Defining Neighborhoods in Los Angeles
A radio documentary told in three parts: The Forgotten, the Persevering and the Undefined.
My father’s an engineer and designs neighborhoods in Ocala, Florida, where I grew up. I worked for him a few years ago and helped lay out the grid of lots and streets. The designs required planning and shrewdness, but the product lacked something.
Sometimes, the subdivisions we built in Central Florida felt lifeless. Some would be built, homes would go up and nobody would move in. Overambitious developers blamed the economy, but seeing a network of roads and homes and only one car in front of one driveway for years took away from the original conceit. These neighborhoods were built with the idea that people would move in and a community would form.
What it takes to make a neighborhood a success is a question that has intrigued me from then on.
Los Angeles offers some answers. Where Ocala offered space, LA offered sprawl. Neighborhoods here have character, they have history. They have what the ones I made lacked. They have soul.
Communities in Los Angeles have an identity. They are alive. Someone can name Echo Park or Koreatown or Glendale and you know exactly what they mean. You know what you’re in for: the food, the stores and the feel.
In a massive metropolis, space is at a premium. Many of neighborhoods here were born out of a lack of space, people cornered and cramped in the little pockets of LA that were left.
Others were born out of necessity, the only place the residents could afford. Others bare testimony to L.A.’s racist past, the only place people of color could live because of neighborhood covenants that barred them from other parts of the city.
Now Los Angeles is made up of the world. It is a microcosm of 180 different nations, with 140 languages spoken. It is a unification of the globe. It often seems that every few blocks a new nationality, and a new chance to explore the world, opens up on the cheap.
Many of these neighborhoods began as ethnic enclaves or places where newly immigrated groups gathered and made a new home in a new land.
The vast city is made up of these neighborhoods, many still directly tied to a nationality or ethnic region across the globe. From Little Ethiopia to Little Bangladesh, Historic Filipinotown to Chinatown and two Japanese neighborhoods (think “Little Tokyo,” but I’ll get to that), there are dozens of mini-nations from around the world.
These areas serve as home bases, meeting places and economic regions.
Los Angeles embraces its diversity. The city celebrates its cultures and allows them to celebrate how they want, whether it’s the Persian New Year on the Westside or Chinese New Year in Chinatown.
Every few blocks, a new part of town, a new neighborhood with a new look, and a new blue and white city sign boldly declaring its place.
Neighborhoods spread across Los Angeles like a quilt, each community a patch that stands on its own, but together makes a complex and cohesive work. People live beside and on top of one another, embracing culture and community unlike their own.
In an increasingly xenophobic landscape, the richness of Los Angeles’ neighborhoods, proclaims that America is strong because of its diversity.
This is a story about three neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Each with a different cultural makeup and definition of what neighborhood means. What role does LA play for people seeking a better life? And how does sprawl strengthen these cultural connections?
Hear stories from the Forgotten, the Persevering and the Undefined to see how the people of these communities continue to define place in LA.
“Where we are is like the crossroads of so many different cultures.
— Marianna Gatto
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