Bringing Back Broadway
City councilmember Jose Huizar launched Bringing Back Broadway, a “ten year vision,” in January 2008. The initiative promised to “revitalize the corridor, activate the theaters” and usher in a streetcar system by 2014. Restorative nostalgia characterizes the visual rhetoric the initiative’s campaign used primarily to convince the voting residents of Downtown Los Angeles of what the street could (or did) look like. This is in great contrast to what it looks like now, and has looked like for the past forty years or so. What sense of place is Bringing Back Broadway attempting to preserve? Its projections of the American dream of a “real downtown” are meant to replace the vernacular streetscapes and economies that once thrived in Downtown Los Angeles, and in so doing preserved the city’s structures from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. The district’s city boosters conveniently ignore this legacy.
