I just returned from a trip around the Gulf of Gökova in Turkey. We flew into Bodrum, a popular summer holiday destination, the kind of place Thomas Cook and EasyJet serve with nonstop flights from Manchester and Liverpool only in the summer months. I always fall in love with the feeling in these beach towns and cities, a feeling of emptiness yet warmth, a lived-in place that has been deserted in the heat of summer. And a feeling of crumbling, as if the sea enters town every night at high tide and chips away at the buildings and streets.

In Bodrum, just as in many western Mediterranean towns, most of the locals leave in the summer, at least in August. When I visit these places I wonder why Los Angeles locals don’t do the same. LA has the same climate, i.e., IT IS TOO HOT IN THE SUMMER. But the majority of Angelenos stay year-round. Why is this? Is it because they are all transplanted tourists to start with? Or is LA simply too much of a world city to stop moving? Or is it something about the city structure itself? Either way, I really think the locals should leave in summer and the northerners should arrive with their shorts and have a nice holiday.

But have you ever seen a tourist in LA? Or even worse a whole tourist family? It is truly a heartbreaking sight; lost on some exhaust-filled boulevard, rattling their luggage down the sidewalk just to end up at some sad Starbucks, ordering the kids as many frappucinos as possible to keep everyone from falling apart in the hot white sun.

So I wonder why the locals don’t leave, and why the tourists come at all. And I wonder if this could be ameliorated by shifting the nature of the city into something a bit more sleepy, a bit more beachy, a bit more crumbling, something just more in line with the climate of overwhelmingly dry summer heat. The question for me is no longer 'How can we make LA a great city?' but instead 'how can we make LA a sad town?' It has good bones for this! A sense of decay on even the newest buildings. A dusty haze in the air. An overemphasis on indoor/outdoor living. Litter. Ice cream.

With this in mind, I sketched out some ideas how to make one of LA's primary tourist paths, the journey from LAX to Santa Monica, an experience more akin to these slightly sad, slightly crumbling beach towns.

Çökertme, Turkey (Image source: http://www.sailingchoices.com)

Itinerary

1: LAX to Downtown Santa Monica

In my visits to beach towns in the Mediterranean and Mexico, I’ve noticed that the first part of the tourist journey, from the airport to the town, is always one of a romantic ecological disturbance. You have the sense that the highway is temporary and the landscape around it persists, with plants ebulliently rising up at the road edge. So as in these places, your first experience of LA upon leaving the airport should not be the sprawl of LA, but semi-ruined civilization colonized by plants. This elicits the strongest "exotic vacation" feeling.

To create this effect, car traffic must be re-directed from the airport. Lincoln Boulevard should be closed to airport traffic between S Sepulveda Blvd and W Manchester Ave. There is no reason anyone visiting needs to see the strip of sub-urbanity that is Westchester (the neighborhood north of LAX). Instead, leaving the airport, you head south on Sepulveda to the Imperial Highway and take it the two miles west to where it meets the ocean. Turning north, you then slowly wind your way through “Surfridge”, the ghost town sandwiched between the airport and the ocean, a former development left abandoned with airport expansion in the 1960’s.

Surfridge ghost town, Los Angeles (Image source unknown)

These crumbling roads slowly being overtaken by plants are the most exciting thing you could possibly see in LA upon leaving the airport. What could imply a more magical trip ahead of you than this eerie trek?

You continue the magic route through the quintessential sleepy beach town, Playa Del Rey, and onto Culver Boulevard through the Ballona Wetlands. This wetland trip is key. It does not hold the beauty of an east coast wetland, but instead embodies the disturbance and detritus that is most central to Los Angeles character and ecology. Wetland plants are perfect for a feeling of ruins overcome by nature - they confuse the tourist and citizen alike - they look like weeds but also seem strangely of the place. And equally important - exuberant invasive plants! Pampas, Arundo donax, Foeniculum vulgare (maybe add some Ferula in the mix for fun) are perfect here - adding some weight and grandiosity to the entrance to your holiday excursion. These species will probably exist here forever so no need to plant them, but enjoy!

Locals from eastern neighborhoods continue on Culver past Lincoln Boulevard, and beach goers turn left on Lincoln Blvd. Lincoln Blvd is too too sad of a destination after the wetland journey - no place for a tourist. The best thing you could do for Lincoln Boulevard is to unpave the sidewalks, make them dirt. (Ideally, you’d unpave the entire street. You should unpave all streets in LA that show such little planning forethought; we could call it “Forced Ruralization.”) Individual business owners can pave/surface/garden their own frontage, but overall we’d have a more uniformly dry, dirt streetscape. This would create the adequate amount of dust, turning the hot white LA light into more of a golden hue, and allow for more colonization of plants on the roadside. Ailanthus altissima (Tree of Heaven) and Opuntia sp. (Prickly-Pear) could be key species planted/encouraged. At this point in the arrival process, the tourist should feel like they're on the outskirts of a Mexican city (because they are?). Any ex-urban highway is good precedent here, but Highway 180 in Mérida, Mexico offers an ideal type.

Highway 180, Mérida, Mexico (Google Street View © Google 2019)

This change exposes the true character of Lincoln Blvd; If we are going to keep ugly boulevards like Lincoln, let’s lean into it. Single-story, unwalkable retail like this will only ever be charming covered in dust, in semi-ruin. Think Verona Beach in Romeo + Juliet (1996).

2: Downtown Santa Monica

When the dust clears, you land in Downtown Santa Monica. One of the key entry points to the tourist zone here is Tongva Park, completed in 2013 by James Corner Field Operations. It’s a beautiful park with planting design that excels far beyond most parks in LA. Yet visiting on an August weekend, you’d have little sense that this was the heart of tourism in Santa Monica. The majority of benches go unused, and the main lawn is empty.

Tongva Park main lawn, Saturday August 10th, 4pm

Tongva Park picnic area, Saturday August 10th, 4pm

This dearth of activity must largely be the result of basic urban design flow, or lack thereof - the path of tourist activity does not naturally lead through the park. The west side opens to Ocean Avenue adjacent to the Pier entrance, but the east terminates at City Hall and little else, not a typical tourist hot spot. Combined with the busy vehicular traffic of Ocean Avenue and the deep cut of the 10 freeway, the park becomes less of a destination, devolving into a suburban park, or even, business park.

Continuing our journey from the newly dusty Lincoln Boulevard, I suggest another intervention: Replace Tongva Park with a tourist-trap market stall area. The proper area for new park design is the beach, below the bluffs (see Itinerary Stop #3). For the tourist journey, this area should be what every summer beach town is at it’s core: a gift shop given urban form, with cheap and aesthetically questionable tchotchkes to your heart’s content. The kind of place that would sell things like this, from Bodrum’s beachfront drag:

This area could be the westside’s Olvera Street, creating a destination with more “local” character, affordable gifts, and a cozy sense of density. Whether themed with invented colonist fantasies à la Olvera Street (perhaps a Tongva theme?) or a simpler politik such as the Farmer’s Market (Third & Fairfax), this could be an engaging colloquial take on the beach town. The area could be lightly landscaped with trees for shade, or overhanging vines/trellises.

Olvera Street, Los Angeles (Wikimedia commons)

3: The beach

There have been two primary design imperatives in Los Angeles design of the past 75 years: sunlight and openness. Neither of these make sense. It is a city with endless sunlight and (previously) endless open space; no matter how hard you try, you’ll always have more than enough of both in LA. Even though the preponderance of open space may be contestable, the nature of single-story sprawl drains the urban energy away into a great open abyss, the sky itself seems larger and more expansive than other cities. Unadulterated sunlight and open space is a desert, uncomfortable and empty. Yet contrary to the common refrain, LA is, in fact, not a desert.

Nowhere is this intentional visual desertification of the city more literal than the Santa Monica beaches. Beginning in 1947, more than 40 million cubic yards of sand dredged from nearby areas were dumped on the Santa Monica coastline to create more of a beach destination. The beaches north of the Pier now span more than 800 feet from bike path to water’s edge. Yet visitors seldom sit further than 100 feet from the water, and more often less than 50 feet from the water.

Santa Monica Beach, north of the Pier, August 2019

No one wants to sunbathe in the Sahara Desert. You need the water by your side to enjoy the heat and the sun. It is in this excessive expanse where new park design belongs. What is needed here is not openness but a constriction of space, a heightening and tightening of experience by walking through vegetation, groves of trees, vegetated dunes, and then, finally, emerging onto the beach. It is only then that the beach becomes a magical haven, sunny and cool, refreshing.

Maria Pia beach, Sardinia, Italy (Image source: https://www.trovaspiagge.it/spiaggia-maria-pia/)

Manly Beach, Sydney, Australia (Image source unknown)

It is not the beach itself that is so appealing, but the beach combined with the interface of nature and shade. Darkness to light, closed to open.

Leaving liberal access for lifeguard vehicles on the Santa Monica beaches, there is easily 600 feet of width for a new park, and thousands of feet in length. Tongva Park is less than 600 feet by 600. The new beach front parks could serve a multitude of cultural and natural uses, from beach dune ecologies, to forest groves, to shaded play and sports areas.

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Ending our tourist journey, the same things that make Los Angeles beautiful are also it’s downfall; it is a city typified by the phrase ‘too much of a good thing’. For both the tourist and citizen alike, we need more mystery, more darkness, more wildness, more ruins to distill the energy of the city, ground it so it doesn’t float away in the harsh, hazy light.

field notes

Los Angeles: Sad Beach Town