I hear a wide variety of languages spoken in greater Los Angeles, but nowhere have I found a richer Babel than the very same place whose other chief attractions include shoe shopping at Foot Locker, a hamburger at Johnny Rockets, and a 3D Hollywood spectacle at the AMC 7. No matter how hard I concentrated on one nearby conversation conducted in an exotically indecipherable tongue, I could understand no more than two words: Abercrombie and Fitch. Though surrounded by a near-Platonic ideal of retail homogeneity, I also beheld the diversity of the world before me; what’s more, I did so from a reasonably comfortable seat, the free availability of which hardly comes guaranteed in the public spaces of Southern California. Yet you usually stand a decent chance of finding one (especially if you go, as I do, in the middle of weekdays) at Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, which offers a concentration of the American commercial mainstream, attracts representatives of seemingly every known nation, and amid it all still cultivates scatterings of the grotesque.
Santa Monica itself presents something of a challenge to those writing or thinking about Los Angeles: though possessed of status as a separate municipality, distinctive blue-and-yellow street signs, and even its own bus system, few Angelenos would even consider excluding it from their conception of their city. Hence my use of “greater Los Angeles” above, a commonly heard fudge of a term meant to catch those zones that, while legally — and, perhaps to some of their residents, psychologically — separate from Los Angeles, remain, for many intents and purposes, its neighborhoods. Incorporated in 1886 and now hosting a population nearing 90,000, Santa Monica ranks in league with, say, Pasadena as a particularly large, venerable, and on the whole wealthy example of what some call Los Angeles’ “satellite cities.” That certainly sounds a bit cooler than “suburbs,” and indeed describes places a bit cooler than the traditional bedroom community, usually with greater density and a less utilitarian identity. Yet the Third Street Promenade, today a Santa Monica attraction seemingly equal in drawing power to its signature pier, at first looks like nothing more than an a linear, al fresco version of the hulking, monolithic shopping malls now decaying in suburbs everywhere.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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