Monthly Archives: March 2020

The Walt Disney Concert Hall and The Broad

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The last time I was in Los Angeles, the Walt Disney Concert Hall looked like this — still more than two years from its completion in 2003. I paid no attention to it then.

On February 22, 2020, the 2,265-seat hall looked like this from across Hope St.
Whatever else you can say about Frank Gehry, his designs aren’t like their surroundings. They’re going to stand out. Also, they’re interesting to stand under.
I’d read that self-guided tours of the venue were free, and that’s true. You get an MP3 player at a table just inside the Hope St. entrance, and off you go. The audio snippets about the development of the building, along with various design elements, are narrated by John Lithgow, with some additional commentary by those who worked on the project, including Gehry.

I was keen to see the auditorium. It was not to be. Musical careers were hanging in the balance in there.

Still, the rest of the interior was worth a look.

Though it’s invisible from the street, the hall has some outside space at mid-level, including greenery. A pleasant interlude among the twists of metal and vaulting ceilings.

 

At one point, the outdoor space practically becomes a box canyon made of metal.

Later that day, I visited The Broad, which is next door to Disney, though much newer, completed less than five years ago.
Interesting texture for a 120,000-square-foot box. It looks good, but how long will it be until its gleaming exterior begins to turn gray and streaky? Eventually, but I won’t worry about it. That will be on designer Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who did The Broad in collaboration with Gensler.

Even at 6 p.m. — the museum is open till 8 on Saturdays — the standby line was fairly long. But not as long as the more popular rides at Disneyland. It took about 20 minutes to get in.

Once in, you see works by the likes of Christopher Wool, Jean‐Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Kerry James Marshall, Barbara Kruger, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and others. Always something interesting to see, even if not everything on the walls is that compelling.

Somehow I managed to miss the Infinity Mirrored Room by Yoyoi Kusama, which I chalk up to being pretty tired after taking more than 20,000 steps that day. So it goes.

One more thing about The Broad, something other museums with sizable endowments could take their cue from: admission is free. Among others, that means you, Met.

Downtown LA Walkabout, Including a Light Brush with Insane Clown Posse

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Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles looks like a pleasant public space, but on the morning of February 22, I only got the barest glimpse. Entry to the park had been blocked all the way around by temporary barricades. This was a concern, since according to the receipt for the walking tour of downtown LA that I’d booked for that morning, the group was supposed to meet at Pershing Square.

Soon I found that we were meeting at the corner of W. 6th St. and S. Olive St., at the edge of the park, with the tour proceeding from there. I wasn’t the only one who asked the guide what was going on at Pershing Square. Turns out the city had rented it for the weekend for a couple of Insane Clown Posse concerts, the second of which would be that evening. Sounded like a must-miss to me.

The tour took us on foot past, and sometimes through, 12 different historic structures in downtown Los Angeles, beginning with the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. This is the central wing of the building.
Originally the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel when completed in 1923, the property has 683 rooms, down from about 1,500 at its opening. People didn’t mind smaller rooms in those days.

The south wing.
Design by Schultze & Weaver, a New York firm best known for the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, though that would come later.

The north wing. Why fly the Singapore flag, I don’t know. Owner Millennium & Copthorne Hotels plc is based in London.

Not far away is the CalEdison Building, one of LA’s grand art deco exercises, designed by Allison & Allison and finished in 1931.
The allegory above the entrance holds a torch. Not a torch of fire, but capped with a light bulb, though the electric utility that used to anchor the building left nearly 50 years ago.
The exterior is grand, but the main lobby is the real wow.
More CalEdison pictures are here.

Speaking of wow, the Los Angeles Central Library came a little further on the tour. Along with the U.S. and California flags flying there is the flag of the city of Los Angeles. The library is capped with an ornate pyramid. Originally it was supposed to be a dome, but 1920s Egyptmania had its influence on the building.

Completed in 1926 with a design by Bertram Goodhue and Carlton Winslow, what nearly happened to the library about 50 years later? Demolition. The Los Angeles Conservancy was organized at that time in response, and the building was saved.

Only to nearly burn down in April 1986. The cause remains a mystery. Our guide asked those of us old enough — which was most of the group — whether we remembered the fire. I drew a blank. Even living in Nashville at the time, I must have heard about it, but I couldn’t remember.

“It happened three days after the Chernobyl disaster, so it didn’t get as much coverage as it might have otherwise,” she said. Such is the news cycle.

The citizens of LA insisted that the library be rebuilt, and it was. Such places as the splendid central rotunda were thus saved again.

Looking up in the rotunda.
On the rotunda walls are fine California history murals, finished in 1933 by artist Dean Cornwell.

Across the street from the library are the Bunker Hill Steps, designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and completed in 1990.
If I knew downtown Los Angeles had a topographical feature called Bunker Hill, I’d forgotten it. The place has quite a history: a posh neighborhood in the late 19th century, a run-down one by the mid-20th century, and then the victim of urban renewal. These days, office towers and other commercial buildings developed during or after the 1980s occupy most of Bunker Hill.

Once you go up a hill, you have to go back down again, or at least we did to reach the next destinations on the tour. So we took Angels Flight Railway down the side of Bunker Hill. This is the terminal at the top.

The original funicular, which opened in 1901, closed in 1969, lost temporarily to urban renewal. The line was revived in 1996 a block south of the original location, though it has spent much of the last quarter-century closed because of safety problems. With any luck, those are resolved now.

Looking up the track, which is nearly 300 feet long.

The terminal at the bottom.
The last place on the tour: The Bradbury Building. I knew it by reputation. A lot of people know it that way. If it were in, say, Des Moines, that wouldn’t be true. But it’s in Los Angeles.
The exterior is nice, but it’s the striking interior that makes it a favorite of location scouts and tourists. An almost exact contemporary of the 1890s Monadnock Building in Chicago, the Bradbury’s superb ironwork reminded me of that building.
One George Wyman, a draftsman without formal architectural training, designed the building, at least according to most sources. He was inspired by the description of a building in Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy, again according to most sources. I like to believe the stories are true, since they argue against credentialism.

Back to Insane Clown Posse. I didn’t actually have a brush with them or any Juggalos closer than a few blocks away. That evening, as I headed for the Metro station to leave downtown, I heard the concert off in the distance. It was probably one of the opening acts, but no matter. I could hear that it was loud.

Cal-Tex ’20

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The clerk at the rental car desk asked, as they always do, whether I wanted GPS for my car. For a small fee.

“Where’s the adventure in that?” I said.

So my whole time in a mostly unfamiliar part of the country last week, I didn’t have GPS. I had a better trip for it.

Before visiting Texas recently – I got home today – I went slightly out of the way to spend a few days in Southern California, flying from the chill of metro Chicago to the mild warmth of Los Angeles on February 21, though basking in better weather wasn’t the main consideration. I wanted a new sampling of Los Angeles, which I hadn’t visited since 2001, and to take a trip out to Palm Springs, where I’d never been.

Like any vast urban area, Los Angeles is visually rich. Plenty to see at eye level, but also above your head.

Also beneath your feet.

Arriving late that Friday afternoon, and after leaving LAX behind in my rental car, I went Ladera Heights, a little-known but well-to-do neighborhood in Los Angeles where I’d rented a room through a peer-to-peer hospitality platform, as they say in the real estate biz. The room was part of an exceptionally pleasant condo unit: clean, well appointed, quiet at night, and not particularly expensive for short-term renters. Everything you need in an arrangement like that. Also, there was free parking on a side street that actually had available parking even late in the evening.

On Saturday, I drove to a Los Angeles Metro station on the Blue Line, parked – at a reasonable $3 for the day; you start paying close attention to parking right away in LA – rode downtown and took a walking tour offered by the Los Angeles Conservancy. That included a look at many fine downtown structures, but especially the Bradbury Building and the Angel Flight.

After lunch at Grand Central Market, I did a self-guided tour of Walt Disney Concert Hall, and then wandered down to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels for a look. A wedding was in progress during my visit, but the place is so large non-guests could easily sit way back. I needed the rest anyway. Downtown LA isn’t that large, but on foot the distance adds up. Still, I had enough energy to visit Union Station after the cathedral, take a walk through Olvera Street, and then return (via subway) to The Broad, LA’s most recent major museum, opening only in 2015.

Sunday was a driving day. By mid-morning, I’d made it to the lush, picturesque Hollywood Forever Cemetery in, of course, Hollywood, spending longer than I’d planned there. Then I drove all the way down Santa Monica Boulevard, famed in song and maybe story, to Santa Monica itself, then up the Pacific Coast Highway a short distance to the Getty Villa, an astonishing place the likes of which I’d never seen before, except in Pompeii — where, as Getty pointed out, everything is old. I returned to Santa Monica in the evening for dinner near the Third Street Promenade.

The next day, February 24, I drove into San Gabriel National Monument a few miles, but the roads were blocked further in – lingering piles of snow at higher elevations, I guess. So I made my way via the Foothill towns to Palm Springs, where I stayed with old friends Steve and Jack for two nights. I spent the first day in town, including a stop at Shields Date Garden. I played no golf.

After leaving Palm Springs on February 26, I drove through and walked around the high and dry Joshua Tree National Park, where you see two kinds of desert for a single entry fee. Which, at $30, I object to. Especially since you pay only $25 to get into Big Bend NP. Sure, the JTNP landscape is remarkable, but that fee just means that Congress is underfunding the National Park Service. Ah, well. If I ever want to see Joshua tree forests again, the Mojave National Preserve is also a good place for it, I’ve read, less crowded and with no admission fee.

The next day I flew to San Antonio, where I had a pleasant visit with family and friends, and even met a few new people, the cherry on the sundae of the trip.