He wore a dark suit with a crisp white shirt and a burgundy necktie, and as he made his way toward me through the late-morning patrons at Grand Central Market, he paused, eyes at his feet.
He bent down, picked up a straw wrapper and disposed of it in the nearest trash can, then kept walking.
“I kind of think of myself as the butler of downtown,” 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 — long enough to have helped bring in the restaurants, retail and night spots that transformed downtown, and long enough to have seen bust go boom and back again. I reached out to him after taking notes on a continuing trend:
Tombstone rows of shuttered storefronts. “For Lease” signs everywhere. Streets full of people in distress.
Some of the old downtown buzz remains, partly because while much of the commerce has cratered, roughly 90,000 people still walk the streets. Even at the height of the downtown L.A. renaissance, there were issues. But the problems are bigger now, and I had a question for Bastian.
Can downtown L.A. make another comeback?
“Spoiler Alert: It’s been hard,” Bastian wrote back to me. “AND we will re-invent ourselves again!”
We made a date to grab coffee at Grand Central and then stroll. And it’s worth noting that I once met Bastian in the same spot when Angels Flight, the iconic funicular that climbs Bunker Hill from Hill Street and connects Grand Avenue to the lower elevations of downtown, was out of commission.
Nobody could figure out how to get the broken down trolley running again, but Bastian took the helm, and this is a man who likes to throw around a line by Henry Ford that goes something like this: Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.
The trolley got back on track.
Thank you, Mr. Downtown.
On the subject of whether downtown survives, there’s always been the question of “who cares” among some people who don’t live or work there, or don’t go to the sports arenas or cultural institutions, and wonder why there should be so much of a focus on downtown when every neighborhood has problems.
“Downtown is for everybody,” Bastian said. “It’s for people in Northridge and it’s for people in Chatsworth and it’s for people in South L.A., because it’s an economic generator.”
The pandemic delivered a big blow, Bastian said, followed by widespread damage during demonstrations that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And more recently, federal raids hit merchants and their customers.
But Bastian said the biggest reason for the current struggles is that before COVID-19 hit in 2020, about 500,000 people worked in downtown L.A. He and others estimate that roughly half of them never returned.
The post-COVID problems in downtown L.A. are similar to those in a lot of cities across the country. But if Mayor Karen Bass is interested, Bastian has all but written a speech he’d like her to deliver from the steps of City Hall:
“Downtown has been suffering for a long time … because people did not come back to the office, including city workers. We are bringing our city workers back starting next week. City employees are going to be at their buildings … serving the public … at least four days a week, and the ones that 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 led me up Bunker Hill to California Plaza, where office workers were enjoying the sunshine. But Bastian noted that at 12:38 p.m. in early 2020, twice as many people would have been out there.
The butler of downtown took one look at the grounds, by the way, and said that if he were the property manager and the grass was as brown as it was, he’d expect to be fired.
Heading south, we came upon the shuttered Daily Grill, near the shuttered Cafe Primo, across from the shuttered Limericks Tavern. We checked out two intersections that used to have two drugstores each, and all four of them are closed.
Windows on vacant buildings were scratched by vandals. We passed a restaurant on 7th Street where four people had been stabbed on Sunday, and peering through the window at Bottega Louie, half the tables were empty, as Bastian had predicted. Along the way, he kept stopping to pick up trash.
At the height of the turnaround, Bastian often worked with Carol Schatz, who ran the Central City Assn. Schatz retired and Nella McOsker, who is in that post now, shares Bastian’s sense of optimism but said there’s “just as much reason to sound alarm bells.”
In September, her agency issued a “call to action” to public officials, saying 100 storefronts and one-third of commercial space is vacant, “a higher vacancy rate than Detroit.”
“There’s always been visible homelessness and the mental health crisis in downtown L.A., and with the dramatic decrease in other foot traffic, it’s more visible and it’s more pronounced,” McOsker told me, particularly along Broadway and Spring.
The September plan called for expanding services to address homelessness and addiction, a greater police presence, more street lighting and sanitation, and implementation of a Vacant to Vibrant pop-up business model popularized in San Francisco (and written about by my colleague Roger Vincent).
McOsker would also like to see Bastian’s back-to-work plan extended to county employees.
Cassy Horton of the Downtown L.A. Residents Assn. is as die-hard a true believer as Bastian, and she went on for several minutes about music venues, farmers markets, dining, diversity and the sense of community. She also said that on her daily 10-minute walk from home to office in the historic core she routinely sees people reeling from the use of fentanyl, and one reason she’s committed to living downtown is to bear witness and demand action.
The top concerns in a survey of residents were homelessness and addiction, Horton said. 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 sufficient coordinated, accountable, and effective institutional outcomes.”
Horton sent me some data on a post-COVID office-to-residential movement in cities across the country. That was one of the keys to Bastian’s recovery plan, in which Los Angeles takes a liability (officer tower vacancies) and turns it into an asset he refers to as Sky Villages.
“These ivory towers will still have offices in them,” Bastian said, gazing to the tops of high-rises, “but a big portion of them will be residential. And it’s not going to be just fancy apartments for rich people. There’s going to be housing for everybody.”
That’s already happening in Los Angeles, but depending on the site, the conversions can be difficult and expensive. But Bastian lives by the Henry Ford line, and whether he’s looking up at the future Sky Villages or looking down for trash, he doesn’t see defeat — he sees unrealized potential.
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,” Bastian said. “It’s only through leadership and hope that things can get better.”
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