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Been reading Unknown California, a collection of essays and articles about California history, and found a couple of quotes about San Francisco that reminded me of this thread:
And this one just kind of made me grin:
Having spent the past few days in San Francisco (I brought this book to read partially because of possible insights into San Francisco) I notice a lot of this--both the fundamentally Eastern design of the built environment (despite its notably Western setting) and the assumption of San Francisco as the pinnacle of Western culture--and also its sense of difference even from the rest of California. The Gold Rush really did settle northern California in reverse--rather than coming across the country, the region was settled from the Pacific inland. It took a few more decades for the migration of western settlers to make it to the Pacific coast, and due largely to a vicious railroad rate war and some very good marketing, most of this later batch of settlers coming west ended up in southern California. The result was a marked difference between the earlier Eastern pattern established in San Francisco, and the later Western pattern established in Los Angeles.
Also maybe for a similar reason to the settling and migration patterns SF and the area directly around the city share the dialect of Philadelphia, S Jersey, N Delaware, and Baltimore. The only two places this specific English Dialect exists. Will see if I can find the link
There might be a few isolated 'urban-lite' pockets here and there but they are few and far between and not the norm. LA is much more auto suburb and sprawl than urban, resembling neighboring Orange County, the poster child for sprawl, much more than it does a Montreal or a London. LA lacks a consistent urban feel. There are no public squares to speak of, no pedestrian-only zones (except maybe a couple token streets for pedestrians along a few small stretches of shoreline). The handful of pedestrian streets aren't really streets as they are glorified, highly commercialized outdoor shopping malls. There are no big iconic public parks, very limited public transit, none of the traditional features that make up a traditional urban fabric. Everywhere you go, the private automobile and its vast asphalt infrastructure just dominates everything, as it does in any suburb. That is the key feature of the suburb, in which the private automobile reigns supreme and everything else is subservient to it.
Only thing that sort of qualifies as public space in LA are the strip mall parking lots, and there are no shortage of those. Except they're made for cars not people. Each one being as big as a football field or two and are as much of an eyesore as they are big. Thousands upon endless thousands of strip mall parking lots on every freaking corner, acres and acres of it along with thousands of miles of endless freeways and highways together with an overwhelming sense of neverending sprawl and the overwhelming scale of the sprawl, collectively all this stuff just annihilates whatever urban fabric Los Angeles might have once enjoyed.
I believe a world-class urban center has to have a high standard of beauty, elegance and grace in its architecture and the built landscape. A great urban fabric contains a high amount of world-renowned architecture and famous public spaces, has a world-class public transit system, is famous for its architecture and regrettably LA is not known for its architecture or its public transit. Some of the historical buildings have been preserved in the downtown core, but its a drop in the bucket in an ocean of sprawl. Sorry to be harsh, but I calls it as I sees it. There's really little if anything urban about it. LA is as phony as a Hollywood movie set.
L.A. isn't known for its architecture? Oofah, the hits just keep coming with this guy:
Also maybe for a similar reason to the settling and migration patterns SF and the area directly around the city share the dialect of Philadelphia, S Jersey, N Delaware, and Baltimore. The only two places this specific English Dialect exists. Will see if I can find the link
Really? My only exposure to the Baltimore accent is via watching John Waters movies and "The Wire" and I don't hear that inflection in SF--although it seems like much of SF's population are people who moved there from somewhere else. It may be an older thing that faded away--just as residents of Sacramento used to pronounce it "Sackamennah" until the early/mid 20th century, suggesting a more East Coast inflected local dialect (Sacramento was built by a lot of the same New Yorkers who built San Francisco, but they moved to San Francisco after getting rich in Sacramento.)
Always amusing when posters grab a map of the Greater L.A. region (A gazillion sq miles) and begin comparing its walkabililty to Manhattan (23 sq miles) or San Francisco (47 sq miles). Or when they start knocking L.A.'s expansive bus system because not enough rich folks ride it, the lulz. Just a complete and total lack of perspective.
Minus the Hollywood Hills (but including Griffith Park), we're looking at a 46 sq mile area (that's right folks, as big as the city of San Francisco). Note how tiny this area is compared to the rest of L.A. County, since apparently the whole friggin' region should be one big walkable area.
Look at all the green in Central Los Angeles. Must be all that suburban sprawl! Basically, if you live and work in this area, you'll scarcely need a car for anything. It's well served by public transit (buses, even a few metro lines), it's criss-crossed by major boulevards loaded with everything. L.A.'s best shopping, nightlife, museums, and ethnic enclaves as here. Other well known walkable areas (Exposition Park/Beverly Hills) are minutes away.
I found this old link I bookmarked. The center, while dense, still is designed far more the automobile than other dense city centers. This can shown by the large amount space used for parking.This explains a good deal the difference in feel between Downtown San Francisco and Los Angeles:
In the end, what sets downtown LA apart from other cities is not its sprawl, or its human density, but its high human density combined with its high parking density.
“The more downtown is broken up and interspersed with parking lots and garages,” Jane Jacobs argued in 1961, “the duller and deader it becomes ... and there is nothing more repellent than a dead downtown.”
Well, I don't know if "designed" is the right word--downtown Los Angeles was laid out before the automobile, and built out along streetcar and interurban lines. A lot of those downtown parking spaces (garages or parking lots) are on blocks that used to contain older Los Angeles buildings of the pre-automobile era, retrofitted to accommodate the automobile, at least somewhat. Plenty of cities did that--there are still some vacant blocks in downtown Sacramento from redevelopment projects that never materialized, used for parking until something got built on the site.
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