A Tour Through the L.A. That Could Have Been

This week, the Architecture+ Design Museum's long-awaited exhibition "Never Built: Los Angeles" opens, highlighting plans for the city that never made it off the page. To mark the occasion,L.A. Weekly takes a tour through the L.A. that would have existed today if these proposals had been realized. Our account is based on a conversation with "Never Built" co-curators Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell. In this imagined version of L.A., the city maintains its Spanish-revival hilltop homes, serpentine highways and celebrity-centric Hollywood flare, but other elements definitely look and feel different.

Fifth Street and Grand Avenue, downtown: Hey folks, thanks for joining us on our walking-cycling–river barge-and-bus tour through the lovely City of Angels. We'll be using many modes of transit across our fair city today, so keep your ears and eyes open, choose a buddy and don't dawdle.

The walking portion of our tour starts on the city center's enormous, terraced thoroughfare, which used to be Grand Avenue but has come to be known worldwide as "L.A.'s great public walkway." Designed by Lloyd Wright, it's wider than a football field, completely free of cars and stretches all the way north to Sunset Boulevard.

A $600 million, offshore causeway stretching from Santa Monica to Topanga Canyon, proposed in the 1960s but never built.

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A+D Architecture and Design Museum

6032 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Category: Museums

Region: Mid-Wilshire/ Hancock Park

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Despite its lush, well-kept hanging gardens, the walkway is rather run-down today — it was constructed way back in 1925. But the etched stone ziggurat motifs in the era's art deco style, its hulking proportions and Assyrian temple look make it feel like a classic D.W. Griffith movie set on steroids. Angelenos love it for its weirdness, but we're also proud — it's put our city center on par with Chicago's and New York's. Folks use it for picnicking, birthday parties, biking, strolling, people watching, suntanning and skateboarding.

We're using it today as a viewing point to some of L.A.'s best downtown sights, like the four gleaming, glassy towers of the Southern California Institute of Architecture's (SCI-Arc) L.A. River–adjacent campus by Coop Himmelblau, and Frank Gehry's alabaster Disney Concert Hall, clad with a warm, natural stone on its exterior curves — which glow like a lotus flower from the inside each time a concert is scheduled in the hall. Seeing the building's glorious glow from within, it's laughable that city boosters tried to convince Gehry to cover the building in silver titanium panels.

As we head north toward Griffith Park via Elysian Valley and the L.A. River, everyone needs to pick up a rent-a-bike. Choose any style that suits you: road bike, hybrid, lowrider, banana seat, beach cruiser. They're all free, subsidized by a nonprofit organization founded in 1995. Donors were especially inspired by the Dobbins cycleway — a 100-year-old, never-completed proposal that was revived in the 1990s by avid cyclist Dennis Crowley, and is now a meandering, elevated wooden route just for bikes, which hugs the Pasadena Freeway.

Many Hollywood stars footed the bill for the bikes, and celebrities funded other great public spaces in L.A.: Throw a rock and you'll hit one of the hundreds of parks and schools funded by your favorite actors.

Elysian Park: Unlike other sprawling, traffic-clogged U.S. cities like Phoenix and Atlanta, L.A. had the clear vision to plan for transit alternatives and to set the pace for smart housing developments that are both dense (to save on energy resources) and integrated into the region's natural landscape. Richard Neutra's Elysian Valley housing complex in Chavez Ravine provides light and airy living spaces in a stacked arrangement on the hilly site. The complex's mix of 24 towers and smaller, garden-style apartment buildings offers three times as much housing as was originally here, when the area was a shantytown. As we pedal through the Chavez backwoods, remember that before the modern, minimalist towers were built in the '50s, the area was slated to be a stadium site for Brooklyn's relocated Dodgers before they became the San Francisco Dodgers in 1955.

L.A. River: Drop your bikes at the dock and hop aboard the barge for the pleasure-cruise portion of our tour. As we wind lazily up the L.A. River toward Griffith Park, enjoy the landscape's bountiful springtime bloom, well known to commuters traveling to and from work on the river barges. Envisioned by local landscape architect Mia Lehrer in 2009, the design scheme for the riverbed has already transformed the once-concrete walls of the flood channel to earthen berms and mounds, so that greenery could once again thrive on the banks.

The 505 Freeway: From Silver Lake through Beverly Hills and into the Pacific Palisades, our tour continues via tour bus on the 505 freeway, L.A.'s alternative to the 10. True, we could've taken the subway — our system goes everywhere in the city, with more than 150 miles of track — or we could've walked through the citywide, interconnected parks system.

Out the right side of the bus windows, notice architect Jean Nouvel's 45-story-tall "green blade" housing tower in Century City, where million-dollar condos are wrapped in an exterior skin of hanging, overgrown gardens — desert flora gardens face south, Mediterranean gardens face north. Out the left-side windows, check out Neutra's Museum of Contemporary Art Westwood, completed in 1936, and the streamlined, '70s modern–style monorail station by Ray Kappe, part of the citywide monorail system.