Last Wednesday, the Related Companies completed the topping out of the US 1 billion dollar mixed-use project, the Grand by Gehry Partners1, across the street from the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
In its most basic form, the new development consists of two towers, several podium levels, and an open plaza. The larger of the two buildings nears 40 stories and provides 400 residences, of which one-fifth will be affordable rate units. The smaller hotel tower at the northern end of the site (bridging West 1st and West 2nd streets) is 20 stories high.
If you like VR experiences, you can tour the Grand here.
The complex includes retail podiums that are anchored by restaurants and shops. A plaza with open terraces runs from east to west, connecting Olive to Grand. The public plaza has stepped open terraces and the developers describe it as an “airy outdoor urban room.” Gehry has indicated that live performances from Disney Concert Hall will be projected on its shiny skin, transforming the hall into a giant urban video screen for the public living room across the street.
With the completion of the Grand nearing, I have updated an essay I wrote in 2004 for the LA Forum about the decades-long effort to redevelop Bunker Hill and Grand Avenue.2
It was interesting to re-read my critique after so many years away from it. Some elements in the essay were predictive, but there were also many facts that I had forgotten.
For instance, if Donald Trump (with Norman Foster!) had not dropped out of the running for the project…who knows? What if Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel had teamed with Frank Gehry on the Grand, each designing a tower? All fascinating alternate outcomes to ruminate over.
As the Grand wraps up, it seems we may also be nearing the end of a 40-year national obsession with shrinking the public realm. Below my original text, I’ve added some questions and a few thoughts about what that might signify for the future of large-scale redevelopment projects in the Biden era.
This post is a lot longer than most, but perhaps you can set aside some time this week to read it.
If you are a fan of Downtown LA’s history, you might enjoy it as I have, again. And, I hope you’ll appreciate the new conclusion.
Downtown, Again. 2004
Spectacle
The future of Downtown Los Angeles is in play again.
The Grand Avenue Project is the biggest public re-development spectacle to come to town in a long while. Under the banner “Re-Imagining Grand Avenue, Creating a Center for Los Angeles,” the newly invigorated push to revitalize LA’s center is once again focused on Bunker Hill, the area around the recently completed Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The Grand Avenue Project is being promoted and organized by the Grand Avenue Committee. This public/private partnership has aimed to “…transform the civic and cultural districts of downtown Los Angeles into a vibrant new regional center that will showcase entertainment venues, restaurants, retail mixed with office buildings, a hotel, and over 1000 new housing units.”
Directed by the Los Angeles Grand Avenue Authority, a joint power entity formed by the union of the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA) and the County of Los Angeles, the Grand Avenue Committee has the singular agenda of creating no less than a new 3.2 million square foot regional center. Also planned for redevelopment is the existing County Mall, a little-used public space that stretches from the Music Center at the top of Bunker Hill to City Hall at the bottom of the hill. Ingenuously, the enhanced park is being promoted as “LA’s own Central Park.” The fact that the County Mall is neither central to Downtown Los Angeles or greater Los Angeles nor, for that matter at only 16 acres, anywhere close to Olmstead and Vaux’s 843-acre urban oasis, seems beside the point. What matters most is that the entire project is hinged on the premise that it all can finally defeat Downtown LA’s dead-after-5 pm and every weekend curse.
Eli Broad, billionaire tract house developer, patron of the arts and architecture, and vice chairman of the Grand Avenue Committee, said recently, “We’re hopeful we’ll be able to create a street where people will stay after work and one that will be a draw for the entire region.” Bringing foot traffic to Downtown LA after dark will cost $1.2 billion. Approximately $300 million will be required for public infrastructure, and roughly $900 million will be needed for real estate development. If successful, the project will generate 16,000 long-term jobs and raise $85 million annually in local, county, and state taxes.
Circus
Eight teams of developers and architects, comprised of some 60 individual firms, responded to the RFQ issued for the project. The Grand Avenue Committee’s County Supervisor Gloria Molina, Councilwoman Jan Perry, the CRA’s Bud Ovrom, and LA County CAO David Janssen reviewed the submissions. They announced in late January 2004 that five teams were shortlisted to compete for the job:
1/ Grand Avenue Development Alliance, a consortium led by Australian property giant Bovis Lend Lease with Arquitectonica of Miami, Manhattan-based Gary Edward Handel + Associates, MVE & Partners, and RTKL;
2/ Forest City Ratner Development of Cleveland, owners of the 42nd St Retail and Entertainment Complex in Times Square and developers of the recently unveiled Downtown Brooklyn Basketball Arena;
3/ J. H. Snyder Company, the LA-based developers of the local Water Garden business park, with private equity real estate investment group Lubert-Adler Partners and the Jerde Partnership, Johnson Fain, and the recently re-formulated Rios Clementi Hale Studios;
4/ The Related Companies, backers of the $1.7 billion Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle in Manhattan, with architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, under partner David Childs, with Elkus Manfredi.
5/ Operating as Bunker Hill Ltd., LA-based – Weintraub Financial Services with the Bronson Companies, Apollo Real Estate Advisors, and the Vornado Realty Trust. The local consortium counts Gehry Partners, LLP (teamed with and the promising young firm Daly Genik) as their architect with landscape architects the Olin Partnership.
Curiously, Gehry, who would seem to be Bunker Hill Ltd’s trump card, has downplayed his role, publicly announcing that he is not so much interested in the design of the project as its potential for urbanism. “For me, it’s not important if I do a building – I’ve got Disney Hall. I’m more interested in urban planning,” Gehry recently stated.
Nevertheless, rumors of all-star designer involvement have spread with Jean Nouvel, and Zaha Hadid pegged to join the Gehry-led team. Earlier yet, Sir Norman Foster was temporarily aligned with New York developer Donald Trump’s team, which has since fallen out of the bidding process.
Notably absent from the redevelopment frenzy is the local ‘dream team of Ming Fung, Craig Hodgetts, Thom Mayne, and Eric Owen Moss, who have joined together in discussions with several potential developers but remain on the sidelines for the moment. Should they ultimately enter the Grand Avenue fray, they may also rope in Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelblau, designer of the new Central Los Angeles High School # 9, and Steven Holl, architect for the new Los Angeles County Natural History Museum.
Also conspicuously out of the running in the redevelopment frenzy is Dutch urbanist and iconoclast Rem Koolhaas, whose last two ventures in Los Angeles, a scheme for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new facilities on Wilshire and new headquarters for Universal Studios over the hill in the San Fernando Valley both fizzled after losing funding and backing.3
Amnesia & Erasure
Despite, or perhaps because of the optimism surrounding the project, there seems to be a state of amnesia about the number of “ground-breaking” and largely unsuccessful fresh starts Bunker Hill has been given over the last five decades.
The view that many Angelenos hold of downtown as one of the city’s final great redevelopment frontier seems endemic, and its power wards off any bad flashbacks associated with the numerous failed efforts to redevelop Bunker Hill.
Granted, LA is coming off a blissful decade of significant civic achievements – Richard Meier’s Getty Center, Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral, and of course, the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Additionally, Angelenos have witnessed an overhaul of the city’s infrastructure, including a $2 billion Alameda Corridor transport conduit, a new subway system, a linked light rail network, and an “intelligent” metro bus line.
So perhaps accordingly, the city’s dismal record downtown has yet to spark any questions about the viability or the reasoning behind the latest attempt to revive Bunker Hill. Indeed, the redesign, promotion, and marketing of Bunker Hill’s future are something of a local tradition in line with LA’s infamous skill for manufacturing the future while destroying its history.
As early as 1950/51, the newly established CRA tagged the then down at its heels Bunker Hill as “Redevelopment Area Number One.” Overlooking the downtown of the 1930s and ’40s – the LA that Raymond Chandler called “that old whore” – Bunker Hill was a community of reportedly 10,000 low-income, largely immigrant, and minority residents living 10 to a room in squalid, disintegrating Victorian structures.
The initial Master Plan developed by the City Planning Authority called for the complete clearing of the area, including its population. In its place, the study proposed a series of 20 story high public apartment blocks arranged around octagonal-shaped courtyards. The scheme, widely pilloried, was scrapped, and by 1959 the firm of Charles Luckman and Associates was retained to develop a new master plan.
Luckman, the former CEO of the Lever Company and later was a partner to William Pereira, planner of Irvine, one of this nation’s largest master-planned communities, put forward a new scheme that envisioned some 11 million square feet of office and retail space, 2,000 hotel rooms, and 3,000 residential units. Not coincidentally, Luckman’s plan also proposed that Bunker Hill be scraped clean, graded, and neatly divided into a series of gridded zones connected by overhead walkways and moving sidewalks.
It would be 15 years before the Luckman plan for Bunker Hill could begin to be fully implemented. In the intervening years, amendments were made for cultural facilities and significant height variations. The master plan was refined again in 1968 by Bay area firm WBE – Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons – by which time the Bunker Hill High Rise Apartments, the first new structures on the Hill, were completed. By 1970 Bunker Hill was shaved clean and the last of its Victorian homes had been “air-lifted” to the Heritage Square Museum.
Save the 40 story Union Bank tower; there was very little new construction completed or in the ground. Aerial photographs from the period 1973-74 look less like Los Angeles than images of Rotterdam after it was bombarded in 1940.
Aside from those few lone towers, Bunker Hill was effectively the largest open construction site in North America.
Deja Vu
From 1970 until the mid-Eighties, close to twenty housing, retail, and office structures were erected around Bunker Hill. These included five significant buildings – the Bonaventure Hotel, the Security Pacific National Bank, the Arco parking structure, the Los Angeles World Trade Center, and the Figueroa Courtyard. The construction boom that emerged in the early Eighties drove the development of the Angelus towers, the Citicorp Center towers, the Marriott Downtown, and the Wells Fargo Center.
This active new city core would lead the CRA to conduct a nationwide design-development competition for a mixed-use 11-acre development situated at the top of Bunker Hill, the so-called California Plaza.
In February of 1980, the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles (CRA) declared five North American developers' proposals were accepted for the 11.2-acre L-shaped site between the Music Center and the Central Business District. Projected for the site was a mix of office and commercial space (70%) and residential units (30%). One and a half percent of the project’s cost was earmarked for the construction of a Museum of Contemporary Art and a 1.5-acre park. Additionally, the CRA had stipulated the reinstatement of the “restored” Angel’s Flight funicular.
The shortlist included:
1/ Metropolitan Structures Inc., with Fujikawa, Conterato, Lohan and Associates, the successor firm to Mies van der Rohe;
2/ Olympia York/Trizec Western with SOM;
3/ Cabot, Cabot & Forbes with A.C. Martin and Davis Brody Bond;
4/ Bunker Hill Associates with Arthur Erickson, Kamnitzer, Cotton, Vreeland, and Gruen;
and the ‘LA All-Stars’ team:
5/ Maguire Partners with Harry Perloff, Barton Myers, Edgardo Contini, Charles Moore, Lawrence Halprin, Cesar Pelli, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, Ricardo Legoretta, Frank Gehry, Sussman Prejza, Carlos Diniz, and Robert Kennard.4
By June of 1980, the competition had come down to pair of final competitors – Arthur Erickson’s team and the supergroup led by Harvey S. Perloff, Dean of the School of Architecture at UCLA, the team that Rem Koolhaas would later name the LA All-Stars.
Arthur Erickson vs. the LA All-Stars
Canadian Erickson’s winning scheme, the so-called California Center, presented a composition of several towers connected by a plinth arranged around a swirling center at the site’s “city-end,” the California Plaza. Essentially its ‘parti’ developed from an established, homogeneous Modernist gesture unified by an unremittingly banal language – tower blocks and excavated courtyards.
The All Stars’ scheme, by contrast, abandoned the singular Modernist gesture in favor of a sort of Post Modern orchestrated chaos. In the place of a unified nod to the master plan developed by Luckman, the All-Stars presented an ‘exquisite corpse’ – 9 projects approximately connected by a varied necklace of public spaces designed by Moore and landscape architect Halprin. Emblematic of Moore and Gehry’s adventurous and often outré civic work of the period (Moore’s Piazza D’Italia or Gehry’s Loyola Law School), the CRA soundly rejected the entry.
Criticism of Erickson’s winning project came fast and sharp.
Invited to comment on the competition process, Rem Koolhaas declared that the Erickson scheme “…poignantly evokes what is no longer there: conviction, seriousness, invention.” He was not too fond of the competition’s approach either. He continued, ”…for lovers of Los Angeles’ ‘no-topia’ both schemes are disappointingly alien to locale mythology. In fact, the images they offer are similarly removed from the LA myth of the freeway, of low intensity, etc. Granting it would be another kind of nostalgia to condemn LA to a perpetual life without a center of gravity, it is surprising that the image of downtown is presented here as merely an East Coast one seen through rose-tinted polaroids.”
Equally scathing, Village Voice critic Michael Sorkin wrote of the winning entry, “…the Erickson presentation, instead of actually supplying any evidence of good design, sought to overwhelm by a mass of visual codes signifying good design. Instead of architecture, one was exposed to a banal lexicon of renderer’s icons for urbanity: flapping banners, balloons, pushcarts with mustachioed vendors…” Sorkin added, “…one would expect a cogent expression about the particular character of Los Angeles, one of the world’s wonder cities. This requires an act of imagination, an act which unfortunately proved unnatural to most of the entrants.”
Hope
Given the increasingly celebrated re-emergence of Downtown as a bona fide residential and cultural center and the entrenchment of LA more generally as a center for contemporary architectural experimentation, it seems vitally important now to re-examine the future imagined for Bunker Hill yesterday as a way to sharpen our ideas about Downtown today.
One wonders if the current excitement building around the Grand Avenue Project will spark an interest in a genuinely new discussion about Downtown’s prospects, or we will be treated yet again to the usual, quotidian developers’ exigencies that are too often passed off as urbanism.
“We want a great mixed-use project that works economically,” says David Malmuth, real estate consultant with Robert Charles Lesser Co. and a board member of the Grand Avenue Committee. Malmuth, who helped conceive the recently completed Hollywood & Highland mall, brought Michael Eisner to Times Square while at Disney Development in the early 1990s.
He claims that the need now at Bunker Hill is “… to move more towards a process that’s about urban planning ideas and a financial approach, as opposed to a pro forma that’s not going to be accurate – and that everyone knows is not going to be accurate.” What remains to be seen is what the current definition of “urban planning ideas” means.
I suppose the notion of bringing a miniature version of 42nd Street or a Central Park to LA seems to define the outermost limit of what the Grand Avenue Committee is willing to picture as urbanism. In that case, one is forced to wonder how far we have come since the CRA announced its first set of plans for Bunker Hill some 50 years ago.
The journey Bunker Hill has made from tabula rasa to Walt Disney Concert Hall hardly seems like a coherent trajectory. However, somewhere in its history, Bunker Hill presents a case for returning to something akin to urbanism or at least the will to experiment with our accepted ideas about Los Angeles.
“It’s difficult within the public environment not to ask for something that is so specific,” Malmuth remarks. “But then you’re locked into disappointment, and you’ll build gradually toward failure. I want to get a great project built here.” While Malmuth may be correct, in any assessment that could be made about Bunker Hill’s lost opportunities and erased history, the Walt Disney Concert Hall creates a powerful argument for innovative urban form. I must say here that its success has been entirely dependent on its urban specificity and the clarity of its architectural vision for LA’s future.
In the twenty-four years that have passed since the last major competition held to determine the future of Bunker Hill, it seems as if Los Angeles has devolved from being the subject of wonder (think of Reyner Banham’s tribute to this city) to being a city increasingly concerned with simulating the picturesque urbanisms of the East Coast or 19th century Europe.
The financial intricacy and complexity of the development process notwithstanding, one hopes that what remains of LA’s distinctiveness as a contemporary city- its history of architectural experimentation, idiosyncratic forms, and cultural diversity- will provide the Grand Avenue Committee with enough impetus to back a motivated team with a courageous scheme for Grand Avenue.
This city certainly deserves a proposal for Grand Avenue that is unapologetic about exceeding our current demands of urbanism or the litany of disappointing plans that have been foisted on Downtown Los Angeles.
Postscript: Downtown, Again 2021
History is a funny thing.
As Heather Cox Richardson reminds us, “Historians are fond of saying that the past doesn’t repeat itself; it rhymes.” Like another great writer, Kurt Andersen, Richardson has divined something newly afoot in American politics.
It may be too early to tell, but after four decades of Reaganomics and a half-decade of Trumpism, the recent passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act by President Biden may mark the end of the anti-government paradigm that celebrated and drove the ultra-privatization of American cities and, in particular, large urban redevelopment projects.
I wonder what impact this promising shift away from the radical defunding of government services, massive tax cuts for the rich, the off-shoring of American workers’ jobs, in other words, a wholesale abandonment of the Commons, will have on our cities?
After so many years spent reversing the forward-thinking advocacy movements that help define the United States from the Depression-era to the late 1970s, what might a return to a politics of broad-based civic-mindedness mean for urban planning and design?
Will we ever see a truly Jacobean5 return to the democratization of urban development decisions?
Can our governments, at the local, state, and federal levels, take a more active role in leading the creation of a less exclusive civic realm for a wider public, not just one for the well-moneyed?
Do massive mono-cultural private sector projects reshaping cities like New York and LA (for instance, the Related Companies’ Hudson Yards and the Grand) need to be replaced by multiple, smaller-scale, public-led, community-centric affordable housing and open green space projects?
In LA, should we try to imagine a revamped, supercharged CRA, the failed Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles that was “…dedicated to revitalizing, refurbishing, and renewing economically depressed areas of Los Angeles?”
Maybe it’s just too all too soon to tell.
But as the era of radicalized anti-governance seems to draw to a close, it’s certainly interesting to think about other possibilities for the future of our cities.
As for the Grand Avenue Project-saga and the Bunker Hill redevelopment opera, I would like to think that the urban heart transplant operation has finally succeeded.
Maybe our Tin City will yet have a heart after all.
With that said, the unexamined boosterism about the neighborhood continues unabated, even in the midst of a national crisis.
The site adjacent to Angels’ Flight, below California Plaza, is being prepped to receive Angels Landing, a “$2 billion [64-floor] hotel development proposed for the Bunker Hill neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, [that] will create thousands of new jobs and generate millions in annual tax revenues for L.A., according to a new analysis.”6
Somewhere in the story of Bunker Hill’s redevelopment, from 1980 onwards, there is a parable about what happens when a big city like Los Angeles gives over the control of its evolution to a semi-privatized decision-making process.
At a minimum, the notion that public or cultural spaces have to be tethered to private domains even to exist became so utterly naturalized that many Angelenos came to mistake the circulation and seating areas of our Disneyfied open-air malls as actual public zones even though they remain utterly encircled by private entities.
More worryingly, the sloppy mixing of the public’s interests and private money in LA has bred a culture of limited political accountability and obscured public transparency about the decisions that shape our city. That has led, unfortunately, to rampant pay-to-play political corruption.
With all that stated, what really puzzles me after thinking about the California Plaza competition at length, is what remains of the legacy of urban thinkers like Harvey Perloff and Charles Moore in today’s world.
Their plan for Bunker Hill presented something novel, a democratic Collage-City made up of competing, and diverse voices organized laterally, and from the bottom-up, the opposite of the top-down, privately led quasi-public space-making that has been applied haphazardly to North American cities since the 1980s.
I do think what Downtown LA could use now is a bit more of the Perloff-Moore approach to remaking the city and a lot less developer-driven urban fantasy mono-zoning, a lot less gilding over unaddressed inequalities.
What the Southern California region needs most now is a politically well-governed means to deliver a more equitable distribution of open space, affordable housing, accessible transit, and yes, a lot more artful, democratic public space planning: whatever rhymes best with “orchestrated urban chaos.”
Notes
Frank Gehry, the Grand’s architect (who turned 92 two weeks ago), has been involved in various design proposals for Grand Avenue and Bunker Hill since the early 1980s. He has several large-scale projects in design across LA, including The Ocean Avenue Project, the Warner Bros. Second Century expansion in Burbank, and a mixed-use housing complex near the Sunset Strip's eastern end in West Hollywood.
Coincidentally, my essay was reissued in 2019 as part of The LA Forum Reader. If you don’t already own it, you should try to get a copy. It includes some great early writings by Margaret Crawford, Sylvia Lavin, Mimi Zeiger, the late John Chase, and an interview with Mike Davis by Joe Day.
Koolhaas, who has had a long love/hate affair with LA, has struggled to land a major project here after his firm’s debut in Beverly Hills, the Prada Epicenter on Rodeo Drive, opened in 2002. The drought, it would seem, has finally ended as the Audrey Irmas Pavilion, next to the Wilshire Temple in Koreatown, gets close to completion.
At the end of this month, I’ll be posting ‘Arthur Erickson vs. the LA All-Stars,’ a little-known, boot-legged article by Koolhaas (an anti-hero mine) from Traces (1981) about the California Plaza competition. And, sometime in April or May, I will be posting another little-known, boot-legged article, “Explaining Los Angeles” by the late Michael Sorkin, a hero of mine.
Both writings were published in a fanzine designed by Brian Roettinger that accompanied the exhibition I co-curated at SCI-Arc, ‘Whatever Happened to Los Angeles?’
After Jane Jacobs