Heavy-duty? I felt like was raining anvils.......LOL
You make many valid points, and a few go off the rails.
LA High was a huge loss, but in the early 70s I don't think the city was there yet with respect to saving and rebuilding vs. bulldozing and starting fresh. After all, it took the razing of Penn Station for people in New York to wake up.
The "car and freeway thing" was inevitable though. We can look to all the cute trams and such in Europe, but remember - they've had mass access to cars in far less numbers and for far less time that we had in the 20th Century. Giving up ROW was the biggest mistake.
LA Live: I'm not a fan either, but we are not everyone. Not by a longshot. "Everyone" seems to like it. And developers are anything but stupid. They build what "everyone" likes. Fail to do so and they trade in their hillside Brentwood home for a shopping cart on Santee. LOL LOL.......
And it's fair to note developers are not ignorant of a growing desire for smaller scale.......take a look at Caruso's work. Nothing he does is in hopes to be "biggest".....it strives for "most comfortable". The Grove seems too ersatz for me and probably most who read this, but again, "everyone" seems to like it.
I think we agree that CRA or no CRA, very little of what was on Bunker Hill could have lasted to the present. Most structures were crappy fire-traps - it's surprising they lasted as long as they did. Assume CRA did not bulldoze Bunker Hill....what then? Horrid high rise public housing, such as what was proposed (perhaps deceptively so) for Chavez Ravine? Or perhaps equally horrid Geoff Palmer "Italianate" apartment fortresses, as described on this page or the one previous? And remember - if you save Bunker Hill, then by default the Historic Core goes away. And even if you saved BOTH Bunker Hill AND the Historic Core,and kept tens of millions of s.f. of office space out of Downtown and forced it out elsewhere.....what then? Downtown would have fallen into an even greater abyss than it did in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
No easy choices.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tovangar2
Not to get too heavy-duty about it, but every time I see one of these damn planning overlays I'm reminded of the Milgram Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment. What are people thinking? The conclusion dawn from the experiment was, "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process." Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, they continue under instruction from "authority".
If anyone here hasn't read Jane Jacobs Death and Life of Great American Cities (the fiftieth anniversary edition is out), relatively cheap, used copies may be had from Amazon.
Yet still the Robert Moses "solution" is turned to again and again because it makes the rich richer. More money was to be made tearing down LAHS rather than repairing the tower, the ghastly Staples Center/LA Live complex is supposed to be "fun". The freeway "system" (as opposed to the Red Cars, the "best public transit in the world") and Bunker Hill...well there's a gazillion examples. Our alleys and byways and lanes are gone. Depopulated, pedestrian-hostile, weird, abstract, anxiety-producing environments are in.
It's like we've lost the will to resist, ashamed to want human-scale, convenient, charming, decent streetscapes including Dragon Dens and Spotlights. Afraid to speak up. |