Where We Are
Where We Are is an ongoing examination of L.A.'s twinned identities as urban and suburban written by one of the area's great chroniclers, D.J. Waldie.
As of 2011, D.J. Waldie's posts can be found elsewhere on KCET.org where he writes on two blogs...
History is an assembly of stories. And it is wise of writers of history to know that stories are never as simple as the teller might prefer.
An unexpected downpour is a reminder of Christmas babies, bird guano, and the guns of August 1914.
Are the new development guidelines more of the same, with little real impact, or are they something else?
Not all angry shouts are inevitably strangled for reasons of decorum. Some are painted over.
I tend to be a skeptical optimist, particularly in a city with a long history of connivance with developers when there's money to be made (and spread around).
Yesterday, 1,440 persons were buried in the "potter's field" at the Los Angeles County Crematorium Cemetery.
A "luxury gap" on Wilshire is the most garish irony in Metro's boulevard busway. But there's even more opposition from elsewhere on the westside.
Buried in the pages of the new ordinance is an "Easter egg" for developers - a 20 percent increase in density to be granted administratively.
The farm is gone, blighted by poverty politics, ethnic conflicts, developer hubris, and secret land deals. But some of it lives on
I think of the physical humiliations of using Art Leahy's buses and trains. If only he were here with me, I would feel less alone in the cold and the dark.
Picking buttons for a 40-year-old coat with the Button Lady was an occasion for small-scale joy.
They were farm boys, according to the credit manager of a department store on Pico. They were from "Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Arkansas," he said.
The houses of TVland have been remade and recombined, preserving and demolishing and disappointing, just as L.A.'s real neighborhoods are.
I've walked the same way for decades and I still see some detail along the way that has been there all these years that I've not seen before.
All but the most utilitarian of Los Angeles maps through most of the 20th century had a divided purpose. They charted some aspects of the actual city, but they also fantasized a city of desire.
At the corner of Hayden Avenue and National Boulevard in Culver City and across from the new Expo light rail line from downtown rises the near-rhyming Samitaur Tower.
Art across town and across decades - juxtapositions of politics and painterly abstraction, of passionate commitment to liberty and books packed in a crate.
Noir-adjacent authenticity is elusive in the new Downtown, withholding. "A lot of nights there it looks like the Westside, and that's not why we moved down here," said one resident.
I'm leaving Lakewood City Hall after three decades.The sum of my years as a local government bureaucrat? A moral imagination.
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