It’s Off to Shop We Go, Redux: Or, Why I Hate L.A. Live

[Stick with me folks…at the end of this blog I will provide you with a POSITIVE review of something! Yes! Something I read that I LOVE! I promise there’s more to me than a bundle of negative energy…]

I have recently signed a lease with the boyfriend for a space in Glassell Park.  I am leaving downtown to its yuppie gentrification.  Goodbye, empty “loft” units.  Goodbye South Park.

And most importantly, goodbye L.A. Live.  You can go fuck yourself.

And in the spirit of luvving L.A. Live, I come to you today to build upon something I said about L.A. Live in a previous blog (rant):

LA Live, too, functions similarly to [Rick Caruso’s and other similar] lifestyle centers – its buildings face inward upon each other around false public spaces, so the crowds moving within the giant entertainment developments rarely crowd the truly accessible streets of downtown L.A.

When I wrote the above, my L.A. Live experience consisted of riding my bike past / around it, marveling at the rapidity with which the hulking monstrosity was being constructed.

Now, however, I have been to L.A. Live as a consumer of its wares and its space. I have suffered through a meal at ESPN Zone (which my parents loved), cowered in front of a live feed of Fall Out Boy on the giant 42 FOOT WIDE screen in the L.A. Live courtyard (which didn’t bother my mom that much, as she is going deaf), and twitched amidst its twinkling flashing dripping blinking strobing lights (which my parents found exciting).* And as my sister’s death grip on my arm grew tighter and tighter, as her frightened desperate need to run screaming from L.A. Live as fast as she possibly could grew more and more palpable (as did mine), and as Fall Out Boy taunted from the giant screen giant speakers “I Don’t Care,” all I could think was:

I HATE L.A. LIVE.

As my parents soaked in the ESPN Zone cultural experience, my sister and I whispered possible L.A. Live culture jams. “Banner drop?” I suggested. “Zombie invasion?” she added. And as if on cue, my mother (who had not been listening to me and my sister), watching a table of law students do Irish car bombs, said “I read in the LA Times that there is an LAPD substation here because the police are concerned about drunkenness and other vices associated with the types of businesses at L.A. Live.” My sister and I deflated. And all I could think was:

I REALLY FUCKING HATE L.A. LIVE.

That’s not totally true – it wasn’t the only thing I could think.  Also flashing through my brain was something about how the LAPD substation was another perfect example of state (The State) resources protecting and fostering capitalism (by ejecting arresting criminalizing anything that might disturb or discourage consumer’s happy-go-lucky money-spending experiences at L.A. Live).  But mostly it was:

GODDAMMIT L.A. LIVE SUCKS ASS.

So I twittered:

L.A. Live has its own LAPD substaion. How to fuck LAPD + L.A. Live at same time? I wonder if my tweet is being monitored as TERRORISM? 7:26 PM Dec 16th from TwitterBerry

And for good measure, just to see if I was being monitored, I twittered:

Terrorism at L.A. Live. 7:40 PM Dec 16th from TwitterBerry

Anyways, regaling you with the above tale was mainly just to illustrate the point that I got the chance to take a good long look at the L.A. Live quote-unquote public space that night.**  And truly, it looks just like the fucking website (and the picture above): a giant insanity-filled courtyard. I didn’t venture anywhere other than the giant courtyard, although there must be more to it. The courtyard was enough, thank you very much.

And, after that night, my analysis remains the same: although there are no barriers as such – theoretically, anyone wandering around the streets of South Park could wander down 11th into said courtyard – the design of L.A. Live itself provides a barrier, an obvious delineation between the public streets and this policed consumer space.  The false shiny hard spendy surfaces, the drinking eating shopping hordes staring into onto upon around the courtyard through the panopticon windows, even the type of material used as sidewalk surface differentiates the space from the streets and sidewalks of the city.  You remember what a city is right?  Where people are supposed encounter one another, where one can experience people that are the same that are different that are suspiciously similar that are nothing like each other?

Christopher Hawthorne wrote a pretty darn good review of L.A. Live, from an architectural critic’s perspective.  Although my quote with which I opened this blog comes from a slightly different perspective (architecture and planning as fostering socio-economic xenophobia) than Hawthorne’s (we need public space for all the nice yuppies in the nice lofts to foster nice gentrification of no man’s land), I leave you with the following quotes from his review (and a recommendation that you read his review, despite its orientation):

–  Los Angeles, city of enclaves, is methodically, unapologetically building itself one more.

–  When we trap the energy of an urban crowd inside this sort of self-contained world, and when we allow developers and their architects to heighten the differences between that world and the streets around it so dramatically, we help keep the rest of our blocks underused and, as pieces of the city, undernourished.

–  I have written before about how the plaza, which sits entirely on property owned by the developer, creates an impressive stage-set version of a public square….[The problem is] that it actively discourages any of the activities we traditionally associate with the use of collective space in a city: talking, reading, sitting under a tree, even pausing with a friend for a cup of coffee.

I also leave you with a request:  In light of the LAPD presence, what can I (WE) do?  I have ideas – a bloc banner drop action, perhaps (clown bloc, zombie bloc, pillow fight bloc, dance party bloc, zoo animal bloc, etc., with the bloc distracting people from the banner drop and scattering as soon as the banner is dropped) – but more suggestions are always welcome.

So that, dear readers, is why I hate L.A. Live.  And this, dear readers is something that I love!  I happened upon a blog on the Just Seeds website about a photography book – Big Box Reuse – focusing what communities do with big box retail spaces after the retailer has closed up shop and left the giant eyesores behind:  Hooray for creative adaptive reuse of shitty architecture and the people who appreciate it!

*I love you, mom.

**…and to garner sympathy for my horrifying experience…

Tags: architecture, Big Box Reuse, city, downtown L.A., Just Seeds, LA Live, planning, public space