Downtown: the fun of politics

August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So assuming I get out of class a little early today I think I'm going to be making my way down to City Hall to sit in on the meeting on the new LAPD headquarters. The LA Times also has an article today. Now, I don't have a lot invested in the debate so I'm really going more to sit and listen than I am to push any particular agenda. I do feel like it's a bit of a shame that the headquarters can't be rebuilt on the site of the current Parker Center, but I understand the economics of trying to fit a temporary headquarters while construction occurred. I am curious to see the plans for the new space, particularly to see if they do address the neighborhood's desire for a park in anything more than a token way. I don't think the whole space needs to be made into a park: the Civic Center doesn't do all that poorly for green space right now. It would be nice, though, to see the city hold true to what the neighborhood thinks it was promised.

At the very bottom of the LA Times article you get this quote, which doesn't really make any sense to me:

Three years ago, the City Council did approve a plan to make the entire block into "open space" as part of a land swap with the state.

But Perry said Monday the city never committed to a park.

"Open space does not mean park," the councilwoman said.

Well, ok, but I'm pretty sure open space doesn't mean police headquarters either.

ah, classic cinema

August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So in the first installment of my censorship class we watched two films: Baby Face and Belle of the Nineties. Now before today I was only vaguely familiar with Mae West. I knew who she was, and I knew a bit of her reputation. That is what it is, but here's what I couldn't get over:

Mae West is a female Rodney Dangerfield. Their acts are exactly the same. Mae West here is Rodney Dangerfield from Caddy Shack. Think about it. If you watch for it it's pretty eerie.

senior living in downtown

August 24, 2004 by Eric Richardson

The LA Times today has an article on Angelus Plaza, the senior housing project right in the middle of downtown. I've wondered about how such a large project can survive in the midst of the renewed development taking place right now, and this article gets a little into its history. I had no idea that Angelus Plaza was 24 years old. The articles quotes a lady who's lived there since the project opened:

"Nothing was built here. I saw all these buildings grow," Medina said, recalling that when she arrived, workers hadn't even finished the sidewalks.

Downtown, including the skyscraper developments of the 80s, have grown around Angelus Plaza. The new development and the resurgence of downtown as a destination have happened around Angelus Plaza. Though I don't like the sprawling footprint or the somewhat blank look of the Plaza, I'm perfectly ok with having such a project downtown... how could I not be? They're people who came to downtown when no one else was coming. We came later. We can't try to drive them out, they want what we want. They want the best for the neighborhood. They want revival, they want people on the streets.

When I moved away from USC and moved downtown, I became excited about living out in the real world. What makes it the real world? A mix of ages and social classes. I don't want to live in a downtown comprised entirely of young loft-dwellers. Yes, there's a lot of downtown that needs to change, but this isn't one of those parts.

from the neighborhood

August 23, 2004 by Eric Richardson

One of the things I've been meaning to do since I moved downtown is to put some effort into looking around for cool historic pictures from my neighborhood that I could get prints of to hang in the apartment. Today I noticed that USC has a Digital Archives that includes a bunch of pictures taken by AAA (or the Auto Club of Southern California, if you prefer to be technical). The collection includes some good candidates for making it to the wall.

This 1930 image was taken from almost directly in front of my building facing north. Of course my building was built until a year or two after that, so I'm not sure what was there at the time. The intersection in the image is 6th and Spring. The Hotel Hayward still has that same neon. It's amazing to note the pedestrian traffic in the area. The 1932 guide film I saw at the Natural History Museum named either Broadway and 7th or Spring and 7th (can't remember which) as the busiest pedestrian intersection in the country.

getting set to go back to the grind

August 23, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Classes start today at USC. I'm on campus to take care of a variety of little things, even though my first class isn't until 9am tomorrow. I'm actually looking forward to what I'm taking this semester, which is a good change. I've got two cinema classes, and two COMM classes, with an extra 2-unit improv theatre class thrown in for good measure.

First thing tomorrow is Censorship in Cinema, with Casper. I mentioned a few months ago that this was the class endowed by Hugh Hefner. Books for the class include Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

My second cinema class is the generically titled Film and/or Television Genres. This is a class that each year or so switches professors and genres, going from westerns to musicals to who knows what. This semester it'll be on speculative cinema, basically films that paint a picture of the future. Books include Ender's Game and The Man Who Folded Himself.

My two COMM classes are Sports, Communication, and Culture and Massive Multiplayer Online Games. Oddly enough, I'm not a gamer. I play NCAA Football on the XBox, and that's about it. Though the class sounds a little dorky, I'm interested in seeing how it addresses community building in online worlds and seeing how transferable the concepts are to other online venues. And it fit my schedule and seemed sort of easy.

So there you have my semester, minus the random improv class.