On April 24, 2006, architect Frank Gehry unveiled his plans for the $750 million dollar re-design of downtown Los Angeles, an undertaking that is the first of a three phase $1.8 billion "improvement" project to be overseen by real estate tycoons, The Related Companies of California (www.related.com/index.asp?model=homeRelated&view=1&companyid=7). Construction is slated to begin this coming December. Mr. Gehry envisions "developing" a three acre area adjacent to the Walt Disney Concert Hall (which he also designed), situated along historic Grand Avenue - a district to be bursting at the seams with majestic luxury hotels, grandiose condominiums, restaurants, rooftop pools and bars, splendid retail pavilions, a health club and spa, and oh, yes - "100 affordable apartments." Something tells me a humble painter like myself won’t be able to come up with the money for one of those allegedly reasonably priced apartments.

The New York Times reports (www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/arts/25gran.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) that the goal of Mr. Gehry, with backing from the Los Angeles Grand Avenue Authority (comprised of county and city officials and chaired by billionaire Eli Broad), is to "create a new, tightly woven community downtown as well as a fresh destination for the area’s 17 million residents and the 24 million visitors it has each year." The re-design will apparently connect the Grand Avenue neighborhood to LA’s downtown cultural center, which is comprised of Disney Hall, the Music Center, the Colburn School and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Mr. Gehry is supposedly straining to design public space that will capture downtown LA’s identity, and he is quoted as having said "It’s not New York, it’s not Paris - it’s a different image and we’re struggling to find it."

I’m not struggling to find it, it’s not difficult to locate at all, it’s right there on the streets of the area to be gentrified. Grand Avenue is already home to a "tightly woven community" of poor working class Spanish speaking immigrant families and their businesses. On March 26, 2006, some 2 million of them demonstrated for immigrant’s rights (www.xispas.com/blog/2006/03/2-million-people-march-in-los-angeles.html), marching in the same area targeted by Gehry and his backers. Mr. Gehry should take a walk in that quarter of the city, but then, perhaps he already has, and he promptly put out of mind what he discovered. It’s a fair guess no one actually bothered to ascertain the needs and desires of those who live and work along Grand Avenue, but then, they can’t afford luxury condominiums, so why bother?

I was born in Los Angeles and I grew up on its streets, I know every back alley of downtown LA and once had an art studio in its abandoned industrial area. I’ve been drunk on those downtown streets, and wandered the asphalt labyrinth looking for inspiration. I’ve been chased by the riot squad along downtown boulevards and had illuminating conversations with homeless sidewalk philosophers. I’ve conspired with poets and artists in seedy downtown bars, and followed dreams along the concrete banks of the LA river - this is my city, I love it and I belong here. But no one ever asked me how I thought the downtown area might be improved. There was no debate or vote, billionaires simply swept down and told us how things would be - they decided the fate of my city.

You can see the skyline of downtown LA from Skid Row - where some 11,000 people live and sleep on the filthy cold streets in makeshift huts constructed from cardboard and rubbish. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported in 2005 that the number of homeless people in LA County on any given night had reached approximately 90,000 individuals, making Los Angeles the homeless capital of the United States. $750 million dollars would go a long way in alleviating such human misery. Despite promises made by the Los Angeles Grand Avenue Authority, many large businesses have not been lured to the downtown area. The LA Times reports (www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-grand25apr25,0,2713405.story?coll=la-home-local) that high-end retailers are fearful of the homeless and low returns on corporate investments. "We’ve looked at downtown a lot, and I have not been able to answer the primary question of who is my customer on evenings and weekends," said Rick Caruso, the developer behind several super mega malls in Southern California.

I’ve spoken here of the social realities framing the announcement of a new downtown center for Los Angeles - but what about questions pertaining to aesthetics and architecture? The Gehry/Los Angeles Grand Avenue Authority plan is promoted as an avant-garde venture with its glittering high-rise towers, cubist buildings of translucent materials, and pavilions of glass and limestone, but to me it all masks something unspeakable and profoundly undemocratic - it’s a monument to hyper-consumerism and centralized power. Andy Merrifield, writing a book review for Harvard Design Magazine about the French Situationists and their views on architecture (www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/12books_merrifeld.html), put his finger on what bothers me: "Ultimately, the Situationists remind us of what’s gone, of the cheap thrills of the everyday city, the city now beleaguered from every side, airbrushed by corporate logos, plagued by burgeoning rents and inflated property values, greed and exploitation. The Situationists still sing a paean to the oppressed minor leaguer, to those who play in worn-out city ballparks—to those who still mix and mingle in street-corner societies in the fast-disappearing affordable parts of the city."

Surely, it is argued, the renewal of downtown LA and its transformation into a vital cultural center would be a good thing, a truly progressive accomplishment - but is this in point of fact, being offered to the people of Los Angeles? Let’s not get sidetracked in a discussion over Gehry’s abilities as an architect, the real issue here concerns the relevancy of a "city center" for a huge sprawling megalopolis like LA that actually contains several very diverse focal points. Dispersing $1.8 billion worth of development money to underserved and forgotten communities, with the express purpose being the construction of cultural centers, would do much to advance the arts and improve the quality of life in LA. The needs of bureaucratic government and corporate greed are served well by the Gehry/Los Angeles Grand Avenue Authority plan - the people are not.

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"Vision without action is daydream. Action without vision is nightmare." - Japanese proverb

www.art-for-a-change.com/blog

It's a so-so movie, but also a good reminder of what Bunker HIll was before the City tore it down for redevelopment (into parking lots and big arts edifices). That was where the Italians, Filipinos, Mexicans, and other immigrants lived.

Little Tokyo used to be where Parker Center is at, and before that was an actual neighborhood running down to 8th St. It's all warehouses now.

The foothills of Boyle Heights are being gentrified. The projects are being torn down or rebuilt, at a lower density.

That's one reason for all the homeless. The homes and residential areas were razed, for commerce, or yuppified (and not by accident or chance)... then later, a few "arts" buildings pop up (the CRA likes those things) where the ticket prices are so high that regular people can't attend unless they know about some of the secret discounts.

But it's true, the homeless are being pushed out to other parts of LA. If you don't see them already, pretty soon, you're going to find the corpses of mentally unstable people in the middle of your suburban neighborhoods.

I guess it's justice. Us subrbanites can run away from (or segregate from) the economic horrors we've created for only so long. Eventually, our responsibilities must be met.

Have a nice day.

great post.
opened my mind.
loved the harping on the undemocratic nature and even more about how he will "find la".

The real LA was there in downtown for all to see on March 25th

Gehry should be on Broadway & Olympic this May 1st if he wants find LA

The harassment of the homeless by LA's current police chief clearly reflects a desire by him and his buddies in the "business community" to drive them out of downtown altogether, preferably, (from the police/business point of view) out of LA entirely - to Long Beach, Pasadena, and other nearby municipalities.
I can't help commenting on that design - the buildings near the high-rises look like they are designed so that no one will notice if they are wrecked by the Big One because they already look like they were wrecked.

One kinda wonders where the "activist" community is when things like this happen. Why are there no rallies, no protest demonstrations, against monstrosities like this? Jane Jacobs, who just passed away yesterday, and her band of protesters successfully stopped Robert Moses from building an expressway through Greenwich Village in the 1960s. It's not like there's no precedent.

So I'll ask again, is it possible to get a movement going to stop this hideous yuppie playground from being inflicted on downtown Los Angeles, and to encourage something being built that is on a human scale and that can be bought or rented by working people?

I disagree with the original poster in one regard: the architecture really is important. Gehry's masturbatory fantasies may look good on paper--at least, to the sort of people who are impressed by that sort of twee postmodern junk--or in a photograph from far away, but at street level they are an inhuman, alienating mess. They are nothing more than glorified malls with "luxury" condos on top. Yuppies included, no assembly required. I think that a movement to stop this project, if one were to coalesce, would require as part of its list of demands that there be no "starchitecture" in the replacement project.

I also think that such a movement would have to be very broad and inclusive. Preservationists, urbanists, environmentalists, and social justice activists would have to put aside some differences to work together on this.

Heard some guest on KPFK enthusing about how Echo Park is gentrifying, and how it's great that really rich people are buying and renovating up the hill. Some folks in the "progressive" community seem to like gentrification and raising rents so high that no poor people will be able to afford to live in those newly hip, artsy neighborhoods.

Sausau, which show was it, and do you remember the guest's name?

That sounds like something that would have aired during the hijacker days, when Mark Schubb and Marc Cooper were running KPFK and attempting to turn it into another KCRW by reaching out to an affluent yuppie audience. I thought the bad old days of coupster rule were supposed to be over.

YUPPIE GENTRIFICATION AND THE POMOS WHO ACCEPT IT

It is NOT terribly suprising that the progressive community has not objected to that apparently yuppie project in apparent crassness .

After all much of the progressive movement has been infiltrated by postmodernist/relativist types who support that weird, pusiillanimous approach of respecting opinions or "points" of view...which they often are wont to whitewash with phrases like "looking at it from the other perspective" or "going beyond the us versus them" or finding a balance (all just waesel phrases that mean selling-out) . Such a namby-pamby approach has spread like a weird ideological mildew into so many circles. In this present bizarre decade--all too many in the progressive community --unlike the progressives of the past --have bought into that bizarre pod people , sell-out way of thinking that seeks to be "conflicted" --aka ambivalent--to tolerate ambiguity ..to squeal on about so-called "shades of grey" ..and try to find a middle ground somewhere in the middle between virtue and inherent crassness . Many of the weird ambivalent/ambiguous articles in the UTNE reader attest to that.

Often it is the most seemingly passionate in the progressive community that from time to time talk that conflicted, pod people relativist talk about finding a "balance" and "looking at it from other perspectives" --and hence want to sell out good social causes by respecting worthless yuppie opinions a little . (Actually the term 'perspective'-- when used as another word for the word 'opinion' is a misnomer from the beginning--an example of dangerous new-speak . The term 'perspective ' does NOT when used technically refer to opinion ...it was originally a term which referred to the layout of an object in space in reference to other objects or the horizon...New-speak is quite ugly) .

Much of the weird/ ambivalent relativist thinking would CLAIM (falsely enough) that supposedly we are somehow supposed to believe that denouncing the yuppie (wrong ) opinions is somehow as bad and oppressive as discriminating against a minority ethnic group or women ...can you believe the bizarre , pusillanimous hogwash that would liken the itinerary of the spoiled , creepy degenerate yuppie sub-culture to that of a cause like an ethnic group that really does count for something or the cause of oppressed women --and the cause of women really does count for something !

Perhaps the postmodernist, opinion-respecting, neo-progressives have been saturated for so long in the postmodernist MTV propaganda show titled 'The Real World' or the insipid pablum of trendy ANTI-philosophers , that respecting even the crass, hideous soulless itinerary of yuppies who want to destroy the land and destroy authentic community ...becomes an automatic sort of tic after a while ?

Well NOT every statement regarding values is mere opinion ..folks . It's high time progressives jettison postmodernism and get single minded. There are NOT two sides to every issue--at the risk of stating what should have been fessed up to as obvious long ago . To hell with being conflicted. An ointemnet without flies is long overdue !

I'm not sure if the project is "postmodern." It seems more "modern" to me -- the city and developers working together to impose modernity on an area that became "postmodern" over the last 20 years.

Downtown was postmodern -- people reinterpreted old theaters by turning them into swap meets, with a bricolage of vendors selling products imported via the globalized economy. Restaurants often featured two or three ethnic cuisines on one menu -- "American", Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern. Traditional Mexican American dominance of brown space was also post-modernized :-) by a new mixture of national and indigenous identities.

It's just not the kind of "postmodern" that the developers want. This project is just an expression of one thing: money. That's modern as modern can be!