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Posted Jul 10, 2016, 5:01 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 6,499
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mojeda101
It's hard to imagine just how different DTLA was only a few years ago. The gaps are being filled.
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that's one of the reason hunter's pics or similar photos posted here by other forumers are so important & helpful. They give a better understanding of where dt has been, of where dt is going.
As Easy notes....& which are made clearer in pics like the ones taken by hunter....there remains a variety of very visible parking lots that need to be filled in. I always keep that in mind when the finer points of architectural design of new projs are being discussed here, or when forumers are aiming the concepts of urbanism 101 like a laser beam at dt to the degree that the other issues....which I think the average person is more likely to notice & be bothered by.....are lost in the shuffle
but dtla has come a long way. From this....
etsy.com
to this....which was posted 3 yrs ago & now doesn't include more recent changes, including start of work on the 2 new apts towers filling in former parking lots on spring st near 8th......
Quote:
A Los Angeles Primer: Spring Street
Walking the length of Spring Street one morning, I counted 22 surface parking lots. I do this not out of a "Rain Man"-style numerical compulsion, but a no less distracting desire to feel out the progress of a city's urbanism. The surface parking lot test gives you a sense of density, for one thing -- obviously, the denser a neighborhood, the less of itself it can devote to idle cars -- but it also lets you gauge its state of flux. "This'll be a great town," New Yorkers have for over a century said of their home and its constant construction, "as soon as they get it finished." Manhattan's perpetual unfinishedness, of course, defines it as a "great town," and its developers know they can always and everywhere put up or tear down something more ambitious than a square of paint-lined concrete. Spring Street, which still boasts a formidable collection of architectural monuments to Los Angeles' grandly aspirant early twentieth century, now offers a window onto downtown's modern revival, and the view from it often looks exciting indeed.
Still, enthusiast though I am, a snarkier sentiment roils within me: if your downtown still has surface parking lots, then you, my friend, do not have a downtown. Yet they have nowhere to go but away. I make bets with downtown-dwelling friends about when the last surface parking lot will have vanished. Twenty years from now, certainly. Ten years, maybe. Five years -- dare we hope? Out-of-downtowners, or at least those who live far enough away from downtown, tend to respond with an interestingly point-missing question: "But then where will people park?"
An absence of parking indicates not just a demand for actual buildings but no need to stash vehicles in the first place: you'll either live downtown already, or in a place connected by rapid transit. Granted, this all sounds a tad implausible to Angelenos of thirty, forty, fifty years' standing who came to know downtown Los Angeles as the locus classicus of the sad postwar fate of the American inner city. Recall "A Note on Downtown", Reyner Banham's brief chapter in "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies", which opens with the words, " ...because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves."
Downtown did indeed function as the center of Los Angeles up through the thirties, back in the years that earned the then-finance-heavy Spring Street the label "the Wall Street of the West." That era leaves us a legacy in the form of a surprising number of distinguished old Beaux Arts buildings along Spring's mile and a half, many of which fell into disuse before 1999's Adaptive Reuse Ordinance allowed their conversion into retail spaces, apartments, and condominiums. Downtown now looks well on its way to becoming a kind of center again -- a population center, in any case, especially of the young --
Reality, however, vindicates neither the optimists nor the pessimists, especially in Los Angeles. The very existence on the corner of Spring and Fifth of The Last Bookstore, a two-story, 10,000-square-foot cavern of not just new and used volumes but vinyl bins and small-scale art spaces as well, makes me believe we live in at least one of the better possible worlds. Old-fashioned though it may sound, I check for the presence of a vast destination of a bookstore -- compare the Strand in Manhattan, or Powell's in Portland -- as another test of urban viability. Angelenos disagree about such an operation's long-term prospects amid the accelerating process that few dare call gentrification, but if The Last Bookstore has them, downtown Los Angeles has them.
By the same token, I watch closely whether Spring Street's existing independent coffee shops can thrive alongside newly arrived branches of national coffee chains, a coexistence that signals a healthily diverse urban ecosystem. That said, I spent another morning looking forward to a cappuccino from CoffeeBar, near the corner of Sixth, only to find it had shut down permanently just the day before. "This is why we can't have nice things, Los Angeles," I muttered, sitting bitterly at the window of the Starbucks recently opened across the street. Still, having heard complaints about CoffeeBar's prices and strangely limited hours, I didn't take its demise as that of the canary in downtown's coal mine. I could, after all, just as easily have gone to Spring for Coffee up the street, but other customers had, at the middle of a weekday, already filled all of their seats.
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flickr.com
^ If ppl ever feel a need to complain about some improvement in dtla of today or the recent past, they should get into a time machine & travel back to the yrs when pics like that were taken. Or the time when that british architectural critic, Reyner Banham, who loved LA, wrote about the city in the 1970s. He died in 1988. I think if he got into a time machine back then & traveled to dtla in 2016, he'd feel a need to revise his comment of 'that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.'
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