A Los Angeles Primer
The always multiplying, subdividing, subjective experiences and perceptions of Los Angeles make for an infinitely more interesting city to write about than any single, objective place. Hence my own project, a book which takes the name of "A Los Angeles Primer" and extends its spirit to the many Los Angeleses of the 21st century. Each week, this column will adapt an essay on one aspect of the city from the book-in-progress.
A Los Angeles Primer:
This place "Where Hollywood Movies Are Made" once, indeed, had the bulk of the Los Angeles film production industry. More importantly, to my mind, it also once had the Tokyo 7-7 Coffee Shop, perhaps the only Los Angeles eatery ever to attain perfection. But do any of the points of interest that remain within or at the border, like the Museum of Jurassic Technology, fit with the Culver City brand?
A Los Angeles Primer:
When the New Yorker's "far-flung correspondent" Christopher Rand came to Los Angeles in 1964, he based himself in Sawtelle, the quiet "satellite Japanese quarter" which let him observe the city's cultural hybridization with Asia and Latin America. What can we observe there almost 50 years later, now that we have more cultures than we can even identify?
A Los Angeles Primer:
Since its riots nearly 50 years ago, troubled Watts has drawn the pens Clive James, Jan Morris, Reyner Banham, and Thomas Pynchon. But even these astute observers had to contend with the surprising placelessness they found there, given the neighborhood's fearful reputation and vivid history of racial strife. Has it become a more recognizable place on its own terms today?
A Los Angeles Primer:
In only 56 years, downtown's Bunker Hill went from the formerly grand but still dignified shambles that housed Arturo Bandini, down-and-out protagonist of John Fante's "Ask the Dust", to the stand of gleaming high-rises that itself simulated a virtual city in the techno-thriller "Virtuosity". Should, or can, we keep one Bunker Hill in mind while thinking about the other?
A Los Angeles Primer:
With its cheerful if often decrepit architecture, its highly curated retail, and its famously freakish boardwalk, Venice offers its own version of reality more than do the other coastal neighborhoods. But after a glimpse into the sociology of the place, should we see a veritable culture war roiling beneath its remains of beachside bohemia?
A Los Angeles Primer:
Angelenos talk about Echo Park as a neighborhood which, over the past half-century, has suffered. But this century's elements of peace and prosperity, not least in the form of boutiques, pedal boats, craft beers, and kale salads, haven't wholly overwritten the neighborhood's recent past — nor the past before it.
A Los Angeles Primer:
"Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future," said Robert Hughes of Brazil's midcentury planned capital. He could have said it about Century City, Los Angeles' midcentury planned business district. What does a walk down the increasingly semi-walkable Avenue of the Stars reveal about the place today, and how the ideas behind it have aged?
A Los Angeles Primer:
As far out of fashion as dining in the former tourist trap of Chinatown has become, eating a curry beef pie amid the neighborhood's Hello Kitty-filled underground malls and weary concrete plazas makes for a rich experience of its own. But might a new generation of entrepreneurs like chef Roy Choi turn it all into something else again?
A Los Angeles Primer:
You may find the Third Street Promenade a bland retail experience, but you'll also hear a wider variety of languages spoken there than anywhere else in Los Angeles. A piece of Southern Californian urbanism that came well before its time, it at once points the way to the salvation of the weary shopping-mall concept and shares the sheer observational appeal of all the world's successful public places.
A Los Angeles Primer:
Tourist guidebooks may direct Los Angeles' visitors from abroad to the Walk of Fame, but just two miles east on Hollywood Boulevard, they'll find a much more fruitful cultural experience -- certainly a spicier one -- in Thai Town, a neighborhood with less David O. Selznick and more Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
A Los Angeles Primer:
Contrary to what its name might lead you to expect, the Arts District does, in fact, contain art, and not just the murals on its disused warehouses and factories. Artists once replaced its industrialists, and now the businessmen and "creative class" have come. Will they speed up the area's vital flux, or slow it down?
A Los Angeles Primer:
Neither urban nor suburban, Silver Lake, with its namesake reservoir and surfeit of fascinating houses, has become a space for style, wellness, and artisanal retail. But should we fear a rising monoculture?
A Los Angeles Primer:
One of Los Angeles' many formerly wealthy enclaves, one immortalized in song by Richard Harris and Jimmy Webb, MacArthur Park's Art Deco mansions have long since given way to pupusas and proselytizers. How should an Angeleno make best use of it all?
A Los Angeles Primer:
Traveling the nearly sixteen miles of the closest thing Los Angeles has to a a "main street" by bus reveals the boulevard's host of impressive parts, even seen standing at a smudged window. But what, long-awaited transit innovation or otherwise, will add them up to a sum?
A Los Angeles Primer:
An object of fascination for the writers of "When Harry Met Sally" to "The Simpsons", restaurant critics to Yelpers, Ethiopian cuisine has its Los Angeles center on a single block of Fairfax Avenue. We can easily visit Little Ethiopia for a satisfying meal, but how, then, to assure ourselves of our ability to engage with a culture beyond paying for its food?
A Los Angeles Primer:
The "Wall Street of the West" when downtown first functioned as the center of Los Angeles, architecturally venerable Spring Street offers a window onto the urban revival that may well make it the center again. So what's with the faded bike lanes and all those surface parking lots?
A Los Angeles Primer:
Built around one of the few traditionally strollable "cute streets" Los Angeles has to offer, Larchmont Village has undergone an intriguing, if subtle, process of cultural fragmentation since the era of the Three Stooges and Raymond Chandler.
A Los Angeles Primer:
The first line in Los Angeles' modern rail system, which Reyner Banham called "socially necessary," opened 23 years ago to great fanfare. A lot of people ride it today, but has it really achieved its goals?
A Los Angeles Primer:
Does the Jazz Age linear downtown, "America's Champs-Élysées" which once offered car-friendly shopping (and a huge Japanese department store), have a place in our urban renaissance?
A Los Angeles Primer:
The freeways fascinate in the same way the crueler university social experiments of the sixties fascinate: they show us something about ourselves, though not necessarily something we want to see.
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