The “Real” Los Angeles
By: Luca Johnson, Staff Writer
I didn’t think I would like Los Angeles. As an East Coaster, my image of LA has always been one of vapidity, image obsession, traffic and smog. This characterization has persisted for many decades. According to New York based photographer Bruce Davidson, the 1964 East Coast intelligentsia viewed Los Angeles as “a cultural desert with acrid air, bumper-to-bumper freeways, tall palms, and sordid Hollywood types.” More recently, actress and outspoken New Yorker Chloe Sevigny went on a viral tirade against LA, saying it was the “last place” she would want to live.
New York and Los Angeles are famously pitted against each other as rivals and polar opposites. New York has been constructed by many as “real” and LA as “fake.” It’s become a cool opinion to not like LA. New York has almost unquestionably won the war and has cemented itself in the American cultural imagination as “the place to be.” New York promises dynamism, walkability and authenticity. It’s “the city that never sleeps”; a place where you can find your true self. Los Angeles’s promise is a bit more elusive. The city is sometimes envisioned as a sort of paradisiacal fantasy world, full of sunshine, palm trees, and good vibes. A place long romanticized in music and film. But these imaginings are contradicted by the image of Los Angeles as being defined by urban sprawl and poor air quality.
However, the incongruousness of Los Angeles’s urban and natural environments is exactly what made the city so captivating to me when I visited this January. A place that forces you to reckon with the absurdity of going on a hike in “nature” only to look out at the endless sprawl and smog. Or strolling down a shopping street while being dwarfed by the colossal San Gabriel mountains.
I came across an incredible photography book in a museum gift shop called “Nature of Los Angeles 2008-2013” by Bruce Davidson that perfectly captured these contradictions. Throughout his career, Davidson has taken an interest in the “flora of urban areas” as a way of highlighting the absurdity of urban life. As Davidson puts it, he’s “interested in nature being where it wasn’t before.” To Davidson, the plants in Los Angeles “give a poetic posture to concrete freeways, tacky strip malls, and the endless grid of local streets.” Many of his photographs capture monumental palm trees in their discordant urban contexts, framed by industry like oil rigs and loading bays, criss-crossed by power lines and residential streets. He even includes a photograph of bushes that line the median of the freeway. His work asks the viewer to question the purpose nature serves in urban areas, and to view the city through the eyes of plant life.
No other city has wrestled with, and appropriated nature the way Los Angeles has. Take the city’s usage of the palm tree, for example. Connoted with leisure and luxury, the tree has been associated with Los Angeles for decades to attract new residents. However, contrary to popular belief, the tree is not native to the region. Tens of thousands of them were planted almost 100 years ago for the 1932 Olympics, and soon their 100-year life span will expire, and they will all die. Although the trees are undeniably alluring, they do almost nothing to capture CO2 or provide shade, and the city plans to replace the dead palms with native trees when the time comes. The beauty of palm trees has been shamelessly used to conceal the environmental harm being inflicted upon the land in Los Angeles. Like the oil rigs off the coast of Long Beach, disguised as palm tree covered islands. Palms can be seen beside gas stations and auto repair shops, their presence domineering.
Some have argued that the dry, arid climate of Los Angeles was never fit to sustain so many millions of people. The struggle over controlling water has been a part of the city’s existence for centuries, and scars of this fight can be found all over the city. The infamous Los Angeles river was paved with concrete in 1938 in an attempt to retain as much water as possible. The Silver Lake Reservoir, the namesake body of water of the Silver Lake neighborhood, is a manmade, half empty basin, whose walls are paved with concrete and crudely filled in with asphalt. The endless sprawl of concrete, and the outdated stormwater drainage system has made it so that water has nowhere to sink into the ground, leading to extensive flooding, and lack of groundwater retention.
Conversely, access to the ocean is a big part of what makes the city so desirable to so many people. The Pacific winds keep the weather in LA perpetually warm and pleasant. The beach is drawn into the urban landscape, serving a similar purpose that other cities’ manmade parks do. The sand is covered with tire marks from patrol cars that constantly roam around. The beaches are larger than most of the ones I’ve seen on the East Coast, and provide respite from the bustling city.
At times, the city can feel like a lush forest of plants and trees. Streets are lined with giant bird of paradise flowers, with bright orange blooms that resemble exotic birds. Occasionally the flowers are accompanied by Ruby-throated hummingbirds that glisten bright pink and green. There are Camphors and Australian Willows, Sycamore trees and fragrant Eucalyptus. There are Jacaranda trees which become full of bright purple flowers in the spring. The front and back yards of houses on residential streets overflow with lemon and orange trees. Because the sidewalks are seldom used, the trees and plants overflow into them, as if attempting to reclaim the land as their own. There’s something inspiring about the resilience of the trees and plants in LA, that grow tall and proud despite their concrete surroundings.
One of my first and favorite days I spent in Los Angeles this past January was in San Pedro, an often overlooked seaside neighborhood that straddles the Port of Los Angeles, the largest seaport in North America. There had been a wind storm the night before, leaving the sky completely clear of smog in every direction. On one side of me was the Pacific Ocean, with the pale blue silhouette of Catalina Island. On the other side of me was the port, with thousands of shipping containers and looming cranes. Beyond the miles of sprawl, you could see the snow capped San Gabriel Mountains in the distance. The ground was littered with giant palm fronds knocked down by gusts of wind from the night before, and many were jammed haphazardly into trash cans. It was unlike anything I had ever seen. A city so at odds with its natural environment; the immensity of the built environment giving new meaning to the natural.
Los Angeles’s complex relationship with artifice is reflected in the city’s culture, too. For many, the social culture of LA is defined by the entertainment industry, which arguably brings about surface fakeness and opportunistic social climbing. In the same way that the nature of the city has been cosmetically “enhanced” to suit urban desires, LA is famous for being a capital of cosmetic surgery, or enhancing one’s “natural” appearance. External beauty is seen as the ultimate goal, and the pursuit of physical attractiveness is undertaken at whatever cost. I overheard so many conversations about vitamins and supplements, chlorophyll, wellness shots, sea moss and maca powder.
However, these perceptions of LA’s culture hardly scratch the surface of the city’s cultural multiplicity. Like the city’s non-native palm trees, transplants have done a lot to establish their presence in the city, and their image is exported as the “true” LA. Despite this, all kinds of immigrant and subcultural communities call Los Angeles home, and find ways to organically share in their culture. Take the Chicano community, for example, which has shaped the culture of Los Angeles for generations with incredible food, music and art. Historic Chicano neighborhoods like Boyle Heights have overcome highway expansions and displacement efforts to maintain their cultural identity. The bustling Koreatown, the largest Korean population in the United States, as well as other enclaves such as Chinatown and Little Tokyo, continue to fight against gentrification encroaching upon them from all sides.
A lot of the negative things people say about Los Angeles are true. However, people often overlook the resilience of LA communities in the face of these difficulties. Despite car culture and car infrastructure decimating neighborhoods, and cultivating isolation, people still find ways to come together. One can find markets with stalls selling street food and artisanal goods on the corners of strip malls and gas stations, bringing life and joy to their paved surroundings.
In such an absurd urban landscape, people still find ways to make meaning and beauty of their surroundings. Like the famous LA “golden hour” before sunset, when the smog catches the sun just right, engulfing the city in a warm glow. Or at night, when the sky is illuminated in silvery gray from the light pollution, as if to mimic the white light of the moon. This is how I like to remember Los Angeles.
