The malaise of a city

Chris Kraus on what Los Angeles wanted to be

Union Station became known as the "Last of the Great Railway Stations" built in the United States

Yesterday I caught the Metro from my neighbourhood, MacArthur Park, to downtown Union Station. Access to our Metro station is partly blocked. In an effort to shut down the long tight lines of street vendors along Alvarado Street that once made pedestrian passage to the station virtually impossible, the city has installed two walls of chain-link fence to form a narrow path across the sidewalk. Before the ban, the street vendors sold stolen merchandise — shampoo, phone chargers, grey-market sneakers — and sometimes drugs, and they had to pay the MS-13 gang for protection. But rather than ‘cleaning up’ the area around the park, the imposition of the chain link fence has created a narrow, terrifying corridor far worse than anything I’d ever seen. Huddled fentanyl and methamphetamine smokers lean against the fence together passing pipes. Bug-eyed semi naked men stumble through the trash-lined pathway. It is a hellscape.

Los Angeles state, county and city government has invested heavily in LA Metro during the last decade to make the region less car-dependent. Still, the cars are almost always two-thirds empty. The commuting, fare-paying riders form a small and visibly nervous minority.

Four stops and 10 minutes later I arrive at Union Station. The station is about three miles away and it would have taken about half an hour to get to it in LA traffic.

Built in 1939, the grand historic station is the centrepiece of the visionary Patsaouras Transit Plaza: a sprawling, master-planned network of passageways and terraces that link the county’s rail and bus transit hubs to a cultural plaza, new apartment buildings, and two large buildings that house the Metro Water District and LA Metro Transit headquarters.

The Transit Plaza was developed through an innovative public-private partnership in the 1990s, a peak decade of Los Angeles urban expansion. An unsigned mural in the lobby of the Water District building depicts the essential flow of water through the golden desert land, connecting people across centuries. Two mosaic frescoes by Steve Rogers present a utopian vision of 20^th century possibilities: a metropolitan centre ringed by modest rural homes and vegetable patches.

Nick Patsaouras, the retired electrical engineer for whom the Transit Plaza was named, describes this and other late-20^th century LA projects in his exhaustive and impressive book, The Making of Modern Los Angeles – A Chronicle. He describes a series of urban projects developed on the fly by truly dedicated planners, builders, architects and public servants. What has changed? He blames the mayor and the city council with their wrong priorities but beyond that, he told me, there is “the malaise that has inflicted our city.”

Chris Kraus’s new book, The Four Spent the Day Together, is published by Scribe