ARCHITECTURE : Holiday Tree Lots Help Residents Rediscover a Lost Sense of Space
Most of the year they are leftover lots, forgotten corners of the city lost to weeds, dirt and graffiti through the vagaries of time.
Around the beginning of October, however, they come alive with lights, bales of hay, pumpkins and small desks with metal money boxes. After Halloween they empty out, but after Thanksgiving they are again transformed--this time into small, fragrant urban forests amid the bustle of the city. Families tromp through them, picking trees by size and fullness. It’s in the Christmas-tree lots, not in the shopping malls with their piped-in cliches, that the holiday spirit lives.
These tree lots allow us to rediscover the one common good that we usually ignore in this city: space.
We are very protective of our own private space, retreating behind elaborate protective devices and walls to carve out a place we can call our own. But we are completely noncommittal when it comes to public space, leaving our parks to starve and allowing wide streets and commercial development to replace what fragments of a public space we might have left. Space is for us something beyond the bounds of the city, out in the ocean or up in the mountains.
So it is up to the forgotten corners of the city, the triangles left in the middle of intersections, the sites that can’t be built on and the flood control areas, to remind us that there is a place where we can all come together in this city, or where the city just can display itself, in all its beauty and ugliness, around a piece of land.
Most of those sites are by their very nature unusable, but the Christmas tree lots are there for us to stroll through. You see sides of buildings you would never notice, you sense a scale that is understandable.
The best part is that these spaces are not designed. Instead of the elaborate attempts to create a “pedestrian scale” (which is to say to fill whatever space we have with colorful graphics and nostalgic street lamps), here the simple grid of the pumpkins or the trees gives shape to the space.
The trees especially create a nice scale, slightly higher than a human being, but intimate and comfortable. Walk through and you will find yourself actually talking to people you don’t know. Families, couples--people from all walks of life--wander through these miniature forests as if they were in their back yards.
None of these Christmas-tree lots taken separately are very remarkable. There is a very fancy one on La Cienega Boulevard, where the owner sits talking into a portable telephone while the Range Rovers pull in and out; there are battered little lots on Venice Boulevard or Highland Avenue whose openness and greenery make them seem even more of a relief in contrast with the busy boulevards.
But it is the mere fact of the lots’ existence that makes us realize what we are missing. We lack not just the smells and feels of the outdoors, but the ephemeral, surprising, social and essentially leftover sense of space.
At Christmas, we can realize that not every part of the city has to be useful, designed and designated. Making parks doesn’t make sense if people use them only for jogging or dog walking, and creating plazas nobody uses is equally nonsensical. What we need is urban accidents, places that are undefinable, places that are pregnant with possibilities and open to the city around them.
