Heading north on the Red Line one morning, I looked around the crowded car and saw only tourists from abroad. Chinese, many of them huddled together over guidebooks and most wearing bulky, expensively long-lensed cameras around their necks, made for the most visible presence. I also spotted a Francophone family, the father of which flipped through the pages of Lonely Planet’s “Ouest américain.” Which part of the city had they chosen to explore, I wondered as we passed through Koreatown and Los Feliz, then turned toward Hollywood. None of them got off before I did, at Western Avenue, which led me to suspect the worst: the train would soon disgorge them all onto the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A conversation with some visiting Germans the week before had primed me to make that assumption. When I asked them where the friends and literature they’d consulted suggested they go in Los Angeles, they recalled only a few: the Santa Monica Pier. Universal Citywalk. The Walk of Fame.
They at least came with an advantage over some visitors, who show up secure in their many assurances received that Los Angeles contains, in its nearly 500 square miles, nothing at all, and that they can continue guiltlessly on to San Francisco. Others hear that Los Angeles at least offers Disneyland, a thirty-mile drive out of the city and into another county entirely. But most travelers with a little time on their hands seem to wind up, sooner or later, on Hollywood Boulevard. I don’t mean to condemn an entire street, much less one that runs for five miles through several different neighborhoods, but it seems to pull people as if with its own gravitational force into the wrong one, Los Angeles’ embarrassing equivalent of Fisherman’s Wharf or Times Square. I make an exception for the Egyptian Theatre, whose stream of revival screenings from the American Cinematheque did more than its part to convince me that I could live in no other city in America, but west of Vine Street, Hollywood Boulevard saddens, especially when you consider how many people take it, surely with no small bewilderment, as representative of the entire city.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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