Urban History Association’s Opening Plenary - Brenda Levin's Remarks

David Myers: [...] In light of the way we frame this evening’s panel "Learning from Los Angeles — What Urban America Has to Learn from Los Angeles," we want to address a pair of interrelated questions: What is distinctive about Los Angeles as an urban experience and experiment? What does L.A. tell us—or teach us—about urban life at this critical moment in U.S. history?

[…] L.A. as a source of brilliant sunshine and dark dystopia, as a site of opportunity and a capital of housing carceralism, as once and future home of the Olympics, and as the hunting grounds of mass federal agents […] Without further ado...I’ll introduce our speakers.

First, someone who needs no introduction is Dr. Becky Nicolaides, one of L.A.’s leading historians, a consultant, and co-founder of History Studio, a partnership of award-winning scholars providing expert research, editing, and original content for the entertainment industry. She is the author of The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945, published last year. Becky has the impossible task of sketching the arc of L.A. urban history—told to me yesterday in nine minutes (ten, which is two more than other panels were given, because of the degree of difficulty).

Next, we’ll hear from Gustavo Arellano, one of L.A.’s great journalists…Gustavo was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary, and part of the team that won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting for coverage of the now-famous leaked audio recording that upended Los Angeles politics. He’s the author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, and the child of two Mexican immigrants, one who came to this country in the back of a truck and another in a shed. Gustavo tonight will trace the arc of L.A. culture, with a particular focus on the distinctive mix of peoples, cultures, and especially immigrants to the city.

Third, we’ll hear from Brenda Levin, the nationally renowned and award-winning architect and historic preservationist. Brenda and her firm, Levin & Associates Architects, have played a central role in the revitalization of many iconic buildings and properties in Los Angeles, including the Bradbury Building, L.A. City Hall, the Ford Amphitheater, Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Dodger Stadium, the Griffith Observatory, and Grand Central Market—to mention only a small number of her projects. Brenda will focus her remarks on the Griffith Observatory and Grand Central Market as case studies in the kind of public-private partnership that has shaped, and reshaped, the cultural and physical landscape of Los Angeles.

And last but not least, Raphael Sonenshein, recognized as one of the most astute observers of L.A. politics and governance for many years. Rafe was a professor in the California State system at Fullerton and then Cal State L.A., and the director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs. He’s both an award-winning scholar and a public servant, having served as Executive Director of the L.A. Charter Reform Commission. Since 2023, Rafe has served as the Executive Director of the John Randolph Haynes Foundation..

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Brenda Levin: Los Angeles is a city of reinvention, but it is also a city of memory written in stone, brick, and steel. Its built environment is not just physical; it is symbolic. Every building tells a story of who we were, who we are, and who we might become. My work has sat at the crossroads of those narratives—preserving icons of our past while adapting them to serve the needs of today. In Los Angeles, architecture is both record and prophecy.

From the Bradbury Building to City Hall, these structures hold the civic DNA of Los Angeles. Preserving them is not nostalgia. It’s maintaining a vocabulary of civic identity. When people around the world see the Bradbury on screen, City Hall, or the restored Wiltern Theater lit up on Wilshire, they see Los Angeles projecting itself as historic and cinematic… grounded and global.

Los Angeles is a city built by coalitions. Its architecture is never just brick and mortar—it’s the product of public purpose and private investment, of cultural memory and civic ambition. For my remarks tonight, I want to highlight two projects that capture this dynamic: the renovation and expansion of Griffith Observatory and the evolution of Grand Central Market. One is a public-private partnership; the other is a story of private reinvention. 

Together, they show us how Los Angeles builds—and rebuilds—itself.

When Griffith Observatory first opened in 1935, it was a civic gift: a place where Angelenos could come for free to look at the cosmos—and, in the process, at their own city. By the 1990s, after sixty-plus years of intense use and seventy million visitors, the building needed major infrastructure and programmatic upgrades, state-of-the-art equipment, and expansion. The concrete was cracking, the copper domes had weathered, the Hugo Ballin murals were deteriorating, and the systems were outdated.

The solution came not from the government alone, but from a coalition. The single most important guideline for the proposed work was that the Observatory continue to appear much as it had in 1935 from the city below and upon arriving at the building, with no visible impact from the building’s 40,000-square-foot expansion. 

The Griffith Observatory renovation and expansion were made possible by a combination of public funding and private philanthropy. In the 1990s, Los Angeles voters approved County and City bond measures that secured nearly $60 million. The Friends of the Observatory, founded in 1978 precisely to protect this landmark, stepped in to launch a private capital campaign. The Ahmanson Foundation, the Oschin Family Foundation, Leonard Nimoy and Susan Bay-Nimoy, among others, made transformative contributions totaling $30 million. The campaign ultimately raised over $90 million, combining City, County, State, Federal, and private funding, and that partnership secured the future of a well-loved, overused icon.

We restored the original 27,000-square-foot building and expanded the facility by excavating beneath the front lawn to create 40,000 square feet of new exhibition and education space (with Pfeiffer Partners). When it reopened in 2006, Griffith Observatory was not just restored. It was reimagined for the future.

Since then, millions more have visited. They come for the stars, but also for what the building represents: Los Angeles investing in its own civic identity. 

The restoration and expansion of Griffith Observatory renewed one of the world’s most famous astronomical institutions, creating a state-of-the-art civic facility for scientific education, research, and the joy of discovery. It re-energized a civic stage where Angelenos look out at the cosmos and, simultaneously, back at their city.

Now, let me contrast that with Grand Central Market. Since it opened in 1917, the Market has been an engine of private enterprise. Its stalls have mirrored Los Angeles’s waves of immigration: early on, German and Italian vendors; later, Latino grocers and food purveyors; and then Southeast Asian entrepreneurs. For over a century, it has been an immigrant entry point—a place where new Angelenos could launch a business with little more than family labor and a good recipe.

In 1984, when Ira Yellin purchased the Market from the Lyon family, we were retained as architects for the renovation and revitalization. Our role included developing the design guidelines for the 58 stalls, restoring vintage neon signage and designing new ones to match, repairing and reopening skylights that had been covered during World War II, and stripping away layers of prior modernizations to reveal the historic character.

There were many challenges: 58 individual business owners of varying ethnic backgrounds and native tongues; code enforcement for a building type that had no precedent; political hoops to jump through; and years upon years of deferred maintenance. While preserving the historic integrity of the Market and incorporating new vendors, we established a framework for its future.

In the last 40 years, Grand Central Market has become a case study in urban reinvention. Private investors saw an opportunity in its downtown location. They curated new tenants alongside legacy vendors. GCM has always been owned by family businesses whose sustained investment has enabled the Market to weather economic challenges. It has, however, suffered during the COVID shutdown and previous impacts of economic recessions, the writers’ strike, and now ICE raids that have challenged the vendors’ economic stability and are impacted by the reduced numbers of patrons—all part of a downtown decline in tourism and office occupancy.

In spite of those challenges, GCM remains vibrant and active through creative programming focused on sustaining legacy vendors while introducing new ones. Instagram and social media played a huge role as the Market became known for its food focus. In 2013, the opening of EggSlut on Broadway—in a stall vacant for ten years—generated an immediate influx of patrons and continues to draw a cross-section of Angelenos reflective of the city’s diversity.

There’s tension, of course: reinvestment brings the risk of displacement. But Grand Central Market demonstrates how private capital, when responsive to cultural demand, can sustain diversity and empower entrepreneurial spirit. It remains what it has always been—a living stage for Los Angeles’ changing demographics. It adapts. It endures.

Neither of these projects happened in isolation. They required coalitions: public and private partners, developers, cultural institutions, philanthropists, and city agencies. In Los Angeles, partnerships are not just financing mechanisms. They are civic engines of negotiation. They determine how the city balances preservation with innovation, equity with economics, and memory with progress.