In this newsletter:

• Feature: Miracle Mile crawls from the tar pits of LA history 
• Culture critic Carolina Miranda weighs in on LACMA extension 
  
• A werewolf statue in Altadena inspires silliness, loyalty, and maybe a little too much attachment 
  
• LA is smoggy... but not nearly as bad as it used to be 
• Activist committed to reopening the Cinerama Dome gives up
  

Miracle Mile crawls from the tar pits of LA history   
by Brandon R. Reynolds

The easy metaphor is also the apt one: The development of Wilshire Boulevard is a lot like the mammoth trapped in a pool of asphalt over at the good old La Brea Tar Pits. The big guy wants to go somewhere, wants to live his life, but he’s stuck. 

 "Too big to fail" is not always proven by the fossil record 

Feel free to interpret the deeper meaning of the mammoth (too big to survive? too slow to adapt?), the tar (bureaucracy? bad budgets?), and the inevitable predators who come along for an easy meal (NIMBYism?). You might also decide to skip this whole exercise and just poke at the tar with a stick. And who could blame you?

But stop poking for a minute and listen: The Tar Pits neighborhood — Wilshire’s Miracle Mile — is trying to free itself from decades of being stuck. The great beast is on the move: LACMA’s $724 million David Geffen Galleries are opening, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is up and running, and on May 8th, the D Line will start service right across the street from LACMA’s lamp posts. (The Tar Pits themselves will close in July for a two-year, $240 million renovation, opening in time for Olympic crowds to poke at the goo with whatever it is Olympic crowds poke at things with.)

A walkable cultural hub? Accessible by shiny new subway trains? With plenty of park space for picnics? Who says you can’t see evolution in action? Wilshire, it seems, is dragging itself out of the muck.

Just waiting on all the construction to be done already.

“ I think what people are interested in is: Is it going to come back now, because there's this array of cultural institutions and the Metro that's going in?” asks Michael Storper, an economic geographer and urban planner at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. And if so, “will that cause the Miracle Mile to get its glory back?” 

Storper studies how technology, politics, and culture contribute to a city’s growth or decline. On Wilshire, Storper sees the possibilities in a place that’s setting itself up to attract locals, not just tourists.

“ You've got the museums, several of them, and LACMA’s really turned itself into a powerful cultural institution that attracts people — the jazz nights, the park, all kinds of programming,” he says. 

In other words, if you build it, they will come. But will they stay? (Even with an Erewhon?) “All that I think is going in the right direction, but what's going to make it a place that people want to just be in?”

If you stroll west past the Peterson Automotive Museum, or east under the new Geffen wing soaring over Wilshire, the cultural energy dissipates pretty quickly. You’re once again just on a big car-centric street in a big car-centric city.

That, of course, is by design.

In the late 1800s, millionaire Henry Gaylord Wilshire gave the city a strip of land through a barley field to develop as a thoroughfare — at the time, four blocks, running between Westlake and what is now Lafayette Park. He was a socialist millionaire who wanted to preserve the community he was building in that barley field. And so, according to the LA Conservancy, he decreed that “no rail lines or heavy trucking would ever be allowed along his boulevard, lest the pleasant, residential character of the neighborhood be disturbed.”

By the 1920s, Wilshire’s connection to the car was instantiated in the architecture. Developer A.W. Ross designed the “Miracle Mile” around the idea that buildings should have bold signs and large windows, to attract the attention not of pedestrians, but of drivers going by at 30 mph.

This was fine for a while, as retail (and ample off-street parking) kept Wilshire viable for decades. But then “ the money moved west,” says Storper. “That's LA’s story in the 20th century, is the money keeps moving west. And of course it ends up with the very wealthy west side and Brentwood and the Palisades.”

So the current flurry of activity around Museum Row and the D Line is trying to do a lot of things: resurrect the cultural life of the Miracle Mile, for one, and defy the autocentrism of Wilshire’s past, for another. And maybe one more thing: kick off an era of high-rise residential development that brings in people, and thus the businesses that cater to people who could, in theory, walk to them.

But: Will the Wilshire renaissance lead it into a culturally rich, transit-first model of 21st-century urbanism?

Storper suggests that with the advent of state law SB79, encouraging development near major transit stops, we can expect a boom of high rises. Yet his research suggests it won’t benefit everyone — just earners willing and able to pay for the larger apartments and condos that are attractive for developers to build. (Developers don’t want housing prices to drop, obviously.)

Moreover, he says, while the D Line is a good start, “ to create a meaningful shift out of your car, you need at least two walkable metro lines that go to a lot of places. One won't actually do it,” he says. “And so that's a problem for LA: How many decades or centuries will it take for LA to get to that point where people can abandon their cars?”

Not to be a killjoy about it. After all, out there in LACMA’s sculpture garden, you have a perfect tableau for Wilshire, maybe for LA generally: A mammoth forever trying to free itself from the past, yes, but on the banks, Angelenos sip their sparkling wine in the sunshine, toasting the progress that has been made.

In The Neighborhood

• “I was very concerned about that much concrete,” Carolina Miranda confesses to Press Play’s Madeleine Brand regarding the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, which she first saw before the art was hung. During that visit, Carolina says, “A lot of it felt very carceral. I really couldn’t have imagined looking at art in those spaces.” But “now that the building has the art in it, if feels more alive than it did in the beginning.” Check out their conversation for Carolina’s take on the “blob” architecture, the curation of the art, and the still-under-construction courtyard.  
   
• When you stumble across Altadena’s 7-foot-tall grimacing werewolf statue, “you feel like you’re now in a community that embraces the weird, the unusual," says Altadena resident Courage Escamilla. So, of course, Norman Jr., as the lycanthrope is known, has become a symbol of town pride and resilience. But as with any good werewolf story, one day the full moon appeared, a transformation happened, and out came the pitchforks. Reporter Steven Cuevas has the monstrous tale.
  
  
• If you didn’t grow up in LA in the 1950s and '60s, you might not “realize how profoundly disgusting the air was, how it really made people sick on a daily basis,” UCLA Law’s Ann Carlson tells Morning Edition host Danielle Chiriguayo. Carlson’s new book Smog and Sunshine relates the story of how LA cleaned up its air — thanks to, among others, a group of Hollywood mogul wives, grassroots groups from East LA, and – no joke – a CalTech pineapple chemist. Today, says Carlson, “we’re in rough times environmentally,” but “knowing that we’re going to have some tough times doesn’t mean we give up.”
  
  
• When the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood closed in 2020 because of the pandemic, like thousands of other people in LA, Benjamin Steinberg was sad. When it didn’t reopen as the pandemic eased, Steinberg couldn't accept it. So he started the Save the Cinerama Dome campaign. He organized protests. Got tens of thousands of people to sign his petition. More recently, he hired an engineer to project his message onto the theater itself from across the street. But then the company, and the family that owns the theater, started pushing back. Police showed up. And now he says his campaign to save the Cinerama Dome is officially over. Steinberg tells his quixotic story to fellow Dome superfan (and KCRW’s All Things Considered host) Steve Chiotakis.
  
  

Local Meme of the Week

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KCRW's Local Letterbox

• 5 Things to Do This Week – Read! Read what, you ask? Swing by the LA Times Festival of Books for plenty of ideas. There are panels, author talks, book signings and, when you’re authored-out, mariachis and food trucks. KCRW will be there with our partners at Active Cultures, and a tent dedicated to the memory of our own Bookworm host, Michael Silverblatt.  
  

• Art Insider with Carolina Miranda – sister dreamer, lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles is a new sculpture park on an 11,000-square-foot lot in South Central. Carolina finds it “full of love.” 

• Wildfire News Updates – LAist reports on growing coyote sightings across the area, CalMatters highlights commentary from a candidate running for California Insurance Commissioner who lost his home in the Palisades fire, and KCRW looks at the low snowpack’s impact on the coming months. Plus, PBS SoCal is highlighting environment-focused content from LA and beyond all month long. 

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