If you want to understand the Zabar’s Zeitgeist as it drifts west to my home state, you could do worse than read When the Next Wave Wipes Out, an article on the economic decline hitting the supposedly-bohemian enclave of LA’s Eagle Rock.
Only the NYT could bemoan Eagle Rock’s downfall as if it were Paris in the Twenties. And on the front page of its website, no less. Pretty funny to those of us who’ve been around there. It does have a good pizza place though, Casa Bianca, which is far better than the conventionally-trendy little boutiques and cafes the Times seem to think are such great contributions to urban development.
The deep recession, with its lost jobs and falling home values nationwide, poses another kind of threat: to the character of neighborhoods settled by the young creative class, from the Lower East Side in Manhattan to Beacon Hill in Seattle. The tide of gentrification that transformed economically depressed enclaves is receding, leaving some communities high and dry.
For long-time residents, the return to pre-boom rents may be a blessing. But it also poses a rattling question of identity: What happens to bourgeois bohemia when the bourgeois part drops out?
And more importantly, what happens to New York Times advertising? The Times’ Scott Timberg continues:
Over the last five to six years, Eagle Rock became the glamour girl of Northeast Los Angeles, a crescent where the asphalt jungle meets the foothills. The neighborhood of 35,000 or so has attracted screenwriters and composers, Web designers and animators, who labor on their laptops in cafes, discuss film projects at Friday night wine tastings, and let their children play with the handmade wooden toys in a Scandinavian-style coffee shop, Swork.
“It is easy to sniff at such urban affectations,” adds Timberg.
Indeed it is.
Lived in Los Angeles for most of my wretched life, knowing L.A. area pretty much inside and out, and can only say after reading the above…………who knew.
That article almost makes me sorry that the NYT is waning away.
In NYC, I expect it to be a good thing. The rising real estate values devastated poorer communties in Manhattan (people were paying mansion taxes on shoe-box studio apartments). And if you enjoy the off Broadway arts scene, you pretty much have to go to the burroughs. Most of the arts groups were driven off the island. Along with most small owner-operated establishments.
If the city can keep crime under control during the process, it will be the best thing that’s happened to this city in a long time.
Drove through Eagle Rock most Sunday’s through the fifties, and remember it was notable for only two things: the shortest line between Pasadena and Glendale and the first Bob’s Big Boy restaurant I had ever visited. (Loved their Big Boys and their chocolate milkshakes.) Not much else stood out about the place except the big Eagle Rock (never could “see” the eagle in the rock) and a funny apartment building built on a triangular patch of real estate and designed to follow the contours of the land on which it sat. Who would ever have guessed the place would become home to screenwriters and web designers? Who knew what a web designer was? Who knew what a web was? Who knew what a computer was in the fifties? Alas, the place has peaked and started to decline without my knowing it. I don’t now feel any richer for the knowledge, nor is the NYT any richer for having informed me. Last time I was in the neighborhood it was on a freeway above the old Eagle Rock, zipping past so quickly I didn’t see any of the places I used to remember. I didn’t see any web designers or screenwriters either. F
I lived in Eagle Rock in the 60s when I was a medical student. It was a convenient and low cost place then but it deteriorated after we moved away. My daughter and her fiance have just rented an apartment in South Pasadena, another nice community that is convenient and has nice options for young folks. At one time she lived in Silver Lake and I annoyed Cathy Siepp no end by recounting the nasty little things that happened her, like having all her clothes stolen from the gated and locked apartment house laundry room. Growing up in Orange County does not prepare kids for urban life.
This post is pretty trivial.
Yes, I got your point a long time ago. The NY Times is always, always, bad, bad.
It’s getting played out. Try to make up a new bogie man.
What ever happened to Al Gore?
There is a certain irony of the leftist creative classes mourning the loss of those small boutiques, and they won’t be back due to the policies of those they keep putting back in office.
There was a 2 sided coin to this in Atwater Village. There were many interesting old houses that were restored, but some affordable old stores were replaced by vanity shops on Glendale and Los Feliz Blvds.
There is far more value to me in an affordable restaurant or a good auto repair shop than five candle and soap shops.
Add this loss as just more refuse on the trash heap of failed history.
The Rocky Mountain News and The San Francisco Chronicle have died.
Both had become extremely Liberal news propaganda, like the financially distressed NYT and the LAT.
The readership was limited to primarily Liberal Ideology.
As they say in other businesses ….”People are just NOT buying it”.
Newsweek with only 65 pages and ten of them ads for Meds and Health care (what does that tell you about their readership?). TIME and Newsweek (LIB ‘tools’) both excitedly promoted Robert Mugabe and his leftist CHANGE massacres, over 20 years ago didn’t they?
The same with totally non profitable Liberal ‘Talk Radio’ on the AM frequency.
Conservative ‘Talk Radio’ has no such problem…Hmm wonder why?
Is that the reason that The reverse labled, ‘Fairness Doctrine’
(restrictive doctrine) is raising it’s ugly head?
To ‘force feed’ the Liberal doctrine to the public?
I left LA in 1990. It’s a joke, right? Eagle Rock??! LOL!
“What happens to bourgeois bohemia when the bourgeois part drops out”?
How bout the neighborhoods become interesting again.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that Eagle Rock, home to Occidental College, was where The One had a brief academic interlude (never did hear what his grades were that semester). I stopped there this summer to visit the campus for just long enough to sniff the leftist aroma. Eagle Rock Boulevard was pretty run down the month before the market started to tank.
Don’t worry the MSM and Air America will get their Obama bailout bucks. Free markets don’t rule anymore. Welcome to AmericaniStan.
More evidence that everything is spinning out of control. I must have missed the memo or something, but i had the impression that gentrification was a ‘bad’ thing. Maybe it’s not so bad when the gentrifiers are ‘creative’ folks? Whatever. Last time I checked Casa Bianca was still open, thankfully. I’ll really start to worry when these places begin closing: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-outthere30-2009jan30,0,2484619.story.
Bourgeois Bohemia will be amazed to find out that it cannot exist without the wealth created by poor midwestern shlups mining coal, growing corn or making washing machines. Oddly enough, Obama’s “stimulus” ignores them completely, preferring instead to subsidise the benefactors of their work thus completely turning economics upside down.
Two additional (beyond Casa Bianca) reasons not to sink into bobo despair over the quagmire in Eagle Rock: Eagle Rock Italian Bakery and Oinkster. One venerable, the other relatively new, and both likely to be around for a while.
I grew up in Sunland-Tujunga, when it was blue-collar and kind of skuzzy, went to junior college in Glendale, and visited relatives in Pasadena pretty regularly until I went away to the military in the late 70′s… I remember Eagle Rock as being also kind a skuzzy. Kind of a stretch to think of it all as ‘gentrification central’. Maybe it will now go back to being skuzzy and working-class affordable.
The only other relevant thing I recall about Eagle Rock was that the embryonic mall there in the early 1970s had a Mexican food place in it that served seriously wonderful soft tacos. The food of the gods, I tell you – the food of the gods. There wasn’t much memorable about the mall, but to me, the tacos were definitly worth a detour for.
I live on the westside but go to Eagle Rock for down-home Italian food
at the Capri on Eagle Rock Blvd. not far from the turn off for Occidental
College. Good food, good prices, and hasn’t changed much in 20 years.