“It’s hard to screw up a pupusa,” a friend replied when I suggested he have one for lunch. The thick, cheese-filled Salvadoran tortillas, topped generously with shredded cabbage and hot sauce, available across Los Angeles, do give their preparers little chance for grievous error. But the location of my friend’s office places him especially well to enjoy a fresh one on the cheap: from the very spot where we stood, nine stories above MacArthur Park, we could see the ladies with their shopping cart-mounted griddles parked on Alvarado making them fresh. This welcoming sight hardly seems to agree with the threatening image the area spent many of the past forty years cultivating, but it contrasts even more starkly against the visions of the park’s late nineteenth-century builders. A onetime high-profile vacation destination and one of the city’s many formerly wealthy neighborhoods, MacArthur Park and the surrounding Westlake area has since become the second-densest (after neighboring Koreatown), and one of the poorest — but one of the most delicious.
“MacArthur Park is melting in the dark,” sang Richard Harris on his immortal 1968 recording of the song “MacArthur Park”. “Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark,” sang Weird Al Yankovic on his parody, capitalizing on the mid-nineties popularity of Steven Spielberg’s scary-dinosaur movie. Strictly speaking, MacArthur Park must also, in that era, been pretty frightening in the dark. Legend has it that, by then, the place had become, effectively, an open-air market of vice: drugs, sex — human souls, no doubt. I’ve heard “Permanent Midnight” author Jerry Stahl tell some serious MacArthur Park stories. Despite sensing little of that former menace today, I can assure you that the neighborhood retains its robust trade in fake identification documents. Walk down certain side streets, and you hear the same short question over and over again — “IDs? IDs? IDs?” — no matter whether you look like you have indeed just endured a trying illegal border-crossing, or whether you look like, well, me. (After turning down yet another fake ID, my friend with the office remarked that the slouchy entrepreneur offering it must have mistaken him for “the world’s baldest sixteen-year-old, non-chemotherapy division.”)
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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