Last Sunday, a writer from a certain New York newspaper described being frustrated in his search for the “essence” of L.A.
“Something escapes me about Los Angeles,” Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote after driving around Culver City, pondering the storefronts on Venice Boulevard and the Hollywood sign on the horizon.
New Yorkers have long been perplexed by L.A. Three decades ago, in the film “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen famously said: “I don’t want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.”
I’ve been waiting for years to tell Woody that the spirit of L.A. can’t be found at a traffic light. Nor will you find it in the debris at the edge of the freeway or at four-way stop signs, which are other places Klinkenborg went looking for it.
In search of a way to get at L.A.’s true nature, I called Tomas Benitez, an art maven and writer who’s worked in L.A. theaters and galleries.
Benitez is a native Angeleno and an old soul who grew up in 1950s Boyle Heights and South L.A. among blacks, Jews and people of Mexican, Italian and Japanese ancestry. In the 1960s, he rubbed elbows outside the Whisky a Go Go with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
“Finding the essence of L.A. is not meant to be easy,” he told me.
Still, he said he believes he stumbled upon the secret of L.A. one evening in the 1980s, when he drove with his young daughter from the Eastside to the Pacific Ocean, almost 30 miles along old Brooklyn Avenue and Sunset Boulevard.
It was a journey that began with a greasy sandwich in the San Gabriel Valley, taking him past taco stands, transvestites, iconic nightclubs and faux Roman villas.
“On that drive, we saw the world change 10 or 15 different times,” he told me.
It seemed to me Benitez was on to something. To really know it, you have to keep traveling between our north and south, our east and west, our glitz and our grit. You have to discover new L.A.s for as long as you live here.
That’s because L.A. is really numerous cities in time and space, some of them layered on top of each other.
Near its center and in that amorphous area many people inaccurately call “the Eastside” is the old city, which grew up around the junction of the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco. It’s the time-worn L.A. you see in neighborhoods such as Echo Park and Watts. For me, those places are the baroque heart of the city.
Photographer Tony Di Zinno lives in this Los Angeles, in Lincoln Heights, in an 1888 brewery that’s been converted to lofts. It’s a creaky building of brick, tin and wood, with dramatic vistas of downtown skyscrapers and a vast rail yard where locomotives and boxcars join up in thundering collisions. Many artists live in his and other neighboring industrial buildings, he told me:
“The people here are longing for something. We’re looking for something authentic, precious or romantic.”
Di Zinno was born in Cleveland. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I thought L.A. was Muscle Beach and Hollywood.”
When he first came to L.A., he lived in Venice and got used to a certain Westside-centric view of the city. “The elite thinks there’s no real life east of the 405,” he said.
My sense is that a lot of outsiders see L.A. the same way, at least initially. The Westside Di Zinno is referring to isn’t a place — it’s a state of mind. It’s the way you think when you live in the L.A. that aspires to be a global city, the L.A. that collects Rembrandts and Greek statues, the L.A. whose residents believe they inhabit a sunny playground by the sea.
That L.A. exists in many places besides the Westside, of course, although most newcomers first encounter it long before they get here — in television and film. Eventually, they’ll find in neighborhoods west of La Brea a city that looks like that fictional L.A.
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