I had to pick up a relative at LAX a few days ago, staying at a hotel in dtla, the former holiday inn across from LA Live....the drive from the 105 fwy to the 110 was bumper to bumper for most of the way. Once we got to dt itself, however, the congestion largely disappeared. That urban schizophrenia of LA has always annoyed me. It's as though ppl in LA like living in their cars on a fwy but not in neighborhoods themselves.
The large size of LA's population isn't as apparent based on various surface streets or certainly sidewalks, but on clogged fwys. The sidewalks of dtla in particular are way less active than they'd be not just compared with what's found in a world class city like london, tokyo or nyc, but even in santa monica or old town pasadena.
Because dtla was in such bad shape for over 50 yrs, it became increasingly unfriendly & lost the ppl factor. Also since many of the hoods around dt aren't too friendly either, the type of person who keeps a city booming isn't as common as they are around west LA or several miles to the north in the san gabriel valley, or south behind the orange curtain.
dtla is still better today in general than it was yrs ago...the apt tower rising at 7th Fig & on the corner of 8th & fig help fill in big gaps. But the road to recovery is behind where it would be in 2021 if dtla hadn't fallen so far behind decades ago. Or because it was never competitive enough to begin with.
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EDIT: If things like the new 6th st bridge & whether it could have been designed by a Santiago calavatra instead of michael maltzan...btw, I think it's very good....or if frank Gehry's grand ave proj should have had granite walls instead of painted concrete ones were the main problems facing dtla...& LA in general....the city would be in fairly good shape.
the following city doesn't have the supposedly nice weather of la, & it is post covid pandemic too....but oh, my....it makes dtla...& even nyc....seem like it's still stuck in some semi lockdown, semi depression, semi abandoned world....
the number of ppl out & about on these streets makes me think of a much nicer version of the number of ppl in their cars on the crowded harbor fwy between LAX & dtla.
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London was full of nice looking hoods going back over 100 yrs.....LA regrettably wasn't...That's a crucial difference between the two cities....not so much due to the arrival of the automobile or the building of fwys...or ppl running out to the burbs because dtla was too popular & crowded.
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