Could Los Angeles grow to become a “real city” like New York or London? Last year, LA gained at least 50,000 people, according to a recent report from the California Department of Finance, pushing the population to more than 4 million people for the first time in the city’s history. — Vice
Part of the appeal of Los Angeles has been its refusal to be like other cities. For years, its objective "center" was a forbidding cluster of office towers with near zero street life, while in outlying, low-density neighborhoods, people partied in back yards that ran up against wildlife preserves, hiking trails, and quaint man-made lakes.
However, as other big, traditionally urban U.S. cities gradually became stupidly unaffordable (looking at you, New York and San Francisco) and Moby wrote that one Op-Ed, a sizable number of creative-class types decided to try their luck in a place with what then had half the rental costs and much more temperate weather.
Now, with a rapidly growing subway system and a still undaunted, ebullient vibe, L.A. may be starting to take itself seriously as a city, which ironically could be its undoing, or the impetus for spectacular urban development. If history is any guide, it will be both, creating the newest weird, beautiful, idiosyncratic iteration we collectively call "Los Angeles."
L.A., in the news:
3 Comments
Los Angeles needs to have more respect for its past. An industry was created here that changed every culture on the face of the earth and there is virtually no recognition of that fact, not by the industry itself or the residents of the city
Is it just because the industry is too busy making money, competing with other forms of entertainment, or just afraid they will be seen as "old" by looking back to their beginnings?
The city needs a complex as massive as the Smithsonian or Universal Studios that would offer live venues and museums for all forms of human entertainment while honoring those early artists and creators that made the city possible.
Museum Row on Wilshire Boulevard is already here, and getting an upgrade. They are remaking LACMA, they already remodeled the Petersen Museum (though it is as ugly as sin) and they're building a massive Oscars museum right across the street. If that's not enough, a subway stop is coming right in the middle of all that, to be open within six years. That sounds like a city to me.
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