CicLAvia Takes on Wilshire

The  seventh CicLAvia to grace Los Angeles turned Wilshire Boulevard from Downtown to Miracle Mile into a street fest to celebrate this historic crosstown corridor. Like the six CicLAvias that preceded it, today we use the occasion to celebrate: not only the city but our identity and our differences. While such qualities are often subsumed behind make, model and color, today we can embrace not what divides us but what unites us.

Of course we’re all citizens of a great metropolis that stretches from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Of this global agglomeration Los Angeles is the capital – a material testament to our once-and-enduring economic and political power. We’re still king of the Pacific Rim, after all, and despite some grumbling now and then the future is still made here. Heck, we’re a manufacturing powerhouse and we host the nation’s busiest port complex. We make and the world takes.

But arguably it’s a different story when it comes to making our city a comfortable home. The physical fabric tells the story; and much of it is in decay. Even here on our signature Wilshire Boulevard the pavement crumbles. Whole stretches of the corridor seem to telegraph the ‘creative destruction’ and regeneration inherent to capitalism itself.

Now, the hidden hand of the market had a major assist from decades of bad urban and social policies. Graced by the planner’s wand, neighborhoods suffered disastrous programs of freeway building and urban ‘redevelopment.’ These did nothing to help the places left behind when flight-to-the-suburbs sapped wealth and subsequently the local jobs base essentially ‘self-deported’ (hat tip to Romney!) to inland Riverside County, Mexico, and most recently overseas.

These epochal shifts changed the character of the central city and with it the communities along Wilshire. Today many neighborhoods along this essential commercial spine struggle to just hang on. For the occasional visitor from beyond, the blocks between the 110 Freeway and LACMA are simply places to pass through on the way to somewhere else.

Yet urban history is on display for the curious CicLAvia participant. The boom decades of the 1910s and 1920s has bequeathed a treasure of urban antiquities like Bullock’s Wilshire (now a law school) and the Pellissier Building and Wiltern Theatre, as well as gems that testify to the wealth once resident here: the Town House apartments, the Bryson apartments, and the Los Altos apartments.

Urban history is practically vivisectioned by Wilshire as it runs through the turn-of-the-century Westlake district (anchored by MacArthur Park – nee Westlake Park) to the former oilfields long ago developed as ‘Miracle Mile‘ in today’s Mid City section near Fairfax. All along, Wilshire Boulevard bears witness this city’s era of fastest growth and, arguably, its unparalleled magnificence – a corridor that staked the region’s claim as the premier automobile city anywhere.

And there’s the irony: it’s a corridor best seen today by bike or by foot. And for a hundred thousand riders, walker and rollers today who formed a sinewy chain of unbridled joy, the automobile paradise was reclaimed from the motorist for everyone to enjoy. Thank you CicLAvia for making it happen.