One night not so many weeks ago, I went to visit a friend who lives in West Hollywood. This used to be an easy drive: a geometry of short, straight lines from my house in the mid-Wilshire flats—west on Olympic to Crescent Heights, north past Santa Monica Boulevard. Yet like everywhere else these days, it seems, Los Angeles is no longer the place it used to be. Over the past decade-and-a-half, the city has densified: building up and not out, erecting more malls, more apartment buildings, more high-rises. At the same time, traffic has become a catastrophe, which means that, even on a weekday evening, I soon found myself hopelessly boxed-in and looking for a short-cut, which, in an automotive culture such as this one, means a whole new way of conceptualizing urban space.
There are those (myself among them) who would argue that the very act of living in L.A. requires an ongoing process of reconceptualization, of rethinking not just the place but also our relationship to it, our sense of what it means. More than most cities, Los Angeles is a work-in-progress, a landscape of fragments where the boundaries we take for granted in other environments are not always clear. You can see this in the most unexpected places, from the Grove to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where Chris Burden’s sculpture Urban Light—a cluster of 202 working vintage lampposts—fundamentally changed the nature of Wilshire Boulevard when it was installed in 2008. Until then, the museum (like so many of L.A.’s institutions) had turned its back on the city; Burden’s intention was to create a catalyst, an entry point. When I first came to Los Angeles a quarter century ago, the area around LACMA was run-down, seedy; it’s no coincidence that in the film Grand Canyon, Mary Louise Parker gets held up there. Spend time on Wilshire now, and you’ll find a different sort of interaction: food trucks, pedestrians, tourists, people from the neighborhood.
Perhaps only in Los Angeles would this feel like a revolution: a street with a culture unto itself. But then, L.A. may be unique among American cities for having failed to recognize its streets as public space. For as long as it has had a self-image, that image has been one of cool containment: the single driver, moving between home and work and leisure, along boulevards, Joan Didion once observed, “devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.” This is a place where you can leave your house and drive to work, to dinner, to the movies without ever actually stepping outside. This is a city in which the most basic cornerstones have long been private: private life, private architecture, what Louis Adamic called “the enormous village,” where the single-family house is the essential heart. And yet, in contemporary Los Angeles, all that is changing, as population growth has forced our hand. What is the great civic project of the twenty-first century? The construction of light rail, subways, a public transportation network in which the one-car-one-commuter vision is replaced by something more collective, more inclusive, less about what the city was than what it has become.
Let this seem more orderly than it’s meant to, we’d do well to remember: L.A. is a city framed by chaos. This is both the finest and the most difficult thing about it, that anything goes. Want to open a restaurant that looks like a Brown Derby, or a movie theatre in the shape of a pagoda? Go ahead. Want to live in a chateau or a fairy tale cottage, construct a set of towers out of concrete and broken terra cotta in the heart of Watts? Not only will no one get in your way, you can become a hero doing that. I think of Simon Rodia, who spent thirty-three years working on the Watts Towers only to abandon them when he was done.
Indeed, in walking away from his creation, Rodia became an exemplary Angeleno. First, he pursued his own idiosyncratic vision; then he left it to the city, creating a heritage larger than himself. The same is true of Burden’s lampposts, or the Hollywood sign or Disney Hall. All were erected for one purpose, in a single moment, and all were remade, through time and familiarity, as something else. This is how cities grow, how they develop. This is how identity is formed. Such a process defines Los Angeles as we recontextualize and navigate and incubate it, as we ponder what it will become. Is it a city of sprawl or one of neighborhoods? A landscape of spectacle or substance? The answer, of course, is neither—and both.
If that sounds contradictory, so be it. Los Angeles has always contained multitudes. “[W]ith such vaulting ambitions,” James M. Cain wrote in his 1933 essay “Paradise,” “it might pull off something; you can’t tell.” Cain was addressing the booster myth, that old come-on about Southern California as a paradise on earth, but eighty-one years later, the comment resonates. What are our ambitions now? To build a city, I’d suggest, that works. This requires the kind of (self-) consciousness that has always been an aspect of L.A.’s personality, what D.J. Waldie calls its “sacred ordinariness.”
For Waldie, that has to do with history, with not turning our backs on the past. I read it somewhat differently: that in a city so misread, so mythologized, the radical perspective is the one that sees it for what it is. Here we see the power of light rail, of art projects that turn the streets back into public space. Here we see the value of our self-reflection, the way the city has of thinking about itself. What will Los Angeles look like in the future, when, we must anticipate, density and gridlock will be endemic and the neighborhood will assert itself (as it has already begun to) as the building block of civic life? I don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s in the thinking, in the incubation, that L.A.’s possibilities reside.
