.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }
This charming and historical building, in downtown Westwood, blocks from UCLA, is evocative of the old romance with Spanish themes, courtyards and the beautiful architectural dialogue between sun and shadows. A place to go for refuge from the oppressive El Sol of this region.
This is what visitors once expected Los Angeles to look like, and it might have delivered this for a brief time between the World Wars. But today, this structure of old tiles, lanterns, bow windows and decorative coffered ceilings, is largely second rate. There is no nice café, strumming guitarist, pastries, wine bar or art gallery to visit as one meanders down these halls or up the patterned stairs.
It still is a strange thing, and a disquieting one, that the “action” of Los Angeles largely takes place along the periphery, away from the center of any particular old town. Century City, The Grove and Third Street are real only in the sense that they are not places to live, only to shop.
But where people might live and shop, time and neglect have beaten down our oldest districts. I see it in the abandoned decrepitude of Van Nuys, in the struggling cacophony of grossness in old Sherman Oaks along Ventura, in North Hollywood and other areas.
Granted, there is a new “hipness” to downtown Los Angeles, but how many upper middle class families take their kids to see a movie on Broadway and 7th or stop afterwards to shop in a store or eat in a restaurant near Union Station? The biggest crowds are in the outlet stores, the giant malls, or in front of their computers at home. You have to drive to a huge parking structure, and descend into a land of Crate and Barrel, Abercrombie and the Banana Republic. Where is the special and the different parts of the city?
Perhaps there is just too much retail in L.A. Could we restore some equilibrium to our lives by demolishing certain bad neighborhoods of bad shops (like Victory and Lauren Canyon) and creating garden villages where asphalt once roamed free?
To bring life back to old Los Angeles, the one that this courtyard exemplifies, will take a transformation of the imagination, partly private enterprise, and partly zoning. These magnificent spaces should be natural magnets for life and laughter, not ghostly spaces inhabited by the hot, desert winds.
Here in Van Nuys 
The market determines how much retail we “need,” but it sure would be nice if they could do it better and work some residential into it. There has been some opposition to this sort of thing where I work, but I can see a changing tide.
LikeLike
Part of the problem is exemplified by Westwood. The well-to-do families of Westwood made it clear that they did not want a thriving social hotspot where they lived because of unwanted elements that it might bring.
As a student there ten years ago, Westwood was almost a ghost town. Today it’s beginning to show signs of life but by essentially becoming a mall. Still not much nightlife there, but Whole Foods has become somewhat of a gathering spot there, as sad as that might sound. Opinion is changing, though, as the population there grows younger and more open to urban life, but I still doubt residents who paid top money for their properties would welcome the even heavier traffic that a lively Westwood Village would attract. It’s too bad. Westwood with its grand theaters, university, and commercial areas would make for an ideal “downtown” area.
LikeLike