Hollywood’s Home Town Has Become Its Own Dystopia
I was wholly unprepared for the environment that unspooled before my daughter and me as we explored Los Angeles for historic Jazz sites along its South Central corridor. I had become accustomed to seeing pockets of homeless camps scattered around the city, especially tucked below freeway overpasses and back spaces where old rail lines sat dormant, along with bursts of informal, unlicensed markets. But this day, September 5, 2020, was an entirely different story.
The Southland was already bracing for a record heatwave. Temperatures inland were expected to reach 105 or higher (nearby suburb Woodland Hills actually reached 121 degrees). Wildfires were exploding around the area as the typically grey smoggy skies turned an eerie yellow. I had laid out a plan to kick things off at the Watts Towers, move downtown by way of Thomas Jefferson High School to the Historic Central Jazz Corridor and then over to Hollywood.
In Watts, we were greeted by a cordial woman who was eager to share some of the neighborhood’s history with us, clearly a couple of white tourists visiting the historically Black and now predominantly Hispanic section of town. Simon Rodia built the towers largely on his own, without plans or permits, over 33 years. Charles Mingus grew up in a house that once stood across the street. The Towers and the historic Watts Station, the area’s main train depot, were two of the very few structures not to burn during the ’65 Watts Rebellion. Inscribed above the main entrance, Rodia engraved “Nuestro Pueblo.” Our town.
This lady told us how she, her sister and friends would collect glass and shells for Rodia and even pointed out a spot where she placed a cluster of tiles including a pottery shard with a rose for her mom. She pointed out her old home (the blue one across from the community center) and said she needed to go back and see to her sister. She asked for nothing, simply giving us her time and her memories. As my daughter and I continued to walk around the park we came back to the lady, now with her sister, hiding from the heat under a tree, an apparent victim of heat exhaustion struggling to take in water. Clearly, both were now homeless, still clinging to their old neighborhood. We offered help, and they smiled and politely declined. We handed them some bucks, again nothing they asked for, and they thanked us and wished as a nice day, encouraging us to see other points of pride of South Central. It was not an unusual interaction with good people who like so many today find themselves homeless. Proud. Accommodating. Kind. Uncertain.
From Watts, we ventured over to Compton Avenue via 103rd Street. After World War II, this was an area booming with Eastern US migrants flowing into sunny southern California looking for opportunity of good jobs leading and prosperity without the stigma of segregation and racism still rampant in the South. Neighborhoods like Avalon Gardens, Alameda, Florence, Vernon and South Park were cultural hotbeds, breeding people like Alvin Ailey, Dexter Gordon, Kerry James Marshall, Stanley Crouch, Woody Strode and Augustus Hawkins. Then the riots hit in ’65 and then again in ’92. Poverty and decay led to gangland warfare until truces were declared like the Watts Truce of ’92. Black families began to leave en masse, with neighborhoods changing their cultural identities to Hispanic.
Today, the streets are lined, block upon block, by umbrellas and canopies shading folding tables and blankets covered by infinite items. Old shoes, bulk goods, bicycle parts, homemade ceviche and paletas, you name it. Only, these were not a few isolated clusters — these strings of marketplaces went on for blocks, both along the main Compton Ave. corridor and cutting back into alleyways and side streets. The sidewalks were choked with people selling, buying, bartering, the vast majority without masks to protect from COVID-19 spread. My work colleagues, academics and scientists at Arizona State University, had recently published an article about the rise of these informal economies and marketplaces sprouting up during the pandemic, but even they could not have foreseen this.
It was evident that these unlicensed ventures were not simply opportunistic. They were essential. Vendors who set up shop ad hoc to sell what they could to buyers who were looking for deals without the additional costs of sales tax or brick and mortar overhead. Eventually, the proliferation of these markets forced LA to declare them legal in 2018, largely because of the influence of food vendors. They are now an integral component of these South Central communities.
Central Avenue, between 43rd and 31st Streets is a different situation. It’s still Los Angeles, alternatingly poor and wealthy from block to block, but it has received some affirmative attention. Anchored by the historic Dunbar Hotel, the neighborhood was seeing some revitalization. A pocket park across from the Dunbar, now called Central Avenue Jazz Park, has a small stage adorned with a colorful mosaic of famous musicians and musical moments from the area. Harmony Elementary, Sally Ride Elementary and George Washington Carver Middle Schools are clearly community points of pride. Historic Adams Boulevard and USC are nearby.
But as one ventures further into downtown, the sense of history and community disappears. Aside from a sign affixed to a light pole in front of the old Lincoln Theater where Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Billie Holiday played to packed houses, there is no indication of what this area once was. The 27th Avenue Street Bakery is the last outpost, still producing their famous sweet potato pies (among other items) since the 1930’s. The Santa Monica Freeway, now simply known as “The 10,” became the line that white people stopped crossing after 1965.
The crazy thing is, today, it’s what is on the north side of that freeway that represents how hard this American economy has been to so many Americans. Just a few blocks north and then a couple of blocks west, the roads turn into villages of tents and makeshift structures. Entire sidewalks and even some of the parking lanes have become the footprints for a new city of people with no address to call their own. It is Woodstock without the music festival, refugee camps where the refugees are escaping the economy, not a war or government. People squeezed together, wearing minimal clothing but still wearing masks, many beyond ragged and likely filtering the bare minimum, to try and fend off the virus. These were people struggling to survive. Just survive.
The area of 5th Avenue between Central and Los Angeles Street has been known as Skid Row since the depression. It used to be filled with low-cost residential hotels and social services offices while the people would retreat to the alleys for the nights. Today, it sits in the shadow of the high rises and distinctive architecture that makes up an otherwise revitalized downtown. The iconic city hall in its white granite glory is a mere six blocks away. The mosaic of matted down blues, greens, reds and grays at ground level pressed against the glass and steel of American capitalism stings the senses of any human with compassion for others.
In July of 2019, there was an 11 percent increase in the homeless population over the previous year to nearly 5,000 people within an area of less than one-half of a square mile. In July of 2020, the number grew to 7,617, more than 425 of them under 18 years of age. The City has moved in portable toilets and handwashing stations on nearly every street corner. Skid Row makes up 18 percent of the City of Los Angeles’ total homeless population crammed into one-thousandth the area of the entire city.
The current estimate of homeless in Los Angeles County is 66,436 human beings. A 2020 UCLA study shows that nearly 47 percent of those people, or more than 31,000, were employed in the last four years. These homeless are not grifters or transients living off the system. These are good people, many working even right now, who simply are unable to pay for shelter because they are unable to earn more than $10,000 per year. Many are like the lovely lady from Watts and her sister, mainstays of a neighborhood without an address to call their own.
As my daughter and I made our way to the 405, we crossed through Beverly Hills, where the average household income is $193,000. In a pristine park on Rodeo Drive, across from the city hall Eddie Murphy made famous, was a rally of non-mask wearing people waving around Trump signs. What do you think were the chances they had zero clue what existed a mere 10 miles to the east of them?
This past weekend, Los Angeles — the largest city in the most populated state in the wealthiest nation in the world — was a tinderbox. It has become a microcosm for all of the planet’s challenges and threats — social, economic and even environmental. While the world surrounding it was literally on fire, thousands upon thousands of human beings ignored the natural disasters beyond their borders only to try and make it to tomorrow. Forget any notion of a dystopian future. It is here and it is now.