“Los Angeles is the most beautiful city in the world, provided it’s seen at night and from a distance.” You usually hear that line credited to the filmmaker Roman Polanski, but the observation at its core has proven so resonant for so long that the variations and attributions have multiplied. Often it comes delivered by a longtime or even native Angeleno, proactively expressing their distinctive combination of shame and pride. I tend to think some of this attitude comes from living in a city universally known by name but difficult to recognize by skyline, and even that depends on which sets of distant buildings you consider part of it. In search of a logo, the popular Los Angeles news site LAist simply accomplished by graphic design what many of us, especially the tourists, wish we could accomplish in the built environment — placing City Hall, the Capitol Records Building, the Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood all together, right next to a palm tree. Part of me wishes that, given this suspension of geography, they’d gone ahead thrown in the Century Plaza Towers too.
But unless the much-discussed Big One strikes, necessitating a complete reconstruction of the city, Los Angeles will never put all its icons in one place. Hence the emphasis instead on the whole strikingly vast basin-draping blanket of lights against the darkness you see flying into LAX, or from high ground at the Getty Center or Griffith Observatory. Even if the remarkable development of recent decades hasn’t yet made downtown into a symbol of all Los Angeles, its glittering towers certainly give it the look of a jewel in the crown. A good deal of this post-sunset slickness now emanates from L.A. Live, an “entertainment complex” opened in 2007 at downtown’s southwestern corner. Comprising restaurants, bars, a couple of music venues, a hotel, condos, offices, broadcasting studios, an enormous movie theater, and the Grammy Museum — not to mention copious amounts of parking, with even more copious amounts promised to come — it also enjoys something of a symbiosis with the adjacent Staples Center. NBA enthusiasts thus count themselves as among the part of the population, with reasons to pass many of their nights at L.A. Live. Others still know it only as a point of light, albeit a 2.5-billion dollar one.
Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.
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