On a recent Saturday, Gail Goldberg, chief planner of Los Angeles, stood under an Arco sign and contemplated the junction of La Cienega Boulevard and Rodeo Road.
The intersection's four corners had a strip mall, another strip mall with a Carl's Jr. in the parking lot, a 7-Eleven and the Arco gas station. Traffic was thick in every direction.
A posse of planning employees surrounded Goldberg -- dressed in a black warmup suit and sun visor -- as she asked them to tell her all the things wrong with the cityscape.
She then put her question another way:
"How old would your kid have to be," Goldberg said, "before you allowed them to come here on a bike?"
"Twenty-seven," answered one.
In the 15 months since she was hired away from San Diego by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Goldberg's public profile has steadily grown, owing to hundreds of appearances before community groups who can spot her just as quickly as their photogenic mayor and tough-talking police chief.
At once plain-spoken, funny, motherly, charismatic and diplomatic, Goldberg, at 63, finds herself in a position to determine whether a city tolerant of sprawl, traffic and cheap architecture can grow elegantly. She, too, represents the mayor's radical new take on Los Angeles: Both are determined to rebuild some of the city's old neighborhoods and make them taller, denser and linked to mass transit.
Yet not everyone with sway over city affairs has figured out where Goldberg fits and if politicians will listen to her. When downtown's much-ballyhooed Grand Avenue project was approved in February, for instance, no one so much as asked if she thought it was all that swell.
But those who know Goldberg stress that she is not to be underestimated and that she has come to the job by persistence and overcoming tragedy. A child of the 1960s who for years was a stay-at-home suburban mom, Goldberg now embraces an urban lifestyle and believes deeply that planning is not just about building things, but about social justice and providing a nice place for people to live.
"I like to think we're speaking for people not at the table or for residents who don't live here yet," Goldberg likes to say.
City government, of course, has been trying to "plan" Los Angeles for decades, with decidedly mixed results.
Walking away from Rodeo and La Cienega, near the Baldwin Hills, that Saturday, Goldberg declared: "It's almost impossible to believe that this kind of lack of planning could be an accident."
