Here's the the communities it covers for you old time's sake:
Angelino Heights, Echo Park, Historic Filipinotown, Korea Town, Lafayette Park, Macarthur Park, Pico-Union, Temple-Beaudry, Virgil Village, Westlake... (followed by massive LAPD crime waves) ----------------
Thanks. We lived in two places. One on Alvarado, between Beverely and Court, for a few months, then moved to Lucas and Beverely. The latter was on a giant hill overlooking the intersection. Assuming the map is oriented North-South as top-bottom, if you look just south of that intersection, you'll see a curved street, Emerald. It goes around the outside rim of a hill overlooking a big tunnel where the electric rail cars ran to downtown. I used watch them come in and out, when I was too restless to go to sleep at night when the bedroom door was closed. They looked like toy trains. It was right during this time they quit running---a big city stink. Before we left for Mexico, we could take the same system from around Hoover and Vermont out to Venice or to the Santa Monica pier. This was a big all day adventure. Fun going out, killer tired, bored, sweaty, starving coming back.
Other features. Witmer St had a long row of older houses and small apartments that lined both sides, where most of my nieghhorhood friends lived. Our big project was doing something with the steep hill, roll down it some fashion. Home made skate boards with real skates nailed to a 2 x4 or 3 x 6 was better---both dangerous---ride into screaming hell. We found a big 55 gal drum made of heavy cardboard and tried getting inside and rolling that down---fucking nightmare---never do that again.
A Filipino kid invited me and a my buddy, a big slab of a Mexican kid to his birthday party. We were the only ones to show up from school (Union Avenue). I was surprized, most of the guests were family. The three of us were the only kids our age. He was dressed up in his sunday suit. It was sort of fun, but strange---strange things to eat. Few people spoke English and their Spanish was unintelligible (if it was Spanish). To get to his house you could cross Beverely through an underground walkway tunnel. Weird scary tunnel, the kind they have in horror movies, dim, abandoned like---meet a troll child molester...
In general the area was very mixed, asian, latino, white and a few black kids. We did hike up to Echo Park a few times, but for some reason it was an obnoxious walk on Glendale with narrow sidewalks, and very busy. They also wanted too much to ride the little motor boats and you had to have an adult. Kids couldn't rent the boats. The ducks were kinda fun to watch, get them fighting over popcorn, and there were the usual weirdos hanging around. Another thing they used to have were tables and benchs were old guys played chess, like out in Santa Monica, only more rundown. It was sort of interesting to watch because of the tension and the clocks.
Looking at the map, I can see why my parents picked this area. It was super convienent. USC and Exposition Park was a bus ride. The main branch of the LA City library was another short ride. These were my stepfather's haunts when he wasn't working. The old LA County Museum of Art was located in Exposition Park near the Natural History Museum. The latter had all the big prehistorical mammals wired together that are now moved to La Brea(?). The other exhibits they had that I really liked were the giant beatles, giant butterflies stuck on pens, and the scenes with giant animals in lighted tableau and darkened walk ways. We would also take the regular buses out Wilshire and walk around looking, but not buying maybe have lunch or dinnner at a fancy place.
My mother was back to teaching at some school named after street numbers. The electric rail went straight to downtown through the tunnel, where there was still a big department store area---where we went for Christmas to see the displays and shop. A lot of big streets had electric buses. And we didn't have a car! Many of these buses were sold to SF Mini, where they are still used on a similar electric grid system around the city. The most serious problem on Lucas was the intense smog--its very near the main interchange and a bunch of blouvard intersections of downtown.
What I think most people don't realize is how critically important mass transite is to quality of life connecting the existing public and cultural institutions together. Sure it's better for the air, but this other impact is important to people living in the area and has a more immediate consequence.
LA was a pretty good life at one time. Many decades later I was complaining about LA to my stepfather, and he said, well, it always seemed like a civilized place to me. By then he had lived in New York, DC, and Tokyo. Since I knew him and his habits, I took him on a car tour of SF sort of following his routine, only in reverse, I was taking him and his wife, like he used to drag me around. It was great fun. SF went yuppie, but it didn't completely destroy itself, so that most areas have remained pretty much as they have been for a long time. Instead of driving out to the freezing beaches, we went to Muir Woods to finish off the day. He was getting too old to walk much, so we left him at the visitors center and me and Michiko did the Tokyo speed hike through Muir Woods. They had plenty of money, so we had dinner at the St. Francis where they were staying----dimly remembering the old Builtmore where I used to meet him when he came to LA back when I was going to high school and out at Northridge... On one of his visits up here, he wanted an old fashion hamburger with fries and a shake, evidently impossible to find in Japan, so I took him to local place, The SmokeHouse and sat outside on varnished redwood benchs and watch the crowds going by...
Anyway, one of things that I like about Oakland-Berkeley and a lot of SF, is the general feel is not that much different, only running at about 85% scale in spacetime. Add some palm trees and widen the streets. My apartment is a smaller nicer version of some of our old places. My kitchen is practically a cut-out with the same ancient appliances and tiled sink counter, and same goes for the bathroom.
Just put on some bacon and beans in the old pressure cooker...
CG