Now, just a minute. It’s one thing...

Now, just a minute. It’s one thing for San Francisco to triumph over L.A. in a poll in Conde Nast Traveler magazine. But it’s quite another when Travel & Leisure magazine includes “The Long Goodbye” among “20 Books That Best Evoke a Sense of Place” because of author Raymond Chandler’s description of “ the shadowy streets of San Francisco.”

Chandler, the Bard of L.A.? How dare the magazine imply that Chandler’s hard-boiled private eye, Philip Marlowe, would ever ride one of those cute cable cars. (And then what? Slip off to the Napa Valley for a little Chardonnay and cheese?)

Here is the real fictional Marlowe at his living room window, stiff drink in hand, listening to the traffic below on shadowy Laurel Canyon Boulevard in “The Long Goodbye”:

“Far off, the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels. . . .”

No cable car bells ringing here.

Travel & Leisure did, however, honor the City of Angels with two citations in its “20 Top Travel Quotes”: Woody Allen’s joke about our “sole cultural advantage” being the ability to make a right turn on a red light, and H.L. Mencken’s crack that L.A. is “19 suburbs in search of a metropolis.” Actually, L.A. is now 87 suburbs in search of a metropolis.

Elsewhere in T&L;’s 20th anniversary edition, L.A. was snubbed in the “20 Most Terrifying Travel Moments” category. Well, we’d match one of the Pasadena Freeway’s 90-degree, 5-m.p.h. off-ramps any day with “the third-stage ascent of the Eiffel Tower.”

Or the shock of coming upon Disney’s corporate headquarters in Burbank, which is held up by the Seven Dwarfs.

And, finally, it seems incredible but there were no films set in L.A. in the magazine’s list of “20 Movies That Made Us Want to Be There” (“An American in Paris,” etc.). Forgotten were such heart-warming epics as:

1--”Earthquake.”

2--”To Live and Die in L.A.”

3--”Blade Runner”

4--”Day of the Locust”

5--”War of the Worlds.”

Remember when City Hall was destroyed in “War of the Worlds”? A real wish-we-were-there scene.

While we’re shamelessly promoting Angeltown, we should explain our recent item that “L.A. holds the national record for most holdups ever in a city--750 in 1983.”

One reader called to ask: “What’s that for? A week? You can’t mean a year.”

Sorry, we should have said that was the one-year record for bank holdups.

Where else but in L.A. would a single man advertise on his front lawn? Carolyn Guiditta of Arcadia found one such example in her neighborhood (see photo).

Apparently, not everyone appreciates us.

On a recent Southwest Airlines flight from San Francisco to San Diego, the pilot pointed out the lights of L.A. below. The passengers booed.

Philip Marlowe would have hooted with laughter.

miscelLAny:

The city’s parking systems coordinator is named Jay Carsman.