Real L.A.? No, Thanks . . . Just Pass the Sushi
In a recent article on Los Angeles, the Atlantic Monthly swept aside the old myths and foresaw that in the 21st Century we may become the Western Hemisphere’s leading city.
This heady prognostication was shadowed, however, by warnings that we may yet be overwhelmed by such problems as smog, traffic congestion, inadequate housing and education, sewage pollution and the lack of regional unity among suburban entities.
As real estate editor Dick Turpin pointed out in his review of this article Sunday, its authors (Charles Lockwood and Christopher B. Leinberger) are “authoritative Angelenos,” so their piece is not the usual bag of cliches.
It is an excellent overview of Los Angeles present and future, but I am worried that if the Eastern press employs people who know something about Los Angeles to write articles about us, they are going to ruin our image.
Though they deny its symbolic value, the authors give a graphic picture of downtown Los Angeles, noting that the reports of its death were premature. Its new skyline and concomitant shops, condominiums, hotels and museum, they observe, form only a small part of what we call downtown.
“Downtown is a microcosm of greater Los Angeles, and totally different worlds exist in one block. Within its 4 1/2 square miles, downtown has a Hispanic shopping district along Broadway that is the busiest city shopping district west of Chicago, a civic center with one of the largest concentrations of government offices outside Washington, D.C., a Chinatown, a Little Tokyo, a busy Skid Row, a fledgling Soho-like artists’ district, one of the largest garment districts in the country, and a wholesale flower market. . . .” Most L.A. critics never get east of Rodeo Drive.
One staggering fact: Last year, greater Los Angeles, including its 18 “urban village cores” with a population of 12.6 million, produced $250 billion worth of goods, making it the world’s 11th largest “nation” in gross national product.
I am somewhat anxious, though, over the authors’ judgment that “to describe most of today’s Angelenos as laid-back would be as inappropriate as calling most New Yorkers polite.”
For decades Los Angeles has been treated contemptuously by Eastern pundits after superficial examinations. Remember H.L. Mencken’s great conclusion that “the whole place stank of orange blossoms”? We have inspired, and no doubt deserved, such epithets as Lala Land, the Nowhere City, Smogville, Tinseltown and Lotusland, to name but a few, and that image, I suspect, is what makes us so alluring.
I would hate to think that we are now to be inundated with reports in the popular magazines based on serious studies of Los Angeles and its problems. I doubt that any Eastern publications can help us solve them, and I’d just as soon that they’d go on thinking of us as a sort of Disneyland on wheels.
My hope is sustained, though, by another recent article on Los Angeles, in the Amtrak Express. It was sent to me by Carleen Bentley, with a plea that I put its authors in their place.
“You are the only person I can think of,” she says, “who will select the right words to prove that they are just envious of our way of life out here in beautiful California.”
The article, by Maureen McElheron and Linda Eklund, is called “Going Native in L.A.,” and it runneth over with all the cliches we have grown to love. I think it’s very insightful. All critics of Los Angeles are envious.
The authors say: “Here is a movie industry to take you out of the moment, a space industry to get you completely out of this world, and all manner of para-sails, hang gliders, skateboards, surfboards, and tangerine-flake babies: anything to move you along in defiance of gravity, ordinary reality, and plain common sense. . . . But the world loves it. It likes a city where nothing’s more than 40 years old and everything is sun-drenched impermanence. All you need own is a car and a phone--two machines without which Angelenos could barely exist. . . .”
That’s our town.
I don’t want to read any more articles about our gross national product and our insoluble problems. I don’t want to see our old image drown in a sea of statistics.
If any Eastern reporters want to check out the real L.A. with me, they can call my answering machine. I’ll be at the beach.
