Sidewalking by David L. Ulin

 

To borrow from the Tao Te Ching, the Los Angeles that can be spoken of is not Los Angeles.  The city is an enigma going back to the days when English was the second language of everyone in the pueblo, or as they called it then, la ciudad de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles de Porciuncula.  David L. Ulin grapples with the city’s ghosts and history in his book, Sidewalking:  Coming To Terms With Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2015).

The author is a New York native who relocated to L.A. in the early 1990s.  Since that time, he has dedicated himself to studying his adoptive city not from a car, but on foot.  He is a dedicated walker in the city and a rider of public transportation.  In Los Angeles, Ulin walks to “pay attention, to see the streets, the buildings…to immerse [himself] in a world that might otherwise slip by.”  His efforts to come to terms with Los Angeles include history, culture, and imagination.  To him, walking the city is a “mechanism of narrative, of liberation…a way to find and maintain one’s place.”

One cannot discuss Los Angeles without talking about racism.  Most people in and out of L.A. know of the riots following the taped beating of Rodney King, but Ulin takes the city’s entire history of upheaval.  The Watts riots in 1965, the Zoot Suit riots in 1943, and the “housing covenants and miscegenation laws,” and on back to the Mexican-American War:  the city is steeped in unrest and violence.

There is much to consider when talking about historical Los Angeles and in the southwestern United States as a whole.  Ulin cites the treaty signed between General Pio Pico and John C. Fremont which ended hostilities between Mexico and the United States in 1847 as significant.  But not all history in L.A. is in the long past.  Ulin discusses the growth of mall culture, especially the Grove.  He spends a lot of time analyzing developer Rick Caruso, who built the Grove and several other projects in the city.  He is the master of the mixed-use property that includes both business and residential units.  Caruso has raised this kind of building to an art form, especially with his Glendale Americana at Brand and the Grove.

Caruso, who admires Walt Disney, describes how the Grove replicates his idea of Main Street U.S.A.  Yet, the area is tightly controlled.  There are rules and regulations that create a lack of spontaneity within its confines.  The Main Street is constructed for shopping, people watching, and fine dining.  Recently, the real streets encroached on this simulacrum when rioters, walking alongside those protesting the murder of George Floyd, gained entrance to the Grove and burned a kiosk and vandalized several stores before LAPD put an end to the rampage.  The Main Street at the Grove became part of every real street in America, and could not escape the anger of these times.

Ulin points out that we used to have streetcars in this city.  They were removed when California embraced the car culture, and only now are we talking about putting them back into service.  Caruso is again the catalyst for a system that would connect the neighborhood around the Grove with subway terminals and public transportation corridors.  Ulin makes an important point:  public transportation must be ubiquitous to fulfill its promise.  He attends a public hearing and shocks the audience by saying he wants a subway stop on his block.  He makes the point that only in Los Angeles must one drive to find a place to walk.  “Melrose Avenue, Venice Beach, Griffith Park, even the Third Street Promenade…all are served by lots and parking structures, as is, of course, the Grove.”

Ghosts haunt Ulin’s walks and forays in the city, and these sections are the strongest and most evocatively written.  All around, he sees change.  “This is the most obvious idea in the world,” he writes, “that time takes everything from us, that streets feel possessed by ghosts because they are possessed by ghosts, the ghosts of all the people who have ever traversed them, who have ever occupied those cubic feet of space.”  L.A. is a haunted city.

The term, Sidewalking, comes from the shops on Main Street where merchants could stand outside and welcome in pedestrians to their shops.  From this, Ulin takes his title.  It is all about community, commerce, and culture.  He digs deep into L.A.’s unique character, its quirky places and inhabitants, its history and darkness.  He concludes with poetry:  “What else is a city but a dream in three dimensions, inhabited by succeeding generations who create identity in the muscle memory of its streets?  What else is a city but an imaginatorium, where the surface, the public record, is constantly collapsing into the interior landscape, the streets as markers, territorial or otherwise, the building blocks, the triggers, of identity?  That is how cities develop, that is how they evolve.”  L.A. continues to challenge, to defy, to strive to escape its history while simultaneously embracing that history.  And David L. Ulin keeps walking.