Category: Uncategorized

This is a red light. For almost 100 years, the entire world has understood this signal to mean one thing: STOP!

When automobile drivers, often distracted by a mobile phone, run through an intersection when the light is red, somebody is going to get hurt or killed. It is not the fault of anyone other than the law breaker who ran a red light.

About two months ago, several people were killed waiting for a bus at the corner of Victory and Kester. Some drunk or drugged out driver ran through a red light.

Every day in Los Angeles, I see cars speed through intersections after the red light is on. These include Woodman and Burbank, Oxnard and Hazeltine, Van Owen and Coldwater. Nobody stops them. Nobody is pulled over and ticketed. I haven’t seen a cop go after a red light runner since I was a boy living in Lincolnwood, IL in the 1970s.

People run red lights because they are allowed to do so without penalty. If they were ticketed $2,000.00 for a first offense, they might slow down and even stop at yellow and red lights.

There is nothing complicated about enforcing the law. We don’t need to spend countless hours debating traffic safety and whether the new Busway is unsafe. Just enforce the law.

It sometimes seems that the developers ideas of what Los Angeles could be are comprised of Disneyland fantasies: Cheesecake Factories, Starbucks, two million dollar lofts in Venice, and a Virgin Record store on every corner with a multiplex movie theatre and 24 Hour Fitness. These are retail complexes with thousands of parking spaces, where shoppers are lured to a fake city street in order to waste money at overcrowded and Fitch and the Gap.

But atomized development with a Third Street Promenade stuck here and an Old Pasadena out there does not a fine city make. There needs to be a central core of walking, vitality, culture, commerce, architecture, civility and beauty. The Staples Center, Disney Concert Hall, and the new Catholic Cathedral are offered up on the altar of praise as examples of LA’s “new maturation”.

Yet a walk through downtown LA is still one of the most disturbing and dystopian experiences in the world. There are no public restrooms. Dark tunnels, poisonous air, huge freeway overpasses and blank walls mixed in with thousands of homeless people attests to our utter cruelty and indifference to human life. We are SO PROUD of being American, yet we lack those human traits that are in evidence in many poor nations from Sri Lanka to Peru. Are we big enough to be self-critical? Don’t ask the G.O.P.

In Spain, a nation with a climate similar to Southern California, the city of Barcelona is an example of an urban area where cafe life, architectural variety and pedestrians are blossoming. Coming out of 50 years of a dictatorship, Spain some how seems more free than the United States and Barcelona compared to Los Angeles is much more livable and pleasant.

The new Busway across the San Fernando Valley is a progressive and imaginative creation. But what SURROUNDS IT will determine how successful it eventually is. Barren boulevards like Sherman Way, Van Owen, and Burbank are not enticing destinations. Neither are the enormous concrete parking lots, strip window office towers and trees on top of parking garages that is also known as Warner Center.

Barbara Walters of ABC, who has done more to erase the line between news and entertainment than any figure since Ronald Reagan, has just announced her 10 most fascinating people of 2005.

On the list is sweet and ditzy comeback girl Teri Hatcher, and of course Tom Cruise, the increasingly psychotic billionaire actor whose teeth have bewitched the world. Attorney Tom Mesereau, was chosen as the one who defended Michael Jackson, the twice innocent child molester. Condoleeza Rice, whose rigidity and loyalty to the untruths that guide her boss, also appears here. Kanye West, who tops the charts doing something digital and rhytmical with his hands on his crotch, is also deemed fascinating. One of West’s most profound utterances, his plea to stop anti-gay prejudice: “Yo man, just stop it!”

“Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2005” will air Nov. 29 (10 p.m. EST).

Kevin Roderick has written a beautiful and fascinating illustrated history book called “Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles” J. Eric Lynxwiler did a tremendous job researching.

The book shows the development and evolution of the Boulevard as it progressed from bean fields into mansions, apartment houses, fine stores, and elegant architecture. From the 1920’s until well into the 1960’s, it was considered the best address in Los Angeles. It is enough to bring you to tears to see the Ambassador Hotel in its heyday astride the litter free sidewalks.

Crazy in a Los Angeles way, with its hat shaped Brown Derby Restaurant and filling stations with costumed attendants waiting next to the pumps, Wilshire also erected religious buildings of great dignity, lush parks and man made lakes. There are archival photos of elegant and unique homes, neon signs and even… lampposts… that created a sense of propriety and maturity in the young metropolis.

Roderick’s book reminds us of what we have lost, and how poorly we measure up to those visionaries who came before us in building a beautiful city.

NOTE: the above “Wilshire Boulevard” photos are from www.yesterdayla.com.

October 29, 2005 was the opening day for the new Metro Orange Line which traverses the San Fernando Valley between North Hollywood and Woodland Hills’ Warner Center. Dave Sortero, a spokesman for the MTA was quoted in the San Fernando Valley Business Journal as saying, “We’re projecting an average of 22,000 weekday boarders every day by 2020”. Opening day crowds, which included children holding orange balloons, were an optimistic sign of success.

The bus line will draw development and zoning changes to the areas along the bus route. Perhaps the bus will allow Van Nuys to finally become the hub of the San Fernando Valley again.

At 11815 Laurelwood, in the vicinity of Carpenter and Ventura, east of Laurel Canyon, developers are busy erecting the latest housing designed to appeal to urban sophisticates. Mortgage lenders are drooling as they ever willingly loan money and devise some devious financial quakery to those suckers who can convincingly fake a high income. Interest only loans anyone? The last days of the bubble are leaving behind some strange architectural oddities…..

For close to a million dollars, these unpleasantly angled townhomes called “Deckhousecourt” sprout a butterfly shaped entrance leading to a collection of 21 residences. Cold steel windows and asymmetrical angles are a turn-off. Warm colors of rust, burnt orange and tan are meant to counteract the clinical, medical office aura.

The interiors are predictably white walled with high ceilings and not much else. Collectively, the homes do not create a community but wall off the building from the neighborhood and neighbors from each other. There are no common gardens, just a narrow corridor of doors. The court yard Spanish style antecedent of old Los Angeles is nowhere in evidence.

The community, in its defense, boasts the lovely and academically praised Carpenter School. There are large trees and hills. Ventura Boulevard, with its mod hair salons and upscale sushi restaurants is within walking distance. Hollywood is but minutes away, and for those who work at CBS on Radford, or anywhere in the East San Fernando Valley, this is the promised land.