Nokia Plaza a Bust or Just Not Ready Yet?

It is just so soul-less, if that is a word, there. All these overpriced boring bland music acts playing at the Nokia. Too expensive. Too generic. Too blah.

Nokia square is not a gathering space, but an advertising space that serves a purely commercial function. Nobody would go there just to hang out and see friends. Being there, I feel very “monitored” by the cameras and security guards. One can sense the uneasiness that the corporate suits must have felt in constructing a private space that was so open to the public space around it.

I also find the interior of the Nokia theater to be very uninspired and artless, sort of like a really big AMC Theater.

This space serves its purpose, and I have to respect that and choose to spend my time in other locales. This is corporate america shlock, but have no fear, Downtown is still big enough and funky enough to absorb this space without much impact.

Nokia Plaza Bust? Hah, what a moron. The people that are speculating whether this is a boom or bust for Los Angeles is ridiculous. They’re all probably Anti-Urbanists.

1) LA live will be successful and is succesful at what it provides currently. It comprises of only the nokia theatre, and almost all concerts sell out. It achieves its goals.

2) LA live isnt finished yet. When the retail opens, its success will be measured by patronage. Since there are outsie patio spots, there will naturally be people eating outdoors near the plaza.

3) LA live’s plaza will never be used by people to just hang out. I know AEG said they would, but without a lt of chairs or greenery, there really is no motivation to do so. People who are at LA live to eat or play will probably walk through the plaza or linger for a few minutes before leaving. There is nothing wrong with that.

LA live’s plaza isnt union square nor is it a real blvd like hollywood or sunset. It is an activity center that will probably be full of people going to eat or watch a show.

When LA live programs events in the plaza, people will likely come out in droves, but if you aret eating or playing at LA live, why would you go?!?

You cant window shop (no retail), you cant take a long stroll (its not a real street), and you cant walk through it on your way to somewhere else (the plaza is on an off street). the planners knew this the whole time.

I think LA live is achieving what it planned to achieve. There was some booster talk about it being the central gathering place of LA or Times Square West, but I doubt planners ever really believed that.

they belived many people would come to watch shows and eat or play. The also believed that those people, would walk though the plaza and perhaps stop for a few moments to take in the action. I think they will achieve that.

The space serves its purpose: Helping crowd flow before and after big events.

After numerous visits to the plaza, I’m leaning toward the Hawthorne sentiment. Even with the restaurants and hotel open, it’s still going to be basically an enclosed courtyard, monitored by a high-security camera room.

If that’s what they’re touting it as, that’s one thing. But to even consider it a “neighborhood gathering space” is so far afield as to be absurd. No dog walking, no “hanging out,” no photos, nothing.

I was the local resident Mr. Hawthorne (not Hawkins) quoted. Donald Bren encourages dogs at his Fashion Island and Spectrum Center in Orange County. I was very surprised the security guard asked me to leave the plaza…and my dogs are very well behaved. AEG needs to really embrace locals, tourists and downtowners. I was also told by a woman who has the apartment complex at Olympic and Grand (seems like mostly older Korean residents) to keep my dogs off her lawn. What a welcome for me and my pups to downtown. They won’t allow dogs in Grand/Hope Park. There is very little green space in South Park. I also clean up after my dogs and am very responsible. It is very frustrating to run into this anti-canine attitude in a Downtown area. People need to chill.

A security guard told me that I can’t ride my bike there, they need to fix that.

Walking by the other night I was disappointed to see AEG kill any chance for cross-pollination of the Staples Center and Nokia Plaza by placing signs restricting pedestrian crossing between the two. These two spaces were supposed to enhance each other, but now crowds or an individual would have to walk back to Figueroa to cross and then back up to the plaza if that’s where they wanted to go.

Simply stupid.

I have not gone to an event at the place—nor will I, as my concert-going days are long gone; I am not a fan of the big crowds—but the open space is no less anti-pedestrian than the nearby shopping mall at 7th/Flower and the Bonaventure. Mere airiness is not inviting. It is purely a commercial space. As for it being a public square, even Albert Speer would have done much better.

the street front on figueroa is an imposing wall of nothing - it is not inviting and i suspect even less so once the vid billboard go live. i feel like i am driving past a prison. the paths way from fig leading into the plaza is like walking thru a canyon - narrow walkway with tall buildings very claustrophobic. the designers made a mistake by not chosing a more inviting design. i will never patronize this architectural monstrosity

Aside from the dog issue my other major grip about the project is that they choose to block off the corner of Olympic and Figueroa. Rather than opening up that corner and incorporating it to the community they enclosed the space and made it accessible only from “Chick Herns Drive”.

Despite all the negatives, I hope the project is both a financial and cultural success as much of downtown L.A.’s public image is tides to its success.

Also feel free to join us for the next dog walk on Wed. Feb. 13 at 6pm, Pershing Square.

Unfortunately this is corporate schlock and downtowners will have to look elsewhere to find their hang-out space. However, stadium spaces rarely become hang-out spaces anyway, as they don’t attract locals but instead attract people from all over the LA metropolitan area. Agree that there is very little green space in the South Park area, and unfortunately few of these obnoxious new apartment/loft buildings have taken that into consideration. When will Los Angeles / downtown realize that its green mentality is just not strong enough?

Perhaps you should move to the suburbs? And even there I can think of various parks, and park-like areas, that are surprisingly underpopulated on most days, during most hours.

Oops. Don’t know where “Hawkins” came from. Updated in the post.

Look again.

I’m glad that dogs aren’t allowed everywhere. I prefer not having them around.

I think it was intentional. AEG wants to create an open space, to promote L.A. Live. The problem is, most public spaces in Downtown L.A. have, historically, attracted the wrong crowds, namely homeless people, gangs, and vandals.

It’s one of the reasons why MacArthur Park, in essence an urban jewel, is not attracting it’s share of families and tourists. No matter how many police surveillance cameras they’ve installed.

It’s a delicate balance, between being welcoming to the public, and being tarnished and trashed. AEG just decided to play it safe.

I don’t think AEG ever intended LA Live to be a “neighborhood” hang-out space. They were going for something more along the lines of New York’s Times Square (when I visited TS, I certainly didn’t want to simply “hang out” there…no green space, no place to sit, packed with people like sardines). It’s for tourists, not downtowners. As one of my New York resident friends said to me, “Times Square is the seventh circle of hell” because all the tourists are in the way. I doubt that that many of NYC residents go to TS all that often.
AEG is going for that concept, and while they won’t pull off anything as “mega” as TS, it’ll be something like it. So it’s not a failure; it just wasn’t meant to be what Mr. Hawthorne envisioned (or he was relying on misinformation or simplistic PR, more likely).

L.A. Live will be all about the desire to be force-fed American Crap Culture. Plain ans simple.

If the Grand Avenue development goes under, perhaps there would be a chance that the overseers would realize that they made the same mistake as the CRA did when it awarded development rights to so much terrain to one single developer (Cal Plaza). Of course we got a museum out of it; but what else?

Instead they need a Bohemian Scheme, a combination of SoHo and North Beach. Get AT LEAST ten developers involved. Award a rent-free space for Larry Ferlingetti in a separate building so he can set up the southern branch of City Lights Books. Make it Victorian in design; just like Bradbury’s mansion at Hill and Court. Forget about redoing the mall until the existing county buildings are replaced with something much finer, so that the mall is no longer so isolated from Temple and First streets. Give the area human warmth. Divide it up! Forget about highrises; twelve stories, max. Let Broad build a museum, across from the concert hall.

When Angel’s Flight was first constructed, the city editor at the Times noted that an artist had taken up residence across Olive Street and he labeled Bunker Hill as the city’s new bohemia. Let’s go with that instead.

Bohemias do not happen by design (other than large spaces for low rents). They are organic.

The rest happens when people trapped in their salary/consumer lives follow the people they see having real fun…

LA Live is the male to Hollywood and Highland’s female. Both are destinations spaces for non-locals (tourists, convention goers, suburbanites who only notice new and shiny) and people on mass transit.

Something’s gotta give, folks. Over-inflated housing prices in the burbs will continue to deflate for two more years. The cost of highrise residential construction sure the hell will not. Sure, a certain demographic will pay a premium for a desirable location. But what impact will declining prices in the burbs have on spanking new highrise accommodations in Downtown? Disney Hall and so much puff-mongering will do only so much for marketing of the Grand Avenue development. On the downside, those gawd-awfull county buildings will remain in dead/dull Civic Center adjacent amidst a declining market. Who will buy in, despite Frank’s design? I’ve got a feeling that they’re going to be forced to start over from scratch. Hopefully, they will program in replacements (four) for the county buildings, that at least ten developers will be included and that the planning will take a far more textural approach. LOTS more texture. Look towards Prague: we need Fred and Ginger, not 40 story glass stumps. At the outset, Frank said that he was primarilly interested in programming and planning at the pedestrian sidewalk scale. Yet he has been forced to turn away from the bottom of the hill, to ignore the Historic Core. My hope is that the whole enterprise goes belly up. And the Related outfit can take it’s Columbus Circle mentality back to New York and stay there.

Replacing those county buildings is not simply a matter of tearing them down and building new ones. There must also be an interim operations plan.

The Mosk Courthouse alone turns out more of the County’s civil proceedings than, I suspect, all the other Los Angeles Superior Courts combined.

In other words, unless a temporary operation with equal capacity and access is set-up during the construction project begins, the next courthouse will have to exist before the current one can be left for the wrecking ball.

Scrap Grand Avenue and get Gehry to design some bureaucratic buildings on the site. The developers who were going to enjoy the tax breaks on the project can instead enjoy the cost overruns associated with any government construction project.

The cost overruns of the City’s new police administration building alone eclipse the annual revenue from the TUT.

Yes, build a new county courthouse across First Street from the Times. Put up a Kenny Hahn Board of Supes council chamber/auditorium where the Music Center Annex now sits. It could be quite a sculptural object as seen from the freeway. Yes, the Supremes would have to walk back and forth from their offices to the chamber; GOOD! A private developer can build an office structure on Hill south of first for temporary use of county admin offices. Then tear down the old county buildings, build four new ones - sited so that people can see the cathedral from Olve Street. And redo the mall keeping the large trees.