Op-Ed: After Eli Broad, how will we remake Los Angeles?

Emperor Napoleon III directed his prefect of the department of Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, to remake Paris. Between 1853 and 1870, the emperor’s bureaucrat drove iconic boulevards through warrens of medieval lanes and byways. Paris was made into our image of it: Belle Époque nostalgia.

Robert Moses, equally imperiously between 1924 and 1966, punched multilane highways through New York’s Black and brown neighborhoods and into the suburban countryside. Moses helped to cement an image of midcentury New York as the capital of American business and finance, deadening much of what made the city livable.

Broad’s most ambitious remaking of the city’s skyline is the Grand Avenue project, intended, he once said, to turn the blocks from the Broad to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels into the Champs-Élysées of Los Angeles. The project’s pivot is— 176,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space, a hotel and apartments designed by Frank Gehry and facing Gehry-designed Disney Hall. Construction of the billion-dollar high-rise towers topped out only a few weeks before Broad’s death.

To better serve its future sense of place, Grand Avenue may require less architecture and more humanity. Proposals for landscaped plazas, outdoor performance spaces and making part of Grand Avenue a pedestrian mall point in the right direction.

opinion Los Angeles has a restless spirit, and embracing that is key to its perseverance. Make tile by tile, brick by brick; add sun and smoke, steel and glass and stucco and street art…with the current of possibility pulsing through its veins. Keeping that beat alive will remake it.

opinion I just moved to your city, who wouldn't mind showing me interesting places?

this is terrible news

United States Latest News, United States Headlines

Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.

Wall Street slips as inflation jitters spark broad sell-offWall Street lost ground on Tuesday as rising commodity prices and labor shortages fueled fears that, despite reassurances from the U.S. Federal Reserve, near-term price spikes could translate into longer-term inflation.
Source: Reuters - 🏆 2. / 97 Read more »

Wall St closes lower as inflation jitters spark broad sell-offU.S. stocks closed lower on Tuesday as rising commodity prices and labor shortages fed fears that despite reassurances from the U.S. Federal Reserve, near-term price spikes could translate into longer-term inflation.
Source: Reuters - 🏆 2. / 97 Read more »

Stocks close higher as banks, technology lead broad rallyA choppy day of trading on Wall Street ended Thursday with stocks broadly higher and another all-time high for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Source: latimes - 🏆 11. / 82 Read more »

Op-Ed: NFTs are digital tulip fever: Would you pay thousands for a bar code?Nonfungible tokens are a dressed-up species of bookkeeping. But what art needs is less auditing and more ecstasy.
Source: latimes - 🏆 11. / 82 Read more »