Pershing Square Revisited; Panel Brainstorms Design Solutions

Christopher Hawthorne: In many ways, Pershing Square is emblematic of the kinds of planning obstacles we face in Downtown Los Angeles and the city. It is a piece of the public sphere that in many ways used to work quite well as a gathering spot and shared space. If we didn't ruin it, we at least severely compromised it over the years by making a series of decisions that gave leeway to cars and a parking garage at the expense of pedestrians and the free flow of people from the streets and sidewalks into the park and vice versa...

...We come together for this conversation at a time when the subject of park space and park design in Downtown Los Angeles-despite the financial crisis-is very much at the top of the agenda. The latest version of the Civic Park, which is connected to the Grand Avenue development Downtown and is designed by Mark Rios of Rios Clemente Hale, will be unveiled tomorrow. Also, there is a small park on Spring Street, near Fourth Street, that the city of Los Angeles purchased not long ago. It was the first purchase the city has made under the so-called Quimby Fund, which has been very controversial. There is certainly movement and development on this topic. Whenever there is movement on this topic it is never long until we turn collectively to a discussion of what to do with Pershing Square.

All of us have been thinking a lot lately about the recession offering a chance to catch our collective breath and an opportunity to more carefully plan the shared spaces of the city. Certainly with the delay and possible demise of the Park Fifth project on one side of Pershing Square, which promised to help fund some improvements to Pershing Square, we are faced with a chance to do some planning.

This evening's discussion is very much in that spirit: pausing to talk, debate, and reflect on the history of the park, the legacy of planning, and the decisions that have created its present form while seeing what we can learn and what lessons we might apply from that legacy...

...Throughout much of that history the same group of questions has tended to swirl around the park. Namely, is it possible through design alone to restore the vital role that it once played in civic life in Los Angeles? Or is that goal driven more by nostalgia than a real understanding of the roles that open space and Downtown play in contemporary Los Angeles? More recently the questions have examined what role Pershing Square can play as Downtown changes, becoming more residential and perhaps more vibrant than it has been in some time. Most recently, as that evolution begins to stall, how do we grapple with the fact that Pershing Square, despite a lack of popularity with much of the population, remains central to much of the homeless population of Downtown? The question is where that leaves us in considering Pershing Square. First of all, it leaves us with a park that never seems to reach its potential, our hopes for it, or the role it played in the past.

Now it finds itself having lost some of the funding that we expected from the developers of the Park Fifth tower or other developments. At the same time, the city is moving forward with plans for-or at least exploring plans-for some modest but not unimportant upgrades to the square.

It's important to pause at least at the beginning of this conversation to list and to remember what the park does offer, even in its less than perfect, current condition: a park that is at-grade, of a manageable size, near the heart of Downtown, with a long history as a crossroads for the city, and which is now served by a Metro stop. When it comes to public space in Los Angles, that list of attributes is hard to scoff at...

Daniel Biederman: ...Programming is what will win the day at Pershing Square; there is just not enough programming there now. There is a lot of symbolic architecture but not enough programming-everything from food to having chess, checkers, backgammon, movies at night, or carousels...

[Bryant Park has] a reading room. It is interesting that Pershing had a reading room back at the same time that Bryant Park did. Bryant had it in the 1930s, and we reestablished it six years ago. We have books, papers and magazines. We let people borrow them and trust that they will return them. It's a terrific creator of activity. Wi-fi is hugely significant and draws huge crowds. I have a picture with huge snowdrifts and people doing Wi-fi in our park when it's 20 degrees.

At Herald Square-a tiny little park across from Macy's that is famous because of the song-we haven't programmed much because we don't have the room. There are movable chairs. You seem like an intelligent audience, so you know the work of Holly White: moveable chairs, movable chairs, movable chairs. There are some in Pershing Square but not enough. We have 3,800 in Bryant. The moveable chairs, the flowers, the different lighting, and a little bit of programming have really made it a much more pleasant space...

...It is very hard to rely on government funding. Always, not just in 2009. Government funding was never good backing for public park operations. It is always the first to go. I was a private sector guy when I first started this thing and I said, "Let's not take government funding." Later on we found out it is also a bad idea to take private philanthropic money. I sometimes start my speeches on revenue saying that we don't take a dollar of government or philanthropic money and a lot of people raise their hands to ask what else there is. There is other stuff, especially in media capitals like L.A., big cities with sophisticated players and a lot of money sloshing around. Even in bad times there is money in the private sector...The money for Bryant Park-which costs about $8 million a year for six acres-comes from park events, restaurant rents, assessments, concessions, grants, and random contributions that are more like sponsorships. Though it is harder in smaller cities like in Newark, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, it is possible in L.A. Pershing Square has a lot of potential here...

...The last thing Pershing Square should focus on is what I will call "managing attendance," which is more sophisticated than you think. Obviously, you want more people. My visits to Pershing Square in the last two days have reinforced my belief that it rarely has many people in it. More important, it is not drawing healthy male-female ratios. Holly White always taught that the way to tell the health of a park was to go into a public space and count the first 50 people you see. If the count comes out with 26 women and 24 men, that's great. If it's 42 men and eight women, that's not good. Women vote with their feet much more aggressively than men do. They are well aware of physical problems and threats to their security.

More importantly, the homeless to non-homeless ratio is very unhealthy. You do not have to do a thing about homeless citizens as long as they are obeying the rules and as long as the ratio is in the right number range. The right number is 300:1 or 400:1. Bryant Park has 13 homeless people. We know everything about them because they live there. But we have 4,200 other people. Women don't come into our park and say, "This is a homeless hangout; I'm getting out of here immediately." They see that it is safe for them and that therefore the homeless people are fine.

You don't want to get into the business of pushing out the homeless. You want to get into the business of drawing in so many others that it's not really visible that there are large numbers of homeless there and it's comfortable to women, who are your key constituents...

Barry Sanders:...Our job on the commission and at the department, with its 10,000 employees, is to listen to the people of Los Angeles. We will listen to this discussion, and we appreciate this initiative enormously to get the ball rolling on in a direction I'd like to see it roll, which is to make very major changes in Pershing Square to make it work for all of us.

These considerations deal with architecture but they also deal with programming, demographics, and the city plan. It's not limited to what is within our perimeter in Pershing Square.

Let me speak about my own opinions-not the opinions of the commission or the city. My view is that the square does not work as it is. The architecture is heavily responsible. The walls are a central part of Legoretta's design. Once you are inside those walls it's actually not that bad. There is a lot of hardscape, but there is a lot of hardscape right out in front here, too.

But getting into the park is a serious problem. Not only are there walls, but the park is elevated above grade. Worse than that, there is high shrubbery on the other side of the walls, presumably, higher than when Legoretta had it planted. Inside you feel threatened by the walls. It also limits ingress and egress, which is the last thing you want to do. You can only get inside at the corners. There is a split in the middle on the eastern/western side, but you're limited with ingress and egress.

A fault to the lack of ambition of that re-do is that you're still surrounded by about six, seven, or eight lanes of traffic on all sides. Bryant Park, which is wonderful, only has streets on three sides. Here you are basically surrounded by freeways on four sides. You can't cross those streets except with a crosswalk sign.

When we put in the subway, why didn't we have it exit out in the park like they do in London? Do you walk out into the park when you get out of the subway? No. It is on the other side. You have vacant buildings at the Southwest corner. The Biltmore turned its back on the park in the 1990s, never to return. Whatever you may say about population and whether it's at the center of the city or not, this park is where no people are. Urban parks need people. It can be dirt and bricks, but if there are a lot of people there, then it is working. If there are a lot of people there then it doesn't matter if there are homeless among them, as Daniel already said.

We would like to see a couple of changes. It would be wonderful if the park were no longer on the edge of the Downtown population but rather were in the center of it, but the current economic climate means we'll have to wait. It will come, but we are years away from it...

...When you're the Recreation and Parks Department you can do two things. You can fight for a change in design. You encourage the people who have tremendous interest in this park to get going, start a movement, and do a complete redesign of the park: Take out the garage and put in a new one that also serves the Jewelry Mart-you must have a garage for the revenue-then you have twice as many cars and twice as much revenue.

If Pershing Square becomes the center of redevelopment-and it will now take many years-we will have population growth on the perimeter. In the mean time, until it has happened, the only way we get that population in the park is by modest changes to the park's physical attributes. I believe they should be more modest than most people say if only to respect the ethics of the Legoretta design-as much as I don't like it. There are things we can do in terms of redesign that will bring people in. We have sidewalks outside of the walls so that people don't have to come in-reroute the sidewalks inside. Get rid of the high shrubs and put in grass.

The other thing to do is what we are already doing: reprogram the park: we have concerts five nights a week, winter and summer, two months of a very successful ice skating rink, and we have an art show all summer long. We are talking to the folks who run the marathon to have events coinciding with the marathon. We are in final talks to bring the weekly Fifth Street Farmer's Market inside the park, and we will, starting in April. At the behest of the park advisory board we are looking at unconventional ways to get a restaurant in there. It's hard. It's a population problem. Prior attempts have failed due to lack of business.

We are also looking at some physical changes. When I became president of the commission I asked to see all 400 parks in the city...but I particularly wanted to see Pershing Square because of my preexisting opinions about it. It seemed to me that the Palm Court, the northeast corner, was the worst part of the park...In two weeks construction will begin on the northeast corner to bring in new plants, new grass, and steps in the palm court. The project will take a few months. There will be new irrigation, and there will be a pet care feature. Maybe one day we will have a dog park. We have also changed the management among some of the people managing the park to make sure that it's kept up correctly. That is happening too, all in consultation with the community...