Music Center Plaza; LA’s new tree czar

·30 min·2 clips

Howard Sherman explains how the Music Center's new plaza now welcomes people with escalators, canopies, and dining options.

A plaza asks for an audience. The Music Center opened with public fanfare in 1964, but downtown has changed around it. Civic buildings now have to meet the street, not hover above it. Before the renovation, someone on Grand Avenue could look up and feel unsure how to enter. The redo answers with gentler stairs, escalators, and a plaza that reads more clearly from the sidewalk. Bob Hale and Howard Sherman talk about a downtown that has more reasons to climb the hill now: the Cathedral, the Concert Hall, Grand Park, and the Grand. The edge matters. Grand Park can hold 50,000 people for a festival, then go back to being a nearby neighborhood park. The Music Center Plaza is chasing that same double life. Its reopening brings a civic ceremony, Labor Day weekend events, and LED screens with room for a Dodgers game. Then the episode turns to shade, and the details get a little thornier. Los Angeles has a new city forest officer, Rachel Malowich, with a job that sounds simple until she explains it: add 90,000 trees to streets and private yards. She starts with people's tree stories because those stories affect whether planting works. A tree can mean trouble, protection, memory, shade, or maintenance, depending on the person looking at it. Species choice is only part of the work. Malowich also has to deal with residents, overlapping agencies, sidewalks, and parkways that may not have enough room. A coast live oak needs space. Ficus trees show what can go wrong when the city squeezes trees into bad spots. The bigger question is how Los Angeles makes room for shade without pretending every strip of concrete can handle the same tree.

As heard by us

A plaza renovation and tree talk about how Los Angeles gets built.

Los Angeles gets looked at from the curb up here. The Music Center Plaza renovation comes off as the sharper half, with Howard Sherman and Bob Hale laying out how gentler stairs, escalators, bright canopies, and banners are meant to make the Music Centre easier to read from…

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You want LA civic design with real street-level consequences.

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