Op-Ed: An avenue named Vin Scully

Far be it from me to begrudge Vin Scully, but when the City Council voted in January to rename Elysian Park Avenue in honor of the Dodgers’ announcer, I was not on board. Elysian Park Avenue, after all, has been a street here for more than a hundred years; as Sallie W. Neubauer, past president of the Citizen’s Committee to Save Elysian Park, explained in a letter to The Times, “In changing Elysian Park Avenue, the city has effectively wiped out any Elysian Park identification” from “the park’s main thoroughfares.”

Neubauer’s point is that the old street name is a last link to a disappeared Los Angeles, as old street names often are. Scully, of course is a last link also, not only to a generation of iconic voices (Harry Caray, Red Barber, Jack Brickhouse) in the broadcast booth, but also to the Dodgers’ long history in Brooklyn, where they played for nearly three-quarters of a century before moving to California in 1957.

This makes for a certain unintended irony, since the sensibilities of the Committee to Save Elysian Park and the City Council overlap. Both are in service of the same idea, that the past matters or, even more, that what once was should not disappear.

Such a sense of nostalgia has been part of Los Angeles’ personality from the start. As far back as the 1880s, Helen Hunt Jackson was already describing the place with a kind of wistful (if backhanded) longing: “If communities, as well as individuals, are happy when history finds nothing to record of them,” she enthused, “the city of the Queen of the Angels must have been a happy spot during the first fifty years of its life.”

Sixty-five years later, Raymond Chandler made a similar argument in “The Little Sister”: “A long time ago … Los Angeles was just a big sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.”

If it seems contradictory to consider Los Angeles through the filter of nostalgia, then so be it; contradiction is a key part of the city’s charm. Yes, this is a place that looks to the future, or at least exists largely in the present tense, a place where history is often regarded as a joke or a punch line. And yet, that history is real, as is our longing for it, for the connection it implies. If nothing else, it also reminds us that beneath Los Angeles’ slickest surfaces reside actual depths.

That, I’ve come to believe, is the story of Vin Scully Avenue, which embodies the grand Los Angeles tradition of the manufactured moment that, nonetheless, may tell us something real. I think of Chinatown and Olvera Street, the Farmer’s Market and the Grove.

All of them began as counterfeits or come-ons, attempts to mediate, or recreate, something that once or never was. Chinatown, for instance, was razed to make way for Union Station, then reconstructed a few blocks north. Tenth Street was widened and reconfigured in preparation for the 1932 Olympics, but how often do we think of that when we drive Olympic Boulevard?

What I’m saying is that history (that word again) has a way of working itself into the crevices when we don’t expect it, lending weight to even the most contrived changes to the cityscape. Eighty years later, the new Chinatown isn’t new any longer, which blurs the line between artifice and authenticity.

The same, I’d suggest is true of Vin Scully Avenue. On the one hand, it made for an easy photo op, the sort of uncontroversial glad-handing in which the City Council specializes. On the other, it tells us something about who we are.

This has not always been the case when it comes to the city’s proclivity for changing names. The 2003 decision by the City Council to reframe South Central as South Los Angeles reeks of social cleansing, as if the issues faced by our communities could be mitigated by removing two syllables. A similar intention infuses Sepulveda’s rebranding as Panorama City, or even East Hollywood’s reinvention as a set of easily identifiable microclimates, such as Little Armenia and Thai Town.

Other changes, though, feel less forced, more resonant. In the 19th century, Broadway was Eternity Street because it terminated at a cemetery; the new name became a symbol of a city on the rise. Now, we have Cesar Chavez Avenue and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, and if Scully is not (how could he be?) of their social significance, it is also the case that Los Angeles has never known the Dodgers without his voice murmuring across the airwaves on a soft night in summer, which represents its own sort of social glue.

Scully is not the first Dodger to have inspired the street namers. In 1967, the city considered renaming Fairfax Avenue for Sandy Koufax, who had retired from baseball the year before. That it didn’t happen tells us something about the shelf life of players as opposed to announcers, but even more, it has to do with the vagaries of fame. “After all,” an official commented to the Times, “Fairfax is a very long street and is very well known, and how well is Koufax doing this year?”

The issue is legacy, in other words — that ineffable quality with which all cities (even this one) ought to be concerned.

David L. Ulin is a 2015 Guggenheim fellow and the author of “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles,” which was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

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