hodgetts>> They did share, for the most part, this idea
of primary shapes, although the primary ranged from a kind of
Aztec to a very, very low almost aeronautical elliptical form.

Deborah Borda>> The beautiful art deco design, which is the
sort of theme of the Bowl.

Vicki Curry>> The fourth shell continued the theme, which has
become a landmark recognized around the world.

Craig Hodgetts>> The shell which we all came to know over the
last seventy-five years was designed by a group called the
Allied Architects and it was a consortium of highly regarded
architects in Los Angeles who came together to produce this
shell.

Vicki Curry>> When it was built in 1929, it was intended to
last a little longer than one season, but certainly not seven
decades.

Craig Hodgetts>> It was mounted on tracks. It was built of
very lightweight, almost disposable materials, and it just so
happens that the wheels froze to the tracks through rust and it
got to be more trouble than it was worth to take it down, and it
simply endured.

Vicki Curry>> As it endured, it became an icon, especially as
icons of culture and entertainment performed there over the
years.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> The first few decades of the Bowl featured
legendary artists in the worlds of classical music and ballet,
including Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and Heifetz. But things
started to change when Frank Sinatra appeared on the stage in
1943.

Frank Sinatra>> "It's been quite a controversy out here, I
understand, as to whether or not I should appear here at the
Bowl. I don't see why there shouldn't be a mixture of all kinds
of music in any Bowl or any public auditorium. Whether you hear
a concert singer with a philharmonic orchestra or a crooner with
a jazz band, it doesn't make any difference."

Vicki Curry>> That opened the Bowl to performances of all
kinds, including three concerts by The Beatles.

[Film Clip]

Vicki Curry>> But over the decades, the shell began to crumble
and performers began to complain.

Deborah Borda>> The stagehands always used to joke about this.
They said, let's just pray the termites keep holding hands
because, if they let go, the whole thing's going to collapse.
But then there was another issue. Of course, when you talk
about music, you talk about acoustics and sound. I don't know
if you ever have been at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl where
you've actually seen the conductor pick up the phone and get on
the telephone. Now he's not calling out for pizza (laughter).
The reason he's calling is that he's saying, "Hello, soundman?
I'm looking at the trumpet, but I can't hear him."

Vicki Curry>> Despite the canyon's natural acoustics, the shell
that made it a symbol and the city that grew up around it
changed the sound of the Hollywood Bowl. Various improvements
were tried over the years, including a reflecting pool that sat
in front of the stage from 1953 to 1972 and doubled as
intermission entertainment. In 1954, thirty-five foot light and
sound towers were built to help drown out the noise of the
Hollywood Freeway. Other options were tried in the seventies
and eighties.

Deborah Borda>> Frank Gehry designed two different sort of
acoustic solutions, the famous sono-tubes and then the big
spheres, to try and create the right kind of refraction of sound
so people could hear each other. It just didn't work.

Vicki Curry>> Los Angeles County and the Philharmonic decided
the Hollywood Bowl needed a makeover for the twenty-first
century, but preservationists fought to save the historic shell.

Craig Hodgetts>> When we began the project, we tried very, very
hard to keep the old shell and add to it. It turned out that
adding to it, while that was possible, would have required in
the end rebuilding the old shell because it was made of asbestos
and rotting steel.

Vicki Curry>> Performers and stage technicians wanted a new
design that would serve their needs, but in the end, the shape
that is the emblem of the Hollywood Bowl remained. Everyone
agrees the curved shell is the identifying feature of the
Hollywood Bowl, but it's the shell that caused acoustical
problems for the musicians. So how do you create a great space
for music while preserving the look that made the Bowl a
landmark?

Craig Hodgetts>> Well, what we came up with was what we think
and hope is a sublime relationship between the acoustics
requirements and the requirements of memory. It has all the
bells and whistles that allow lighting designers to perform
wonders, that allow stage designers to do their tricks and allow
the orchestra to sound its best. In order to do that, the shell
became much, much larger than the old one. In height, it's
about a third higher. In width, it's about a third wider.

Deborah Borda>> I think it's the size that is really intended.
It fits the bottom of Bolton Canyon so beautifully. I just have
been so taken by how perfectly suited it is for the place and
how it's a wonderful combination of tradition in the future.

Craig Hodgetts>> We had to make something that was enduring,
was kind of timeless, elemental, and that would stay in peoples'
memories and, in fact, continue their memories into the future
without breaking faith with what was there before.

Val>> One of the best things about the Hollywood Bowl? You can
get a seat for most concerts for just one dollar. I didn't say
a front row seat. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For
everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you
next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

This program was made possible in part by a grant from the City
of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times, an insider's look at the
killing fields of Los Angeles where gang violence has made us
America's murder capital.

>> Last night, a young brother got killed right here. When I
went to work last night, I talked to him when he was out here.
When I came home from work, they were wrapping his body up in a
body bag.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.