William Fulton’s Tribute to Robert Maguire
Next American City | Tue, Jun 3rd, 2008 | Category: Report | City: Los Angeles | Tags: building, los angeles, downtown, california, architects, next american city, development, robert maguire, william fulton
“Almost 30 years ago, a young developer named Robert Maguire III came up with an audacious proposal for the greatest development project never built in downtown Los Angeles.
Responding to a request from the Community Redevelopment Agency for a plan for Bunker Hill, Maguire put together a team that included most of the leading architects and planners of the day. His idea was to combine a reconstruction of Bunker Hill’s historic urban fabric—complete with apartment buildings cascading down alongside the Angels Flight funicular railroad—with a few office towers.
Everybody agreed “A Grand Avenue,” as the proposal was named, was a spectacular plan for urban redevelopment. As a mixed-use and urban project, it was way ahead of its time. But nobody believed that Maguire had the financial wherewithal to pull it off. The CRA instead gave the project to Metropolitan Structures, then a leading developer of high-rise offices. It went on to build the prosaic California Plaza—and went bankrupt doing so.”
But no matter. Maguire had made his presence known—and it wasn’t long before he set the tone for big-time development in L.A. in the 1980s. He was largely responsible for the downtown office landscape, which set the table for today’s condominium building boom. And although Maguire’s era of downtown office development has long since passed, his idea of combining business and civic activities in one project—and one complicated deal—lives on ...
-William Fulton, L.A. Times
Read the rest of Fulton’s article pm Robert Maguire here.
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