I lived about five blocks away from 800 Lake Street, near Alvarado and 3rd in 1953. We only stayed there a few months. I can still picture what the block across from MacArthur Park looked like---iconic 1930s sleazy, dirty yellow brown brick storefronts with apartments or offices above, bars, newspaper and magazine place on the corner(heading toward Wilshire), medium sized grocery store somewhere near Beverely, I think. We found a bigger and better place on Lucas, which I've mentioned before.
Then the weirdos in the park. There was a controversy over calling it MacArthur. It used to be called West Lake Park. I think MacArthur wanted to nuke China about then.
``Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of its own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an "anti-tour" of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb...''
There is reason. LA seems under almost continuous re-development, some phoenix-mutant syndrome on steroids. The other day I was thinking about the statue of Pershing in Pershing Square and looked it up. Fucking gone. Some bullshit concrete thing there. In LA lore that park and square was the location for crank speeches on everything from nuclear war and communism to the christian apocalpse.
LAMOMA should commit a new wing to just the history of city with tableau like room sets from the periods. See the Archaeology of Los Angeles at the new modernist wing. (Mom, can we visit the dead baby room?)
I was thinking about what a tremendously difficult thing it used to be to find a place by address, out in the basin, several miles south of where James Dean was camped. You could get really lost and not be able to tell where the freeway was. This happened to me once trying to track down this giant American Can factory, looking for a summer job. I found the place, but getting back I had to drive on faith-based dead reckoning. Let's see... The ocean is over there, so the freeway has to be in this direction...
Then I remember getting caught in the downtown interchange during rush hour and counting the stacks while making headway by inches. Getting on or off around there was a nightmare to get back going in the intended direction. (I think this is where Michael Douglas gets out of his car in Falling Down---which I enjoyed as LA dark comedy.)
So there must be millions of Angelenos who give thanks nightly to the universal GPS-mapquest god. I don't think I would get in a car in LA without a laptop now.
CG