Fabulous Forum

My palms are beyond sweaty. I have no idea what I should be doing, and my mother is a horrible teacher. She screams, “For the love of God, Hailey, you need to drive like an athlete! Your sister is going to be so much better than this!” The car abruptly starts and stops with my novice toe-taps; I’m only fifteen years old and I desperately want to learn how to drive. So desperately that I even solicit help from my melodramatic mother. It really shouldn’t be this hard, I keep telling myself. It’s a wide open parking lot surrounded by a circular building. There aren’t even any other cars to hit. Suddenly I see flashing lights approaching us, and I am on the brink of tears. I learned how to drive in the Great Western Forum’s parking lot.

People think Los Angeles has no history; this is both true and false. We don’t have the history of an ancient Mesopotamian civilization, but we do have some value accrued to places, even if the places have only been around for less than 100 years. The Forum constitutes as one of these places. Home to the Lakers during the 1980s when they won 5 NBA championships, the Forum was the place to go to watch basketball among other things. Half of the allure of attending a Laker game is to look out for celebrities. Famous concerts took place at the Forum during the 1960s,1970s, and 1980s (and maybe there is an argument for the 1990s and beyond as well); performances like Elvis, Elton John, Bob Dylan, and the Jackson 5 all played to sold-out shows at the Forum. It even hosted the basketball portion of the 1984 Summer Olympics. But now, now being circa 2005, I’m driving in the deserted parking of a place that no longer is fabulous. I mean, we came here because we knew it would be empty. So what happened?

The Staples Center is what happened; the Lakers, Clippers, Sparks, and Kings all moved to the new downtown venue. Now the sold-out concerts are played there, too. And the Forum is now owned by Faithful Central Bible Church, a large congregation that hosts services at the venue on Sundays. It’s still open for concerts and other events, both secular and not, but I was hard-pressed to find a performance there that I wanted to see, let alone who the performers lined up to play this venue even were. This kind of embodies who we are as a city; a bigger and better option came along, and the masses flocked to it. We tend to forget about spaces that mean something to us, because another space has been fabricated to mean something more. Should I just accept this as healthy change? Am I allowed to mourn for the loss of the “Fabulous Forum?”

Pondering these questions leads me back to the flashing lights that fifteen year old me sees as we drive through the parking lot. A man who works for the forum’s security sternly tells us that this is private property and we need to leave immediately. I’m relieved for two reasons. I no longer have to practice driving with my certifiably insane mother. But more importantly, I’m pleased that someone, even if it’s a lone security officer, is still protecting the Forum.

--Hailey Hannan

photo: the erstwhile "fabulous fourm" via hockeyarenas.com