Results tagged “brenda levin” from Ron Kaye L.A.

In a dramatic last-minute shift, Councilman Jose Huizar proposed a "prenuptial agreement" that would require the Autry National Center to renovate the Southwest Museum in Mt. Washington and operate it as a living museum as part of its lease agreement with the city for its planned expansion in Griffith Park.

It wasn't clear that Huizar's Solomon-like "splitting the baby" proposal fully pleased either of the warring parties.

The Autry took over the Southwest and its vast collection of artifacts of the Old West in 2003 at a time when the city's oldest museum was in disrepair and had suffered years of mismanagement  It has spent $7 million on repairs to the century-old facility and promised to restore it but refused to enter into a binding agreement.

Eastside activists have waged an intense campaign to block the Autry's 79,,000 square-foot expansion that would more than double the size of its Griffith Park museum and demanded that the Southwest be fully restored  and operated as the main site for display of the collection of 250,000 artifacts.

On Tuesday afternoon before an overflow crowd in the City Council chambers, the years-long fight came to a head before the five-member Board of Referred Powers.

"While I believe that the Autry is acting in good faith when it says it is committed to renovating the Southwest Museum, I think the community deserves to have a binding commitment in writing to ensure that they and future generations enjoy one of Los Angeles most treasured
cultural institutions," said Huizar, who represents the area.

The board -- Janice Hahn, Ed Reyes, Bernard Parks, Bill Rosendahl and Tony Cardenas -- gave Huizar four weeks to negotiate the agreement with a firm timeline for the Southwest's
reopening.

Here's a report from the meeting by OurLA.org writer Chris Rowe, a West Hills Neighborhood Council member:

At the start of the meeting, it was announced that Councilmember Huizar wanted to speak first. And the feeling from the "Friends of the Southwest" was one of fear. Would this Councilmember ask his colleagues to support the Autry.

 

In a surprise to everyone present (Friends of the Southwest), and the mood was one of disbelief, Huizar spoke about a document signed by the Autry that promised to protect both museums. He stated that he wanted a " Prenuptial Agreement" -- a very finely crafted document that was airtight that would protect the Southwest Museum and its contents from being taken by the Autry for the purposes of creating the grander "Autry National Center" at Griffith Park.

 

The Autry's representatives stated that this hearing had only to do with the EIR for the Autry  - and nothing to do with the Southwest Museum. They believe that what the future of the Autry is will have no negative impact on the Southwest Museum at all.

 

Brenda Levin, the architect for the expansion of the Autry gave a beautiful presentation of the renderings of the future museum in Griffith Park. Levin spoke about how this beautiful modern museum of glass would blend with the landscape and incorporate the most modern of designs that fit the concept of "Green Building". As she spoke about how this glass structure was more natural -- I was thinking: "How much more natural can you be than the adobe of the Southwest?"

 

VICA's president Stuart Waldman and many friends of the Autry spoke in favor of the expansion at the Griffith Park site.

 

Native Americans -- including Rudy Ortega Jr. of the Tataviam tribe -- favored the Autry. At least five representatives from different Native American groups said the Autry would be a place where more small children would learn about their Native American cultures and the history of these people and the missions in the area.

 

Daniel Wright of the Friends of the Southwest spoke about the need to protect the Southwest Collection -- to keep it at the Southwest intact. He said Levin had created a rendering of an expansion of the Southwest on its current site prior to being hired to design the expanded  Autry. A great deal of fuss had been made about the many projects that Llevin had designed throughout the City.

UPDATE: The Cultural Heritage Commission will consider a proposal today from the Griffith J. Griffith Charitable Trust to designate Griffith Park as an historic-cultural monument to protect it from city efforts to develop it. The great-grandson of the man who donated the park to the city in 1896 will make the presentation at a hearing at 10 a.m. in Room 1010 at City Hall.

This is a complicated story of promises betrayed, public trust trampled and ethics ignored -- the kind of things that take place every day, in one way or another, when the city's people stand in the way of the politics of City Hall.

It is the stuff that sleepless nights are made of for ordinary citizens trying to preserve what's good in their communities, the stuff that happy paydays are made of for those on the inside of a bankrupt political culture.

It sweeps in priceless American Indian artifacts and the city's oldest museum, the giveaway of public money to private interests, the corruption of the Griffith family's gift of a great "people's park" to the city and the web of insider relationships that are so much a part of L.A.'s "Chinatown" history.

Mostly, it's the story of what's killing L.A., the story of leaders that operate in secret and put private interests ahead of publc interests, the theme that runs through the heart of L.A.'s history for 150 years, and of the disregard for the needs, values and interests of local communities.

The focal point of this particular drama is the Southwest Museum campus in the Mt. Washington-Highland Park area where community activists are battling the Autry Museum which has assembled a high-powered team that includes respected architect Brenda Levin, the high-powered lobbying firm Latham & Watkins and PR man Steve Sugerman, the City Hall insider convicted in the DWP/Fleishman-Hillard scandal.

"The fight to save the museum is at the crossroads where politics meets culture in Los Angeles," says Daniel Wright, the local attorney who helped the effort to preserve this community treasure for years and with activist Mark Kenyon has put together a remarkable website called The Biggest Black Hat in the West..The Autry National Museum's Theft of the Southwest Museum."

There was an astonishing collision at that crossroads at a 4 1/2-hour hearing on Monday on Autry's plan to expand dramatically in Griffith Park and put the Southwest to death as a museum a century after it was born as the heart of the area's identity.

Autry CEO John Gray declared at the hearing he had "saved the Southwest, and put a plan in place to make it viable on a day to day basis."

But not as a museum. Instead, its collection -- worth between $300 million and $1 billion, far more than the Autry's --  will be put on display in the expanded Autry's proposed "Southwest Galleries."

To many in the audience, the plan to save the Southwest Museum dropped like a bombshell: The public will pay the bill to end the Southwest's life as a museum.

Under an extraordinary deal, the Los Angeles Community College District quietly agreed to use money from its $3.5 billion bond issue on the Nov. 4 ballot to renovate the Southwest Museum and use it as a satellite campus, thus relieving those costs from the financially-burdened Autry.

The deal was cut without community involvement or discussion and inserted as a line item in the bond issue by College Trustee Mona Field, according to the Arroyo Seco Journal.

"The bond measure plan came as a surprise to participants" at the City Hall hearing, it reported.

Members of the Friends of the Southwest Museum Coalition pleaded that the Autry's 2003 takeover of the Southwest contained a commitment to keep the museum and its collection together and the building's conversion to a school "could jeopardize the Southwest Museum's position on the National Register of Historic Places," said historian Charles Fisher.

Coalition co-chair Nicole Possert, a preservationist, told the hearing officer:  "The Southwest is an icon that can once again be lifted to the level of the Observatory: "When the taxpayers paid for a Gold Line Southwest Station, they were not paying for an educational facility, they were paying for an (active) museum."

The Black Hat blog headlined the latest twist in the plot this way: Coalition Reveals Autry Plan to Shift Costs to Rehabilitate SW Museum to Los Angles Taxpayers.

"This bait and switch by the Autry demonstrates a reckless disregard for its fiduciary duties to operate the Southwest Museum as a separately identified and independently run museum institution," they wrote in a post today.

The Autry's website took a decidedly different view of the situation in a posting under a small banner promo labeled "A New Plan."

"The City of Los Angeles and the Autry National Center have begun an important public review process for the Autry's plan to modernize and reconfigure its Griffith Park facility. The modernization plan provides greater access to larger segments of the collection, especially the Southwest Museum Collection, which has been hidden from the public for decades."

The drama over the Southwest Museum goes back to the 1990s when it fell on hard times and no one paid much attention until the Autry made its play, boasting that it had $100 million in assets and would come to the rescue and restore the Southwest's glory.

Activists claim that the Autry inflated its assets 25-fold and actually had less in assets than the Southwest. They have filed complaints with the state board that regulates accountants over the financial statements the Autry used and with the City Ethics Commission against PR man Steve Sugerman.

The Black Hat blog tells the back story of what unfolded: