The Sum of Our Parts

Once upon a time, when I had big hair and a hemline up to my kazoo and no kids, I developed such a crush on downtown L.A. that I hauled off and moved into the place. Oh, the alabaster glory of City Hall! Ah, the splendor of the Music Center at night! Al’s Bar! Gorky’s! A downtown person--that was who I was gonna be.

Problem was, being a downtown person--being downtown, period--just wasn’t as compelling as you’d think. Other than one night when a bunch of us sneaked into some hot tubs on Bunker Hill, downtown life mainly consisted of sitting around. The Music Center seemed stuffy to people our age; the museums were farther away than we’d thought. It was too dangerous to walk anywhere, and even if it hadn’t been, you could never get into any of the buildings except through the parking garage.

The people you saw at Gorky’s were pretty much the same people you’d seen the night before at Al’s Bar. And behind the Mohawks and nose studs, they usually turned out to be people who’d gone to high school together in, like, Reseda, except for the Mexican immigrants who came to Broadway every Saturday.

After a while, I realized that I was spending almost every waking hour in other parts of the basin, and moved. It would have been great to have been a downtown person, but downtown just wasn’t me.

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I offer this bit of personal trivia because Los Angeles, it appears, is having yet another worryfest about the state of downtown. Oh, the need for a new sports arena! Ah, the fate of Disney Hall! The character of the loft district! The preservation of the cathedral! A people with a downtown--that’s who we’ve got to be.

Never mind that downtown is no more compelling now than it was when I lived there a decade ago. The conventional wisdom is, a great city should have a great downtown, and L.A. doesn’t, and isn’t it a shame.

William Fulton, an urban planner whose book, “The Reluctant Metropolis,” examines Southern California’s growth, says that on book tours, the question he has been asked more than any other is the hand-wringing “What about downtown L.A.?”

“I’m amazed at the level of interest people have in the place, as opposed to their level of commitment,” Fulton laughed.

What he meant is, there’s something vaguely phony about our perennial fret-a-thon. Oh, we talk a good game, and even get worked up enough on occasion to throw up another architectural behemoth or two. But when the weekend comes, downtown always reverts to a hard sell, the green eggs and ham of leisure events.

Nothing, it seems, is enough to make us want to hang out there. Truth now: Unless you live downtown-adjacent--in, say, Silver Lake or Echo Park--when was the last time you spent a Saturday at the lovely Central Library? How about the Music Center? Once, maybe twice this year?

Even fun-filled Broadway feels like a schlep if you’re a suburban Latino who’s discovered the mercados of Huntington Park. The fact is, given the land and the options, it just seems unnatural to us to settle for a single gathering place.

So we put a little bit of downtown in a lot of convenient locales: Century City and Koreatown, Old Town Pasadena and the Santa Monica Promenade, Monterey Park and Artesia’s Little India. The Beverly Center, CityWalk, the Sunset Strip. A main street for every mood.

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The rap on this setup is that it “allows” us to become insular, to retreat into our separate communities and forget the greater good. And it is true that, in the suburb where I live now, there are people who haven’t made the half-hour trip to downtown Los Angeles in 20 years.

But has that insulated them? Not really. The last time I checked, most were as concerned as the next guy about the greater good. It’s just that they aren’t downtown people. Southern Californians don’t tend to be. A big, bruisin’ civic core goes against the nature of a metropolis that sees itself as a loose affiliation of places.

And this is gonna sound terrible, but what’s the problem with that? Why do we need a “great” downtown to be a “great” city? Because that’s what other cities have? Really, now.

It would be nice if we were downtown people, but downtown isn’t us. So what would happen if we stopped nagging ourselves and let our character take its course?

Here’s my prediction: We’d be fine. Even great. Maybe some of that hand-wringing might get channeled into something compelling, like better parks, or air conditioning in the schools.

You’d be surprised how much energy you discover when you realize your nature and accept yourself. It was time-consuming, maintaining that big hair, tugging on that miniskirt.

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Shawn Hubler can be reached online at [email protected]