Latest news with #OceanwidePlaza
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Downtown L.A.'s Graffiti Towers Featured in New Tony Hawk Video Game Remake
Downtown L.A.'s most infamous unfinished skyscrapers have found an unexpected second life — as a backdrop in a video gameOceanwide Plaza, the trio of half-built towers next to Arena, appears to be making a digital cameo in the upcoming Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4. According to Time Out, in a newly released video promoting the game's Los Angeles level, a graffiti-covered high-rise looms in the real Oceanwide Plaza was supposed to be a $1 billion luxury complex with condos, hotels, and high-end shopping. Construction started in 2015 but stalled in 2019 after the Chinese developer ran out of funding. Since then, the towers have sat unfinished The towers gained national attention in 2023 when about 27 floors were tagged with graffiti. While city officials initially promised to remove the tags, the graffiti remains more than a year later, turning Oceanwide into an accidental the game, the towers appear as part of a larger digital homage to L.A., which also includes a recreation Miracle Mile's El Rey Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4, which launches July 11, will be previewed during a livestream event hosted at the El Rey on May 8. The invite-only THPS Fest will feature performances by Danny Brown, Lupe Fiasco, Adolescents, and Urethane. Whether Oceanwide Plaza will be cleaned up, demolished or left untouched by the time the 2028 Olympics arrive in Los Angeles remains to be seen. For now, the towers remain standing, and now, part of the Tony Hawk universe. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 releases July 11 across a variety of video game platforms, including Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Steam.
Time Out
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Downtown L.A.'s infamous graffiti towers are being immortalized in a new Tony Hawk game
Oh, Oceanwide Plaza… The trio of Arena –adjacent towers began construction a decade ago, but stalled out in 2019 when its developer ran out of money. Then, early least year, the windows of about 27 floors were tagged with very visible graffiti—and, despite the L.A. City Council initially saying it would clean up the buildings, they still remain all tagged up. Now, these monuments to Downtown L.A.'s slump are about to be immortalized in a video game. The graffiti towers' appearance is actually part of a much more upbeat announcement: The Los Angeles-inspired level in the upcoming Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 will include a detailed recreation of Miracle Mile's much-loved El Rey Theatre. Thanks to a collaboration between publisher Activision and promoter AEG Presents, both Goldenvoice and the Roxy will have billboards in the level, as well. But the announcement footage for the El Rey's inclusion came with one unmissable detail: a graffiti-covered skyscraper looming in the background that looks unmistakably like the beleaguered Oceanwide Plaza buildings. If you're wondering what a Mid-Wilshire theater is doing next to a DTLA high-rise, the remake of the early-aughts skateboarding game's L.A. level is kind of a pastiche of local landmarks. (And the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 didn't include the El Rey in that space but an adult movie theater instead.) Pershing Square's purple tower is immediately recognizable, as is the Biltmore across the street and the car wash by L.A. Live. You can also spot the U.S. Bank Tower, the L.A. Central Library and some fictional earthquake-damaged freeway overpasses. The latest Tony Hawk remake releases on July 11, but ahead of that on May 8, there'll be a livestream hosted out of the El Rey to reveal more information about the game—with performances from Danny Brown, Lupe Fiasco, Adolescents and Urethane, no less. (We've reached out to Activision to find out if average Angelenos can purchase tickets to the in-person event, which has been dubbed THPS Fest.) You'll find plenty of folks musing online about whether Oceanwide Plaza will be scrubbed of graffiti or demolished altogether by the time the 2028 Olympics arrive in L.A. But, you know, worst case, these Tony Hawk remakes have suddenly made us realize that— forget the Sepulveda Basin —L.A.'s abandoned graffiti towers just might be the perfect place to stage Olympic skateboarding.
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
During a Housing Crisis, Graffitied Buildings Expose the Cruelty of Excess
In Los Angeles, artistic takeovers of abandoned high rises and mansions force us to ask a crucial question: why aren't empty buildings being used? The Oceanwide Plaza complex, a $1.2 billion ultraluxury development in Los Angeles, if built to completion would have included three towers—a hotel with residences, and two 40-story residential towers containing nearly 500 condominiums—located right across the street from the city's downtown convention center. In 2019, when the Beijing-based developer Oceanwide Holdings Co. axed their involvement, the construction site went dormant, save for a few guests in the spring 2024: as the site's three towers languished, graffiti artists ("taggers") took to making it their own. Across all three of the 40-plus-story buildings, they scrawled their tags, some as tall as 12 stories. But it didn't stop there: In September, three single-family mansions across the city's wealthy enclaves were reported to be covered in graffiti—some with similar tags. The first two, both located about five miles apart in the Hollywood Hills, are owned by film producer John Powers Middleton. On Mulholland Drive, neighbors told CBS that the house had been vacant for years and was hosting squatters; NBC reported that the second Middleton home on Sunset Plaza Drive, which was for sale at $21.5 million, had been cited for vacancy and abandonment eight times since 2022 before media outlets took notice of the vandalism. Shortly after, reads another CBS story, a third mansion in Lower Bel Air partially owned by Osama bin Laden's half-brother was "nearly covered in spray paint at every square inch." These are two different scenarios: both are financial failures, yet at first glance, one might reveal the problems of offshore investors, and the other simply a local nuisance. Maybe it was some type of schadenfreude but, especially in the case of the Oceanwide towers, the internet took great delight. The glitzy Oceanwide project that critic and Dwell contributor Mimi Zeiger called "another entry in the junkspace haze of supermodernism"—a reference to Rem Koolhaas's tirade about the death of architecture—became "a collective resistance to the banal aesthetics of market-rate capitalism" after being graffiti bombed. Yet as graffiti pops up in neighborhoods where highly desirable single-family homes sit empty during a massive housing crisis, graffiti, so often depicted as evidence of decay, points to our country's limited access to basic human dignity through housing. Vacancy becomes about excess, not deprivation. It's nothing particularly novel; graffiti has historically contested the idea of ownership and belonging. Ismael Illescas, a scholar and professor of Ethnic Studies at Chabot College, documented Southern California's history of "street writing" in his dissertation, "Between Art and Crime: Graffiti and Street Art in Neoliberal Los Angeles," noting that some of the earliest street writing in the 20th century came from predominantly Mexican American youth; in the 1930s, those working as shoe shiners "marked their territory by drawing their names on the walls where they worked in East Los Angeles." Through his ethnographic and historical research, his work asserts that graffiti became a way for young Black and Latinx artists—those he says are, "marginalized, ostracized, and invisibilized"—to "assert their dignity" when upward social mobility is limited. Dignity has also been a critical point when addressing housing shortages. In L.A., reports that the median home price is currently $1.2 million; a 2023 report by The Angeleno Project shows that the city is short 270,000 affordable units. Perhaps the anticipated 500-plus Oceanwide condos—a project that came with zero affordable units—called attention to the dignity gap inherent in housing today. L.A. critic Carolina Miranda told Scripps News that the subsequent tagging "draw[s] attention not just to the fact that the building is abandoned, but everything in the system that led it to be abandoned." Here, I assume that she's not just addressing the developer's financial woes, but the development ecosystem at large. Building more housing is a net good, until that housing is inaccessible for even those with a median income, which in L.A. was clocked at $79,700 in 2023. At Oceanwide, not even a jaded trickle-down ethos could yield confidence in a bloated project. So when the graffiti bombs spread months later to L.A.'s wealthy, residential neighborhoods, it was surprising—only insofar as that vacancy took on new meaning. For those who occupy neighborhoods that have histories of urban renewal property razing or postindustrial neglect, vacancy is a residue of disinvestment, the result of resource extraction and systematized impoverishment. In these places, blight, which has been characterized as everything from trash overflows to graffiti to buildings in bad shape, becomes a moniker for racialized poverty. But the problem of vacancy looks different in these L.A. neighborhoods. The Vacancy Report, assembled by the Alliance for Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), reports that there were 93,000 units sitting vacant in 2017; 46,400 vacant units are not on the market and are being used as investment properties, vacation homes, or are otherwise being held off the market while owners wait for property values to rise. Real policy solutions for the problem of speculative investments exist, like vacancy taxes which can collect funds for affordable housing by taxing such vacation and investment properties. But unlike vacancy under disinvestment that yields large-scale dilapidation, vacancy created by excess wealth flies under the radar, hiding amongst maintained mansions and glassy towers. For these three private mansions, excess is the blight—the graffiti just pointed it out. It's an exciting evolution for graffiti itself as the art form morphs from claiming the right to space to asserting the right to housing, teasing out the ironies and injustices of our current market. These private homes will surely someday sell—the Oceanwide towers are for sale (for an undisclosed amount)—but whoever picks up the properties might do so with an understanding that wealth can create its own problems. Perhaps less fan-crazed than Luigi Mangione's one-trick move for class warfare (and far less violent), the art of tagging is in this moment symbolizes the widening gap between the rich and poor, the need for dignified housing, and the problems of speculation, all with style. Top photo of an abandoned mansion in Hollywood covered in graffiti byRelated Reading: Well-Designed Low-Income Housing Is Possible Yarn Bombing Uses Knitting as a Public Art Form
