Why the rush to Manhattanize L.A.?

LA Times ^ | August 12, 2007 | Joel Kotkin

[Fiji Hill]

When the action began shifting to Wilshire and points west, not everyone believed it would last. In the 1950’s, United California Bank believed Spring Street would remain the financial center, so they built a bank building there in 1958. It would the last financial building to be built on Spring Street.

In 1964, Occidental Insurance apparently thought the action was moving south, so they built the Occidental Center, a high rise south of Downtown which sticks out like a sore thumb—a lone high rise surrounded by much smaller buildings.

[Fiji Hill]

Most of us took the Yellow Car.

[SC Swamp Fox]

Manhhattanite sizes of 250 to 350 square feet.

I'm not sure how much they would have to pay me to leave my 85 year old, 3000 sq.ft. house in small-town, SC.

I enjoy mowing my lawn, caring for my flowers and trimming the hedges & bushes....they can pack sand.

[SoCal Pubbie]

You are quite right. I was downtown yesterday, and I'm in LA often. There is a renewal of downtown. However, this story is the typical tale of Southern California. A great place with a character all its own screwed up by people moving in from elsewhere (like Anschutz and Broad).

Manhattan high rise and loft living is all the rage even I my own Orange County. I never saw I’d see the day. Can paying for parking at the mall be far behind?

[ErnBatavia]

Pershing Square and was pleasantly surprised as to how the area had been cleaned up, and how one could feel safe walking the streets even at night.

Just don't go east a couple of blocks. Skid Row now runs from there all the way to Interstate 5

[norton]

REAL Yellow Cars were square and had wood seats :)

[Nice pic though]

[x]

You are 180 degrees off. This is the new era of decentralized living. The economies of scale that prompted the growth of the older cities has been overtaken by the increases of efficiency of distributed services and the costs of maintaining an urban core. There is nothing efficient about crowding 20,000,000 people into a small, difficult-to-maintain space.

Can we really generalize like that?

Your vision depends a lot on low energy costs. It may also not be practical where free land is limited.

You can spread people out to Vermont or Montana, but a city like New York or Los Angeles is going to need a reason for being if it's to go on and prosper. Will it find one in complete decentralization?

[Fiji Hill]

I’m sure Whittier, where I lived, wasn’t served by Yellow Cars or Red Cars in the 1950’s. I only saw freight being hauled on the PE (Pacific Electric) line near my home. The tracks were later removed.

To get to downtown LA from Whittier in the 1950’s, you would likely take Washington Blvd. to the Santa Ana Freeway in East LA. If you were headed east towards the mountains or desert, you would take Workman Mill Road through the Lazy JG beef cattle ranch and past the Pellisier dairy farm in West Whittier—the 605 and 60 freeways were yet to come. And if you were headed for Huntington Beach, you could either drive through the dairy farms along Golden West Avenue or through the bean fields along Highway 39.

[doorgunner69]

Why not? Half of NYC move to SoCal in the 70’s and totally corrupted the society already. Let them have the cesspool, it is a lost cause.

[ichabod1]

San Francisco is the Manhattan of the west coast. LA is... LA, it doesn’t need to emulate anyone.

[RichInOC]

I think that particular car left the garage years ago. In many ways, Los Angeles is New York with better beaches. And the driving is merely quite uncomfortable instead of completely stupid.

[norton]

(Nostalgia orgy)

You can, or recently could, still see the right of way and grading in Elysian Park and in Redondo (Red Line to the beach).

My early years were two and a half blocks from downtown LA if you didn't count the trolley ride in between - and I still have a couple of smashed pennies to prove it.

Bean fields, strawberry fields, dairy farms and some significant swamp land, all paved over today.

(And)
You can tell an old timer by use of "Santa Ana Freeway" or "Pasadena Freeway" instead of numbers that, to this day, I can't relate to my travels...the 105 is just "the one above the 91" instead of the "Airport Freeway".

[Cementjungle]

...when they built our one and only subway line...

Los Angeles has too much of a love affair with the automobile to ever seriously consider public transportation. That's a huge problem for dealing with growth.

[Pelham]

“There is no there there” was used by Gertrude Stein to describe Oakland, CA, her hometown.

Oakland is also a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, PA where Stein was born. One writer claims that the Oakland she is referring to is that one, rather than Oakland, CA, where she grew up. As far as I know there is no there in either Oakland.

[Clemenza]

Oakland in da ‘burgh has always been slightly more happening than anywhere in Oakland, CA. Oakland, CA is alot like my mother’s hometown of Jersey City. I used to ask my mother why JC’s downtown (Newark Avenue) was more like a main street in a town of 5,000 than one of 250,000 and she said the reason was because NYC was 1-2 stops away on the PATH Train, so there was no reason to hang around other than to work or sleep.

[Fiji Hill]

You can tell an old timer by use of "Santa Ana Freeway" or "Pasadena Freeway" instead of numbers that, to this day, I can't relate to my travels...the 105 is just "the one above the 91" instead of the "Airport Freeway".

Come to think of it, yes, indeed, people younger than I use the freeway numbers and not the names. However, I sometimes inadvertently call the San Bernardino Freeway "Highway 99" and the Santa Ana Freeway "Highway 101," even though those designations were long ago dropped after the freeways became part of the Interstate system.

The official name of the 105 is the Glenn Anderson Freeway, a name I prefer not to use, since Anderson, a former legislator and lieutenant governor, was a liberal Democratic hack. I like to call it the Watts Freeway, because it takes you straight into the heart of beautiful downtown Watts.

[norton]

"The official name of the 105 is the Glenn Anderson Freeway, a name I prefer not to use..."

Anything NOT named (renamed) after Kenneth Hahn, MLK, or Cesar Chavez, is OK with me. But, I'm expecting to have to add anything not named after Villaraigosa / Villar to that list soon enough.