At the center of L.A.’s universe

URBAN THEORISTS tell us that Los Angeles is a multipolar city, and of course they’re right. This vast megalopolis does not revolve around a single political and financial center in the same way that more traditional cities do. Still, the hoopla over the reopening last week of the Griffith Observatory reminds us that, despite the pretensions of the Westside and the economic power of the suburbs, the cultural heart of our region lies within the historic core of the city of Los Angeles.

I say this as a proud product of the suburbs. I grew up in a lovely hillside neighborhood in Glendale, on the safer, cleaner side of the Los Angeles River. But even as a child, I felt my roots were more in the city than in my hometown. Just as many of my childhood friends looked back to the American Midwest, Korea or Armenia as their families’ homelands, I always saw L.A. as my point of origin. It is where my father was born and, like me, baptized -- at La Placita, the old Catholic Church across from Olvera Street. My mother, raised in Chula Vista, was a student migrant to the big city who’ll never forget first laying eyes on the towering San Gabriel Mountains on a winter day. I knew L.A. wasn’t as exotic as Armenia, but the romance was real.

I also knew my parents had left the city for a reason. I knew they didn’t want to raise their children at Arapahoe and Olympic, where they lived when first married, or in the apartment they were renting on Florence near Normandie when my oldest brother was born in 1959. In myriad ways, my upwardly mobile parents let their sons know that we were being spared the indignities of city life -- rising crime, deteriorating schools. The city limits weren’t merely a jurisdictional line but a social barrier that our family had successfully crossed.

But like all borders, each side has its own allure. Despite its problems, the city offered a sense of grandeur that, for all its sweetness, Glendale could not supply. When I was young, my parents would throw us into the baby blue Ford Gran Torino for a night out in the city: Little Joe’s and Chinatown, or Les Freres Taix in Echo Park. As I grew up, my father took me to Watts Towers, the county Museum of Art, the long-gone chamber music concerts at the Natural History Museum and, of course, Griffith Observatory.

My fondness for the observatory comes less from childhood visits to see Saturn on a clear night than from the dome’s comforting, dignified presence on the hill. Like a star in the sky, the observatory centers Angelenos. Every time a childhood asthma attack sent me to the emergency room at Kaiser Hospital in Hollywood, I saw it. Afterward, it loomed over me as we turned right onto Los Feliz Boulevard heading for a shortcut through the park. It signaled the way home.

Though it’s been closed for nearly five years, the observatory is never far from my mind. I see it every day through my apartment windows. Last week, I had a chance to stroll through the new and improved space, and while I’m sure the newfangled displays will please children, I was most happy to see that the Foucault pendulum, the Tesla coil and the seismographs were still there.

And my favorite part was entirely unchanged since my last visit. After my tour ended, I went to the roof to peer over the city on a hazy day. My guide and I peered down into the backyards of the houses below and identified some of the buildings on the flatlands. There was Kaiser Hospital and, nearby, Childrens Hospital, and the blue tower of the Scientology headquarters.

“Look,” my guide said with a laugh, “there’s Tom Cruise waving at us.” Home.