Eli Broad envisioned Grand Avenue as DTLA's Champs-Élysées. Instead it may be a memorial to an urbanism of big gestures that is passing into history.
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.
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