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Posted Apr 29, 2017, 7:27 AM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 6,433
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mojeda101
Took a long overdue trip to Downtown today. Got an update for you guys.
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this article fits in nicely with your very welcome set of pics......
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Downtown Los Angeles Is America's Most Colorful Neighborhood
Scott Beyer
Los Angeles--For those who love navigating cities by foot, New York will always be America's main option. Los Angeles, despite being the densest urban area, never achieved this walkability, thanks to government efforts to socially engineer sprawl. But one Los Angeles neighborhood, at least, offers something more colorful--and arguably better--than anything else in the U.S. It is the city's downtown area, better known here to locals as "DTLA."
In some ways, DTLA's evolution into this rarefied air has been circular. During the city's initial pre-WWII growth era, downtown was the business and transit epicenter. It hollowed out substantially in following decades thanks to suburbanization, but since 1999, residential population has tripled to 60,000. DTLA has regained its cultural moxie amid this growth, with GQ calling the neighborhood, unto itself, "America's Next Great City."
The story behind this revival is, first and foremost, one of deregulation. According to Brady Westwater, a renowned local realtor and gadfly, the biggest measure was the city-approved adaptive reuse ordinance passed in that crucial year 1999.
But there is another quality to DTLA that transcends all this; the neighborhood has a quintessentially "Los Angeles" feel that is too ambiguous to describe for readers, but that suggests how more of the city might function if it were ever allowed to urbanize.
One driver of this quirky exceptionalism, said Westwater, is the number of major institutions--formal and de facto--that are clustered within DTLA so closely, yet are so radically different from each other.
“We have more things that are important in an urban sense within walking distance than any city in the world,” he said.
Meander through the 8.6-square-mile neighborhood, and one will encounter, in no particular order, the following: a high-rise Financial District; an Arts District loaded with galleries; a Fashion District; a Chinatown; a Little Tokyo; a Korean area; a Mexican Town; a Union Station; a major covered street food collective called Grand Central Market; a Civic Center that has the highest concentration of government employees outside of Washington, DC; an additional arts district along Bunker Hill featuring venues of a more institutional nature, like the Broad Museum; an entertainment district that includes a stadium and convention center; Grand Park LA; and the list goes on.
“I could count 40 different major government, civic and business functions that are all within walking distance here,” said Westwater. In New York and other major cities, meanwhile, it would take days to access a similar number of equally-prominent institutions, given their distance apart.
The city at large has never really been appreciated for its artistic culture; in fact, this seems to fuel stereotypes about it being a land of flaky half-acquaintances and blonde bimbos. But make no mistake—Los Angeles is a cosmopolitan global crossroads for film, fashion, photography, painting, graphic design and music, with more artists per capita than every major metro except New York and San Francisco. The trends that start in Los Angeles get consumed worldwide, from the movies people watch in Madrid to the Top 40 radio heard in Wichita
At street level, this artistic ecosystem achieves somewhat sterile dimensions in Hollywood and Burbank. But its most unruly aspects have flooded downhill and into DTLA. Go there on a Friday night, and it is a Bacchanalian mixture of drugs, upscale whiskey, music, color and noise. Many of the people here look like artworks unto themselves, with a mixture of tattoos, piercings and wacky hairdos that render them the mini hipster versions of Dennis Rodman.
The fact that these types, and all the other above-mentioned ones, swarm throughout DTLA, amid an urban design motif that is a combo of opulent, grimy, ghetto fabulous and radical chic, gives the entire neighborhood a surreal quality.
So what, exactly, is DTLA's secret sauce? It is diversity, in the broad sense.
Downtown Los Angeles achieves this diversity more than any American neighborhood. It has diversity of building types, with corporate skyscrapers abutting mid-rise historic structures abutting small factories. It has diversity of uses, with grandiose civic institutions next to dingy bars where you'd sooner find a modern-day Bukowski. And it has a diversity of people, from across the world and every income range.
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