Are all of the landmarks there really so generic?
Did the movie industry influence less-recognizable monuments and other features in the past? Or is it just that the city's culture lends itself to a "scrubbed" culture?
The author sounds like she spent most of her life west of Hollywood. I would be bitter too if my outlook was so myopic. She somehow managed to miss the bustling Jewelry District and Gallery Row on her way to Skid Row, and must have turned around before she reached the Arts District.
Yes, this is just not a very well-informed article. It's pitched as kind of a pithy survey of the city, but it works better as some impressions from the viewpoint of a teen who grew up there.
The author appears to have graduated Brown in 2011 and been in Brooklyn since then. In her childhood and teen years here, it's unfortunate she didn't get to visit more of the city. ("All I ever did was drive the familiar loop of surface streets I knew, smoking cigarettes, blasting the heat with the windows down on winter nights.")
That's all ok as far as it goes, but what mars the article to the point of profound irritation is that she seems to have taken on a lot of tired and dated viewpoints. (Hollywood as an over-riding explanation, the freeways, hauling Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht up from their graves for one more anecdote, the remarks about Downtown.) The article sounds like the way stereotypical older Westside residents talk.
> Nobody knows where to go; it’s not a city designed for accidental social discoveries. You think of a place, you look it up, you go; you look up the way back, you go home.
It was the First Interstate tower (now called the US Bank Tower), a fairly unremarkable building downtown, other than the fact that it is the tallest building in California and tallest building west of the Mississippi.
So to answer your question, yes, the landmarks in LA are very generic and non-memorable.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Walt_Disn...
But as you say: less well-known.
the truth is a lot more boring. LA is a great major city to live/work in but an exceptionally shitty place to visit, unless you stay with knowledgeable locals.
in that way, it's the opposite of SF and NY, tough places to live in but mind-blowing next-level kind of awesome places to visit.
blue is being extended next year, then purple:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_Rail_%28Los_Angeles_Count...
Maybe if they took that diagram and put the entire thing in Santa Monica, you can probably make Santa Monica like NYC.
I am also talking about public transit coverage. I meant to get to NYC levels of public transportation and convenience LA needs to be more dense.
> that's the whole point of LA. they built it on the west coast to get away from the east coast.
Other way around. They built NYC because LA was too far west, the traffic was too shitty, and they wanted more variety in the weather.
This article made me so happy I almost teared up because I sometimes forget how engaged and comforting this city is.
It is definitely an A->B city where it is hard to notice what comes in between. So often I'm invited to a restaurant or event and it exposes a cultural micro-climate that I've never guessed was there despite driving within a block of it every day for years. It's a great city if you want to have territory to explore.
(Though havig acquaintances who know places and the internet helps a lot too.)