Personal experience: 5 things that startled me in Los Angeles
Several years ago in May, after a sleepless night, saying goodbye to rainy Moscow, I flew into another life. Los Angeles is a city of clear azure skies, where the sun shines 329 days a year! Oh, miracle! Of course, the weather factor greatly influenced my decision to move here. Luckily, the best journalism school in the world is also located here, which I am preparing to enroll in. But that's not what this is about. Speaking as a city observer, I want to talk about how Los Angeles greeted me: my amazing discoveries and unjustified expectations.
1. City of earthquake resistant houses
The thing about Los Angeles is that it's instantly recognizable. This city has been featured in films and TV series so many times that it no longer seems completely new or foreign. It’s as if I’ve already been here and I’m familiar with these wide highways, shaded by rows of slender palm trees, these tasteless, tawdry banners, billboards and banners with which the whole city is replete, this low-rise buildings for the most part: toy buildings, cheap to produce, as if sculpted from clay .
When I was looking for housing, one of the managers told me that their four-story house was built in just a month. Instead of reinforced concrete load-bearing structures, they use wood(!), mainly spruce, as in a real Russian hut. Who would have guessed?! But this, as they explained to me, is not at all the eccentricities of architects or a desire to save money, but a vital necessity. Los Angeles is located in an earthquake-prone area (weak tremors are recorded almost every day throughout California), and wood is a flexible material that will prevent buildings from completely collapsing in the event of an earthquake. For two months now I have been living in the West Hollywood area in such a wooden and plasterboard house, and I know in detail the life of my neighbor from the apartment across the street. I know that he is now going through a midlife crisis, he has problems with his girlfriend, with his parents and even with his dog, a German shepherd, who howls from loneliness all day long. Yes, the walls here are really very thin.
2. City of aesthetic chaos
In Los Angeles there is no architectural aesthetics, which is customarily admired in the cities of Europe. There is no clear architectural logic. This is an ideal city of contrasts, where next to a well-groomed, quiet residential street overgrown with mimosa and fir trees - like Lanewood Avenue - there is the glitz and poverty of noisy boulevards with glass business centers, restaurants, schools, churches and, of course, homeless people.
Homeless Los Angeles - an integral flavor of the cityscape. They are here as familiar as trees or urns.
Dirty, ragged, with suitcases or carts stolen from supermarkets, they wander from the street into the street, asking passers-by for food trifles. They live on benches, steps of public institutions, bus stops, where they leave behind an unbearable stench. Many vagrants love to flatten themselves right in the middle of the sidewalks, plunging into a drunken sleep. Passers-by may offer help, but more often they simply bypass. Americans got used to this neighborhood long ago. I haven’t yet, but that doesn’t matter. What’s more important is that homeless people are completely harmless, even friendly, and don’t skimp on compliments and smiles when you pass by.
3. City for cars, not for pedestrians
Most residents of Los Angeles, unlike, say, “serious” Parisians, do not even know what it’s like to sit at a cafe table located right on the sidewalk and drink a cup of coffee for hours in pleasant company. The culture of recreation in public places is basically not developed here. No infrastructure. The same sidewalks that serve as places for walking and relaxing in European cities are here completely devoid of any attractiveness: narrow, paved with rough concrete slabs, full of cracks and potholes, and often covered in shameless excrement of the homeless population.
Of course, in the city there are parks, squares, squares where people walk, but there are very few people who want to. Even on Independence Day in the Grandpark (this is one of the most central and most famous parks) in the downtown area, where I went in search of unbridled fun, I managed to count only a couple of dozen people who arranged boring picnics on the lawn at the fountain.
In general, it is customary to leave the house here except for walking the dogs, shopping and entertainment (in strictly local, closed places), where they usually get by car.
And it's true when they say that in Los Angeles it's hard to do without a car, which is truly amazingly. How does such a giant agglomeration, which is an order of magnitude larger than Moscow, operates without a developed public transport system?
4. City of rare buses and unpopular metro
Waiting for a bus in Los Angeles means standing at the bus stop for 10-15 minutes at best, and at worst - an hour and a half (especially in the main tourist areas like Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Malibu, Santa Monica and Venice). Only buses go along the main streets, and in order to get to the nearest bus stop, you need to walk 15 minutes. The city authorities, apparently, are satisfied with this, because only tourists, newly arrived immigrants and the poor, as a rule, Mexicans and African Americans, use buses here.
In the subway the same picture as in buses: tourists and marginal. But those quite a bit. The Los Angeles subway is always almost empty; about 300 serves thousands of people a day (by comparison, the daily passenger traffic of the Moscow metro reaches 8 a million people). However, in the local subway much has been done for convenience: electronic ticket sales, quiet, comfortable cars, creatively decorated stations. Here it just smells like some kind of staleness and rot, although the subway is new, it’s only 27 years old. But the main problem is still different: you cannot go far on this type of public transport. Metro includes all 5 main lines, which cover only half of the city.
5. City of moral enlightenment
Even before coming here, while watching a video about Los Angeles, doubts still creep in that in this urban environment that is devoid of aesthetics and meaning, I will not feel completely uncomfortable. But now I understand, the experiences were in vain. In Los Angeles, despite the fact that the city is not a resort, you still have a feeling of lightness, friendliness and calm. There is no anxiety, aggression and tension dissolved in the air, as in Moscow. There is no oppressive gray weather, gray people and gray streets with bulky buildings hanging over the body and soul. Stunning weather and nature, of course, do their job: what is one ocean, and what mountains!
Los Angeles is a city of simplicity and practicality, which is reflected in the people themselves (and maybe vice versa). What they have is enough for them. The appeal of the built environment is an issue that locals don't seem to even think about. They live in some kind of creative freedom, inexplicable for Russian people, which no one has the right to violate. This is the endless strength of this city.
All photos of the author.
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