If L.A.’s $6.4 billion bid for the 2024 Olympics is successful, one can’t help but think how different the experience will be from 40 years earlier, when the city last hosted the event.
When the Summer Olympics were here in 1984, downtown was a veritable ghost town after 6 p.m. While that didn’t prevent the games from being a financial boon – one that is still paying dividends today – the conditions now are significantly different. Downtown is actually an asset the city didn’t have back then, a vibrant city center full of bars and eateries that’s just a short train ride away from the main cluster of sporting venues in Exposition Park.
Alan Rothenberg, chairman of Century City’s 1st Century Bank and a local sports impresario who was in charge of soccer at the 1984 games and is a director of the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games, said that while the whole city is likely to benefit from a third L.A. Olympics, downtown’s sleek hotels and trendy restaurants might get the biggest boost, being close to many venues and at the heart of the region’s public transit network.
“No question about it,” Rothenberg said. “It’s not just downtown, but downtown will be the primary beneficiary.”
Rothenberg is particularly excited about a proposed Olympic Village near the Los Angeles River on the eastern end of downtown, which would be converted to much needed affordable housing after the games.
“If that can be implemented, that’s just one more great thing for the city,” he said.
While concerns over cost overruns torpedoed Boston’s 2024 bid, Rothenberg agrees with Mayor Eric Garcetti’s belief that L.A.’s existing stock of first-class venues should mitigate that risk.
“We don’t have to make massive capital investments in the infrastructure, which has really been the multibillion-dollar hit for almost every host country,” he said.
Although L.A.’s history of success makes it a strong contender to score the games for a third time in ’24, Rothenberg said the competitive landscape is a little stronger this time around, with Paris and Rome among the other applicant cities.
“The other bidder in 1984 was Tehran,” he said. “We had a lot more negotiating leverage.”
Hack the Police
Cleaning up the neighborhood in the best way they know how, techies hosted Civic Hack Night: Community Policing, a hackathon at downtown co-working space Impact Hub L.A.
The hackathon was designed to develop community policing software that would replace existing programs that are outdated and clunky, said Rahul Sidhu, chief executive of policing software company Spidr Technologies, a Playa Vista startup that co-sponsored the event with nonprofit Hack for L.A.
The hackathon focused on a number of issues endemic to downtown, such as homelessness, vandalism and a need for better community relations. A number of police officers spoke on the challenges of building trust with local communities and how technology could help.
Feverishly typing code over pizza and beer, about 100 hackers came up with a number of different prototypes, including a graffiti documentation program, websites for better back and forth between the community and police, and software to better track the homeless and place them in shelters.
Ultimately, technology could help police better coordinate responses to issues beyond their purview, said Sidhu, enabling other organizations to deliver community services.
“The police are out there pretty much alone and not getting much help,” he said. “If the only people helping these people are police officers, then you’re going to get police results.”
SoHo West?
New York contemporary art gallery Maccarone will be joining New York galleries Hauser Wirth & Schimmel and Adam Lindemann’s Venus Over Manhattan by opening an outpost in Los Angeles.
Maccarone announced last month that it would be exhibiting new paintings by artist Alex Hubbard titled “Basic Perversions” to inaugurate the gallery, which will open next month – a day before the Broad Museum opens on South Grand Avenue.
Hubbard, who lives and works in Los Angeles, will be showing more than a dozen works in pigmented urethane, resin and fiberglass at Maccarone Los Angeles.
The 50,000-square-foot gallery, at 300 S. Mission Road just east of the river, also includes a 15,000-square-foot outdoor space for hosting events and displaying sculptures.
Maccarone was founded in 2001 by Michele Maccarone, who expects to put on two to three exhibits a year here. Maccarone said in a statement that when she first saw the vacant space she was very inspired by it as the place reminded her of her first gallery on the Lower East Side and now in the West Village.
“The departure point was really the building,” she said.
Staff reporters Matt Pressberg, Garrett Reim and Subrina Hudson contributed to this column. #DTLA is compiled by Senior Managing Editor Jonathan Diamond. He can be reached at [email protected].
