ARCHITECTURE : View From the Top of La Cienega Reveals Region’s ‘Promised Land’

One of my favorite tricks when I’m showing first-time visitors around Los Angeles is to bring them from the airport to the Westside along either La Cienega Boulevard or La Brea Avenue.

After you wind through the surreal landscape of the Baldwin Hills oil fields, the barren hills start to open up, the road curves and there is western Los Angeles, spread out for you from downtown to the ocean.

Especially on a clear night, the effect is spectacular: A field of lights stretches between you and the Hollywood Hills, sparkling with all the riches of LaLa Land. At night, darkness hides a lot, including the industrial buildings in the foreground and the reality of the socioeconomic differences of the Westside. By day, artificially green foliage serves the same function, giving you the impression of a lush landscape dotted with a few tall buildings.

From the top of La Cienega, the Westside puts on its best face, appearing as the Promised Land revealed after the Purgatory of the oil wells.

It is all over in a fleeting moment, and then you descend into the world of concrete, asphalt, advertising and confusion. If you want to hold onto this mirage, get off at the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area exit, park your car and walk out to the edge of the hills. There you can see and understand the geography of the Westside. It appears as a valley between the string of hills and bluffs on which you are standing (which turn into the Culver City bluffs and then the Westchester bluffs farther west), and the heights of Brentwood, Bel-Air, Beverly Hills and Hollywood across the way.

Down the middle of this valley runs a man-made line of hills formed by the tall buildings that ring Wilshire Boulevard all the way from the knot of downtown to Santa Monica.

There is a rhythm to this line, which starts with the tall structures of Mid-Wilshire, subsides into the lower reaches of Hancock Park, comes back alive with the isolated towers of the Miracle Mile and Beverly Hills, masses together into Century City before turning into the Chinese Wall of Westwood condominiums and offices, then finally offers one last exclamation point at the sea in Santa Monica.

A few isolated clumps of offices, like those of Hollywood, or even single buildings like the apartment slab at the corner of Sunset and Doheny, stand out, but mainly the Westside falls away from these parallel ridges into valleys of green and brown, dissected by the geometry of streets, avenues and boulevards.

From this vantage point, an area that seems formless up close makes sense. You can understand the march of commerce out to the sea, the subdividing of the ranchos into residential developments and the crawl of the rich up the hills where they, like you, can survey the terrain with privileged clarity.

You can experience the reality of a water policy that has turned a semiarid plain into a Garden of Eden. You can even see the success of buildings that have clear shapes or are quite simply painted in a light color that catches the eye. You cannot see the poverty, the ugliness and the crowding that are also part of the Westside.

As you sweep down La Cienega, having experienced a perfect automotive moment of beauty, that reality soon swallows you up, leaving only a memory to help give shape to the confused and troubled urban scene that surrounds you.