Essay

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Essay/lacter/april5/mike1st

By MARK LACTER

The rain had stopped several hours earlier, just as the weather guys had predicted, just in time for the opening weekend of spring. But Los Angeles would first have to navigate the last day of the work week a 24-hour stretch that for some would begin in the early morning hours and for others would end well past midnight the next day.

Friday, March 26, 1999 just a date in time for most of us. Give it a week or so and we probably couldn’t tell it apart from any other day of the month. But if you accept the notion that each of our lives, one way or another, contributes to the lifeblood of a city, than maybe it makes sense to examine some of those lives if only for a random day on the calendar.

That’s what the Business Journal did on March 26, when 19 reporters and five photographers were sent out to observe 34 workday scenes of Los Angeles. We started at around 4 a.m. at the downtown L.A. Flower Market and ended well after midnight the next day at the Martini Lounge in Hollywood.

As news days go, the 26th turned out to be routine mostly the usual court arraignments and traffic accidents, according to City News Service logs. But that doesn’t mean stuff didn’t happen. This is, after all, Los Angeles a place where the routine sometimes takes on a sense of the surreal. For example:

Auto legend Lee Iacocca at the wheel of an electric bike on the grounds of his Bel Air estate.

Down-on-their-luck day workers looking for construction jobs that would bring a few badly needed dollars.

A Marina del Rey plastic surgeon advising his patients on what should be nipped and tucked.

The producer of “Home Improvement” duking it out with lawyers from the Walt Disney Co.

A helicopter traffic reporter giving chase to a freeway driver on the run.

A hotel bartender fending off advances from her well-heeled clientele.

Singer Whitney Houston belting out a medley of tunes at the Soul Train Awards.

The Lakers losing to Sacramento.

As it turned out, lots of things would happen over the course of March 26. Based on the law of averages, people would get married, have affairs, purchase homes, enter therapy, be hired, be fired, invest in Internet companies, curse the freeway traffic, give birth, undergo chemotherapy, work out, finish up taxes, clean up hotel rooms, think about starting a new business, think about closing a failing business, wonder where the day had gone, wonder if the day would ever end, go shopping, go to the movies, and finally, go to sleep.

Seemingly everyone would be on the move and for many of us the trek would somehow involve the 405, which has become a daily caricature of congestion.

Actually, everything about a day in L.A. takes on distorted proportions. Consider, just as an example, the quantity and variety of food that is consumed in a single day, from whoppers to corned beef sandwiches to Porterhouse steaks anywhere from 10-20 million meals on this day alone.

That number is really just a guess. Very little of our daily comings and goings ever gets quantified, certainly not in a timely fashion. Even in an information age, L.A. is just too huge and its financial underpinnings too varied to keep track of specific numbers. We are, after all, the world’s 12th largest economy. But more than that, we are a polyglot of cultures, pursuits and prospects drawn together by little else than geographic coincidence (and maybe the weather).

The amazing thing is that the place works at all that hundreds of thousands of people get into their cars each morning, traverse the maze of streets and freeways, make a few bucks sometimes a lot more and manage to return home in time to watch “Jeopardy.”

A young journalist just back from several years in Tokyo, one of the world’s most orderly cities, was asked about his initial impressions of Los Angeles. “It’s a mess,” he replied. And of course he’s right politically, culturally, economically, every which way, really.

L.A.’s “messiness,” by now almost a clich & #233; among urbanists, can be understood by simply looking at a Thomas Brothers map and realizing that “L.A.” is just a convenient moniker for an array of cities and jurisdictions some of them only vaguely familiar even to those those who have lived here for years. Quick where is Pomona? How would I get from Baldwin Park to Huntington Park? Is Monrovia near Arcadia?

No wonder it’s almost impossible to get regional consensus; in this land of parallel lives, there is little overlap. We seldom deviate from the comfort zones that take us to and from work each day.

L.A. did have that overlapping look for a brief moment in the mid-’80s thanks, curiously, to the Olympics, the tune “I Love L.A.” (which became almost a community anthem), and the “Showtime” Lakers. But these were temporary facades: the Olympics ended, the song got stale, and the Lakers started to lose. Masked were the city’s vicissitudes, including worsening race relations, a shifting economy that separated rich and poor as never before, and a lack of political leadership to do anything about it.

As we all know, things went from bad to much worse. Now, a revival of sorts is underway, spurred mostly by the economy and the absence of any recent regional calamity. How long it will last is a matter of debate. Boosters point to Staples Center, Disney Concert Hall, the downtown Cathedral and major redevelopment in Hollywood as symbols of a rebuilt, refashioned Los Angeles that’s just around the corner. Skeptics wonder with some justification whether any of this would be happening without a go-go stock market that has kept the national and local economies growing well past the point that most experts had predicted.

Unfortunately, little of the debate gets played out day in and day out. It’s not that we’re uninterested in the city’s future Well, on second thought, many of us probably are (at least it seems that way, judging from the local election turnouts) and besides, the daily, personal grind is usually a lot more pressing.

That personal grind is laid out every single day of the week you just have to look around.

“The experience of Los Angeles, whether on foot or in an automobile, is basically of texture,” Robbert Flick, a USC professor of studio arts, notes in the book “Rethinking Los Angeles.” “There’s a certain sense of depth as you travel down the streets and start looking at things. The primary textures are basically the facades of buildings because so much of Los Angeles is flat The adornment of the facades becomes an indicator of what might be inside.”

Flick was speaking in a visual context, but taken a little more broadly say from a cultural and economic perspective the picture becomes especially striking. On March 26, my schedule happened to take me along Western Avenue between the Santa Monica Freeway and Sunset Boulevard, then east to Hollywood. Later that day, I went from Mid-Wilshire back to Hollywood, downtown, and finally, westward to Beverly Hills and Westwood.

A pretty standard circuit, right? But consider how many separate and identifiable business communities I drove through each crammed with people pretty much like you and me looking to improve their lots or just stay in the game.

Our March 26 trek across L.A. reminded me a little of the old TV show that promised “8 million stories in the Naked City” (even though “Naked City” was about New York and the stories were seldom as compelling as what you’ll come across on Western Avenue and beyond). Here, going from rags to riches is strictly standard-issue; it’s what brings so many folks to Los Angeles in the first place.

And while not always pretty or inspirational, it’s a fascinating story that makes this city one of the world’s entrepreneurial capitals.

Grab a seat and let us take you around.

Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal.

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