For the past several months I have done that unheard-of thing in Los Angeles: gone for a walk. I started walking mostly for health reasons, since I was obliged to quit my old health club in February and had not been getting any consistent exercise since then. But since I never owned a car until three years ago, walking is something I've always done a lot of and always enjoyed--until the car came. Then, despite my best efforts not to, I became a typical Angeleno, driving to anything that wasn't extremely close. Indeed, one of the great surprises has been how easy it is to walk to places that seemed distant--from my apartment to Westwood, with all its movie theaters (a couple miles away), is about twenty minutes. (Bear in mind, twenty minutes on the 405 may not cover even that much ground.) I even discovered that I could walk to and from work in just over half an hour, and on a nice cool day, that's no hardship at all.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that if you want to get to know your neighborhood, there is no substitute for learning on foot. Already, my walks have shown me where, as a driver, the best escape routes are when the obvious ones get backed up (and here in West L.A., it doesn't take much for these roads to get clogged). (Although if you think I'm gonna tell you what that escape route is, you're crazy. Crazy I tell ya, crazy!) Sometimes, walking around can be a lot like going into a bar and checking out the women: "Yeah, I wouldn't mind inhabiting that space," or "God no, not in a million years."
But you can also learn a lot about the history of a neighborhood by walking it, in ways that might not seem so obvious. The population density of West L.A. has been increasing in recent years, and it becomes easy to see why as I wander from block to block. Most structures are now small apartment buildings, with some upscale (but modestly-sized) condos here and there; the bigger condo towers are just a little further north and east, lining Wilshire. So for the most part the neighborhood still feels pleasantly residential, but then you start noticing that there are some scattered single-family homes dotting the area, and then you notice some lots where a structure has been recently torn down, and where construction is beginning on a small apartment building. Clearly, then, this neighborhood used to be filled with those classic L.A. bungalow-styled houses, modest little homes with modest little yards, but as real estate values rose, the owners probably sold for a big profit and moved somewhere more upscale. Those homes were torn down, and the same space was made to hold more people (more people paying more rent, further increasing local property values and the pressure on homeowners to sell and move).
In this way, the area's population density never has a big spike upward; rather, the pressures of more people and more cars ratchet up slowly, one small apartment at a time. It's not so awful when the neighborhood manages to retain its calm residential flavor; but locals react with considerable alarm when some ham-handed developer comes along with a scheme to build a massive apartment complex in the heart of the neighborhood--namely, on a section of the nearby VA Center. Bear in mind, the land for the VA Center was donated over a hundred years ago on the strict provision that it only be used for the benefit of local veterans; but now, with funding being cut and property values high, it must be a nearly-unbearable temptation for the land's trustees to sell off a portion and reap big profits.
Locals, though, have watched the slow ratcheting-up of population pressures, the increased traffic on the roads, the fact that you really can't add new roads to relieve those pressures, and they react aggresstively to the notion of a giant new complex coming in.
And now, after several weeks of prowling this neighborhood I've been living in for nearly three years, I am finally beginning to really feel like one of those locals. I'm beginning to feel the slow, quiet pulse of the place, to value these little streets and the few little homes that remain. Quite suddenly, simply because I needed a little exercise and wanted to do a bit of walking, I have gained something I never expected: a whole community that I can call my own. I no longer say that I have an apartment that happens to be in West L.A.; now I say that West L.A. is my home.
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