That was time. It’s time to see what was done in late March and early January.
From the plains of Pasadena, I ran uphill to Altadena.
On radio, KUSC is one of the most famous opera works, a moving duet from “The Pearl Fishers,” a music of friendship and loss.
It was the soundtrack. I was now looking for a familiar place in the landscape that was just as unfamiliar as the other side of the moon. Relative homes, friends’ houses, shops, landmarks – there was little to navigate. Sometimes it’s a painted street number that’s barely easy to read about curbs, and sometimes even that.
Here in Los Angeles, there are moments we have never faced before. Our catastrophe once came to us alone. One earthquake at a time, one flood at a time, one economy at a time, a drought or recession that beats one economy at a time.
This will all bottom out our biorhythms at once. fire. LA City Budget Hall for $1 billion. Climate change. And then there was a headwind of President Trump’s way.
We asked ourselves this question before, but it didn’t involve the urgency we have now. Can Los Angeles still achieve big things?
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Toni Raines sees the tile ble of a family home burned out by Eton’s fire.
(William Leanne / For the era)
Fire recovery is the first and most important task here, and its logistics are overwhelming. Neighborhoods return to one burnt lot at a time – or they don’t. Cities change how they prepare for the future – or they won’t. A poll from the UC Berkeley Government Institute co-hosted by The Times found that even one in four people living in LA County have not seriously considered moving due to the fire, with over seven in 10 people happy with their neighborhood.
So we want to keep it and stick out, and then what?
Rick Cole, a Pasadena City Council member, former mayor, former LA vice mayor and former Santa Monica city manager, once said “Los Angeles is not designed to work.” But I might turn his phrase around: Los Angeles is designed to not work.
Citizens’ power is deliberately flattened and spread throughout the city. Because 100 years ago, drafting city operating rules is about not paralysis, but maintaining the integration and seduction of corruption, so hasn’t that been going well recently? )
As a result, our civic machines, and perhaps even today, were ineffective. And in the vacuum of that power, the rich and powerful unselected people aim to achieve great things.
This is why LA stuck 233 miles of straws into Owens Valley and inhaled water into LA in the 1940s and 50s. It helped to land the Dodgers and modernized the LAPD. However, the voices of the working class were muted and systematic labor was suppressed. The contamination was not restricted and neither was spreading.
This aviation view shows the Dodger Stadium under construction in the Chavez Valley on March 7, 1962.
(AP News)
The nominal power of the people at city hall now feels opaque and distant, and I feel that the city itself is too vast for it to become a strong identity. Residents have come to be called “Angelonians” rather than forgerying a single character called “Angelero” or as a young man interviewed by KTLA during the fire. It’s easier to stay with our clear neighbours, people from Koreatown, or people from San Pedro. The city feels centrifugal and is separated by spirit and geography. During our two riots, mayhem was too often called “there.”
Over the years I’ve heard from people who claim I’m writing about my uncollected trash and unpacked potholes. I ask if they had already called a member of the city council or if they had called the official city services department. They didn’t know who it was or where to see it. Some really didn’t know which city they lived in.
Confusion is allowed. The people at the police station that you watch on TV are mostly LAPD. The mayor they saw on TV was L.A’.S. And our mayor is not like the mayor of New York, he has more authority than the health, education and welfare programs. Some of these authority belong to the county, and it is also known as Los Angeles to increase confusion. The LA city is the largest in LA County, but there are 87 others. The city is huge, but at 500 square miles, all of LA County exceeds 4,000.
It needs more than normal energy, and it may be too easy to slip into the inertia of pushing us beyond these substantial obstacles and sharing nothing else than crude traffic and nice sunlight.
Two arches are dark at the 6th Avenue bridge on December 21, 2023 due to copper wire thieves. The $588 million project took over six years to complete.
(Brian van der Bragg/Los Angeles Times)
Why don’t we have any good things? The brilliant sixth Avenue bridge, a ribbon of light, went dark a few years after it opened. The thieves were made with miles of copper wiring to sell for just a few thousand dollars. The thieves also stole historic metal markers and plaques in downtown’s historic Pueblo and Chinatown. Gee, too bad, LA, well.
We suffer from what political scientist Francis Fukuyama calls “pacifism.” He defined VOX in 2016, saying, “The rules of veto power… The American political system has always made it very difficult for governments to actually do things because many parts of the political system give them a veto power on what the system is doing.”
He might mean LA too.
Although it can be difficult to tell the difference right away, the legal opposite critical mass is larger and wider than in the normal period. Almost 40 years ago, there was a deep change in strength in South Lara’s neighbors and grassroots groups, bringing together their muscles, confronting their own councillors, and halting the Lancer Project, a closed system incinerator that burns garbage into energy near the Coliseum. They lived with truck caravans, brought in trash and didn’t want to pull out any toxic ashes. And because pollution doesn’t respect zip codes, this fledgling environmental justice movement has also energized other parts of LA.
Instead, flatland operations are often vocal imbalances. This may explain how Kibosch was made on a 16-mile ground rail line across the West San Fernando Valley in the early 1990s. Decades later, the more modest 6.7-mile rail line of East Valley, scheduled to be completed in 2031, is under construction.
Nimby’s muscularity remains strong. The Times just published a letter to the editor from a Westside guy complaining about a day in the year that the LA Marathon will ruin Westside traffic, why can’t he end up not just in the rest of LA, but in the rest of LA? The marathon is a world-class event. It’s scheduled a few months in advance, so it’s not surprising when it happens. And the reason the marathon ends on the West Side is that runners can head to the beach, the coolest part of town, so they may often cross the finish line on hot afternoons.
The runner will hand over the Hollywood sign on Hollywood Boulevard on March 16th of the 2025 Los Angeles Marathon.
(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)
And then there’s the Hollywood sign. Certainly, it must be the pain that lives around the signs that are crammed with tourists into the narrow streets. The LAPD should be vigilant and even offensive to patrol.
However, the historical signs have been there for over 100 years. That’s not that people have bought a house there and woke up one morning to realize they have Hollywood signs! Cheap, it’s our Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and at least it needs to be brightened up for the World Series and Super Bowl victory, the Olympics, the World Cup, the Oscars and the Great Year Day. And why don’t they even have Earth Day?
Historic La had sex with us to carry people up and down our hills. Now we are fighting over a gondola that was proposed to carry Dodger fans from Union Station to Dodger Stadium. Is this beyond us too? Is it really impossible to send a gondola up and down the hill without wiping off affordable homes in Chinatown without damaging critical and vulnerable open lands?
Should we continue to get it our way? You can’t do anything big without acting like a bigger committee at 25 years old.
Donna Bojarsky is dedicated to public issues as she handed out the “RFK President” button when she was eight years old. She moves in the world of cinema, charity and politics, and “Convee” is one of her favorite words. Donna isn’t everyone’s matcha cups, but last year she loves and believes in LA as a co-founder of an urban nonprofit organization and co-founder on building civic culture.
Housing: Enough to stabilize the city. Why not build more classic perk-rare style complexes? People shouldn’t feel like losers who don’t rent and own them. Make your apartment great again!
Art: Where are our citizens? How we plant trees, and plant art around town with more vitality. How about preserving and protecting eye-catching murals decorating LA walls and highway abutments? Example: The painting of an Olympic runner on the 110 highway near Judy Baka’s 4th Street exit was whitewashed by an official transit graffiti removal contractor, not a destroyer.
The triforium was set up in the shadow of the city hall in 1975. Artist Joseph L. Young’s 60-foot-high sculpture featured nearly 1,500 multi-colored Venetian glass prisms and 79-note glass bell electronic carillon.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Near the city hall is a 50-year-old triforium, a three-legged technicolor jukebox that was supposed to serenade passersby every day for half a century, but well, it really didn’t work.
Technology: Where is Silicon Beach? Tech needs to amplify its own profile by modernizing how it navigates apps for urban, public and public services that attract not only urban services but also every part of LA Life, as My311 does now. What about the transport apps that show off your routes in most trees, historic buildings, or funky old restaurants? Don’t be strangers in our own place.
Charity: LA rarely makes the top 15 or even 20 charitable cities of websites ranking such things. A great fortune was created here, but left behind too much charity legacy. For example, some big names have created names named Benefices: The Broad and David Geffen Foundations. However, when it comes to local policies, many famous Angelenos, who are actively invested in national policies, are not on the map.
If so, this is the LA moment. We cannot argue that we are a great city in between, bringing together serial crises and moments on stage: the reconstruction of the Postriot, the fires of the library, and the Olympics.
We are demanding something big. Is the big one still in our grasp? Otherwise, citizens’ clocks are caught up in a declining future. If so, don’t go beyond us.
Explaining Pat Morrison and LA
Los Angeles is a complicated place. In this weekly feature, Pat Morrison explains how it works, its history and culture.
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