“This will create a vibrant city center where people can work, live and play”
“An iconic tower will rise”
“A sense of community will be created”
The gross, enormous cliches of urban development were again shouted yesterday as LA city and county officials approved plans for five new skyscrapers, including some 40-50 stories tall, along with 400,000 sq. feet of retail stores, a multi-cinema complex, condominiums, and a 16 acre park. All carved out of downtown parking lots and vacant land.
The LA Times said, “Planners envision Grand Avenue as the spine of a nearly mile long row of cultural and religious institutions”.
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What it REALLY WILL LOOK LIKE in 15 years:
Visitors in 2020 will walk alongside the museums, churches, and concert halls drowning in a poisonous pea soup of smog. Patrolled by closed circuit cameras, LAPD helicopters,gated garages and bomb sniffing security guards, it is an architectural landscape of appalling monotony, banality and alienation. The Patriot Act insures that any one of the Earth’s seven billion inhabitants, who might visit here, will be completely known and pre-investigated by federal, state and local authorities. No doubt 24 Hour Fitness and Jerry’s Deli will be safe from Islamic radicals.
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Real Estate mogul and mass clone house creator, Eli Broad, the 28th richest man in America, [according to Forbes], is the head of the Grand Avenue Committee. His organization is “spearheading” the unholy combination of developers, the Catholic Church, Disney and others who believe the highest values are achieved with the biggest dollars.
Related Companies, who recently built the 75 story black glass office tower, mall and shopping center called TIME WARNER NEW YORK, where some restaurants charge $500 for a meal, will be the project developer. Donald Trump as Medici.
The goal is to bring a “heart” to the city by building enormous condos inhabited by tax attorneys. Empty Multiplexes as DVD’s and home entertainment technology make theatergoing extinct. A 16 acre park, neither large enough for hiking and exploration or small enough for beauty and maintainence, will allegedly tie the entire Ponzi scheme together.
Los Angeles has heard all of this before, when they razed and destroyed the old Victorian houses on top of Bunker Hill. When they rammed the freeways through the orange groves, they said it would create a vibrant, modern metropolis of speed and convenience. LA’s downtown today is simply the most frightening and deserted collection of buildings in the world. To be lost on one of the dark avenues, or circling round and round, trying to find one’s way onto the freeway, is to experience a uniquely Angeleno urban torture. Tunnels, concrete overpasses, windowless expanses of marble perched precariously atop a tectonic fault ready to shake and collapse and bury us any second……Hell itself!
If Broad, and the others powers that be, really had hearts, they would get their asses over to Los Angeles Street, to the infamous Skid Row, where tens of thousands of dirt encrusted human beings live, eat, shit and exist on the sidewalk inside makeshift corrugated paper huts. Where are the Spielbergs, the Cruises, the Villaraigosas, the Eisners, the Broads, with their billions of dollars(?) as almost one hundred thousand of their fellow Americans live in utter poverty like nomadic refugees in the heart of the second largest city in the United States?
Oh, glorious tomorrow with your Gelsons, Gap, Banana Republic, Good Guys and Best Buys, California Pizza Kitchen, dancing water fountains choreographed to Neil Sedaka, multi-plex plastical, classic, pseudo Art Deco movie house with Adam Sandler’s latest drek!! Tear down that wall Mr. Gorbachev! Let the developers come forth! We are building a land of dreams that will amaze you!
Here in Van Nuys 
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