"walking around looking at stuff"

I get alittle giddy when I'm downtown. I mean Los Angeles, I mean what can be called "the historic core," as any city expert is quick to solemnly point out, "L.A. doesn't *have* a 'downtown.'" Mhm.

So anyways, I'm at Pershing Square, just come up from the Red Line, and I'm standing at 5 th and Hill, and I walk up 5 th, toward Broadway. Now as recently as the childhoods of late-middle aged Angelenos, Broadway was a great, grand, street full of all the department stores and theaters in the highest splendor the city achieved. Running parallel, one block over from Broadway, is Spring St. Back in the day, it was called "The Wall Street of the West," and M.F.K. Fisher has made mention of how plentiful and legendarily good its restaurants were.

Perhaps fortunately, this area has been benignly neglected. These great, huge fine buildings sit in the sun, advertisements for residential hotels fading upon their side offering rooms costing per week what you could now spend on a snazzy 20 oz. coffee beverage. Little human-sized businesses fill up all the spaces along the streets, producing a very amiable bustle. No, it is not remotely as elegant a crowd as it once was, but it is a good one. Singularly eccentric looking folks greet each other pleasantly and share cigarettes and discuss the Lakers and life feels good to me when I'm there. The endless amounts of old residential hotels seem to be divvied up between still being residence hotels albeit of a different sort than perhaps they were, and rehabbed lofts. I try to make out what is going on in the upper stories of some of them, that give evidence of the remains of balconies, and second-story ballrooms and the like. One building has a pair of big gargoyles sticking out from about the third floor and I don't know why. An ancient looking woman in a motorized wheelchair gazes off into space like the riddles of the Universe just might give themselves up this time. We make eye contact and greet each other pleasantly, as strangers do, and she goes back to studying.

A big empty corner retail space on Spring (I believe it was) has faded walls, high ceilings, and hexagonal tiles on the floor that bear wear-marks suggestive of the placement of counters. Big, engaging oil paintings are lined up leaning against one of the walls. Somehow, I do not think that this is a temporary gallery space, and that makes all of it more interesting. Everyone standing at the bus stop behind me is brightly reflected in the window glass. I am too, inexplicably dark and hunched, staring like some sinister figure. It's an odd way to see myself.

I've wondered before and I wonder again what it must have been, to live here, back in 1909, 1923, 1935. What was it like to live between two of the mightiest streets in the whole region?
I walk past two hardworn men counseling each other about recovery as I head into the Nickel Diner. The area may lack its former elegance, but clearly there is no lack of dignity on these streets.

If you haven't been, you should go to the Nickel Diner. (524 Main St.) The food is good, real, comparatively affordable, and the desserts CANNOT be beat. One of the owners was chatting with me about the old menu murals painted on the walls. Apparently when they pulled down the old panelling and the lowered acoustic tile ceiling, they discovered this evidence of a diner previously in this space back in the 30's or 40's. "Sometimes a place tells you what it wants to be," she said.

I saw potted geraniums of coral and purple all up the fire escapes-to the roof-of one old building as I walked back to the Metro station. Herodotus said something I don't remember about the changing fates of cities.