Issue 0: An Introduction
Welcome to Take Surface Streets: a newsletter about pockets and corners of L.A. that the average motorist may never notice.
Whether you’re a recent transplant, have lived here for the past 20 years, or all of your life, it is easy to find one’s self in a geographical loop in our sprawling city—you can get in the habit of solely traveling between the neighborhoods you live, work, or visit for recreation. And all else, the seemingly dissonant spackle and grout that glues the city together, becomes blur and bore, becomes the soft focus background behind the glass, becomes secondary to the phone call or the podcast.
And of course, there are more walkable cities than this, and of course, more walkable cities yield more random exploration. A last minute decision to ditch a cab and hoof it may reveal some hidden gem one may have never stumbled upon. And of course, people do walk in Los Angeles. Sure, the cliche spawned from a certain class of citizen and a popular Missing Persons song remains popular, even after its decimation in Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (which should be required viewing for Angelenos new and old), but yes, largely, we are an automotive town.
The city is often maligned, or at least misunderstood, as some haphazard daisy chain of smaller cities, scattered from the desert to the sea without cohesion. At 80 MPH, it’s an understandable diagnosis, especially when the observer is fresh. But as Reyner Banham writes in “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies,”
…the language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality there to a unique degree…and the city will never be understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented life.
So join me as I prowl the concrete of this bright and guilty place. Los Angeles, particularly lately, hasn’t been a beacon of preservation. Landmarks and local charm go vapor for new development at a dizzying clip. We are a city that is obsessed with trading in for a younger model. But I plan on remembering some things.
I will attempt to highlight interesting places throughout the city with a mix of historical and modern context, trivia, gossip, and simple rumination on the mini geographies I personally consider sacred. Each issue will adhere to a loose theme and include ancillary connections to film, literature, art, and music.
The first issue will concern Dark Glendale: Rockhaven Sanitarium, The Lost City of Tropico, and the Murder Houses of the 134.
“So, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.” -Reyner Banham
In the meantime, tell your friends!