Westward Ho!

This Is (One Reason) Why We Can't Have Nice Things!

Coming home on the Orange Line about 20 minutes ago, I got off at my station and a group of young people -- maybe legal drinking age, but only just -- were about to get on. They had an empty bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin, and I guess they figured that they couldn't bring it on the bus (they could), so they had to make a quick decision. They threw the glass bottle under the bus, got on, and the bus pulled away, not knowing that the bottle was directly in the path of one of the rear tires. When the bus was gone, there was shattered glass everywhere. If I'd had a few seconds more, I'd have alerted the driver, but it all happened really quickly. I'm going to hunt down the number for Metro's transit cops and let 'em know so someone can at least clean it up and prevent another bus from a potential flat tire or accident.

I'm livid. We take enough flak for the high operating costs of our transit system, but everyone still gets in a pantytwist about bad service. I'm glad we have what we do have. Thanks for vandalizing an important public resource and endangering passengers, you ungrateful little turds. Oh, and there was a garbage can about three feet away from you.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Yesterday Green LA Girl ran a Q & A with me as part of its weekly series about car-free female bloggers in Los Angeles. It's a great series and I encourage you all to check out the other entries as well:

Kenya
Kristina
Browne
Kathryn
Enci
Paula

It's noteworthy that all of these females (including me) do not have children. Unfortunately this is not representative of a sizable segment of transit riders in L.A. -- the mothers who rely on Metro to get their children around. A few posters have noted this; I hope we get to hear from the car-free parents out there soon. Another thing I've noticed: the overwhelming number of bicyclists in the series. I'm not one. I support riders' rights and want cities and suburbs to plan for bikes in their circulation elements, but I occasionally worry that the alternative transportation community is too bike-centrist in its collective voice and its commentary. Not everyone who's car-free is a rogue culture-jammer on a fixie. (To be fair, not every cyclist is one, either.)

quick shout-out from NYC before returning to L.A.

I've been hanging out back at home for the past week and a half. Interesting trip -- I only ended up seeing my parents for a little under a week because they jaunted off on some retiree-friendly cruise to Paris. The rest of the time I got to have their Brooklyn Heights apartment to myself, provided I'd take care of the cat.

The cat's name is Kerouac. I sort of cringe when I tell people that these days, because we got him when I was in high school, and it's SUCH a perfect name for the family pet of a pretentious high-school bookworm. He was absolutely tiny when we brought him home from the adoption shelter; he was shy, but he loved to run around and climb all over the furniture and appliances. Now he's about 17 in human years.

He's been slowing down for sure; however I've noticed a difference in him from the way he is now and how he was when I was last home in October for my grandmother's funeral. In October, he could still jump onto the bed, onto the couch... now he has trouble and sometimes gives up if he can't figure out a graceful way to do it. Also he seems depressed. I give him food, change his litter, give him the same amount of affection and attention as in the past, but he cries a lot. I haven't gotten much sleep because his cries wake me up. This is what people tell me raising an infant is like. I'll pass for now. But I love the hell out of Kerouac, and having just lost one family member, it would devastate me to lose another and worry that I hadn't been there for him. So, dander allergies be darned, I'm doing what I can.

Anyway, on this trip home I felt very cloistered. Every day it was either pouring rain or near/below the freezing mark. Sure, I saw friends, I rode the subway and the bus, I walked around midtown Manhattan in a gloppy storm with a wind-gnarled USC umbrella overhead, I had pizza and root beer at Totonno's in Coney Island. We had a girls' night out at Vinegar Hill House, chugging BYOB wine and savoring tender, thymey chicken served in a hot cast-iron skillet. But I stayed home more than I went out, and in doing so, I realized I wasn't missing a heck of a lot. New York is New York. It ebbs and flows, and I was here when the Lower East Side was a shantytown, and I was here for the spend-til-you-puke Sex and the City era, and I've been through the shitty recessions before and here's another one. It's always New York though; plus ça change. Los Angeles, for all its differences from New York, has so many of the same things that make the latter city great -- movies movies movies, a steady stream of touring bands and local dudes, an insane food scene fueled by unrivaled diversity and melting-pot cross-cultural contamination, a more-or-less liberal attitude that sometimes successfully degreases the squeaky wheels of conservatism.

There wasn't much that I thought I needed to do while I was here in New York. I even ride the subway when I'm in L.A., so it wasn't a huge sigh of relief -- just another grudging acknowledgement that NYC's system is comprehensive and well-coordinated while L.A.'s is in its infancy. And NYC's MTA is broke.

Off to bed with me. I think.

Peanuts, By Charles Bukowski

I don't know how familiar you have to be with either cultural touchstone to find this funny, but I reckon "beloved comic strip + dirty-old-man poetry" is a winning combination however you slice it.

Additional Bukowski content: The LA Weekly on the unknown fate of Buk's bungalow at 5124 De Longpre Ave in East Hollywood.

Lambert-St. Louis International Airport

Via MeFi: an object lesson in airport expansion and its consequences.

Wyoming: Smarter Than The Rest of Us

Wyoming is ranked 49th out of 49 mainland U.S. states in terms of "average individual's added cancer risk, all sources" in this Scorecard study of States With Health Risks From Hazardous Air Pollutants. Apparently the state that gave us Matthew Shepard's killers and Dick Cheney is doing something right.

Memo to Silver Lake

Regarding your parking situation...

Get over yourself.

I say this as a twice-resident (ok, a subletter) of your neighborhood: once up on the northeast side of the reservoir where Glendale Blvd and Silver Lake Blvds intersect, and then on Sunset and Descanso, above Dusty's. I still visit frequently. I'm one of THEM. I'm in ur gelato shop, contaminatin ur peaceful oasis. I'm on ur hillsides, admirin ur Neutras.

I also say this as a non-driver. Look, I know the parking is bad. But as the article says, the neighborhood was not built to accommodate that many cars. If you're a resident and parking is a consistent concern for you, maybe it's time to consider moving somewhere more suburban and car-friendly. How about Glendale? Silver Lake is one of a handful of places in L.A. where it's easy and pleasant to live without a car, and I'd love to see more people taking advantage of that, and more planners working toward cultivating a sense of "walkability" in older neighborhoods.

To visitors: There are many buses you can take to get around tha SL, including the new DASH line. If you're going to Sunset Junction, that's just a short walk from the Red Line Sunset/Vermont station.

Back where I'm from (the evil New York City), many people don't have their own spaces at home, but there are many offsite parking structures/lots where they can pay a monthly fee for a guaranteed spot nearby. Why doesn't Los Angeles have more of these? If the City thinks its draconian development policies about minimum allotments makes these businesses redundant, they're dead wrong. I'm not the keenest advocate of letting markets run things, but hey, if people HAVE to have their parking, why not make these alternatives available and then let car owners pay for it? They're already paying anyway -- as reflected in the price of their home, and there's seldom an opt-out plan for those who don't intend to use the space. With apologies to Don Shoup, the land that car sits on ain't free.

Checking In

Posting from the LAPL's Echo Park branch, a nice newish building with good air conditioning and free wifi (and plenty of outlets). I like that on the desk where the public computers are, there's -- somewhat inexplicably -- a stack of Environmental Impact Reports, with a yellow label reading "Environmental Impact Reports" right above them. They look lonely. I should read them sometime. Surely I can't be the only planning/development geek in this part of the woods. Especially with Silver Lake being the modernist-architecture capital of L.A.

Speaking of architecture, I feel guilty for not having followed the ArchNewsNow list quite so regularly lately. A friend alerted me to the results of this AIA America's Favorite Architecture poll. Some interesting choices, some not so much. I'm a little unnerved that the once-reviled Twin Towers are in there -- is this contrarianism, revisionist history, nostalgia, or all of the above? With all due respect to the people in the buildings on 9/11, those towers were a blight on an otherwise grand skyline. Nicest surprise on the list: NYC's Apple Soho store. Good to see the Gamble House represented too.

Various and Sundry

My first year (well, my first two semesters) of grad school is over, and I'm still recuperating. Here lies Westward Ho, who blames Cedd Moses for her early demise, particularly these past few nights.

Thursday ended at Seven Grand, Moses' great new whiskey bar. I love its small size and its quiet, private feel. It's on the second floor with an open-air deck out back that faces an eerie-looking vacant office building. The DJ right on the floor reminded me of bars back home in NYC, where DJs are much more part of the nightlife even in spite of New York's weird cabaret laws. I danced, sloppily, to the sloppy country & western cover of Dylan's "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" that this guy was spinning.

Seven Grand is sited where one of the original Clifton's locations used to stand, but that's not all, according to one blogdowntown commenter:

The beautiful building Seven Grand is in was originally built as the corporate headquarters, manufacturing center and flagship store of Brock Jewelry which at the time was the nations largest jeweler. Celebrity customers included Mary Pickford. Brock Jewelry company seems to have gone under sometime during the Great Depression. Sure, Clifford Clinton came along later, basterdised the architecture, and thew a cafeteria on the first floor, Clifton's offices on the third, bakery on the fourth, and a "Soupeasy" in the basement. Clinton traveled the world as a missionary and the soup easy which sat just three floor below his feet was not going to be spared of his true love Jesus Christ. Alas the "Soupeasy" featured a life sized diorama which took up an entire room and included a very large effigy of Christ himself. If they wanted to eat the homeless were apparently forced to hit a button at which point in time a speaker in the Jesus effigy would play and a recording of Cliford Clinton pretending to be Jesus Christ demanding the individual to pray with the bizzare effigy before they were allowed to proceed to the free soup and bread. My point in all this? I think we should refere to the building as the Brock Jewelry Building rather than the "old Clifton's Silver Spoon building" as everyone does.

After Friday's big banquet at the San Antonio Winery (more on that in a bit), a bunch of us carpooled over to Cedd Moses Watering Hole #2, the Golden Gopher. I drank Maker's Mark Manhattans and played Galaga (badly) and Ms. Pac-Man (excellently). Then we stumbled through the downtown night and danced to the Punky Reggae Party at La Cita.

I don't have much to say on the San Antonio Winery itself -- it was nice enough, although for our banquet they only provided Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, my two least-favorite kinds of wine. It is in a pretty inaccessible location, way down an obscure street called Lamar off N. Main, in that gnarly industrial/Cornfields/L.A. River part of the city between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights. I tried to walk there from Union Station and got lost, because I kept going up Spring instead of Main, and had to step over lots of broken glass and outrun a couple of guard dogs (in high heels). I did get to walk past Nick's, which was closed.

APA '07

The nor'easter is in full swing -- with wind, rain, and ice bearing down on Philadelphia, and conference attendees who've been promised a most "walkable" city are lining up in droves to catch a taxi five blocks back to their hotel. I just left early because my toasty room at the Sheraton suddenly seemed very inviting; I nearly fell asleep in the comforting darkness of a convention center screening room where an Ed Bacon film festival was going on (mostly his 1983 ULI documentaries), having dosed myself up on Robitussin a few hours prior. I bought a t-shirt before I took off.

Conference is going OK; the highlight so far was RFK Jr.'s keynote address, crucifying the Bush administration and all the corporate polluters that Dubya hired to run the various federal environmental offices (run them into the ground, that is). Kennedy is very clear on who his enemies are and he's not afraid to name names. Frankly, I worry for his safety.

Over the past few days I've been gravitating towards the transportation/infrastructure sessions, including panels on airports, bus shelters, short-haul rail travel across megaregions, and sidewalk building and maintenance. There's been a nice assortment of of planning books on sale -- some of which I'll make a mental note to look for used on Amazon, although I did order a copy of a former professor's book through the on-site APA display.

We've been eating well too: last night was a reception where the Yuengling and Tastykakes flowed freely, and on Friday night we had great Senegalese food near the Penn campus. Thumbs way up on the Reading Terminal Market -- which, incidentally, is across from the erstwhile Reading Railroad station, now the convention center.