On May 13, 1987, publicity-shy Lillian Disney announced through representatives that she was bestowing $50 million so a philharmonic concert hall could rise in downtown Los Angeles, honoring her late husband. She specified that it should be "one of the finest in the world."
Walt Disney Concert Hall, due to open Oct. 23 and already celebrated in some quarters as a masterpiece, promises to be just that. It arrives 10 years later and, at $274 million, 2 1/2 times costlier than first anticipated. The path to its creation has been as angled, undulating and full of precipitous swoops and dips as the structure itself.
Lillian Disney's unsolicited gift landed on a Los Angeles that generally thought it was doing all right for itself. It was still morning in America in the go-go '80s. Southern California, with its dynamic aerospace industry, was a leading arsenal of Ronald Reagan's campaign to defense-spend the Evil Empire into oblivion.
By 1995, a universally understood shorthand of disaster had come to define L.A. in the popular imagination. Rodney King. Florence and Normandie. Northridge earthquake. O.J. And, for cultural doings, Disney Hall. The project was a bust, a ship that had run aground before it was even launched. The sail-like vision that architect Frank Gehry had conceived existed only in models; years had passed, millions had been spent, and there was nothing to show for it but the underground parking garage upon which the great hall was supposed to sit.
"It was like, 'What else can go wrong here?' " Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavksy recalls. "You thought this was a biblical seven years of disaster, all overlaid with a recession. But Disney Hall was not an act of God. This one was in our control. The civic leadership got together and said, 'Enough is enough.' "
As Disney Hall went from dream to blueprint to fiasco to gleaming presence, friendships soured, its chief benefactress and one of her two daughters died, a star architect's reputation was tarnished, then restored, and an uneasy, elite alliance forged to salvage the sunken project was tested in boardroom brinksmanship that threatened to scuttle it all over again.
Here's how it unfolded, in the words of some of those involved in taking the concert hall from the gift-wrapped, assemble-it-yourself surprise it seemed at first to the hard-won reality it became.
Part 1: 1987-94
Starting and stalling
