Page 217 - Flaunt 171 - Summer of Our Discontent - Lili

There are more women and children than there were before, more than ever.
A little bit east is the Arts District. There are art galleries and restaurants there. There is a there there. There are wine bars and software engineers. They eat handmade sausages. They eat venison burgers.
It is 90 degrees in the Arts District too. The bars are air con- ditioned and pleasant. Their customers are pleased. Life in Los Angeles can be pleasant. Abandoned warehouses become lofts. Software engineers and other creatives love high ceilings and
JACOB LAWRENCE. “THEY WERE VERY POOR” (1941). OIL ON CANVAS. 12” X 18”. COURTESY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK.
exposed pipes. And also $15 craft cocktails. SROs have exposed pipes too, but they leak
and are often wrapped in torn asbestos that flakes like bad dandruff. And causes cancer.
Black and brown people predominate on Skid Row. Young white people are the people who buy the Arts District lofts. White people have all the money.
Little Tokyo lies between the two neighbor- hoods. There are far fewer Japanese people there now than there were before. Hipsters have come to love Little Tokyo too.
The rich and the poor, and the poorest of the poor. The only people left in Los Angeles.
The middle class? They don’t live here anymore. They live now in Fontana, in Rancho Cucamonga, in Palmdale if they’re not fully mid- dle class. They drive a long way to work each and every day and a long way back home.
If you stand at 5th and Spring, a few blocks away, you see both sides. You see all sides. You see Los Angeles. Not the ocean, not the mountains, except on the clearest of days and when you look way up, your neck tilted way back, and you can see above the smog and the skyscrapers, old and new, and you look above the cranes that are there to build even newer high rises, high tech office towers and high-priced condominiums, but on an average day, that’s not what you see.
There is the Alexandria Hotel, once splendid, built by and for Charlie Chaplin, once elite, then an SRO and now being renovated to become elite once more, once again.
Across the street—The Last Bookstore in LA, a place for all, homeless people reading books
on ragged couches, placed there for people to really read books, mingling with hipsters flipping pages, waiting until the Crocker Club next door opens for dance parties. Outside the bookstore, the Metro bus stop, Latina chambermaids waiting for their trip back to unincorporated East LA, unincorporated because back in the day, cities did not want to include the places in the County that did not have a high tax base. At all four corners
of 5th and Spring, men—mostly men, veterans, old and young men, mostly black and brown men, forgotten men—ask passersby for money; the pe- destrian light changes and the asks begin where the crosswalks end. The Middle Ages. Beggars and mendicants. Franciscan friars. But this is not voluntary poverty. Those asking for alms at 5th
and Spring do not wear robes or sandals. Some of the men have a pitch: “I need bus fare back to San Bernardino.” Others are in bad shape, merely extending a grimy cardboard coffee cup. Sin- gle mothers with children crouch in the doorways of shuttered shops. They are less mobile; they have their kids in tow. Perhaps they just set out a bucket of some kind, or a hat or a child’s sand pail.
Coles French Dip is a brief trip around the corner. “Established in 1908, Coles occupies the old Pacific Electric
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