Internal and External perceptions of LA

"I just want to be in a swimming pool, eating tacos and signing autographs" - "The Smithereens" the movie one of the down and out character's says about moving to LA while living in a scummy basement apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

They say that when you visit Venice, Italy you need to arrive at it by the sea.  Venice is a magical place where all your romantic impressions from movies and history come true.  And this perception is solidified if you literally approach it properly. I, on the other hand, arrived to Venice for the first time by train.  Which means I passed through Mestre before I got to Venice.  Actually, my hostel was in Mestre and I stopped off and walked around that city for a couple hours before departing for Venice.  If Venice is a magic dreamland then Mestre is an industrial nightmare.  Most cities have a mix of "nice" qualities and necessary, but "ugly" qualities, but when faced with a place that needs to exist as a fiction then all the necessary aspects of it get shoved into a nearby area and the local commerce tries as much as possible to get visitors to ignore it.  Or sometimes, like in the case of North Vegas, be afraid of it.
Still, I was absolutely glad I went through Mestre and got a chance to see what a completely rejected working class construction zone was like where there is practically nothing "nice" or "beautiful" about the entire place.  I guess it might seem strange, but I have never really agreed with most of society on these terms of "beauty", "good", "prosperity", etc.  Often I find things that are supposed to look beautiful to actually look very ugly and visa verse.  This particularly true with modern architecture.  As one of the last created cities on earth Los Angeles as some of the most diverse architecture and it can change dramatically within a span of 10 feet.

One of the most apt and concise descriptions of the conundrum of LA I found in a somewhat creative bureaucratic text book from 1955 titled  The Metropolis: Is Integration Possible? which is part of the series Metropolitan Los Angeles - A Study in Integration [the entire book is quite facinating because it give eloquent and complex descriptions for a purpose that is clearly supposed to be quite dry given chapters titled "Local Governments - Your Concern", "Water Supply - Your Heritage", "Protective Forces - Your Safety", etc]:

"Los Angeles and its environs are many things to many people.  The metropolis spreads out across the coastal plain and its surroundings valleys in a turning areas, farm lands and orchards, industrial centers and oil fields.  No other metropolitan area in the United States, or perhaps even the world, is so diversified and decentralized.  Consider the dilemma of the visitor from New York or Chicago who is completely at a loss because he can find no particular place to pause, as in Time Square or The Loop, and say to himself, 'This is Los Angeles'."

With such a short history as a city Los Angeles approaches itself in a very "modern" way.  If cities were humans who had personalities then Los Angeles reached adolescence and its most influential time period in the 1950's.  The biggest explosion of the cinema industry, automobiles, suburbs, microwave dinners and disposable products.  It is a disposable city.

How can a city express an adjective such as disposable? If you spend any time in virtually any city that is older then LA you quickly notice that there are a lot more older and classic buildings then in LA.  However, often, especially in California, many buildings are not necessarily older then LA, but they are much more cared for.  Simply spend some time in downtown Los Angeles and you can see a dozen buildings that are over 100 years old.  There are a few, like the Eastern Building, that are pristine and well cared for, elegant, beautiful and decadent.  However, there are hundreds of others that are decaying, rotting and falling apart.  Why?  It's quite easy.  Just like the City Market of LA (which I describe in a previous entry) many buildings in LA develop a certain amount of decay where it becomes more of a nuisance to repair then it is to destroy entirely and rebuild a new building entirely.  It a way it's a perpetual process.

Let's take a recent example at my armamada, the University of Southern California.  Just a few years ago they constructed a new Building for the Cinema School.  The Lucas building.  This was to replace the old Lucas building (both created from huge donations from, you guessed it, George Lucas).  The old building was only built sometime in the 80's, but just over 20 years later the University needed to fix so much in the building and, according to the Dean, there were so many new restrictions in relation to earthquake safety that it was cheaper and easier to just tear down that building and build a new one all together.  So, now the old building is just a memory.  It is disposable. Get rid of the old to make way for the new.  When the old is just out of style that it's an eyesore and just before it becomes beautiful again as a historic relic.

So, this is what real estate developers do.  They wait for a building to die, in a sense.  They want a building to become an eyesore (or become a hazard) in some cases for much older buildings that have a historic value to it.  That way they can bypass city laws forbidding destruction of historical landmarks.  It might take 5 or 10 years, but eventually they will have their way and the city looses more of it's historic culture and instead is replaced with the cookie cutter machine of big industry where everything should look the same. Every Walmart looks the same, every high rise, every 7-11 and eventually everything will look and be the same.

Enjoy it while we can.