Grand Avenue Project
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The Grand Avenue Project along with the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment District is a project currently under development designed to revive downtown Los Angeles. The 2.05 billion dollar project, which is to be built on Grand Avenue next to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, is designed to give Los Angeles a thriving city center. It has been compared to, and is intended to be the L.A. version of the Champs-Élysées of Paris and the Central Park of New York City. The location seems like the ideal place to build such a project since about 5.8 million people live within 15 miles of the Grand Avenue Project according to the Grand Avenue Committee. The project will create over 5,300 long-term jobs and will generate over $95 million annually in taxes for all levels of government, with the (Los Angeles) county receiving $2.3 million and the city receiving $5.8 million per year.
[edit] Design
The project's key public component is a 16 acre (64,000 m²) park stretching between the development's two boundaries: City Hall and the Department of Water and Power building. The park was designed to be pedestrian friendly and will connect Bunker Hill to the Civic Center. Plans call for tree-shaded sidewalks, plenty of street lights, benches, and kiosks, to encourage the walking and exploration of the area. The new Grand Avenue will also be equipped with upscale shopping stores and high-rise condos, in addition to a shopping center, bookstore, multiplex movie theater and a gourmet supermarket. The super-luxury Mandarin Oriental Los Angeles is scheduled to open in a Gehry-designed high-rise tower as part of the project.
The project will also include a park that is to be built between city hall and the DWP building. This area is already a public space with plazas, a Court of Flags, and a park-like area with a large fountian where many county workers take their lunch under trees. However the design is disjointed and cut off by the entrances to several parking garages.
[edit] Reception
While generally greeted with positive response, there have also been critical concerns expressed by local citizens, community leaders, local business owners, academics and advocates for the homeless. Grand Intervention, a project of the Norman Lear Center at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, has attempted to maximize public input into the design of the park. This project, begun with a call for ideas in a July 2005 Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times, resulted in more than 300 design submissions from across the city and around the world. Furthermore, when the park developer chose its design team, Grand Intervention invited them to view the best of the proposals. Since effective urban planning requires direct civic engagement by diverse and disparate communities, the Lear Center felt that new technology could extend the outreach process beyond the conventional Vermont town meeting model. In an effort to extend its public outreach on L.A.'s new civic park, the Grand Avenue Committee and the developer, The Related Companies, endorsed Grand Intervention's online civic engagement efforts. The Lear Center has offered live and archived Webcasts of community park workshops, online transcriptions of the workshops and online digital resources of all materials distributed or displayed at the workshops.
Some business owners fear their businesses won't be able to compete with such a large, government-backed project and that many small downtown businesses will shut down. Backers of the project say that it will attract more people to downtown and therefore boost local business.
