CRITIQUE : Dream Street : Fanciful and Fun, Universal City’s Highly Imaginative City Walk Creates the Feeling of an Archetypal Public Gathering Place Without L.A.’s Urban Grime

Any visitor to Los Angeles who comes from Europe, or from older U.S. cities such as New York or Chicago, is astonished by our lack of any real public gathering places.

We have no urban green spaces to rival London’s Hyde Park or New York’s Central Park, no city plazas to equal Rome’s Piazza di Spagna or New Orleans’ Jackson Square. Compared to Manhattan’s Broadway or Barcelona’s Ramblas, our major boulevards seldom have pedestrian crowds mingling on the sidewalks.

The few major parks and plazas we do have are, like MacArthur Park, too crime-ridden and dangerous to enjoy or, like Pershing Square, a kind of no-man’s-land lost between the social and ethnic fault lines that run through the heart of the city. Our main streets are traffic arteries where motorists stop only to shop.

On the other hand, Los Angeles boasts the richest array of private spaces of any major metropolis in the world. Compared to New York, London or Paris, our houses and apartments are generous in area, our gardens are ample. Even our poorer districts, such as Watts, say, offer their inhabitants more private space than comparable places in Harlem or Glasgow.

The glaring disparity between our private and our public lives presents our urban planners, elected officials and commercial developers with a major challenge: How to create a public arena people will actually adopt?

The most recent attempt to create such an arena is the new $100-million City Walk development at Universal City.

This imaginative project has stirred considerable controversy among planning professionals and urbanists. Many architects and urban critics balk at the idea of accepting a privately owned development like City Walk as a true public place.

For the crowds who’ve flocked to City Walk since its opening in May the answer is clear: They love it.

And the reasons why they love it reveal some crucial truths about the nature of urban life in the late 20th Century.

These truths will confound the idealists who cry out for less-contrived urban gathering places. They will, however, confirm the instincts of those who believe that people will take to a new kind of city place that entertains them and respects their need to feel safe.

City Walk succeeds brilliantly as a public place that most Angelenos will enjoy. It’s less successful, however, as an act of architecture, and that’s a pity.

As a place, City Walk is great fun. The owners, MCA Development Co., and the Venice-based Jerde Partnership, which designed City Walk, intend it as the hub of a planned $3-billion “Entertainment City” surrounding the existing attractions of the Universal Studios Tour, Universal Amphitheatre and the Cineplex Odeon cinemas.

The present development, which curves down the hill to the west of the cinema complex, represents only half of Entertainment City’s proposed main street. The other half, which will repeat the same pattern to the east of the cinemas, will follow later. The entire development could take as long as 25 years to complete, depending on the future economic climate in Los Angeles.

About as long as Rodeo Drive from Wilshire to Santa Monica Boulevard, City Walk offers the array of restaurants, fast-food outlets and stores one might expect to find in any suburban mall.

But there’s a difference. To start with, City Walk doesn’t have the major department stores that anchor all major malls. In addition, it has unusual facilities, such as the Museum of Neon Art and a branch of UCLA Extension.

There’s also a difference in the way City Walk is designed. Focused on a wide circular central court, the walk is open to the sky along its length. With its copious supply of outdoor seating, its varied levels and variety of facades, City Walk intends to create the feeling of being in a kind of archetypal L.A. dream street in which all the urban grime is edited out.

The facades are, in architect Jon Jerde’s phrase, a kind of “background architecture” derived from L.A.’s street vernacular. “It’s a movie set of quintessential L.A.,” Jerde explained. “Its theme is a kind of lively, stylish trash that’s very Angeleno.”

What this means is that the designers have culled a vocabulary of L.A. street frontages and details and tossed them into a design blender. There’s a sliver of Art Deco here, a slice of Streamline or ZigZag Moderne there, mixed in with slashes of Hollywood Boulevard neon and chunks of free-standing mini-mall postmodern junk. As he did in San Diego’s popular Horton Plaza, Jerde has conjured up an eclectic style of architectural bits and pieces that appalls the purists but seems to charm the customers.

In City Walk, Jerde’s “background architecture” is overlaid with signs and structures added by the various tenants. The mock red-and-silver-striped lighthouse and steel ship masts outside Gladstone’s were put there by the restaurateur. The cartoonish mural decorating the frontage of Wolfgang Puck’s Pizza Cafe was created by the owners. The spaceship crashing into the facade of Things From Another World, a sci-fi emporium, was the tenant’s inspiration.

Oddly enough, it is this overlay of commercial fantasy that almost saves the architecture. Where the Jerde facades are labored and banal, the additions have the kind of flash and verve that still make Hollywood Boulevard a lively place to look at. With more boldness and imagination, Jerde could well have conjured up a truly fascinating movie set fantasy of an L.A. dream street.

It is obvious from a number of his projects, including Horton Plaza and the huge Mall of America near Minneapolis, that Jerde is mostly concerned by the big picture, and that’s where City Walk succeeds.

Its physical layout is thoughtful. The buildings rise from single story at the west entry to four and five stories in the central court, creating a varied skyline. The street is just wide enough and the facades just tall enough to give City Walk the feel of an urban thoroughfare. The central square creates a strong pivot to turn the street perspective as it curves away.

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City Walk is a good place to people-watch. The crowd is varied, including young and old, tourists and locals, families and singles. The ethnic mix seen here is unusual in our racially segregated metropolis.

Absent, however, are the people and things that make truly public places truly urban. There are no homeless in City Walk and no gangs. There’s no litter or graffiti and little, if any, crime.

There’s nothing new in all this. From the late-18th Century on, privately owned public places have screened out “undesirables.” Paris’ Palais Royal, opened in 1784 as the world’s first recreational shopping precinct, excluded the poor, except for three special days every year. Nineteenth-Century European commercial precincts, such as Milan’s Galleria and London’s Burlington Arcade, were built to protect shoppers from the footpads and pickpockets who preyed upon the public thoroughfares.

Our own popular Farmers Market on Fairfax has, since the mid-1930s, created an outdoor private public place not unlike City Walk in its intent. Like City Walk, it attracts a mixture of tourists and locals who mingle in cheerful safety. In this respect the difference between places such as Farmers Market and the typical shopping mall is less than meets the eye.

The fact is that, since the massive suburban flight from urban centers following World War II, shopping malls have become the focus of what some urbanists call our “new downtowns.”

The architect Witold Rybczynski, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, described these new mall-centered districts as “the chief place to meet fellow citizens in a non-combative environment.” With the addition of cultural and communal facilities such as theaters, museums, adult education schools and, later, housing, such places are becoming the basis for the creation of a real sense of community in post-urban America.

We have to face the fact that the old notion of the city as a coherent place is fading. Los Angeles is now more a region than a metropolis, and such vast agglomerations can’t provide the kind of urban identity the traditional city once offered.

Along with this absence of identity comes a deep distrust of the public realm that cities once celebrated and enjoyed, and no idealistic appeals for its restoration will change the public mood.

City Walk, with its feeling of safety and its vivid presence, re-creates the urban street in terms most people now can enjoy and trust. In that sense, it’s a model that should be studied carefully by everyone who really cares about the future of cities.

It’s not hard to see that City Walk’s basic mix of entertainment and shopping in a re-imagined urban environment could be applied in a variety of situations not necessarily linked to existing amusements such as a studio tour.

It could improve the standard suburban shopping mall by transforming its enclosed and generally desolate central circulation spine into a real street open to the air--a street lined with varied “buildings” rather than the featureless shop fronts that seem to go on forever.

The visitors to City Walk plainly enjoy its feeling of being an urban experience, and one can easily imagine such a place attracting a similarly happy crowd in Glendale, Monterey Park or San Bernardino, or in a town such as Palmdale with no real streets to speak of.

Alternately, the City Walk model could be repeated in our poorer inner city districts where the public avenues are often too grimy or too dangerous to linger. Each urban City Walk could have its own particular local and ethnic style and flavor--Korean in Koreatown, Mexican in East Los Angeles, African in South-Central.

City Walk is an imaginative first step on the road toward reinventing the incoherent and often inhospitable metropolis as a new kind of urban place where citizens can gather and mingle with a feeling of personal safety. It is the early model of a public place where people will want to gather and mingle, and remember what city life was like when it was fun.