Devoted Denizen’s Advice: Don’t Give Up on Hope

If Hope, Ark., could become the sentimentalized, Hollywood-produced metaphor for Bill Clinton’s presidential upbringing, then there might be a metaphor somewhere this new year in a street called Hope.

Like Los Angeles, Hope Street is fitful and promising, stopping and starting as it does while traversing the center of our L. A. universe.

But you never give up on Hope.

In one way, I grew up on Hope, holding down a junior and senior high school job at 1120, where Jack Schaefer and Associates shipped out everything from Indian rugs to Mexican jewelry and Spalding tennis rackets. I even learned how to wrap and ship a Western saddle.

The old nearby Y was for learning handball and the Olympic press. And car dreams first took hold at Earle C. Anthony’s Packard showroom.

Then and even now, Hope was a street of small businesses like Jack Schaefer’s and big enterprises like J. W. Robinson’s. Then was more horizontal, now more vertical.

Once, according to civic legend, there were the parallel downtown streets of Faith, Hope and Charity, but only Hope abides. Living on Faith and/or Charity didn’t have the same lilt and appeal as living on Hope.

Living on Hope may be what L. A. really is about--a blend of the high-powered high rises of Bunker Hill, the down-slope storefront entrepreneurs, the corner marisco (seafood) stands, the two-story apartment hotels, the daily street scenes of the office people and the nightmare alley scenes of despair.

All of life ebbs and flows on Hope. People are born (California Medical Center), get schooled (Trade-Tech or, at its southerly and unceremonious end, nearby University of Southern California), work (Wells Fargo Center, First Interstate), live above everything (Bunker Hill Towers), exercise (YMCA), shop (Broadway Plaza), are entertained (Music Center), pay bills (Department of Water and Power), get religion (Christian Science Reading Room near 7th, the I Am sanctuary off Pico), get tagged (DMV), drop off the kids (the county day-care facility), eat (Stepps) or die there (a choice of two hospitals and, until a few years ago, the Armstrong family morticians, who relocated a few blocks west).

What Hope Street doesn’t have is continuity. From Temple south to Fifth, it is the Great Wide Hope. Beyond that, it stops and starts, a lost Hope shattered by two freeways, the Santa Monica and the Harbor, and dead-ended at both ends by the 101 and the Harbor again. It’s interrupted by the downtown library, Trade-Technical College (the old Francis Polytechnic High School) and Orthopaedic Hospital, where the 2300 block is that hospital’s guarded emergency entrance.

Hope has more signs announcing that it is Not a Through Street than possibly any other in Los Angeles.

Other than minor-league alleys and lanes like Dewap Road and Gen. Thaddeus Koscuszko Way, Hope is one of the few downtown streets that has been downgraded in demeaning small type in the Thomas Guide. It is no one’s alternate route.

Other Los Angeles streets can claim fame. There is Sunset Boulevard, the movie and soon-to-be Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Western Avenue became a play, and Hollywood and Vine remain tourist attractions. Although poets and country singers speak of hope, no one has sung of Hope.

The street reflects some of the failures, challenges and, to some extent, the successes of Los Angeles.

From Temple to 5th Street, it looks like a vital Los Angeles, where condos and office buildings have risen on the ashes of Bunker Hill Victorians. At Washington Boulevard, where the Blue Line splits the street, it is a mix--the homeless sleeping at noon on the sidewalks in front of old storefronts that still carry legends of the Overland car, half a block from the city’s once-and-future rail system. Beyond Washington, it struggles against age and the planners who dug freeways out of front yards.

But there are signs of a struggle to come back--a redesigned parking structure for USC, a new DMV fortress-like building. These are signs of a newness--hope springing--but there are other signs of contemporary callousness, such as the brutal slabs of concrete dumped on the Hope Street side of the Harbor Freeway’s banks.

What hope could flower on those grounds?

At Washington Boulevard, where Hope exists for only one strange block--angle parking on one side, parallel parking on the other--a Blue Line street sign makes an erroneous statement: Grand Station.

You got it wrong, folks.

It’s not Grand. It’s Hope. So, planners, make a metaphor for a street called Hope. How about Grand Hope Station?