Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

YES, WE’LL GATHER AT THE RIVER

We’ve all heard the words to the old and familiar spiritual “Yes, We’ll Gather at the River,” and, indeed, in a few years, if we do not gather at the actual rim, we will put ourselves together near the river. We speak, of course, of the L.A. river, which channels dry wind and warm dust through most of our Southern California year.

And, yes, we will gather, if we plan it well, at a riverbed of now-isolated communities in downtown Los Angeles—those areas being Little Tokyo, Olvera Street, Chinatown, and the intermingled Italian commercial isles.

Created separately by different customs in various years, these proofs of our immigrant past stand but a few hundred yards apart. Yet they might as well be separated by tens of miles for all the mixing or lack of mixing between these towns within a city.

Rarely do the inhabitants of the three or four communities stroll from one to the other. Rarely do tourists, abandoning their cars, ricochet happily from one immigrant duchy to the next.

All that must change.

What is missing at this moment in time? The almost forgotten pedestrian of yesteryear. Who removed his legs and turned off his lights?

We did, by neglect, surely not by plan.

To see what we have done wrong and what can be renovated right, the simplest stroll through London, Paris or Rome will reveal the paucity of our imagination, and the need to rejuvenate curiosity and the delight that is derived from walking mile after mile and relishing the mileage.

Consider: we fly nine-thousand miles for the privilege of walking our shoes off in those cities. Then we return to feast ourselves along two paltry city blocks in our cars.

How come?

The answer, of course, is that Paris is a continuous river of fascination, an assault of delight. The eye, the ear, and the culinary nose are bombarded on every hand by color, light, sound and the scent of breads and foods adrift from one thousand bakeries and twenty thousand restaurants. The same, on a smaller scale, holds true for London, Rome, Vienna and Madrid.

Can we borrow and learn from the humane and delightful customs of these cities, to insure that our downtown immigrant isles do not remain closeted but become part of a tributary-flow of Angelenos and emigres from Iowa? Can we break the dams that hold the people back from participating in the old adventure of walking?

Yes! Imagine with me:

Let us use the Music Center plaza on Bunker Hill as our possible starting place. Fill it with more chairs, tables and a clutch of outdoor wine, coffee and sandwich places. Then build a bridge across Hope Street so that pedestrians could stream down past that fine, roaring fountain, which most people have never seen, along the rarely-discovered mall. Said mall to be strung with miniature lights and filled, every few yards, with new curio shops, bookstalls and miniature sandwich places, so that the pedestrian is lured on to reach Broadway.

There our yellow brick road, for that is what it might start out as, would turn north. In turning it would become a Mexican/South American river of bright inlaid tiles, recalling the esplanade along the seafront in Rio. This stream of brilliant tiles would lead us through a refurbished section of Broadway to turn east on First to lead us a few blocks to Little Tokyo. Along the way, the tiles would gradually change shape and color until they become the symbols of the Land of the Rising Sun, the dragons of history, which will flow, still under a canopy of miniature lights, past yet other small shops, so that our curiosity is unending. We would hasten shopping through Little Tokyo and emerge into a long serpentine of walk, which would lead us to Union Station.

There our “yellow brick road,” our “mosaic pedestrian pathway,” would deliver us to Olvera Street and then, in the river of lights and new fine foodstalls, along North Broadway through Sicilian-Italian archways and finally another dragon-dance of inlaid walks, this time Chinese, until we reach Mandarin and Szechuan country…

All this on a double-size walk that would be arbored with ivy and flowers, an arched shade from the sun. Then, a safe route by night, festooned by thousands of miniature lights. Along the way, your quick or easy walker/tourist would meander past curio cubbies, bookstalls, and portable pushcart spreads of graphic arts, lithographs, etchings, and watercolors from every land. Similar to the miles of book, magazine, poster, and postcard stalls along the Seine in Paris with, here or there, your honorable hot dog, bagel or lemonade/wine-cooler establishment. So your ever-curious, ever-wandering, old-fashioned walker would be led on under ivies and illuminations, with much to provoke delight on all sides. The old auto would be gladly abandoned and forgotten. A New Year would arrive when tens of thousands of surprised folk would stare down and cry, “My God! I have feet!”

So there you have our new Los Angeles river, beyond the old, fixed to the land, illuminated on all sides, crackling with curiosities, and adrift with scents from four continents. In this astonishing, new riverbed, flowing in twin tides day and night, in opposite directions, would stroll, walk, hustle, or who knows… even jog, the once lost tribes of pedestrians locked out of motion and pleasure by too many decades of the city dreams neglected and the waiting, ready, and eager walkabouts stranded on curbs.

We might even have a mariachi leaving every half hour from the Music Center to run the new emigres from Corn City and Hoboken down the hill.

But eliminate Bunker Hill if you wish, concentrate only on the bright creek, the compelling dry wash that would push and pull imaginations, young and old, to bounce off Tokyo but to land in Mexico City, rebound from Rome and land at last in echoes of Beijing.

What a gift to give ourselves as strangers to the streets.

Our legs? Restored!

Our élan? Revived.

Our lives returned to an old and familiar way of glorious living.

Can we do this, and make a vital bed through which our futures flow high-tide?

I’ll run ahead.

You come, too.