Neighborhoods

            This morning I boarded a train at a Metro subway station, a few minutes walk from my apartment to a museum filled with Rauschenbergs, Warhols, Harings, and works upon works from the greatest artists of the twentieth century. No – it wasn’t MOMA, and this is not New York. Dear world, this happened in Los Angeles. Believe it or not, I took a train to Downtown LA.

            “Downtown was dead,” said Richard, who managed office buildings in the city center in the eighties, before becoming a high school world religions teacher. “Everyone was selling everything.” Indeed, before 2008, Downtown was mainly an in and out destination for work and business, and most couldn’t imagine being there past sundown.

            Today, as I transferred at the 7^th Street Metro station, I thought about how downtown is the one part of Los Angeles that feels like a “true city,” as opposed to the patchwork of vibrant neighborhoods walled off from each other by the dove-shaped freeway network. Standing on the subway platform, there’s actually face-to-face human interaction. I don’t think we were really made to be sitting alone in a car in traffic for hours on end. My body tells me that it doesn’t feel good sitting there, powerless by gridlock. But there’s a satisfying energy here, a shared sense of purpose – people (quite a few, believe it or not) making their way to their dot on the map.

            Taking the Metro in Los Angeles causes me to come to terms with my city and its lack of civic identity, unity, and sense of pulling each other up.  One of LA’s biggest challenges is that even in 2016, it is still a very much a segregated city. Subconsciously or not, we’ve carved out Black neighborhoods, Asian neighborhoods, white, Jewish, Latino, everything, and our perceptions of other places in the city – may as well be our perception of another state, or another country. On a daily basis, we soar over these neighborhoods in our cars, our own little worlds, often oblivious to what’s right under our tires. Downtown now, however, is an early preview of the new LA, summed up by LA Times writer Christopher Hawthorne as the “third LA,” where car may still be king, but with a little more interaction with our streets. According to Metro, 350,000 people a day ride the trains. This May, the train will finally go all the way west to Santa Monica, and by 2024, a subway will zip under Wilshire Boulevard, one or the most congested corridors in the city, a train can pick you up from LAX, and you’ll be able to cross the county, corner to corner on one seat. 7^th street shows that if you build it, they will come, and maybe, we’ll see each other as people, instead of targets of our road rage, if we get out of the car once in a while.

Walking down Hill Street on my way to the museum, I can smell food, street hot dogs and tacos and lo mein from the Grand Central Market. I catch a few of looks, and plenty of unfortunate scents. Past a guy smoking a joint, a bunch of hipsters with dogs, and far too many homeless. Under the skyscrapers, the cranes, back into a subway portal, I travel back to my Westside apartment. 

-Sean Eckhardt