Los Angeles

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A person living in LA with usually be intimately familiar with surface streets in the one region where they live — maybe two regions, if they work in another part of town. Otherwise, it’s just the freeways. This myopia will relegate LA’s myriad of cities to place names passed on freeways, heard on news, or regarded as just too far out there. A youth in Downtown LA may have never gone to the beach; a Valley

teen may view the city over the hills as a distant southern frontier, like the border with Mexico. However, with adulthood usually comes a useful repertoire of little memories: a few restaurants near your cousin’s place in Alhambra; loving the Pier and the Promenade from when you had that beach day; a mental image of Koreatown after visiting a bar there once. Sure, you can get around ok — but you may get a little lost.

Los Angeles City

Downtown LA	Downtown LA epitomizes the core aspect of living in Los Angeles: it is what you make of it. Indeed, like much of Los Angeles, Downtown is ill-suited for tourism. Many of the best Downtown gems are not advertised, and it is too large to just stroll around and take in everything. If you try walking, you may easily stumble into famously dangerous districts anchored by prisons and soup kitchens, where sub-poverty flotsam washes up and pitches tents on sidewalks. The borders between safety and danger are thin but discrete. Different ends of a city block can exist in entirely different worlds. One time I asked my friend if it was safe to walk to a certain bus stop at night. “Yes, that area is fine.” “But aren’t the soup kitchens just a block or two away?” “Exactly, a block makes a big difference in downtown LA.”
East LA	East LA is marked by poverty, regarded as a Latino ethnoburb where few people go unless they live there or have relatives. East LA is bordered on the north by a mountain range that harbors wealthy pockets of homes. Winding between the hills, though, are streets that continue from Downtown LA, bringing East LA’s currents with them (Is that the same Figueroa as in Downtown? I didn’t know it was so long. Wait, is that the same Broadway?). Indeed, Highland Park and Lincoln Heights very much share East LA’s culture. However, cross the Arroyo Seco at San Pasqual Park and suddenly money order, calling card and liquor tienditas are suddenly replaced by boutique shops and predominantly white people. Alhambra is a buffer area where Latinos, Chinese, Whites and Cal State LA students give way to one another.
East Sunset
Mid-Wilshire
Hollywood	This place is awful.
West Hollywood	Los Angeles has a significant gay district.
Beverly Hills
West LA

South Cities

Mountains separate the San Fernando Valley from LA’s metropolitan core, but geography does not distinguish LA County’s diverse southern region. The endless concrete expanse known as LAX is the northern boundary of the wealthy coastal South Bay; Inglewood is the northernmost of the hideous, poorer suburbs in the eastern limits of the South Bay; and if you’ve gone south to Jefferson Blvd, you’ve already crossed the fuzzy border of South Central, with its extreme urban decay; the LA River separates East LA from the poor and lower-middle-class expanse of the Gateway Cities.

South Bay	South of LAX is a string of quintessential beach communities. These comprise their own cultural unit: the architecture, the cool ocean breeze, the laid-back attitude (except regarding vicious fights for parking and zealous homeowners’ associations).
South LA	The limits of this dangerous southern region are mainly a sense. To the north there is a feeling going south of Venice Blvd that this is a different part of town, a feeling which intensifies south of Adams Blvd. Below Jefferson Blvd you have definitely crossed into South Central, whether you realized it or not: you have gone past the threshold between safety and danger. Indeed, South Central is famous for gangs — it is a desperate place dominated by black projects and Latino immigrants without support networks.
Gateway Cities
Long Beach

If an Angeleno from either of the four valleys spoke to a foreigner, they may say I’m from Los Angeles for the sake of simplicity. But in LA itself, one would always specify what specific town they are from. These regions each have their own cultures and histories. Indeed, folks from Santa Clarita or Antelope Valleys refer to LA proper as LA, like it is far away, a place for daycations, events, hearings

visiting your adult children. The exception is the people who live outside of LA proper because you get a lot more house for your money or the school district is great but work or go to school in the city. The freeway traffic jams every morning and evening; the friend who takes a Metrolink train daily to a good private school; a co-worker at LA City Hall who lives in Santa Clarita (You live all the way over where?).

San Gabriel Valley

The San Gabriel Valley conjures images of the southwestern, Route 66, historic flavors from its north; or the Asian ethnoburb in its south. Nobody actually says San Gabriel Valley unless they need a convenient term for the region “east of Los Angeles, you know, like Pasadena.” Or if they live more inland in the stark, hot, dry suburbs: “out by Azusa, Arcadia.” Or even those furthest reaches of LA territory: “I live way out there, in West Covina, like, by Pomona.”

Volunteer organizations and clubs will use San Gabriel Valley (SGV) to bring all these people together, threaded together by the 210 Freeway in the north and 10 Freeway in the south. SGV refers to people who are on the same side of downtown LA’s traffic and live close enough to join the same Sierra Club. But each part of the San Gabriel Valley is otherwise independent: there is no sense of this is my home when someone drives through Pasadena en route to Covina.

Greater Pasadena

Some folks know Pasadena for Old Towne, a lovely area along Colorado Blvd with a plethora of stores, pedestrian scrambles and enough alleys and hidden courtyards to keep even regulars like myself wondering what new place I’ll find each evening. Pasadena’s baggy-sweatpants cousin is Altadena, closer to the mountains and without the sort of commercial centers present in Pasadena. Generally the way to be sure you’ve crossed into Altadena is to notice that the streets are narrower, the lawns don’t abide Pasadena’s absurd 15′ minimum and you haven’t seen major shops in several blocks. There are some beautiful old neighborhoods, cathedrals and Coffee Gallery.

Inland Suburbs

Vintage — but not in a cool way, nor historic.

Areas immediately adjacent to East LA like Highland Park and Lincoln Heights share its murals, graffiti, drum-circles and art communes — thus they are included in East LA. East LA culture even penetrates into Alhambra, but this is where the Chinese ethnoburb begins. These two zones of the San Gabriel Valley exist in their own realm, distinct from Pasadena, Covina, and the other 210-accessible areas.

Chinese Ethnoburb

Not to say that all of the San Gabriel Valley proper is homogeneous: in fact, it has plenty of depressed areas, ghetto, crime-laded zones. But these are immediately adjacent to, sometimes across the street from, wealthy areas which seem unaffected by gangs which roam their territories in low Cadillacs.

San Fernando Valley

Technically part of Los Angeles City, but the mountains separate it culturally. This is a region of one- and two-story buildings, strip malls and suburbs.

Santa Clarita Valley

Isolated geographically, this always feels like a remote outpost of the LA empire — inaccessible except by a few transit lines and freeways.

Antelope Valley

Just like the United Kingdom’s suzerainty over Canada, this is only technically Los Angeles.

Los Angeles: A Segregated City

Los Angeles is a segregated city. Race and wealth define most of its identity — how do you know if an area can be considered a race- and/or class-defined area? Because if you do not belong in that group, you may have never set foot that part of town. This is especially true of the poor Latino and Black ethnoburbs; Yeah, I grew up in the ghetto! one of my friends told me with a cautious laugh about her childhood in South Central. However, this segregation can also apply to insular rich (not necessarily white) neighborhoods, especially those with hilly, windy streets.

Latino		Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Murals, the sort of colorful, prideful, Latino-centrism that fills Chicano Studies classrooms, Mayan-Warrior-God-Cesar-Chavez murals, with its socialist-fascist aesthetic married to a semi-nationalist ethnic pride.
Black		How do you know if a black community is black? Because if you’re not black, you do not go there. But then I saw the beauty: the murals, the couples kissing at bus stops, the prostitute at a Church’s Chicken, and it is possible too fall in love with South Central.
Russian
Persian
Jewish		Though many Persian Jews live in Beverly Hills, it is between Beverly and Melrose, in the blocks immediately east of Fairfax, that you will find quintessential Orthodox Jewry.
Suburbs		Grids that would make Tron envious.
Rich Areas		Rich areas like Beverly Hills.

Los Angeles History

44 dusty settlers unpacked their belongings on Sept 4 1781 on the west bank of the Los Angeles River. This was the final part of the Spanish master plan for the colonization of California. Eleven families of different ethnic backgrounds (Spanish, Black and mestizo) founded this pueblo. The little town grew slowly.

In its second century Los Angeles was a boomtown. The coming of the railroads, development of a top-notch harbor, construction of vast aqueducts bringing water from hundreds of miles away, discovery of oil, motion picture industry and the discovery of gold all contributed to Los Angeles’ growth.

Pre-History		The site of Los Angeles was originally an Indian village referred to by the Indians as Yang-na. On September 4, 1781, Father Junipero Serra and Governor Don Felipe de Neve founded a pueblo for the King of Spain alongside the Indians’ Yang-na village. The pueblo was named El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula (The City of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula — with <>Porciuncula being the early name for the Los Angeles River.
Mission Era		The founding of the mission marked a new epoch in the region’s history. However, it was not until the founding of the Pueblo that Los Angeles itself started its long tale.
Mexican Rancho Era
American Rancho Era
Modern Era Begins		With the advent of the modern era, the history of the old Pueblo ceases to be the history of Los Angeles.
20^th Century
Contemporary