Cities with an undeserved bad rap

[SFBruin]

I'm moving to Oakland soon, I hope its bad rap is a little undeserved.

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by LA21st

Agreed. Like I said, the options are there and it's not much of a walk to Westwood Village for many of those highrises.
Westwood Village isn't a cool neighborhood in LA, but it's busy as hell, especially during the week. Alot of office towers in the area and there's friggin buses everywhere.
It acts like a small downtown. It might be the most in need off a subway station than anywhere else in LA. At the moment anyway.

*nostalgic sigh*

Westwood Village used to be cool, hehe back in the 1980s. When I was a teen back then, that's where everyone wanted to hang out. It was like a very lively college town in the middle of the Westside. A lot of young people, and even a nightclub or two. Westwood had way more movie theaters back then than it does now, too, so that also contributed to a lot of crowds. When LA hosted the 1984 Summer Olympics, word was you saw a lot of the athletes partying in Westwood (UCLA served as one of the Olympic Villages). Friday and Saturday nights, they would even close off some of the streets to traffic, and there would be people walking everywhere, and they even had pedicabs to take people everywhere within the village and to some of the parking lots. When I got my drivers license at 16, when I wasn't going to Melrose, I was going to Westwood; you could easily park at the Federal Building and then just walk into Westwood Village. The decline of Westwood started in the 1990s, when what used to be called the "Santa Monica Mall" (a pedestrianized 3rd Street that was done in the 1960s) was redone into the "Third Street Promenade," and more and more people started going there. A much publicized gang shooting that killed a young female innocent bystander in Westwood in the early 90s, plus neighborhood groups that thought Westwood was getting too rowdy, also contributed to Westwood's demise as a hip and happening place.

[LA21st]

Yea, that sucks. I never saw Westwood in it's heyday. It's coming around in the last few years, and I think the subway stop will be great for it.
But there's probably alot more competition for the young people to go to than back in the 1980s.

To be fair to Westwood, Georgettown in DC and Lincoln Park in Chicago arent what they used to be either. Georgetown was a popular spot for young people in the 1990s but
I just dont hear about it as much anymore.

[austlar1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJIiFIbkNZ8

[IrishIllini]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

and maywood in the western burbs also has a reputation for gang violence, though i have no numbers.

I couldn’t find any numbers either. I know some S/SE (NWI) suburbs aren’t idyllic suburbia, but even the worst suburbs don’t compare to the city’s worst neighborhoods.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by IrishIllini

but even the worst suburbs don’t compare to the city’s worst neighborhoods.

true.

no suburb touches the likes of garfield park or englewood when it comes to street violence.

hell, few places anywhere in the developed world do.

[IrishIllini]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

true.

no suburb touches the likes of garfield park or englewood when it comes to street violence.

hell, few places anywhere in the developed world do.

What I hate about these discussions is how selective we are with who gets heat and who doesn’t. People don’t talk about crime in Atlanta, DC, Houston, Nashville, etc. the way they do Chicago, Baltimore, Philly, St. Louis, etc. LA and NYC have cleaned up their act, but a lot of the bad has just been pushed to NJ or Riverside County.

[Chisouthside]

Originally Posted by LA21st

Yea, that sucks. I never saw Westwood in it's heyday. It's coming around in the last few years, and I think the subway stop will be great for it.
But there's probably alot more competition for the young people to go to than back in the 1980s.

To be fair to Westwood, Georgettown in DC and Lincoln Park in Chicago arent what they used to be either. Georgetown was a popular spot for young people in the 1990s but
I just dont hear about it as much anymore.

I think in the 90's and early 2000's Lincoln Park was popular because for a lot of scared suburbanites it represented a "safe" place to hang out in Chicago. At the time wicker park, logan square were still grimy, Pilsen was still Pilsen, the west loop industrial, and even lakeview was still more weird than hip.

[Steely Dan]

^ lincoln park simply reached late stage gentrifcation where a neighborhood gets so fucking expensive that it becomes a bit too homogeneous and stale, so the "cool kids" move on to greener pastures where they can still afford to live.

that doesn't make LP a bad place to live or anything, i mean, it'll always be close to the lake and downtown, and those attributes will always make it desirable, but it's no longer the "it" neighborhood where all the happening stuff takes place like it was back in the 80s/90s.

you can probably pinpoint the death of LP as one of the "it" neighborhoods when Lounge Axe closed in 2000.

[LA21st]

Thats what I was saying earlier. It's not bad, just not what it was. Westwood Village is still a solid, vibrant place. its just not in its heyday anymore. Its too expensive/stale or whatever. Same goes for Georgetown.

[the urban politician]

Originally Posted by Chisouthside

I think in the 90's and early 2000's Lincoln Park was popular because for a lot of scared suburbanites it represented a "safe" place to hang out in Chicago. At the time wicker park, logan square were still grimy, Pilsen was still Pilsen, the west loop industrial, and even lakeview was still more weird than hip.

Right now Chicago doesn't even really have an "edgy" area any more.

You can say it's Pilsen and Logan Square, etc but the difference between today and 1985 or even 1995 is the difference between night and day.

Back then, city neighborhoods were completely cutting edge territory for generations of kids who knew nothing but the suburbs and who barely ventured into the city.

Today, in 2019, we've probably spent 2-3 decades gentrifying and sanitizing our cities, so even neighborhoods on the gentrification edge don't feel as "out there" as urban hoods in the 1980's probably did.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

Right now Chicago doesn't even really have an "edgy" area any more.

humboldt?

little village?

bronzeville?

woodlawn?

[Chisouthside]

It's not the same feeling i dont think. I grew up in Pilsen, but I remember being terrified but also intrigued by uptown and logan square in the early 2000s. i went to whitney young and had friends from those neighborhoods so i would spend time up there. Even west town along milwaukee avenue in those days seemed edgy. now most neighborhoods are either just dangerous, gentrified or on the cusp or safeish bungalow areas it seems.

[the urban politician]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

humboldt?

little village?

bronzeville?

woodlawn?

They are on the cusp of gentrifying (not too sure about Woodlawn), yes, but are they "edgy"?

[SIGSEGV]

East Pilsen feels pretty edgy to me, but maybe I'm conflating that with artsy.

[craigs]

Originally Posted by LA21st

Thats what I was saying earlier. It's not bad, just not what it was. Westwood Village is still a solid, vibrant place. its just not in its heyday anymore. Its too expensive/stale or whatever. Same goes for Georgetown.

Westwood was already gentrified by the time I got to UCLA in 1998. It always seemed to me more like the unofficial "Downtown Bel Air" than a real university district. That said, it's perfect for the folks living in the luxury towers on Wilshire that were highlighted earlier.

[Handro]

Originally Posted by the urban politician

They are on the cusp of gentrifying (not too sure about Woodlawn), yes, but are they "edgy"?

Hmm, East Garfield Park maybe?

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by craigs

Westwood was already gentrified by the time I got to UCLA in 1998. It always seemed to me more like the unofficial "Downtown Bel Air" than a real university district. That said, it's perfect for the folks living in the luxury towers on Wilshire that were highlighted earlier.

Ha, that's an interesting way to look at it.

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by craigs

Westwood was already gentrified by the time I got to UCLA in 1998. It always seemed to me more like the unofficial "Downtown Bel Air" than a real university district. That said, it's perfect for the folks living in the luxury towers on Wilshire that were highlighted earlier.

Interesting comment; in my opinion, Westwood never gentrified; it never needed to. It was always (at least in the 70s and 80s) an affluent area mixed in with college students. If anything, by the late 90s, Westwood was a sleepy (if not totally dull) shell of itself. In fact, it's somehow more rundown-looking now than it ever was. Maybe the vacant storefronts make it look rundown?

[austlar1]

Originally Posted by craigs

Westwood was already gentrified by the time I got to UCLA in 1998. It always seemed to me more like the unofficial "Downtown Bel Air" than a real university district. That said, it's perfect for the folks living in the luxury towers on Wilshire that were highlighted earlier.

Westwood Village never needed to gentrify. It was not located in that kind of area. It functioned as an entertainment (movies, maybe 12 first run theaters at one point) center for much of the Westside from it's inception in the late 1930s right on up to the 1990s. As a child from Texas, my family vacationed pretty regularly while visiting LA relatives in the 1950s. We used to stay at an apartment hotel called the Westwood Manor on Wilshire towards Beverly Glen. It is long gone, replaced by a high-rise rental with the same name. We used to go to moves all the time in the 1950s in Westwood and get ice cream afterwards at Wil Wright's ice cream parlor. Yes, we did sometimes walk down Wilshire to Westwood Village from the hotel. It was also the shopping and entertainment district for an ever growing UCLA campus just to the north. Check out the scene in Tarantino's new movie "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" where the Sharon Tate character goes to an afternoon movie in Westwood on a lazy LA day in early 1969 for an idea of what Westwood was like for most of the past fifty or sixty years. After the multi-plex screens opened up in places like the Beverly Center, 3rd Street Santa Monica, Century City, or the now near-moribund Westside Pavilion, Westwood lost some of its energy. I never thought of it as a night life area particularly unless you were a student from UCLA out to party a bit, although I have a dim recollection of some kind of near riot of high school kids there some time during that period. Maybe there was a bigger Friday/Saturday night street scene there that I don't know about. My nephews grew up in Santa Monica in the 80s and early 90s, and they did not spend much time in Westwood Village. Most of the older hip kids and young adults partied in Weho, Hollywood, Melrose, or Silverlake. In the early to mid 80s I lived as an adult first in the area south of Wilshire in the Bev. Hills "slums" and later in what is now known as Koreatown. I partied a whole lot, mostly in Hollywood or Silverlake. Sometimes I would take my nephews to movies in Westwood during that period. It was pretty much the same neighborhood I remembered from my own childhood.