Las Urbanistas

“I no longer go to Dodger games, or the L.A. Philharmonic…. I only go out to dinner at restaurants within two miles of my house.”

That was Michael Gale, who lives in Pacific Palisades.

“I’d rather stick hot pokers in my eyes than drive downtown from Santa Monica on a weeknight. Saturday nights are almost as bad. Therefore, I go to Disney Hall only on Sunday.”

That was Kim Nicholas of Santa Monica.

“We learned fast how hard it is to go east in the evening. The first few times we tried it, we assumed there was a big rig overturned somewhere …. We were then, and remain still, incredulous that an entire major American city has allowed itself to become paralyzed every evening.”

That was Maryland transplant and Santa Monica resident Laurie Brenner, who has given up on downtown L.A. cultural attractions and scratched Skirball events because of northbound evening traffic on the 405.

This is but a tiny sampling from the traffic jam of angst that clogged my mailbag after last Sunday’s column. Although my focus was Westside insanity, readers from Orange, Ventura and San Bernardino counties joined the cry-fest, insisting a historically annoying problem has reached the level of catastrophe.

But many readers saved their best work and sharpest barbs for those they hold responsible for an irresponsible explosion of residential and commercial projects erected without adequate consideration of the horrors they generate.

“Our problems can be traced directly to the development community, lobbyists, attorneys and the elected officials,” said Sandy Brown, a Westside activist.

“If you think the Westside traffic is bad now, just wait until all the condo and office projects currently in various stages of development in Beverly Hills and Century City get completed!” wrote Jaycie Ingersoll of Beverly Hills. “I cannot understand how these projects get approved without more realistic consideration of traffic impact, but they do. I always have the feeling that if the right palms get greased, the projects get approved.”

No project drew more fire than two 47-story condo towers proposed for traffic-choked Century City. A coalition of hopping-mad homeowner associations has sued the city over the skyscrapers, and residents are doing battle with City Councilman Jack Weiss, who represents the area, for control of $5 million the developer has offered for traffic planning, parks and other city services.

Homeowners feel like the deck is stacked against them. They point out that the project developer’s Chicago affiliate ponied up $100,000 for the school takeover campaign by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who just happens to support the condo tower project.

The developer, JMB Realty Co., is represented by Latham & Watkins, an international law firm with lots of juice at City Hall that has written thousands of dollars in campaign checks to Weiss.

Is it any wonder, homeowners ask, that city planners approved an environmental impact report paid for by the developer that claims the skyscraper condo project will actually decrease rather than increase traffic?

“It’s not underestimation, it’s willful avoidance of looking at the data,” says Mike Eveloff, president of the homeowners coalition. The group hired its own traffic engineer, who concluded that it was pure hokum to suggest that 483 new condominiums would make for less traffic than now exists at a bank and an over-the-hill nightclub.

“It doesn’t pass the smell test,” said Eveloff.

He was being too kind. It stinks to high heaven.

I put in a call to Villaraigosa’s office, asking for an explanation of massive campaign contributions that came at roughly the same time his office was making public its support of the JMB project as a great example of smart growth. Villaraigosa spokesman Matt Szabo promised me late Friday that he would look into the matter and get back to me, and I assured him readers would look forward to the response.

Weiss told me he supports the 47-story condo towers because they’re just what’s needed in an area that now has an overabundance of offices. He describes a reimagined Century City in which people walk from home to work, shop and go to dinner and a movie without ever getting into a car.

Sounds wonderful, but is he kidding?

The people who work in the expanding Century City service economy aren’t going to be able to afford one of those condos in the clouds, so they’re going to commute to the area each day and add to the congestion. The people who actually live there are not going to lock themselves into the compound as far as I know, so they’ll help jam the streets as well. And if the commercial expansion of the new Century City is a success, what will it draw?

Exactly. More traffic.

The city needs more high-density housing, but the only sensible projects are mixed-income developments near transit corridors. The Century City sky towers are neither.

“I really think you have to be fair here, that there is a property owner who has owned the property for, I think, decades, and there are certain legal rights,” Weiss said.

Yeah, and if you’re a councilman, you have certain obligations — namely to make sure a developer helps solve any problems he creates.

“What my vision is, is a subway stop in Century City, and then to connect that subway stop with the Exposition line stop just south of Century City,” said Weiss. Only problem with that is, last time I checked there was no subway on the drawing boards.

Here’s a different vision worth considering: BUILD THE BLASTED TRANSIT OPTIONS BEFORE YOU APPROVE THE DEVELOPMENT!

Trust me, people have had it. They’re steamed about lost hours and productivity, frayed nerves, narrowing orbits and missed time with family.

I asked for ideas and got them by the dozens, big and small, new and old. Monorails. Traffic cones to add contra-flow lanes on Olympic. London-style congestion fee-charging. Dedicated bus lanes on the 405. Declare a transit emergency and hit up the new Democratic-majority Congress for aid.

Join the fray. Post your traffic gripes and ideas for solutions at

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http://www.latimes.com/bottleneck .

THE DREAM A designer’s rendering of a proposed supervised playground in Lower Manhattan. Backers hope the concept will spread across the country.

By BENEDICT CAREY

Published: January 14, 2007

ALMOST any popular playground offers both a curly slide, and a Hobbesian slide toward a state of child-chaos. Girls scrambling to escape hot lava bang into boys driving a bullet-train spaceship who have just run over a preschooler in Power Ranger tights. Parents lurk around the edges, or push a swing, hoping to make it to nap time before someone draws blood.

All that may soon change, for many families, if an ambitious idea taking shape among New York City planners and a private designer takes hold.

City officials unveiled plans last week for a new kind of playground, outfitted with ponds, pulleys and bulky foam blocks intended to engage the imagination, and “play workers” to help guide fantasy play. In an artist’s rendering of a playground proposed for Lower Manhattan, the guides, dressed in matching bright yellow shirts and baseball caps, oversee the action with an air of calm authority.

The experiment, if it inspires other cities, would mark the first significant change in playground design in decades, since municipalities began replacing steel monkey bars and slides with the boxy, plastic equipment common in many urban areas today.

 

It already raises fundamental questions about childhood.

How much help do children need to do what should come naturally? And to what extent does expert guidance — embodied by the so-called play workers — represent adults’ expectations of children, rather than what the youngsters themselves want or need?

“My first impression is that this is more evidence that we don’t trust kids to play by themselves,” said Peter Stearns, provost of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and author of “Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America.” “And I think it’s fair to ask: Is this really for parents, to make them feel their kids are being properly guided while playing?”

On the surface, a managed playground is a natural extension of a culture that increasingly parcels childhood into schedules. Many children in urban areas from Boston to Houston no longer run out the front door to find their friends; their parents make play dates instead. And youngsters who once might have played on a sandlot or a backyard ice rink now enter organized leagues by first grade.

Pickup games are still around, but they have migrated from the street to computers, where friends gather online at sites like Neopets and Club Penguin.

Cultural critics have warned of the dangers of replacing spontaneous play with organized activities since the 1930s, when the historian Johan Huizinga published his classic, “Homo Ludens,” about the importance of spontaneous and unstructured play to the health of societies.

Children chasing, creeping, diving into alleyways and bushes may look somehow suspect, even dangerous. But experts say the free-for-all has a point: children develop independent judgment, and a sense of risk, privacy and invention all their own when they create play worlds that exclude parents and other adults. Forcing a children’s game to have some goal, as many parents have the urge to do, in effect installs a hall monitor in the game room.

Psychologists who spend time with children, moreover, say that it is important for youngsters to navigate kids-only play situations to develop their social instincts, such as how to join a game that has already started. Designers of the proposed playground were aiming for a space that, in a sense, recaptures the imaginative, collaborative games children used to organize routinely in their neighborhoods, before play dates and the American Youth Soccer Organization.

“I look at this design and see open space and interesting props, designed not just for motor play to get kids moving around, but for creative, thematic play,” said Marjorie Taylor, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. “Children are going to pretend wherever you put them. But if adults offer some scaffolding, some support, that can be a good way to get it started.”

That scaffolding might also make the new playgrounds a hard sell, at least if history is any guide.

The American playground movement, which began in the early 1900s, also envisioned spaces that would draw children for games supervised by adult workers. Designers built monkey bars and slides mainly for preteens and teenagers, a slightly older group than the pre- to middle-school children the new playground is intended for, said Lisa Jacobson, a historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of “Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early 20th Century.”

But the purpose was similar, she said: to provide an attractive alternative to the movies and penny arcades (read: video games and the Internet), a place where children in crowded cities could build social skills and character.

“Then as now, the idea was that play is serious business, that it is the work of the child,” Professor Jacobson said.

The only thing missing was the swarm of kids. After playgrounds were built early in the 1900s, about 20 percent of children in Milwaukee lived within walking distance of playgrounds, according to her research, but less than 4 percent used them. Surveys found similarly low rates among children near playgrounds in Cleveland, she said. At that time in New York City, some 95 percent of children played almost exclusively on the streets.

As one 11-year-old boy, living in Worcester, Mass., in the early 1900s said of supervised playgrounds: “It gets on my nerves with so many men and women around telling you what to do.” He was quoted in “Eight Hours for What We Will,” a study of workers’ leisure by Roy Rosenzweig, a professor of history and new media at George Mason University.

Grade-schoolers living in American cities 100 years later may not mind so much, and may take eagerly to the foam blocks and pulleys and play workers. But one thing that all psychologists who work with children agree on: The little humans will imagine and populate their own play worlds, regardless of what parents or play directors think is appropriate.

Dr. Taylor, who works with children who have imaginary friends, knows one youngster who has a “wife” he calls Mrs. Duck, another who spends time with Elfie, an imaginary veterinarian with tie-dyed hair, and another who plays with Simone, an invisible alligator. “They usually invent far better worlds than we could have modeled for them,” Dr. Taylor said.