{"id":1487,"date":"2013-04-17T10:24:51","date_gmt":"2013-04-17T17:24:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1487"},"modified":"2013-04-17T10:24:51","modified_gmt":"2013-04-17T17:24:51","slug":"a-los-angeles-primer-la-brea-avenue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1487","title":{"rendered":"A Los Angeles Primer: La Brea Avenue"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Thirty years ago, Missing Persons sang that nobody walks in Los Angeles, but experiencing La Brea Avenue suggests a new, more nuanced thesis: some walk in Los Angeles; they just don’t stop walking. If they sit down, they do so in a restaurant, bar, or coffee shop. La Brea offers a great many of those, some highly respected, yet with hardly a spot between them to take a breather without having to tip. Despite making genuinely credible claims to importance in eating, drinking, and specialty shopping, the street remains, on a human being’s scale, for much of its twelve-mile length, starkly inhospitable. Perhaps La Brea still retains too much usefulness as a thoroughfare to make meaningful concessions to street life, yet that very automotive stream and its many attendant eyeballs entices businesses to open there and thus act as their own billboards. “Be here” and “Keep moving”: this street somehow sends both messages, and also neither.<\/p>\n

I put the question of La Brea’s simultaneous abundance and discomfort to Los Angeles Magazine’s Chris Nichols, as much of an expert on this city’s streets as anyone I know. “It’s in the middle of major change,” he explained in an interview on my podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/a>. “La Brea is ground zero for these dense apartment projects right now. I’m not defending that Carl’s Jr. [formerly at the corner of] Santa Monica, but when a very low-grade car-culture thing — easy-breezy parking, you go in and do your business — is replaced by a dense, to-the-sidewalk, giant sun-blocking apartment building, the whole neighborhood is changed. You don’t realize there’s about to be a wall of humanity there that didn’t exist before.” La Brea, in other words, has become a locus of the dominant process in 21st-century Los Angeles, whether you call it “densification,” “infill,” or, to use the term favored by critics of Councilman Eric Garcetti, “Manhattanization.” Garcetti stands accused of having presided over this process in Hollywood, and his opponents in the mayoral race have warned us that it could happen elsewhere if he wins. I’ve heard participants in radio debates speak portentously of the the coming Los Angeles in which citizens find themselves “all smushed up together.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thirty years ago, Missing Persons sang that nobody walks in Los Angeles, but experiencing La Brea Avenue suggests a new, more nuanced thesis: some walk in Los Angeles; they just don’t stop walking. If they sit down, they do so in a restaurant, bar, or coffee shop. La Brea offers a great many of those, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-los-angeles-primer","category-los-angeles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1487"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1490,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1487\/revisions\/1490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}