Downtown Los Angeles

Though the artist known as Gronk has lived in the same funky, baroquely attired Spring Street loft for the last 14 years, you could say that he is really, at heart, a street person.

The Los Angeles City Council is poised to adopt a massive redevelopment district for downtown Los Angeles that would create thousands of new homes--and possibly ease the way for construction of a stadium for a professional football team. Local business officials and others hail the plan as key to revitalizing downtown. However, advocates for the poor are concerned that the proposal will lead to gentrification and skyrocketing housing prices.

With the prospect of a new NFL stadium hovering overhead like the Goodyear blimp, the Los Angeles City Council approved a $2.4-billion downtown redevelopment plan Wednesday that promises new housing, jobs and social services in blighted sections of the city's historic core.

David and Lisa Trulli call themselves born-again urbanists, drawn to the architecture, diversity and energy of city life. So downtown Los Angeles, which some say is going through its own rebirth, seems like a perfect fit for the couple. "As more of our friends are having babies and taking the soccer-mom route, we're kind of not relating anymore," said David Trulli, a 41-year-old cinematographer. "We come down here, and we feel like we're more in our tribe."

He was just a carefree kid having fun, back when he scampered along the streets of downtown Los Angeles, sneaking rides on the Bradbury Building's ornate iron elevators and exploring the fading clapboard neighborhood of Bunker Hill. There is a sense of urgency when Brady Westwater prowls the city's streets these days, though. The 53-year-old feels he has plenty to say about the evolution of the city he loves--and not a lot of time in which to say it.

NEW YORK -- A crowd of about 75 New York real estate pros was happy enough to hear that downtown Los Angeles has the Staples Center, a glittering new cathedral, good freeway and rail links and a soon-to-open Frank Gehry-designed concert hall. But what about schools and grocery stores, the New Yorkers wanted to know. For a delegation of business and civic leaders who staged a one-stop road show Thursday in Manhattan to boost investment in downtown L.A., it was an encouraging line of inquiry.

THE MOST DETERMINED DREAMER WOULD BE HARD PUT TO IMAGINE SOMETHING more ambitious than the latest plan by civic leaders to finally, decisively, gloriously transfigure downtown Los Angeles. The proposal's defining features are a meandering esplanade along Grand Avenue from the new Walt Disney Concert Hall to the new cathedral, and a stunning 20-acre park sloping from a redone Music Center to a renovated City Hall. It will be--pick a number--eight years? 10?

Los Angeles officials have set aside $25 million and negotiated a complicated land swap with the state as part of a bold plan to transform an entire city block in downtown Los Angeles into a public plaza. But few people outside of the downtown establishment seem to know about the plan to create a new focal point for public life in central Los Angeles.

A local investment group has purchased an empty office building in the heart of downtown Los Angeles and plans to transform the 1950s-vintage tower into the central city's first major new hotel in nearly a decade. The proposal involving the 12-story former bank building at 6th and Flower streets--next door to the historic California Club--is a sign of better times for downtown hotels. The downtown occupancy rate has climbed from below 50% in 1993 to nearly 70%--the highest in more than 10 years.