He wore a dark suit with a crisp white shirt and a burgundy necktie, and as he walked toward me among the late-night customers at Grand Central Market, he paused, looking down at his feet.
He bent down, picked up a straw wrapper and threw it in the nearest dustbin, then continued walking.
“I think of myself as the butler of the city,” said Hal Bastian, 65, who has lived in the neighborhood for three decades and is known to many as “Mr. Downtown L.A.”
Bastian has worked in real estate and economic development for years — helping to bring long-running restaurants, retail and night spots that have transformed the city, and watching long periods of recession boom and then bounce back again. After taking notes on the ongoing trend I reached out to him:
Rows of graves in front of closed shops. “For Lease” signs everywhere. Roads full of people in trouble.
Some of the hustle and bustle of the old town still remains, partly because while most of the commerce has gone, about 90,000 people still walk the streets. Even at the height of the Downtown LA renaissance, there were issues. But the problems are bigger now, and I had a question for Bastian.
Can Downtown LA Make Another Comeback?
“Spoiler alert: It’s been hard,” Bastien wrote back to me. “And we will invent ourselves again!”
We decided to have coffee in Grand Central and then a date for a walk. And it’s worth noting that I once met Bastien at the same spot when Angels Flight, the iconic funicular that climbs Bunker Hill from Hill Street and connects Grand Avenue to the downtown area, was closed.
No one could figure out how to get the broken trolley moving again, but Bastian took command, and this is a guy who likes to throw around a line from Henry Ford that goes something like this: Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.
The trolley came on the track.
Thank you, Mister Downtown.
On the subject of whether the city is survivable, there has always been a question of “who cares” among some people who don’t live or work there, or don’t go to the playgrounds or cultural institutions, and wonder why so much attention should be paid to the city when every neighborhood has problems.
“Downtown is for everyone,” Bastian said. “It’s for the people of Northridge and it’s for the people of Chatsworth and it’s for the people of South L.A., because it’s an economic generator.”
The pandemic dealt a major blow, Bastian said, followed by widespread damage during demonstrations following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And more recently, federal raids affected merchants and their customers.
But Bastian said the biggest reason for the current struggles is that before COVID-19 arrived in 2020, about 500,000 people worked in Downtown L.A. and others estimate that about half of them never returned.
The post-COVID problems in Downtown LA are similar to those of many cities across the country. But if Mayor Karen Bass is interested, Bastian has written a speech, but he wants her to deliver it from the steps of City Hall:
“Downtown has been suffering for a long time … because people haven’t come back to the office, including city employees. We’re bringing our city employees back starting next week. City employees will be in their buildings … serving the public … at least four days a week, and those who come five days are going to get promoted faster. And I’m inviting all of you in the private sector to do the same.”
Note to Mayor Bass: What do you think?
Bastian took me up Bunker Hill to California Plaza, where office workers were enjoying the sunshine. But Bastian said that at the beginning of 2020, at 12:38 p.m., twice as many people would be there.
By the way, Butler from downtown took one look at the grounds and said that if he were the property manager and the grass was that brown, he would expect to be fired.
Heading south, we came across the closed Limerick Tavern, next to the closed Café Primo, and the closed Deli Grill. We checked two intersections where there used to be two medicine shops each, and all four are closed.
Windows of vacant buildings were scratched by rioters. We passed a restaurant on 7th Street where four people were stabbed on Sunday, and peered through the window at Bottega Louie, half the tables were empty, just as Bastian had predicted. On the way he kept stopping to pick up garbage.
At the height of the transformation, Bastian often worked with Carol Schatz, who ran the Central City Association. Schatz has retired and Nella McCosker, who now holds that position, shares Bastian’s sense of optimism but said there is “just as much reason to sound alarm bells.”
In September, his agency issued a “call to action” to public officials, stating that 100 storefronts and a third of commercial space were vacant, “a vacancy rate higher than Detroit.”
“There’s always been a homelessness and mental health crisis in Downtown L.A., and with the dramatic reduction in other foot traffic, it’s more visible and it’s more pronounced,” MacOskar told me.
The September plan called for expanding services to combat homelessness and addiction, greater police presence, more street lighting and sanitation, and the implementation of Vacant to Vibrant. pop-up business The model became popular in San Francisco (and was written about by my colleague Roger Vincent).
McOscar would also like to see Bastian’s back-to-work plan expanded to county employees.
Cassie Horton of the Downtown LA Residents Association. Like Bastian, she’s a devout believer and she went on for several minutes to talk about music venues, farmers markets, food, diversity and a sense of community. She also said that on her daily 10-minute walk from home to office in the historic center she regularly sees people struggling with fentanyl use, and one of the reasons she committed to staying in the city is to bear witness and demand action.
Horton said the top concerns in a survey of residents were homelessness and addiction. The group sent a letter to the county Board of Supervisors on March 17 rejecting “a system in which open drug markets and untreated psychiatric crises operate unchecked on residential sidewalks, without adequately coordinated, accountable, and effective institutional consequences.”
Horton sent me some data on the post-COVID office-to-residential movement in cities across the country. This was one of the keys to Bastion’s recovery plan, in which Los Angeles takes a liability (officer tower vacancies) and turns it into an asset it refers to as Sky Villages.
“There will still be offices in these ivory towers,” Bastian said, looking toward the tops of the tall buildings, “but a large portion of them will be residential. And it won’t just be fancy apartments for rich people. There will be housing for everyone.”
This is already happening in Los Angeles, but depending on the site, the conversion may be difficult and expensive. But Bastian lives near the Henry Ford Line, and whether he’s looking up at the Sky Villages of the future or looking down at the garbage below, he doesn’t see defeat — he sees unrealized potential.
He told me, he was the drum major in his Granada Hills High School marching band, and he’s ready to lead.
“We have to have hope,” Bastian said. “Only through leadership and hope can things get better.”
steve.lopez@latimes.com
