Santa Monica

Re “Planet Sideshow Opens in Santa Monica,” by Shawn Hubler, Feb. 25: The “success” of Santa Monica, from my pedestrian and residential perspective, has been a cancer of traffic, mainly afflicting those communities still populated by significant percentages of working-class minorities. Realtors have taken to calling my neighborhood the “media district,” instead of the Pico neighborhood. Like Hooters, Santa Monica has wedded its image to hollow fantasies scripted by B-movie hacks.

When the show is over and the public turns its attention to the latest attraction (the “new” Westwood?) for titillation, the real theater of our city will once again emerge from the quiet and the fog. I remember when the curtain fell on the last act. I was at the McDonald’s on Colorado and watched as the proverbial men in white coats came to take away the last resident of an SRO across the street on 2nd, a small, frightened, bedraggled man, pacing desperately on the sidewalk in front of the place that had been home. Thus began the reign of “progress” in Santa Monica, at the site of what would become Santa Monica Place.

Would that I were bold enough to find that man and record his story; I suspect that it would prove more interesting than all the glitz that followed.

STEVEN KEATS

Santa Monica