LOS ANGELES -- When the Southern Californian sunshine reflects off the stainless-steel skin of the nearly complete 293,000-square-foot Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the viewer can be excused for momentarily confusing his whereabouts. The nautical curvature of the structure's façade, the sweeping roof trusses, the iridescent glow of the stainless-steel panels -- it all seems vaguely familiar.
For a single, murky moment, I envision myself in Bilbao, Spain. This is because the Disney Concert Hall, set to open this October, bears all the trademark tweaks and curves of its designer, Frank Gehry. In fact, the Concert Hall's resemblance to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the architect's greatest claim to fame, is extremely canny, to say the least.
There's another similarity between the two Gehry structures that is not accidental. The Disney Concert Hall, perched atop Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles, is expected to help rejuvenate downtown L.A. like the Guggenheim Museum did for Bilbao. It's also very likely that, as with the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Disney Concert Hall will become L.A.'s most ubiquitous postcard image.
One of the most common complaints about Los Angeles is that it lacks a lively city centre of the European variety. In its stead, mini-centres are spread across a vast urban area, each neighbourhood with its own cafés, restaurants, entertainment venues and mall. It wasn't always so.
At the beginning of the 20th century, L.A. was constructed around a single downtown area that housed all the city's major corporations, banks, doctors, lawyers, its best restaurants and first-run movie houses, as well as the majority of its residents. It was a compact city with high-density housing, onerous traffic congestion and some of the largest shopping emporiums in the country.
L.A.'s downtown thrived up until the 1930s, when cheap land, the automobile and, in some cases, prospects of oil lured the rapid influx of residents even farther west to freestanding homes in new towns by the sea. Downtown land prices, every bit as roaring as the 1920s, pushed residents to cheaper tracts of land in Hollywood, Santa Monica and the San Fernando Valley, where there was room to manoeuvre and garages in which to park cars. A burgeoning tangle of avenues and freeways expedited this process. Eventually, these outlying areas effectively became cities in their own right and by the 1950s, the downtown area had fallen into disrepair.
Only now is the downtown showing signs of recovery. Over the past three decades, the city has invested about $750-million (all amounts in U.S. dollars) to erase much of the area's blight and erect municipal and cultural institutions that will attract both residents and tourists. And the results are finally becoming palpable.
Today, downtown is an imposing mélange of 200-metre towers that provide contrast to the metropolis's monotone horizontal cityscape, sprouting like desert palm trees above scorched brush. And the sheer number of Starbucks and Coffee Bean boutiques on downtown corners is a clear indication that gentrification is well under way.
Some of the most interesting innovations are targeting a young, hip crowd. The opening of the stylish Standard Downtown hotel on Flower Street last year literally introduced the area to the West Side's trendsetters. In the summer, the hotel's rooftop pool-cum-bar is so popular that it has to turn away guests and can charge admission. Similarly promising is the Broadway Theatre Study, which intends to rehabilitate the 12 major historic theatres on Broadway into mixed performance centres, exhibition spaces, dance studios, restaurants and nightclubs.
The skyscrapers and the enormous Los Angeles Convention Center, built in 1993 by renowned architect I.M. Pei, gave downtown a business profile; the cultural and sports institutions that followed have provided tourist appeal. The opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in 1986 enticed many of the city's most discerning individuals to visit downtown on a more habitual basis. Although now overshadowed by the Getty Museum in Santa Monica, MOCA, together with the nearby Music Center that houses the L.A. Opera and Philharmonic, continues to determine not only downtown's but also much of the city's cultural agenda.
In 1999 came the postmodern sports temple Staples Center, an enormous arena that centralized the city's top sporting teams (Lakers, Clippers and Kings). The Staples Center is only a kilometre down the road from the 56,000-seat Dodger Stadium and five kilometres north of the 105,000-seat Memorial Coliseum. It is not quite as compact as New Jersey/New York's Meadowlands, but it is as compact as L.A.'s sprawl will allow.
