I’m Carolina A. Miranda, arts and urban design columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and it’s the weekend which means it’s time for the week’s essential culture news.
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Los Angeles, as the writer Octavia Butler once mused in a notebook, “forms and shatters, forms and shatters.”
This has never been a place with a conventional relationship to its history.
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Where little blue plaques and carefully preserved structures have proliferated elsewhere, L.A. s official stance on the past has typically been both grander and more opaque heavily romanticized, carefully edited, booster-ized, whitewashed and perpetually repackaged in service of whatever comes next.
“We have always had our civic gaze fixed on the future,” Christopher Hawthorne, the city’s first chief design officer and a former Times architecture critic, told me. “To the extent that we have had a coherent sense of identity, it has been very much shaped by that perspective.”
Civic Memory Working Group
THE CITY-Announcing the publication of the Civic Memory Working Group’s report and its topline recommendations,
which propose ways for the City to more honestly and effectively commemorate important historical milestones, protect historic and community resources and develop new monuments and memorials.
Mayor Eric Garcetti himself reminded, When you lose an elder you lose a library.
Public facing monuments and memorials are so important and they have to be about what people care about and at bare minimum: the naming rules and processes must be made open and accessible!
In that spirit, the lad from Sunshine Hill in Studio City, who avoids Nextdoor because it s more abusive than fun, submits the following Oral History and map to the highly talented team at Past Due: Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group.
Los Angeles wants future monuments and memorials to more accurately reflect its history latimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from latimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.