Making the Acquaintance of a Few Smiling Faces in a Sea of Humanity

SINCE LATE LAST YEAR, THE FACES HAVE been beaming down from 2,500 light poles across Los Angeles. If you’ve spent any time in the city, you’ve probably noticed them.

They appear individually, in all their evident ethnic diversity, on banners bearing the names of neighborhoods--Pacoima, Hollywood, Little Tokyo--and the slogan, “L.A.: A World of Difference.”

The campaign, a $2-million project of the city’s Department of Water and Power, was designed and administered by the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau. The banners started going up last November, and they now hang on 84 stretches of main drag and at LAX. Originally hung for last December’s National League of Cities convention, they now await next month’s Democratic National Convention. The photos also appear together on panels at 60 bus shelters in the city.

The banners may fool impressionable outsiders into thinking that all is smilingly, diversely well in the City of Angels. Yet they are meant to extol the attractions of each neighborhood to residents of other areas of the city. In conjunction with the campaign, the convention bureau’s Web site (https://www.lacvb.com) offers detailed itineraries for visits to 29 of the neighborhoods mentioned.

“We’re trying for the first time to promote Los Angeles to Angelenos,” says Melissa Hayes, the convention bureau’s cultural tourism manager. “Also, given that 50% of visitors here stay with friends or relatives, we’re trying to reach those friends and relatives with what the neighborhoods have to offer.”

I’ve heard a few reality-freaks, aware of the self-isolating tendencies of the city’s ethnic and class groups, scoff at the banners as another expensive, typically L.A. dose of image-narcotics. They have a point. Judging from the images, you’d think that Angelenos from Watts to Chatsworth might at any moment join hands and break into the “Ode to Joy.”

I have to admit, however, that I like looking at the banners.

Aside from whatever anti-isolationist values accrue from having faces from Watts and Koreatown hanging in Brentwood, and faces from Woodland Hills and Hollywood hanging in Pico Union, the banners are a reminder that Los Angeles is a great sea of individuals. They’re a subtle rejoinder to the mass media’s (including my) facile aggregating, categorizing and summarizing of a populace that is complex to the point of unknowability.

I like imagining lives for the people depicted. For example, I thought of the robust-looking, white-bearded gent representing San Pedro as a retired longshoreman. I imagined the comely young Latina on the Lincoln Heights banner as an office worker in an obscure cubicle of the city bureaucracy. And I took the mustachioed middle-aged chap representing Fairfax for a Jewish professional, perhaps a rabbi.

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

San Pedro’s “longshoreman” turns out to be 79-year-old John M. Olguin, director emeritus of the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, founder of Whale Watch and all-around neighborhood legend who was designated “Citizen of the Century” last year by the San Pedro Rotary Club. We sat on the rear deck of the seaside home he designed and built half a century ago, while two researchers collated material for a biography of him.

The face of Lincoln Heights, in fact, belongs to that of 27-year-old Tontanzin Carmelo, a member of the traditional Aztec dance group Xipe Totec and an actress who just completed her first film, “Ricky the Pig.” We had Cokes and sopas at El Tarasco on Broadway, near the dance studio where she rehearses and just down the street from where one of her banners hangs.

Fairfax’s representative is not a rabbi but a 64-year-old Latino named Charlie Lopez. At the produce stand he owns in the Farmers Market at 3rd Street and Fairfax Avenue, he cut me a piece of sweet cantaloupe to sample and talked of the giant produce business he used to run before being cut out in a nasty family feud.

Most of the banner people were nominated by neighborhood civic, business or cultural organizations. Those I met spoke delightedly of representing their neighborhoods in far-flung precincts of the city.

Los Angeles may be the most eye-polluted city in the world, with its ubiquitous mammoth images of gun-pointing movie stars and female cliches showing off their male-pleasing parts. The faces of the banner people, however, peek modestly through this barrage, suggesting something real about life here.

“People who don’t know me at all come up to me and say, ‘Aren’t you the lady on the banner?’ ” says D’Ann Morris, the 49-year-old teen pregnancy counselor and local Chamber of Commerce leader who appears on the Crenshaw banner. “But it’s also exciting to people in the neighborhood to see normal, everyday people representing them.”

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James Ricci’s e-mail address is james.ricci@latimes.com