Yes, I'm back in Los Angeles for another 9 days. The weather has been gorgeous since I arrived and I plan on getting in some quality beach time over the weekend.
Today we ate lunch at a venerable old Mexican restaurant located on the fringe of South Central. See photo above.
I don't understand when Angelenos talk about "the 'hood" as we're supposedly driving through it. My rep wanted to avoid the 405 coming back to Hawthorne, and so we drove back through "the 'hood," meaning South Central and Inglewood, which frankly, looked a lot nicer than my crappy neighborhood (Bushwick) in Brooklyn. Everytime she said, "this is the 'hood," I looked out of the car windows expecting to see junkies shooting up on street corners, layabouts trading cash for AK-47's out of the trunks of cars, trash in heaps, and burnt-out cars on the sidewalks. You know, like parts of New York, or Newark. Instead, I saw tidy, well-kept single-family homes (albeit some with bars on the windows), with nice, if not necessarily new, cars parked in front, and working class people going about their business.
I see scarier teenagers outside the Grand Street High School next to my subway stop, fachrissakes. We're talking oversized North Face parkas in July scary, you know what I'm talkin' about?
Is "the 'hood" a state of mind? Or do we have a different reality altogether in New York? Maybe it's all the sunshine.
2 comments:
I think the nastiness tends to lurk inside and travel in cars and erupt at odd moments and places. A very mobile sort of criminality hence the whole 'hood concept escapes me too. But I suppose as weird as LA is to me, Brooklyn would probably be weirder. My street instincts were developed up here in the East Bay and I don't know if they really apply anywhere else. (I've felt perfectly safe well after dark in cities round the world and so I'm thinking, probably not.)
I think Californians often take their cues from the rest of the country even though they would say it is the other way around. And sometimes they don't quite "get it." But they have those nice tans and, usually, really cool cars and what-not, so it's hard not to like them. Except for the humidity thing. I hate them when it's hot and humid here where I live.
Don--my street instincts were developed in Palo Alto, as our host Jane Doe here would say, fachrissakes, which is why I flinch whenever I see a '66 GTO coming down the street that is not "numbers matching."
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