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Eli Broad between the Broad museum and Walt Disney Concert Hall.Credit Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — As Eli Broad prepares for the Sept. 20 opening of his self-named, self-financed $140 million art museum on Grand Avenue, he faces a branding challenge, among others.

Long the most powerful philanthropist in town, Mr. Broad has made it his mission to transform this stretch of downtown into the sort of tourist-worthy “museum mile,” or arts center, that enriches other cities. He has helped to create two leading institutions here, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and written sizable checks to neighbors like the Los Angeles Opera. His new museum, the Broad, with its blue-chip collection of contemporary art and free admission, is expected to draw large crowds.

Yet Mr. Broad’s decades-in-the-making vision for turning Grand Avenue into something grander — the cultural epicenter of a famously spread-out city — still faces substantial roadblocks, from its lack of foot traffic and its bland corporate towers to a debate over its very name: What to call the neighborhood, sometimes billed as the Grand Avenue Arts Corridor?

“I still use the term Grand Avenue Arts Corridor because it suggests a parade of lively arts institutions,” Deborah Borda, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chief executive, said. But the Museum of Contemporary Art’s director, Philippe Vergne, said “corridor” sounded “too dusty and dark.” (No one mentioned the historic name, Bunker Hill, with its battleground associations.)

“At one point I misspoke and said that Grand Avenue was going to be the Champs-Élysées of Los Angeles, which may have been an exaggeration,” Mr. Broad, 82, said in an interview at his museum. “We want more people here, more pedestrian traffic and more activities.”

Despite recent back surgery, he walked briskly past large crates of art to a sleek, glass-walled conference room on the second floor. “We think that downtown Los Angeles with all that’s happening, including the Arts District, by the way — the center of gravity is really here,” he said, mentioning a scrappier area to the east with a trending restaurant and gallery scene.

But you wouldn’t know it from walking on Grand Avenue. Robert Harris, a former dean of the architecture school at the University of Southern California, said that while he sees crowds outside Disney Hall and inside the new Grand Park, a basic urban planning problem remains: “The street itself is awful — the street is very wide, the sidewalks are too narrow, there are few trees, and all the fixtures like lights and signs are ordinary. Everything about the street is completely ordinary. Nobody would ever send me a postcard of it.”

The stretch was so empty when Connie Bruck wrote a 2010 New Yorker profile of Mr. Broad as a bargain-hunting multibillionaire that she called Grand Avenue “a desolate thoroughfare, virtually pedestrian-free.”

So far, Mr. Broad and the museum architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro have made several pedestrian-friendly moves in its vicinity. They widened the museum’s sidewalks by six feet and financed a crosswalk with a stoplight on Grand Avenue. They also designed a grassy plaza to run alongside the museum building.

“We’re going to be having concerts on the streets and movies on the plaza,” Mr. Broad said. “There will be a lot of activity.” Glancing at a timeline on his desk, he said that the work on Grand Avenue “is about 70 percent done.”

Leaders of the area’s performing and visual arts venues have begun discussing cross-promotions and collaborations to create a more dynamic neighborhood, and nearly a dozen are participating in a one-day free public arts event on Oct. 24. Ms. Borda acknowledged that such teamwork hadn’t happened much in the past because “some institutions were engaged in life-or-death struggles.” (Most notably, the Museum of Contemporary Art neared financial collapse in 2008 until Mr. Broad stepped in with a $30 million pledge; he also helped Disney Hall through an early crisis when construction stalled in 1996 by spearheading fund-raising and donating $15 million himself.)

Now, Ms. Borda, the Philharmonic executive, muses about the prospect of holding concerts in the Broad. And MOCA has already created one tie-in with the new museum across the avenue: a free one-year membership to anyone who shows a Broad ticket during the first two weeks after it opens. (Personal ties might help as well: Ms. Borda now sits on Mr. Broad’s museum board, while Mr. Broad remains on MOCA’s.)

The hope is that new restaurants will also bring people to the area — or encourage visitors to linger. Otium, a new restaurant at the Broad, is expected to open this fall, and there’s also an Italian restaurant next door inside a new apartment building designed by Arquitectonica.

But some architects here say that the decision to tuck Otium deep into a plaza alongside the museum, rather than fronting Grand Avenue, was yet another missed opportunity to create a more dynamic street life. The Disney Hall cafe, in contrast, spills out into the sidewalk.

Richard Koshalek, a former MOCA director, called that museum’s decision to situate its own plaza in back of the building in the early 1980s “one of our biggest mistakes.” He said he thinks “there needs to be a diversity of activity along the street that is scaled to pedestrians and designed for them.” Without that, he added, “you will still be walking down an empty street surrounded by these buildings — these big blank walls.”

Mr. Koshalek described the lack of affordable parking in the area as another persistent challenge. The Broad has negotiated with a city agency that owns the garage beneath the museum for a special rate for visitors, $12 for three hours during weekdays. (After that period, rates spike to a maximum of $22 a day.)

Mr. Broad discussed two projects that he believes will make the district more accessible and lively. One is the construction of a metro station directly behind his museum, scheduled for 2020. Another is the Related Company’s long delayed development of a three-acre parcel across from Disney Hall that would include more parking, a hotel, apartments, restaurants and shops.

Known as the Grand Avenue Project, the politically complicated, multiuse complex has been in the planning stages for more than a decade — so long that Frank Gehry was chosen to work on the designs, was replaced by other architects and then selected to replace those architects.

“It’s a key lever” for the community, Ms. Borda said of the project. But she cautioned that much depends on the quality of the buildings: “Something we should all be very concerned about is if they develop a facade that’s fortresslike and doesn’t encourage pedestrian traffic.”

Mr. Broad, who made his fortune in the home construction business as a founder of KB Home, said he was not planning to invest in the Related project himself — “I have no financial interests in anything downtown, by the way,” he added. But he said he would personally try to help the developer secure financing because he thinks the results could be transformative.

“If all this happens with Related, you’re going to have 20 to 25 restaurants here,” Mr. Broad said. “You’re going to have population. It will be a whole different ballgame.”