2010
ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA
41st Mayor of Los Angeles
THE BROAD
Growing up on the Eastside of Los Angeles, nearby downtown had always loomed large in my life. As a young boy, I would take the bus there: to the YMCA, to Broadway where I shined shoes, and to the Olympic Auditorium where I sold La Opinión, L.A.’s Spanish-language daily. Other cities around the world have their best cultural institutions in their centers, while our downtown had seen its best years in the late 1950s and early 60s. I never forgot that. When I became mayor in 2005, I wanted downtown Los Angeles to be the city’s arts and cultural center once again.
Having known Eli Broad for decades, I knew he felt the same way. He had been a longtime and avid booster of our city center, and we had worked together in securing state funds for the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Grand Avenue in the late 1990s. At that time I was Speaker of the California State Assembly, and Eli convinced me that the state should invest $10 million in the hall.
So you can imagine how surprised I was when I read early one morning on the front page of the Los Angeles Times that he was going to build his namesake museum—in Santa Monica. I called him immediately and said, “Why not downtown L.A.? Your museum belongs on Grand Avenue.”
Eli replied, “Life’s too short.”
I knew what he meant. Developing Grand Avenue had been a challenge for Los Angeles civic leaders for a long time. Everyone in town had their own vision of what to put where, and every other block was owned by a different government—city or county. The Grand Avenue Project, which would have included housing and retail on the block across from Disney Hall, had stalled because of the recession.
Eli, who had helped create the Grand Avenue Project, believed the bureaucracy would be impossible to navigate. I asked him to give it a chance and sit down with us to discuss the possibilities. By the end of the day, we had a deal.
When Eli decides to do something, he moves fast. He promised me the museum would open by the end of my term in 2013. He would be off by a couple years, but we still had plenty to cheer that year. The steel frame of the museum was going up on the corner of Grand Avenue and Second Street. On one of those beautiful, sunny, only-in-L.A. January days, I joined Eli, Edye, and several dozen members of Ironworkers Local 433 to celebrate and to put our signatures on the final steel beam.
Since its opening in September 2015, The Broad has welcomed millions of visitors from the Valley to the Bay to my old neighborhood on the Eastside and everywhere in between. Those visitors have been far more diverse and a lot younger than the average museum-going audience. That’s a testament to how open, welcoming, and accessible The Broad is to everyone, and how much the art of our time matters to young people of all backgrounds. I think back to when I was growing up on the Eastside, how hard it would have been to find my way to a museum and then afford a ticket. The Broad has made it possible for any Angeleno to make the short trek downtown—by bus, train, or car—and walk into a museum to find the world’s greatest contemporary art.