Road to Ruin : Until Recently, the Word <i> Pothole</i> Simply Did Not Exist in the Local Vocabulary

I WAS BORN HERE. Here not meaning in the pages of this publication, but rather in this metropolis, albeit at a time when it was a tad less metropolitan. Many people I encounter here take me for a New Yorker, but in New York--where my refusal to dress in the dour, all-black uniform of the true Gothamite makes it obvious--I am pegged as a typical, if under-tanned, Angeleno. I was born here, and I have the memories to prove it. Not just the mental pictures of orange groves within 20 minutes of home--and home wasn’t even in the Valley.

I cherish the moment in 1971 when I first saw the telltale rubble: The high school that had locked me in its clammy embrace had been destroyed in the Sylmar earthquake. For anyone who hated high school, not even the welcome sight at reunions of former campus big shots transformed into pot-bellied suburbanites could be as stirring as the vision of that grim tower leveled by the dutifully vengeful shudders of my friend the Earth.

I have fond memories of the time when every major street in Los Angeles had its own distinctive style of light fixture. This was important to me, as a preliterate 3-year-old whose view out the car window usually included only the tallest objects (of which there weren’t that many). I first learned the streets here by recognizing that Wilshire, for example, was lined with those black, square, lantern-like fixtures, while Olympic was illuminated by tall, chocolate-brown poles with little curlicues. All these idiosyncratic pieces of what city planners call “street furniture” are long gone, replaced by fixtures whose uniformity and functionality--abetted, I’m sure, by lower maintenance costs--make them masterpieces of street-lighting efficiency. So they’re dull.

Now the non-reader can identify streets by their relative pothole level.

Potholes. Until recently, the word pothole simply did not exist in the local vocabulary. (We pause briefly to allow unreconstructed New Yorkers to wax snide about all the other words missing from the local vocabulary. Done? Fine.) Everyone is now urged by the nostalgia machine to view that time back then, whenever that was, as an era of lost innocence. Such reveries are for people who have conveniently forgotten their neighborhood bullies. But 20 or 30 years ago, the streets of Los Angeles were, in fact, perfect.

It was as if we had been blessed not only with this climate of near-constant warmth; not only with soil capable of growing anything that we could afford to irrigate. Nature had also, it seemed, bestowed upon us these ribbons of unblemished asphalt that begged to be driven upon. The only thing that marred the endless smoothness of our divine pavings were the streetcar tracks. Too bad for them.

In the intervening years, of course, the prolific soil has grown a bumper crop of mini-malls, and we’ve dressed up the climate in a diaphanous, light-brown cloak of particulate matter. But what happened to those glorious roadways?

Now, I don’t spend that much time in the library, so the reports that the fiscal aftereffects of Proposition 13 decimated our libraries remain rumors to me. The public schools were never that good--not when I attended them and not during the brief moment when I taught in them--so I discount the blame heaped on 13 for the proverbial Johnny’s perennial illiteracy.

But, hey--I live, therefore I drive, therefore I notice when they don’t spend money on the streets. Until part of Fairfax was finally fixed a year ago, driving it merited stunt pay. There are dozens of other instances, in your neighborhood and mine, where our asphalt lifelines maintain several different driving surfaces simultaneously for our motoring pleasure.

To be fair, I considered the idea that these imperfections had been introduced deliberately, as a way of making Easterners and Midwesterners feel more at home here. Perfect streets had only made visiting New Yorkers of an earlier day turn their condescension up a notch. But such folks aren’t fooled. They know these aren’t the “What do you expect? It snows” potholes of their grim climes. These are just “Fix them? They haven’t fallen through to the sewer yet” holes.

Obviously, these aren’t the glory days of L.A. driving. Traffic woes, and the secret routes to avoid them, have become conversational cliches to rival liposuction. It’s been a long time since “Sunday drive” denoted pleasure. So we clearly don’t need, through official neglect or taxpayer chintziness, any more spine-tingling incursions on our sacred right to automobiles.

But the cracks and the holes and the bumps strike deeper than mere inconvenience or slight physical pain. As a native, I feel the affront most profoundly. Imagine that someone had told the Disney people: “Sorry, for financial reasons, Main Street can only be cleaned every couple of weeks. You’re going to have to accept a slightly messier Magic Kingdom.” My city has told me that the joy ride is over, literally. My friends, that is unacceptable. It might as well rain.