KCET: A Los Angeles Primer – MacArthur Park
KCET has published a great essay by Colin Marshall on the MacArthur Park area – it’s really beautifully written, capturing the essence of our neighborhood in 2013, and an important addition to his book-in-progress, “A Los Angeles Primer: Mastering the Stateless City.” Here’s a sampling of the quality of his writing:
Still, whatever problems MacArthur Park had accumulated by the eighties, life there beat life in a war-torn Central American republic. The immigrants of that era must certainly have felt the same way as they turned up to re-create the best of the small, troubled countries they’d fled. The occasional Korean proprietor aside, its malls, stalls, and swap meets look, sound, and feel indistinguishable from those I’ve experienced in Latin America. With the sight of wall-to-wall activewear, luggage, hair tonics, square-toed shoes, and curative devotional so central to my experience of the neighborhood, I can hardly imagine it any other way.
But right there on the corner of Seventh and Alvarado, a living relic of of an entirely different time has stood since 1947: Langer’s Delicatessen, home of the only hot pastrami sandwich West and East Coast food critics can agree on. And only thanks to the return of rail do we have even it. The Red Line subway, locally dubbed the “Pastrami Express”, entered service in 1993, immediately bringing back the hungry workers who had otherwise long since stopped going near the place. Sitting down for a meal at Langer’s, its interior so immaculately preserved that almost resembles a theme park’s simulacrum of lunchtime postwar urban America, takes you back to a time when, if the park still had so many fire-and-brimstone preachers, then at least they probably didn’t bring loudspeakers.
Thank you, Colin! – The Langers
