Center of it all

Construction on the long-stalled Grand Avenue project may be delayed two more years because developers have been unable to secure financing. The $3 billion Frank-Gehry designed Grand Avenue complex was supposed to be the centerpiece of an elaborate effort to rebuild the blocks stretching from Bunker Hill to City Hall. But While backers of downtown development cheer Eli Broad's recent decision to locate his new contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue, and as work begins on a new 16-acre park nearby, the latest delay on the $3-billion, Frank Gehry-designed Grand Avenue complex is a reminder of how tenuous the broader reconstruction of the civic center area remains. Now it's looking likely that Broad's museum and the planned park - designed as part of the overall development -- will open before construction on Gehry's towers even begins.
Kate Linthicum blogging at LA Now/Los Angeles Times on August 26, 2010

Eli Broad's new agreement to build a downtown Los Angeles art museum gives the capricious billionaire and medieval patron of the arts what may be the sweetest rental deal of the century: a 99-year lease of a large parcel in downtown L.A. for a mere $7.7 million. When I asked how $7.7 million can be considered a good price for the sale of an entire block on a hilltop in downtown Los Angeles . . . (County CEO William) Fujioka referred me to the Community Redevelopment Agency, which did the appraisal (and has not yet answered any of my calls). "If you're expecting a comment I'd be commenting on something I don't know about," he said. Then why did he vote for the deal yesterday? "There were a bunch of reason we approved it," Fujioka said.
Tim Cavanaugh blogging at Reason on August 24, 2010

A little-known group, the so-called Grand Avenue Authority, whose members are County Supervisor Gloria Molina, City Councilwoman Jan Perry, County Executive Officer William T. Fujioka and Community Redevelopment Agency boss Cecilia V. Estolano, agreed to transfer 45 percent ownership in Grand Avenue to Istithmar, a vast investment fund controlled by the royal family of Dubai. The project's original private developer, New York-based Related Companies, will retain 55 percent, and the much-delayed project is expected to break ground anytime. Out of the picture is the huge public investor CalPERS, representing more than 1.5 million California government workers, which backed out, citing its discomfort with "overexposure" in downtown's real estate market.
Tibby Rothman in the LA Weekly on April 10 2008

Let's get to the point, though, four years too late: Why are we even doing projects like this? The economy's sucky, money's hard to come by for even the most basic "uninspired" version, not to mention the "prosaic" advanced variation. What exactly are we spending our hard-earned taxpayers' money on here? What was the ultimate goal of this development? Or was it the same as it's always been, a rewrite of the same old Los Angeles development story: a sinkhole for money that should be going to the redevelopment of places that need it. The next half-thought-through, half-programmed, and half-financed phase of the Oldest Masterplan in Los Angeles. Seriously, could someone out there explain to me why redeveloping Bunker Hill is such an urgent priority?
Tony Chavira blogging at FourStory (retrieved on August 27, 2010)

If you have a desire to transform downtown Los Angeles into a fully urban district, as so many of those leaders always have, you have two basic choices. You can push for changes to zoning, transit, and streetscape designs that over time might make downtown vital and walkable, and perhaps truly central to the region - but are necessarily slow-moving and do nothing for the skyline. Or you can push for individual architectural icons, which are likely to create an instant splash and garner publicity but are less likely to have a broad urban effect. For the last six decades, city leaders have chosen the latter course consistently - in part because it fit their ideas about what a big-city downtown ought to look like, and partly because it was simply the path of least resistance and offered the greatest opportunity for investment returns.
Christopher Hawthorne. "Contemporary Voice: Thickets of Diversity, Swaths of Emptiness." A Companion to Los Angeles. Ed. Deverell and Hise. Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. 485

Since downtown is practically a museum of redevelopment plans gone wrong, of missed opportunities and even more broken promises, maybe we shouldn't want Broad to stop. Someone has to wield power to get anything done, after all, which is what the old Committee of 25 did more than half a century ago in trying to turn their scandal plagued and honky-tonk town into a real city. It's the power Broad wields to get the deals done that get him the things he wants. Cut the deal, name a developer, put him and the mayor in front of a glowing model and announce that the city finally has a heart.

Because neglectful Angeleños seem to have left the matter of the city's heart up to Broad, perhaps we should inquire what's in his.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, I used to make little cities in the sandy dirt of my mother's garden. I'd spend afternoons with Danny Rogala, from the next block over, building rough approximations of the suburban boom going on around us.

To be a child in L.A. then was to be intimate with building materials.

The little cities in my mother's garden didn't last. But making them over and over answered some longing Danny and I had to join in the great invention of Los Angeles.

Eli Broad - the child of immigrants and the hard streets of the Bronx - answered longings of his own in building tens of thousands of ordinary houses in suburban Los Angeles beginning in the 1960s. Afterwards, he built an insurance company, a remarkable art collection, and a commanding presence in the cultural and political life of the city.

Broad is a builder. That's where his heart lies. I imagine he sees so much passing away so quickly, like sand houses in a garden. Broad builds things that last (which is why more democracy and less willfulness would be better). He's all we have, however - a single steady heart to lead all our wayward ones.
D. W. Waldie writing in the Los Angeles Timeson May 26, 2005

The image on this page of the Triforium was taken by Flickr user Omar Bárcena. It is used under a Creative Commons License.