{"id":1746,"date":"2013-07-23T12:20:04","date_gmt":"2013-07-23T19:20:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1746"},"modified":"2013-07-23T12:20:04","modified_gmt":"2013-07-23T19:20:04","slug":"a-los-angeles-primer-third-street-promenade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1746","title":{"rendered":"A Los Angeles Primer: Third Street Promenade"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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:\u00a0Abercrombie<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Fitch<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 and, perhaps to some of their residents, psychologically \u2014 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-los-angeles-primer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746","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=1746"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1748,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1746\/revisions\/1748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}