Travelouge: Los Angeles

 By John Temple Ligon

 

Arriving on the Amtrak Coast Starlight a little before 10 on Monday night, May 21, 2012, I walked off Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Probably better seen in the daytime, I still enjoyed my tour of 1939 mission-style architecture. I had been in the same sleeper from Seattle, something like 35 hours, and I gathered the train continued to San Diego. Ordinarily I would have continued to San Diego, never been there, but I had a schedule to keep and a Getty Center to see.

My previous trip to Los Angeles was in the fall of 2003 when the Walt Disney Concert Hall opened, all $200 million of it. For the opening weekend they put on three galas, each for its own taste in music. I got a call from the Disney people about two weeks before, asking me which of the three galas did I prefer. They offered me two tickets I could pick up at will call on opening weekend. Not knowing how they got my name and not knowing how they managed to misunderstand my role in the world, which was certainly not music criticism, I had to beg off. That weekend was already taken and, besides, I wasn’t sure I could swing the expense of round trip airfare and the general logistics and obligations that came with a run from Columbia to Los Angeles.

Then the agile woman moved to the next weekend, suggesting the all-Mozart weekend. She could assign two seats for one performance near the orchestra. After all, she pushed, the Mozart business would be more suitable to a serious music buff as opposed to the opening weekend’s Classical Music’s Greatest Hits to include spinoff material that made its way into the world as movie themes. Thanks, I said, I’ll do it.

I had no idea who could take the second seat, but I went ahead and let the Disney people hold two. You never know.

I did a little homework and discovered the really good restaurant at street level inside the Disney, Patina, and reserved a table for two following Mozart.

As it turned out, no one could make the trip with me to take the second seat, but I ended up eating at Patina with a fellow music fan who said she was called the Chicken Queen. She was not Frank Perdue’s granddaughter – I did ask – but I believed her when she said her bills were paid by the sale of chickens, lots and lots of California chickens.

Well after midnight, I thought it a good time to find a hotel room. I found a Holiday Inn next to the Staples Center. The next day I took a weekend cheapie at the Biltmore.

The Biltmore Hotel is the grand dame of Los Angeles hotels from the old school. Built in 1923, the Academy Awards in the 1930s and the 1940s were held in the Crystal Ballroom at the Biltmore. That weekend in the fall of 2003, there was a transit strike in Los Angeles; so the buses weren’t running, the fixed rail transit wasn’t running, all the rental cars were taken and all the cabs were taken. I stayed within a short walking radius of downtown Los Angeles for a few days, and I really got to know downtown Los Angeles.

One thing I regrettably missed was the Getty Center, the world’s richest art museum with an endowment of about $6 billion. Ordinarily a $50 cab ride from downtown, access to the Getty that weekend for me was impossible. In fact, to get to the airport LAX I had to find a downtown Los Angeles bus stop for the Santa Monica bus system, where they were not striking. I rode to Santa Monica on the Santa Monica bus, walked the Santa Monica Pier, caught the sunset, and took the Santa Monica bus to LAX on time.

Through it all, I learned my way around downtown Los Angeles, enough to want to return, and I became even more determined to see the Getty Center.

The next chance I had was when I was in Saigon planning the concluding route of my ‘round-the-world tour. Fogg took the train from San Francisco to New York City, and from New York City he sailed to England and won his wager. I wasn’t going back to England. I was going back to Columbia. It made sense for me to leave Los Angeles on the Amtrak Sunset Limited, connecting with the Amtrak Crescent for Washington. I was allowing for layovers in Houston, New Orleans and Washington before returning to Columbia on the 80^th day.  Once I had my ticket for Vancouver on the Diamond Princess, I knew I got another chance to stay at the Biltmore, and this time I would get the Getty, too.

With all the bias built up in favor of the Biltmore, I took a cab from Union Station to the Biltmore. I didn’t have a reservation because I somehow enjoyed the uncertainty and the opportunity to discover a new downtown hotel. I found one clearly separate from the pack, the brutally hip Standard. The Standard was booked up, but the Biltmore did have a spare room. I took it.

The next day I took a $50 cab ride to Brentwood and the Getty Center. After spending most of the day at the Getty, I walked back to the museum’s hovertrain funicular, the fixed-rail connector to the bottom of the hill where people get in their cars and where I planned to get into a cab for the presumed $50 ride back to the Biltmore. Cabs were hard to come by, rush hour and all, so I approached two men who appeared to be complaining about the lack of cabs in a language I didn’t recognize. They did, though, understand me when I suggested we go in together on a cab – they were going downtown, too – and even though they were two-thirds of the cab’s customers, I would pay half and let them pay half. Deal, they said in English.

Oilman J. Paul Getty was declared America’s richest man in 1957. Since 1954 he had been displaying his art collection at his Pacific Palisades house. In 1974 the Getty Villa opened, a home to mostly classical art. J. Paul Getty died in 1976.

In 1984 architect Richard Meier was hired to design the Getty Center, and construction began in 1989. Meier had a successful go at the design of the High Museum in Atlanta, which among other Meier buildings caught the Getty team’s attention. Meier beat out an impressive short list of the world’s best design firms: Batey & Mack; Fumihiko Maki & Associates; Mitchell/Giurgola; I. M. Pei & Partners; James Stirling, Michael Wilford & Associates; and Venturi Rauch & Scott Brown.

In December 1997 the Getty opened after a construction cost of about $1.5 billion, including 1,200,000 sq. ft. of travertine, which was more than 300,000 pieces of travertine.

Now for something impressive: admission to the Getty Center, even on weekends, is free.

The existing institution worth studying as a guide by the Getty team was the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, home of Williams College. The Clark was funded with wealth created by the Singer Sewing Machine. Singer’s founding business partner was Clark, grandfather to the Clark Art Institute founder.

The Clark recently opened a new wing called Stone Hill Center by architect Tadao Ando.

I visited the Clark several years ago to attend a gathering of art historians, and I was completely impressed. I saw immediately how the Getty could use the Clark as a guide.

About 10 at night on Wednesday, May 23, I left Los Angeles on the Amtrak Sunset Limited, planning on arriving in Houston thatFriday around noon.

 

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