He was wearing a black suit with a crisp white shirt and pink tie, and as he approached me through the morning shoppers at Grand Central Market, he paused, his eyes on his feet.
He bent down and picked up a piece of grass and threw it in a nearby trash can, then continued walking.
“I think of myself as the butler of the city,” said Hal Bastian, 65, who has lived in the area for three decades and is known to many as “Mr. Downtown LA.”
Bastian has worked in real estate and economic development for years – long enough to help bring the restaurants, shops and nightlife that have transformed the city, and long enough to see the bust go and come back again. I reached out to him after making notes about a trend going on:
Monument rows of closed shops. “For Lease” signs everywhere. The streets are full of people in sorrow.
Some of the sadness of the city remains, because although most of the trade has gone down, about 90,000 people still walk the streets. Even at the height of the downtown LA Renaissance, there were problems. But the problems are big now, and I had a question for Bastian.
Can the city of LA make a comeback?
“Spoiler Alert: It was hard,” Bastian answered me. “AND we will reinvent ourselves again!”
We make a date to grab coffee at Grand Central and walk around. And it’s worth noting that I once met Bastian in the same place where Angels Flight, the entertainment icon that climbs Bunker Hill from Hill Street and connects Grand Avenue to the lower elevations of the city, went out of business.
No one could figure out how to get a broken trolley running again, but Bastian took over, and this is a man who likes to throw out a Henry Ford line that goes like this: Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.
The trolley returned to the track.
Thank you, Mr. Downtown.
In the matter of whether the city survives, there is always a question of “who cares” among some people who do not live or work there, or who do not go to sports fields or cultural centers, and wonder why there should be so much focus on a city where everywhere has problems.
“Downtown is for everybody,” Bastian said. “It’s for the people of Northridge and it’s for the people of Chatsworth and for the people of South LA, because it generates the economy.”
The epidemic caused a lot of damage, said Bastian, followed by widespread damage during the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And recently, corporate attacks have hit retailers and their customers.
But Bastian said a big reason for the struggles there is that before COVID-19 hit in 2020, about 500,000 people worked in downtown L.A. He and others estimate that about half of them never returned.
The post-COVID problems in downtown LA are similar to those in many cities across the country. But if Mayor Karen Bass is interested, Bastian has written out every speech she’d like to give on the steps of City Hall:
“The city has been struggling for a long time … because people have not returned from the office, including city employees. We are bringing 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 will be promoted immediately. And I invite all of you in the private sector to do the same.”
Notice to Mayor Bass: What do you think?
Bastian led me up Bunker Hill to California Plaza, where office workers were enjoying the sunshine. But Bastian noted that at 12:38 pm in early 2020, twice as many people would be there.
The city butler looked around the grounds, by the way, and said that if he had been the manager of the place and the grass was as brown as it was, he would have expected to be evicted.
Heading south, we came to the closed Daily Grill, next to the closed Cafe Primo, across from the closed Limericks Tavern. We are looking at two intersections that used to have two drug stores, and all four are closed.
Windows in vacant buildings are scratched by vandals. We passed the restaurant on 7th Street where four people were stabbed on Sunday, and we looked out the window at Bottega Louie, half of the tables were empty, as Bastian had predicted. On the way, he kept stopping to pick up garbage.
At the height of the change, Bastian often worked with Carol Schatz, who ran the Central City Assn. Schatz has retired and Nella McOsker, who is now in that position, shares Bastian’s view of hope but said there is “so much cause for alarm.”
In September, his agency issued an “invitation to action” to state officials, saying 100 stores and one-third of commercial spaces are vacant, a “vacancy rate higher than Detroit.”
“There is always a visible homelessness and mental health problem in downtown LA, and with the dramatic decrease in some pedestrian traffic, it’s more visible and more audible,” McOsker said, especially on Broadway and Spring.
The September plan called for increased services to address homelessness and addiction, more police presence, more street lighting and sanitation, and the implementation of Vacant to Vibrant. pop-up business a model popularized in San Francisco (and written by my colleague Roger Vincent).
McOsker would also like to see Bastian’s return-to-work program extended to county employees.
Cassy Horton of the Downtown LA Residents Assn. he’s a true believer like Bastian, and he went on for a few minutes about music venues, farmers markets, restaurants, diversity and a sense of community. He also said that on his daily 10-minute walk from his home to his office in the historic area, he often sees people fed up with the use of fentanyl, and one of the reasons he is committed to staying in the city is to testify and seek action.
A major concern in the citizen survey is homelessness and addiction, Horton said. The group sent a letter to the District Board of Directors on March 17 rejecting “a system where open drug markets and untreated mental disorders operate unchecked on residential streets, without systematic, responsible, and effective institutional consequences.”
Horton sent me some data about the post-COVID-office-to-residential movement in cities across the country. That was one of the keys to Bastian’s recovery plan, where Los Angeles is taking debt (office tower vacancies) and turning it into property he calls Sky Villages.
“These ivory towers will still have offices in them,” said Bastian, staring up at the skyscrapers, “but most of them will be residential.
That’s already happening in Los Angeles, but depending on the site, the transition can be difficult and expensive. But Bastian lives close to Henry Ford’s line, and whether he’s looking up at the Sky Villages or down at the trash, he doesn’t see defeat – he sees unrealized power.
He was the drum major in his Granada Hills High School marching band, he told me, and he’s ready to lead.
“We have to have hope,” said Bastian. “It’s only because of the leadership and the hope that things can get better.”
steve.lopez@latimes.com
