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Downtown

What can one say about downtown Los Angeles that hasn’t already been said? The clichés about alienation, inhumane buildings, Blade-Runner, emptiness…..they all have some truth.

There is a lot of activity and construction transforming parts of downtown these days. A desire seems to be in the air to make a central, vital and important center out of our far- flung metropolis.

But rather than coming together, downtown is itself splitting into many pieces.

There is the official governmental part of downtown that has taken shape with such buildings as City Hall, Caltrans Headquarters, and the new LAPD building. These are the power players of the region, and they are pouring billions into edifices that make their forcefulness felt.

Then there is the cultural and religious architecture of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels, just up the street from Disney Hall, which itself is near the MOMA and the LA Public Library. This is where Eli Broad (clone home real estate developer) and his minions stand and applaud themselves for putting culture first.

Let’s have a hand for the leaders of the church, real estate, government, law enforcement and entertainment. Isn’t it great when concentrated power and wealth is so democratic, diverse and….. caring? Globalism and free trade! Hurrah!

To the south, are the enormous, laser lighted, digital billboarded, corporate behemoths of the Nokia and Staples Center. They attract huge dollars and thousands of paying visitors who come to experience lavish sports events and sit bewitched and dazzled by all the media spectacles that the Internet age offers.

Acres of slick, modern “lofts” are rising near the Staples Center, in an imitation of another authentically cheery, plastic Southern California city: San Diego.

Broadway, the great shopping and theater street, is lined with exquisitely ornate and distinguished buildings. But there is nothing cool or chic (*marketable) in the hordes of wide-bodied Spanish speakers who shop here for baby blue lace wedding gowns and to worship the deity in a converted old movie palace. This is the “real” Los Angeles where people are not aspiring actors or shooting YouTubes. This is the land of Carlos and Maria, where we all come from and where we all are going, whether we like it or not.

To the Northeast, the old Little Tokyo area abuts skid row, a grotesque and Dickensian tragedy of open-air poverty, mental illness, and hopelessness. Urine and feces on the sidewalk outnumber pennies and nickels in the people’s pockets.

Little Tokyo’s eastern edge is now seeing an artistic revival with renovated old factories turned into art galleries. There is also an extension of the Gold Line that will now pass through Little Tokyo and into East Los Angeles.

And finally, there is Chinatown which is the happy recipient of an above ground extension of the Orange Line which makes it possible for enlightened liberals in Pasadena to ride downtown for dim sum without the assistance of fossil fuels.

The Gold Line will connect China with Japan. Mao and Hirohito must be turning in their graves.

But the biggest disappointments are the vast, windy plazas and stark blankness of the new LAPD Headquarters and the recently completed Caltrans. Their entrances stand hundreds of feet back from the sidewalk. In the blinding sun, these vast concrete spaces will bake in the heat. At night, they will stand still, empty and dark.

Billions in taxes will pay for these robotic aliens that ironically exist to serve the public and civic needs of Los Angeles.

When the latest cycle of rebuilding without a grand plan is complete, Los Angeles will have a fractured, unequal, gloomy, dazzlingly empty new stage of weird architectural theories that add up to basically nothing: A soulless landscape of the lost.

Some renovated old buildings will see skateboarders and lattes pop up like tulips in the spring. And many will be hopeful for the revitalization of downtown LA.

And let us not forget the freeways, those smoke emitting nooses of congestion and cancer that ring the neck of the city like an executioner’s rope. They keep working, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, working hard not only to poison this city and burn endless oil, but to complete a meltdown of our planet and the end of the human species on Earth.

But let us smile, because we now have another Pinkberry on the corner with terrific yogurt.

What are we doing with our time and money? What America, what?