The Best Laid Plans

Ignoring the impassioned pleas of local residents, the L. A. Planning Commission recently gave the go-ahead to a development deal on La Cienega and 3rd, across the street from the Beverly Center. They didn't think it was a very hard case. They saw the issue as financial, I saw it as quality of life, and the quality of life is rarely determined by the number on the bottom line.

The Fairfax district where I grew up in the 1950s was a family neighborhood. Gilmore Stadium featured football games and midget auto racing (little cars, not little people); down the street, Gillmore Field was the home of the Hollywood Stars, a minor league baseball team; the Pan Pacific Auditorium hosted the Ice Capades and the circus every year; Gilmore drive-in was our local movie theater; and there were pony rides at the amusement park. Not multi-million dollar businesses, perhaps, but profitable, and all oriented to family activities.

Gilmore Stadium, Gilmore Field and the Pan Pacific are all gone now. The drive-in has been replaced by The Grove, Rick Caruso’s outdoor mall that packs in tens of thousands of shoppers every week, and where the pony rides used to be, the Beverly Center now has four acres of shopping and five floors of parking. On the outside of the building, for the benefit of any families that do drive by, forty foot high billboard ads feature half-dressed models, and that half barely dressed at all.

This ill-considered rash of development means that every day from 2:30 in the afternoon till eight o’clock at night every major street in every direction is frozen solid in a bumper-to-bumper gridlock from which there is simply no escape. It means that developers who are not part our community are making a lot of money at the expense of the people who are.
It means that with the help of the L. A. Planning Commission, a family neighborhood surrounded by urban opportunity has been transformed into a crowded shopping center surrounded by a traffic jam.

When I was young, Ozzie and Harriet weren’t allowed to sleep in the same bed. Now, on Desperate Housewives, they hardly sleep in the same bed twice. Well, times change, but the question I would ask the Planning Commission is, how much are they willing to diminish the quality of our lives in order to create profits for someone else?