All great cities have a heart, a central place where people from all walks of life can go to celebrate and to share.
They are places made meaningful by history, event or geography. Or they are places that draw from the energy, commerce, creativity and diversity of the people who live, work and play there. And they are places people can use and enjoy, not simply monuments to design.
Grand Avenue can be that place.
A blueprint has been delivered giving shape to a vision for Grand Avenue that can help bring Los Angeles together in the shadow of the city’s most stunning cultural and civic icons Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the Museum of Contemporary Art, City Hall.
The $1.8 billion Grand Avenue Master Plan creates a vital center for 15 million people that delivers to Bunker Hill condominiums, affordable and market-rate housing, and pedestrian-friendly and safe streets.
It includes a boutique hotel, iconic towers and much needed storefronts, including bookstores, restaurants, a cinema and a food market. But at the plan’s center is a 16-acre park, an urban oasis cascading from the Department of Water and Power through The Music Center to City Hall. This can be the gathering place for New Year’s Eve, Cinco de Mayo or Fourth of July, as well as a public commons for free concerts or spirited debates, a destination for families, or just a spot for lunch or a midday reprieve.
The Grand Avenue project is privately financed no city or county general fund money would be used in development but the public returns downtown and throughout Los Angeles are ample.
The Los Angeles Economic Development Corp. estimates that more than 25,000 full-time jobs will be created in construction, and that 5,300 jobs will be sustained at build-out. The project is capable of generating more than $565 million annually in direct and indirect business revenues, as well as $95 million in annual incremental government revenue, including $5.8 million annually to local government.
City and county elected officials showed immense leadership in forming the Grand Avenue Joint Powers Authority to select a financially qualified and high-quality developer to create a master plan, rather than putting the cart before the horse and trying to impose a design that may not be economically feasible.
There’s plenty left to do before earth can be turned in 2006. City and county officials must bless the plans within 90 days, architects must be picked to design the buildings and public spaces, an environmental analysis must be conducted. Importantly, the public will have opportunities to continue to shape the final look of the plan.
Los Angeles has been a divided city for years. People from the Eastside don’t go to the Westside and visa versa. People from the San Fernando Valley don’t come downtown. This Grand Avenue plan is real, and it can change the paradigm for how we interact as a city and where.
*Eli Broad is a civic leader, philanthropist and chairman of the Grand Avenue Committee.
