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Category Archives: gentrification
LA Eastside Outings: Taking Over, Part Two
photo by Cindylu
Welcome to Part Two of the Taking Over reviews. A couple of reviews are still making their way through the LA Eastside digital transport, so please revisit this post in the next few days. (New review from Pachuco 3000 below!)
Part one can be found here.
Cindylu:
I’ve lived just a few minutes away from Downtown Culver City since 2000 in Palms South Robertson*. Despite living here for 8+ years, I only recently started spending any significant time (and money) in the area. Previously, there was nothing to do after 5 pm and a dearth of any other sorts of entertainment.
That’s all slowly been changing. The Kirk Douglas Theater playbill featured an article about the “revitalization” (aka gentrification) of DCC in recent years. In a small area you can find several architecture firms, art galleries, a couple of theaters, and several restaurants. On Tuesdays, local growers set up a farmer’s market on a 1-block long Main Street. If you go during a weekend night, you’ll find the 5 or so blocks between the Trader Joe’s and Kirk Douglas Theater quite busy. Now, I regularly shop at Trader Joe’s, buy fruit and vegetables at the farmer’s market, watch movies at the Pacific Theater and eat at some of the restaurants. I’d never gone to a production at the Kirk Douglas until last week. And yes, I can see the inherent contradiction of watching a play on gentrification in my neighborhood due to the gentrification in the area.
Why are “you people” so protective and uptight?
Top: Slum houses on Mateo St,
The Flats before being torn down for Aliso Village
outhouse and Clover St. 1940’s
Art’s Market, DogTown 1950’s
The question is often asked by people who didn’t grow up on the Eastside, “what’s the big deal about the Eastside? “Why is it that you people are so uptight about changes and gentrification, and all the concern about Echo Park, Silver Lake, or whoever, claiming they are Eastside?
Well the photos (from the archives of the LA County Housing Authority), show some of the reasons why the people of and from the Eastside are so thin skinned and protective. None of these neighborhoods (and many, many, others), as poverty stricken and rough as they were, exist anymore except in memories. Some of the destruction happened because there were people with good intentions who felt that tearing down neighborhoods and building housing projects was a positive step in alleviating poverty.
Some of the destruction was just an easy way to create wealth at the expense of the poor powerless people of the Eastside.
LA Eastside Outings: Taking Over, Part One
A play about gentrification? Sounds like an outing for LA Eastsiders! We made our way across town to see if the play would live up to the hype. Did it? Read on…
First, a short summary of the play from the Kirk Douglas Theater website:
OBIE Award-winning solo artist Danny Hoch returns to Center Theatre Group with his riveting new work, Taking Over, a show that brings to vivid life the residents of his Brooklyn neighborhood.
In rapidly changing Williamsburg, the melting pot is boiling over with strained ethnic relations and economic tensions—and the threat of gentrification, which threatens to crush the city’s diversity. Hoch masterfully depicts this community in transition with compassionate and hilarious results.
Read more at the Danny Hoch website. Taking Over ends February 22, that’s Sunday! Oh, and don’t bother watching the opening night video clip on the Kirk Douglas website, lame.
Reviews below, more coming tomorrow…
Dogtown to the Poodle set?
From the Downtown News
A River Runs Through Him
First District Councilman Ed Reyes is seeking a third and final term to make progress on projects such as revitalizing the Los Angeles River.
For First District Councilman Ed Reyes, Almost Everything Revolves Around Reclaiming the Waterway
by Ryan Vaillancourt
“The cornerstone of this would-be transformation is a 67-year-old, 415-unit housing project, the William Mead Homes. In the heart of the North Central neighborhood, the site represents for Reyes decades of neglect, stagnation and gang culture. In its place, he envisions a denser, mixed-income community that would combine hundreds of new, market-rate apartments with the affordable component already there.
“If I can maintain one-to-one affordable that you see there, and triple the density, I can bring in a middle and upper-middle class range of units that complements a facility that decentralizes the economic ghetto that you find there,” he said. “It’s been there for decades and all it’s done is create generation after generation of gang culture. We need to essentially decentralize, disband and disarm the culture that breeds on violence and drug dealing.”
There are two city planners focusing on the possible project at the William Mead Homes site, and Reyes has so far conducted three meetings with tenants, he said.â€
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Of course Reyes is speaking of the projects known as “Dogtownâ€, which has housed many people, for many years, who are not now and never have been gang members.
But it seems that the buzzword “gang “ is code for eminent destruction of a neighborhood of poor and working class people, and the smacking sound of developers and politicians licking their collective lips in anticipation of, as Reyes describes, “higher density, middle and upper-middle class range of units†can be heard at various high end dining and wining spots where the deals are arranged.
Who does Reyes represent after all? The poor and mostly working class constituents of his district 1 or developers and the upper middle class future residents of his higher density nirvana?
Reyes who will be termed out if he is elected this time is suddenly very busy with multi developments, for the good of his constituents of course.
And again we all get to hear that infamous and bogus term “affordable housing”, oh yeah!
Action Against Loft Auction
Browne of The Bus Bench (and LA Eastside contributor) took to the streets to interject some political theatre into the auction of some pricey downtown lofts. With a sign that reads “Will Work For Loft” and “Brother, Can Ya $pare A Loft?” handouts with information on the homeless, it’s the kind of necessary action I wish would be much more common nowadays. Channel 7 news covered the auction because they thought the use of the internet for auctions was interesting. Really.
Public workshops for the Boyle Heights community plan
I attended one of the workshops held by the city to, and I quote, “share preliminary draft recommendations with stakeholders and to seek public input on the Boyle Heights Community Plan -Â this is your opportunity to help shape the physical future of Boyle Heights!” And believe you me I did. I ended up meeting two other people who wanted to share their two cents in what the future of Boyle Heights maybe and what planners are thinking of turning BH into. Shout out to reader Rob who was there and offered some nice company.Â
Awkward moments in Los Angeles
My grandmother, her mother, her sisters, my grandfather (in the baggy pants), friends and neighbors at their first Echo Park home. The home no longer exists and the neighborhood is now called Historic Filipinotown.
I wrote this a couple of months ago but was hesitant to post. But as a friend of mine (a prolific emailer and a notorious drunk – a bad combination) once told me “just close your eyes and press enter”
My friend and I tried to go to the Stories Bookstore opening in Echo Park. We walked by 15 minutes before the opening party was due to start and got a handful of stares from the young guys silk screening in the store window. Hmmm, no sign of opening party anywhere and the sign on the door says “open next week”. Perhaps it’s a private party, oh well.
We walked into the Time Travel Mart, I’d been curious about the place. It looked cool in photos. My friend walked in with me but leaves immediately because he cannot tolerate pretentious irony and the store was chock full of it. I thought the place would be more interesting somehow but it wasn’t. It could be me, I just didn’t get it.
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