Walking along the uneven cobblestone streets with a taco in hand, Angelenos visit this historic monument by the hundreds everyday. The street is lined with 27 historic buildings and the essence of Mexican culture -- mariachi beats linger on visitor's ears. Unlike the rest of Los Angeles's growing Downtown, this street market is the oldest part of the city where several vendors make it a point to not accept credit cards, as to keep withe the tradition of a personal touch . . . . Though a place of festivities, fiestas and restaurants now, there was a time when a serious restoration was in need, and that's where Harry Chandler came in . . . . Olvera Street is a place where the oldest of Los Angeles meets the newest of California tourism and Mexican pride . . . . "
Olvera Street -- Jessica Fernandez
"Even for Broadway, in the heart of Downtown L.A. where Spanish villas resided next to Victorian mansions, the Bradbury building stuck out as something different, something "other.' IN the early 1890s, mining millionaire, Lewis Bradbury commissioned architect George Wyman to design the monument, but Wyamn refused until he received a message from his dead brother telling him to take the project. Keeping with the Angeleno style of borrowing from many cultures, countries and styles, the Bradbury building draws inspiration and material from France, Belgium and Mexico. Wyman cited his inspiration for the architecture as life as he imagined it in the year 2000....I will explore the history behind the Bradbury Building, its use in modern cinema and detail how the building's old-fashioned style is exactly what has kept in in use for the last 120 years."
The Bradbury Building -- Andi Edgett
Even now, walking down Abbot Kinney Bouleveard, one gets a glimpse into the quirky, artsy past that has characterized the seaside town of Venice. Named after it's founder, Abbot Kinney was originally developed as an extension of the bohemian Venice Beach lifestyle. Once can get a sense of this free-spritied lifestyle walking down the street which is still dotted with numerous art galleries. There are still the family-owened businesses with water bowls sitting out front for customers to stop by with their pets, showing that Venice still remains a "dog town." However in the past few years, Venice has begun to shift toward a Beverly Hills-esque sophistication . . . . The collision of old and new is what make Abbot Kinney a perfect example of Arcadia and Utopia combined into one
Abbot Kinney -- Megan McMurtrey
While Disneyland, in Anaheim, is not technically part of Los Angeles, the development of this theme park has had direct correlation to the city of Los Angeles during its entire existence. For instance, the Walt Disney Company originated in Los Angeles and still has its major offices in Burbank. But for this piece, I hope to explore how Disneyland and its neighboring park, Disney's California Adventure (DCA), have been places for tourists and natives to experience idealized aspects of the city in a controlled environment. In DCA, an entire "land" of the park is dedicated to Hollywood while many other areas pay homage to the entire city. . . It can be argued that the Arcadia here is the real elements of Los Angeles that are depicted while the Utopia is the hyper-reality that Disney has successfully created.. . . "
Disney's Los Angeles -- Reilly Wilson
" . . . Angels' Fligtht and the Grand Central market are still downtown making it a place where old/new and invented/naturally beautiful collide"
-- Angels' Flight -- Jackie DiBiase
GROWING up only ten minutes from Anaheim, I spent a lot of my childhood going to Angel’s games. Pulling up to the Big A before games in my red jersey and Rally Monkey, I would be so filled with pride for my Anaheim Angels. Then when the Angels won the World Series on home turf in 2002, the city exploded with halo spirit. People wore their championship t-shirts like a badge of honor, and Angel flags hung from the windows of every car in my city. Anaheim was no longer just the home to Disneyland, but the home of the Angels.
Now, as the baseball season starts up again, I found myself wondering again, why the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim? So I did a little research on the subject.
The Angels were first formed in 1961 as the Los Angeles Angels and played their home games at the newly built Dodger Stadium, which was then referred to as Chavez Ravine Stadium. Then, in 1965 the Angels were bought by the Walt Disney Company and were moved to Anaheim, California, the home of Disney. The team was then renamed as the Anaheim Angels. However, in 2005, new owner Arte Moreno wanted to change the name to the Los Angeles Angels as a way to tap into the L.A. media market. However, in compliance with terms of the lease, Moreno was forced to add “Anaheim” to the team name. Which finally brings us to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, or as many frustrated fans have begun to refer to them as, the “Halos.”
I guess what this title change has taught me is that Los Angeles isn’t just a city, or a destination—it’s a marketing tool. L.A. has one of the largest media markets in the entire country. So in adding “Los Angeles” to the Angel’s title, the owner wasn’t attempting to describe the team’s location, but he was branding the team. So now as confused ballpark goers struggle with the fact that Angel Stadium isn’t actually in Los Angeles, it proves that Moreno’s plan actually worked.
-- Megan McMurtrey
WITH its delicious (albeit overpriced) food, trendy coffee drinks, and prime, curbside location in Beverly Hills, one of my favorite places to people-watch in the city is Urth Café. A friend of mine and I traveled down to Melrose last week for some lunch and some window-shopping, and as always at Urth, we got more than an eyeful.
One of my favorite things to do whenever I eat there is just to sit and watch the eclectic crowd that is always bound to be dining on the small, iron patio furniture and listen in on their conversations. There is always a woman with a miniature French bulldog feeding it scraps of her $30 lunch under the table. There are always the movie industry people with their brief cases tucked under the table and ignoring the person across from them for whatever is so enthralling on their Blackberry or iPhone. And there are always the Beverly Hills housewives who require two tables, one for their lunch and one for the pile of shopping bags filled with designer items that they purchased before working up an appetite.
This time there were two 6-foot tall, wafer-thin models, who pushed their untouched mixed green salads around on their plates while discussing an upcoming photo shoot. There were two men on a blind date next to us, awkwardly trying to make conversation by comparing diet strategies. There was also an extremely tall, longhaired man in knee-high studded combat boots and a large top hat who appeared to be doing a Slash impersonation.
However, there were no celebrity spottings, as there so often are at Urth. That is, until about halfway through our lunch when both of us looked up from our Boba teas to see Jesus walking down the sidewalk. Yes, that’s right… Jesus. He had long brown hair and a full beard and wore the traditional Jesus-like white robe with sandals. He was even carrying the Bible in one arm and blessing all of the customers eating their lunch on the sidewalk. I guess it just goes to show that in this eclectic city, not even the trendiest café is off limits to anyone. Not even the son of God himself.
-- Megan McMurtrey
(photo, urth cafe, tiarescott via flickr creative commons)
LOS ANGELES was boosted into existence by a mixture of several things. Los Angeles initially emerged as a result of the land boom that was made possible by the rail lines leading into Southern California. It grew over the next several decades as a white Protestant community paving over the Mexican Catholic heritage that came before it. As a network of highways and roads were built and the separate neighborhoods became connected by the automobile, the city began to grow into what we know today as Los Angeles.
After reading about the history about Los Angeles, it seems to me that most of perceptions and writings about LA sprung out of the physical geography of the land. As a diverse, widely spread out city, many people became frustrated with how to describe or summarize such an assorted group of neighborhoods. With the beach, mountains, and desert all rolled into one it was difficult to characterize the city as a whole.
Another characteristic of LA that seemed to both bother and puzzle people was the lack of a single type of architecture. With the influence of Hollywood, much of the architecture seemed to be model a movie set. Rather than having a uniform style of architecture like New York or San Francisco, the landscape for Los Angeles was built more on a “propensity for fantasy creation,” as David Fine puts it in his book Imagining Los Angeles. Even today, one of the most iconic places in LA is Randy’s Donuts, where a giant 23-foot doughnut sits atop a tiny drive-in. This is the architecture of Los Angeles.
What I found personally illuminating about Fine’s piece was when he was discussing the reason for why LA literature was virtually nonexistent until around the 1920s. It wasn’t because there was nothing to say about the city or there were no gifted writers, it was simply because virtually everyone was new to Los Angeles. The writers in LA were themselves outsiders, newcomers to the land, and therefore unconnected to the city. Fine uses the great example of Mark Twain. Though Twain began his career in San Francisco, all of his writing were reflective of his home back in the Midwest. Fine describes the literature of the city perfectly stating, “The distanced perspective of the outsider, marked by a sense of dislocation and estrangement, is the central and essential feature of the fiction of Los Angeles.”
You can still see that evidence of the outsider everywhere around LA. Being on a campus where almost half the students come from out of state you can see how most of LA’s population consists of people caught between, “a Southern California present and a past carried from some other place.” Because L.A. lacks a sense of uniformity or its own sense of style, it becomes a struggle to grasp the concept of city or describe it in a single way, which is why so many people are frustrated with Los Angles.
However, I believe that this absence of style is in itself, the “LA style.” As Fine, so perfectly describes it, “In the absence of a dominant style, every style and manner [has] found a place.” LA is indeed a place where anything goes; where nobody fits in but everybody fits in. LA is the outsider portrayed in so many of the movies produced on its land. It’s the newcomer, the underdog. And although it’s had its fair share of struggle, LA has become the hero for so many other outsiders looking for a place to belong.
caption: "griffith" (the old zoo at griffith park)
credit: OmarOmar, flickr creative commons
