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Urban Allergy

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E.D. Maytum's last piece for the magazine was an interview of monologuist Spalding Gray.

Around the country this year we have seen reports of increases in allergic reactions. Some health-care professionals offer theories of rampant pollution, mutated bacteria and, the main protagonist in some B-movie script, aggressive mold. Earlier this year, State Farm Insurance stopped entertaining new California customers for home-owner policies due to a number of unpleasant factors, including mold.

Other scientists, and risk-sensitive individuals, have suggested a more startling theory. We may be more susceptible to allergies because we have so sanitized our living environments that our children may not be exposed to enough dirt, germs and bacteria to build effective antibodies to fight off the negative effects of everyday exposure to life. As any yogurt fan knows, bacteria can be a positive. Our bodies are full of the stuff and it causes health problems if we run short. All the antibacterial liquid hand soaps and germ-killing aerosols aren’t going to change the fact that a certain amount of filth is a good thing.

Los Angeles seems to be driving away from this truth. Instead of tidying up a bit, we’re scouring our urban landscape. Just witness two of our city’s newest experiments in radical surgery: the developments at Hollywood & Highland, and the Grove.

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At Hollywood & Highland, gritty old Hollywood has been replaced by a $615-million romanticized vision of a past that never was. The main force behind the make-over of the neighborhood was an Angeleno named David Malmuth. He’s best known as the leader of Disney’s gentrification of New York’s Times Square, and he worked for Canadians who owned Hollywood & Highland, TrizecHahn Corp. In an interview with The Times several years ago, he summed up his plans for the cleanup of the neighborhood: “What we talk about in describing our ambition here for Hollywood Boulevard is to create a place that’s authentic.”

So visitors to the center venture into Babylon Court--featuring two towering white elephants atop huge gray columns--which is meant to evoke the grandeur of Hollywood past, when D.W. Griffith used similar sets for his film “Intolerance.” It’s an echo of an authentically fictional movie set that never was part of the Los Angeles landscape. It reminds me of a sidewalk sign I spotted once outside an L.A. furniture store: Antiques Made Daily.

Scattered along the floor of the center is “The Road to Hollywood,” an artwork by Erika Rothenberg. One selection reads, “I came here from the Virgin Islands and got a job cleaning toilets. Eight years later, I co-founded a grip truck service.”--Key grip. Another entry mirrors the experience of Whoopi Goldberg: “I was a welfare mother who got herself together and wrote a one-woman show that made it to Broadway.”--Movie star/TV host.

Those are real stories, touching stories, that perhaps no one could quarrel with--except the poor visitor who innocently parked in the parking garage beneath, where rates are an authentic $1 for 20 minutes--a steep price for a welfare mother, toilet cleaner or writer, for that matter.

Outside the new center, Hollywood Boulevard is starting to look like a version of Times Square and 42nd Street. ABC’s new late-night show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel debuts in January across the street from Hollywood & Highland. Kimmel’s producers say “Hollywood will be what New York is to the Letterman show,” according to a spokesman for Hollywood & Highland. The signs and the mouth of the new subway station evoke Manhattan rather than Los Angeles. Here the authentic is actually something similar to other places.

The Grove is closer to the mark. The Farmers Market at 3rd and Fairfax has always been unique to L.A. Its worn but still charming geriatric food hall has been one of the city’s melting pots since 1934. Its patrons still include most every age, race and class in this city--and developer Rick Caruso has preserved the market as well as the original 19th century home of the Gilmore family, who own the land. Even so, the old sights and smells have changed since the $160-million outdoor shopping center opened next door.

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“We’ve married something new and fresh to something old and historic,” he said. And he’s pulled it off, in ways not even Anna Nicole Smith could imagine.

The Grove is a simulation of what a small town main street might be if there were no homeless, no cars, no crime . . . well, you get the point. It’s a well-heeled small town, with an apparently robust economy, for it is filled with expensive shops, restaurants and movie theaters. Transportation is by foot or by a trolley designed by George McGinnis, a monorail designer and retired Disney “imagineer.” You can ride it along the curved streets to your favorite store.

Those streets are curved for good reason, by the way. A feng shui expert told Caruso that curves in buildings and paths help the harmonious flow of energy more than straight lines do.

Maybe that’s what’s missing in Los Angeles. Our streets are too straight. They also don’t have music playing out of flowerpots and walls. Our public spaces don’t have Venetian glass chandeliers, or bellhops catering to our needs, or the magic of dancing water fountains.

Instead, the city is gritty, organic and spontaneous. Do you feel a sneeze coming on?

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