Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles

Chapter 1. A Center for a Centrifugal City

1 A Center for a Centrifugal City Merely vacant land now, Bunker Hill can begin to tie the disparate strands of government center, cultural center, popular markets, ethnic communities and burgeoning business core together—so that it becomes the center for all these other centers. . . . Only by means of a project of such scale and future mindedness can Los Angeles express what is unique about itself and at the same time begin to fulfill its future role as a center of centers of the western world. —Bunker Hill Associates, 1980 Every city needs a place that the whole community can call its own: a space where people gather for celebrations, where people gather to relax and perhaps where people gather for free concerts and theatrical performances. —Grand Performances, 1997 Looking out at Los Angeles at night from the Griffith Park Observatory, densely sparkling lights span the expanse of land as far as one can see to the east, south, and west. North, the mountains are sparsely lit, the lights of the San Gabriel Valley just visible on the other side. Visitors point out landmarks, places they know, inhabit, experience—where they live, the ocean, Hollywood. Tonight the air is heavy and hot. One has the feeling of being inside a dry oven. Downtown is lost in the expanse of lights, unless you look for it. No one near me mentions it, either as home or a place to Centrifugal City 17 go. The lights of downtown’s skyscrapers—Library Tower, California Plaza, the Aon Building—rise vertically from the flat surface, evident as a central business district but appearing as one small part of this wide expanse. This bird’s-eye view does not convey the flurry of past and present activity downtown, the rhythms of urban life that have coalesced in the center city. The intensity of attachment to a project of making downtown a center for the city. The sedimentation of a century’s history of growth and decline and regrowth visible as signs advertising loft developments grace façades that have remained the same since the 1950s. Mid-century demolition of Victorian mansions already turned boardinghouses. Traces of global flows of capital, media, goods, and people materialized in stacks of hundreds of plastic sandals and offices of multinational corporations, in the sound of Spanish as the lingua franca of street commerce and the largest homeless population in the country. A skyline without skyscrapers greeting a future developer and real estate mogul as he flew into Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Bison parading down Olive Street as camera crews follow, capturing the sight for a beer commercial. The seriousness and intensity with which developers, neighborhood councils, residents, and property owners imbue their discussions of the future of downtown. Ongoing struggles over space by homeless, artists, politicians, and business owners, as the route of the monthly art walk increasingly overlaps with the boundaries of Skid Row. An audience of Angelenos dancing to the strains of raı̈ or rock en español or Afro-pop at California Plaza’s Watercourt, as the color of the sky deepens to the blue-black of evening and the lights illuminating the water behind the performers change from yellow to purple to red. At once symbol, site, and structure, the center is mythical, occluding the past and present processes of its formation (Barthes 1972; Bourdieu 1984). The center is constituted as such in its definition and appearance as neutral, thereby obscuring its own making and the exclusions wrought therein. Today, a board member and local developer maintains, Grand Performances ‘‘is a complete success in the development saga of Cal Plaza. Standing at the end is this small piece that’s fabulous free music. It’s like a blade of grass after Mount St. Helens.’’ This blade of grass provides a metaphor for the ways in which the current success of Grand Performances depends on naturalizing the result of a long process that has included urban renewal, bankruptcies, and failed aspirations; with the blade of grass the focus, the violent eruption still smoldering beneath the surface is concealed. Yet the center has forms through which center-making processes can 18 Chapter 1 be investigated. Grand Performances’ achievement of being ‘‘recognized as outstanding in its efforts to promote the performing arts to the public and establish ties to the diverse communities within the urban area’’ (CRA/LA 2000:2...