Boulevard of Reinvention

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts.boulevard/la-ca-wilshire-boulevard-los-angeles-index-dto,04628574.htmlstory

Recommended reading: Richard Longstreth: The Drive-in, The Supermarket, and The Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles: 1914-1941, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999

Rayner Banham: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1971

Wilshire Boulevard or as Richard Longstreth put it, "The fabulous boulevard."  Angelenos tend to see this boulevard which stretches from Downtown Los Angeles to the Ocean as our Main Street.  I chose this article to blog about because this is road I live near and have almost daily contact with.  I actually live near the storied Miracle Mile where the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the La Brea Tar Pits are located.  Thus, I felt compelled to discuss it.  In an ongoing series on memorable streets for the Los Times, architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne goes behind the facade of "the fabulous boulevard" to examine the true story of Los Angeles' Main Street and reveals a completely different side of a street that has been a part of Los Angeles' history.

My own experience traveling down the boulevard in either direction is akin to time travel.  Going east towards downtown is going back to a time when Los Angeles was a fledgling metropolis that attracted the hungry and the hopeful.  The buildings that line the eastern direction are some of the most beautiful you'll ever see.  There no pretense, just a sincere effort make a mundane place more aesthetically pleasing.  Even from the car, the buildings have, what I call an old smell, musty with life occurring within the walls.  In the western direction, going past the Miracle Mile, is the Los Angeles of the post-World War II period and the future.  The buildings are shiny, bright, recalling the sense of optimism that followed soldiers returning from the Pacific and European battlefields and migrant defense workers looking for a better life.  Further west is the Los Angeles of the future, the Los Angeles of the digital revolution on the avante-garde of technology and commerce.  Past, present, future-Los Angeles and Wilshire Boulevard.

Let's start with a brief history of Wilshire Boulevard before diving into Mr. Hawthorne's romantic analysis.  Wilshire Boulevard began it's life as two separate pieces of a whole.  Part of it began in the beach community of Santa Monica, California and the other part near downtown in the nineteenth century, "founded"by Henry Gaylord Wilshire.  The boulevard did not become whole until 1934.  In 1895, Wilshire, along with his father and brother purchased a triangle-shaped parcel of land just west of downtown.  Shortly after the purchase, he filed a plan for a new subdivision for the plot with an east-west road running down the middle he dubbed Wilshire Boulevard.  The first gated community, Fremont Place, was located on the boulevard and was home to  silent screen stars Mary Pickford and Harold Lloyd.  Between 1920 and 1923, the area around Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo (Ro-dayo) Drive was the site for one of the first dirt auto racing tracks in the United States.  Bullocks Wilshire (1929), designed by architects Frank Donald D. and John Parkinson, was the first department store west of downtown to orient its entry porte-cochere and valet parking to the back to accommodate automobile traffic.  The former department story is now home to Southwestern University of Law.  The Bryson (1913) was one the elegant apartment buildings that began to displace the mansins in the Westlake area.  It was followed by the Talmadge (date unknown) built by United Artists President Joseph Schenk for his wife actor Norma Talmadge.  Today, the Talmadge continues to thrive and the Bryson has been restored and provides low-income rental.  There were about twenty-two high-rise office buildings put in the Wilshire Center between 1968 and 1976.  In the 1980s, scores of high-rise and high-priced condominiums were built along a portion of the boulevard, east of Westwood, the "Golden Mile," to reflect the value of the real estate.http://www.preservela.com/archives/000641.html

Definitely a fabulous history but what today?  What has this de facto Main Street become and come to mean?  Unlike Pico and Olympic Boulevards, which run parallel to Wilshire, the boulevard has distinguished itself as denser, more urbane, vertically oriented road.  Instead of acting as the prefect symbol of the city, it has become a  sixteen mile petri-dish for new ideas about architecture, transportation, commerce, and urbanism in Southern California.  It was on Wilshire Boulevard that civic planners first tried a linear downtown, stretching west toward the ocean, instead of the traditional consolidated plan beginning at the foot of City Hall.  Here was the place where Los Angeles built it's first synchronized traffic lights.  A quick digression, Los Angeles has recently synchronized the traffic lights in an effort to ease gridlock with mixed results.  Back to the topic.  The boulevard is dotted with beautiful and beautifully restored Art Deco apartments that harken back to the city's glamourous past.  Unlike some of the other boulevards profiled in this series which faded in prominence after World War II finding new strength in recent years, Wilshire Boulevard has remained the place where the city has embraced and tested the future.

If Wilshire Boulevard is the test lab for the future, then there have been few failed experiments.  Wilshire has been the site for a proposed subway to the sea, the world's tallest building, and many other big proposals that have stalled.  I'd like to address the proposed downtown to the ocean subway for a minute.  Los Angeles is a city that was built, in part, by transportation.  First the Pacific Electric Railcars then the freeways.  Reyner Banham, in his book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, does an excellant job of explaining the history of transportation in Los Angeles.  Los Angeles is a car-culture city and getting people out of their cars and into subways and buses takes a bit of doing.  The high cost of gasoline has prompted many locals to rethink their relationship to the car but overall, we remain committed to the relationship we have with our automobiles.  This partnership is also predicated on the vast sprawl that has been created, ironically, thanks to transportation lines making it possible for someone in the city of Torrence to commute daily to work in Beverly Hills.  This sprawl has also given way to a less dense city, thus less of a need for high-rise buildings.  I believe that as Los Angeles continues to grow into a more urban environment, civic minded people will rethink their hesitation toward the high-rise.  All of this is being acted out on Wilshire Boulevard.

The apparent signs of car culture are not present on Wilshire Boulevard.  As the city continues to grow denser and real estate becomes more expensive, the car and its attendant businesses are being priced out.  I can personally vouch for the Mr. Hawthorne's point about driving for miles along the boulevard and not finding a very necessary gas station or drive through that were central to Wilshire's identity in the first half of the twentieth century.  Now the boulevard is in this limbo state.  The car culture along the boulevard has faded but a rail system and pedestrian culture has yet to take hold.  Their are pockets of a pedestrian culture but not enough to make it interesting.  It gives the whole road a sense of disconnect that are a reminders of it boulevard's early days as a series of disjointed streets.

Bullocks Wilshire, on Wilshire and Westmoreland, pioneered the car-centric features that would become common in the city including a rear-facing entry that was as impressive as the street facade.  Developer A.W. Ross used similar methods in his audacious plan for developing a stretch of Wilshire between La Brea and Fairfax Avenues as the Miracle Mile.  However, as we all know for every successful plan there are several failures such as a series of triumphal arches patterned after the famed Roman arch.  More recently, there was a proposal to build a rapid-bus route along the western corridor, through Beverly Hills, Westwood, and Santa Monica, but these cities did not want to give up a traffic lane.  Typical of Wilshire's luck over the years.

As a place for stand-alone notable architecture, The Ambassador Hotel (1921) by Myron Hunt and Welton Becket's House of Tomorrow (1946, this is, by the way, now a private school) stand out as the boulevard's emblematic failures.  However, efforts to create a more cohesive road would require such a massive effort involving different municipalities that it just seems pointless.  The proposed subway system is the best example of efforts to create a more unified boulevard.  If actually completed, it would demonstrate the city's new commitment to public transit.  However, it faces a powerful and well-funded Westside based opposition.  The current incarnation of this plan is the Purple Line.  Despite the paranoid efforts of the Beverly Hills Unified School District, which continues to oppose a tunnel under the city's high school, the plan seems finally on track (some pun intended) for completion.  As the Wilshire line dealt with one delay after the other, the city was quietly building an expansive business and rail network that brought back to life the boulevards.  The subway as the capstone of Los Angeles' transit revolution has potential to act as potent catalyst.  This transit revolution is fueled by the growth of the bicycle culture.  If anything, the subway to the sea will intensify Wilshire's identity as a boulevard for reinvention.

When the proposed subway reaches Westwood in twenty years, it has the potential to bring UCLA out of its leafy suburban cocoon and let engage with the city.  Could the same happen to USC and other university campuses around Southern California?  Stay tuned.  The Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced plans to build a Purple Line station on a UCLA-owned seven-acre lot on the corner of Wilshire and Gayley (Lot 36).  Since the university is not subject to local zoning or height regulation, it could conceivably build a high-rise to accomodate its growing student population.  A skyscraper would be a dramatic statement and change the image of the university.  The subway could also radically change two cultural landmarks, the Getty Center in Brentwood and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on the western edge of the Miracle Mile by making them more accessible by means other than the automobile.  I'm sure that museum public relations people, accountants, and marketing people are just salivating at the prospect of more visitors.  To that end, LACMA director Michael Govan is working with Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, in anticipation of a Purple Line Station, to redesign the eastern edge of the museum campus to create a grand arrival space, key to the museum experience.  This type of ambition is just part of Wilshire's history as a place for reinvention.  Hey guess what?  That's what Los Angeles is all about, come here and reinvent yourself.