For months, “Star Wars” creator George Lucas held the art world in suspense: Would he put his $1-billion Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles or San Francisco?

On Tuesday came the answer.

Lucas’ personal collection of fine and popular art, including ephemera related to his “Star Wars” franchise, will fill a futuristic-looking new museum planned for L.A.’s Exposition Park, which beat out a competing design for Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The rivalry had pitted the two cities in the competition not only for Lucas’ collection and the tourism it will bring, but also for the thousands of jobs that backers said the project will create.

Lucas has said he will fund the project to the tune of about $1 billion, including building costs, his art and an endowment of at least $400 million.

The Lucas Museum will further expand the art museum landscape in greater L.A., which has become a global hot spot for art production. The Broad museum opened in late 2015 in downtown L.A., across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art. The museum-scale Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery opened in L.A.’s Arts District less than a year ago, and the former Santa Monica Museum of Art will reopen in the Arts District this fall, renamed the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. The Marciano Art Foundation, the contemporary art museum from Guess co-founders Paul and Maurice Marciano, is aiming to open in Koreatown this spring. Meanwhile, the non-collecting Main Museum made a soft debut in downtown’s Old Bank District in October.

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Lucas declined to comment for this article, but the museum board’s announcement said he chose L.A. largely because Exposition Park positions the museum to “have the greatest impact on the broader community, fulfilling our goal of inspiring, engaging and educating a broad and diverse visitorship.”

Exposition Park could become the Central Park of Los Angeles, Garcetti said, adding that Lucas has expressed interest in helping to guide a master plan for the swiftly evolving area, already home to the California Science Center, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the California African American Museum. Plans for the new museum, which will rise along Vermont Avenue on land now covered by parking lots, will include underground parking.

“We have a new football stadium being built, the Coliseum being redone with more than $200 million in upgrades, and the science center is building a whole new building to permanently house the space shuttle and its rockets,” Garcetti said, also noting the proximity to the Expo light rail line and bus lines. The Lucas Museum, he said, “will be the jewel in the crown.”  

Ma Yansong's Exposition Park design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art would have parkland at its feet.
Ma Yansong's Exposition Park design for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art would have parkland at its feet. - The Los Angeles site occupies a narrow strip of land along Vermont Avenue, in a section of Exposition Park now filled by a pair of surface parking lots. (Not to worry, traffic-obsessed Angelenos: The proposal calls for a subterranean parking structure for 1,800 cars.) The museum would rise just south of Jesse Brewer Jr. Park and a light-rail stop on Metro’s Expo Line.Forming a kind of gateway facing 39th Street along the western edge of the park, the building would hold between 265,000 and 275,000 square feet of interior space, with about 100,000 square feet earmarked for galleries. The dimensions of the Treasure Island museum are the same. ... Ma’s design sets aside a significant amount of shaded landscaping under the museum building, where parked cars now sit, allowing Bacigalupi to argue that rather than removing green space from Exposition Park, they would in fact be adding some. And unlike Zumthor’s building for LACMA, Ma’s Exposition Park proposal is topped by thickly planted and publicly accessible terraces.Still, the proposal would squeeze a very large new building into a park already crowded with attractions. © Lucas Museum of Narrative Art