I Love L.A.
Mar. 10th, 2018 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dedalus_1947Roll down the windows,
Put up the top,
Crank up the Beach Boys, baby,
Don’t let the music stop.
We’re gonna ride it ‘til
We just can’t ride no more.
From the South Bay to the Valley,
From the West Side to the East Side,
Everybody’s very happy,
‘Cause the sun is shining all the time.
Looks like another perfect day.
I love L.A.
I love L.A.
We love it.
(I love L.A.: Randy Newman – 1985)
Kathy and I used the opportunity of watching a play at the Mark Taper Theatre in the Music Center to spend a weekend at a hotel for another one of our Downtown Adventures. The play was the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner, Water by the Spoonful, by Quiara Alegría Hudes, and we stayed at the Hilton Checkers Hotel on Grand Avenue, between the Downtown Central Library and Pershing Square. It had been a few years since last spending a weekend downtown, and we were curious to see more visual evidence of the gentrification that had been taking place in “DTLA” over the last five years.
Kathy and I are first generation Los Angeles natives, born and raised in different parts of the city. Through housing changes, college attendance, dating, and work-related travels around Southern California, our knowledge of the city has continued to grow, expand, and change, barely keeping pace with the shifting demographic, ethnic, and economic changes of the city. Los Angeles was home, and even though we once considered moving to Orange County when I was applying for a teaching position at a few community colleges down there, it was the city we worked in, lived in, and raised a family in. However, there is one perception of the city that has always annoyed me. It is a fact that the dream of living in Los Angeles has historically motivated the migration of millions of Americans to come here from every part of the United States. The city draws residents like kids to candy. People come for jobs, career opportunities, their health, the weather, the life style, and the promise of glamour, excitement, riches, and fame. Americans come to reinvent themselves in Los Angeles. What also seems to accompany many of these out-of-state refugees is a virulent disdain for their new city. I was in college when I first began noticing the many snarky jokes and comments by celebrities and comedians about Los Angeles:
“I mean, who would want to live in a place where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light”. – Woody Allen
“Los Angeles is seventy-two suburbs in search of a city”. – Dorothy Parker.
“Living in L.A. adds 10 years to a man’s life. And those ten years I’d like to spend in New York”. – Harry Ruby
“I lived in New York until I was about the age of 30, and then I realized that I’d had enough of life in a dynamic, sophisticated city – so I moved to Los Angeles.” – George Carlin.
For many years I responded to this seemingly universal disdain for Los Angeles by “parachute residents” by acknowledging what the city was not, and excusing its metropolitan shortcomings by stressing its recreational, climactic, and entertainment benefits. What I was really doing, however, was selling Los Angeles short.
Given where these transplanted residents came from, I understood why they were nostalgic for their places of birth. They were raised in or around “old” eastern, or Midwestern cities, like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, or small, closely knit towns. Los Angeles confused them because it was nothing like the cities they were raised in or lived near. I saw these differences first hand, when I spent three long summers in Mexico City as a youth, attending the National University. Mexico City was old and historic – its founding dated back from before the Spanish conquest in 1524. La Ciudad de Mexico is compact and condensed, it is a city made up of many different and distinct neighborhoods or vecindades that you can see and know first hand, by walking or traveling by bus and metro. A visitor can “get a feel” for such a city in just a short time. This is also true in other world-class cities I’ve read about or visited: Dublin, Paris, London, Barcelona, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. All of these cities are made up of easily identifiable communities or districts of the ethnic, commercial, cultural, political, artistic, and hip parts of the city that were in close proximity. However, what I could never understand was the reluctance of transplanted Easterners to see any merit to living in Los Angeles besides the weather. I thought I had dismissed this disdainful attitude until I read an article in the Los Angeles Times last February titled, “Opaque and elusive Los Angeles?” by Christopher Hawthorne. The story succinctly explained what I had always struggled to point out to people about Los Angeles.
Hawthorne wrote his article in response to an earlier “hit piece” about Los Angeles that had appeared in the New York Times last January called “A Paper Tears Apart in a City That Never Quite Came Together”. The piece was written by two out-of-town reporters who proposed that the recent turmoil at the L.A. Times newspaper was emblematic of the city’s lack of support for its major cultural, artistic, architectural, and civic institutions. Hawthorne begins by posing the questions, “What is L.A.? Where does it begin and end? Does it have a center? Does it need one?” and then suggesting that the answers lie in the elusiveness of its urban character:
“Smart, accomplished people don’t like being made to feel out of their depth in a city. Los Angeles makes out-of-towners (like these two New York reporters) feel overwhelmed from their first day here. Their reaction to that feeling, paradoxically enough, is often to attempt to write that feeling away – to conquer that sense of dislocation by producing a story that sets out to explain Los Angeles in its entirety. They simply can’t be convinced, despite all evidence right in front of them, that Los Angeles, as cities go, is an especially tough nut to crack”.
Hawthorne points out that Los Angeles is a unique type of Western city that ignored the Eastern models of concentrated urban centers and it requires time and an automobile to understand. The first step to understanding is a certain amount of humility about the nature of the task. “This kind of city has grown so large – in economic and environmental terms as well as physical ones – that it begins to stretch beyond our field of vision. The best way to grasp it is to understand that it is not Manhattan, Boston, San Francisco, or Chicago – to recognize it instead as ‘a vast field with no distinct borders”.
The only thing Hawthorne failed to point out, however, was that to fully explore this vast stretch of a city is by automobile. Despite Los Angeles’ heroic attempt at binding the city together by metro and bus, the easiest way to get around and learn about it is by driving. Randy Newman’s anthem to Los Angeles gets it right. To really get around this city you have to “roll down the windows and put up the top” because you must drive “from the South Bay to the Valley, and from the West Side to the East Side”. I have lived in Los Angeles all my life, and I have driven since high school, but I admit that in many ways I have only scratched the surface of the city’s many districts, features, and people, especially because of the way it keeps spreading and changing. While living in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles as a youth, I was able to travel through and explore downtown L.A., Elysian Park, Griffith Park, and Hollywood, and I familiarized myself with the nearby communities of Eagle Rock, Pasadena, and Glendale. Because I had extended family living in Lincoln Heights, El Sereno, and Boyle Heights, I was comfortable traveling throughout East Los Angeles, and the adjacent cities of Alhambra and South Pasadena. When we moved to Venice, California in 1959, we visited and explored all the nearby towns of Mar Vista, Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood, Century City, and the beach communities of El Segundo, Manhattan, Hermosa, and Redondo Beach, as well as Inglewood, Hawthorne, and Torrance. Then after I married Kathy, we moved to the San Fernando Valley and raised a family in Reseda and Canoga Park, and worked in and around the nearby communities of Van Nuys, Woodland Hills, San Fernando, Sun Valley, North Hollywood and Burbank. Kathy and I are knowledgeable of many communities and locations throughout the city, and yet, if we are hosting out-of-town visitors or guests, we make no pretense of trying to familiarize them with the city as a single entity. The best we can do is to give them a taste of its many locales, entertainment centers, museums, and universities. We pick and choose particular aspects of the city, realizing that there is no single place where a visitor can walk around and become knowledgeable of the city, or even “get a feel” for it. Los Angeles is a city of too many separate and diverse ethnic, commercial, and cultural zones and districts. I should also confess that I would not be half as curious about continually exploring Los Angeles, if it weren’t for Kathy’s love of driving and her questing spirit to see all the different parts and aspects of the city she was born in. While I may have lived in more parts of Los Angeles than she, she is the true trailblazer and pathfinder when it comes to continually learning more about the city.
Although seeing a play at the Mark Taper was the main purpose of our visit to DTLA, we spent most of our time there walking around and exploring old and new locations. We revisited the Central Library, Bunker Hill, the legendary Biltmore Hotel, and discovered the Ace Hotel and Theatre on South Broadway with its panoramic view of the city from its Upstairs Bar. We noted the growing number of converted loft residences, and the new apartments and condos going up along West 9th Street to house the increasing number of young, affluent urban dwellers. The city continues to change and reinvent itself as much as its citizenry does. Downtown is no longer the staid department store hub where we went to shop in our youth, it is bustling with new energy and vitality. Los Angeles is a unique place, and it takes time, effort, and a car to appreciate it. I have to admit though – I do love L.A.
Put up the top,
Crank up the Beach Boys, baby,
Don’t let the music stop.
We’re gonna ride it ‘til
We just can’t ride no more.
From the South Bay to the Valley,
From the West Side to the East Side,
Everybody’s very happy,
‘Cause the sun is shining all the time.
Looks like another perfect day.
I love L.A.
I love L.A.
We love it.
(I love L.A.: Randy Newman – 1985)
Kathy and I used the opportunity of watching a play at the Mark Taper Theatre in the Music Center to spend a weekend at a hotel for another one of our Downtown Adventures. The play was the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner, Water by the Spoonful, by Quiara Alegría Hudes, and we stayed at the Hilton Checkers Hotel on Grand Avenue, between the Downtown Central Library and Pershing Square. It had been a few years since last spending a weekend downtown, and we were curious to see more visual evidence of the gentrification that had been taking place in “DTLA” over the last five years.
Kathy and I are first generation Los Angeles natives, born and raised in different parts of the city. Through housing changes, college attendance, dating, and work-related travels around Southern California, our knowledge of the city has continued to grow, expand, and change, barely keeping pace with the shifting demographic, ethnic, and economic changes of the city. Los Angeles was home, and even though we once considered moving to Orange County when I was applying for a teaching position at a few community colleges down there, it was the city we worked in, lived in, and raised a family in. However, there is one perception of the city that has always annoyed me. It is a fact that the dream of living in Los Angeles has historically motivated the migration of millions of Americans to come here from every part of the United States. The city draws residents like kids to candy. People come for jobs, career opportunities, their health, the weather, the life style, and the promise of glamour, excitement, riches, and fame. Americans come to reinvent themselves in Los Angeles. What also seems to accompany many of these out-of-state refugees is a virulent disdain for their new city. I was in college when I first began noticing the many snarky jokes and comments by celebrities and comedians about Los Angeles:
“I mean, who would want to live in a place where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light”. – Woody Allen
“Los Angeles is seventy-two suburbs in search of a city”. – Dorothy Parker.
“Living in L.A. adds 10 years to a man’s life. And those ten years I’d like to spend in New York”. – Harry Ruby
“I lived in New York until I was about the age of 30, and then I realized that I’d had enough of life in a dynamic, sophisticated city – so I moved to Los Angeles.” – George Carlin.
For many years I responded to this seemingly universal disdain for Los Angeles by “parachute residents” by acknowledging what the city was not, and excusing its metropolitan shortcomings by stressing its recreational, climactic, and entertainment benefits. What I was really doing, however, was selling Los Angeles short.
Given where these transplanted residents came from, I understood why they were nostalgic for their places of birth. They were raised in or around “old” eastern, or Midwestern cities, like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, or small, closely knit towns. Los Angeles confused them because it was nothing like the cities they were raised in or lived near. I saw these differences first hand, when I spent three long summers in Mexico City as a youth, attending the National University. Mexico City was old and historic – its founding dated back from before the Spanish conquest in 1524. La Ciudad de Mexico is compact and condensed, it is a city made up of many different and distinct neighborhoods or vecindades that you can see and know first hand, by walking or traveling by bus and metro. A visitor can “get a feel” for such a city in just a short time. This is also true in other world-class cities I’ve read about or visited: Dublin, Paris, London, Barcelona, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. All of these cities are made up of easily identifiable communities or districts of the ethnic, commercial, cultural, political, artistic, and hip parts of the city that were in close proximity. However, what I could never understand was the reluctance of transplanted Easterners to see any merit to living in Los Angeles besides the weather. I thought I had dismissed this disdainful attitude until I read an article in the Los Angeles Times last February titled, “Opaque and elusive Los Angeles?” by Christopher Hawthorne. The story succinctly explained what I had always struggled to point out to people about Los Angeles.
Hawthorne wrote his article in response to an earlier “hit piece” about Los Angeles that had appeared in the New York Times last January called “A Paper Tears Apart in a City That Never Quite Came Together”. The piece was written by two out-of-town reporters who proposed that the recent turmoil at the L.A. Times newspaper was emblematic of the city’s lack of support for its major cultural, artistic, architectural, and civic institutions. Hawthorne begins by posing the questions, “What is L.A.? Where does it begin and end? Does it have a center? Does it need one?” and then suggesting that the answers lie in the elusiveness of its urban character:
“Smart, accomplished people don’t like being made to feel out of their depth in a city. Los Angeles makes out-of-towners (like these two New York reporters) feel overwhelmed from their first day here. Their reaction to that feeling, paradoxically enough, is often to attempt to write that feeling away – to conquer that sense of dislocation by producing a story that sets out to explain Los Angeles in its entirety. They simply can’t be convinced, despite all evidence right in front of them, that Los Angeles, as cities go, is an especially tough nut to crack”.
Hawthorne points out that Los Angeles is a unique type of Western city that ignored the Eastern models of concentrated urban centers and it requires time and an automobile to understand. The first step to understanding is a certain amount of humility about the nature of the task. “This kind of city has grown so large – in economic and environmental terms as well as physical ones – that it begins to stretch beyond our field of vision. The best way to grasp it is to understand that it is not Manhattan, Boston, San Francisco, or Chicago – to recognize it instead as ‘a vast field with no distinct borders”.
The only thing Hawthorne failed to point out, however, was that to fully explore this vast stretch of a city is by automobile. Despite Los Angeles’ heroic attempt at binding the city together by metro and bus, the easiest way to get around and learn about it is by driving. Randy Newman’s anthem to Los Angeles gets it right. To really get around this city you have to “roll down the windows and put up the top” because you must drive “from the South Bay to the Valley, and from the West Side to the East Side”. I have lived in Los Angeles all my life, and I have driven since high school, but I admit that in many ways I have only scratched the surface of the city’s many districts, features, and people, especially because of the way it keeps spreading and changing. While living in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles as a youth, I was able to travel through and explore downtown L.A., Elysian Park, Griffith Park, and Hollywood, and I familiarized myself with the nearby communities of Eagle Rock, Pasadena, and Glendale. Because I had extended family living in Lincoln Heights, El Sereno, and Boyle Heights, I was comfortable traveling throughout East Los Angeles, and the adjacent cities of Alhambra and South Pasadena. When we moved to Venice, California in 1959, we visited and explored all the nearby towns of Mar Vista, Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood, Century City, and the beach communities of El Segundo, Manhattan, Hermosa, and Redondo Beach, as well as Inglewood, Hawthorne, and Torrance. Then after I married Kathy, we moved to the San Fernando Valley and raised a family in Reseda and Canoga Park, and worked in and around the nearby communities of Van Nuys, Woodland Hills, San Fernando, Sun Valley, North Hollywood and Burbank. Kathy and I are knowledgeable of many communities and locations throughout the city, and yet, if we are hosting out-of-town visitors or guests, we make no pretense of trying to familiarize them with the city as a single entity. The best we can do is to give them a taste of its many locales, entertainment centers, museums, and universities. We pick and choose particular aspects of the city, realizing that there is no single place where a visitor can walk around and become knowledgeable of the city, or even “get a feel” for it. Los Angeles is a city of too many separate and diverse ethnic, commercial, and cultural zones and districts. I should also confess that I would not be half as curious about continually exploring Los Angeles, if it weren’t for Kathy’s love of driving and her questing spirit to see all the different parts and aspects of the city she was born in. While I may have lived in more parts of Los Angeles than she, she is the true trailblazer and pathfinder when it comes to continually learning more about the city.
Although seeing a play at the Mark Taper was the main purpose of our visit to DTLA, we spent most of our time there walking around and exploring old and new locations. We revisited the Central Library, Bunker Hill, the legendary Biltmore Hotel, and discovered the Ace Hotel and Theatre on South Broadway with its panoramic view of the city from its Upstairs Bar. We noted the growing number of converted loft residences, and the new apartments and condos going up along West 9th Street to house the increasing number of young, affluent urban dwellers. The city continues to change and reinvent itself as much as its citizenry does. Downtown is no longer the staid department store hub where we went to shop in our youth, it is bustling with new energy and vitality. Los Angeles is a unique place, and it takes time, effort, and a car to appreciate it. I have to admit though – I do love L.A.
