DOWNTOWN: "The long, arduous task of bringing professional football back to Los Angeles only seems to get more convoluted with each passing day. In March, the Anschutz Entertainment Group, one of the country's biggest developers, announced it was in negotiations with the NFL to build a $400-million, 74,000-seat stadium in downtown Los Angeles that would one day serve as the home of the city's first NFL team since the Raiders returned to Oakland in 1995." That's the beginning of a June 2002 LA Times story written by then-architecture critic Nicolai Ourousoff.
Ourousoff goes on: "A suspicious public wanted to know who would foot the bill. Last month, Mayor Jim Hahn said taxpayers would be in the clear and that the developer would cover the entire cost of the project. Then on Friday, just as the city began to breath a collective sign of relief and turn its attention back to the Lakers, L.A. Coliseum officials announced that they would be spending up to $1 million to develop their own alternate proposal for a football stadium, infuriating AEG, which claimed it could derail its plan." More familiar LA themes (and this is pre-LA Live) can be found in the rest of his piece, available via this link. [Curbed Staff]
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