LOS ANGELES | Downtown Project Rundown 4.0

[alki]

Originally Posted by citywatch

alki, I don't think that dispersal was encouraged as much as it was a natural progression of ppl not creating a city that was nice enough to begin with. So it was a place far too easy for most ppl to walk away from. Ppl would have been more willing to stick it out if dt had been a very attractive area from the beginning. But it wasn't.

Not true.........the planners came up with the nodal/multi centers concept in the 1970s.........I learned about in grad school. Here is a brief description:

http://www.planetizen.com/node/23535

in the 'noirish Los Angeles' thread at the found city photos page, a forumer posted the following pics....


1951 - Ellis R. Bosworth / Associated Press

Citywatch, you always manage to find the most unflattering pictures of old DTLA. Did you ever see the original War of the Worlds.......its a cult film? I think it was filmed in the 1950s. DTLA looked very nice in that film until the Martians leveled it.

^ bunker hill has long suffered due to the economic factors that you pointed out in your post. But far much less due to its design being too, as you say, le corbusierian, as much as ppl thinking the hood was in general too shabby & unattractive, & therefore migrating away from dt & taking their $$ with them.

Citywatch, Bunker Hill was a fail because people don't like walking a block to go from one building to the next. Stop driving thru DTLA and start by walking Seventh from Fig to Broadway; then the length of Grand Avenue on Bunker Hill. Note the differences. Then read The Life and Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs if you haven't already done so.

I think if ppl in LA a long time ago, inc owners of property, had been better caretakers of the city, dt wouldn't have become so & bunker hill, even with the exact same design & layout, would still not be hurting----even in 2012----for devlprs to fill its remaining gaps.

Cities take care of what's important. At some point in the 1970s or 1980s, most LA movers and shakers decided DTLA was not important. There were some holdouts but even the LA Times had given up on DTLA.

I always knew that city house & the olympic towers would turn out to be pie in the sky. Even for those who didn't care for their design, the neo classicism architecture....with all the trim, granite & bric a brac.....would have cost alot more $$ to create than a simple plain bldg. And no way, no how, would that have allowed the proj to pencil out.

Not true.........there are neo classical bldgs that have been built through out the US during the last 50 years. The bric a brac no longer has to be done by craftsman. There are molds using cheaper materials that can replicate the look. Like other condo projects proposed at the time, City House didn't pencil because market demand wasn't strong enough to make it work.

so here it is several yrs since that proj was first publicized, & the area still is mostly parking lots. Things like that are something far more ppl probably do notice & aren't too thrilled about, compared with their POV of a huge new bldg not falling within certain design guidelines.

This happens over and over again in LA. Bldgs are allowed to be torn down based on a promised development that never materializes. Sometime during the 1980s one of the grandest auditoriums in DTLA was torn down by S. CA Gas because they promised to build a new tower on the site. It never got built and it was a parking lot when I left LA in 1998.