Bill Kay goes downtown LA

Every community can be judged by its attitude to its past. Naturally, before people realise they have a past, things are discarded as they are finished with. We nearly all do that in our daily lives, dumping stuff without too much thought about whether it might turn out to have historical significance. A few people are squirrels who cannot bear to throw anything away, and end up living in homes piled high with stacks of newspapers, photographs, knick-knacks, old clothes and other memorabilia. Very occasionally, as in Lanterman House which I blogged at the start of this month, furniture and kitchen utensils are stored in an attic and form a snapshot of a moment in time - for which the rest of us are grateful but thankful that we didn't have to put up with all that junk.
It is a different matter with buildings in cities. In the centre of most cities space is naturally limited, and in the rush to make obvious improvements homes, stores, offices, factories are torn down to make way for the new. We don't mourn factories that much so much as the machinery they contain, although there were a few beautiful factories built in the 1920s and 1930s.
It was easy for European cities such as London, Edinburgh, Paris, Amsterdam or Rome to stop the clock and preserve streets that are soaked in history - so much that, for me in London at least, it felt like living in one huge museum crawling with tourists peering at this and that as if we were stuck in glass cases for our curiosity value.
On the other hand, commercial buildings in American cities were regularly pulled down because new techniques made it possible to wring yet more profit out of them. It was with great difficulty that conservationists persuaded the city fathers to stay the wrecking ball.
In the case of Los Angeles this has resulted in a hotch-potch of old and new, good and bad, gleaming glass rubbing shoulders with art deco or beaux arts. Nowhere is this starker than in the downtown district, a square mile or so stuck in the north-east corner of the city. Its theatres and cinemas were abandoned as the Hollywood studios took root, and its Victorian mansions on Bunker Hill disappeared after the wealthy decamped west to Beverly Hills, Bel-Air and other fashionable spots.
Although Bunker Hill was colonised by banks, offices and - more recently - public buildings such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the shops down Broadway and Main, Hill, Grand and Olive Streets have been taken over by Latinos and the whole area bustles with clothing, trinketry and jewellery shops, with stalls selling newspapers, magazines, cold drinks, nachos and fruit snacks. While the Broadway theatres are used from time to time they preside over the area like so many grades dames who have seen better days and cherish hopes that their day will come again.
I spent Easter Saturday morning having my first close look at downtown, after a series of nibbles over the past 18 months, snatched impressions that didn't hang together in any coherent shape. But Los Angeles Conservancy, a not-for-profit organisation, is dedicated to raising consciousness of downtowns preserved charms and to that end runs a series of walking tours around the area (see www.laconservancy.org).
Chief among these is the historic core tour, which barely touches the theatres but from Pershing Square gives a thorough grounding in the principal buildings, putting them in historical and social context from the arrival of the first settlers in 1781 and explaining why each style of architecture gave way to the next.
The desire of the Disney and Chandler families to immortalise Walt and Dorothy is a long established tradition throughout the world, simply because most buildings survive longer than most people. In the case of Los Angles we know the custom dates back more than 100 years because the Bradbury building was erected by mining millionaire Lewis Bradbury in 1893 with precisely that thought in mind. It is the oldest commercial building in LA and from that date we can say that buildings were put up with a degree of self-consciousness, not to say an eye on history. More recently Richard Riordan, a former mayor of the city, has had the central public library named after him. Of course, such grandiosity was possible only because building techniques increased the likelihood that structures could be made to last an impressively lengthy time.
But I came away from this comprehensive tour, lasting more than two hours and covering more than a dozen buildings from the Biltmore Hotel to Grand Central Market, with a feeling of frustration, of opportunities lost. LA has been a city of stops and starts - it is, after all, only as old as the United States itself - and it still needs to find an identity. Many plans have come and gone, and the latest envisage restoring Broadway to its former glory at the expense of the Latino traders who have in truth prevented it from turning into a dustbowl. There is an undeniable racial undercurrent to this, because it would involve ejecting the Latinos and reclaiming the land for the Wasps - ironically at a time when Latinos have become the dominant ethnic group.
It is hard to tell, from reading the newspapers, what will come of this debate but I have a feeling that it will become another compromise. Los Angelenos may want the elegant boulevards of a Paris or a Washington DC, but they find it hard to stomach the price - of many people's dreams being trampled on.
After the tour, Lynne, Roger, Ian and myself went down Broadway to Clifton's Cafeteria, an institution almost as old as the Bradbury. We queued to pick from a wide choice of good, solid comfort food at a cost of about $7 a head. Will that too be swept away when the whirlwind sweeps through downtown?