SOMEWHERE in my 20s—about the point when lots of things collide – I realized that every surface I traversed seemed too slick, too glossy. It felt as if I was perpetually ready to slide.
That’s what L.A. can do sometimes.
I needed some traction.
At this turn in the road, I had lived three or four places in the vast super-structure we call Los Angeles. And when not in the city proper, I always found a spot just along its very edges, just steps from the city limits, the shifting dividing lines. Early on, I’d learned how to negotiate the city the way some of my Southern relatives knew how to filet a fish – lifting away the un-needed parts, even more careful about the jagged edges that could do harm.
What was left? a city within the city – my collection of back roads, hangouts, after-thought neighborhoods and hush-hush shortcuts.
That’s how I ended up on Quintero Street.
If I had been looking for Quintero, I would have never found it. It’s both the embodiment of L.A. and its antithesis. The street was a narrow ribbon of asphalt that angled 90-degrees. It had some years on it and thus was redolent with character; everything was ripe and overgrown -- from the bursting loquats to the wild, brilliantly hued vines of bougainvillea that rustled in the wind like ceremonial headresses. This edge of Echo Park played host to a junk-drawer collection of hodge-podge architecture – most of it ugly – a smattering of
Dingbat apartment buildings, sagging bungalow courts and its crowning former-glory – an exhausted Victorian house, that looked as if it had simply crawled to the curb to rest its cracked foundation. That falling-down relic also housed a mysterious cloaked and hooded itinerant, who wandered the neighborhood at all hours with a sling-style knapsack, whom one friend of mine dubbed "Echo Park Man."
That was the L.A. part of it. The
not L.A. part of it, was its very steep San Francisco-esque hill, that gave both the pedestrian and the driver a strange sense of vertigo simply trying to cross the short width of road. The incline was so steep that the first three feet of the passage up the sidewalk isn’t a "walk at all, but a crumbling concrete staircase – giving the brave foot-traveler enough time to work up his or her nerve.
Everything was set at an oblique, down-the-rabbit-hole angle, due to the hill's dramatic grade. The perch, however, allowed for a crow’s nest-style view – the city end to end from the Civic Center to Catalina Island. Not to mention, the glimmer of Echo Park Lake and the light-reflecting roof of Sister
Aimee Semple McPherson’s
Angelus Temple, down below, just as Sunset Boulevard made it's dramatic Downtown-tipped curve.
I fell hard. As soon as I glimpsed Quintero Street -- its ruin and its weird whimsy I knew I was onto some new semblance of home, a new understanding of Los Angeles. It was an absurd looking, really. But I had a clear plan, I could keep watch on my city, the city I was thinking and writing about and perpetually crisscrossing – this impossibly large, wild sprawl of a city, that refused to be pared down to a simple sentence.
I settled in and the street told its own stories without much prompting: insistent police helicopters and search lights scrawled the skies; busses that ran all night; 5am rooster crows made alarm clocks unnecessary; and of course, depending the season the odd wind that would pick up the sound of cheers and applause from Dodger Stadium (apocryphal or not, it made one wonder if this was why Echo Park is called thus?). I woke in the morning to different languages: French, Chinese, Spanish, Romanian, German. And too, from beneath those same doors, came the scents of cuisine from all those origins -- roasted chicken, saffron, garlic, scallions, simmering cabbages.
Come summer, I walked to Dodger games with my writer friends -- often not to watch the games at all, but to sit outside under the bruised, purple sky. We'd hike there, above Elysian Park, talking about books and bands, working our way through old ruins of uprooted houses. We'd meet work friends for the Lotus Festival down by Echo Park Lake. This was an L.A. that had nothing to do with Hollywood or the music industry or dinner at Spago or lunch at Boa or drinks at SkyBar – or whatever was next or primed to be. It was workaday, down-to-the baseboards life, full of folks with dramatic there-to-here stories and also haunted by ghosts of another time. Here, I was able to find some hint of that old/vanished L.A. I’d read about in books or heard of in family stories. That specter of Los Angeles that only seems to hover in the background of family photographs. This was the Los Angeles you’d sometime glimpse in a quick few frames of an old movie – a city with space and moving at a far different pace.
It wouldn’t be until after I moved away, that I would learn that that street, I’d just happened upon, was most likely
named after one of the 44 mixed-race pobladores who founded the City of the Angels.
I wasn't just chasing ghosts -- I'd hit a bull's eye.
If there is a part of the city where, consequently, I feel I've left part of myself, it's here: somewhere in those yellow weeds, the flame of bougainvillea, the sharp scent of honeysuckle, the singing drunk who would bellow his story to the night.
There’s a part of me that didn’t want to leave, but the arm of gentrification has sharp elbows and soon enough, I wasn’t waking up to Chinese and the smell of scallions, or the persistent rooster crows, but late-night parties that tipped into dawn, as a new set of watering holes for the post-Spaceland set, opened up along this far-from glamorous edge of Sunset Boulevard: Sliver Lake was "moving" east, and so Echo Park’s edge was now its selling point. Like so: A new reclaimed neighborhood is born.
Anytime I’m on that edge of the city, I have to slow down as I pass Quintero Street, and glance up the hill. The Victorian is long gone and there are some out-of-place steel and burnished wood jutting up where modest stucco and terracotta bungalows used to be. The hill's crest, you can’t make out from the boulevard: in a certain way, it's like looking through the wrong end of the binoculars. That view, of the possibilities, is to look
down hill from above: You don’t gaze up and back. You look forward, feet planted firmly, eyes trained toward L.A.'s rewritable future, to best compose your chapter in it.
(images, echo park, l.g.)
A COUPLE of weeks ago, Professor Ruben Martinez, who is the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing here at Loyola Marymount University (and my longtime colleague), spoke passionately about his time served here in Los Angeles as journalist, poet, performance artist and pundit -- and how at one point all of that seemed to have merged. He also spoke eloquently about race and class; gentrification; about communities and causes that had been marginalized by the media; about how a writer finds his/her voice while attempting to describe life from the inside out, make the invisible visible.
