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Posted May 7, 2016, 3:29 AM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 6,459
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Originally Posted by Illithid Dude
Honestly, it's incredible how far downtown has come, and how much activity is happening right now.
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Originally Posted by NSMP
I was really overwhelmed by how much South Park has changed since I moved last year. In a year from now, the area from LA Live east to Olive will have added thousands of residents.
Exciting times.
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Downtown LA has fast become the hottest, trendiest, most millennial-centric city in SoCal. People are relocating from suburban areas to lofty downtown apartments, restaurants are opening faster than you can Spago and now even museums are pulling up stakes and heading to the other part of town.
Today, May 6, the Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMoa) announced it will be moving from its current Bergamot Station location into new digs at 1717 E. 7th Street LA, and changing its name to Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA). According to SMMoa executive Director Elsa Longhause the new name reflects the organization’s revitalized mission and new home in a classic industrial building in the heart of downtown Los Angeles’s vibrant Arts District. Longhause said,” In my sixteen years as executive director, what gives me the greatest pleasure is knowing that this new beginning is built on the solid foundation of our past institutional vision and accomplishments. Our name and location may be changing, but what remains constant is our goal to reveal the vibrant, untold stories and pivotal moments in the history of contemporary art. Over its thirty-two-year history, the Santa Monica Museum of Art took pride in its courageous choices and singular point of view. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles will continue to champion these core values through a renewed and expanded lens. A burgeoning epicenter of artistic and cultural energy has recently emerged in downtown Los Angeles; ICA LA is thrilled to be part of this seismic shift.”
The new museum, which will cover 12,700-square-feet of space is being designed by internationally renowned architectural firm wHY under the leadership of founder and creative director Kulapat Yantrasast. The facility, which is expected to open in spring of 2017, will also include 7,000 square feet of dedicated exhibition space, programming facilities, an experimental kitchen-café, and the popular GRACIE retail store.
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AIDS Walk Los Angeles, for 14 years a major event in West Hollywood and for the LGBT community, is leaving the city for downtown Los Angeles.
This year’s walk, which takes place Oct. 23, will begin in Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles and end there.
Craig Miller, AIDS Walk’s founder and senior organizer, lauded West Hollywood for serving as a host of the event over the years.
“This move is an aspirational move,” Miller said. “It’s not about moving away from West Hollywood, it’s about moving forward.”
Miller said Grand Park offers a number of advantages, including being in the center of a revitalized downtown with a growing gay community. Grand Park is so large, so event friendly and so able to accommodate a large crowd, a variety of music , so much parking, a metro station that comes up in the middle of the venue,” Miller aid.
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The L.A. Riots. The Northridge Earthquake. The AIDS crisis. Proposition 187. Fires. Mudslides. White flight. Recession and joblessness. The departure of the aerospace industry. The departures of the Rams and the Raiders. The OJ Simpson trial. The murder of Biggie Smalls. Gang warfare.
“The ’90s,” as Zócalo Public Square publisher Gregory Rodriguez put it, “were rough” on Los Angeles. Rodriguez was moderating a Zócalo/Museum of Contemporary Art event at MOCA Grand Avenue provocatively titled, “Were the ’90s L.A.’s Golden Age?”
Tallying up the iconic Southern California disasters mentioned by the panelists over the course of the evening, the question might seem almost laughable. “But the reaction to the roughness was pretty extraordinary as well,” Rodriguez told an energetic crowd, many of whom clearly had lived through it. “There was this sense of vitality to the era.”
While the first half of the decade “was horrendous,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, the second half marked a comeback that built the Los Angeles of today, and gave the city a greater sense of self. He recalled a UCLA professor telling him he was “parochial” for choosing the L.A. economy as the focus of his scholarship. But after watching the city nearly fall apart, almost every major institution of higher education formed a department dedicated to studying the city. “We rediscovered Los Angeles as academics in the 1990s,” he said, noting that today it can be hard to keep up with all the literature written about the city, a sharp departure from the early 1990s.
Turning to University of Southern California race and pop culture scholar Dr. Todd Boyd....
Boyd recalled visiting downtown Los Angeles before he moved here in 1992. “I just remember how amazed I was at how barren downtown L.A. was,” he said. “It was not centralized, and there really wasn’t much going on at all.” A few years later, he decided to move downtown; people thought he was crazy. Not anymore. “This has become the hottest part of L.A. To go from it being barren and nothing to being crowded with traffic, multiple cultural options, multiple dining options, to have witnessed this and to have had it grow up around me—is one of the most interesting changes to L.A.,” he said.
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