An Opening Door
I noticed something shocking the other day, on Wilshire Boulevard around the corner from my apartment: the Korean Cultural Center had installed a front door.
To those of you who live in older US cities or in other countries altogether, this may seem a puzzling statement. But in the post-WWII cities and suburbs of the United States, it is common to construct buildings that have no front door. There is a parking lot in the back, and an entrance there, but facing the street there is usually a blank wall, or at best some sealed windows allowing one a glimpse of advertising. Oftentimes, the obviously demented architects of these places range transformers or even garbage bins along the street side of the building--in effect turning the neighborhood streets and sidewalks into ramshackle and often dirty alleyways.
I've written about this before, in The Corporate Moon and Architecture, Money, Graffiti, and Birds. And the problems persists: since I wrote those two pieces, yet another corporate drugstore opened nearby, a Walgreen's, and, in a neighborhood full of well-off people within walking distance, the company reflexively put the entrance in the back, by the sprawling parking lot. In front, on what is indisputably the main street of one of the great cities of the world? A blank wall, three half-dead saplings, a utility door--and a refrigerator-sized LED sign sticking out of the wall to advertise the day's specials on toilet paper, junk food, and tampons.
Trash blows up against that blank wall, where no one passes and about which no one cares, and piles up in little windrows. Like a sullen teenager, Walgreen's turns its back on the community that supports it.
The Korean Cultural Center had walled off its front entrance a few years ago, leaving what appeared to be a dead building on the corner. Whoever came and went there entered furtively through the servants' entrance, as it were--ghosts you saw dimly through the iron bars walling off the parking lot (and a garden that remained hidden from view).
Perhaps the Koreans realized that they were serving neither their own community, nor the larger community of Los Angeles, very well with this arrangement. And the blank wall generated graffiti, as they always do. And a community planning effort recently resulted in guidelines that specifically require real front doors on the street in any new buildings.
The Cultural Center is not a new building, and they could have ignored the guidelines. But a couple of weeks ago, workers unsealed the original front entrance and built a stainless steel portico over it--a gracefully-upcurving wing reminiscent of traditional Asian architecture. It looks as though the doors will re-open for the first time tomorrow.
My hearty thanks to them! May they have many imitators!
Go to A Word from Eric Miller
