Quote:
Originally Posted by LAofAnaheim
That day has already come. Look at how busy the restaurants are on 7th street. Look at the people lining up for bars and clubs on Spring Street. Look at how busy LA Live! is at night for sports entertainment venues. Go to Grand Park on the weekends and see kids playing in our "pool" or the late night movies, or dancing at Dance Downtown.
It's no longer a joke. It's become a destination. My friends now want to go to downtown LA at night because it's more fun than other neighborhoods. But it will only get better......
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It would have been more accurate if I had said, "goes from having been a joke..." Obviously, that was in an era of the past which no longer applies to today. Things have, and will constantly be changing in downtown, but it will take time to change the perception of what kind of place downtown was. I do not live downtown (I live in the farthest reaches of exurbia, e.g. 70 miles east), so I am very sensitive to what others who do live outside the city think. I'll provide three examples of what I mean:
1) a while back I remember talking with a German tourist whom I had met at Tecopa Hot springs (Death Valley), he told me about his itinerary in California--two days in Los Angeles (to visit Disneyland, and Universal studios--what else?) and four days in San Francisco, which excited him because of its reputed beauty. When I suggested to him to give more days to Los Angeles to explore the city, you should have seen his face. I do profess love for what I consider "my" city, and have always been a booster. I frankly said to him that whatever he may have heard, Los Angeles is not a beautiful city like San Francisco, but it is an incredibly interesting city (especially downtown, which I think is much more so than San Francisco) and it takes time to explore and understand it. However, no matter what I could say, he seemed unconvinced
2) Knowing a great many people "out here," I constantly ask people about their interactions or experience with downtown. Remarkably, there are a few who have lived in the Los Angeles area for decades and yet have been downtown once or twice, and some never at all--in their entire lives yet! (I know, I'm still dumbfounded by such provincialism). But, for those who do get out of this suburban environment and explore life a little more, their experience with downtown is very superficial (e.g. a day visit to the garment district), or if it is more in depth, it usually results in a negative response. I have tried to update these people about the many positive changes that have taken place, but the negatives--"dirty, rundown, too much graffiti, too many homeless and beggars, rough crowd, gangs, difficult parking, high crime,etc., still take hold. I think in some instances some of these negative images go back several decades (if not back to more than half a century ago).
3) Case in point, after graduation form College in the early 1980's I briefly worked for a building contractor who moved to Los Angeles from Florida back in 1951, and lived in Silverlake. Thinking he would be a good historian of the city, I once asked him if he had gone to downtown much, his response was no--only if he "had to." In his view, in the 1950's and 1960's downtown "was a dark and dismal place, with nothing really happening there." Living in Silverlake he was only ten minutes to downtown, yet he would never go there.
These anecdotes serve to point out that no matter rapidness of progress downtown makes concerning its rebirth, its negative image or the perceptions that people hold in their minds takes much longer to undo.
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