THE URBAN LANDSCAPE : Taking a Walk Down the City’s Streets Drives Home the Need for Public Spaces

Walking in Los Angeles is a strange experience. Walking in a crowd here is an even more rare and enlightening experience.

Several weekends ago, I joined almost 20,000 people parading down the middle of some of the busiest streets of the city. We started at Paramount Studio on Melrose Avenue, walked east to Fairfax Avenue and then came back up on Beverly Boulevard. We were raising money for the AIDS Project LA, but along the way we were also seeing, liberated from the the blur of motion, the places we usually speed past.

Seeing Los Angeles from a vehicle gives you a certain perspective. The world appears to you through the curved frames that surround you in your little capsule, giving it a slightly warped and distant feeling. You tend to concentrate on signs, billboards and the cars all around you. The textures, colors and forms of the city disappear behind those words and brash colors that are meant to catch your eye and guide you through traffic and consumption. You can’t look at anything too long. Several authors argue that Los Angeles looks its best when seen through a rearview mirror; all its confusing messages are flattened into a continually changing collage.

To walk the city means to experience the strange juxtapositions of scale and use, to sense the rise and fall of the land, to feel the heat and to drift through its almost languid expansions of space. The flatlands of Los Angeles actually have a contour to them, so that you see buildings rise up on Highland Avenue or feel the dell in which the Los Angeles Country Club nestles. Walking through Hancock Park, the Spanish colonial stucco walls and red tile roofs of the houses are shadowed by nearby billboards and ubiquitous power lines. Melrose Avenue suddenly seems like an intimate, rather homogenous street after all the contrasts in what we think of as more polite neighborhoods. The sides of Beverly Boulevard ebb and flow with small stores, parking lots, office buildings and apartments, giving you no sense of enclosure, rhythm or scale.

Walking in a crowd made the sense of emptiness even more extreme. While we were packed together by helpful volunteers trying to keep the streets clear, space floated all around us, empty except for the speeding cars. We were a ribbon of intense experience, brought together by a cause, but only passing through. We were not taking back the streets, only laying a temporary claim to them and then leaving them as empty as we had found them. Los Angeles has no public space because we lay no claim to the spaces left over by private development.

The lack of landmarks was especially remarkable. What appear as recognizable markers when you are driving, such as a tall apartment building on Beverly Boulevard just east of La Brea Avenue, turn out to be just forms that you don’t notice until you are in their shadow. Nothing helps define the street and there is little to hold your attention.

Taking this walk made me more receptive to those urban designers who want us to transform the boulevards of Los Angeles into six-story canyons surrounded by a mixture of stores, offices and residences, while protecting the one- to two-story scale of the neighborhoods behind them. Such a plan would help define the public spaces of our major thoroughfares, making them into places of a more intense and definite experience.

After the walk, a friend showed me the new “New York Street” at Paramount Studio. Here master craftsmen have brought together the brownstones and skycrapers of Manhattan as backdrops for movie magic. It was as beautifully convincing as the streets outside were undefined. We should not turn Los Angeles into Manhattan or into fantasies about urbanity, but maybe we should think about making a city where walking is as much fun as driving.

Aaron Betsky teaches and writes about architecture.