Paris the is the City of Light, an affectionate appellation that goes back to its role as a center of learning during the Enlightenment of the 18th century, when the term carried figurative meaning. It was reinforced in a literal sense during the 19th century, when the French capital became an early adapter of gas lighting systems, a cutting-edge technology of that age.
Give it up for Paris – because the name has stuck even as the rest of the world went from gas lamps to electric street lights, with some on the trek from high-pressure sodium and metallic halide to LED.
Paris can still put a “City of Light” slogan on a tourism campaign, though, and it’s a competitive match for the charge that “Big Apple” gives New York, or the picaresque promise that “Big Easy” offers for New Orleans, or the swagger that “City of the Big Shoulders” lends to Chicago.
Los Angeles must compete as a destination for tourism – a key segment of our community of business and vital part of our economy. Slogans count in the tourism business, and we could use one that somehow captures our city’s essence – the common strand woven of the array or flavors and influences that make up life here.
Anyone who’s tried to get across L.A. in a hurry knows that easy doesn’t fit.
And Chicago earned its broad shoulders in the industrial age while L.A. found itself on the visual edge of that epoch.
Los Angeles could compete with Paris – and any other city – when it comes to light.
Not the glittery, man-made stuff that punctuates the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.
We’re talking here about the natural light—the stuff that sometimes is unforgiving in its clarity, sometimes buttery, often hazy, and nearly always a visual backdrop that begs for a soundtrack.
It’s the very light that has no doubt helped conjure thousands of stories into movies.
Don’t leave it there, though, because Los Angeles is much than the traditional tourism selling point of Hollywood.
We’re not perfect.
We have challenges in front of us.
Yet we’ve managed to grow into a fascinating place of various textures and tastes and tones. This place is home to achingly beautiful subtleties, wonderfully obvious natural assets, confoundingly engaging anomalies, and a surfeit of sweet faces that come from around the world to give L.A. the personality that sets the pace for the Pacific Rim.
All of that comes against the backdrop of the light – that lovely stuff that so often makes our days unique in ways that you have to see to believe.
There’s a slogan in there somewhere.
City of Light might be taken, but now is the perfect time of year to take in the light that helps makes Los Angeles the city we’ve become.
We can’t bottle the stuff, but that doesn’t mean we can’t sell it.
A pithy slogan would help.
