Collective Consciousness in Los Angeles
In Downtown, I have a bevy of choices in how to get around without a personal car that are often quicker than driving. There are the city DASH buses, a mere 65 cents and I can hop from my apartment to the Financial District or to Little Tokyo, and another one to hop to the Historic Core or to USC. Or I can rent a Metro bike or a private scooter and take the bike lanes right to Der Nister. Or scoot to the train at Broadway or by Grand Park or walk to Bunker Hill Station and access the rail network. Or I can take the secret aerial walkways right from my apartment, through buildings, all the way to Angels Flight and glide down from the hill on the century-old funicular.
When I leave Downtown, the options run a bit dryer. The county buses go far, but slowly. But I also have the option of renting a car on an hourly basis through a city program for only 15 an hour. Or take a commuter train at Union Station. Or of course, an Uber. (I’m too scared to try a Waymo yet.) There are also more dedicated highway-like bike paths in other parts of the region.
Though I am at the mercy of the availability or the closeness to all of these means of transportation, I also never have had to contend with the traffic and feel so emotionally drained that I sit in my car for a half hour to decompress. My emotions and mood are lighter, and though I can’t carry around as much or be wherever I need to in a blink of an eye, I feel that I am weaving into the social fabric of this city.
People complain about the lack of civic consciousness or collective feeling in Los Angeles. Of all places, Los Angeles is the most American, in that it doesn’t really notice other cities, and that it feels highly individualistic, clinging to privacy and defensiveness rather than creating cohesion.
But the cohesion I am beginning to feel by being on the streets so much is life-affirming. The collective consciousness that is possible in Los Angeles is of the most diverse, the most interesting, the most wonderful people. As a metal box blocks out radio waves, so too does a car block out the emotions of others. Sometimes, those emotions are scary. Sometimes they are disturbing. But precluding those out of fear also precludes the generosity, the surprises, the opening up people do when they talk.
I think one of the most interesting things Americans do when they travel to Europe or Israel or other parts unknown is marvel at the social cohesion of the places they go, and bitterly lament the chaos of home. They fail to understand that, like traffic, they themselves are part of the problem. Society does not become cohesive when it exists to serve you alone. Society becomes cohesive when you invest in it, when you live in it. At this point in time, I recognize many of the business owners, homeless people and my own next-door neighbors, and I fear none of them.
The ironic thing about crime Downtown is that the worst of it is perpetrated by people of all races and classes who come from outside of Downtown to do crime here. It is often reported that there “is an incident Downtown” and not that someone came to Downtown, to do an “incident.” I remember hanging out at the Historic Park near Chinatown and listening to a state park ranger complaining to a guard about middle and upper class people who come from outside of the area and act unruly at parties and festivals at the park — “stay out of our neighborhood!”
There are places here that are meant to grant spiritual transformation merely by being there, a gift that’s granted instantly to anybody who comes. This is naturally true with any place of worship. The expansion of spirituality in Downtown reaches the secular domain as well as the religious one. Starting out with (and mind you, these are painfully few examples) Downtown’s oldest still-standing commercial building, the Bradbury Building, it is important to note that this structure was devised in consultation with a Ouija Board as was the fashion in the late 19th century. Walking the lobby, or as I was recently privileged to do, the second floor, gives a sense of mystique and rapture that I’m sure the architect George Wyman felt inside of himself at the time as he tried to construct a building that matched those in contemporary stories of futuristic utopias. There are wrought-iron elevations, wood-panelled offices of several floors surrounding an open space, and a glass roof; such unmistakable details in a building that looks quite dull from the outside.
Union Station, however, the last great train station in America, as it is called, was designed in the Spanish baroque revivalist Churrigueresque style. A cathedral for the people. Unlike in other stations, rush hour is transcendent. The city streams in and out of the building, as though thousands are going for a quick mass. I step outside to a garden where oranges grow, walking slowly through the square to catch my breath from the majesty of the People.
Just out the front door is Olvera Street, the birthplace of the city, and the old square where Mexican folk dancing frequently breaks out. I remember buying some extremely sugary sweets from one booth. The lady selling to me insisted I try buying them in Spanish. I struggled, but I so desperately want to succeed. It just felt right. Right there and then.
Finding Jewish significance in places is more of a challenge. Once, I went up Angels Flight and a delightful man dressed in old-time garb took my ticket. It turns out he is a historian named Nathan Marsak. I later saw him at the LA Times Festival of Books at USC, where he sold his book on Bunker Hill. A Jewish man himself, he took pleasure pointing out to me that where the DWP building and its luscious fountains stand now (the prime view out my apartment window), there once stood a massive synagogue designed in the Moorish style. Somewhere in the DWP building lies a plaque commemorating this.
But finding a wide variety of cultures and influences in Downtown, a place where the whole city once gathered (to such a point that in 1929, 7th and Broadway had more pedestrians than anywhere in the world, more so than any point in Paris, London or New York), is not an extraordinary challenge.
My favorite sign downtown is a sandwich board placed in front of a (I think) Greek restaurant by Pershing Square. It invites patrons to come in and eat in Farsi, Armenian, Spanish and English. Or at least, last I checked.
