Achi news desk-
For decades the effort to revitalize downtown Los Angeles has been tied to arts projects, from the construction of the mid-century modern Music Center in 1964 to the addition of Frank Gehry’s stainless steel Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003.
But the pandemic was hard on downtowns and cultural institutions across the country, and Los Angeles has been no exception.
Its vacancy rates in the city climbed above 25 percent. Shop fronts are empty. Homelessness and crime remain concerns. Many arts organizations have yet to regain their pre-pandemic audiences. And there have been vivid displays of the area’s thwarted ambitions: graffiti artists covered three abandoned skyscrapers just before the Grammy Awards took place across the street at the Crypto.com Arena, and some lights on the acclaimed new Sixth Street Viaduct were turned off after for thieves to steal. the copper wire.
So it was a big vote of confidence in the area’s continued promise when the Broad, the popular contemporary art museum that opened across the street from Disney Hall in 2015, announced last month that it was about to begin a $100 million expansion.
And it was largely a continuation of the vision of its founder, Eli Broad, the businessman and philanthropist who played a key role in the effort to create a center of gravity in a famously scattered city by transforming Grand Avenue into a cultural hub. . Broad, who died in 2021, helped found the Museum of Contemporary Art and had Disney Hall built before opening the Broad to house his own art collection.
“As Eli said — and he said this when almost no one really agreed with him — Downtown LA is the center and this region needs a cultural center,” said Joanne Heyler, founding director and chief curator of the Broad. “It was fine. At least our experience and audience prove that point.”
The Broad – which offers free admission – says its attendance has improved to pre-pandemic levels, as has the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which says it is once again averaging 89 percent attendance.
But other presenters have struggled. Last summer, Center Theater Group halted productions on one of its three stages, the 736-seat Mark Taper Forum in the Music Center complex, citing financial problems.
“It’s no secret that many arts organizations that are vital to the arts ecology of downtown Los Angeles continue to face hardship,” said Hilda L. Solis, Los Angeles County Supervisor who represents the Grand Avenue section of Bunker Hill and r Arts District nearby, in email. “But despite the difficulties, this field is resilient. Artists and organizations in the area are finding ways to pivot in an effort to reconnect with Angelenos.”
They are also working to attract audiences back to the city center at a time when there is a vacancy and fewer hotels. “It feels a little empty,” said Christopher Koelsch, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Opera, adding that “it’s a lot harder to sell out our midweek performances than it used to be.”
The opera predicts that attendance will reach 75 per cent of capacity this season, an improvement over the past few years but still down from the 83 per cent attendance it had during the last full season before the pandemic.
Traffic congestion is still another barrier to getting people to travel to the city centre, and some galleries and arts organizations have been expanding into other areas to meet people where they are.
Galleries Hauser & Wirth and François Ghebaly, which have downtown spaces, recently added locations in West Hollywood. And while the LA Dance Project is expanding its downtown studio and performance space, doubling its seating capacity, it’s also just signed a deal to perform regularly at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills.
The galleries say they are not giving up on the city centre. “They both complement each other,” said Stacen Berg, partner and managing director of Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, referring to her gallery’s two locations. “West Hollywood is a more trafficked area – we have people coming in multiple times to see one show. Downtown serves as a destination. They make their way to us.”
Ghebaly said he decided to open another location in West Hollywood to give collectors the convenience of “proximity shopping.”
“The ideal way to cover a city like Los Angeles is to have multiple locations,” he said. “These neighborhoods are essentially different cities, cultures, identities — like island states in Greece, only instead of being separated by seas, they’re separated by freeways.”
Dealers say downtown offers an unusual level of physical space and creative freedom. “You simply cannot see these shows anywhere else in LA or in New York,” said dealer Susanne Vielmetter, who expanded her downtown gallery in 2019 and closed her Culver City location.
Hauser’s downtown space, a sprawling complex that includes a bookstore and popular restaurant Manuela, says it drew 4,000 people to its recent opening for Jason Rhoades, Catherine Goodman and RETROaction (part two).
Young people who live and work in the Arts District contribute to vibrancy among galleries. “People are going out into the city centre,” says Mara McCarthy, founder of Box gallery, which presents contemporary art and performances. “They’ll go see a show over there and get a beer down here and go get ramen.”
Grand Avenue remains a case study in progress and a challenge. Some hope the recently completed Grand LA development across from Disney Hall – designed by Gehry and featuring restaurants, shops, a hotel and residences – will live up to its promise. A few blocks away another hotel, the LA Grand Hotel, is used to house the homeless.
“Downtown is at a standstill,” said Richard Koshalek, the former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art who also led the committee that selected Gehry for Disney Hall. “There should be a commitment to a visionary plan.”
There have been signs of attention from government officials.
The Gov announced Gavin Newsom said last month that his administration would push to speed up construction of a $2 billion, 7.6-acre residential and commercial development called Fourth & Central, billed as “the New Gateway to DTLA.” And Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has continued to work to address the homelessness crisis. And the City Council approved nearly $4 million to remove the graffiti on the abandoned skyscrapers and protect the buildings.
Mark Falcone, founder and chief executive of Continuum Partners, which is developing Fourth & Central, said “right now, there’s a perception that there’s more risk in LA and San Francisco than there was five years ago” but that it remains is “very comfortable” on the city center’s prospects.
“We believe that cultural enterprises are the things that give more resilience and long-term stability to a community than anything else,” he said.
Arts administrators make plans too. The Mark Taper has begun offering some programming again (a return of Alex Edelman’s one-man show and a Michael Feinstein concert) and plans to announce a new season that its artistic director, Snehal Desai, says will focus on extensive on weekends to accommodate the event. weakness in attendance during the week.
“The pandemic accelerated some of the trends that were already happening,” said Rachel S. Moore, president and chief executive of the Music Center. “People are much more selective about what they see, but things that are really popular are really popular.”
The Broad recently reached the highest daily attendance in its history: 6,200 visitors on March 30. (For comparison, the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art said its attendance was 1,985 that day.) “There was a feeling at the beginning that the middle of the city in mothballs,” said Heyler, its director. “We have emerged from that moment fully.”
In another promising development, the Colburn School for music and dance has just broken ground on a Gehry-designed expansion to its downtown campus that will include a 1,000-seat concert hall.
“We need a medium-sized venue in the middle of the cultural district,” said Sel Kardan, the school’s chief executive and president, adding that he hoped the stage would be used during the upcoming Olympics.
And the Los Angeles tourism board has focused its latest – and biggest – advertising campaign on art and culture. “Most people don’t know that Los Angeles is now home to the largest number of museums and performing arts venues in the country,” said Adam Burke, the board’s president and chief executive.
Some businesses have recently put down roots in the city, including Spotify, which opened a sprawling new campus in the Arts District, and Warner Music Group, which moved into a new five-story building on Santa Fe Avenue. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, plans to offer corporate membership to try to leverage this new crop of executives, said Anne Ellegood, the executive director, adding that the museum is “thinking a lot about what we can done to bring it. artists back to the neighborhood.
“Everyone in the cultural sector,” he said, “must be thinking about how to make sure artists stay in LA”
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