Why Grand Performances matters.
Grand Performances is a boundary-crossing performing arts series where Bunker Hill's cultural concentration meets free outdoor music, dance, theater and poetry shaped by Los Angeles communities and artists from across the world.
Set within California Plaza along South Grand Avenue near West 4th Street and just steps from the Colburn School, the performance site occupies a sunken public plaza between the glass towers of One California Plaza and Two California Plaza. Arthur Erickson's California Plaza plan organized office towers, terraces, stairs and elevated public areas across the Bunker Hill slope, with the performance plaza forming a substantial open-air room between the surrounding high-rises. The original Watercourt incorporated a 1.5-acre urban garden and a two-tiered WET Design water feature descending 17 feet through terraces toward a lower pool, with performance areas integrated directly into the composition. A 2019 redevelopment designed by Gensler removed the broad central pond and replaced it with lawn, planting, trees, seating and a larger usable audience area, eliminating a 43-foot separation that had divided the principal stage from spectators. The result is an outdoor performance setting whose tower enclosure, terraced Bunker Hill position, inherited stage infrastructure and redesigned central lawn give large public concerts an architectural presence distinct from a conventional amphitheater.
What defines Grand Performances.
Grand Performances is best known for building one of Southern California's longest-running programs of free performing arts from a redevelopment initiative conceived to bring public cultural activity to Bunker Hill. The City of Los Angeles and its Community Redevelopment Agency conceived the program during the district's late twentieth-century redevelopment, with Mayor Tom Bradley's administration supporting the use of performing arts as a public component of the new downtown complex. Metropolitan Structures hired Community Arts Resources in 1988 to develop a seven-year performance plan for California Plaza, and CARS principals Aaron Paley and Aaron Slavin devised its programming direction, governance, financing strategy and long-term support through tenant contributions. CARS then curated and co-produced Celebrations, staging 77 free lunchtime music and dance concerts in the Spiral Court during 1989 and 1990 with Los Angeles performers alongside national and international groups. Michael Alexander arrived from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs in 1990 after seeking a new site for the city's evening programming, bringing those events into California Plaza and later leading Grand Performances for decades. The program developed into an independent nonprofit presenter spanning music, dance, theater, spoken word and other forms, eventually serving more than one million people through performances, workshops, master classes and audience programs. The Association of Performing Arts Presenters honored Grand Performances with its William Dawson Award for Programmatic Excellence in 2000, placing the Los Angeles organization among recipients recognized for exceptional approaches to presenting artists. Four decades after its inception, the California Arts Council characterizes Grand Performances as Southern California's longest-running presenter of free performing arts, with early career appearances by Ozomatli, La Santa Cecilia and Kamasi Washington among the stages in its institutional history.
Programming across those decades has repeatedly connected live performance with specific histories and musical communities across Los Angeles. A 2011 production titled A Night at the Phillips Music Company examined the Boyle Heights store that sold instruments and music spanning Latin jazz, Cuban mambo, classical repertoire, rock and Yiddish swing from the 1930s through the 1980s; Little Willie G., Ollin, Ruben Guevara, members of Hiroshima, La Santa Cecilia and Ceci Bastida participated in the event. Grand Performances joined Los Angeles Opera in 2010 for the company's first outdoor screening, drawing more than 2,500 people to a presentation of Daniel Catán's Il Postino recorded earlier that day at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, followed by an appearance from Plácido Domingo. Federal arts support underwrote another ambitious strand: by 2017 the organization had received $576,125 through 19 National Endowment for the Arts grants since 2000, supporting projects across multiple disciplines. One $35,000 NEA award supported L.A. Aftershocks, a multidisciplinary series tied to the 1965 Watts uprising through music, theater, dance and new media. The 2013 season brought Brazilian maracatu ensemble Estrela Brilhante to Los Angeles after preparatory workshops trained more than 40 professional and pre-professional drummers on authentic alfaias, extending an international booking into local musical instruction. That same year, Stevie Wonder appeared unannounced with Ozomatli during Songs in the Key of L.A., a Grand Performances production built around early Los Angeles sheet music held by the Los Angeles Public Library. The organization reached its 40th season in 2026 with another summer of free programming at California Plaza, extending a presenting history that has linked international artists, emerging Los Angeles musicians and locally rooted cultural projects across four decades.
How Grand Performances fits.
Grand Performances works as the anchor for a Bunker Hill outing connecting the neighborhood's surviving incline railway, contemporary art institution-building and one of Downtown's most celebrated nineteenth-century commercial interiors.
Begin at Angels Flight, where Civil War veteran Colonel James Ward Eddy secured city approval in May 1901 for an incline railway beside the new Third Street Tunnel and began construction that August. The railway opened on December 31 with more than 2,000 passengers traveling between Hill and Olive streets, and a 1905 rebuilding placed its two cars on a trestle carrying them along a continuous grade. A station house and Hill Street arch followed in 1908, and engineer Robert Moore managed the railway for 38 years beginning in 1914 before purchasing it himself in 1946. Redevelopment dismantled the line in 1969; its cars remained in storage for 27 years before service resumed at a new alignment in 1996, with the upper station incorporated into California Plaza. Continue to MOCA Grand Avenue, where Japanese architect Arata Isozaki designed the museum's permanent Bunker Hill home, completed in 1986. The building opened with Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986, an exhibition distributed across the new Grand Avenue galleries and MOCA's existing Temporary Contemporary facility. Isozaki developed the building with references to classical architecture and Los Angeles popular culture, placing much of the museum below street level and using geometric volumes, red sandstone and pyramidal skylights to give the institution a distinctive architectural presence on Grand Avenue. MOCA's arrival embedded a purpose-built contemporary art museum within the same redevelopment district that was simultaneously acquiring major office towers and public cultural spaces. Conclude at Bradbury Building, commissioned by mining and real-estate magnate Lewis Bradbury and opened in 1893. Bradbury first hired Sumner P. Hunt, then transferred responsibility to Hunt's young draftsman George H. Wyman, who supervised construction of the five-story commercial building. Behind its restrained Romanesque Revival exterior, a 50-foot interior court concentrates open-cage elevators, marble stairs, ornate ironwork and abundant natural light into one of downtown's most distinctive surviving Victorian interiors. The building later appeared in films including Double Indemnity, Blade Runner and The Artist, and a major restoration during the early 1990s formed part of the Grand Central Square project. The progression moves from Eddy's surviving transportation link to Isozaki's purpose-built institution for contemporary art and culminates in Bradbury and Wyman's nineteenth-century commercial interior, tracing three radically different chapters in the architectural and cultural development surrounding Bunker Hill.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Enjoy editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
Foresyte may earn a commission when you book.
