by Richard Risemberg
People everywhere, crowding the sidewalks under ornate façades, drifting in and out of narrow storefronts crammed with glittering shelves, thronging in and out of buses and subway trains, stopping traffic as they pour across the streets against the red…a chill in the air, and the winter light casting the shadows of tall buildings across the faces on the street…surely it must be a scene from an old movie about autumn in New York or Paris, some idealized vision of the downtowns that never were in a past we've left behind decades ago…surely it can't be…but it is…is this, is this Los Angeles? The City of the Future? The Place That Forgot Time? The town that never was, and that has always turned its back on the past?
Well, so it is. America may be going to hell in a shopping basket in a thousand chrome-and-formica mall infernos in the suburbs, but the old-fashioned downtown shopping experience lives on, and grows stronger, in Los Angeles. Once derided as a hundred suburbs in search of a city, LA has in fact always kept a vibrant downtown at its core. This downtown suffered a bit in the stretch from the Modernist '60s through the Corporate '80s, but its momentum was too strong, and it's back. The artists that broke ground in the loft district fifteen years ago have already been priced out by young professionals who grew bored with office parks and stucco ghettos in the hills, and, while Skid Row still occupies a few blocks around Fifth Street, most apartments in the old Historic Core are well-maintained, expensive, and already rented out, with hundreds waiting for a crack in the 97% occupancy rate....
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| Text and Photos ©2001 R. Risemberg |
