Posted Nov 19, 2018, 10:12 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 6,459
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DTLA-Joe
Looks like demo may be starting!
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Quote:
Built not to last -- yet still standing
March 25, 2008
Even before it opened in 1969, the "Erector set" parking lot at the corner of 1st and Olive streets downtown was one of Los Angeles' most reviled structures.
Richard G. Mitchell, head of the Community Redevelopment Agency, complained that it was just another monolith of concrete, asphalt and steel atop Bunker Hill. The mass of girders and slabs, perched atop what look like stilts, "fights you," Mitchell said. He predicted it would have a "depressing effect" on downtown.
Robert Bolling, president of the Southern California chapter of the American Institute of Architects, agreed, warning that the structure would have a "deleterious effect on the fabric of the city."
At the time, the 1,062-car structure's saving grace was that it was temporary. Planners promised the "portable parking structure" would be dismantled and moved somewhere else, replaced by a more fitting form of architecture.
Looking at it perched atop Bunker Hill, some confused it with a half-finished office building. And as the hill became populated with true architectural gems -- MOCA, the Cathedral and then Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall -- the "Erector set" became even more of a blight.
In a few weeks, workers will finally begin removing the structure. As planners originally promised, it will be replaced by something more architectural: a Frank Gehry-designed condo and shopping complex clad in glass, concrete and limestone.
The structure went up in a matter of months in 1969 as a quick fix for a pressing problem. A survey conducted in 1966 showed that more than 250,000 cars were entering the city center each day, but there were only 81,000 parking spaces.
The designer, engineer Charles Bentley, was marketing what he called a "revolutionary concept": a low-cost portable parking structure that could be erected in a matter of weeks over an existing lot and taken down and moved as land uses changed. His $850,000 edifice was put together much like a child's Erector set. Concrete floors had connectors embedded into them so that they could be easily joined to the support columns and beams.
L.A. turned out to be the first major American city to try temporary parking buildings.
L.A.'s cutting-edge parking concept won attention from futurists, who saw only one flaw. "Their appearance -- which is most charitably described as functional -- does not do much to improve the aesthetics of a neighborhood," Time magazine wrote in 1969.
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