Asking what a city “is” can be futile, when trying to be accurate. Ask me what New York City is and immediately I’ll tell you: men in suits walk out of the subway yelling into the smartphone in their right hand while taking angry bites out of the pizza in their left.
Chicago is characterized by grit, Boston by history, and Miami by tank tops, Dwyane Wade, and hurricanes. My instinct with Los Angeles is to say this is where rich and famous carry purse puppies around. But I also know that’s not true except for possibly the Northwest corner of LA and I only really know that part through TV and the movies.
Mark McNeil, co-founder of the LA-based radio station, dublab, recently told me L.A. “doesn’t have a cultural identity, it has a multicultural identity.”
I began to notice things within his context.
Looking from my apartment window nine stories high and facing DTLA, I don’t see an end to the sprawl and I don’t even think I see anything in particular. Tall buildings in the financial district surrounded by endless single-family housing units that are about the size of a rural gas station. Is this a city where somehow both everything and nothing is happening at once?
I feel an existential crisis creeping on. Historically, I am not alone. It seems to be what happens here on a fairly regular basis.
In 1880, Los Angeles had 11,000 inhabitants, fewer people than are currently enrolled as undergrads at USC. In 1900, it was 100,000, and today it’s over 3.5 million. Rapid immigration characterizes the city, and since LA is geographically isolated from the rest of the country, “an island on the land,” as Carey McWilliams so famously called it, the people who do come in, come from all over.
Los Angeles is populated heavily by transplants from the East Coast, and the Midwest. LA also has a richly diverse Latino population, a richly diverse Middle-Eastern population, and a richly diverse East Asian population. It’s sort of as if the entire world decided to meet in Southern California at the start of the 20th century. What brought people here, I wonder? Thinking of my own circumstances which are very much determined by a “running away,” and escape and search for the chance to re-define myself and destiny. In the name of progress…human progress.
Combine the diversity and youth of the current population in LA with a history of racist zoning ordinances, and the city’s sprawled layout and you have LA’s characterizing segregation. With that segregation comes a lack of the kind of homogeneity which would lead to a singular metropolitan identity. This is largely why Los Angeles gets accused of not having a culture, I conclude, and that’s because it doesn’t; it instead has many.
Growing up in New Jersey, I am familiar with three Los Angeleses: the Ideal, the reality, and the joke. The “Kid’s Almanac” — my first contact point — convinced me that LA was a sunny beach town where they filmed all of my favorite shows.
LA the fairy tale that Damian Chazelle (a graduate of my East Coast High School) depicted it as in La La Land. Then, I learned about the reality that Los Angeles wasn’t, in fact, some separate entity from the traditional laws of urbanism, but instead, it was hugely troubled. Just because they wrote the Simpsons in LA doesn’t mean that crime and poverty don’t plague the city. I learned about Watts, Rodney King, highway segregation, and the general neglect of East and South LA. I found out about the gang wars, the fact that crack was born here, and the elevated rates of depression and suicide.
This fed into my third notion of Los Angeles, the joke. It’s objectively ironic that a city as troubled as Los Angeles is seen as a glamorous wonderland. It seems as if Los Angeles thinks more of itself even though it has much of the same problems as any other sprawl such as Houston or Atlanta. It’s because of this dichotomy that LA has developed a reputation as being comically fake. Just as many of the celebrities who act as unofficial LA landmarks are gorgeous and ornate on the surface, even though in their personal lives, they’re as troubled as anyone else, the city has masked its own normalcy in sunshine, silver screens, and surfboards.
From actually living here, I’ve learned there is truth to all of these perspectives, as well as even more nuance. I’ve seen extreme wealth in the houses up in the Hills, and I’ve seen the hopelessly static poverty south and west of downtown. I see the cruelly humorous hypocrisy of Los Angeles in the Grove, a luxurious outdoor mall which gained its reputation as an urban oasis by systematically removing the homeless, if any showed up.
Sure, it’s pretty, but in no way is it organic. The city’s image is hypocritical because characterizing LA by citing Hollywood neglects South LA, but simultaneously, what’s the alternative? It’s not necessarily dishonest, seeing as it’s not a secret that the gang war between the Bloods and the Crips started in LA.
It’s not like skid row is hidden under a blanket, and with the rise of Kendrick Lamar, Compton has emerged as the capital of conscious hip-hop. In search for the true identity of LA, I find that all the candidates cancel each other out and again I’m left with nothing. So, what does that mean?
Neither Los Angeles is seemingly more “Los Angeles” than the other. It’s all new, it’s all shiny, it’s all horrible, and that’s why it’s beautiful. No one claims the city.
Since LA isn’t defined by itself, it gets to be defined by you. People come out here to escape. When we move here, we take the parts of our past we wish to keep, and attempt (although sometimes unsuccessfully) to leave our unwanted baggage somewhere in the Mojave Desert.
What could be more purely American than a city defined not in its entirety, but by the mean of each of its polymers? What’s a more American value than self-actualization? What’s a more patriotic aspiration than the pursuit of happiness?
Los Angeles is the microcosmic symbol of what America is, what it wants to be, and what it has created. America is the culture of Los Angeles, and Los Angeles is the culture of America.
Looking out from the ninth floor of my apartment building, I don’t see an end to the sprawl, and I don’t even think I see anything in particular. Tall buildings in the financial district surrounded by endless single-family housing units that are about the size of a rural gas station.
It’s a city where somehow both everything and nothing is happening at once.
It’s nowhere, and it’s everywhere.