Downtown LA is hurting. Frank Gehry thinks arts can lead a revival

Later this year, Andrés will open a Bazaar Meat, his high-end steakhouse that originated in Las Vegas, on the second level. Santa Monica Italian, French and Moroccan restaurant Massilia will also open a branch on Grand Avenue this year, and other tenants will be announced in 2024, Related said.

The additions to the Broad and the Colburn promise to boost foot traffic on Grand Avenue, said Sel Kardan, president of the Colburn School, which opened on Bunker Hill in 1998 and has about 2,000 students.

Construction began recently on the expansion of the Colburn School. It is the third Gehry-designed building on Bunker Hill.

Colburn Center, as the addition will be called, will include a 1,000-seat concert hall with an in-the-round design meant to create intimacy between the performers and the audience. The hall will have an orchestra pit and a stage large enough to accommodate "the grandest works," Kardan said, making it suitable for orchestra, opera and dance.

He expects that the new hall will host more than 200 events a year at various times of day. The Colburn Center will also more than double facilities for the school's Trudl Zipper Dance Institute, creating what the school called "one of the most comprehensive dance education complexes in Southern California." The facilities will include a 100-seat theater and four professional-size studios for instruction and rehearsal.

With the new addition, "there could be three or four performances going on on our campus on any given night," Kardan said, a combination of educational performances, guest artists and events put on by local arts organizations.

The Colburn Center is set for completion in 2027. The Broad expansion should open a year later, museum President Joanne Heyler said, and add to street life on Grand Avenue.

Attendance at the Broad has returned to pre-pandemic highs of more than 900,000 annual visitors, she said, with a new daily record of more than 6,000 visitors set in March.

With the expansion,"we're simply responding to the tremendous enthusiasm of our audience that is now consistent with pre-pandemic levels and seemingly growing," she said.

"I am under no illusion that downtown in general is free of challenges," Heyler said. "We in the entire area have a lot to work on, but as a meeting point, a place to enjoy a cultural destination, our experience with the Broad is that things are vibrant. And I know that goes against the typical narrative of downtown."

The Grand was "the next-to-the-last piece of the puzzle" for Bunker Hill, said landlord Christopher Rising, whose firm Rising Realty Partners owns two office buildings there. The final piece will be Angels Landing, he said, a $1.6-billion hotel-housing-retail complex set to rise next to Bunker Hill's historic Angels Flight railway in time for the 2028 Olympics.

Rising laments that office attendance is still below pre-pandemic levels, especially among nearby government buildings that were packed with public employees who helped bring a sense of activity to Grand Avenue and other downtown streets.

"There are years of vision that are coming to fruition" on Bunker Hill, Rising said, "but the vision was heavily dependent on synergies with government workers. Without them, it's slowing things down."

More can be done to improve Bunker Hill, Gehry said, and the streets near Grand Avenue that are thick with parking lots are now ripe for development. The Colburn addition is going up next to the existing school on a former asphalt lot at 2nd and Olive streets.

"To keep upping the ante, we still have work to do," Gehry said, such as "fixing" the Chandler Pavilion to make it a better venue for opera performances.

"There are also opportunities to connect down to the arts district, the civic center, and Little Tokyo on the east-west streets," he said. "That is very exciting to me."