Downtown Los Angeles has been the historic center of the Southern California region since its inception and Bunker Hill one of its pivotal constituent parts. The development and redevelopment of Bunker Hill in the last one hundred-odd years provides a special opportunity to observe the process through which the architecture and urbanism of Los Angeles was developed during various phases of the city's growth.

Bunker Hill was platted in the 1880s as part of the first wave of neighborhood formation in Los Angeles. Its varied topography, elegant streets, single-family houses and gardens made it one of the most amenable residential locations in the city. And its adjacency to commercial establishments, governmental and cultural activities turned it into a choice residential address for the elite of an emerging American town.

After 1900 and as the pattern of development in Los Angeles began to change, its urban and architectural character was seriously affected. By the turn of the twentieth century, Downtown was the center of regional employment and retail uses in a Los Angeles slowly being transformed into a city. It included a multitude of twelve-story building blocks that defined impressive streets and boulevards. Its overall building fabric was dense and continuous and generated an active pedestrian life.

Downtown was connected to a series of suburbs and independent towns strung along the stations of the "Red Car" train system. These suburbs and towns were composed of discrete neighborhoods and were surrounded by large tracts of beautiful, open and productive agricultural land. The myth of Southern California as a place that combined all the advantages of urban and rural life was born during this period of time. Meanwhile, the automobile was also being firmly established as a serious means of transportation. It was being used both for short trips within individual towns and for medium trips between them.

In the early 1920s the imperative for establishing downtown Los Angeles as the civic and cultural center of Southern California became a political reality. A number of competing proposals were commissioned, but the most extraordinary one was prepared by the Allied Architects, a group of classicist architects who associated during this period for the purpose of executing civic architectural and urbanist projects.

The Allied Architects' plan for a civic, administrative and cultural center of the Southern California region is the most extraordinary architectural vision ever presented for downtown Los Angeles. It was conceived at a metropolitan scale. Its sheer physical size, approximately one mile in each principal direction was amazing. Its program was equally ambitious: The assembly of all the major public buildings of Los Angeles into a complex composition dominated by public gardens and places.

The mythic, integrative power of the plan was also monumental. It incorporated El Pueblo, the Spanish foundation site of Los Angeles; Fort Moore, the hill overlooking El Pueblo where the American army camped during its occupation and annexation of the Mexican pueblo; a new train station, symbol of an industrial America that absorbed and transformed California; and new cultural, entertainment and administrative buildings, the symbols of a progressive, democratic US-centered civilization. All of the above was included in the interest of restating the principle that a beautiful city, a city of deep culture and a prosperous city are interdependent.

The overall formal idea of the Allied Architects' plan was landscape driven. A powerful Beaux Arts composition of spaces arrayed on major and minor axes, it was very skillfully overlaid onto the grid of downtown. In the north-south direction its principal axis was centered along the ridge of Bunker Hill along Grand Avenue. In the east-west direction, the public spaces and new streets erased the irregular pattern of small streets and blocks that were part of the original pueblo. Its overall configuration was mountain-like, an extruded pyramid with a flattened ridge and a series of linear gardens tiered along its slopes. There is no doubt about the fact that this was a massive clearance project. But its ambition was clearly directed at the public good: The monumental, almost millennial marking of the civic center of the Los Angeles region.

The centerpiece of the plan was a seven-block-long public piazza called Las Alturas. On one end of its gently sloping ground was located a monument to Fort Moore and on the other, a major public building. Temple, First, Second and Third Streets were tunneled under Las Alturas and access to this largely pedestrian place was through local streets on its edges.

La Rambla was located on the first tier, approximately 15-20 feet lower than Las Alturas. It was, in effect, a highly landscaped Olive Street, connected to Hope Street around a semicircular apsidal road wrapping around Fort Moore. Hope Street terminated at El Prado, a hilltop block-sized park in front of a proposed public library. If the precedent for Las Alturas was French, the inspiration for La Rambla, clearly suggested in its plan configuration, if not its name, was Catalan, perhaps a tribute to Father Serra.

La Ronda was located on the lowest tier, a rather simple connecting of Hill and Flower Streets also around Fort Moore. What is particularly wonderful about La Ronda is that as it circumnavigates Bunker Hill it becomes tangent to all the smaller piazzas and parks of the ensemble, El Prado, El Paseo and La Plaza, the extension and enlargement of the original square of the city's foundation. As one would drive or walk La Ronda, they would enter all these great public spaces on their edge and would sense that they were cleverly placed perpendicular to Bunker Hill, and sloping down and away from it, visually connecting to the city beyond.

La Ronda also intersected through a massive city hall building on the west side of the project. The city hall, of an identical parti as the one constructed on its current site later in the decade, dominates Las Alturas with its elaborate plan and imposing biaxial massing. This could have been a powerful and complex building, combining a traditional formal role in terminating the east-west axis and a thoroughly modern one in its overlap and multilevel intersection with Flower Street on the north-south axis.

The Allied Architects' plan incorporated fifty new buildings. They were used mostly as poche between the body of the existing city and the extraordinary figures of public spaces that the plan defined. The most developed combination of buildings and gardens unfolded on the cross axis. Three spaces reminiscent of the sequence of squares at Nancy, France were formed by the county buildings: El Paseo, a linear Carriere-like square without a name and La Alameda depend for their character on the formal inflections of the buildings that surround them. The fronts of the buildings are massive, continuous and uniform in scale. Their backs combine to form beautiful civic gardens. All kinds of public uses were intended for the fifty buildings. It is hard to ascertain the use for each one, as the plan is without an index. Most buildings are described as normative, with the exception of the buildings intersecting the axes and the train station to the east which dominates La Alameda.

The eastern most portion of the plan is an attempt to turn La Plaza into a formal park containing the important remaining historic building fragments of early Los Angeles. The integration of monuments with new buildings and gardens is a strategy well worth pondering in the future reconstruction of the foundation settlement of the city.

The idealistic character of the Allied Architects' work can be sensed not only by its astounding programmatic scope and overall form, but also by its attitude towards the existing city. The plan proposed clearing Bunker Hill in its entirety. It avoided any engagement with the areas of Downtown where commercial uses predominated. Pershing Square, its commercial center was drawn uncontested on the edge of the plan. Eventually the plan's civic dignity fell victim to crass politics, bureaucratic confusion and real estate interests that favored the development of the open land between the many towns of Southern California.

The city and the county judged the project too large, too expensive, too complicated and opted out for a scaled-down alternative, a version of which remains incomplete seventy years later. By the mid-twenties, real estate interests had began to sense the potential of the automobile to give universal access and value to the endless tracts of land in the Los Angeles basin. Beginning with the extension of Wilshire Boulevard westwards from Downtown and the construction of an extensive network of all-weather surface roads in the 1920s, the fate of the Allied Architects' plan was sealed. The city was going to sprawl and it didn't need, perhaps it didn't even deserve, a Civic Center appropriate to a world-class city.

By the end of the World War II and the beginning of massive freeway construction, Bunker Hill was a neighborhood of a vital mix of uses, people and buildings of a kind quite typical of other American urban centers. The dream of a great civic center to challenge and dwarf San Francisco's was long gone. But the temptation to re-energize the economic potential of Downtown by razing it and reconstructing it in a thoroughly 'modern' form began to pick up support.

By 1942 the Los Angeles City Planning Commission set in motion the intellectual and political agenda for revitalizing Downtown. The architectural and urbanist instrument for accomplishing this task was the theories promoted by CIAM, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, of which the progressive Los Angeles architect Richard Neutra was an active member. The 1942 illustrative site plan of Bunker Hill by the Planning Commission combines two tragic trends: clearance and the international formal language of Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse. Not only did the plan propose the obliteration of one of Los Angeles' most interesting and vital inner neighborhoods, it also replaced it with the normative and arbitrary modern slabs that eventually robbed every American city of its public realm. It would be many years before architects and planners realized that the public realm in such schemes was not to be replaced by parkland but by huge streets and parking.

The spark that ignited the "Urban Renewal" catastrophe at Bunker Hill and everywhere else in California was the enactment by the state legislature in 1945 of a Community Redevelopment Act. It authorized creation of local redevelopment agencies to acquire properties (using eminent domain proceedings, if necessary), clear them, and resell or lease them to private developers in order to build anew using the maximum densities of the most productive uses available, most typically, office and commercial retail. Redevelopment was a wealth-generating instrument, through which Community Redevelopment Agencies would come to control the disposition of monies accruing to them by the tax increment difference between the value of the new development and the existing improvements on the land.

The theory of redevelopment was based on questionable assumptions regarding physical and social decay. 'Blight' was variously described during this period as being caused by mixed uses, old fashioned street patterns (the grid), heavy automobile traffic, a run down (but affordable) housing stock and adverse environmental conditions. In retrospect, all these criteria were offered as rationalizations to hide the true motivations behind massive urban clearance. It was in fact the associating of dense city form with social heterogeneity and social dysfunction that precipitated the mass demolition of America's downtowns after 1945. The existence of 'urban problems' should have been addressed in place everywhere. Instead, Bunker Hill was cleansed only to have its social pathologies appear south, east and west of Downtown in ever more virulent forms. Particularly because the poorer citizens of the city had lost faith in the ability of their city's leaders and planners to listen to their needs and respond to them.

The urban theories of Modernism emerged as the antidote to blight. The Bunker Hill Urban Renewal project was approved by the Los Angeles City Council on March 31, 1959. The two formative concepts of this new urban plan were described as follows: "First, automobile and truck movements will not be permitted to destroy the usefulness of the new development. A division between pedestrian activities and vehicular travel will be controlled through grade separation, escalators, super blocks, pedestrian malls, peripheral and sunken parking garages, public transit and off street truck loading. Secondly, human scale and beauty will be the keynote of the "new city within the city". Removal of all height limit restraints will permit skyscrapers with breathtaking views. (The hill will be regraded but will remain a hill.) Building coverage controls will provide much more usable open space, light and air among the structures, than has ever before been realized in the center of a major city. Parks and other recreational areas and aesthetic features will state that this downtown is not only for trade but for livability and comfort as well. In short, it will be built for people."

This absolutely chilling description of the Bunker Hill project is the clearest outline of the method by which most classic American urban centers were destroyed. They were replaced by a fragmented version of the "Ville Radieuse", an imported, internationalist urbanism. The operation was in full swing in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The resulting urban environment was catastrophic throughout the country but particularly in Downtown Los Angeles: more traffic and smog than before, streets dominated by freeway standards and faceless, huge garages; buildings designed like bunkers, inaccessible to the sidewalk, massive and scaleless; rooftop parks, inaccessible to pedestrians; districts of downtown fragmented and separated from each other, their pedestrian life extinguished; hundreds of significant landmarks and buildings razed; the natural profile of Bunker Hill graded by twenty feet and destroyed; blight spread throughout the center of the city. The cleared redevelopment sites remained virtually empty for almost fifteen years — an image of desolation offered to millions of freeway commuters that fueled the decline of Downtown as the region's symbolic center.

In the mid-1960s, Floor Area Ratio (FAR) legislation was enacted by the City of Los Angeles into its zoning code. In the interest of delivering urban form dominated by the monumental towers and random chaotic residual open space of modernism, entitlements were coupled to abstract, mathematical ratios of density — the multiples of the ground area of a given property that can be built. By this decision, density was de-coupled from form guidelines such as height, built to lines, land coverage, and block profiles. It was such codes that historically had kept buildings within typological limits and had allowed the incremental construction of the public realm as individual buildings were put in place. The ugliness, scalelessness, unfriendliness, lack of street landscape and public parks, the insecurity, in short most of the perceived ills of Downtown as it has recently existed can be traced to this disastrous piece of FAR legislation. It allowed the introduction into the city of isolated buildings and residual open spaces unsympathetic to its existing building fabric and public open space network. The resulting Downtown Los Angeles of Urban Renewal was chaos by design.

In 1972 the Community Redevelopment Agency published "Central City Los Angeles 1972-1990, Preliminary General Development Plan", popularly known as the "Silver Book." This document became the blueprint by which the detailed architectural development of Bunker Hill took place. It was a planning effort sponsored by the major corporate powers located in Downtown Los Angeles with the support of the heads of all the technical departments of the City. This was a document with predictable recommendations, considering recent political and planning history. It took advantage of all the legislation of the 1950s and 60s and eventually delivered a stereotypical modern downtown whose skyline matched Houston's, Atlanta's, Kansas City's, and those of most other American cities. Happily, the plan's provisions for the development of housing in South Park were not realized. They were to be based on the design of a nine-block sunken park surrounded by high-rise apartments. Another violent imposition of a new formal order on the body of Downtown involving the clearance of at least twenty-five blocks.

In 1984 Maguire Thomas Partners and the Community Redevelopment Agency negotiated a complex agreement for a project on the southern edge of Bunker Hill. It involved the construction of two office towers, the renovation and extension of Bertram Goodhue's Central Library, the construction of three major parks including the renovation of Pershing Square, and the revitalization of the streetscape along three blocks of Grand Avenue and three blocks of 5th Street. Now complete, the project is a remarkable accomplishment in beginning to reverse the ravages of urban renewal. It is focused on the public realm of Downtown which it repairs and enhances. The various projects are dispersed enough to have already attracted further private development. They are architecturally ambitious and beautifully layered onto the body of the existing city. They encourage pedestrian life, a source of enjoyment, safety and civic pride in any city. It is a model of catalytic development of the kind that includes a mixture of building, open space and landscape projects, and which has the power to reverse recent trends and enhance Downtown Los Angeles's position as the center of a region with which it is inextricably linked.

Since 1989, an advisory committee appointed by Mayor Bradley has been working on a new Strategic Plan for Downtown Los Angeles that will guide its growth to the year 2020. The plan represents a consensus among all major community, business and public interests regarding the future of the center of the City. The process of planning brought to one table the committee along with consultants in the various aspects of urbanism: architecture, landscape architecture, transportation, economic planning, environmental planning, homelessness and social services and policy implementation. It was the first time in more than fifty years that single-purpose planning was displaced by the simultaneous consideration of all the technical aspects and all the particular economic and social interests relevant to the reconstruction of Downtown.

The Strategic Plan intends to link again the economic prosperity of Downtown to the beauty and unique character of its public realm for the benefit of all the citizens of Los Angeles. It directs all future public and private investments and actions to the task of coordinating this reconstruction. The scope of the plan covers all ten neighborhoods and districts of the center of the city and is not limited to Bunker Hill. Considering that at five square miles the project area is quite enormous, many of its provisions are surprisingly physical. The new train transit system, a proposed downtown trolley bus circulator and the pedestrian-friendly streets that parallel them are presented as the primary means of linking the disparate pieces of Downtown to each other. A whole open space network of metropolitan, civic and neighborhood parks can be leveraged out of individual building and infrastructural projects. Building design prescriptions are based on both the adaptive reuse of significant existing buildings as well as the design of new ones that define public space on their street sides and private space in the interior of blocks. The grain of development is purposefully kept small so that the maximum number of citizens can participate in the development process.

The Downtown that can be generated out of the physical provisions of the Strategic Plan depends on an urbanism of new-found realism whose nature is only now becoming clear. It replaces the compositional rigidity of classicism and modernism with the idea of collective form accomplished out of multiple incremental projects. It rejects the modern fixation with designing all buildings as isolated monuments in favor of few monuments rendered within a continuous urban fabric. It stresses the importance of shared public space serviced by a variety of transportation modes. It depends on the intense mixing of uses in space and on the conservation and reuse of the existing city as an irreplaceable cultural and economic resource.

The current need to rebuild Downtown Los Angeles is not based on a romantic notion that the concentric city of the past should be reconstructed. Instead, the struggle to redefine the center of this metropolis is emblematic of the need to direct our society's energies toward a commitment to permanence of place. That is, the agreement to deal with the problems and opportunities that are presented by the world we inhabit in its current state. Despite the rhetoric dominating our recent history, it is not possible to escape the issues of the day, it is not possible to continue to build ever further into nature; and most certainly, it is not possible to make or remake a city out of uncoordinated, single-interest, single-purpose projects whatever their size.

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