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A Los Angeles Primer: the Farmers Market

We must make peace with the fact that some people arrive in Los Angeles expecting to spot celebrities. Nine times out of ten, though, they board the plane home disappointed; this city fosters a secretive, detached celebrity culture, the uppermost sector of which somehow walls itself off completely from open society. Public figures of slightly less renown make their way through Los Angeles as any other resident would, but this everyday conspicuousness renders them, in many cases, inconspicuous; I sense they take pains to avoid places “celebrities would go.” Visitors from other states, other countries, and other continents alike, thus roam the likes of Hollywood Boulevard and the Sunset Strip in vain, encountering only the occasional reality television star, a class of performer whose very existence owes to their readiness for the spotlight. If you wish to bask in the aura of proper celebrities — the kind who don’t want you to notice them — go somewhere like the Farmers Market, which for nearly eighty years now, at the corner of Third Street and Fairfax Avenue, has offered a collection of produce dealers, food stalls, larger eateries, coffee shops, and souvenir stands.

Perhaps this already sounds like a tourist trap, and I haven’t yet mentioned its abundance of palm tree-filled postcards and its vintage gas pump, enshrined and gleaming just as it must have back when the Gilmore Oil Company kept a functioning station there. Yet the whole operation has, over time, settled into the kind of hybrid appeal enjoyed by Seattle’s Pike Place Market (the kind that has, in recent decades, eluded San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf): it draws locals and outsiders in seemingly equal measure, inspiring in them seemingly equal enthusiasm. Seated at one of the many tables scattered around the Farmers Market, practicing the ancient art of people-watching, I’ve seen day-long waves of obvious regulars making beelines for long-preferred seats, politics-arguing old-timers, Los Angeles-unsavvy new arrivals wondering if they’ve stumbled upon the city’s center, hungry employees of nearby CBS Televison City, and foreign nationals with cameras in hand. One day at the Farmers Market, two such tourists, young girls from Japan, approached me very slowly. “Take a picture with me?” one asked, gesturing toward her friend who stood ready to capture an image of her traveling companion and this specimen of the elusive Homo americanus.

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.

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