Quote:
Originally Posted by bjornson
By Cara Mia DiMassa, Los Angeles Times Staff
Though the area has seen an influx of loft dwellers over the last decade -- the population has doubled to 34,000 -- many urban planners see it as a work still very much in progress. Even the most ardent of downtown supporters agree that the area has not yet reached a critical mass -- in part because most of downtown's rejuvenation is occurring in pockets rather than across the entire zone.
New downtown dwellers still complain about a lack of shopping and that for every newly vibrant street, there are others that still seem dead.
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The reporter, in a few sentences, pretty much captured the essence of the hood's current shape & situation. That's why I'm always hoping to see as many new changes & improvements to the hood as possible.
The one problem with her article is that she didn't go into greater detail about the latest info on projs like parkfifth. She didn't reveal anything we're not already aware of. So I wish she'd have nailed down a more specific timetable for the parkfifth's groundbreaking. However, I know that the 300 reservations the devlpr has publicized for some time could be alot higher to give the funders more confidence to move forward, or something closer to 360 or 400 reservations, or at least half of the total number of condos.
Quote:
Officials at Park Fifth and Grand Avenue insist that the delays will be brief and that the developers are on track.
Park Fifth would rise around Pershing Square with two towers -- including a 76-story building -- containing a five-star hotel as well as upscale shops and eateries. Its developers also encountered road bumps getting through the public environmental impact report and entitlement processes, and also have had to add a new investor to cover the additional capital required in the current financial market to get the project off the ground.
Despite the difficulties, Nelson said, they expect to open the first of the two high-rise towers in late 2010. And she said sales for the project were moving forward, with reservations on 300 of the approximately 750 units.
Nelson says she thinks the development can succeed where others have failed because it is distinctive. "We are super-high end. And we're the tallest residential building west of Chicago -- which people have latched onto," she said.
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I wanna see the pool of potential buyers or renters in the hood expand beyond the current group of mainly young singles, inc students from USC, & ppl from a few other countries, mainly Korea, & start to include empty nesters, residents from hoods several miles to the west of DT----like the ones living near all the $$ highrise condos going up on wilshire blvd & Century city----& all the burbs in general. The hood will really come into its own when it 24 hr population is even more diverse.
Meanwhile, here's the way that a visitor from the London Times sees things:
Art attack in Los Angeles
Once a rambling city of suburbs, LA is reinventing itself. Chris Haslam reports on La-La land’s cultural revolution
There’s an enormous electronic billboard on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Bundy. Somewhat predictably, LA has turned stopping at the traffic lights into an ad break: as you wait, you watch commercials for a shiny mobile phone for $35 a month, the latest chick flick and a hybrid car that can go from LA to San Francisco on one tank of good intentions. Stay tuned and you’ll see Jesus – not Christ our Lord, but Rodriguez the tax attorney – and then, as the lights turn green, a fleeting glimpse of local-boy-done-bad Emigdio Preciado Jr, one of the FBI’s top 10 most wanted. It’s LA life boiled down to a series of messages from its sponsors, but LA culture is far harder to pin down.
Because Los Angeles has no centre – Dorothy Parker famously described it as “72 suburbs in search of a city” – any visit here is essentially a trip to the ’burbs. Universal Studios is in North Hollywood, the Getty Center is in Brentwood and the Huntington Library is way out in San Marino. The best hotels are in Beverly Hills, the best bars are in West Hollywood and the beach is over in Santa Monica. And that’s the way it’s been since the automobile and the freeway allowed Angelenos to commute, with billionaire building contractors such as Eli Broad selling suburban living as the quintessential architectural expression of the American dream. The downside was that downtown became a desert, a nightmare on Main Street, abandoned after dark to the rats and the gangs.
Such urban heart disease used to be fatal, but these days there is a cure. It has worked – sort of – in London’s Southwark and it has given Bilbao a new lease of life. Valencia is undergoing treatment and LA, with its characteristic affection for medication, is already addicted. And it’s an easy pill to swallow: you build a Tate, a Guggenheim or a City of Arts and Sciences, and that stilled heart starts beating again.
Over the past 15 years, the city has poured a lot of money into its empty heart. There’s the $163m (£84m) cathedral – nicknamed the Taj Mahoney after its controversial cardinal – and Frank Gehry’s magnificent Walt Disney Concert Hall, part of a highbrow entertainment complex that is LA’s version of London’s South Bank. A mile away down South Figueroa Street, beside the huge stadium of the Staples Center, is the Nokia LA Live complex – a $4.2 billion entertainment zone comprising a theatre, performance spaces, bars, restaurants and a 54-storey Ritz-Carlton (to open in 2010) – touted, somewhat depressingly, as “Times Square West.”
And that’s just the start. This summer sees the beginning of the Grand Avenue Project, a $3 billion reworking of the city centre, pitched as “the Los Angeles version of the Champs-Elysées”, and featuring a 16-acre park flanked by public buildings leading down to the Daily Planet tower of City Hall. The man behind the plan is none other than Eli Broad, the builder who made his billions persuading Angelenos to live in the ’burbs, and the Grand Avenue Project isn’t his only scheme to drag them back into town.
The shallowest city on earth has been pimping its artistic attractions for years, but since that was like Burger King announcing it sold salads, nobody paid much attention. After all, this is the city where cultural tourism means finding Britney’s house on a map of the homes of the stars.
So when LA announced the gala opening of the Broad Contemporary Arts Museum (BCAM) on an old car park, my expectations were matched only by my enthusiasm. Or, as the locals say, I was, like, whatever, dude. And then I was, like, wow, man. Forget the building: the architect Renzo Piano’s original concept is there somewhere, buried beneath layers of travertine and compromise (the locals are already calling it Pompidou Lite) – but what it contains is the distilled essence of contemporary American art.
The show starts on the third floor with a cabaret of Jeff Koons’s finest moments. Michael Jackson and Bubbles, in all their nauseating, Franklin Mint tackiness, recline in the shadow of an elephantine stainless-steel balloon dog, a 6ft cracked egg and a theme-park St John the Baptist. It’s the sacred and the plastic profane, side by side in a space that could be nowhere but LA. Anterooms hide Warhol and Hirst, curiously out of context in the natural light flooding through the glass ceiling, and as you percolate downwards in the biggest lift I have ever seen, through six galleries rammed to the rafters with works from Rothko to Rauschenberg and Baldessari to Basquiat, it becomes clear that this is a world-beating collection.
All but a handful belong to Broad, who’d need another dozen BCAMs to display the full extent of his loot. Ludicrously, despite having his name above the door, the septuagenarian builder-turned-benefactor has now decided not to donate his hoard to the museum, lending the works on display for one year only. The 178 pieces by 28 of the world’s most important contemporary artists might never be in the same place at the same time again, but that’s not the only reason why you need to visit LA this year. In a post 9/11, postcredit crunch, postmodernist and soon-to-be post Bush world, there are
few cities outside of Shanghai that are buzzing like the City of Angels.
This month, the breathtakingly beautiful Getty Villa (
www.getty.edu) relaunched its theatre lab series, offering cut-price performances of reworked classical texts. Nothing quite overshadows the true-life drama of its former curator, Marion True, standing trial in Italy on charges of antiquity theft, but Oedipus Rex, reset somewhere between the State penitentiary and the barrios of East LA, comes close, in a Socrates-meets-the-Sopranos way. Performances of Icarus and Philoktetes run for the rest of the season, with tickets at just $7 (£3.50). February also saw the opening of the $18m Chinese gardens at the Huntington Library (
www.huntington.org), and this autumn sees the launch of the Grammy Museum (
www.grammymuseum.org), charting the history of recorded music.
But, above all, you should come for the art. The New York Times has conceded that LA is “the centre of visual art making” in America, which must have really hurt. The Getty Center, that hilltop temple of high art, celebrates its 10th anniversary with the installation of the Stark collection of modern sculpture, comprising 28 pieces by the likes of Miro, Magritte, Léger and Giacometti. And the jewel that is the Museum of Latin American Art (
www.molaa.org) has reopened after a three-year, $10m expansion.
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