Philanthropist Eli Broad Envisions L.A. as World-Class Cultural Center

Through his philanthropy and political activism, Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad has set an ambitious agenda for change in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reports.

In recent conversations with the Times, Broad, who built his fortune in home building and insurance, sketched a vision for a grander, more sophisticated Los Angeles, one distinguished by its public architecture and cultural affairs, and deserving to be ranked — alongside New York, Paris, and London — as one of the great cultural centers on the planet.

Broad arrived in L.A. in 1963 and found a city with only a handful of cultural heavyweights and few defining cultural monuments. "There was no great opera," he said, "no great symphony hall, no modern art museums, no Getty." Inspired by his wife Edythe, he started collecting art, and by the end of the 1970s had become a major art and architecture patron as well as the first chairman of the city's Museum of Contemporary Art. It was his work on downtown's Disney Hall, however, that firmly established him as a civic leader. Broad turned around what had been a project on the ropes into an icon of Los Angeles architecture and a monument to the city's revival. "People thought it was a black hole," he said of early fundraising efforts for the Disney Hall project. "Instead, it became a rallying point for people to get involved."

To build on that civic momentum, Broad argues that the city needs a premier institution its leaders will want to serve, much as the Metropolitan Museum of Art does in New York, and he sees the Los Angeles County Museum of Art taking on the role. To that end, he is recruiting younger members to the LACMA board and helped acquire a major donation for the museum from British Petroleum, signaling BP's return to local philanthropy. When BP bought Arco, one of the city's most reliable civic participants, and moved its headquarters out of town, the company's support for local arts evaporated. That trend seems to have been reversed, in part because of Broad, and LACMA is a chief beneficiary.

Neither reticent nor modest about his achievements, Broad told the Times that downtown L.A. is well on its way to being recast in his vision, and that the city's civic landscape may well bear his imprint for generations. "I don't think that would have happened," he adds, "without my doggedness."

Newton, Jim. “The Broad View of L.A..” Los Angeles Times 8/27/07.

Primary Subject: Community Improvement/Development
Location(s): California, Los Angeles, San Francisco

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