Rich Mintz  

In my two days in Los Angeles this week I saw a substantially more effective transit city than the one I grew up in. There wasn’t anything I didn’t know about, but partly because of where I was spending my time I saw a whole lot of stuff, including gleaming new Metro Rapid buses everywhere, much better transit signage at stops and outside stations, bike racks on the front of every bus, better coordination among systems and routes, bike signage and sharrows, and so on.

I rode the LA MTA bus (in those days still the RTD, I think) to and from school every day for 6 years (1977-1983). I experienced the modernization of the fleet, the arrival of air conditioning, and some of the the first limited-stop service (on the 560, previously the 88, along Ventura Boulevard). But the bus was never something, in those days, that anyone with a choice would use.

A decade later, living in LA as a young adult in the early 1990s, I was a pretty heavy transit user. By then the 304, 320, and 333 limited-stop services were in place along the Wilshire, Santa Monica, and Venice corridors, and I used all of them — an improvement over earlier days, but still not worthy of the immense passenger volumes, especially on Wilshire (one of America’s busiest transit corridors). And at that time, crosstown service (N-S) was still pretty poor.

Things have changed. The Metro Rapid services (especially the 704 and 720 and the Orange Line) have made a vast improvement in mobility, with traffic signal priority and buses coming at 5-minute or better daytime headways, and I was astonished to see the map of lines with 12-minute or better daytime headways, especially on crosstown service. There was a time when waiting for a bus on Fairfax or La Brea could drive one to drink, but apparently that day has passed.

The other thing that’s happened is that multimodal trips are better accommodated. The dozen or so second-tier companies, like the Santa Monica and Culver City municipal lines, appear to be better coordinated with Metro in respect to both routing and transfers, and the whole system seems very bike-friendly, with 2-bike carriers on the front of every bus (which I saw people using).

Oh, yeah, and there’s a subway, which so far doesn’t go anywhere I need to go, but that’ll change with the opening of the first leg of the Subway to the Sea, which must be impending. The Metro subway lines prominently proclaim that they are open to bicycles at all times (like the NYC MTA and pretty much no other transit system). I could imagine myself living, say, in Venice and commuting into mid-Wilshire via a combination of bus and bike according to my whim.

When I lived car-free in LA in the 90s, people thought I was crazy. But in those days, my parents’ and grandparents’ cultural norms controlled. Now there’s a whole grownup generation after mine, and they think very differently.

Today (because I was in the neighborhood) I stopped in front of my old apartment building at 230 1/2 South Sycamore Avenue, where I lived from about 1990 to 1992. It’s in an LA neighborhood that I’m not sure what you would call it, west of Highland (so it’s not Hollywood) and north of Third Street (so it’s not Miracle Mile or Hancock Park) and south of Melrose (so it’s not West Hollywood or even West Hollywood-adjacent). Come to think of it, I don’t know what we called it even when we lived there, I think we just said “you know, near Third and La Brea.”  That still works now, although the real estate agents probably have another name for it.

In those days this neighborhood was only starting to be trendy in the way that whole swaths of the city have now become trendy.  The early “trendy” businesses I remember were Rita Flora, a cafe/florist where I used to buy Gerber daisies one at a time walking up from the bus stop at Wilshire, and the restaurant Campanile and of course La Brea Bakery. And a coffeehouse called The Living Room at 1st and La Brea, where you sat on old furniture from someone’s grandmother’s house back before that was really a thing, long before “Friends,” back before coffeehouses were even really much of a thing — it’s long gone now.  And El Coyote, which was retro-trendy even 20 years ago and is still there — in fact, I drove by it today.

This part of town was “too far east” for a lot of people I know to consider living, and “too far west” for others (a smaller group). My grandmother’s little house, where she’s lived for more than 60 years, is only about a mile and a half to the north, but she’s definitely in Hollywood (albeit at the edge of it), and this is sort of nowhere. Some of our neighbors were Orthodox Jews (my grandmother’s longtime synagogue, Etz Jacob, is nearby), but it being LA, no cultural group really predominated.

It was a two-up, two-down apartment building with a relatively grand central staircase, built in a blandly Spanish style that might be called “California Ranchoid,” a type of building that exists by the hundreds or thousands in a wide swath of Hollywood and West Hollywood and Miracle Mile and Mid-Wilshire. If you remember Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom, she lived in a building like this (and in fact, Fun Fact!, in these same years that I was living here, Jeremy Piven used to hang out at a house not too far away with some friends I knew, who were friends of his, but now I’m getting off topic). Our block was the rattiest in the area (because across the street, instead of more houses, we had the side wall of a supermarket parking lot) and it was still probably the nicest block I’d ever lived on with my own money up to that point.

My landlady, who was a lovely woman, was a Cajun Zydeco dance enthusiast (maybe she’s still around — if you are, hi!), and one of the few “older people” (younger then than I am now, obviously) I knew who had a healthy city-type social life despite having adult responsibilities and adult challenges. She was a great model for me, and I still think of her sometimes.

And while I lived there I learned a lot of adult things, including: how to drop out of graduate school even if you aren’t exactly sure what you’re going to do next; how to freelance; how to convince potential employers who don’t know you to give you a chance; how to borrow money when you are in need, and how to pay it back. I also learned a lot about Madonna and Sandra Bernhard and Camille Paglia during this period, and the semiotics and cultural meaning and theoretical underpinning thereof (we were graduate students in English in the ’90s, for God’s sake).

I even learned how to live in LA without a car, 15 years or more before such a choice became a bit more common among people in my social group. I don’t think I knew a single other person without a car in those days (and I eventually got one), but even then, it could be done.

Those were happy days, on the whole, and I think back on them fondly.

After an unexpected delay that led to my missing my flight (moral of this story: if you select your rental car company based on price, expect the level of service you paid for), I had a few hours to kill tonight at LAX. And where better to spend them than Pann’s, the 50-year-old Googie diner at La Tijera and La Cienega? I grabbed myself a cab over there, took over a booth, and proceeded to blow my diet — Dreamburger, fries, thick fresh onion rings (the best, Jerry), two Arnold Palmers, and a chocolate malt for dessert.

They have real food, too — their fried chicken is quite good — but the Dreamburger is one of the best hamburgers I know, certainly better than any diner hamburger I’ve had in New York. Hefty fresh-grilled patty of select beef, “special sauce,” shredded lettuce, cheese, on a buttered bun, wrapped in paper to hold it all together.  And it’s only about 6 bucks.

What I like best about Pann’s is that the food all tastes like what it is. For instance, the blue cheese dressing, which they obviously make in-house, tastes like milk and blue cheese (like blue cheese dressing used to taste when I was a child), not like oily mayonnaise. The croutons taste like pieces of bread tossed in oil and salt and baked in the oven by human hands, which is what they are. The onion rings were onions recently enough that they still taste juicy and sweetly pungent. I watched them make my chocolate malt, so I know exactly what went into it, and it was everything you would use at home and nothing else. And so on.

For your delectation, here are a few photos, including the before-and-after shots of the hamburger plate.  I spent almost twice as much on the taxis to and from as I did on the meal — and it was totally worth it.

Time for a brief plug for the Hotel Angeleno, where I’m staying again this trip. Those of you whose Los Angeles experience goes back more than a few years may remember it as “the round Holiday Inn at Sunset and the 405,” but a decade or so ago it got a boutique hotel makeover, and it’s the kind of small hotel I like. There’s no blue lighting in the hallway like at a W, the staff wear ordinary-looking hotel uniforms, you can eat your bagel in the sunny lobby and no one complains; but it’s still nicer than any chain hotel (at left you see a cactus rock garden in the center of a coffee table in the lobby, a nice touch). And you can’t beat the location.

The rooms are very comfortable without being pretentious (they can’t be too pretentious, since they’re small and wedge-shaped); the staff are accommodating of special requests; and there’s a very good restaurant on the rooftop with excellent breakfast in the morning and fine dining in the evening.  There’s even a small poolside area, pictured below.  And for all this, I’m paying quite a bit less than I paid for the nice-but-relatively-generic convention Hilton in San Diego that I was at earlier in the week. Highly recommended.

A new street sign design has hit some of the streets in downtown Los Angeles. Featuring the LA city seal, and a new typeface (which isn’t, however, Clearview), they look pretty classy.

It’s not clear whether these are going to be the new standard, but I hope they are — they look, as Curbed LA put it, “badass.”

The blogger Militant Angeleno has compiled a survey of the five types of street signs still in place in Los Angeles, from the “shotgun” and “black blade” that prevailed when I was a child to the ugly, poorly-copy-edited “trapezoid” that started taking over when I was in high school.

I’ve got one of the “blue blades” right here in my kitchen — I bought it from a junk shop on Abbot Kinney Boulevard just after the name changeover from West Washington Boulevard in the early 1990s:

I was one of those kids who did creative and/or geeky things after school. I took an afterschool art class in the first grade (we experimented with all kinds of interesting media — it was the ’70s), took an afterschool class in simple electrical circuitry in the third grade (batteries and switches and light bulbs), took a disco dance class at a dance studio in the sixth grade (best not say too much about that), took the bus alllll the way up to a hobby store in Northridge to buy Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia in the seventh grade, and so forth.

But one of the most formative experiences of my creative youth was taking pottery classes at Everywoman’s Village, the hotbed of ’70s do-your-own-thing women’s liberation on Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys.

The Village (not just for women, although mostly so) was like a cross between an ashram and the Learning Annex, with a dollop of macramé and a soupçon of consciousness-raising stirred in. They offered classes in all sorts of arts, crafts, and life skills, from the pottery and guitar classes I took to more practical skills like typography and layout. As importantly, in those late-’70s days when self-actualization was in the air, they embodied a vision of life that’s not so different from the Brooklyn of Etsy and homebrewed beer and curated moustaches. It was a place where people who had started off narrow, or with limited options, came to open their minds; the sorts of people I remember from my classes were like the women in 9 to 5 — which was a journey of self-actualization, too. The closest contemporary approximation I can think of is Brooklyn’s Third Ward, but the Village seemed much more politically charged.

Physically, Everywoman’s Village was a collection of modest beige stucco bungalows on an asphalt lot with some patches of scrubby grass, surrounded by cinderblock walls. (I’d call the style “High 1960s Community College Annex.”) It was a simple place, some studios and classrooms with metal folding chairs. But the vision transcended the surroundings. The colorful murals, like other wall art of the 1970s, put ideals and social commentary right in front of you in visual form. (Sandy Bleifer’s Can of Cardines, under the Hayvenhurst Avenue overpass of the Ventura Freeway, is from the same time period and only about two miles away.) And while on the grounds, you felt like you were part of a grand experiment in community — a crowdsourced place, back in the days when “crowdsourcing” required you to get an actual crowd all into the same place at the same time.

The Village is long gone — there’s a cheap-looking newish hotel on the site, verified by this Google Street View picture of the “Kauai Surf” apartment building I remember from just outside the back entrance to the premises, right behind where the pottery bungalow used to be, where my mom used to pick me up. But I think of it from time to time. It had a cameo in the script of Boogie Nights, so I know I’m not the only person who remembers it.

There’s not much left online, but the image above of “housewives on the way to practice yoga at Everywoman’s Village” will give you the flavor. More images from the same series here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Although I’ve been away a long time, it’s still true (and will be for at least a little while longer) that I’ve lived more than half my life here in Southern California, where I’m spending the next few days. I lived my entire youth in L.A., and then came back for five years as an adult. I was born right here at UCLA, very close to where I’m writing this — in fact, from the window of my hotel room where I shot the photo at left, if I were a crow, I could fly to the front door of UCLA (oops, “Ronald Reagan UCLA“) Medical Center in four minutes flat. (It might take a bit longer to fly all the way to the delivery room where Dr. Holve brought me into the world, given that the old hospital had 27.5 miles of corridors — that’s over 50% more than the Pentagon, if you’re keeping track.)

My mother was born in Santa Monica, about 5 miles from here. My father came here with his parents in a bassinet, on a long boat ride from Seattle (or was it a train?), before he was old enough to talk. In fact, three of my four grandparents grew up in places that, from the vantage point of some New Yorkers, might as well be suburbs of Los Angeles (those places being Oakland, Seattle, and Spokane).

All of this is to say that, despite a long absence, my roots here are deep. Indeed, I’m part of a small minority in my family who have left the West for any extended period of time, and one of only two or three who have stayed away long enough to establish permanence somewhere else.

And that makes Los Angeles a place I return to with a sense of eager familiarity, even excitement, but also with trepidation. The experience is so thick with memories (most of them happy, or at least ordinary, but still, very, very present), so teeming with people I knew and places I used to go, so colored by choices made that forestalled other choices, overshadowed by alternate lives foregone in favor of the actual life I’m living now, tinctured with family obligations and disappointments and resentments and old scores — you know, so heavy — that, for all my pleasure in returning, it’s hard to stay too long, or to come too often.

Every visit starts the same way:

I walk out of the airport into that bright, bright sunlight, with billowy clouds overhead and the white concrete viaduct along World Way, and palm trees and the Theme Building. And I’m excited! It’s not gray here, it’s bright and the air is dry and clean and, even by the airport, the air carries a bit of honeysuckle and eucalyptus (the fragrances of my high school and elementary school, respectively) and the faint odor of beach sage and the sea, along with the jet fuel and car exhaust. There’s usually a breeze.

And I wait for the rental car bus, and it takes me to Budget, which has been in the same place, in the same configuration, for at least the 25 years I’ve been renting cars at LAX. I’ve been renting there forever because of some faint vestigial memory that, at some point decades ago, Budget was cheaper and had better cars, neither of which is true anymore — although it’s still a quick exit onto 96th Place, and a quick drop-off from Airport Boulevard when you’re dashing for a flight, so that’s something. The bus takes me around a ramp that was built in the 1980s but that I still think of as “new,” past the Radisson (which used to be the Hyatt, back when I used to know people who worked there and answered the phone “It’s a beautiful evening at the Hyatt at Los Angeles Airport, [name] at your service” on penalty of being written up if they diverged from the script), past Lot C where my father parked for every business trip he ever took.

So I wait in the Budget line, and get my car, and head up Airport Boulevard (past the Sheraton Four Points, which used to be the Renaissance, where I attended a memorable party in 1992), and I slow down for the dip at Manchester because in 1981, my taxicab-yellow 1971 Mercury Cougar XR7 bottomed out in the dip and a crack appeared in the windshield, from top to bottom, that I couldn’t afford to fix for a year. We called that car “the Beast,” both because its license plate had 666 in it and because the passenger-side door wouldn’t close right and because, really, who would paint a car aftermarket taxicab yellow? I bought the Beast out of a classified ad, after my mother’s transmission caught on fire climbing the Masonic Avenue hill in San Francisco and she took her old car back from me, from a guy who had an office in the same building in Encino where Councilman Marvin Braude kept his district office. He’s the same councilman I wrote a letter to in the second grade, in 1973, telling him that the “walk” cycles of the traffic lights on Ventura Boulevard were too short for old people and children to cross. And he actually answered me, establishing my faith in citizen action to change the world. (That letter he sent me, on the ornate letterhead with the embossed Los Angeles City Hall on it, is probably at the bottom of some plastic tub in my storage unit in Jersey City).

So I take the right onto La Tijera, passing 98th Street (where, in 1993, my friend Annie and I met every morning at 8:30, and one of us left our car in front of a random house and piled in with the other, so we could shave half an hour off our commutes by riding the carpool lane down to Costa Mesa where we were learning the fundamentals of direct response marketing), passing the new post office on the left (built on the grave of the Marie Callender’s, where my father and I used to stop for pie on the way to drop me at the airport to visit my mother in San Francisco), passing Pann’s, the Googie diner at the edge of Inglewood, still run by the same Greek family (and I can confirm that it’s the same family, four months ago the Boon Companion and I were eating at the counter at Pann’s and the elderly matriarch was puttering around behind the counter and we talked to her) after, what, sixty years, which opened around the time my father decided that being an optometrist in Inglewood wasn’t doing it for him and he wanted to go to medical school. And Pann’s is still there, and it still serves excellent burgers and milkshakes (not to mention coffee and pie), and I still stop there on the way to the airport, almost every time.

And I turn left onto La Cienega, pass Slauson and the oil wells and hit the downhill straightaway where I got a speeding ticket in 1990, and suddenly there it is in front of you as you go down the hill, the whole city, with the towers spread out right to left along the Olympic-Wilshire-Santa Monica corridor, from downtown to the sea, with the mountains behind. Right at the bottom of the hill, on the left, there’s a Target, which used to be Fedco, where we shopped back when you actually had to be a public employee or union member to get in — a little rattier than the Fedco in Van Nuys, but also bigger and more authentic. That was the place to get a deal on a TV, or cheap but well-made underpants, back in 1975.

See what I mean?

We’re now barely 15 minutes from the airport and I’ve typed a zillion words and I’m already exhausted, and you’re probably exhausted from reading it. And we’re nowhere near the parts of the city I actually lived and worked in yet. I grew up 15 miles away — imagine how loud the memories get once we cross over Sepulveda Pass! And it’s like this the whole time I’m here. It never stops, the rambling monologue in my head, until I get on the plane and go home. And, if I can, I spend the first 48 hours back in New York in my apartment, just reading, or listening to music — doing something quiet.

No wonder I’m spending tonight shut up in my hotel room (admittedly a nice room, in a nice hotel, the kind I like, not too expensive but with some personality and a very good restaurant, and where the valet brings the car out in 90 seconds if you call down), reading news from home (by which I mean New York). There’ll be time for more L.A. in the morning, and I have a long day ahead; I’d better rest up.

“A funny thing happened on the way to the Cheesecake Factory,” writes Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, about the gentrification of downtown Los Angeles. “The economic collapse has also managed to freeze downtown’s transformation from sleepy to energized — and freeze it at a particularly appealing spot.”

Like most positive assessments of LA’s urban scene throughout my life (including some that have come out of my own mouth over the years), this one seems like it’s reaching a bit — in particular, I don’t think the spaces among all those downtown microneighborhoods are so “easily [navigable] on foot or on a bike” — but the fundamental point he’s making is right on:

Gentrification has decelerated in several parts of downtown into a kind of limbo, leaving them sufficiently changed to feel newly vital but not enough to seem overexposed. At the same time, plummeting housing prices and the conversion of several ill-fated condo projects into rental buildings means not only that the area is continuing to attract new residents but also that it may see a more compelling mixture of people — more teachers and designers, fewer real-estate speculators — than it did when forgettable two-bedroom units were selling for $800,000.

Something similar is happening in New York. Nevermind the neighborhoods that shouldn’t have been gentrifying at all, and wouldn’t have been if the market hadn’t gone crazy. Whole desirable swaths of the city — including parts of Manhattan, like the Financial District where I live — have become living choices again for people whose means are within the range of “ordinary.” And the projects representing the worst of the excess (on the Williamsburg waterfront, and the far West Side) are mostly in trouble, and at the very least have had to ratchet back the most odious of their marketing in order to attract a broader range of clientele.

I pay more to live here than I was paying in Brooklyn — but if rents hadn’t tumbled a year ago, I wouldn’t have considered it. And there’s a much wider range of people living down here than there was two years ago — and a lot wider than a few blocks away in Tribeca, which has managed to hold its position as the most expensive neighborhood in the city.

I enjoyed my visit to downtown LA last spring, and can see the evidence of revitalization everywhere. It was exciting, given that I don’t think I ever knew a single person who lived or played downtown in the first 30 years I was alive. No one would be happier than me to see the central core continue its upswing, so I’m glad to see Hawthorne shining some light on the things that are worth paying attention to.

Here comes FarmVille for iPhone.

Could you beat a Muppet in a staring contest? I doubt it.

Daniel Kroop launches Los Angeles and First, a blog about Los Angeles politics — specifically the City Council — that promises to be a good read, if the first week is any indication.

Am I really the only person in America who finds the “gay panic” subtext in this Pretzel M&Ms ad a little bothersome?

Aerolineas, the Argentinian airline, updates its brand identity.