Las Urbanistas

THE CORN IS NOW higher than an elephant’s eye in downtown L.A. — to paraphrase the song from “Oklahoma!” — and you’ll need at least a small giraffe to see over it. I hope no one driving by has crashed. There, growing very fast on 32 acres between the Chinatown Gold Line stop and the Broadway bridge over the L.A. River, is a deep-green, buzzing, drip-irrigated, waving-in-the-wind cornfield — or “Not a Cornfield,” as creator Lauren Bon calls her public art piece.

I know this piece of land well, but as a dusty, toxic brownfield and future Los Angeles State Historic Park. I began to write about it five years ago, when Friends of the Los Angeles River spearheaded the David-like battle to wrest it from a Goliath L.A. real estate developer. Soon after, I began to lead tours of the river with my friend Alan Loomis, and we’d always stop here to ponder the significance of the empty, weedy lot under the downtown skyline.

So why a cornfield — a “living sculpture” that Bon plans to harvest in November? To begin with, this place is called the Cornfield, and while no one seems to know why for sure, the pueblo did grow crops here for the first 100 years. The Zanja Madre, the town’s lifeline, delivered water from the river across this spot. As the Southern Pacific rail depot for the late 19th and 20th centuries, the Cornfield continued to be crucial to Los Angeles’ heartbeat.

And then, just as the Cornfield was about to fade into an anonymous future as a warehouse complex, Friends of the L.A. River assembled allies to wage the all-out battle. Los Angeles, they argued, has always notoriously shortchanged public parks in favor of private development. And the Cornfield just happens to sit inside the city’s major downtown center and beside the city’s big concrete sewer-like river — the two places where the absence of parks symbolizes L.A.’s failures of public space.

The Cornfield became the site that augurs the coming of parks to L.A. neighborhoods. Yes, we treasure L.A.’s wild mountain parks, but we sorely lack the smaller, interstitial parks where everyone can play, walk, run, breathe, picnic, gather — the places that are vital to any city’s social and environmental health. Community, equality, sustainability — could L.A. use more of these? We go to the wilderness parks to get away from the city, but these parks create and sustain the city we want. The Cornfield became the spot where environmentalists, social activists, politicians and business and neighborhood leaders joined together to demand that the city make public parks a priority. Their victory marked a turning point for the revitalization of downtown, the L.A. River, and therefore, Los Angeles.

Until Bon planted corn this summer — and began to bring people back in for tours and events — the Cornfield was also a dusty, surface-of-Saturn-like scape. On paper, State Parks had built walking trails, bike paths, sports fields, picnic areas, heritage gardens, grand entrances. On the ground, the Cornfield remained a fenced-off no-man’s land. Alan and I would bring people here and say, “OK, now imagine it’s open and really green.” That was the genius, after all, of the early boosters of river restoration who went to the place where Schwarzenegger fled on a motorcycle from an alien in “Terminator 2″ and envisioned a 51-mile greenway through the heart of L.A. County. It was as if they were wearing special glasses, while the rest of us were just using our eyes.

“So imagine,” Alan and I would urge at this epic battle site, “a great central meadow filled with people, and a grand descending staircase from Chinatown.” We would try to get the people on our tours to look through the fence across the dust and desolation and say, “Wow.”

And now, I walk the path up the middle of this field, my ears brushed by corn tassels, and say, “Wow.” Who wouldn’t? It’s a cornfield. In downtown Los Angeles. Ten feet from the Metro tracks. Which to me is the point and the brilliance of Bon’s colossal art project. All that unexpected corn calls attention to this piece of land. It evokes the past, but points to the future, in the moment when we take a breath in between.

It says, look at this place that’s been called the Cornfield. It hasn’t always been a cornfield. It’s not going to be a cornfield. But let’s remember its historic role in this amnesiac city, and let’s begin to re-enter this space and celebrate it. And then, we’ll harvest the corn and deliver this spot to its future — to L.A.’s spirit of place, its heartbeat, for the 21st century.

In late July, I brought a large group here. “Imagine,” I was about to begin, but though the corn was about as high as an elephant’s toe at that point, a few people began to sing the “Oklahoma!” song. At least one person took in the sight of the corn beneath the skyscrapers and said, “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.” And all said together, “Wow.”

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Jenny Price is the author of “Flight Maps: Adventures With Nature in Modern America.”

Correction Appended

NEW ORLEANS - Optimism is in short supply here. And as people begin to sift through the wreckage left by Hurricane Katrina, there is a creeping sense that the final blow has yet to be struck - one that will irrevocably blot out the city’s past.

The first premonition arose when Mayor C. Ray Nagin announced that the model for rebirth would be a pseudo-suburban development in the Lower Garden District called River Garden. The very suggestion alarmed preservationists, who pictured the remaking of historic neighborhoods into soulless subdivisions served by big-box stores.

More recently, Mr. Nagin contemplated suspending the city’s historic preservation laws to make New Orleans more inviting to developers - evoking the possibility of architectural havoc and untrammeled greed.

But politicians and developers are not the only culprits here. For decades now, the architectural mainstream has accepted the premise that cities can exist in a fixed point in historical time. What results is a fairy tale version of history, and the consequences could be particularly harsh for New Orleans, which was well on its way to becoming a picture-postcard vision of the past before the hurricane struck.

Now, with the city at its most vulnerable, such voices threaten to drown out all others. A forum on Gulf Coast renewal held recently in Mississippi was dominated by champions of New Urbanism, a sentimental and historicist vision of how cities work. Meanwhile, those who favor a more complex reading of urban history - one that embraces 20th- and 21st-century realities as well as the 19th-century charms of New Orleans - risk being relegated to the margins.

The fate threatening the city can be witnessed at River Garden, the mayor’s favored model for the future. A few weeks after the storm, I drove through the development with Wayne Troyer, a local architect who opposes the mayor’s vision. To evoke some of the qualities of a vintage New Orleans neighborhood, the houses are designed in a mix of traditional styles. A ribbon of row houses extends along Laurel Street, their wrought iron rails loose reproductions of those in the French Quarter. Nearby, larger two-family houses are modeled on traditional bungalows, with pitched roofs, shallow porches and shuttered windows decorated in pretty pink, yellow and blue hues. Traditional lampposts, evidently a mandatory feature of pseudo-historic developments, line the streets.

All the hallmarks of a conventional suburban subdivision are here. Telephone wires are buried out of sight, and houses are set slightly farther apart than their counterparts in the real New Orleans to make room for paved driveways. The distancing is meant to afford privacy but suggests wariness instead; the driveways keep people off the street, fostering a sense of isolation.

Yet the most obvious clue that we have entered a surreal world is the sight of empty shopping carts on the lawns. The carts are from the nearby Wal-Mart, which has long since replaced locally owned stores in much of the United States . Today, Wal-Mart’s ubiquitous blank box and blue-and-white sign represent our withdrawal into a sealed, homogenized world.

What is missing from River Garden, of course, are the small-grained details of everyday life, built up over decades, that the development claims to honor.

For Mr. Troyer, the most telling reality is what it stands next to: five stoic brick buildings that are all that is left of the St. Thomas Hope project, affordable housing constructed in the early 1940’s. Their simple forms, topped with slate tile roofs, are the kind of public housing that is typically reviled by public officials these days.

But for Mr. Troyer and many other architects of his generation, the simple three-story structures, set around a small central court, have a human scale that sets them apart from big developments. Whatever their flaws, they reflect a social pact - the promise of decent low-cost housing for every citizen - that was broken long ago, and is not likely to be repaired through a process of urban gentrification.

Yet River Garden is not the worst-case scenario. Driving along the industrial canal a few days later, I came across Abundance Square, a mixed-income residential development. Caked in mud, the development’s barren roads are lined by rows of houses intended to evoke visions of a traditional community. Here, however, the result is the generic suburban formula: houses of identical cookie-cutter design neatly separated by driveways, empty lawns and a grid of privatized roads. The argument for such development, of course, will be that New Orleans needs to rebuild quickly, and standardized housing formulas are better than nothing at all. It is the argument of diminished expectations, one that serves the interests of developers while draining cities of their vibrancy.

The assumption at work here is that the only alternative is to do nothing. But in fact, the way architects think about cities has been evolving for some time now; the question is whether the city is willing to tap the intellectual resources at its disposal. Stephanie Bruno, for example, is the director of the Preservation Resource Center’s Operation Comeback and one of the pre-Katrina heroes. Over the past decade, the center has been restoring early 19th-century vernacular shotgun houses and Creole bungalows in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The project, a rare mix of preservation values and social vision, was part of a broader strategy to resurrect poorer neighborhoods by helping low-income families obtain mortgages to buy the rebuilt homes.

By linking historical continuity to communal self-esteem, it demonstrates that urban revitalization efforts need not be reduced to dull formulas.

Just south of St. Claude Avenue in the Ninth Ward, many of the restored houses look relatively intact from the street, although they are heavily damaged within. Some were restored only recently; in one case a paint can still sits in the middle of a living room floor whose boards are stained by flood waters.

Hearing of the damage, Ms. Bruno says she was overcome by exhaustion. But many of these houses can still be saved. Rather than the softer, more absorbent woods used in newer construction, many of them were built out of cedar, a hardwood that is more likely to survive the flooding intact.

Identifying what can be restored will be painstaking work. It will require the kind of government support - tax incentives, adjustments in preservation and zoning laws - that has become a rarity in a country that tends to equate the interests of business with the public welfare. What Ms. Bruno and others fear most is that these houses will simply be bulldozed in the name of expediency to make way for large-scale development like Abundance Square. (Why, after all, develop a house or two here and there when you can wipe out an entire district, rebuild it, and reap enormous profits?)

Even if many of Ms. Bruno’s humble shotgun houses are saved, the city’s 20th-century landscape - the kind of neighborhoods that mainstream preservationists tend to ignore - is unlikely to find defenders. Built in the city’s bowl, an area that was drained during the city’s expansion in the 1920’s, the Mid City area symbolized the city’s embrace of modernity. Its mix of California-style bungalows and late Victorian houses, now severely damaged, has more in common with the sweeping landscapes of Los Angeles than with the romantic images of the city’s European roots. As such, it is likely to be ignored by local custodians of the architectural past.

To suggest, meanwhile, that the city’s neatly compartmentalized historical styles - shotgun house, Camelback, Creole cottage - can be reconstituted in wholly rebuilt neighborhoods is to endorse a theme park version of the past. It reflects an absurdly reductive historical narrative, one that ignores the reality that conflicting historical strands are what give great cities their vitality.

Doubtless large parts of New Orleans will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. But the best architects working today are as likely to turn to the cavernous Superdome for inspiration as to the spires of St. Louis Cathedral. They understand that a city’s 20th-century inventions - from the bungalows to the canals to the freeways - are as integral to its identity as the 19th-century vernacular.

That insight leaves us better equipped to cope with the issues facing New Orleans in the 21st century. Past and future must learn to live together.

Correction: A Critic’s Notebook article on Tuesday about the architectural future of New Orleans misidentified a hardwood that was widely used in the construction of humble 19th-century dwellings there. It was cypress. (Cedar is a softwood.)