Journey to Center of a City With No Center

You know them by their guidebooks, fanny packs and befuddlement. They stand at intersections in downtown L.A., trying to look nonchalant while wondering where the sights are and if they’re about to get mugged. They’ve just landed in the city and assume that downtown is the center of things in L.A. If you told them that many Angelenos have never been to the city’s historic heart, they’d never believe you.

They are tourists, of course--easy to empathize with if you’ve ever found yourself in their shoes on a faraway street corner. But in downtown Los Angeles, center of a city that has no center, they stand out like gazelles caught in the headlights.

At the corner of 4th and Hill streets, Helga and Karl Heinz Roessler are a case in point. She’s getting a bottle of water out of his backpack. He’s squinting at a street sign. When asked if he needs help, Karl Heinz says stiffly, no, he has a map.

The Roesslers are from Munich and are staying at a hotel near LAX.

Though the couple made a beeline for it, downtown didn’t even place on the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau’s most recent list of the top 10 tourist sites in the area. (In 1995, Universal Studios came in first, followed by Disneyland the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Rodeo Drive and Venice Beach). Still, it’s not unusual to see tourists wandering along Broadway or Figueroa Street. Some are there on purpose, others by accident. But it’s the rare traveler who knows precisely what to make of downtown L.A.

“The architecture is really quite nice,” says Helga Roessler, “although this place hasn’t the cozy atmosphere of Munchen.”

That’s an understatement on the massive scale of L.A. itself.

Lucy Bradley, programming director at Hosteling International’s Santa Monica hotel, which caters largely to overseas visitors, says a few of her guests venture downtown. “But they seem slightly confused when they get back,” Bradley adds.

Many tourists who come downtown arrive with similar misconceptions, or no conceptions at all. “It’s as if they just got off the bus here. They don’t have anything, even maps,” says Jeff Godsil, assistant manager of the Thomas Bros. Maps store on West 6th Street.

Sitting on a patio outside Grand Central Market, Christopher Ang and Alagesan Alagappan from Malaysia are trying to figure out how to get to the Greyhound Bus terminal to buy tickets to Las Vegas. “Are these the only big buildings you have?” Ang asks. “We have more big buildings in Kuala Lumpur.”

“Are there any palaces here?” asks Alagappan.

The Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau has an information center on Figueroa Street, between Wilshire Boulevard and 7th Street, with a multilingual staff and more brochures and maps than these two Malaysians could stuff in their backpacks. And everyday, the Downtown Center Business Improvement District, financed by area merchants, dispatches a fleet of six information kiosks on wheels, stationed for two hours at a time in spots heavily trafficked by tourists, such as Pershing Square and the landing of the Angels Walk funicular. (The funicular closed indefinitely after a fatal accident last month). The kiosks are staffed by cheerful “ambassadors” in purple polo shirts. They know, perhaps better than anyone, how discombobulating L.A. can be for visitors.

Carolyn Gentle, an ambassador for six months, says, “Lots of people think Hollywood is here, that they’re going to find movie stars’ homes, the Walk of Fame and Mann’s Chinese Theatre.”

Her colleague, Ruth De Leon, has more than once had to disabuse tourists of the notion that the beach lies just west of the Wilshire Grand Hotel, about where the Harbor Freeway is. “Most don’t have cars, so they’re sometimes disappointed. But we tell them how to get to Hollywood and Universal City on the Red Line Metro,” she says.

Randall Ely, chief operating officer of the downtown merchants’ district, says many tourists--and especially those from overseas--choose to stay downtown because of its “central” location, that is, almost equidistant from Disneyland and Universal City.

Half the guests at the New Otani Hotel on South Los Angeles Street are from Asia. Sales and marketing director, Clinton Fischler, says they’re intimidated by skid row but are far more disappointed by the tawdriness of Hollywood.

Uno Thimansson, manager of the 285-room Hotel Figueroa near the convention center, says his guests are primarily bus tourists from Europe and Japan. The Japanese often follow an L.A.-Anaheim-Las Vegas itinerary; many Europeans--which these days includes many East Germans--do three-week “Western highlights” bus tours that include San Diego, Scottsdale, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Carmel and L.A.

It isn’t that hard to get around L.A. without a car, says tour guide Greg Fischer, who lives in Westwood and takes the bus and subway on his frequent trips downtown. He started guiding tours when a friend from the L.A. Department of Water and Power called him and said there was a big group of befuddled foreign tourists standing at the top of Angels Flight. Fischer decided there was a niche for him as a downtown tour guide.

Fischer routinely ushers his clients from the Patsaouras Transit Plaza, just east of Union Station, to El Pueblo Park at the southern end of Olvera Street, where the city was founded in 1781, and then, via the Red Line Metro, to sights such as Angels Flight, Bunker Hill, Grand Central Market, the Bradbury Building, Million Dollar Theater, Biltmore Hotel and L.A. Public Library.

The grand Victorian homes atop Bunker Hill where the city’s rich, established families lived in the early 20th century, and the architectural gems that were their banks, department stores and theaters below lingered for a time before being boarded up or torn down.

Still, says Fischer, “downtown is loaded with dusty jewelry.”

For those in the mood to appreciate the old gems, the L.A. Conservancy, a historic preservation group, offers downtown walking tours Saturday mornings. Angels Walk L.A., a nonprofit organization, has created a series of easy-to-follow, handsomely illustrated walking-tour brochures. Inspired by Boston’s Freedom Trail, trod by 3 million tourists a year, the self-guided Angels Walk L.A. tours may one day become attractions in themselves, says Deanna Molloy, executive director of the organization.

Boosters such as Molloy believe that the erstwhile city center could compete as a tourist attraction with such hot spots as Santa Monica and Universal City if only Angelenos themselves started coming downtown.

Attracting locals is the mission of the 3-year-old Downtown Center Business Improvement District.

“Our goal,” says chief operating officer Ely, “is to let people know that downtown is alive.” Indeed, the residential population of downtown Los Angeles has grown in the last few years, a trend that is expected to continue as developers create more living quarters by renovating old buildings or putting up new ones.

Besides its crew of ambassadors, Ely’s group employs an 18-member maintenance crew to tend hanging flower baskets, paint over graffiti, empty trash receptacles and sweep the streets. It also employs a bicycle-riding patrol, which works in conjunction with the LAPD and tries to keep homeless panhandlers from bothering tourists. “Panhandling isn’t illegal,” said Keith Boles, the group’s security services captain, “so we can’t make them leave.”

(In recent months, police have made an effort to move the homeless out of skid row, an area slated for redevelopment just east of tourist destinations in the city’s historic core. In 1999, a dozen homeless people filed suit against three downtown area business improvement groups--not including the business improvement district--claiming they had been harassed by the private security forces. As of last week, the suit was still pending.

Boles has found that some foreign tourists, especially those from countries with tight welfare nets such as the Netherlands and Germany, are sympathetic to panhandlers and street people who work and live chiefly along downtown’s Main and Spring streets. Boles remembers a European tourist taking him to task because he had asked a panhandler at the door of the McDonald’s restaurant on Hill Street to decamp. “She’d just bought him a filet of fish Extra Value Meal and told me to leave him alone,” says Boles.

A young man from Amsterdam, who is walking along Pershing Square and doesn’t want to give his name, reports that a beggar offered, in exchange for a dollar, to guess where the young man bought his shoes. “We have beggars in Holland,” the Dutchman says, “but they aren’t friendly like that.”

Even more striking to him, though, is downtown’s desertedness. “Where is everybody?” he asks. “And why did they go?”