Heart of City in Cardiac Arrest--Still

Drive up Alameda Street, along the eastern frontier of downtown, through the smells of rotting fruit and truck exhaust. At 3rd Street, a left will take you into Little Tokyo. Head right and you’re in the maze of big rigs and loading docks that used to be my neighborhood.

It’s one of those dingy, Central City pockets notable these days not for what it is, but for what it was supposed to have been: a sort of Soho West, a community of the creative and the curious. The warehouses were being leased as loft space. Loading docks doubled as underground clubs by night. This quadrant, the boosters said, was surely a sign that the resurrection of downtown Los Angeles was at hand.

Never mind that the lofts violated every chapter of the building code and the air was as ripe as an outhouse at high noon, that the panhandlers were so brazen they begged, not for quarters, but for the exact price of a bottle of Night Train, including tax. It was a statement to live at the city’s molten core. From the third floor of our warehouse, across the street from a fish cake factory, we were sure that something dramatic was about to occur.

But that drama never transpired. Five years later, the day still dawns with the hiss of hydraulic brakes. There isn’t a gallery or a cafe in sight. The only sign of humanity at the loading docks one recent day was a discarded vinyl purse, its contents--a few tissues, a lipstick, some business cards for an amnesty consultant--dumped in a heap on the hot asphalt.

In the space where I once lived, a woman was running a T-shirt factory. Live there? It hadn’t crossed her mind. Her home, she said, was in Silver Lake, just a few minutes away, where the hills are gracious and the trees are green.

Why did things fizzle? It wasn’t for lack of a colorful cast.

At one point, there were 23 people living (illegally) in our building. There were two rich kids from the Bay Area, a woman with an orange crew cut and a heart-and-dagger tattoo, and a guy with waist-length hair and a Chicken-of-the-Sea mermaid suit who ran an underground club.

There was a guitarist with hair the shade of raspberry Jell-O, a martial arts instructor, a pilot who made mysterious clandestine trips to South America. There was a painter named X-8 who dressed only in black and whose canvases featured very large swastikas (one of which my dog once critiqued earnestly with an uplifted hind leg.)

I lived in a room the size of a basketball court, with hardwood floors and a bathroom made of glass bricks. You could look out the high, arched windows and see the glittering lights of East L.A.; you could open a window and hear far-off music at night.

But there was something unliveable, overall, about the place. One close friend capped his first visit by giving me a gun and nailing all my windows shut. And he was right. It wasn’t safe to walk after dark. The ambience was foreboding and grim. Once I passed a heap of blankets on a loading dock at dusk. As I approached, the blankets sat up and screamed.

I was on my way out in 1987 when the earthquake hit and we discovered why it was illegal to live in our lofts: The warehouse was of unreinforced masonry. The keystones popped from the window frames. Rubble rained on my books and bed. Eventually the roof was torn off for seismic retrofitting, the winter rains came and everyone scattered--the rich kids to Hollywood and Newport Beach, the mermaid to Europe, the pilot (rumor had it) to jail. X-8 changed his name to X-9 and moved to the San Fernando Valley. I got married and moved to the suburbs.

Now when I hear the city’s redevelopment czars talk about how dynamic and vibrant a community downtown “soon” will be, I wonder about their definition of soon. Because five years later, my old neighborhood remains as down-at-the-heels as the junkies who used to tie off and shoot up outside my door.

Was it the city’s fault? Maybe. Certainly in five years, City Hall could have encouraged the construction of some amenities for the area. Was it the people? Possibly. It’s hard to persuade renters and people without families to feel a stake in a place.

But perhaps more than anything, it seemed a function of the natural laws of Los Angeles, laws that defy all effort to impose a center that will hold. If New Yorkers are dominated by Manhattan’s gravitational pull, Angelenos run on centrifugal force. The idea here is to have a city without actually having to put up with one. People don’t live downtown because they can live in any one of a dozen far-flung neighborhoods and still feel at the urban center of things.

Maybe that’s why I don’t pine much for downtown these days. There are a million stories here in the Naked Suburb. My loft felt like New York, and perhaps that’s the key: My days in the city’s “heart” were the furthest I’ve ever felt from its soul.