A Man. A Plan. Now What?

Can one man envision a city whole and will that city into existence? Actually, yes.

In the last 150 years in Southern California, a lot of cities have sprung up from little more than sunshine, dirt and a guy in a suit with a megaphone, standing in front of a billboard and selling house lots. Some of those cities evaporated in the sun, but some are metropolises now with more momentum than disoriented, disconnected downtown Los Angeles.

Downtown’s direction used to be set by something called the Committee of 25 (always described as “shadowy” for the noir qualities of the committee’s role). For more than two decades starting in the 1950s, the committee of magnates and businessmen decided who was to be elected mayor, who would run the really important city stuff -- water and power, the port, public works -- and which grand schemes of public betterment (and private gain) would rise on downtown’s hills.

That was Los Angeles then, when the city could muster 25 broad-shouldered men with money in their pockets (often taxpayer money). The Committee of 25 and their Fortune 500 companies aren’t downtown anymore. They’re not even in California anymore. Globalized downtown has a Committee of One. He is Eli Broad.

Among many other of his achievements, Broad (and his billions) willed into existence the election of Mayor Richard Riordan, L.A.’s Democratic National Convention in 2000, the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art on Bunker Hill -- the latter two bright islands in a sea of drab government buildings and 1980s office towers.

Now Broad has a plan and the power to make that sea part for something grander -- an ennobling of the stretch of avenue from Disney Hall to the cathedral into a sort of Champs Elysee and the creation of a 16-acre commons from the foot of the Music Center down through the state and county buildings to City Hall. Broad has taken to calling it “our Central Park.”

Part of the $1.9-billion Grand Avenue project will be financed with the commercial and residential developments that will be fitted into the new plan’s footprint. The retail component sounds, unfortunately, like a typical suburban “lifestyle center” with the movie theaters and bookstores that are everywhere. This is probably good business, but it may be bad urban planning. I don’t know.

Nor do I know if it’s a good idea to have one man’s vision be the pivot on which a project of this importance will turn. It’s not that Broad has been anything less than public-spirited, in the way that immensely wealthy and willful men imagine they are public-spirited. When Broad makes things happen in L.A., he sees to it they happen in ways that reasonably satisfy him, which he understands, I guess, to be the common good. (The county art museum was going to be radically rebuilt. Instead, it’s getting a much tamer expansion -- and a new building/museum, with Broad’s name on it.)

Downtown is practically a museum of redevelopment plans gone wrong, missed opportunities and even more broken promises, so we need Broad. Someone has to wield power to get anything done, after all, which is what the old Committee of 25 did half a century ago in trying to turn its scandal-plagued and honky-tonk town into a real city.

The muffling velvet glove that Broad applies to get the things he wants is another habit of that other committee: cut the deal, name a developer, put him and the mayor in front of a glowing model and announce that the city finally has a heart.

Because neglectful Angelenos seem to have left the matter of the city’s heart up to Broad, perhaps we should try to inquire what’s in his.

When I was a boy in the 1950s, I used to make little cities in the sandy dirt of my mother’s garden. I’d spend afternoons with Danny Rogala, from the next block over, building rough approximations of the suburban boom going on around us. The little cities in my mother’s garden didn’t last. But making them over and over answered some longing Danny and I had to join in the great invention of Los Angeles.

Eli Broad -- the child of immigrants and the hard streets of the Bronx -- answered longings of his own in building tens of thousands of ordinary houses in suburban Los Angeles beginning in the 1960s. Afterward, he built an insurance company, a remarkable art collection and a commanding presence in the cultural and political life of the city.

Broad is a builder. That’s where his heart lies. I imagine he has seen his share of things passing away quickly, like sand houses in a garden. But Broad builds things that last in Los Angeles -- which is why more democracy and less willfulness in the planning process would be better.

He’s what we have, however -- a single steady heart to lead all our wayward ones.