Marty Kaplan

Save the snark for another public folly. Sure, the just-revealed plans for the Grand Avenue civic park, which will run downhill from the Music Center to Spring Street, come nowhere near to living up to the hype that accompanied the park's announcement three years ago — "a world-class destination," "the new 'Central Park' of Los Angeles," "the most dramatic public space in all of Los Angeles." But if it gets built, the view from Music Center Plaza to City Hall will be much better than what's there now, and the city will get a new stage for civic engagement, which may turn out to be more important.
When the 16-acre park was announced as part of the $3-billion Grand Avenue redevelopment project, what troubled me was the delegation of the civic park's design to a developer, Related Cos. True, Related will pony up the $56 million to pay for a "base" park, but the land belongs to the city's citizens, not its developers. I was concerned that an opportunity would be lost if the design emerged from a sole-source contract, rather than from a competition that would tap into L.A.'s creative energy.
That's why the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School, together with the Los Angeles Times, launched a rump park design competition, which ultimately attracted more than 300 proposals. I also wheedled the Grand Avenue Committee, Related and the design team it hired to conduct a public charrette, to Webcast its outreach events, to use online visualization tools and polling, and to consider the unofficial design submissions, plus the ideas that the Lear center solicited from architects and planners around the country. We called our effort "Grand Intervention." (You can browse the imagined parks at GrandIntervention.org)
Did it make a difference? There was no way to change the biggest constraint on the park project: its low budget ceiling of $56 million. More than half of the cost of the "base" design unveiled Tuesday by Rios Clemente Hale Studios is infrastructure — relocating ramps to underground parking lots, making the landscape weight-bearing, providing electricity and plumbing.