Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

We spent a lot of time learning about each other’s favorite places around Los Angeles. Our conversations motivated us to actually investigate the places we had long been curious about. Since workdays were intended for one destination and never allowed the opportunity to explore the stops we passed along the way, we replaced the monotony of going to work with trips to places across the city, learning about the history of our communities, and having fun. Transit stopped being a line from point A to point B. If we wanted to get to point B, we could—and did—make stops along the way.

Transit became not just our means of getting around, but also our way of feeling connected with the outside world. Taking the train to work each morning offered wonderful views of the mountains, the gleaming downtown skyline, and the neighborhoods we passed through. Our fellow riders gave us a sense of the lives we shared the city with, its vitality and diversity. Major events—like protests or strikes or championship celebrations—have a way of spilling out into the transit system and bringing out a sense of shared identity and community.

Union Station took on a deep personal significance. Under its high-vaulted ceilings, we would meet up on our way to work or before venturing out to explore the city. We would pause to grab a coffee and admire the station’s golden hues and tranquil courtyards, or watch the trains rumble out of the yard. Then we would get swept up in the throngs of passengers rushing to their next train as we set out to find something we hadn’t seen before. For one of us—a transplant to LA—changing trains in Union Station was literally their first experience of Los Angeles, making it the natural starting point to take in as much of this new, unfamiliar, and exciting place as possible. As a Los Angeles native, the other was rooted in local tradition and culture, with limited experience beyond East L.A. Exploring the city together led to conversations about the urban changes and development of each neighborhood. And we would trade historical knowledge for the memories and nostalgia for what L.A once had been. We experienced the city through each other’s eyes and witnessed the lives of all the amazing people who contribute to L.A.’s essence.

A city this vast is too much to take in all at once; you can only wrap your mind around it by breaking it down into smaller pieces. For us, we broke it down along the transit lines, learning Los Angeles one route at a time.

We explored the different communities along the Gold Line, starting with Chinatown and Boyle Heights. It’s easy to recommend the beautiful and enchanting neighborhood in Chinatown, where the neon lights dance on reflective surfaces as you walk down the street. Or strolling through Boyle Heights on a weekend night, when the aroma of carne asada wafts from every corner taco stand. The more we explored, the further out we traveled, eventually finding hiking trails that offered an escape from the city, with tall shady trees stretching above your head and parakeets loudly chattering as they soar from one tree to the next.

Along the Blue Line through South Los Angeles, we found beautiful places and wonderful people. In Watts, while disappointed with the scaffolding covering Watts Towers, we found friends willing to talk to us about art in the community. A little further north we found the Alameda Swap Meet and El Faro Plaza, two large warehouse spaces bustling with Latino entrepreneurs and delicious scents from tacos to raspados. In these spaces we found people who showed us the true meaning of community and togetherness. If you have a creative spark in you, the friendly faces in Watts will take you in. And if you are looking for a lively space to watch a game and eat tasty food, the people in El Faro Plaza are there for a good time.

With the Red Line, we ventured past the Walk of Fame and through the Hollywood Hills. While known for impeccable homes, we found secluded streets with wide-open vantage points of the city and a neighborhood intended for pedestrians, with small walkways and staircases. It felt like stepping away from the city; our senses were tuned to the fragrant smells of flowers and fresh air, birds chirping, and dogs barking as we walked past. And even while we were standing in the center of the city, the sounds of cars and trucks were faint and barely noticeable.

Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

Riding the train at dawn is possibly the most peaceful way to encounter L.A. When the sun is rising over the east, you hear the city waking up. But even before that, you will find Latina women bundled up in scarves and sweaters already boarding buses and trains to move across town. They traverse the city as they travel from the Eastside to their housekeeping jobs on the Westside. Bundled all the way to the top of their heads, lugging large thermoses filled with coffee to drink and wake up as they move. These women would share stories about the large mansions they worked in. These large glamorous homes were meant to look untouched and pristine, and while they maintained these homes, these women would also have to keep an eye on the curious children who needed to be cared for. They would then take the transit system back home, where their work continued as mothers.

The pandemic has limited our movement and put a hold on our adventures. We can’t see new places or stumble upon old friends on our regular commute. The pandemic robbed us of the connection with the outside world that transit offered. We miss the community of people who used transit on a regular basis and were happy to share stories and chat. Now people limit their movement and faces sit behind masks as people protect themselves from the virus. Right now, the trains don’t feel like they have that love and energy we used to encounter, but we look forward to the day that everything begins to buzz with excitement again.

Courtesy of Janeth Estevez and John Perry.

We’ve long wanted to illustrate how transit can be an excellent means of seeing the city. As the pandemic dragged on, we finally conceived Transiting Los Angeles as a way to share the places that we’ve fallen in love with to inspire others to explore them as well. We think of our blog like a series of postcards: “Wish You Were Here.” Despite our different perspectives, transit has shaped a common understanding of our home. While we try to pick up the pieces of our lives amid all this uncertainty, it’s nice to remember that there are still wonderful places within reach. Los Angeles will be forever changed by the pandemic, but whatever comes next, transit will always take us where we need to go.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> Transiting Los Angeles appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With the lights dimmed to match the evening’s shadowy theme, the packed hall gasped and laughed along with the atmospheric film, which is now hailed as one of the greatest movies of all time. Directed by Carol Reed, written by the novelist Graham Greene, and featuring a powerhouse cast including Orson Welles, The Third Man was filmed on-location in Vienna after the war. It captures the desolation of a bombed-out city—with plenty of plot twists as the characters chase each other around the rubble.

As Zócalo publisher Gregory Rodriguez said in his opening remarks before the screening, “It’s film noir at its finest.” He pointed to an essay published on Zócalo by Michael Shelden that explored the enduring allure of this movie’s moral ambiguity, where the borderline between good and evil is so hazy that you end up rooting for an unscrupulous, unapologetic racketeer.

The event’s guests were young and old, longtime fans and first-time viewers, some with family, some on early dates, and some alone and simply eager to see a good movie.

“It’s actually my favorite movie ever made,” said Mitchell Glavas, one of the attendees. “I’ve studied history, and I’m a huge film noir fan. It just epitomizes post-war noir.”

Many people cited the film’s highly acclaimed script, soundtrack, or setting as the main draw. “You can’t build Vienna after the war, but if you go to Vienna after the war to film, then you’ve got a good set,” said Jerry Jewett.

Others were attracted to the setting of the screening itself. Teresa Thompson had never seen The Third Man before, but she has been passing through Union Station for 70 years—including during the time the film was made, she pointed out. She likes that the station hasn’t actually changed that much over time. “It’s cool they have the same chairs they had 70 years ago,” she said.

Some guests, of course, came on a bit more of a whim. “My husband dragged me here after work,” said Theresa Dahlin. “He made me dinner, so I agreed to come.”

As the crowd filed out, they could be heard murmuring to each other about Welles’ charisma and the bleak beauty of Vienna—proving, 67 years later, that there was still much to discuss about what good can come from the devil’s handiwork.

The post A Darkened Train Hall Is the Perfect Place to Watch a Classic Film Noir appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On September 2, actress and poet Melora Walters walked into the Traxx Bar at L.A.’s Union Station, in her hand a copy of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, the powerful poems he wrote about the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath. Walters sat down on one of the wooden stools around the tall bar table in front of a mic. The bar was nearly empty, a few drinkers nursing their glasses and staring up at the muted TV sets high up by the ceiling, with baseball highlights and football commercials on a loop.

For the next half hour, she read, her haunting voice echoing out from the bar and into the cavernous train station, unsuspecting travelers looking around to see where the voice was coming from, as if this was the chanting of a ghost.

I’m involved with a small publishing imprint, Writ Large Press, which developed an experimental pop-up project a few years ago called the Downtown Literary Alchemy Laboratory (DTLAB) that brings people together through texts, books, and the act of publishing. The project proves that places like downtown aren’t just blank canvases when it comes to creating art. We want to pour our share of talent into an existing world, to add, to give freely, and then pass away.

The series #90for90 was this summer’s iteration of DTLAB. It brought free literary and community events to Union Station for 90 consecutive nights, including that poetry reading with Walters on the 66th night. Through #90for90, we wanted to explore what happens to a community’s spirit, camaraderie, morale, and economy when we present art in an open and public space night after night.

I first had the idea after I spoke at a panel discussion at an Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in February. I found myself repeating a refrain: Writers should partner with businesses in their communities. For example, instead of paying rent to a venue for a book release event, writers–who will bring in a crowd–can convince a business to share in the profits.

It is worth exploring and establishing the value of art in a neighborhood. Too often, artists and writers serve as the “fertilizer” to make an area cool enough for outside investors to come in, build new condos, raise rents, out-price existing tenants and businesses, and change the character of the neighborhood without input from those who have called it home for years. It’s something I saw when I lived in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn about 10 years ago and see currently in downtown L.A. today. By partnering with established local business owners, artists and writers can help to strengthen the businesses, giving them a better chance to survive and flourish as neighborhood rents go up.

Members of my family have lived and worked in downtown L.A. for more than 30 years. When my family first moved to the U.S. in 1980 from Paraguay (after having moved to Paraguay in 1976 from Korea), my mother worked in sweatshops here. And my first job was as a cashier at a combination mini-mart and hamburger joint on Main Street between Winston and 4th streets. I earned a little extra by holding a little brown lunch bag full of cash for the coke dealer outside the store.

My friends and I used to spray graffiti on the sides of buildings as a way of attacking what had been built to divide, walls that marked the point where the inside people no longer had to share with or even deal with the outside people. As a sign of how things have changed downtown, that activity now bears the more respectable name “street art.” And street art is now corporate-sponsored, funded by entities that want to teach us to love the walls, to convince us we are happy to be excluded because it’s only from the outside that we can see the art. I love when artists want to create art here, but it doesn’t help when they pick names for their studios inspired by military constructs or lock away their entrances between metal gates and pit bulls.

Now I live on the corner of 7th and Los Angeles, in the same building where my parents live in a low-income unit. My brother lives a few blocks away, on 2nd and Figueroa. And while everyone downtown is happy that crime has gone down, we are also tired of people who want to deal with issues through avoidance: developers, for instance, who want to build bridges between buildings, so that people with money don’t have to walk past the homeless and other vagrants in the streets.

On the 18th night of #90for90, two teenaged boys were walking fast past the bar. An elderly woman was reading her poetry inside.

The boys stopped, sat down outside on their skateboards, and listened, not just to her, but to the rest of the line-up.

Afterward, they walked in to shake hands with all the poets they had heard. They asked if they could read something too. I nodded.

One of the boys took the mic, announced that he and his friend were waiting for their train back to Fresno, but wanted to contribute something to the night.

“I’ve never read anything before,” he said as he pulled out his smartphone and scrolled to find his piece. “But you guys inspired me.”

*

One week before #90for90 began in late June, I happened to meet Tara Thomas, who owns Traxx Bar and Restaurant at Union Station. She suggested we could do events at Traxx in the future. I got excited because Traxx Bar was one of the first “fancy” bars I’d gone to back in 1998. I liked the idea of being back in Union Station, a place that I traveled through almost every day for a year between 2006 and 2007 when I commuted between downtown and San Clemente.

Union Station, that great monument to transitory people, turned out to be perfect for us because what we did each night was to make artists appear in that tiniest, but most important, of universal events: that fleeting moment when individuals, each heading somewhere else and often in opposite directions, cross paths.

There was a couple rendezvousing at Traxx Bar on August 2, two people who always met at this bar and ended up staying for the entire reading when they learned the group of poets reading that night was from the Inland Empire.

“I’m from the Inland Empire,” she screamed. “We are checking this out!”

And there was the young guy in his business outfit–white button-down shirt, tie now loosened, jacket hanging on his stool–who sat at the bar for about 10 events. Every night he was there waiting for his train and asked me what events were coming up. He sometimes offered his critique on a writer or event. Finally, on September 16, our 80th event, he offered his own voice. At an event called Testimonios, where a group called the Northeast Alliance played music, burned sage, and chanted, and the host encouraged anyone at the packed bar to come to the mic to share stories of displacement as neighborhoods changed, he spoke. He talked about his parents, and how they had to leave the house in northeast L.A. where they’d lived for so many years because they could no longer afford it. And now he was here, immersed in our project, first by chance, now by choice, talking publicly about his personal history–which he admitted he doesn’t typically think about as he tries to climb the corporate ladder.

*

Reflecting on it now, I realize #90for90 was always about one thing: the end. It’s what poet and artist Amanda Katz, who presented her work on night #81, and I talked about in her studio: that the things we value most in life–people, pets, life itself–are things we know to be temporary. We didn’t want to build a monument or a fort. We wanted to experience collectively a life that is always counting down.

We knew that one day the final night of events would come. And it would end like all the other nights–the mic and speakers put away, the workers putting the stools up and sweeping, the bartenders covering the open bottles and calculating register receipts. Some late train rider rushing in to ask the bartender if it was too late to order a beer.

We’d be gone, too, perhaps to another bar somewhere in downtown. But we hope that one day, somebody walking through Union Station for one reason or another will say to herself, “Hey, I remember. I remember what was once here,” and words she had heard read by a poet whose name she can’t even recall will echo inside of her.

The post Catching a Train—and Fragments of Poetry—at Union Station appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’ve been trying to write about the two of them and that moment that day at that bench, but everything keeps sliding out of focus. Nothing holds still long enough for me to capture it.

One hundred thousand passengers and 700 trains passed through Union Station every day during the war—1 million people every 10 days, 3 million a month, 36 million a year. So many arrivals and departures. So many lives headed in so many directions. So many little stories and moments like my parents’.

The waiting room is enormous. It seems to have been built to house Chicago’s early-20th-century ego.

Standing there, looking around, any true child of Chicago is left to marvel not just at the city’s big brash ego but at the killing whoever sold the builders all that marble and glass must have made (not to mention the big brash bribes he had to pay to get the marble and glass contracts in the first place).

They razed half the station years ago, but the scale of the designer’s vision endures. Even now, with daily arrivals and departures down to a trickle, Union Station will soar for you, if you sit there and let it.

Most of the ticket windows and virtually all of the concession areas and alcoves have been sealed off, but, 125 feet overhead, the original skylight still produces a suffused, all-day twilight. The glass is a bit more pigeon-spattered, and the new, taller buildings nearby steal more of the sunlight. Still, sitting there, looking up, you get the idea. You sense the grandeur.

Ninety years of foot traffic have worn swales into the white marble stairs that descend from street level to the waiting-room floor. And there are the benches, including my mother’s, rank upon rank of them—long, solid, empty, waiting for the glory days to return.

It’s a good place to sit and contemplate your enigmas. You can sense generations of ghosts bustling by, perpetually arriving and departing in that twilight. You can feel their energy still roiling. This is a place you can conjure with.

My mother had a complex, rational, and extremely precise mind. She put herself through teacher’s college by the time she was 18 and the University of Chicago by the time she was 24.

She self-consciously dismissed her trips to their bench as “sentimental journeys.” I think she was embarrassed to give in to something as simple and maudlin as her love for that moment in August of 1944 when, gaunt, war-weary, and wounded, the young man she’d been waiting almost three years to marry was suddenly, safely, and finally there.

He’d spent nearly two years as an infantry scout in the jungles of New Guinea. He’d seen combat. A lot of combat. He’d contracted dengue and malaria. Like every other man in his outfit, he’d expected to die fighting. In May of 1944, he was wounded severely enough to get shipped home and discharged.

Standing there at Union Station three months later, looking at the love of his life, he’d weighed less than 100 pounds and counted himself the luckiest man in the world.

She made her journeys alone well into her eighties, but last year, on the 66th anniversary of the day, my sons and I went with her. She was 92.

I don’t think it was an especially successful trip. Her feelings about the man, their moment, and the place were far too private and subtle for her to express to the phalanx of hulking, less-than-subtle, testosterone-addled descendants who’d accompanied her.

So we sat there on her bench. The enormous room, empty and quiet, echoed the way empty enormous rooms always do. Their small moment was still there, just out of her reach. After a while, we took a cab across the Loop, had lunch, then cabbed back to Union Station and caught the train home. It was to be her last sentimental journey. She died in February.

When the weather turned nice in early May, we buried her ashes with his. This time he’d had to wait for her. The first few returning birds attended. A quarter-mile to the east, truck tires sang on the Tri-State. The cemetery crew waited nearby. Everyone who had something to say had an opportunity to say it. When we were finished, we hugged one another and left.

I haven’t visited her bench since she died, and that’s probably for the best. I would just be intruding. It was her journey, and their moment—just one among millions that have taken place in that room. So I’ll leave them there and leave the story at that before everything slips out of focus again.

Yes. Probably for the best. And besides—I’ve acquired a few small moments and sentimental journeys of my own.

Peter Smith is a Minneapolis-based writer and radio commentator, and author of two books, A Porch Sofa Almanac and A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors.

Buy A Calvacade of Lesser Horrors: Amazon, Skylight, Powell’s

*Photo courtesy of Peter Smith.

The post A Veteran’s Return appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.