We stayed a week with a good university friend of mine in West Hollywood (“WeHo”), a trendy part of LA. He’s been super successful in a number of fields and has made LA his home for the last few years. Ella and I were keen to spend some time with him, catch a glimpse of his LA life, and do a little touristing.
We started in LA’s downtown.
First stop was a Grand Central Market – a hundred year old marketplace with about 40 vendors selling a range of tempting stuff. It was classy.
Nearby, we found a Blue Bottle Coffee cafe. The US chain seems to have carved out a place in the premium segment of the coffee market – promising recently-roasted single-origin beans in all their coffees. The coffee I had was outstanding. They’ve made some waves in Japan and Korea, too. Nestle now owns a big stake.
LA’s downtown felt a little seedy, and we decided not to stray too far. We did find some great architecture. Below is the City Hall – an iconic looking building completed in 1928. Buildings dating back that far were built without earthquake-protecting materials or techniques. Along with a number of old government buildings on the west coast, in the late 1990s, LA’s city hall went through a “seismic retrofit” to try and protect it from future earthquakes.
The San Andreas fault runs for 1,200 kilometres through California. This fault is formed by two continental plates pushing against each other – the Pacific Plate (moving north) and the North American Plate (moving south). They move at about 30mm per year. Pressure builds over time and jarring moves can produce mean earthquakes. The San Andreas fault has three sections. The northernmost section runs along the San Francisco Bay area, while the southernmost section starts northeast of LA and runs down to Mexico. The faultline doesn’t run through LA, but its close enough to be devastating. The only section to not experience a big earthquake in the last 300 years is the southern one, and some seismologists say the area is overdue.
We also spotted the Walt Disney Concert Hall close by.
My friend showed us a couple of his favourite spots in the city. One was Guisados taco restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. Excellent tacos.
Another was just called “Farmers Market” with neighboring “The Grove”. Great food stalls and an outdoor shopping mall.
We also wandered around Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills is actually a separate city from LA, although its surrounded on all sides by the metropolis. There are a few reasons for this – an interesting one being ‘water’. LA never had enough natural water for its burgeoning population. This goes back to the 1890s when oil discoveries in the city brought an influx of immigrants. The city built the ambitious Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, bringing water all the way from east California. Today, the aqueduct is almost 700km in length. The city’s charter was worded such that LA could not sell or provide surplus water to any area outside the city itself. As neighbouring areas developed, they quickly joined Los Angeles to access the city’s water.
Beverly Hills is a bit of an anomaly. It was founded on the hopes that riches of black gold (oil) would be found under its surface. This didn’t materialise. However, they did find sufficient blue gold (water), and quickly shifted into housing and community developments. With its own supply of water, it resisted being annexed by LA.
Beverly Hills is now, of course, home to many of LA’s rich and famous. The list of celebrity residents is impressive in the 90210 zip code. We did a little mansion-spotting while cruising the palm-tree lined streets north of Santa Monica Boulevard.
Rodeo Drive is Beverly Hills’ fashion shopping mecca. On a sweltering hot day, we strolled past Rodeo’s luxury shops and stopped in at the original Cheesecake Factory restaurant for a coffee and a slice. From that one store, the chain has expanded to 215 stores with well over $2 billion in revenues.
We spent a morning at Venice Beach, one of LA’s weirdest neighbourhoods. It was founded by a tobacco millionaire Abbot Kinney in 1905 as a tourism-focused beach resort town – very loosely in the image of Venice, Italy. It soon had canals, a pier with amusement rides, restaurants, dance halls, an aquarium and streets with Venetian architecture. But the ‘Disneyland of its day’ fell on hard times. By the 1950s, it became known as the “Slum by the Sea”.
Today, Venice has gone through patchy gentrification. Parts of it look like a dump, while others look amazing. Some of the original canals remain and look really cool:
But it’s Venice’s beachfront that is the real spectacle. I’ll let the pictures do the talking:
Venice is an odd place. While I certainly had my safety sensors up, it was still fascinating. It seems like the strangest mix of people and activities – a truly unique place. Out of this strange place came some brilliant music groups like ‘The Doors’. We met up with two of Ella’s friends and had a good meal at a trendy burger spot near the beach.
From Venice, a short drive north takes you to Santa Monica, another city completely surrounded by Los Angeles. It’s a far more upmarket area, with a beautiful beach and a world famous century-old amusement pier. Santa Monica Pier holds a ferris wheel, small rollercoasters, a big arcade, a carousel, and other attractions, along with a range of food and drinks spots. On the beautiful summer day we were there, the pier was jam-packed.
Santa Monica is also the end of the famed Route 66. The 4,000 kilometre highway starts in Chicago, passes through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona before ending in Santa Monica. It has become a symbol for the ‘Great American Road-trip’, or simply an escape or a new start. By 1985, Route 66 was sidelined by the new system of interstate highways. Today only parts of the original route remain. More on this later.
We had an awesome time exploring the mighty Los Angeles. It feels more like a collection of different interesting places that all happen to be next door to each other, and makes for a great tourist destination. But our stay wasn’t quite over yet. We still had one more adventure – the one and only Disneyland…