Curbed LA comments on the anger over the cancellation of downtown festivities on New Year’s Eve:
“Just wanted to rant about how Downtown LA can’t throw a fucking new years party if their life depended on it… after years of doing random concerts that never attracted a crowd, Giant Village last year was a moderate success. This year, Giant Village (which had a 6 block section of downtown closed off) had a great lineup and 15,000 people expected. Unfortunately, they didn’t plan for the rain and the thing got cancelled by the fire marshall because people could have gotten electrocuted! Downtown my be a real city center in a few years, but not yet.
Next year, I am up in mammoth snowboarding or at another city that has a real celebration!”
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Doesn’t LA have the world’s suckiest New Years celebration? Mayor Sam agrees. How do we compare to New York, Sydney, Paris or Hong Kong? We need something insanely cool and here is my suggestion:
I have always thought that Los Angeles should prohibit vehicles on the Hollywood Freeway from Barham to Melrose and open it up to pedestrians for a thrilling New Year’s Eve celebration. The city could hang thousands of Chinese lanterns along the highway, and light up the all the 1920’s buildings in Hollywood. Enormous light shows, great bands, and the nearby Red Line would help bring thousands to the celebration. Crowds would walk and promenade on the Freeway and take in those thrilling views that formerly were restricted to 70mph fly-bys.
The same helicopters that fly overhead to report on traffic accidents could monitor the gathering, and the event would attract worldwide attention. California is famous for its freeways, and the idea that they could be transformed into something safe, without drunk driving on New Year’s Eve, is an idea that should be put into practice on New Year’s Eve 2007.
Since the entire world watches the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day, why can’t they watch Hollywood party the night before?
Here in Van Nuys 
Ubray02-I would like to see more of the freeway system used as a Sunday only bike route to encourage us to get out of our cars. I think the 110, north of downtown to South Pasadena would be a good place to start as it is a relatively short distance. You are an avid biker, what do you think about that?
But taking the Hollywood Freeway on New Years and turning it into a party strip would be a brilliant way of advertising LA as a city of something other than driving. The whole world would take notice, and it might completely transform the image we have of being a city where nobody walks.
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ubrayj02 wrote: “I read about that Scot-Irish thing in a book about human violence called “Culture of Honor” or something like that.
Where did you hear abuot it?”
Interestingly, I learned about it in an urban studies class I took in college. The professor explained that American land-use has emanated from English “ruralism.” The history goes back for several hundred years, but ruralism was a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and the ascendancy of capitalism and the emerging industrialist bourgeoisie. That was just one side of the coin. The other was the cattle thieves from the Highlands. (The Highlanders worried about cattle thefts from the English.)
This led to a distrust of urbanism. It was against cities and crime, loose morals, pestilence, filth and brutality of factory work. The United States was being colonized at the time this was happening.
The United States was also seen as an escape from modern capitalism, as a way to turn back the clock. Also, the first government institutions were inordinately tilted in favor of rural interests. And with the passage of over 200 years, the appeal to “rurality” and “simple values” is still an effective political and marketing trope.
It’s effective because most of American society was raised knowing that money is better than authenticity and with enough of it, anybody can buy into any lifestyle they want to project.
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Wad,
I read about that Scot-Irish thing in a book about human violence called “Culture of Honor” or something like that.
Where did you hear abuot it?
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The freeway shut-down idea is not unprecedented. The Pasadena Freeway has been shut down for one Sunday morning a year just so people can walk or bike along it car-free. (A bit of history: The Pasadena Freeway was once built for bicycles. It later was widened to allow cars to use it.)
The one big problem I’d have with a freeway New Year’s Day party is that when the freeway is closed, the arterials will have to do the heavy lifting. This is a gathering people will go to, so don’t presuppose that the traffic will look like it does midnight January 1. It’ll be tried once, and people will proclaim how much they hated it because of all the street traffic.
It’s not a bad idea, though, but you must still think of unintended consequences.
Andrew wrote:
“Humane gestures are needed as an alternative to the corporate soulessness of Universal City, City Walk, the Grove.”
Agreed here. But we must also get people to shake the mind-set that these are the places to where people have to go.
It’s a Disneyfied reality where people are entertained to the point of not being cognizant of reality. Interestingly, we outlaw drugs for this very reason.
“We have to create a public and civic space to gather in.”
It could be something that already exists. Just get several people to agree to meet up somewhere, rather than building a sense of place from scratch.
Farmer’s Market is like this. It’s next to the Grove, but it has been around longer and nurtured small businesses. FM primarily attracts elderly Jews from the nearby neighborhood who will gather around tables, share coffee and doughnuts, play cards and talk. The nice thing is that security is not there to hurry them up and out so that they have to shop and give up their seats for other diners. This has pretty much been a characteristic of FM.
Find a place like this, and truly make it inclusive. Turn no one away.
“Those who tout traditional values, somehow ignore the architectural order that classical cities represent. Los Angeles is radically worse in many respects because it wants to deny civic order and design and instead puts us all in isolated houses separated by vast distances in an environment of banality and endless sprawl.”
Keep in mind that American behavior is an aberration in the world. We inherited it from the rural English and the Scots-Irish.
Most Americans, regardless of where they live, have a rural mentality of distrust of others and the public sphere. This is the Janus face of rugged individualism.
Urban design can change, but sociology has to change with it. One reason why we don’t act like Europe is that the urban evolution in Europe occurred while its cities were very homogeneous. The U.S. always absorbed immigrants and had a dispossed native underclass in the Native Americans and African Americans. This heterogenity resulted in forced and self-selected segregation.
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Wad,
I think your analysis is pretty spot on. I remember when people did fire their guns off on New Years. Just like 4th of July though, all of that excitement and danger was cracked down on by the powers that be in Los Angeles. Maybe it was for the best, but what replaced it (nothing to do on both holidays) sucks almost as much as random bullets falling through people’s homes and killing them.
I think the freeway shut-down idea is genius. I think it should happen on more than just one freeway too. It would be like a transit-backwards day. A day when the normal patterns of travel are temporarily suspended – like Holi but with cars.
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haha.
thanks for being so considerate.
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Thanks for the contact information Mr. Yezerkian. Will talk to you soon!
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JZY:
I tried to reach you. I asked 411 for the telephone number of “JZY” but the only listing they had was for John Z. Yezerkian in Glendale.
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Why didn’t we have a party together over New Year’s Eve?
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Wad-
I pretty much concur with your views on the founders of LA, who did come from the Midwest and hoped to create a garden city here. There are people who even believe that this is an appropriate model for the 21st Century. But we aren’t blind to the ugliness, sprawl and disfunction of living here–the fact that one cannot even go out to dinner easily on a Friday night because the logistics of assembling people from different areas (Pasadena, Santa Monica, Torrance) is so daunting and the traffic so awful. That’s one reason to change the Freeway (for just one evening) from a clogged and polluting vehicular swamp into a light filled, pedestrian party.
Humane gestures are needed as an alternative to the corporate soulessness of Universal City, City Walk, the Grove. We have to create a public and civic space to gather in. Those who tout traditional values, somehow ignore the architectural order that classical cities represent. Los Angeles is radically worse in many respects because it wants to deny civic order and design and instead puts us all in isolated houses separated by vast distances in an environment of banality and endless sprawl.
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I think part of handling a mass gathering of any kind in L.A. is that there are two mentalities prevalent that are antithetical to community-building.
One is the 20th century legacy of Los Angeles as a Midwestern outpost. The communities that came here not to build a community, but to prevent a community from being fostered. They brought with them a rural mentality of distrust and suspicion of others, especially of the vulgar city life of New York, Boston and Chicago. They didn’t much care for public spaces, which they saw as Petri dishes for vagrancy and collectivism.
The other we can thank Hollywood, or I should say, the entertainment industry, for creating. The culture of celebrity has created a cocoon effect you see in the Third World, where a small moneyed aristocracy feels they are mired in a swamp of discontent filled with restive native savages out to get them. You have celebrities, and several factors more of wanna-bes, who are too afraid of leaving their homes because or going out among the people because they feel their kind is under siege. What would be the most likely answer for these people not going to a public New Year’s gathering? “I’m afraid a bullet will hit me.”
Maybe that’s what L.A.’s tradition should be. Ground all planes for two hours, from 11 p.m. Dec. 31 to 1 p.m. Jan. 1, so everyone can fire their guns off with impunity, to ring in the New Year.
Otherwise, L.A. will not have one grand New Year’s celebration like those other cities. We’re as cliquish as a high school. We’d have small neighborhood First Night celebrations, but we’d still be distrustful of outsiders coming to our neighborhood events.
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Party on the 101… Interesting idea. It would get world-wide attention…. We do have many successful community block parties (Sunset Junction in Silverlake; West Hollywood Halloween Celebration). Our new mayor and his new administration maybe open ears…..
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I dig
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Did you read about the 10 billion $ downtown remake? Wash Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/01/AR2006010101086.html
It IS somewhat depressing to sit in any house and watch the ball drop, if one has the slightest desire to celebrate with others.
Isn’t there always a big street party you can pay for on Sunset every year?
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Since we cannot all congregate in our non-existant downtown, I forever am thinking of places we might all meet up in. The Hollywood Freeway seems the most logical and central location. Fear or no fear we have to push ourselves and our imagination to do things differently.
Isn’t it depressing to sit alone in your home in Calabasas and drink beer and watch the Times Square ball drop? Can’t we do better than that?
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That being said, I do like your idea.
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In addition, this is a “city” that does not have much civic mentality. It very much exists, functions and motivates itself through Bulkenization and fear.
Unless there is will to break off the physical as well as mental barriers among “neighborhoods”, “communities”, a true celebration of any kind is a very hard sell.
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