Photos of Time-Warner Center, NYC.
It was deja vu to open up a recent issue of the LA TIMES and find the lead headline about the downtown Gehry project.
I thought I was back in 1915, when the Times might have headlined “MULLHOLLAND WILL BRING WATER TO OUR BELOVED CITY” or perhaps 1950, “FREEWAYS TO TRANSFORM OUR CITY INTO MODERN METROPOLIS” or maybe 1965: “URBAN RENEWAL ON BUNKER HILL WILL CREATE A NEW DOWNTOWN”.
No glass or steel tower, consisting of luxury condos and those repetitive chain stores, will EVER create a better downtown. Maybe more sterility and isolation, but nothing lasting for the good of many.
Readers of the LA TIMES seem to have grasped the essential plasticity and phony boosterism in the Grand Avenue scheme.
Elijah Wood said: “The tragic flaw of architect Frank Gehry’s model of a “revitalized” downtown is that neither he nor anyone else involved seems to have any affection for the downtown that already exists.
You don’t revitalize a city by building generic glass boxes; you revitalize it by stressing its unique advantages. From Olvera Street to the old movie palaces, there is a lot to love about downtown.”
Ken Christensen wrote: “Please, somebody stop Gehry! Everyone is in thrall of the star architect these days. They think one giant project — a sports stadium, museum or something else — will bring back the good old days of a vibrant downtown. The reality is that downtown Los Angeles is deadly depressing and that giant projects such as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and the Walt Disney Concert Hall don’t help.”
Who is enthralled with gigantic sports stadiums, mega malls, enormous glass towers, and starchitecture? Bankers, developers, politicians, lawyers.
On a recent visit to New York, I went into the new CNN-Time-Warner mall complex in Columbus Circle. Something very similiar to what Gehry is proposing. 70 stories of black glass with a slick mall on the ground level. I tried to take some photos of the interior, and was approached by a guard who instructed me to aim my lens towards the windows overlooking Central Park. But I was absolutely not allowed to shoot images of the storefronts.
There was something sickening about visiting the headquarters of the largest communications company in the world and having the secret police censor my photographs.
As we lament how Google cooperated with the Chinese government in censoring “Falun Gong” or “Freedom” have we considered how our own country has become an entertainment oriented police state where shopping and the internet are OK as long as they serve the powers that be?
Redevelopment used to mean the alleged creation of a more humane environment, or removing slums. Now it promises us acres of shopping and distorted glass towers with psychopathic proportions and dystopian realities.
Here in Van Nuys 
“They’ll likely snub it, saying “If I wanted to see this corporate crap, I would have lived closer to the Third Street Promenade.” “
You mean people living in downtown will be dramatically different from people who live in Santa Monica or near the Grove in mid-town? I doubt it. However, they’ll certainly snub Grand Avenue if it remains what it is right now: mostly undeveloped, weed-strewn fields or auto lots.
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JZY wrote:
[Jane Jacobs] had spoken out her loath for big American cities, and was living in Canada because “American cities are too hostile.”
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Her public reason for relocating to Canada was to prevent her kids from being drafted to fight in ‘Nam.
She would still visit many American cities, and you have to see the sad irony into moving from an American city to the largest city in Canada (though, when she moved there, Montreal was No. 1.)
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On the suface, she rooted for urban neighborhoods such as the North End of Boston, praising it to be the fine example of urban environment. Little did she know, neighborhoods like the North End or Chinatown were highly controlled and shaped by the immigrant mobs, and her nostalgia and romantic vision of ethnic enclaves prevented her from trully seeing American cities.
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If the mobs were the only thing that held ethnic communities together, then there was a reason for it. Remember that big cities needed cheap immigrant labor and offered no social mobility. Don’t forget that municipal government, the churches, the banks, the chambers of commerce and the benevolent associations were off-limits to ethnics; these were the WASP mobs.
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Like I had said, Grant Ave is only a little piece of the Downtown area. That is, if you absolutely find it meritless, there are other jobs that are more satisfactory, yes?
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Yes. I wouldn’t mind Grand Avenue if it’s nothing more than it is. The problem is that Grand Avenue is not just a development; it’s the Great White Hope.
This one project also has to deliver ephemeral qualities; not just a Borders and Starbucks, which have practical use, but the envy and fawning admiration of the world. It has to change everything about downtown.
And it will not.
Remember the edifice complex of the early Tom Bradley years? Downtown saw the creation of many office buildings, but it was Los Angeles’ mid-life crisis akin to the man in his 40s or 50s who buys a sports car and has an affair with a 20-something underling to keep him from acknowledging the inevitability of his decline. How did downtown change? We got buildings, but also created an area that people only go to because they have to work and only look forward to getting the hell out of there at 5 p.m. That’s also why you see fast food places that are never open nights or weekends.
Downtown was able to maintain the plurality of a business community destination, and had the competitive advantages of history and aggregate business location, but it was anti-Jacobsian because people didn’t matter. Except for creative arts, people don’t enjoy working. Couple work antipathy with a single-purpose use to make an area geared to nothing but work, you create an area that people would rejoice if it was abadoned and left to rot.
But now you are seeing people willing to live in downtown, and a desire to make a community.
So how does Grand Avenue fit in to the downtown of the past and the future? Badly.
The downtown residents have started, and want to see more, unique businesses that can truly give downtown an identity. You begin to see restaurants, bars and quirky small businesses, even within close proximity to Skid Row. Downtown residents are having meetups and are exploring the area.
Is Grand Avenue built for these people? They’ll likely snub it, saying “If I wanted to see this corporate crap, I would have lived closer to the Third Street Promenade.”
It must then be dependent on outsiders, and if the goal is to mine sales taxes, it has to be. It would be terrific for workers, but the blueprint calls for massive parking and orienting floor plans around entering and exiting from the garage. Umm, downtowners ride the DASH. Second, what makes Grand Avenue so special that people would want to visit it over a mall closer to their house? Third, the homeless will gravitate to Grand Avenue because that’s where all the people and their spare change and leftover scraps are.
If Grand Avenue never existed, there would be all sorts of other uses for that land, and life goes on.
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See my latest response to “Dr. No”. I can’t quite figure out what we need to outgrow.
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Dr. NO on Ms. Jacobs:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/weekinreview/30jacobs.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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Well, then again, what is the critical mass of the real dedicated urban dwellers in this “town”? Many would argue that the whole allure of L.A/SoCal is that “informal”, sprawled, segregated life style missing in the older metropolis on the East Coast. As Koolhaas observed years ago, downtown U.S.A. has been the new love toy of suburbanites. And since the wealthy, perky and alas, determined suburbanites are driving the development in the long decayed city centers of (white fleet, remember?), what could you do about it? Working with them or sit still, throwing curses and reactionary criticisms at them?
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So would people prefer that Grand Avenue remain a big nothing, a big joke?
Many folks in Los Angeles and beyond already perceive the center of the city as being far worse than a “Babbitt”. They see it as being a mostly decayed, ugly and lifeless part of town, the West Coast’s version of a half-assed downtown St Louis, Kansas City or Cleveland.
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Wad,
No, Jane Jacobs really was not inspiring with respect to large metropolis. She had spoken out her loath for big American cities, and was living in Canada because “American cities are too hostile.” On the suface, she rooted for urban neighborhoods such as the North End of Boston, praising it to be the fine example of urban environment. Little did she know, neighborhoods like the North End or Chinatown were highly controlled and shaped by the immigrant mobs, and her nostalgia and romantic vision of ethnic enclaves prevented her from trully seeing American cities. She would be and should be remembered, sort of like Christopher Alexander and his Pattern Language. But as being instumental in making great cities of tomorrow, well, she is no heroic figure.
Like I had said, Grant Ave is only a little piece of the Downtown area. That is, if you absolutely find it meritless, there are other jobs that are more satisfactory, yes? Now, L.A. won’t have Grant Ave every where(for various obvious and less obvious reasons; such as $). Maybe China would(ok, joking here). Certainly, LA does need much more good infill redevelopment for its newcomers as well as those that have stuck around. But fixated on the supposed pros and cons of that little piece of Grant Ave. and exacerbating frustration on the short comings of LA’s distant and recent development mistakes are not positive, would you agree? “Non-Grant Ave.” type of infill urban development of sizable scale that is tasteful, politically progressive, middle class and younger generations (in their 20’s and 30’s) empowering…etc, have not become the ionic love child to the sensation-making media. However, they do exist, and alas, because of their low profitability, less than adequate are in the progress.
Grand Ave. or say, Ground Zero are never about to resolve the most sophisticated urbanist concerns. That said, we cannot devalue all of the component projects in that development. If we agree that great urban environment is the result of layered mosaics, then our vision would also broaden to perceive the bigger picture. While I agree with your criticisms of banality attempt to cloak under a starchitect’s fame, and the deleterious urban legacy of the Midwestern WASPs, city making and redevelopment continue. Greatness and, perhaps more crucially, the livability of L.A., will not depend on the success or failure of this one project, but the timely augmentation of all other activities about town.
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JZY, every city does have its share of monuments, but what’s the intention of monumentalizing something? What ideals are there? Los Angeles is too heterogeneous and the populations too transient to form a civic ideal. And back when Los Angeles was all about forming its ideal, the ideal was formed by Midwestern WASPs who just brought Midwestern customs to their outpost city.
We have a pleasant climate that was made for savoring the outdoors, yet a long time ago it was decided that everyone had to get everywhere in cars and condition people to be averse to communities and fellow residents.
Grand Avenue is like a 21st Century interpretation of “Babbitt.” The project is built to fulfill some civic inadequacy, which it will ultimately not resolve.
Grand Avenue is nothing new; why would people return to it after opening week? Not only people nearby, but people from the next town or even the next county? Heck, Proposition 13 forces every city in California to build such sales tax mills just to stay above water. This means that other cities will want Grand Avenues of their own.
And for Mrs. Jacobs, she just states elements that made strong cities. If she was an apologist for Boston and San Francisco, she’s also an apologist for Mattapan and Hunter’s Point. She would probably hate large metropoles because they’re not communities in so much as shopping malls: come in, fulfill your duty and leave. Places you couldn’t love even if you tried very hard to.
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WAD,
But every city has its share of monumentality and edifice for reaching the purists ideals.
Grant Ave. area is such a small piece of the entire Downtown and L.A. area. Being led to fixate on it as the promotional activities hope to achieve, is in itself a loss of focus of a larger past, present and future L.A. development (i.e. that the city had been developed with the automobiles in mind). From there, the built form must accommodate and appeal to those more than well-known habits and cultures of drivers. I believe you know them better than well.
Jane Jacobs was an icon, for sure. However, she was the apologist for such cities like Boston and San Francisco; small, provincial and culturally conservative boutique urban centers. She was ultimately not a fan of the large metropolis (pluralist, global, commercialized, competitive, dangerous…etc) such as one that we reside in.
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Masturbatory trash heap? Sounds good to me.
Or how about the ratty environment of an area like Van Nuys that Andrew, unfortunately, is stuck in? Talk about trash heap.
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It is ironic that the Grand Avenue project had its coming out party at the same time that the great Jane Jacobs passes away in Toronto.
While Grand Avenue was Page One news, Jacobs received an obituary that was nearly a full page long. She’s an urban planning icon who fell into that role by accident.
Her overall vision for great cities was to make them unique and reflect a common ideal among its residents, and that cities should be scaled around day-to-day human interaction.
Grand Avenue mocks this in every possible way. It’s a monument in an area that has more than its share of past monuments that never restored downtown’s glory. It has a retail component that will be Hollywood & Highland with a better floor plan. And not only is it unoriginal, Grand Avenue makes a stew out of every redevelopment ingredient used in the past 50 years, all in one location.
Since Frank Gehry is leading the charge, no doubt he’ll orient Grand Avenue to look down upon his last creation, a masturbatory trash heap of a concert hall that we’re not supposed to revile because of who designed it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Grand Avenue turns out to be an anachronistic debacle.
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The reason the center of the city is so “deadly depressing” is not because of new shiny, “giant” projects, be they a cathedral or concert hall (or Frank Gehry’s proposed buildings on Grand Avenue), but because so much of it continues to be a sprawl of hard-up or underutilized, often grimy properties. Actually, the area is laughable and “deadly depressing” because it doesn’t have enough “giant” projects, and instead has an abundance of seedy, unattractive properties, including the auto lots which Gehry’s development is to replace.
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