TIME: Almanac (Reference Edition)/Time Almanac Reference Edition (COMPACT Publishing)(1994)(Mac 4 TM-030).iso/TIME/051892/0518640.000;1

Text File | 1994-04-13 | 6KB | 209 lines

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ESSAY, Page 84

Los Angeles Is Not La-la Land

By Stanley W. Cloud



    [STANLEY W. CLOUD is a native of Los Angeles. From 1982 to

1986 he was executive editor of the L.A. Herald Examiner. Today

he is Washington bureau chief.]



    Every generation or so, the real Los Angeles intrudes itself

into the palmy myth preferred by the outside world. The riot two

weeks ago was such an occasion. Suddenly, La-la land -- with its

beaches and movie stars, Rolls-Royces and Evian, its Italian

suits and car phones, its upscale shopping malls and matching,

coke-sniffing boy-girl bimbos -- was gone. In its place were

wasted landscapes and hard people whose anger and alienation

seemed for a while to know no bounds.



    An immediate good that may emerge from the rioting is that

the world will finally begin to lose its sense of Los Angeles as

primarily a city of careless rich people. It was never that,

isn't today and, if demographic trends continue, never will be.

In the past decade, the number of Hispanics and Asians in Los

Angeles has nearly doubled. The new immigrants came to the

largest manufacturing center in the U.S. not to sell movie "proj

ects" but to find jobs. The truth is thus the very antithesis of

the myth: at its core, Los Angeles is a blue-collar and workaday

town. Its residents tend to drive pickups or subcompacts, not

Beemers and Rollses. They wear jeans and baseball caps and speak

in accents redolent of Oklahoma or Texas, Ohio or New York,

Mexico or El Salvador, Vietnam or Korea. Few Angelenos have ever

seen a movie star. Many have never even seen Rodeo Drive, much

less shopped there. Black, white, brown and yellow, they have

created little communities that frequently resemble the places

they left behind. In the poorest of those communities, the

streets may not be as mean as those in, say, the South Bronx,

but they are every bit as tough.



    Many of the big dealers of Bel Air and Hancock Park have

good intentions where the city as a whole is concerned. They are

liberals, and they want to be involved, but they -- even more

than their counterparts in other big cities -- are an enclave of

such rare privilege that it is quite possible for them to avoid

contact with Angelenos of, let us say, a different stripe. Even

when they venture out, with eyes straight ahead on the freeways,

most of them never even see the problems they care so much

about.



    So what? So this: for better and worse, L.A. is the city of

the future. It is the first major metropolis in history in which

everyone is in a minority. A place that has no majority culture

is a place, paradoxically, in which the West's old, traditional

promise -- that, if you can get there, you may have a new

beginning, regardless of bloodlines or station in life -- is

most likely to be kept. That promise, however, is not fulfilled

in the "when you wish upon a star" myth; it is fulfilled by the

Okie strawberry picker who survived the Depression and bought a

farm, by the New Yorker who built a chain of car washes, by the

Vietnamese refugee who worked his or her way through Cal State

Long Beach and became a physicist. In stressing its most trivial

and least typical aspects, we miss the lessons that L.A. has to

teach about how modern urban societies should -- and should not

-- be organized.



    The "should" is the tarnished but still real promise (plus

such unique Los Angeles contributions as multiple urban centers

instead of a single downtown and, pace Woody Allen, right turn

on red); the "should not" is in the promise's failures. Cities

of the future should not, for example, be without effective

systems of mass transportation, as L.A. has been since the

1950s. Modern cities should not encourage the kind of

uncontrolled urban sprawl that destroys a sense of unity and

shared experience in its citizens. And modern cities should not

stress growth over the environment as they plan for the future.



    And what of race? Los Angeles is rapidly becoming a city of

multiple ghettos. The blacks are in their place, the whites in

theirs. The Vietnamese are here, the Koreans over there, the

Japanese in the middle. The Salvadorans, Mexicans, Nicaraguans

and other Latin Americans may all be Hispanic, but they too are

increasingly likely to be separated along national lines. The

phenomenon is not new. Watts has been a black ghetto for 60

years or so. Indeed, what was once a relatively small and

discrete area around Central Avenue has grown until it is now

defined more by the color of the people who live there than by

actual geographic boundaries. Seen in this way, the city of the

future becomes a vast continent of warring states.



    Which brings us to the matter of the police. Under Daryl

Gates, the Los Angeles Police Department became an army, not a

police force. With its battering rams and paramilitary uniforms,

its choke holds and Taser guns, it set the hard-nosed, Magnum

Force, make-my-day standard for urban law enforcement through

the '70s and '80s. In the process, it became so muscle-bound and

senseless that it was unable to cope rationally with a traffic

hazard named Rodney King, let alone with rioters and looters.

Here too L.A. takes us into a Blade Runner future.



    Usually, when the problems of U.S. cities are discussed, the

focus is on older places -- New York City or Detroit or Chicago.

Los Angeles was always, well, Lotusville. With the Watts riots

of 1965 quite forgotten by most, if L.A. had a real problem

(besides freeway traffic and smog), it was how to protect

pedestrians from the roller skaters at Venice Beach. Now the

world knows better. L.A. is what lies in store for everyone,

unless Americans stop wishing on a star.