Cafe California: A Lack of Common Ground : Identity: A feeling for community is not defined by real estate. Belonging is what builds the sense of shared space, a rarity in driven Los Angeles.

A middle-aged retarded man, wearing a house key on a string around his neck, carried his coffee from inside the cafe to a sidewalk table. He sat down, promptly smoked a cigarette and hummed a hymn while watching passers-by. Occasionally someone stopped to say hello.

It was early in the morning--and cold. Soon, a meticulously put-together gentleman arrived, complete with combed mustache. He was elderly, dressed for the 1940s, but his suit jacket did not quite match his pants and his vest was an altogether different shade of brown, set off by a bright red tie and a pocket handkerchief to match. He sat down at another table, with dignity, and savored his morning beverage, a Budweiser.

The other tables slowly began to fill, outside and inside: a professor and two students argued; several merchants about to open their stores arrived; a gaggle of lawyers on their way to court sat quietly staring at their briefs, assorted laborers and office workers took an early coffee break from work. Some spoke in Spanish, some in English. Others sat alone and read.

This perfectly ordinary morning gathering could easily have been in Paris, Munich or Prague. Cafes and coffeehouses punctuate London’s Bloomsbury, New York’s Greenwich Village or San Francisco’s North Beach.

Yet such a collection of morning life does not happen in downtown Los Angeles, Century City or even Westwood. The one described above was at the Aroma coffeehouse on Main Street in downtown Riverside. More urbane areas of Southern California offer few communal places quite like it, though some can still be found sprinkled in crannies such as Venice. Coffeehouses thrive on the periphery of culture, while the Los Angeles Civic Center is altogether vacant of such places, unlike Lincoln Center in the middle of Manhattan.

Most coastal cities here are striped by fancy condominiums and million-dollar homes, complete with security gates, plus a few vestigial bungalows starting at $250,000. But communities are not defined by real estate. Communities are constructed from some common ground, neighborhood by neighborhood, where people who believe they belong share space, even if they live and work apart.

Communities require common places. In principle, a park bench is enough to get a conversation going and parks once served this purpose well. No more. We all know how MacArthur Park has melted in the dark. Those who linger there, out of habit or nostalgia, are melting, too. Urban parks are no longer habitable. Communities may be states of mind but they need a safe place to live.

Bars won’t work as substitutes; they exclude adults who do not drink and infants who travel by stroller. Tavern atmosphere is no place for morning coffee and a chat. Cafes and coffeehouses offer more congenial open spaces, to watch, to talk or listen, even to lose yourself in thought. The purpose is not so much to eat or drink but to be part of the human parade, to have a particular public place to occupy, a familiar landmark for the soul, a place where they may not know your name but they know your face. That’s the way it works in Paris but hardly here.

Yes, thousands of places serve food fast and pour coffee from Santa Monica to Eagle Rock. But custom dictates that one is to eat and leave, as expeditiously as possible. Do not dawdle, do not ponder, do not savor any communal atmosphere. There are some older coffee shops where retired people linger, even if they sit apart from one another in separate isolation booths. But those places are melting down, too. Two decades ago a particular Bob’s Big Boy restaurant in Glendale served as a community center; now it has disappeared.

There are also the lunch counters where lost souls occasionally sit, talking to themselves. They would be far happier at a sidewalk table, I think, talking to the street.

Numerous imitation French cafes and bistros are available in more affluent parts of town, along Sunset Boulevard, for instance, where the food can be so carefully prepared it commands the center of attention. Imitation French cafes are not for everyone.

We form some connections because we want to, with lovers and with friends. Other connections are negotiated for business or social advantage. Our connections of place--where each one of us is welcome--require recognition, each elderly man, each lawyer, each student familiar to the next. Tiny Naylor’s in Hollywood was once such a place; then it was demolished.

Commercial malls do provide some common ground but do they become a substitute for old-fashioned parks and neighborhoods?

Coffee bars and tables sit amid the food halls of Beverly Center or the Westside Pavilion, for example, right next to cinemas the size of screening rooms. You can sit and compare notes on what you’ve seen, have a conversation inspired by a movie or a purchase. Yet in fact that hardly happens. Food halls in the malls are places where shoppers drop until sufficiently rested to get on with their consuming. Mall-walking turns out to be more a private, sensual indulgence of acquisitive fantasies: admire, feel, buy. I prefer catalogues to malls.

Some time ago I was in South Coast Plaza, waiting for a friend. She was late. We had arranged a rendezvous at the F.A.O. Schwarz toy store. We were going to buy a stuffed animal together. I wandered with a cup of coffee up and down the corridor and loitered in the store for an hour. Two plainclothes officers quite politely rousted me. A mall is not designed for lingering.

There are simple economic explanations why cafes of community don’t exist in Southern California urban centers. Rent is dear and coffee cheap; the turnover would be too slow to make a profit. Lingering also doesn’t fit the image of a city on the move, especially if the clientele arrives in unmatched pants and jackets.

Yet economic explanations are not the dominant reasons. Lack of common grounds--communities of interest--are the larger trouble. Angelenos or Orange County residents are either too new or too unsettled to develop the sense of shared geography that holds on in places like Riverside or Barstow.

Urban Southern Californians prefer to drive alone, on the way to economic independence and social autonomy. Forget identity--ethnic, geographic or historic. Instead of neighborhood names, ZIP Code numbers.

An insidious philosophical thesis permeates, especially in prosperous subdivisions: To each his own. It would seem that each creature is better off by himself or herself. The landmarks of the modern urban soul are more likely clothes than coffeehouses.

Los Angeles used to be a collection of communities absorbed into a sprawling city, one by one. The separate communities, a Highland Park or a Silver Lake, then more or less lost identity, leaving a giant without a face. The lack of recognizable, sharp features and common places is what bemuses older Easterners and Europeans. But this same phenomenon is also making a blur of their urbanscapes and faces. No wonder cities have grown so hard to govern.