I Have Seen the Future: Surviving L.A. Live

by Gary Phillips

photo by Beverley Keefe

I’ve had my buzz on, standing in the plaza along with such, er, luminaries as L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina and Carol Shatz. The latter is head of the Central City Association, whose icy indifference to the plight of the fast-disappearing low- income and homeless residents of downtown makes Patty Hewes (the velociraptor lawyer Glenn Close plays in the TV series Damages) look downright Ghandian. This was the occasion last Thursday of the grand opening, if that’s the right term, of L.A. Live, some ten years in the making. Some call it Staples World, what with a massive Ritz Carlton Hotel and residences, Grammy Museum, relocated Conga Room, and high end steak houses.

Prior to the throng gathering before the 52-foot electric Christmas tree in the center of the plaza, we’d been in the newly operating ESPN Zone bar and restaurant across the way. The we is my wife, Gilda Haas, and me. Gilda is the executive director of the grassroots organization SAJE, Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, that was part of a larger effort by other like-minded entities called the Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice that negotiated a community benefits agreement with the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), the fine folks who have wrought L.A. Live. The harbinger of things to come was the construction of the Staples Center in 1999, figuratively spearheading the gentrification of what came to be dubbed the Figueroa Corridor—that is, commercial buildings, arenas and residences, and massive parking structures, along Figueroa Street stretching from Olympic Boulevard to the north heading south to USC at Fig and Exposition.

While enjoying my AEG comped booze in the ESPN Zone, and sampling such appetizers as crab legs and mini-hamburger sliders, I was reflecting on the inevitability of it all; of this mightily transformed downtown. A place where up till the early sixties, if I recall correctly, there was an ordinance preventing buildings being erected taller than City Hall within so much of a radius and where the Tom Bradley regime built up parts of downtown in fits and starts, awaiting the hoped-for Pacific Rim boom.

photo by Beverley Keefe

In the late nineties, as the Staples Center was being built, I had a decent-sized office in an eight-story building at 1010 South Flower (at Olympic), owned by the First United Methodist Church. I paid on a month-to-month less than $240 per, and wrote a couple of my novels there—Shooter’s Point and The Perpetrators, for those keeping score. 1010 was a several-stories home to many a progressive nonprofit, and was ideally situated. You paid $40 a month for parking at a lot behind it on Grand and could walk into the heart of downtown for lunch, go to the Dutton’s bookstore beneath the Arco Towers, or even catch a flick at the Laemmle Grande movie theater tucked damn near underneath the 110 overpass on Figueroa at Third. The Flower Street building was torn down and turned into a parking lot not long after Staples opened. This after the church had built senior housing where the parking lot had been on Grand. The other part of the plan was to rebuild it using some Community Redevelopment Agency monies as a two-story complex of offices for the Methodist Church and an expanded childcare center.  Even if this new scaled down office structure—and there’s a sign up in that parking lot announcing it too is finally going to be built—were to offer space for rent, the neighborhood has become too upscale for a mid-list writer like me to afford the freight.

photo by Beverley Keefe

For milling about the Zone were the ones who all had a hand or extracted certain givebacks, like local hiring requirements, low income housing set-asides, and Living Wage agreements, to make L.A. Live a reality. Gathered were the reps and workers of the various unions—namely building trades and Unite-HERE, representing the kitchen and wait staff to the security guards—the CBO types like my wife, the local pols, City Hallers, and the developer class and their minions. On endless loops on flat screen monitors there was either text fading in and out thanking the various aforementioned entities who worked together to make this hoopla happen or ads for downtown lofts. I have seen the future, and it’s the waterless toilets in Club Nokia. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Rorschach (by Dave Gibbons)

Back at the tree lighting, MC Adam Carolla, a homegrown celeb it turns out, introduced the lineup to usher in this new era. Coming to the stage to speak were, of course, our playboy mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa; city councilwoman Jan Perry, whose district includes most of downtown; USC football coach Pete Carroll (What? The chancellor couldn’t come ’cause he was too busy counting all the property ’SC owns between Staples World and the campus? But I ain’t hatin’ on you, Pete, even though you aced Norm Chow out of the program, and the BCS was doing you wrong but finally you’re headed back to the Rose Bowl.); Natalie Cole, who sang a lovely rendition of her dad’s “Christmas Song”; AEG prez Tim Leiweke; and Britney Spears. Who, coming out in freshly coiffed hair and a long white winter coat, seemed to be channeling Bette Davis as she said a few throaty words and didn’t sing.

Together these limelighters pulled on a giant candy cane and the tree of lights did its thing to applause and live horns. L.A. Times reporter Cara Mia DiMassa wrote in the December 2 California section, before this opening, that L.A. Live has a “... slight Dickensian feel amid the flashing screen and curved lines ...” Standing in the plaza, aglow from the Jack and Coke I’d been imbibing, it wasn’t Dickens so much, but images from the alternate realtyWatchmen that flashed through my head. If you don’t know the classic comic book miniseries, just google it or wait for the movie coming next year. But as I stood at the waterless urinal in Club Nokia’s men’s room afterward, as the festivities that night included a concert by America at the venue (me and the old lady only stayed for the opening act, Keb’ Mo’), trying to sum up my impressions of this thing, the words of the paranoid, sexually-repressed, driven Objectivist masked vigilante Rorschach from the Watchmen gurgled up ...

“Hurm ...”

For more on L.A. Live, check out Tony Chavira's feature article and Nathan Walpow's weblog post.

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