Tag Archives: Metro

Downtown L.A. Forecast: Rain, Coronavirus, More Tear-Downs

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TRIGGER ALERT: ‘#CYNICAL’ SKIP TO VIEWING PHOTOS FOR THE CAKE AND ICE CREAM

It may be only a short time yet before riding Metro becomes foolhardy. (If quarantines get like they are in Europe, it might become impossible.) Plus, we’ve got storms coming this week… winter storms reliably increase local infections, and turn the whole of Metro into a hobo jungle. Who could give the homeless a shred of blame for their squalor? With society trapped in an abysmal spiral of human catastrophe, run by billion-airheads and ignored by checked-out consumers, Metro and the public libraries are the only sick-room/shelter the folks living rough have got. Noting their lack of proper health care (easy to note, since I share it) I imagine that if the weather doesn’t warm up soon, there must be a crushing, Medieval death toll among the hapless, sitting-duck homeless population of Los Angeles — and anyone who has to ride Metro with them.

SO, Patient Reader, since I might not be able to venture Downtown again for a while, I took advantage of the already relatively deserted City today. I hadn’t even realized the LA Marathon had just ended, until I met crowds of flushed, panting athletes getting ON the subway at Pershing Square just as I was getting off!

LEAVING NORTH HOLLYWOOD: NoHo Park lies adjacent to NoHo Station. Distant looms Mt. Cahuenga, at the foot of which is the NEXT subway stop, Universal City. That’s how long the distances are between Metro stops. It’s another dozen stops or more to Downtown, through Hollywood, Los Feliz, Koreatown, and Westlake.

  • I’m not deterred…under the mountain we go! Destination, Angels’ Flight at Pershing Square.
  • Grand Central Market

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Grand Central Market, by giving itself over to high-priced hipster food, kicking out the farmers, attracting white kids and raising the rents on Broadway, killed the entire historic district. Only five years ago it was the bustling, throbbing, Mexican/Chinese shopping and entertainment (movies) district. It was ‘polyglot’ but it was exciting and colorful and certainly made plenty of money; there were fabulous Beaux-Arts shopping arcades and cafeterias, and there was mariachi music playing everywhere and fascinating old legacy businesses, like music shops and expert Italian-import tailors selling ridiculously cheap fine haberdashery. It now appears every building along Broadway, except the market, is vacant on spec of “redevelopment”. Even the homeless seem to stay away now.

  • The rear of the Bradbury Bldg. gives on Biddy Mason Plaza and Monument
  • Historic Downtown. They’ve ALMOST completely destroyed it. Murals are the artists’ last resistance.
  • St. Vibiana’s, the old Catholic cathedral of an old archdiocese
  • Now it’s a private banqueting hall and occasional club space. Seriously.
  • But it’s still here!

FLETCHER BOWRON SQUARE: Alta California’s provincial capital and archives, Government House, once stood here in a fine adobe. So did El Palacio, Abel and Arcadia Stearns’s huge casa adobe; also the city’s first hotel the Bella Union, where the Butterfield Stage stopped. So too, the first LA County buildings. Also the first big commercial “blocks” in the 1870s, Temple Block, Baker Block, etc., London or New York-style Victorian emporia. They grew out of ground-floor adobe saloons which still retained the original dirt floors. These buildings all grew up together and were more or less knocked into each other for 100 years, with floors and wings that served as publishers, wineries, importers, flophouses, opium dens, artist studios. You know, the City. Then it was all torn down — surviving opium dens, Raymond Chandler-esque Victorian boarding-houses and all — in the 1970s….for THIS.

  • The Triforium. Shudder.

I guess it was appropriate to honor Mayor Fletcher Bowron by tearing down the City’s central core, since he was the man who had torn down almost everything else. Progress Bowron, LAX Bowron, Freeway Bowron, Bunker Hill Bowron. I reflect, that great men are drawn to civic office because they are awed by the living City and wish to increase her health and beauty; and small men are drawn to city leadership because they hate and fear the City, which belittles them. They have to prove how high THEY have risen, by pissing on the past and killing what they never could understand. LA has had both kinds of leadership; and it shows. For 150 years, it’s looked like a Promise of Paradise that has been bombed by its own citizens. Okay! We’re walking, we’re walking…

  • Main Street crosses Aliso over the gully that used to hold El Camino Real, but now holds the 101.
  • Yangna was here. Still is, it seems.
  • The Merced Theatre — 1871. Joining San Francisco, the Merced created a circuit, “the Coast”, and the Western branch of the U.S. entertainment industry was born. In the early 20th century it was a drag ball resort.
  • Pico House, the hotel Pio Pico built on the Plaza in 1870 with the proceeds of selling the Valley.
  • A coral tree, LA’s official city tree, blooms in the Plaza.

For years I wondered what they did to the Pico House in the early 80’s that was so damned embarrassing it had to be closed to the pubic forever. Since today the lights had been left on in the abandoned building for some reason, I finally got a chance to take a look. This is what all the best, and best-paid, minds in civic planning, historic preservation, and commercial design, came up in 1981 with when their task was: “preserve LA’s most historic luxury grand hotel and restaurant complex, located on a highly-touristed corner, in the middle of a National Park, on a spot that marks the very center of the City.”

Avila Adobe, in the heart of Olvera Street:

  • View Union Station from the rear garden of Avila Adobe.
  • Turkish rugs and Chinese silks, smuggled through San Pedro to evade the Monterey customs.
  • The ‘new’ Cathedral
  • Robert Graham’s Queen of the Angels
  • Saint Andrew, detail from the Ezcary Altar, completed in Spain in 1678. For years this was the main altar at San Fernando Mission. Note the wonderful vines!
Before heading back down into the bowels of Metro, I paused at one of the fountain courtyards at Union Station.

“Lucky California” — Art at Valley Village Station

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Metro is going through one of its dodecennial “Change Absolutely Everything!” moments, including re-naming the Orange Line (to the “K”-Line, no comment). The Orange Line was formerly cleverly named, as the extension of the original Red Line (which was cleverly named because it reminded people of the “Red Cars;” but now Cleverness and Colors Are OUT at Metro; the Red Line is demoted to the “B”-Line. I haven’t found out which is the “A”-Line, I bet it’s somewhere on the flash Westside.)

Anyway, the Orange Line is/was the pleasant trolley-bus hybrid that serves the Valley. Valley Village station is only a block from Home Sweet Home, and I’ve engaged with its public art since 2005.

The artist, Phung Truyng, teaches art at Los Angeles Valley College. Much of her work takes perspective from her Los Angeles history as a Vietnamese/Cambodian refugee.

It is the only art along the whole Orange Line that recalls the once-golden agriculture of the Valley, specifically oranges. (It also recalls our aerospace industry, and a superbloom of poppies.) Given my recent Orange Obsession, I thought it would be timely to share it, before Metro gets any other big ideas and suddenly takes the art out.

Canoga Park, CicLAvia

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Poor Canoga Park. It was their turn for a CicLAvia — LA’s bizarre, un-pronounceable, but doggedly persistent, city festival of the bike. Some lucky street is chosen, and for one day “CicLAvia” takes over a few blocks of XYZ (usually struggling) retail district. They shut down the traffic and suffer, specifically, bikes, but now also skaters and scooters and pedestrians, to take over the streets.

Poor Canoga Park. Sherman Way is really one of those awesome, cool, funky local Valley streets that really could have used a spanking blue sky to draw folks to its book stores, cafes, and services. Any other Sunday morning, Sherman Way might have been filled with clanging bicycle bells! Poor Canoga Park.

Still, the View, and the stalwarts on bikes who turned out, were alike lured from the foggy dew by the neighborhood’s old time comfort-food establishments, each of which had steamed-up windows, and each of which was dishing to packed houses. Indian, Cavaletta’s Italian Deli, mucho Mexicano, Vietnamese, and Henri’s American Diner. (Pho 21 won the View’s Choice Award.)

[The View is dim on CicLAvia, which I think diverts the public by making safe, temporary bicycle petting-zoos and calling it “green progress.” Meanwhile everywhere else, and every other day of the year, LA has the highest bike fatality rate on Planet Earth. The City does barely any– no, actually, nothing –about making an integrated, safe, point-to-point non-motorized vehicle (i.e., bike) path network. This should especially be a cinch in the flat Valley. CicLAvia solves nothing! STILL: poor Canoga Park.]

It was just clearing up when the View, and everybody else, was ready to hop on the Orange Line and go home. Still, it’s sweet to see that Safety Officer helping that little girl in the red coat cross the Orange Line. The View applauds such Protection and Service. Thanks LAPD.




Griffith Observatory at Sunset

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Atop Mt. Hollywood, at 1,134 feet above the briny blue, Griffith Observatory is a high-point of public life of LA. The cost to any citizen or tourist, a mere $2.25 (Metro fare to Vermont/Sunset + .50c for the short DASH Observatory Shuttle; or park at the Greek Theatre and DASH up). It is a foolish Angel who doesn’t take Hawk Perspective from this spot from time to time. Especially when the day’s sunset looks to be fine, when the President is being impeached, or it’s the last day of the hottest September on Record.

The View to Mt. Lee, home of the Hollywood Sign, which is 1,709 ft. above the mean line of the Venice surf.
  • No Street Furniture Allowed!

“Griffith Observatory is a free-admission, public facility owned and operated by the City of Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks in the middle of an urban metropolis of ten million people. The Observatory is one of the most popular informal education facilities in the United States and the most-visited public observatory in the world (with 1.5 million visitors a year). Griffith Observatory is a unique hybrid of public observatory, planetarium, and exhibition space. It was constructed with funds from the bequest of Griffith J. Griffith (who donated the land for Griffith Park in 1896), who specified the purpose, features, and location of the building in his 1919 will. Upon completion of construction in 1935, the Observatory was given to the City of Los Angeles with the provision that it be operated for the public with no admission charge. When it opened in 1935, it was one of the first institutions in the U.S. dedicated to public science and possessed the third planetarium in the U.S. 

Fulfilling the Observatory’s goal of “visitor as observer,” free public telescope viewing is available each evening skies are clear and the building is open. More people (8 million) have looked through the Observatory’s Zeiss 12-inch refracting telescope than through any other on Earth. More than 17 million have seen a live program in the Observatory’s Samuel Oschin Planetarium.”

— Griffith Observatory website
  • Los Feliz and DTLA. That’s Olive Hill, right: site of Hollyhock House, now a UNESCO World Heritage site!
  • The industrial ribbon, left, is the Rio de Los Angeles, running behind Silverlake hill to DTLA, right.
  • Mid-City. The low hill on the south horizon is Palos Verdes
  • Hiking back down is a nice way to finish.