IT'S a given: Certain thoroughfares in Los Angeles are so famous that it is nearly impossible to think about them without conjuring some larger-than-life, cinema-screen-size association.
That's what happens when your city is a movie set.
-- L.G.Mulholland Drive is known for its edge-of-the cliff beauty, its startling gemstone-lights views, but also for its snaky treacherousness if traversed with a potent combination of high speed and willful carelessness.
Nowadays, Sunset Boulevard feels less like a destination and more like an aging myth we still revisit and retell because we've become so accustomed to that ritual. Immortalized in movies and still the marquee draw on the double-decker tourist bus routes, the 24-mile stretch hasn't lost its power; it still beckons, luring the hopeful -- many of them teenage drifters who arrive in vast numbers via Greyhound or risky hitched rides.
You don't need a GPS to find some of the more well-traveled, high-profile roadways. Most everyone can point you to Hollywood Boulevard and its faux glitter Walk of Fame. Pacific Coast Highway, which stretches out, luxuriously along the gentle curve of coastline, offers its own set too-good- to-be-true promises. Looming just above that east/west thoroughfare, you'd find Laurel Canyon Boulevard, a winding rustic road, it's higher reaches associated with a certain era of barefoot and fringed Southern California musician. Much further east and angling south, Central Avenue powers along the city's working-class spine. In a long-ago incarnation -- before its reputation was scared by insurance red lining, poverty and violence, a short stretch of it played host to the West Coast's golden age of premiere jazz sounds.
Because we Angelenos spend so much time in our cars, traversing roads that carry us from one edge of the city to the other, the streets we travel most over time begin to gather complex, personal meaning. They recall a certain moment in our lives, a particular escape route or perhaps signify a road that was a route to a significant life transformation.
Even in our traffic-distracted state, we watch them change: they become narrowed or broadened or "beautified." They get closed-off and turned into gentrified "walk streets." They go from being secret shortcuts to being outed by Caltrans' fluorescent-orange flags and detour signs as viable alternate routes for any and all to plunder.
No matter. Somehow, they always seem to remain "ours."
Over the next few weeks, under the "Arteries of Memory" banner, a few guest bloggers will be reminiscing about city streets -- some famous, some infamous and some hidden slivers of afterthought -- and the side-roads of memories that they travel to when they find themselves passing over them.
You too might have an L.A. street that speaks to you, that transports you to a destination that isn't just a physical place, but a series of memories, a thoroughfare that evokes , stories, sounds, textures. Maybe you'd like to join the mix too. (It would be your extra credit "close-up.")
(please pitch via email, thanks.)
(top photo: hollywood hills downward, by clinton steed via flickr creative commons
bottom: hollywood walk of fame via http://www.wildnatureimages.com/images%202/060309-015..jpg)
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