Last April, the Los Angeles Planning Commission endorsed a list of 14 aggressive principles to help make the city more livable. The first sentence of the plan was blunt: "Demand a walkable city."
But demanding and creating are two very different things. Too often in Los Angeles, city officials still give cars and the free flow of traffic almost automatic planning priority over pedestrians.
A recent case in point involves a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which will unveil its expanded campus on Feb. 16. It is an example of the left hand of the city's officialdom not knowing -- or caring -- what the right hand is up to.
And it has had the indirect effect of killing off plans for a street-level restaurant and terrace, across Wilshire from the museum's new buildings, by Greg Lynn, a young, unusually talented Los Angeles architect. As part of the expansion, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, the museum proposed extending a drop-off lane along the north edge of Wilshire at Ogden Drive, directly in front of its new plaza and entry pavilion. The request triggered a bureaucratic back-and-forth between LACMA and the city's Department of Transportation. The short version goes like this: The DOT refused to approve the new lane unless the museum also was willing to remove the stoplight and crosswalks at the intersection and extend the median strip running down the center of Wilshire.
The agency apparently worried about new traffic bottlenecks as drivers dropped off museum visitors and as pedestrians crossed Wilshire to enter LACMA.
According to Melody Kanschat, LACMA president, the museum pushed for a solution that would continue to allow pedestrians to cross Wilshire at that point.
"We went to them at least three times with design proposals that would keep the intersection open," she said. Every time, she said, the DOT turned them down.
Eventually, fearing delays to the construction work that could jeopardize the opening date for the expansion, LACMA decided to go along with the DOT's wishes. The sum effect of the changes to the intersection, carried out last fall, has been to seal the south side of the boulevard off from the north right where the LACMA campus has established its new center of gravity.
Speaking last week by phone from his Genoa office, Piano sounded resigned to the changes. Of the DOT, he said, "They do love to take out traffic lights, don't they?"
