Colin Marshall

“We’re gonna live in Century City,” sings Tom Petty on his and the Heartbreakers’ 1979 song named after the place. “Go ahead and give in — Century City. Like modern men and modern girls, we’re gonna live in the modern world.” At that time, Century City, 176 acres built up against Westwood and Beverly Hills, may still have looked like a viable concept of the future. Even as recently as 2004, it provided both setting and title for a short-lived CBS science-fiction legal drama set in then then-far-flung year of 2030. Now, at least in my experience, it serves primarily as a navigational aid: if you can see downtown, if you can see the mountains, and if you can see the thirty- and forty-story towers of Century City’s narrow skyline, you can roughly triangulate your location in Los Angeles. Handy though that may sound, I suspect the district’s builders, working in the late fifties and early sixties with a piece of the former 20th Century Fox backlot, had — as that era’s builders often did — something grander in mind.

“Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future,” said art critic Robert Hughes, standing in Brasília, in an episode of “The Shock of the New”, his television series on modernism. “This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent, and talented men start thinking in terms of space rather than place, and single rather than multiple meanings. It’s what you get when you design for political aspirations rather than real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.” Each and every one of my trips past Century City — and before now, all of them took me past it, since I never had a legitimate reason to enter — got me thinking about Brazil’s highway-wrapped, monument-studded capital, planned and built whole in the late fifties, officially inaugurated in 1960. Just three years later, Century City’s first building would open. Later that decade, the Century Plaza Hotel, designed by World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki, would have its ribbon cut; his West Coast twin towers of the Century Plaza would open in 1975.

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.

“A good urban context and the history it represents teach, with a sense of humor, even kitsch how to live.” So, in “Travels in Hyperreality”, writes Umberto Eco, who, despite not necessarily having Los Angeles in mind, nevertheless sets up a pillar of the mental framework needed to consider this city. Much of what appeared here in the early- to mid-twentieth century — the countless unprecedented forms of advertising, the theme parks, the buildings shaped like the products sold within, the freeways — must have at first seemed somehow “unreal,” and calculatedly so. While some of these have since vanished, the intervening decades have seen a steady drip of reality, even mundanity, seep into the survivors. What we might once have held up for ridicule as Los Angeles kitsch, we now barely even notice at all unless we look carefully enough. Take Chinatown: some regularly use and even enjoy it, while most seem to have only the vaguest awareness of its existence. In 1938, the year Olvera Street developer Christine Sterling opened one of its predecessors, China City, everyone would have had an opinion.

“China City must have been a sight to behold,” writes William Gow in the article “Building a Chinese Village in Los Angeles.” “Located near Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles, only a few blocks from the nearly completed Union Station, the walled city featured buildings adorned in Chinese-style architecture, a lotus pond, and Chinese rickshaw rides. There was a temple, and replica buildings from the set of the 1937 Hollywood blockbuster, ‘The Good Earth.’ Costumed Chinese American workers greeted tourists, and a Chinese opera troop performed live shows in front of the shop of Hollywood recruiter Tom Gubbins.” What a staggering wealth of kitsch this urban simulacrum of a cinematic simulacrum of a Chinese village must have offered. Alas, one 1939 fire weakened China City, and a second 1948 fire destroyed it. When you walk through today’s Chinatown, you walk mainly through the descendant of New Chinatown, the other late-thirties development that competed with China City to both employ Chinese and Chinese-Americans and provide free-spending Angelenos with a non-threatening Middle Kingdom experience.

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.

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.

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.