Serendipity

Just recently, a business acquaintance suggested I would enjoy a meeting scheduled for a downtown Los Angeles hotel. I figured I’d go because the Museum of Contemporary Art is right down the street and I hadn’t been there for a while.

So off I went, braving rush-hour traffic, biting hard when I discovered it would cost me nearly $40 to park for the morning and doing my best to stay awake as the speaker droned on about something that wasn’t holding my interest as well as my friend thought it would. I was happy to note that I wasn’t that I wasn’t the only one whose focus was drifting: After a welcome mid-session coffee break, I headed out toward the museum and noticed that several other people from our group had settled on the same idea.

Once I stepped out of the hotel, however, I heard the unmistakable sound of moving water and sought it out, bee to a newly opened blossom, until I caught a glimpse of a large fountain/cascade in what I identified from its signage as California Plaza’s Water Court.

Before checking it out more closely, I doubled back to grab a camera I always have in my car and stepped toward the plaza on a path that led me behind the waterfeature. Perhaps because of the time of day (or maybe it had to do with the drought?), only the waterfalls were working when I swung around front – but even without any jets dancing in the foreground, it was still a wonderful space.

I learned later that the plaza had been established in 1992 as the surrounding buildings were being completed. Both the waterfall and the jet display came courtesy of WET Design of Sun Valley, Calif. – a name familiar in the world of water displays for everything from this relatively simple sort of installation to the mesmerizing fountains in front of the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

It’s a nice public space, with the back wall of the fountain structure cutting off traffic noise from above the sunken plaza and creating an amphitheater for live performances. The deck-jet terrace doubles as a stage for these concerts (with the water turned off, of course), and the area is ringed by built-in seating terraces. Quite a cool little space.

Even without the jumping jets (which can be seen in the videos linked below), I truly enjoyed my time there: The waterfall system reminded me in some ways of fountains by Lawrence Halprin, but with a sense of ocean waves built in through variations in the size of the falls. (This is a particularly angular perception of water flow that anyone who’s spent as much time at the beach as I have would recognize and appreciate right away.)

Downtown Los Angeles has been undergoing something of a renaissance of late, with people moving back to the core of the city after many, many years of heading the other way, to the city’s burgeoning suburbs. Speaking as one of those suburbanites, I’m happy with the way things are going downtown and like visiting spaces like the Water Court.

The next time you’re in town, stop on by – and please be advised that there are many cheaper places to park than the one I chose in my rush to get to a less-than-memorable meeting on time!