A Further Revitalization of Downtown, or Massive Boondoggle?

(Pic: L.A. Times)

I remain pretty uneasy over the Grand Avenue project, which the L.A. County Board of Supervisors and the L.A. City Council approved on Monday.

And it's not just the tax breaks that bother me -- although, considering the sweet parcel of land that Related Cos. is getting to develop, tax breaks just seem excessive. Nah, it's also the fact that the development seems a little too generic to make the kind of impact that Eli Broad (who spearheaded the Grand Avenue campaign) and designer Frank Gehry say it will.

Yeah, I know -- at least this is something. And any development that finally rids us of that awful parking lot across the street from Disney Hall should earn our respect. But again, I don't think this was handled right at all.

Martini Republic captures that sentiment well in the post What's Wrong with the Grand Avenue Plan, noting that the planned park between City Hall and the Music Center appears to be almost an after thought in the plans:

$50 million is not nearly enough to earmark for this space, nor should this space be a patchwork of programming. A great lawn is all too often a great yawn—and never should it play second fiddle to any kind of development, let alone a naked commercial one. A colorful garden—nice in a Sunset Magazine way, but where is the civitas? Where is the history of the City in this? And the same team promised wonderful gardens at the Disney Hall—and you know what they delivered in the line of gardens there—mere afterthoughts.

We need to do something theatric and dramatic with this space, not turn it into simply pleasant foliage with a suburban bend in the road. To guarantee that it doesn’t happen, we should not hand it over to banal practitioners of commerce.

Other cities have a Wailing Wall, an Arms of the Church, a Place de la Concorde, a Speaker’s Corner, a Sheep’s Meadow, in which the residents are invited to contemplate their greatness and acknowledge their failings. There is no better place in LA to do that than the space between City Hall and the Ferraro/ol’ DWP—and we’re on the verge of blowing it, handing it over to guys who dream of Banana Republics, whose only real promise is to put a few more dollars in the City coffers if we give them enough tax breaks to let them do what they want. It should not happen. Our civic identity should be better than that.

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez also registers his concerns:

At the risk of offending a man who could soon be my boss, we're about to turn over one of the rarest and most precious commodities in Los Angeles — open space that's owned by all of us — to a mega-development that could be dropped into any city anywhere.