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THE OTHER L.A. STORY
In the land where suburban sprawl was invented, there are again signs of life in central Los Angeles. Downtown L.A. was always there: we just weren’t looking hard enough.
Text: GUY SADDY
As our cab pulls up to the Downtown L.A. Standard hotel, we are greeted by a lineup. Not a lineup to the hotel nightclub or a convention event but rather to the hotel itself. And what a lineup: the hard-bodied and the expensively improved, all squeezed into clothes so casual you might be tempted to applaud the nonchalance were it not so carefully contrived.
Victor, our cab driver, stops the taxi in front of the valet. "So, where does one go on a Friday night?" I ask, while paying the fare.
"Look around you," says Victor incredulously, waving his hand toward the hotel entrance. "Where else do you want to be?"
Where else, indeed. My girlfriend and I navigate the lineup and pass through a lobby filled with the young and beautiful, splayed across multilevel purple couches created by noted furniture designer Vladimir Kagan. A DJ spins loud house music while two breasty women play pool – and really, it’s more like a disco than the entrance to an upscale hotel. It’s a scene, an A-list scene, and it is spilling out of the Standard like champagne from a shaken bottle. A security guard stands by the escalator, defending access to yet another scene: invited guests only.
"It’s a wrap party," the guard explains. There is a pause. "For a movie," he adds gratuitously. Welcome to L.A. Sort of. To be more specific, welcome to downtown L.A.
Located well inland, roughly halfway between Beverly Hills and East L.A., downtown is the historic birthplace of modern Los Angeles. That pedigree, however, has done little to brake its descent. Long neglected, adjacent to tough neighbourhoods, for years it qualified as an urban afterthought. How incongruous, then, all this glitz must seem to those Angelenos who know the area, mainly to avoid it. But perhaps the new buzz – that L.A.’s long overlooked downtown is finally becoming a destination – is actually true.
The evidence of a renaissance is everywhere. There is the recently built Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, where Sunday mass is standing-room only. There is a slate of buzz-worthy restaurants like Cicada, Zucca, Water Grill and Ciudad. There is the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall opening this fall, a gorgeous, loping structure that sits atop Grand Avenue like a stainless steel Brancusi sculpture. Add to this mix the Geffen Contemporary (also reworked by Gehry), the Japanese American National Museum – and, of course, L.A.’s second ultrahip Standard hotel – and a case for resurrection is solidly made.
The next day, after breakfast, we strike out. First on our list is the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), which has in its permanent collection everyone from Franz Kline to Mark Rothko. In the temporary exhibits, I am taken with the works of Sam Durant, particularly Abandoned Houses, his model-size sculptures of the Case Study Houses, famous modernist L.A. area homes built between 1945 and 1966. But Durant has sprayed his miniature replicas with graffiti and charred them with fire, recasting these icons as ruins suffering from years of neglect. Beneath the irony, the artist’s vision is poignant, almost apocalyptic.
After MOCA, we walk to Chinatown and tour its two main pedestrian arteries, Chung King Road and Gin Ling Way, now the nexus of a growing gallery scene and home to cutting-edge clothing stores like Tokyo a Go-Go and eclectic gallery boutiques like Shop Chuey. As the sun starts to set, Shop Chuey’s owner, David Keeps, offers to drive us back to the Standard via the scenic route. We skirt Olvera Street, a small avenue packed during the day with busy restaurants and a variety of leather goods and other merchandise. We take in the Arts District, dominated by studios and converted warehouses occupied by everyone from actor Jason Lee to neon artist Lili Lakich, whose work sells for up to $170,000 per piece. On the southwest edges of downtown, we drive by the Original Pantry Cafe, a Los Angeles institution since 1924; the no-frills restaurant is lined up out the door. On Hill Street, we pass an incredibly ornate structure, part ancient Mexican temple, part Deco disaster. "That," says Keeps, "is The Mayan." Once a theatre along the lines of Grauman’s Chinese, it’s now a landmark music club.
But with twilight giving way to nightfall, the tenor of downtown shifts. As we drive past some of the same streets we walked earlier in the day, something’s ominously different. Portable toilets line the sidewalks, along with tents and makeshift shelters.
"What the hell...?" I ask.
"It’s Tent City," says Keeps. At night, with stores shut down and few restaurants open past dusk, the area essentially reverts to the hundreds of homeless who call downtown home.
"My God," I mutter. There is nothing more to say. The scope of despair is almost epic.
"Go a few blocks," says Keeps, "and it’s Blade Runner."
From the penthouse suite in Spring Towers Lofts, you can hardly see L.A.’s future for the past. Across the street from the renovated downtown apartment building is the Los Angeles Stock Exchange, once the anchor of South Spring Street, heart of the city’s former Financial District. In the distance, to the southeast is the Fashion District and Santee Alley, with its hundreds of kiosks offering $5 designer-knockoff sunglasses and heavily discounted Kenneth Cole leather jackets. A few streets over is Broadway, once the ci-ty’s most stunning major thoroughfare. Today it cuts straight through the Jewelry District, an area known for its innumerable tacky gold stores and discount shoe shops.
And it’s precisely this – the character of the old downtown, -rooted in the past – that L.A. seems bent on sweeping away. Mainly, it seems, through building monolithic complexes like the Staples Center or the Disney Concert Hall, outposts that may draw people downtown for a few hours but can’t keep them there after the Lakers leave the building or the last Paganini lick trails off into the air. Even the Standard exists in its own stylish little bubble; like many other hot spots in greater Los Angeles, it has only a passing relationship with its surroundings. In Los Angeles, everywhere you go is a -destination, and to get everywhere you need a car. As a result L.A., almost uniquely among major cities, does not reveal its secrets easily.
The exception is the dilapidated district that includes the Historic Core. At night, much of it is a blighted grid. In the light of day, however, it shows its potential. And the potential of these neighbourhoods of the past dwarfs the shiny and new, much-hyped downtown.
That past, as it were, is roughly located between Hill Street to the west and Alameda to the east, from 1st Street south to Pico Boulevard. Here, everyone walks, and although we’re only a few blocks east of the Standard hotel, there is so much more life on these weathered streets. Broadway, jammed with people on the weekend, resembles a Turkish bazaar: endless blocks of tiny clothing stores and gold shops, with the proprietors often lingering out front, beckoning you inside. Everywhere, the architecture hints at the city’s glorious adolescence. The Bradbury Building, with its perfectly preserved iron and wood interior, is part functional office, part museum. Gorgeous movie houses like the Los Angeles Theater were once the focus of this street; even now, their beauty is indisputable. Although many of the area’s once-grand structures have fallen into disrepair, Broadway’s inherent graciousness, like an aging society matron whose fortunes have soured but whose dignity remains intact, is evident beyond any withering facade.
As we wander these crumbling blocks, I picture the Los Angeles of old, the city of Raymond Chandler novels and 1940s film noir movies, a place where men wore fedoras and drank their whiskey neat and women danced slowly in spiked heels. Much of this past is archived in joints that survived the post-freeway exodus. Like in the wonderfully kitschy Clifton’s Cafeteria or Cole’s, which claims to be Los Angeles’ first restaurant, established in 1908. Today you can still get a French dip sandwich, an L.A. specialty, for a fiver. On its walls is a series of photographs, shots that document downtown L.A.’s transformation from small town to major urban centre and give testimony to its decline.
What these amateur archives fail to chart, however, is the area’s proud Mexican-American present. On 5th Street, between Spring and Broadway, we stop outside Del Real Taco, which, almost impossibly, has managed to shoehorn a bona fide mariachi band into a space barely large enough for a couple of tables for an impromptu concert performed not for tourists, but for locals. Latino music blares from many of the street-front shops, and fresh fruit vendors hawk pineapple slices from sidewalk carts. The people are small, their bodies not sculpted by Jake (or anyone else); some female clothing store mannequins have even been altered with extra rear-end padding in order to appeal to a culture that has an ongoing appreciation of the serious booty. At five foot ten, I tower.
It might look and sound like Mexico, but it isn’t. In the Toy District, my girlfriend inquires about a couple of cheap items for our nieces. "Quanta costa?" she asks, pointing.
"Four dollars," says the clerk. Okay, English it is.
"How much for two?"
"Four dollars… four dollars," he says, a smile creeping across his face. "Eight dollars."
After paying, we exit through the back – and run smack into a most extraordinary scene. We are in the midst of a convergence of alleys, and the place is packed. It’s a combination flea market and street festival. There is laughter, and music blares. Everywhere, people eat bacon-wrapped hot dogs loaded with onions and peppers, grilled in the open air. It’s a commercial enterprise; it’s a party. And we are part of it. It’s our own discovery, and it’s one we’d never make driving the streets of West Hollywood in a car. And for the first time, I think that Randy Newman got it right: "I Love L.A." But it’s a very different L.A. than the one in his famous song.
Night looms, so we make our way back to the Standard. As we arrive, Juliana Margulies breezes through the doors and into a waiting limo. We go upstairs to the crowded poolside bar and digest the day. A DJ spins records; a movie is projected on the building across the street. Beautiful people sit on couches and discuss pretty things. I keep thinking about Sam Durant’s MOCA exhibit, although in ways the artist didn’t intend. Having found unexpected beauty in the decay of downtown L.A., I can’t help but see Abandoned Houses with fresh eyes.
Art imitating life, in the shadow of Hollywood. How appropriate. Smiling, I make my way to the bar. I order a whiskey, neat.
LOS ANGELES
WHERE TO STAY
Downtown LA Standard The old Superior Oil Building has been renovated with a mid-century modern aesthetic. Check out the regular Sunday pool party: ultratrendy and ultracool.
550 South Flower St.
213-892-8080
www.standardhotel.com
Figueroa Hotel Built in the 1920s, this former YMCA now has a Moroccan-meets-Spanish colonial vibe – shouldn’t work, but it does.
939 South Figueroa St.
213-627-8971
www.figueroahotel.com
Millennium Biltmore The grande dame of downtown hotels since 1923; a recent facelift ensures she’ll remain a contender.
506 South Grand Ave.
866-610-9330
www.millenniumhotels.com
WHERE TO EAT
Ciudad Latin-inspired cooking without boundaries from Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, hosts of Television Food Network’s Too Hot Tamales.
445 South Figueroa St.
213-486-5171
Restaurant Mai This tiny lunch place has incredible Mexican food at ridiculous prices, like tortas (a Mexican sandwich of grilled chicken, refried beans, avocado and pickled carrots) for under $5.
633 South Spring St
Pacific Dining Car A former rail car converted into an old-school steak house featuring USDA Prime beef, dry aged in its own freezers. Within easy striking distance of downtown; open 24 hours.
1310 West 6th St.
213-483-6000
WHAT TO DO
El Pueblo Historic Park Go to see the oldest buildings in L.A., but stay for the bustling ambience of Olvera Street – as close as you’ll get to Guadalajara without crossing the Mexican border.
Santee Alley You can buy everything from coloured contact lenses to the trendy jeans sold on Melrose Avenue – for much better prices. Packed on weekends.
Grand Central Market Los Angeles’ largest outdoor market since 1917. Chili heads will find an amazing assortment of chili powders – from chipotle and morita to cascabel and pasilla negro.
317 South Broadway
INFORMATION
LA Inc., The Convention & Visitors Bureau
213-624-7300
www.lacvb.com
HOW TO GET THERE
Air Canada offers daily service to Los Angeles from Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal.
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© 2004 enRoute is published monthly by Spafax Canada Inc. All rights reserved.
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