Friday afternoon was a treat. Private walking tour with John Buntin, author of L.A. Noir, a well researched book that depicts the low life, crime war and police corruption in the 20's and 30's. Too bad not being able to go on his special Esotouric tomorrow morning but I already know almost all the places. I can visit them later at my own time.
Having to document my pitch for Elle is a fantastic excuse to indulge in my passion for the darkest secrets of LA LA Land. It was at least a copule of months that I did not walk Downtown at sunset, up and down Broadaway and Fifth, deep inside skid row and then back on Hill all the way to 7th e Angel Flight. Never like today I thought how much I love this place with my guts. I used to say I loved Los Angeles but could not take Downtown, its traffic and smoggy air, the dirty gum paved streets and the too many homeless sleeping in cardboxes on the sidewalks. Now I see only the beauty. The history resurrecting thanks to restoration of the palaces and the theaters. Hig rise lofts sporting names borrowed straight from Italian counts' last names, placed where once was the noisy electric cars station.
I am in love with the old cafeterias and the cops joints run by Armenian merchants in the Saint Vincent courtyard, in the heart of the jewelry district. Should I live here, an eventuality suddenly appealing to a consumated beach girl/wood woman like I think to be, I'd buy my donuts and coffee at the bakery inside Clinton. I would definitely go back to read the actual hard copy of the L.A. Times there every morning instead of the on-line version on my computer, looking out the window to canyonland.
I can't get over the way my perception of this lively, messy, charming part of the city has changed. It does not even resemble the abandoned place I disliked twenty years ago, when I had to be Downtown to improve my English in a very good school on Grand and I could not even find a decent lunch place around. Downtown was damn dead then. Inhabited only during business hours by bankers and merchants who could not wait to escape his streets before dark. How sad.
Who could imagine that nightlife in Downtown was going to be what has become now? Who could predict the internal immigration of artists and galleries spinned by the well-aimed low rent plan offered to them by developers?
To make a long story short, today Downtown is really Live And Die in L.A.
A transient city reshaping another face from its past. To be here now. Surprising and seducing again.
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