http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-los-angeles-identity-architecture-hawthorne-essay-20131222,03245365.story#axzz2oKMkSlc6
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Downtown Los Angeles, aerial view
urbanone.com |
Hello Everyone:
I hope holiday is going well and your getting a chance to spend it with the ones you love. I noticed that in a span of a week, we've increased page viewership to 5420. Do you thing we can do 10,000 by April 1, 2014? I think we can. Today's topic, creating a new identity for the city of Los Angeles, comes to us from a recently published essay by Christopher Hawthorne. In his year-end essay, considering the future of Los Angeles' urban identity, Mr. Hawthorne looks at the direction the "City of Angels" is headed in for better or worse. Mr. Hawthorne looks at urban trends that took center stage in the past year and their impact on the city. In a side-bar piece, which you can read later, Mr. Hawthorne looks at the best and worst architectural moments of 2013. In the meantime, let's look at how, once again transportation is reshaping the geography of Los Angeles.
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1935 Map of Los Angeles
scresources.com |
The revolution tentatively began in 2005, when Christopher Hawthorne arrived in Los Angeles and the first phase of the Gold Line, the light rail line traveling from downtown to Pasadena had just opened and construction on the Expo line hadn't begun. James Hahn, the mayor at the time, was ending a largely uneventful single term as mayor. Measure R, the transit tax that would make over the city, was four years in the offing. The celebratory CicLAvia ride through the open streets of Los Angeles was six years away from its debut. The stage was set for the trends that would emerge in 2013. This past year saw high-level debates over the future of the L.A. River, new parks in Santa Monica and downtown, blockbuster exhibitions at the Getty dedicated to Southern California's architecture and design heritage, the election of Council member Eric Garcetti to mayor and his early initiative, historic preservation wins in Beverly Hill (a preservation ordinance) and elsewhere, forward movement on a planned subway and light-rail lines, and expanded Union Station. These signs of progress, all contributed, this year, to the feeling that Los Angeles crossed over into new civic territory.
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The L.A. River
thelariver.com |
When I bring up the L.A. River in during dinner conversations, the response I get is "L.A. has a river?" Yes, it does and it's more than "literally a puddle on slab of concrete" as one person Christopher Hawthorne follows on Twitter recently did. However, this rather unattractive, highly-engineered body of water that slices through the heart of the city has real potential. As Los Angeles continues to spread out, finding room for parks is getting tougher and more expensive than before. The big attraction of the river is that it qualifies as a linear park on a massive scale, already in public hands, awaiting discovery. Mr. Garcetti, who took office in July, made the river an early priority, lobbying the Army Corps of Engineers to support a $1.1-billion plan. This plan was one of three options under consideration to remake the eleven mile river. In the interim, he launched the Great Streets initiatives in October, with the goal of using improvements to forty streets around the city to open more for cyclists and pedestrians, or in the words of the mayor, "activate the public realm." While the Great Streets initiatives needs some improvement, it's place to start.
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Sunset Boulevard
google-latlong.blogspot.com |
Nevertheless, the Great Streets initiatives points to a new emphasis on urban design at City Hall. It suggests the concept, clearly laid out in Christopher Hawthorne's fascinating series of article on Los Angeles' great boulevards, the city's major streets are returning to the heart of civic life, something that has recently gained political traction. Almost every demographic trend implies a move toward a public future is in the making. This trend, according to Mr. Hawthorne, is irreversible and demonstrates that Los Angeles is no longer interested in just building freeways or single-family houses, the twin pillars of the twentieth century. To further buttress this point, a recent Harvard study reported that Los Angeles has a higher proportion of renters-52%-more than any other metropolitan area in the country. While some live in single-family homes, most live in apartment or other multi-family buildings, which comes with increased density and mass transit.
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Los Angeles urban sprawl
lasmogtown.com |
On the whole, native Angelenos are driving less and using transit more, according to other new information. For example, ridership on the Expo Line jumped 38% between August 2012 and August 2013, passenger numbers that weren't expected until 2020. If you take bus routes, Angelenos take more trips using mass transit than New York or Chicago, not to brag or anything like that, but we may soon overtake Chicago. Los Angeles teens and twenty-year olds are falling in line with thinking across the United States that owning a car is more of nuisance than a ticket to independence. My how times have changed. A measure to extend the Measure R sales-tax hike will likely make an appearance on the 2014 or 2016 ballot, it passes as predicted, it will accelerate work on the region's most important transportation projects.
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L.A. Live
aehospitality.com |
In the course of remaking Los Angeles' identity, there will be potholes along the way, u-turns (couldn't resist the transportation metaphor), and the inevitable lawsuits to block subway tunnels and skyscrapers, those signifiers of urban life that appeared a century ago. There will also be hemming and hawing over bike lanes and anxiety over the fact that drivers and homeowner, pampered poodles for so long, have suddenly become a persecuted class. Fear not, it's getting easier to view the opposition for what it is, a group of individuals who have benefitted for a long from generous policy-think the notorious Proposition - and are accustomed to setting the political agenda. These are the people who helped create the urban condition that we're all now quite anxious to fix.
Happy New Year my friends, fans, followers and fiends. We'll talk more tomorrow.
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