There you have my remedy. There’s my plan to cure your urban ills.
Good grief! you cry, what’s so new about that!?
Nothing, I reply, sadly. It’s so old it now must become new again. Once it was everywhere in some form. Now it must be thought of and born all over again. It has existed in the arcades surrounding St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy, for more than five hundred years. It exists in the Galleria in Milan where, one hundred years ago Mark Twain fell in love with it and wanted to stay on forever at its “tables all over these marble streets, people sitting at them, eating, drinking, smoking—crowds of other people strolling by—such is the Arcade. I should like to live in it all my life. The windows of the sumptuous restaurants stand open, and one dines and enjoys the passing show.”
If we could summon Mark Twain back from the dead he might well point out, ironically, that we already have many such plazas in Los Angeles, which have languished and fallen into disuse. We have forgotten the reasons why Pershing Square and the Olvera Street Plaza were built 50 and 150 years ago, as centers about which to perambulate souls and refresh existences.
Most of the elements I speak of are available on Hollywood Boulevard or the Sunset Strip. But there the automobile spoils and finally ruins any chance for real encounter, and the supermobs prevent leisurely enjoyment.
Olvera Street, already mentioned, fulfills many of my requirements, as does, on a large scale, Disneyland. You can indeed sit, eat, lounge and stare at Uncle Walt’s, but you don’t really go there to shop, and it isn’t a community center, but a Southern California asset.
Century City qualifies in many ways. But it has no true center, the plaza sitting/eating area that would give it identity. Nor are there plans that I know of to give that new community a real navel. It will finally be a series of fine islands, each kept incommunicado from the other, cut off by villainous avenues and murderous cars. If dramatic reason prevails in time, the new theaters being built there should be connected by fantastic moving sidewalks that would gloriously transport visitors out of the theaters and over to the main restaurant/shop arena.
The Santa Monica Mall suffers for similar reasons. It has no true center. And, most nights, the stores close early.
The Farmers Market is a grand social gathering place for food. But it goes dark at six each night, seven in the summertime.
Which inevitably brings us to a rethinking of our ideas on social life and business hours.
Life really begins at dusk in Rome. In the blue hour, and late on through the idle evening, shopping continues, mixed with time to wander, linger, sit, and stare.
The Plaza I have constructed here should never be built unless it opens for business at three each afternoon. Week nights it should stay open until at least 11:00. Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights the closing hour should be 1:00 or 2:00 A.M.
Will this take some real doing? Yes. Because your average small American businessman is locked into a nine to five schedule. No new hours are worth considering. So, thousands of new customers are ignored and your small business flounders for seemingly inexplicable reasons.
Take Pico Boulevard all the way to the ocean, or Western Avenue most of the way to Long Beach, and what do you find? Small businessmen flaking away, dying, vanishing, on all sides, mile after mile. With no pedestrians, they survive by their frail wits. The same lost and dreary little shops seem to have lingered on, changeless, from my childhood.
And if by chance there is pedestrian traffic on one side of Sunset, let’s say, the shops immediately across die because no one crosses over. At Pico and Westwood, the stores on the north side rent for less because their income is far less than the shops on the south side, where the immense gravity of thousands of parking spaces attracts a large number of cars.
So your small businessman has many reasons to affiliate himself in such an amiable environmental plaza as the one I propose, where he will be guaranteed a fresh river of pedestrians every hour. And being situated on the north, south, east or west side of the plaza will not affect his business by so much as a cent.
Bring that small businessman in, then, into this effort to recenter our lives. Give the community back to the community, to build a base for young and old, and discourage the endless miles of mindless driving as millions of people pass other millions looking for Somewhere To Go.
But, the Somewhere To Go will only work, I repeat, if it opens late and closes late.
Los Angeles, at this very moment, has many smaller shopping centers that stay open fairly late but which are, instantly, unappetizing. Arriving, one sees thousands of cars, acres of blacktop and confusion. Or, if the cars are hidden out back, as at the Santa Monica Mall or the small plaza near the May Co. at Pico-Overland, you find, once again, the same mistake—no true center, no dramatic watering trough for one’s imaginary horses, no place where one can whittle, spit, and scratch.
Ocean Park, before it was improved out of existence, once had to perfection all the things I most desire.
No, I don’t mean P.O.P. I mean the old Ocean Park fifteen years ago, with its bingo parlors and pastrami dips and pizza shanties, its bookshops, its theater, the seedy pier itself with all its frayed games, and thousands of places to sit and snooze or yammer and gossip. It’s gone now, its shops plowed under and concreted over. Its good people have been real-estated, delegated, outlawed away, pent up for some unnamed sins in those dreadful new tenement towers that front the beach, and not allowed out. What’s to go out for, if you dared? No one bothered to think, to remember, to rebuild the small shops. No one had even a small dream that maybe old and young might like to deliciously collide and saunter in thousands of small, warm crowds as they once did night and day by that beautiful sea.
A shred of that grand old Ocean Park is stranded high and dry, praise God, right now on Fairfax Avenue. There, by sheer fine good Jewish community spirits, I find the kind of life I have been describing in this article. With Canter’s Delicatessen as social gymnasium center, and many shops open most nights, it is one of the last few lost places for us to Flee, Go Find, for us to actually Look, See Friends! As in the thirties when just such social assemblages of familiar faces happened every night in our lives around Western and Olympic, Beverly Boulevard and Vermont, or Vermont and Washington, where life, not very high but certainly not low, was lived.
Let me beat the long dead urban horse once more, and then recapitulate.
Two years ago, I lectured one Saturday night in Pasadena. Finishing about 8:30, I walked down into the heart of Pasadena searching for a cab.
The streets and sidewalks were empty! No cars. No people. And this, mind you, early on a Saturday night. It looked more like Sunday sunrise in Zion, Illinois.
Finding a cab, I made it to Hollywood. There, at Vine Street, I found a far more unnerving sight: traffic blocked for a mile in four directions. Beetle infestations of automobiles loomed and burnt out their motors everywhere. Thousands of people jammed the sidewalks.
The facts are plain and sad. Pasadena, and many places like it, is shut. Hollywood, with its good and bad, hustlers and prosties and yellow-robed Buddhist chanters and singers, is open. The Pickwick Bookshop, true center of Hollywood for most of us, is wall-to-wall people every night but Sunday.
I could list hundreds of similar community examples. But they all add up to our singing a blues version of that old song, “Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?” We ought to know. We helped drive him off and away.