Los Angeles opens 'Grand Park' downtown

This week Los Angeles is unveiling its most significant open space project in the city's downtown.

A 12-acre area of downtown between City Hall and the city's music center that was previously parking lots and small pieces of public spaces got a $56 million makeover. And now the first section of the park opens tomorrow to the public. The Los Angeles Times reports on the impact the park is expected to have on L.A.'s downtown:

The park opens to a transformed downtown, where over the last decade or so thousands of residents have moved in, creating a vibrant scene of restaurants, shops and galleries.

To city leaders, Grand Park provides this new community with much-needed open space, a respite from the grind of city life as well as a hub for community events. They also hope it will play a big role in downtown's future growth, helping spur more development in the area and create more of a residential feel.

Will this park be L.A.'s High Line Park in New York or Millennium Park in Chicago? That's yet to be seen. But Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times' architecture critic, says that while parts of the design leave more to be desired, the park is "an attempt, imperfect but encouraging, to chip away at the rigid infrastructure of the car-dominated city and make a private city a little more public."

Check out this video tour of the park here.

Image courtesy of Los Angeles County

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com