L.A. Again Leads the World--This Time in Party Meekness

There was something missing at Los Angeles’ millennium festivities: people.

Paris sizzled. Rio went wild. But in Los Angeles--a city that redefined Babylonian revelry--the type of street festivals that drew millions around the world fizzled under the fabled Hollywood sign.

People bypassed glitzy balls for intimate parties and dinners. Freeways were dark and empty.

And after watching most of the world noisily cheer the new year on television, many found Los Angeles’ millennial moment anticlimactic, defined most by what did not happen: Planes did not drop out of the sky. Apocalyptic terrorists did not spread mayhem. Wild partyers did not fill the streets.

In fact, more than a few greeted the dawn of the new era with a shrug of Y2K ennui.

“It was so hyped that I was sick of the whole millennium thing way before it even happened,” said Gina Nahai, a critically acclaimed novelist and Beverly Hills resident who passed over galas for a close friend’s dance party. “Most of my friends had dinner with their families and didn’t even go out.”

Officials mainly blamed the rain for the feeble crowds at California millennium fetes. Ventura County blamed a flu outbreak. Officials in Long Beach gave up and canceled one street festival altogether--and so didn’t have to blame anybody. San Francisco’s 20,000-strong crowd was declared a crushing disappointment by a city that proudly upholds the ecstasy of occasional excess--until more than 200,000 additional revelers surged in just before midnight.

People were hardly surprised that cities like San Diego were sedate. But the failure to ostentatiously flex the Los Angeles party muscle seemed like a serious lapse of spirit in the place that invented the languid hedonism of the endless summer and turned substance-abuse rehab into a hot singles scene.

Even on the Sunset Strip--known for club-crawling flash and trash and bumper-to-bumper conga lines of weekend cruisers--there was such a pathetic lack of traffic that it might have been an ordinary Monday night.

Hardly an impressive showing for the first turn of the millennium since the Dark Ages--at a time when unprecedented national prosperity has elevated American materialism to levels unmatched since the Gilded Age.

Many in Los Angeles blamed the lack of a central civic mecca, such as Paris’ Eiffel Tower.

“Where in L.A. would one assemble?” asked Thomas Hines, a UCLA history and architecture professor. “There’s no Times Square. There’s no one single place that is close enough to enough people.”

And in a city where freeways and shopping malls are sometimes pressed into duty as public space, many thought the scattered urban venues where Los Angeles held its official parties were poorly chosen.

Science fiction author Ray Bradbury would not have gone to watch Mayor Richard Riordan light up the Hollywood sign unless aliens had stolen his memory banks.

“Have you been to Hollywood lately?” he asked disdainfully. “There’s no one on Hollywood Boulevard anymore. You can hold a celebration with the homeless, the druggers, the prostitutes and the mindless. We can’t hold celebrations except inside malls--which is ridiculous.”

And there’s another thing, the curmudgeonly literary institution quibbled: The new millennium does not really begin until 2001.

“The 20th century is not over yet,” he said. “Doesn’t anyone realize that?”

City officials say they went to great efforts to overcome the challenges of getting people together in a place that often seems Balkanized by geography, ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status and real estate. That is why they planned separate celebrations in different neighborhoods that represent the many heartbeats of Los Angeles.

Some found that approach appropriate.

“L.A. is sprawling and disconnected. We’re a huge mosaic,” said Lisa Miller, the editor of a legal supplement to the Daily Journal. “It is quintessentially Los Angeles to have a lot of smaller celebrations that are very different, as opposed to this forced unity that you’d see in some other big cities.”

Others were not happy with the strategy.

“I felt like it was segregation,” said 27-year-old Rafael Rodriguez, who attended the celebration at Olvera Street, the site of Los Angeles’ original Spanish mission settlement. “It defeats the whole purpose of diversity in Los Angeles.”

Attempts to weave the various celebrations together seemed canned and artificial to some people at Olvera Street, where a paltry several thousand showed up--though that was enough to make it one of the best attended celebrations in the city.

There, people partied to the sounds of quintessential Los Angeles band Los Lobos. As the clock struck midnight, couples kissed, and cries of “Feliz ano nuevo” mingled with strains of “Auld Lang Syne” from a telecast of the celebration miles across town at the Hollywood sign. Mayor Riordan kissed his wife.

“It felt like we were watching TV the whole time,” said 28-year-old Gabriella Anorve as she left the event with friends Rafael Rodriguez and Munia Bhaumik. “Like we were watching the Academy Awards. We didn’t need to see Riordan kiss his wife.”

The TV also triggered a universal human insecurity: that somewhere people were having a better time at a better party.

Said Munia Bhaumik, 28, of Echo Park: “Compared to Athens, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, L.A. sucks.”

Plenty of Opinions on What Went Wrong

If civic party satisfaction was diluted, the spin was not. Pundits, professors and city officials provided enough opinions on Los Angeles’ flaccid fiesta for an entire episode of the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.”

Deputy Mayor Noelia Rodriguez blamed the rain for spoiling years of careful plans to create a decentralized celebration that would reflect Los Angeles in its entirety. Lighting the Hollywood sign was a more recent idea, suggested earlier in 1999 to the mayor by--who else--an actress, Geena Davis.

“It was the first time in the history of the city that we tried something like this,” Rodriguez said. “We were taking the party to the people. Unfortunately, for the first time in 10 years--or, as the mayor is telling people, the first time in 150 years--it rained.”

Al Nodal, head of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, which handled planning for the events, said officials expected “tens of thousands” of people at the parties. The city issued free tickets to the events, but by Thursday, fewer than half of the 400,000 available had been distributed.

City officials believed that crowds would build as the day wore on, but because of the rain, that prediction quickly evaporated. “We lost about six hours because of the rain,” Nodal said.

“I did a lot of thinking about this on the freeways yesterday,” he said Saturday.

Added Rodriguez: “We were building up to what we thought would be a big crescendo [the lighting of the Hollywood sign]. . . . You can’t compete with Mother Nature.”

But to LAPD Officer Trevion Stokes, the virtual boycott was evidence of a deeper communal character flaw: apathy.

“It is absolutely pathetic,” he carped. “So there’s a little rain.”

Many city officials admitted that they did not attend any of the public celebrations either. Gov. Gray Davis went to a celebrity bash at Paramount Studios. In Los Angeles, a lot of the best social life--and architecture--is private.

Dr. Michael Singer, a psychiatrist who lives in Long Beach--where the civic fest in the downtown Pine Avenue district was canceled for lack of interest--believes that fears of millennial insecurity were a big reason Angelenos did not venture out.

Did you really want to be barreling down the 405 with cars zigzagging past you? Guns going off? What about the much-hyped fears of terrorist bombs?

“Just mentioning the word ‘terrorism’ ” raises fear levels, Singer said. “They say, ‘Terrorism is under control.’ Well, that’s like telling the hypochondriac, ‘Well, I think your heart is all right.’ ”

Like a lot of his friends, Singer and his wife, Beverle, dined with three other couples but were home watching TV by 8:30, and “We felt totally safe.”

They spent hours watching Hong Kong, Egypt, Paris, London, New York and Washington, D.C., celebrate the new year.

“By the time it hit Vegas, you were just about sick of it,” Singer said. “We’ve seen it 10 times. We yawn. It’s anti-climactic.”

But many people in Los Angeles shed the Y2K self-consciousness, surrendered to a good time and partied like it was 1999.

Matthew Roth, who lives on the Westside, didn’t know or didn’t care that the Los Angeles New Year’s was considered a bust.

He and his wife crowded into Babe’s & Ricky’s, a blues club in Leimert Park, and counted down to the new year with other regulars, many of them good friends.

“It was wonderful--one of my best New Year’s ever,” Roth said.

“It’s funny to talk about the city as if it were one thing,” said Roth, a historian for the Automobile Club of Southern California. “It’s all of these things--Disneyland, the Hollywood sign. There is no mass market. It’s a collection of segments.”

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Times staff writers Beth Shuster, Louis Sahagun, Mary Curtius, Jocelyn Y. Stewart and Jim Newton contributed to this story.