It was Mike Davis who came up with the concept of Fortress Los Angeles, in his book City of Quartz: a Southern California city-state where, as the population diversifies, exclusion replaces inclusion.Davis’ grim reverie flew in the face of Mayor Tom Bradley’s multicultural dream and pilloried Los Angeles as a city uniquely hostile to newcomers. […]
Category: LA Weekly
McKinley Assassinated
The McKinley Building doesn’t jut over the horizon. It’s not the city’s tallest, oldest or most significant architectural landmark, but it once was a building that assured you — after you walked into its soothing, European-style courtyard — that the world was a better place than it had seemed a moment before.And now we’ve lost […]
The Statewide Dick
Here’s a question for you: How could Richard Riordan neglect Los Angeles even more than he already does? The answer: become governor.For that matter, could anything do more to revive the Northern California secession movement? Or at least leave the state – and, with it, our city – teetering on that brink? But by last […]
Riordan’s Back
Dick Riordan did the right thing by California last week – counter to the urgings of rich business friends and certain ranking egos at the Los Angeles Times, he declined to run for governor.You could follow his reasoning. Competing against Jane Harman and Al Checchi, Republican Riordan wouldn’t get campaign money from Democrats. Running against […]
AIDS Panic at the County
By the arcane calculus of county politics, Peter Kerndt’s National Institutes of Health grant caused a lot more than $1.5 million-per-annum’s worth of trouble. That’s why, though it promised to facilitate research to cure the world’s most widespread deadly disease, the County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday officially voted the project it supported out of […]
Mayor Overboard
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.Where Alph the Sacred River Ran is actually not one of the named destinations of Mayor Richard Riordan’s current Asian safari. But there aren’t too many other Far Eastern places the city’s 80-person official trade task force – enough people to found a colony – is […]
Council Ousts Ostrich
I woke with a start. The Tuesday council meeting had been droning along with mesmeric predictability. There was a six-figure transfer from the Storm Water Abatement Fund. Some General Plan updates. A Request for Proposal for an L.A. Triathlon. A list of new “Technical Corrections for the Plumbing Code.” My chin drooped. Unconsciousness beckoned appealingly.Then […]
A River Should Run Through It
An otherwise conservationist friend once said, “The problem with the Los Angeles River is that there is really no such thing. It’s a concrete flood channel.”That was what I thought. Until I attended my first Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR) conference last week.It wasn’t just a routine meeting. Perhaps 300 “Friends” gathered at […]
Upgrades on the Gravy Train
The Daily News had fun lately with the aftermath of the “triumphant” Riordan Far East junket.The News found plenty of witnesses to several cases of upgrading the mayor’s party’s airline accommodations from business to first class. The upgraded included Mr. and Mrs. Riordan (though the mayor later claimed he’d paid these fares himself). Such upgrades […]
The Eleventh Plague
A skeptical young Metropolitan Water District chemist explained it to me 10 years ago. Over a dinner of Montana Avenue pasta, she laid it out straight: “In the environment, there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”I noted the remark and filed it away. At that precise time, though, we believed in solutions. I was […]