34. Objects of desire
A wooden corpse. Flanking the gilded reredo at the Plaza Church on Main Street are two shallow bays. In the bay on the left is a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Pinned to a bulletin board are wounded snapshots, each picture pleading for solace or some grace to endure. Lying in a glass case in the right bay is a near life-size sculpture of the crucified body of a very Castilian Jesus, its wood and plaster painted a naïve white over which the greenish pallor of death has begun applied.Sublime stairs. The cast iron stairs filigree the light falling through the core of the Bradbury Building.
Anonymous grace. The streetlights of Los Angeles remember every decade of the past hundred years in cast, spun, and poured iron, in steel, and in the speckled mica and gray concrete of the ubiquitous Marbelite Corporation of America streetlights (that were invented here in 1912). Street lights are the city's "Louvre of the streets" with classical, Baroque, Beaux Arts, and Moderne designs watched over by the curators of the Bureau of Street Lighting.
A compass rose. Downtown Los Angeles has a crooked heart. It's cocked about 36 degrees from the rigid, north-south grid that has long been the nation's rational dream of town planning. Downtown's streets have their own dreams. They do not lead to the cardinal points of the compass, as do the principal streets in most American cities, but to the uncertain spaces in between. Stand in front of the Biltmore Hotel on Pershing Square and look down at the compass rose set in the sidewalk that shows, against the evidence of your eyes, that the streets of downtown still resist, after more than 160 years, the city's American occupation in 1847. Downtown's streets conform, as best they can, to the orders of Charles III, King of Spain. His ordinances required city grids to have a 45-degree disorientation from true north and south to give, it was said, equal light to every house throughout the day. Given the way the city extended along the bank of its uncertain river, only 36 degrees of compliance to the royal order were possible.
Light. Lawrence Weschler was thinking about the light in L.A. He was thinking about the way it can suffuse the air with a shadowless, bright ether called "airlight." The light hangs in the dry air that masses in front of the mountains that rise abruptly behind the city. The thermal inversion layer overhead dampens upward heat currents that would make the light seem to tremble. One result of the air's immobility is smog. The other is the still light of downtown. Weschler was thinking a luminous, dense fluid, more permanent than the buildings themselves. He was thinking of the passage of pedestrians and cars through this light and how it admitted and ignored them equally. When he asked me what I thought of the light in L.A., I added only one detail "? the light, clear as stone-dry Champaign, after a full day of rain. "Everything in that light is somehow simultaneously particularized and idealized," I told him. "And that's the light that breaks hearts in L.A."
A school underground. Beneath the surface of downtown is a subway where, every few minutes since 1993, a secular community assembles, interacts, and disappears. It members gather, still a little amazed, as L.A.'s subway riders. The waiting riders have the freshness of recent converts, but also their tentative ways. In notoriously private L.A., most Angeleños haven't acquired the habits of being in public. They are learning how to be thrown together into a peaceable assembly like this, momentarily unsorted by race and income the way the rest of L.A. is.
A cenotaph. Among the many things tossed too carelessly on the ash heap of history was the war of Capital and Labor. Their violent, turn-of-the-20th-century battles are not even half remembered now. But the glum slab of the Los Angeles Times building on Spring Street remembers one of them. The antiunion rallying cry of "True Industrial Freedom," is still deeply carved into its red granite façade. Dedicated in 1935, the Times building is a cenotaph for the 21 non-union pressmen, linotype operators, and editors who were blown up by a cell of pro-union agitators on an early October morning in 1910 and flung into fire and collapsing masonry.
Wheels. Los Angeles loves wheels. It loves the steel wheels on trains, chrome wheels on custom cars, and the urethane wheels on skateboards. Wheels over the asphalt, the concrete, the adobe soil of any freeway or sidewalk or backcountry trail, if it leads away from wherever it is you are. Wheels are the fix for this city's need. The need "? the rush "? is momentum. Los Angeles moves or it isn't Los Angeles. Nothing is too good for wheels. There are 21,198 miles of roads, highways, and freeways in Los Angeles County; two-thirds of our public space is space just for wheels. There aren't enough acres of parks for all of us, but there are acres and acres of parking lots for wheels.
June gloom. Is Los Angeles the Land of Sunshine? You don't need a weatherman to tell you it isn't so. Veteran Angeleños (that is, anyone here at least a year) know the disappointment of waking to skies as gray as freshly poured concrete, of noons that appear filtered through a dome of dirty milk glass, and of afternoons that play out in miserable dullness until, like a cruel gift, sunset roars through a slit on the western horizon in colors of magenta and gold before fading into night. Spring and early summer in Los Angeles, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, deliver just 11 clear days in May and 14 in June. The definitions of clear and cloudy are subjective, but on even the partly cloudy days, the daylight hours are at least half obscured. That's an average. At LAX, there are only nine perfectly clear days in June. The gray season is made in the Pacific Ocean. Cold currents rise close to shore; a persistent high-pressure zone further out channels warmer air eastward; and the springtime vortex of the Catalina Eddy fabricates fog from the interaction of cool water and warm air and pushes it on shore when the air of inland valleys rises in the heat of midday. Television weathercasters call the visible result "the marine layer" although what they're really talking about is fog. Gray skies, in their ever-returning cycle, have been faithful to os Angeles in their baleful way. This is the place we've come to, as much mediocre gray as it is superlative brilliance.
The Thomas Guide. As a boy, I paged through the old Renié Atlas of Los Angeles and later the Thomas Guide. Perhaps this fascination with maps was my longing for the unattainable fluidity of motion that the Thomas brothers offered, but the fact that there was a map that linked my neighborhood to the vast grid of Los Angeles, made the place more real to me at least (if not more comprehensible). The Thomas Guide is the book that explains Los Angeles to itself; it's our Odyssey and our Talmud. And do you ever wonder, as I do, why the Thomas maps continue to print the boundaries of the Spanish and Mexican ranchos over the present-day city grid? Why the persistence of those abstractions, even though rancho boundaries have only a marginal relationship to the jurisdictional boundaries of the present?
The image on this page of the Bradbury Building was taken by Flickr user Matt Bucy. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
