Bigfoot Is Coming

   Having had its way, more or less, in Brentwood, the Getty Trust is now throwing its weight around in Pacific Palisades. 
   It wants to turn its small, idiosyncratic “villa” into what sounds like a thoroughly conventional, commercial entertainment complex -- with two large restaurants -- one indoor and one outdoor -- with a liquor license, a 3,000 square foot bookstore and a 650-900-seat outdoor amphitheater. 
   And it proposes situating this thoroughly conventional, commercial entertainment complex in the middle of a residential neighborhood just off the Pacific Coast Highway. It’s hard to imagine a less likely site. Anyone who drives PCH knows that it’s already at capacity. And the neighborhood and the adjacent wild canyons and trails would be forever altered and diminished by the addition of a big commercial development. 
   Given all that, one would assume that the Los Angeles City Planners and the Planning Commission would reject the Getty plan in a blink, but, as we have seen too often, common sense, logic and concern for the integrity of neighborhoods or residents’ well-being are in very short supply in City Hall. In apparent lockstep with Getty, city officials have thus far overcome sense and logic to give the guys on the hill their way. 
   Getty’s motives are equally tawdry. J. Paul Getty was famously greedy, and stingy. But the Getty Trust just built the $1 billion Getty Center and still has about $5 billion in the bank. Why does it want to turn its little gem of a museum into a big, bustling commercial entertainment complex? 
The answer is as simple as it is discouraging. It’s doing it because it can. 
   Here and now, non-profit institutions are at least as ambitious and aggressive and rapacious as any for-profit corporation. Therefore, the guys on the hill can’t look at the villa as an odd, charming curiosity which they should simply preserve. They are driven by their own egos and, possibly, old J. Paul’s ghost, to turn it into a profit center -- at the expense of their neighbors. 
   Opponents of the Getty plan have been labeled anti-culture, philis-tines who care nothing for the finer, nobler things of life. That, of course, is bunk. This struggle isn’t about culture. It’s about real estate, and money, and power. 
   And we should all wish the plan opponents Godspeed. Because, here and now, the Getty Trust is looking more and more like Bigfoot. Having squashed a mountain in Brentwood, if this Bigfoot succeeds in stepping on a Palisades neighborhood, there may be no stopping him. 

The Doris Day Spot

   Angelenos, meaning everyone in the great L.A. nation, dream big, and their dreams are as various as they are, but they almost all begin the day with the same small prayer: may I have the Doris Day spot everywhere I go today? 
   As anyone knows who’s been here for more than five minutes, the “Doris Day spot” is the parking place that’s literally at the door of your destination. In some circles, it’s more cherished than the Oscar or the Emmy because to find it right there where and when you want is not simply convenient, it’s a sign. Today, the Doris Day spot, tomorrow the world. 
   Parking spaces are so coveted that more than a dozen members of the UCLA football team risked fines, jailtime, ridicule and disgrace by using ill-got handicap parking placards. 
   Parking, or the lack thereof, may be the most vexing issue of the day in Santa Monica. Week after week, troops of people appear before the City Council to ask for parking relief. And week after week, the Council listens sympathetically and grants them relief, in the form of preferential parking. 
   At its August meeting, the Wilshire/Montana Neighborhood Coalition cut right to the chase and approved a motion to turn the the entire neighborhood -- from Wilshire to Montana and Ocean Avenue to 21st Street -- into a mega-preferential parking district. If the Coalition has its way, presumably all the members of all the churches and synagogues in the area, all the older students at all the schools and all their parents would have to park either south of Wilshire or north of Montana and hike back from there. 
   Naturally, this massive vehicular shift would cause Mid-City Neighbors (to the south) and the North Of Montana Association to petition for preferential parking district designation, too. 
   Where will it all end? People are not ready to abandon their cars, much less abandon their quest for the Doris Day spot and no matter how much residents cherish the streets where they live, they do not own them, and the City is running out of neighborhoods into which it can shunt cars.
   We don’t know where or how it’ll end, but it might begin with the City’s requiring businesses to either provide off-street parking for their employees or give them a parking allowance, which would enable them to park in commercial garages or lots.