LA CDC Honors Architect Jim Bonar, Who Recalls Skid Row Redevelopment Challenges

I have had a tough time relating to "legacy." My Oxford Dictionary tells me legacy is a bequest, but that is what dead people do. I am 67 but very much alive. Also, finding my LA Community Design Center pension fund lacking, I still have a job. And, with what the financial markets have done with my beneficiary managed retirement fund, I may continue to work for a long time.

In response to your bestowing the "legacy," word, I am now going to tell three short stories illustrating the legacy left to me by the LA Community Design Center.

Number one: I was not only the first executive director, I was one of the first professional volunteers in 1968, when one of my USC professors, Emmet Wemple, asked me to respond to a request for urban design services from a resident group in the City Terrace Community of East L.A. Fellow architect Richard Tell and I designed a playful hillside walkway with round concrete forms offering places for kids to play. We were delighted when the residents named the steps "El Pasaje de los Barriles" (Walkway of the Barrels).

12 years later, I was filled with quite a different emotion when Steve Gavin, then President of the Central City Association, asked me to attend an East L.A. community meeting where a community organizing group called UNO wanted to consult with a planner on a gang violence problem. The site of the problem was none other than the City Terrace Pasaje de Los Barriles. I had then to advise the residents on how to approach their county supervisor to have the walkway torn down and right of way reverted to the adjacent property owners.

For a prideful architect, that was a strong lesson in humility.

Number two: LA CDC was thrilled the Sunday in 1973 that KTLA broadcast live their weekly television program on L.A. neighborhoods from the brand new East 60th St. Neighborhood Improvement Center designed by CDC volunteer architects, including our founder Margot Siegel, located on Wall Street in South L.A. Of course, never having visited the site, and probably never having visited south L.A. in advance of their TV show, the producers were miffed at the occasional trains running down nearby Slauson Avenue, hooting their way through the intersections. But they really got crazy about the jets approaching LAX every three minutes.

The 60th St. Community Center is now shuttered. While it is sad to see a community-owned enterprise fall victim to changing demographics and priorities, for 30 years it served as a vital tool for young people of modest means to find their place in Los Angeles culture. Carey Tolbert, a founding director and a continuing director for ten years and her daughter are here tonight and can tell you how they did it.

Number three: I was never more thrilled than I was in 1976 to see the L.A. City Council adopt Mayor Bradley's Blue Ribbon Committee Report on the Central City Redevelopment Project, which prominently contained LA CDC's Skid Row Community Plan, authored by Gary Squier with Cliff Allen and Ron Silvera. This plan recognized Skid Row as a community and articulated housing and jobs programs for its residents.

The adoption proved to be a promise kept at some level. Eventually, more than three thousand units of very-low-income-serving rental housing are in service as envisioned. Many of these have invaluable rental subsidies and supportive services. The LA Community Design Center developed two such projects in partnership with Chrysalis, an employment training center.

Yet today this community remains a horrifying nightmare, arguably the worst Skid Row in the U.S. Today there is a police program that boasts 10,000 citations for jaywalking and littering and 9,000 arrests meted out in the last year to Skid Row residents, who, if the offense is drug trafficking, lose their access to housing and recovery services. Skid Row is a sober reminder of how far we have yet to go in creating humane communities.

I am quick to relish achievement when low income people gain an amenity commonly enjoyed by people of greater financial means. When there are complications, particularly involving competing visions for the same community-as there are in Central City Los Angeles-here, community development gets really tough. Frankly put, the legacy is hard work and insufficient recognition.

So I applaud you LA Community Design Center members who have continued to successfully labor in this field every day. You are working at a scale and achieving more ambitious feats that I and the other pioneers ever foresaw were possible.

For my nine years of service, I only dreamed of designing and developing the new housing that you execute daily.

Tim Kohut and the others on the design team are regularly delivering architecture that is not only attractive, it offers caring and supportive environments to families that deserve no less. The level of sophistication of the enterprise is commendable and I am honored to be identified with you, whatever you end up calling yourselves.

I want to leave those of you who pursue community development with four wishes:

• I wish you the courage and stamina to muster the monumental, super-heroic resources that always seem required for project success.

• I wish for you the serenity to accept as lost those causes wherein those you would help lack the will to perform their jobs.

• I wish for you the wisdom to keep your community partner out front of you.

• I wish for you the longevity genes so that you get to see your successes.

Thank you LACDC for giving me the opportunity to do professionally what I love doing.