How do you define Los Angeles?

[VZN]

I was going to put this in an already existing thread, (and if there is one merge them mods) and I did a search and nothing came up... so I felt that this topic warranted it's own thread and discussion.

How do you define Los Angeles? Share your thoughts

Last Sunday, a writer from a certain New York newspaper described being frustrated in his search for the "essence" of L.A.

"Something escapes me about Los Angeles," Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote after driving around Culver City, pondering the storefronts on Venice Boulevard and the Hollywood sign on the horizon.

New Yorkers have long been perplexed by L.A. Three decades ago, in the film "Annie Hall," Woody Allen famously said: "I don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light."

I've been waiting for years to tell Woody that the spirit of L.A. can't be found at a traffic light. Nor will you find it in the debris at the edge of the freeway or at four-way stop signs, which are other places Klinkenborg went looking for it.

In search of a way to get at L.A.'s true nature, I called Tomas Benitez, an art maven and writer who's worked in L.A. theaters and galleries.

Benitez is a native Angeleno and an old soul who grew up in 1950s Boyle Heights and South L.A. among blacks, Jews and people of Mexican, Italian and Japanese ancestry. In the 1960s, he rubbed elbows outside the Whisky a Go Go with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

"Finding the essence of L.A. is not meant to be easy," he told me.

Still, he said he believes he stumbled upon the secret of L.A. one evening in the 1980s, when he drove with his young daughter from the Eastside to the Pacific Ocean, almost 30 miles along old Brooklyn Avenue and Sunset Boulevard.

It was a journey that began with a greasy sandwich in the San Gabriel Valley, taking him past taco stands, transvestites, iconic nightclubs and faux Roman villas.

"On that drive, we saw the world change 10 or 15 different times," he told me.

It seemed to me Benitez was on to something. To really know it, you have to keep traveling between our north and south, our east and west, our glitz and our grit. You have to discover new L.A.s for as long as you live here.

That's because L.A. is really numerous cities in time and space, some of them layered on top of each other.

Near its center and in that amorphous area many people inaccurately call "the Eastside" is the old city, which grew up around the junction of the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco. It's the time-worn L.A. you see in neighborhoods such as Echo Park and Watts. For me, those places are the baroque heart of the city.

Photographer Tony Di Zinno lives in this Los Angeles, in Lincoln Heights, in an 1888 brewery that's been converted to lofts. It's a creaky building of brick, tin and wood, with dramatic vistas of downtown skyscrapers and a vast rail yard where locomotives and boxcars join up in thundering collisions. Many artists live in his and other neighboring industrial buildings, he told me:

"The people here are longing for something. We're looking for something authentic, precious or romantic."

Di Zinno was born in Cleveland. "When I was a kid," he said, "I thought L.A. was Muscle Beach and Hollywood."

When he first came to L.A., he lived in Venice and got used to a certain Westside-centric view of the city. "The elite thinks there's no real life east of the 405," he said.

My sense is that a lot of outsiders see L.A. the same way, at least initially. The Westside Di Zinno is referring to isn't a place — it's a state of mind. It's the way you think when you live in the L.A. that aspires to be a global city, the L.A. that collects Rembrandts and Greek statues, the L.A. whose residents believe they inhabit a sunny playground by the sea.

That L.A. exists in many places besides the Westside, of course, although most newcomers first encounter it long before they get here — in television and film. Eventually, they'll find in neighborhoods west of La Brea a city that looks like that fictional L.A.

These days, Di Zinno enters the newer, more affluent L.A. to meet clients, and he passes through it on his way to LAX and assignments in places like Monaco and Afghanistan. Then he returns home to the brewery and the older L.A.

Heading to nearby Dino's Burgers on Main Street, he finds a group of low-rider aficionados gathered outside. He loves the feel of the place — just as cosmopolitan, he thinks, as the other half of the city, but without the pretensions. "I've got everything here, all around me," he said. "Chinatown, Little Tokyo, East Los Angeles…."

The older L.A. where Di Zinno now lives has always been a place of cultural mixing. It was the last stop on the wagon trails across the continent. Today, it seems to me, it's still a rough-and-tumble Western frontier town writ large. It's the city that was torn by ethnic and labor riots in 1871, 1913, 1943, 1965 and 1992.

I grew up in that older L.A., but always had an eye on the west — among other things, my father worked at the Beverly Hilton. Tomas Benitez also traveled routinely westward into the glitzier city — with his mom to shop at I. Magnin on Wilshire, or with his father and stepmother for dinner at Perino's.

Each of those cross-town journeys, Benitez said, "was like going out and hanging out in another corner of the world."

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That's the L.A. Benitez wanted to show his 8-year-old daughter Tara on that long drive down Brooklyn and Sunset — the movie stars and the wannabes, the barrio and the mansions all joined together.

Benitez was returning home, but Tara was born in St. Louis and had never seen L.A. They had just arrived at the family's new Eastside home after a weeklong drive. But Tara wanted to see the ocean, so they got back in the car.

After a quick run to the Hat in Alhambra for a pastrami sandwich, they got on Sunset and reached Olvera Street with its mariachis and brightly colored wares. They cruised through Hollywood and saw odd people on the sidewalk. "That girl looks like a guy!" Tara shouted. "That girl is a guy!"

They passed the huge billboards on the Sunset Strip and the Beverly Hills Hotel — "It was a place out of a movie, but it was real," Benitez said. Finally they reached Pacific Palisades and the ocean, where Tara put her feet into the water around midnight.

"That drive was all about L.A.," Benitez told me.

That makes sense to me. Los Angeles is a city built of many messy collisions. The confusion, delight, loathing and bliss you feel when you take the time to truly see it — that, to me, is the essence of Los Angeles.

[milquetoast]

home

[Westsidelife]

The essence of Los Angeles is that there is none. Everything is open to interpretation. It is a city of infinite variety and possibility. It is what you make of it.

[milquetoast]

yeah

[klamedia]

A beautiful mess. The ever evolving devolving city.

[VZN]

IMO...

There is no one definite L.A. that is the face of the city, and not one of them is the 'real' L.A. To look for an absolute L.A. is a fruitless endeavor, and this is what makes L.A. unique in this regard.

It's also the limitless innovations and infinite possibilities in the city that constantly amaze me, and how everyone from around the world wants a piece of it. There's a certain phenomena and dynamic that exists in L.A. which is certainly inexplicable and can't even be replicated anywhere else. That is why this city is so interesting to observe.

[kidA]

One of the best articles I've read that describe this city and makes you WANT to live here! I love it!

Thanks for finding it...going to share.

[Kenny]

That drive on Sunset Blvd is the best representation of LA if you are looking for something tangible.

I did it once, drove a friend from East LA on Cesar Chavez to Sunset all the way to the ocean. He said, "wow we technically drove through a hundred cities on one street".

[VZN]

In Defense of Los Angeles

The City of Angels is the whipping boy of urban planners, mocked by cultural critics, and disliked even by many visitors. One of them is Bernard Henri Levy, the French writer famously sent by The Atlantic to follow in the footsteps of Tocqueville.

His worth-your-while, multi-part exploration of America gets a lot right, and some wrong, about our nation. Nowhere is his criticism farther from the mark than when he arrives in Southern California, muses that there is a language of cities, and wonders if Los Angeles is "the prototype of a city with a poorly developed language, the prototype of unintelligible, illegible discourse."

For after all, what must be true for a city to be legible?

First, it has to have a center. But Los Angeles has no center. It has districts, neighborhoods, even cities within the city, each of which has a center of some sort. But one center, one unique site as a point of reference for that law of isonomy the Athenians believed was the principle behind every city, a hub or focus with which the inhabitants of Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Venice, Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Saigon and Little Tokyo, Malibu, Inglewood, Pico Union (and I could go on, since Los Angeles officially numbers eighty-four neighborhoods, where 120 languages are spoken), could have a relationship at once distinct and regular--nothing like that exists in Los Angeles.

One immediately wonders about all the other cities without a center of the kind he describes. Tell a New Yorker that Times Square is the center of his metropolis and you're liable to get stabbed. Midtown is its business center, Wall Street its financial center, Williamsburg its hipster center, and on the list goes. The geometric center of Paris is the Arc de Triumph, sitting at one end of that most grand boulevard, streets radiating out from its roundabout, but is it the hub or focus of Parisian life? Where is the center of San Francisco? Is Seville's hub its cathedral or the Guadalquivir? The tiny town of Ord, Nebraska, has a downtown square with a county courthouse that is plainly its center. Is it therefore a more intelligible city than any of the others? This metric cannot stand up to scrutiny.

Mr. Levy goes on:

Second, it has to have a border beyond which it dissolves or breaks apart. But Los Angeles has no border. Along with Tokyo, it is the limitless, indeterminate city par excellence. Or if there is one--if there is, necessarily, a space that is the city proper and another that is not yet the city--the property of this border is that it is undetectable, impossible to determine or situate. I looked out for it when I arrived from San Francisco. It's like the border that separates night from day, or day from night, about which I swore to myself every night, and every morning, when I was a child: "There, that's it, I'm going to trap it, I'm going to keep my eyes wide open, and this time I won't miss it"--but no, I failed, every time I mysteriously failed. Night fell, day broke, and once again I had missed the instant of transformation--just as here I missed the borderline of Los Angeles, this burgeoning city that goes on indefinitely, interminably stammering, a huge slow animal, lazy but silently out of control.

This is overwrought. On what we'll call its western edge, Los Angeles has as stark a border as any urban area: the Pacific Ocean, which stops any notion of sprawl at its shoreline. Greater Los Angeles is also hemmed in by some rather majestic mountains. It is easy enough to see the city's limits from the air, conceding sprawl that extends interminably in other directions -- one is hard-pressed indeed to state the precise moment one is moving from Los Angeles into Orange County.

Of course, Los Angeles is hardly alone in its sprawl, and is very much alone in the starkness of its physical boundaries, so it hardly seems the appropriate example of the quintessential city without defined limits.

Mr. Levy writes:

Third, it has to have a vantage point, or several, from which it can, as in the Paris of Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, be embraced with a single glance. But is it because of its gigantic size? The immensity of the five counties--Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Los Angeles--over which it is spread? The fact that the County of Los Angeles alone, with its nine million inhabitants (17 million in greater Los Angeles), extends more than fifty miles from east to west and sixty from north to south? Is it this precocious horizontality, the product of earthquake threats, which so clearly distinguishes it from New York and Chicago? Is it the smog, the smoke and fog, that envelops it for most of the year and makes it one of the most polluted cities in the country? The fact is, these viewpoints do not exist.

What a peculiar criteria to set forth as a standard that an intelligible city must meet, and not only because atop Notre Dame one can hardly embrace Paris in a single glance. Elsewhere in his travels, San Francisco seemed to strike the author as a perfectly intelligible city, but if there's a point where the whole metropolis can be seen in a single glance I don't know it, and the hills and fog do far more than the smog in Los Angeles to obscure the view on a regular basis. I've stood atop the highest points in Rome, never seeing the whole city at once spread before me, and the list of cities that fail on this metric goes on.

Finally, a legible city has to have a heart, and this heart must be pulsating. It has to have, somewhere, a starting point from which, one feels, the city was produced, and from which its mode of production is still intelligible today. It has to have a historical neighborhood, if you like, but one whose historicity continues to shape, engender, inspire, the rest of the urban space. But this place, too, is nonexistent. In Los Angeles there is nothing like the old neighborhoods from which you feel, almost physically, that the European cities, or even New York, have emerged. They do show me the old neighborhood. Kevin Starr, the excellent California historian, takes me not far from Chinatown, to Olivera Street and Old Plaza, which are supposed to be the nucleus of what was once called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles. But they are dead places. It's a neighborhood frozen in time. However much Starr leaps from house to house, with his considerable bulk proving surprisingly agile, with his ink-blue too-warm suit and his bow tie that makes him look like a private eye out of Raymond Chandler, to explain to me how gargantuan Los Angeles was born from this tiny seed; for all this, something isn't right. You don't feel any possible common denominator between this stone museum, these relics, and the vital, luxuriant enormousness of the city. And the truth is that with its pedestrian islands and its restored façades, its profusion of typical restaurants and its stands selling authentic Mexican products, its wrought-iron bandstands, its cobblestones, the varnished wood of the Avila Adobe, which is supposed to be the first house in the neighborhood, this street makes me think of all the fake "heritage towns" that I keep running into in America.

A Parisian can be forgiven for sensing the dearth of old things even in East Coast cities, and Los Angeles is certain to seem shockingly new. I'd counsel spending some time at the Santa Monica Pier if one wants to see a location whose appeal has been surprisingly consistent since its first incarnation. That LA makes the writer think of fake heritage towns is actually itself a sign of enduring themes, since between Hollywood and Disneyland greater Los Angeles basically invented the fake landscape, perhaps to its shame rather than its credit. On the other hand, whether on Cannery Row in Monterrey, sitting at a cafe in the Latin Quarter, or traipsing through the Roman ruins, great cities often see one era's heart turned into the next era's heritage town.

Mr. Levy concludes:

For an illegible city is also a city without a history.

An unintelligible city is a city whose historicity is nothing more than an ageless remorse.

And a post-historical city is, I fear, a city about which one can predict with some certainty that it will die.

I am a conservative gambler. And I'll go all in on the proposition that Los Angeles isn't going to die in my lifetime or that of my grandchildren, hostile attacks from nuclear powers notwithstanding.

None of this is to say that Los Angeles is without its flaws. Take a look at this post, and tell me about them by emailing conor.friedersdorf@gmail.com

[klamedia]

Typical. Out-of-touch.

[pesto]

I think Levy is better at specific observations than in pulling ideas together. This is a curiously modernist analysis for someone from a postmodernist age. Someone might inform him that there are infinite histories and suitable ones are invented by each generation. Of all people, a Parisian should know the historical reinterpretations that Paris has gone through. Writers from Faulkner to Robert Penn Warren have been doing this in the US for 80 years.

A relevant quote from John Milton that is always worth repeating: "We see things not as they are, but as we are." I'm afraid Mr. Levy is a bit narrow and perhaps a bit frightened by Los Angeles.

[Pegasusbsb27]

the Ultimate City!

[clop]

Multicultural

[icracked]

What kind of question that? Its a city in California.

[desertpunk]

LA IS PRETEND.

[kidA]

orly?....and what's an albuquerque anyway?

[desertpunk]

Originally Posted by kidA

orly?....and what's an albuquerque anyway?

It's where you all made "that left turn".

[milquetoast]

Kid might be too young for Bugs Bunny.

[desertpunk]

Originally Posted by milquetoast

Kid might be too young for Bugs Bunny.

Well then he's way too young for the other reply I had waiting for him!

[Mr.Hollywood]

if you dont like LA why are you even wasting your time on this Thread? go look at a thread about your lovely desert city... No more of this.. lets get back on the topic we started on kk