Life’s Passing Us By Without Sidewalk Cafes

Noting that patrons of the Hollywood Bowl continue to drink wine and other alcoholic beverages throughout the performances, Betty A. Wesley wants to know why we still have rules against sidewalk cafes.

“If we’re this lenient about drinking at the Bowl,” she asks, “why can’t we at least repeal the outdated, puritanical law which prevents us from having wonderful European-style sidewalk cafes in Los Angeles?

“European cities don’t seem to have suffered from this leniency; yet I doubt that any of them would allow us to get drunk in one of their concert halls. Our values here seem strangely mixed; and I, for one, wish we could do something about them.”

I am not sure from Wesley’s letter whether she is more incensed about drinking at the Bowl or the banning of sidewalk cafes, although there is something to be said for both positions.

As one who has often enjoyed sipping wine at the Bowl, I can hardly complain about others who do the same, short of getting plastered and kicking bottles down the stairs. I have found that during those sensuous summer evenings, a glass or two of Chardonnay helps me to become one with the Bach or Mozart or Stravinsky. Moderation, of course, is obligatory, since one must still drive home.

But I am wholeheartedly with Wesley in her plea for sidewalk cafes. As she points out, they have added much to the pleasure of life in European cities without having any adverse effect, as far as I know, on the crime rate or the incidence of public drunkenness.

One of the complaints most commonly made by foreigners against Los Angeles is that there is little social contact in public places. We are all trapped in our cars, and there is almost no street life.

It is true that we are a mobile city; we drive to our malls and vanish into their stores without encountering one another on sidewalks at all. In New York, walking down the street may be compared with a line scrimmage in football, but at least one has contact with one’s fellow citizens.

In Los Angeles, the closest thing we have to sidewalk cafes are those open dining areas between fast-food stands in shopping centers, but they are not truly outdoors: We do not feel the sunlight or see the birds and butterflies. We have no sense of leisure and contemplation.

I am told that the rule against sidewalk cafes is not puritanical in origin, but reflects the city’s feeling that businesses should not be conducted on public property, which sidewalks are.

Evidently some factions in city government are trying to relax these interdictions against street vendors at Olvera Street, with the backing of the Catholic Church. Perhaps they will prevail, and sidewalk cafes will follow.

Reservations against sidewalk cafes on moral grounds are hardly justified. What is the difference between serving drinks on the sidewalk and serving them just inside a swinging door?

They would be a boon to social intercourse. No more convivial spot in the world exists than Les Deux Magots cafe on the Left Bank in Paris. One sits at one’s little table, crowded up against the other patrons at other little tables, and one sips one’s wine or coffee or aperitif while the parade of tourists, Parisians, soldiers, artists, bureaucrats, mistresses, models, authors, hustlers and gymnasts goes by. I believe that if one sat at Les Deux Magots every day for 10 years, he would see every person worth seeing in the world. (After all, most of us don’t get to Paris every year.)

Sidewalk cafes would dramatically change the quality of life on Broadway, which has more pedestrian traffic than any other street in the city. If one could watch the passing throng while sipping a glass of cabernet sauvignon and nibbling a taco, the street would become a place of relaxation, comfort and reflection, besides an avenue of frenzied shopping.

Of course, a complement of the sidewalk cafe would be the sidewalk toilet, about which the Parisians seem to have no embarrassment. When it comes to public accommodations, the United States is the most backward country in the western world, and Los Angeles the most backward city.

Meanwhile, about the only place where one can drink outdoors is the Hollywood Bowl. No wonder it’s become a bacchanal.