Which brings us round to a final description of my Plaza:
• Bandstand at the center on which local talent can sing and play.
• Four hundred or five hundred chairs surrounding the bandstand, where people can sit all night, every night, under the heavens. In winter, such as it is in California, outdoor heating can be installed.
• Around this, the great pedestrian treadway. On this, real people actually walking!
• And around them, in turn, the shops, the theaters.
• Underneath: parking. Or the next block over, hidden, for God’s sake, behind bushes and trees.
Final points:
• In all eating places, plenty of booths facing each other, for conviviality. Too many places, like Baskin-Robbins, have seats lined up against the walls. The message implied is: So Long. Get Away. Good-bye.
• Again: late hours. Better a small businessman working till midnight than a small businessman bankrupt and on relief.
If you can’t build a large plaza, build a small one with just one or two theaters and a dozen shops. The most important element that remains constant is the center, the conversation pit, the plaza walk-around concourse where people know, are absolutely sure if they bother to go, they will see someone they knew from junior high, high school, college or some neighboring area. The Bunch, The Gang, The Friends must have a Hearth.
Let’s start with one plaza such as this, and build more. Needless to say, the ones that follow must not duplicate the first in texture or color or sense of drama. The plaza conceived in Fullerton should not be repeated in Pacoima, Watts or Baldwin Park.
Just as in the great cities of the world, there is only one Eiffel Tower for Paris, one Tower of London, one St. Peter’s for Rome, so, on a lesser level, each plaza in all the 80 lost and needful Los Angeles small towns should in some way strike individual chords of the Mexican, Jewish or Black backgrounds they arise from. In West Hollywood, of course, you would let the crazy fine Greenwich Village spirit that runs wild there work your design for you.
We have been yelling for years against the Orwellian world of 1984, and at the same time have been busy building such a world and walling ourselves in.
Now we must remember that drama and theater are not special and separate and private things in our lives. They are the true stuffs of living, the heart and soul of any true city. It follows we must begin to provide architectural stages upon which our vast populations can act out their lives.
Many plazas exist now, waiting to be rehabituated, redramatized, like the Main Street Plaza and Pershing Square. Others, like the Santa Monica Mall, or Century City, lack only a true pedestrian walk-around center to make their hearts beat. Most must be built from the ground up.
And, in building, it seems, we must look back to the dear Jews and the rare Latins to learn how to live.
O Children of Israel, come out of Fairfax and old Boyle Heights. Send us your architectural rabbis to lead us from the wilderness of the blacktop and oil drips and gasoline fumes. Open our eyes so we may see. Sit us down so we may rest. Open our mouths so we may talk and eat…
O small towns of Mexico, send us your mariachis to strum at the centers of our plazas to bring the people back, the girls wandering this way, the boys ambling that, two warm rivers running softly over the wide mosaic walks.
Dear Moses, sweet Virgin of Guadalupe, teach us Gentile Protestants how once more to spend an evening that is neither far-traveling and senseless, nor violent, nor sick, nor hidden away from the world in colored but colorless TV.
Inhabitants, inheritors of Tel Aviv and Guadalajara, hear me now. The hour grows late. Help, o help. Give us back to ourselves.
For what finer gift is there in all the world?
THE AESTHETICS OF LOSTNESS
To be lost. How frightening.
To be safely lost. How wonderful
To not know where we are, as children, is a nightmare.
To not know where we are, as adults, traveling, is a perfect dream.
I know not if others have dared an essay on this subject. I have rambled on about it for years and feel I should now get it out on the pavements.
Think back on your first trip to New York, London, Paris or Rome. Large cities, preferably, for then the chance of getting deliciously lost is enhanced.
Do we fly to far places, then, to get our weathercocks spun north for south, west for east?
We do not set out for that. But that is the secret part and portion of our adventures.
To wander down Piccadilly, turn left, and suddenly say: “Where the hell am I?”
Or to set off in the wrong direction from the Spanish Steps and freeze—wondering which right or left turn to make.
And then the reverse situation—
A week, two weeks, or a month later, figuring the whole damn thing out and suffering what might well be called the Travel Blues. In other words, wanting to be on the move again, to plan again, to know that arriving is okay, but the mysterious journey is the best reason for living. Now, having figured out a town or a city, you are seized by the Desperate Empties.
London as a puzzlement is superb.
London, with its puzzles solved, deflates.
Temporarily, of course. London and Paris are so gigantic it is easy to find new places wherein to vanish and be safe and all in one piece happily reappear. I would not recommend this procedure, this year in New York. Such vanishing might result in a permanent disappearance.
What am I getting at? Why this raving on about environmental inscrutability and the bewildered traveler? Well, most certainly one of the reasons we jet to other lands and other towns is the boredom of the too-familiar at home. We go to Hong Kong and Tokyo not for the reason that we profess, but for the education that leaps upon us unbidden, and the romance that hides around a corner to vanish us for an hour or a day. At the eternally young core of any sojourn is the surprise and delight of being confounded and happily sunk in indecision.
All right, Bradbury, get to it.
The sum?
We have begun to build cities that are too easily solved. There is no mystery, no imaginative lure, no texture in the blank facades, the empty and expressionless faces of banks or other corporate structures. This plus no candy, book, or sweet shops means that when the bank shuts and the IBMers gas on home, the city drops dead. You can skate through those places at 50 miles an hour, for there is nothing to see, nothing to wonder about or linger over. There is no bafflement.
The blind buildings do not even hold out a tin cup, asking for dimes. So, because no texture, no attraction, no chance for you to be enticed into even trying to get lost.
What can we learn from this?
That even in our interior malls, we can plan in such a way that, for a brief if not lengthy time, we can enjoy a few sensations of lostness. To build into these arcades twists and turns, and upper levels that by their mysteriousness draw the eye and attract the souclass="underline" That can be the subliminal lure of all future architectures.
Hell, why not, at the very top level of some future mall rear an entire floor labeled: THE ATTIC? Up there stash all your antique shops, antiquarian booksellers, Victorian toy merchants, magic shops, Halloween card and decoration facilities and little cinemas running “Dracula” fourteen hours a day, or name another half-dozen specialty stores that wouldn’t mind being half-lit and fully exciting. Do you mean to tell me that wouldn’t be the first place the kids would rush, hurling themselves and their parents onto escalators headed up among the fireflies and dingbats?