It’s because I love my Los Angeles full of texture and a little untamed that I worry in these days of rapid displacement and rampant development.
One of the first things I noticed as the rents in my Hollywood neighborhood went up was that the fluttering silk flags and drawings on torn cardboard and other random street art projects that often would appear overnight suddenly became more and more rare.
— The Los Angeles Times
How does a city maintain its identity under the pressures of global brands and developers hungry for real estate? Though Los Angeles is a city known for destroying its recent past for the elusive present, there are only so many buildings and details this city can turn over before it's a different place entirely.
Looking at the Los Angeles of previous decades, one can see a metropolis full of quirks: consider, for instance, the now-demolished Brown Derby, the now-renovated House of Davids and the The Burger That Ate LA, a restaurant modeled after an enormous hamburger and a shrunken LA City Hall (regularly featured on the show Melrose Place), which has been aptly repurposed into a Starbucks.
As these establishments are refurbished, relocated or altogether destroyed, an element of the city's eclecticism shifts from present reality to distant memory. The scale and speed of development happening throughout the city can even make it difficult to remember what is in the process of being lost, in the case of the Netflix office expansion currently taking place over several blocks of Hollywood.
This is, of course, a phenomenon taking place in several cities throughout the world, but it is so few that have quite as large and beloved an unpolished quality as Los Angeles.
3 Comments
On the cool places and quirky buildings that get mourned: some of them actually replaced even earlier sites of interest. Never glad to see fun spots go away, but you have to choose your period of nostalgia.
I always loved The Burger That Ate LA structure, but not sure why its current occupancy by Starbucks is "apt"....
LA was cool when film was black and white.
https://www.vintag.es/
LA is now overrun by wannabe hipsters from all over the US working for Netflix or Amazon Prime, who have a very sterile, boring definition of "cool". Reclaimed wood + glass interiors are the only thing that appeal to a lot of these bozos. Oh, and add some brushed stainless.
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