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Downtown Los Angeles from Echo Park
As someone who loves cities - dense, traditional cities - I always, automatically, hated Los Angeles. Living in San Francisco for seven years (1999-2006) helped multiple my uncritical hate for LA. San Franciscans frequently heap scorn on Los Angeles for every thing from being "flat" to "too spread out" to "fake" to one type of "wasteland" or another. This Los Angeles hate is common around the nation, widespread in the general public and typical in the classrooms of urban planning academics. Los Angeles is the archetype of all that is supposedly wrong with cities. It is easy to blindly follow this crowd, until you live here and take time to explore The City, that is.
Without doubt, there is some truth to the things critics of Los Angeles say. The problem is that many detractors have, quite obviously, spent little time getting to know this city. Los Angeles, The City and The County, is a huge place. Parts of it are "flat," bankrupt from an urban perspective, and generally unappealing - just like the suburbs of San Francisco, Chicago, or New York City. But in order to make fair comparisons between mammoth Los Angeles and much smaller (in land mass) places like San Francisco or Manhattan (all limited with respect to growth by bodies of water), one must judiciously break LA apart.
The core(s) of quintessentially urban Los Angeles
I live in Los Feliz, located right in the middle of a stretch of Los Angeles that I identify as one of its urban cores. To the east of my neighborhood, in order, are the communities of Silverlake, Echo Park, and Downtown Los Angeles. To the west, one finds the heart of Hollywood followed by West Hollywood, which, technically, is not part of Los Angeles. In practice though, for the purposes of walking and exploring a city, it can be called part of LA. These places are bisected by streets like Sunset, Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Wilshire Boulevards. They are surrounded to the north and south by the eclectic neighborhoods that weave Los Angeles together. This roughly 10-mile long stretch of Los Angeles is comparable to the 49-square miles that make up San Francisco. Viewed in this fashion, Los Angeles holds its own against any city in the world on the basis of urban vitality.
Within this core of Los Angeles there are spaces of seemingly barren urban wasteland. Often, this initial assessment holds true. But, with great frequency, further exploration reverses such assumptions. The critics cannot keep themselves from harping on LA’s dead spaces. As an urbanist, I dislike them just as much, but the difference is that those who give Los Angeles the benefit of the doubt realize that much of the scorn it receives is unfair. An urban double standard exists.
It is not all that often than one hears a San Franciscan touting the urbanity of neighborhoods such as the Outer Sunset, Bayview-Hunters Point, or the Excelsior District. Along the same lines, parts of Upper Manhattan, for example, are not representative of neighborhoods on the lively East Side or Greenwich Village. San Francisco and New York, or any other major city for that matter, are no different than Los Angeles. Surely there are differences in landscape (although the urban core of LA is quite hilly in places!) and certain types of density (LA is quite dense), but Los Angeles, like its counterparts, is instructive in relation to what is good as well as bad about urban America.
My articles on Examiner.com will proceed to reveal, one at a time, the great urbanity that exists in Los Angeles. Often I will stick to this predefined core; at other times, I will veer to its outskirts. Some contributions will be deep and introspective, while others will point out attractions and relevant happenings around Los Angeles. All of my input will come with an urban flavor and a critical eye.
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