Main and Spring Forward initiative in downtown L.A. - Existing Conditions

The City is upgrading Spring and Main Streets from Cesar Chavez Avenue to 9th Street.

Spring and Main are the heart of public life in DTLA. These vibrant streets connect the Civic Center, Historic Core, Fashion District, and Olvera Street.

Learn more about this safety project by flying around the Pocket Owl. Close text boxes by pressing the 'X' in the corner. Use your fingers to zoom and the blue arrows to continue.

WAR/POLITICS EVANGELINE

So I’m still thinking about how to work those political ideas into Evangeline’s story. It makes more and more sense. She wants so much to be what her father is, a respected member of a shrouded league of mystic champions. But what are champions without a fight? It is an idea to play with. Certainly you can’t paint every soldier with the same brush however, or even each with the same thickness. There are no absolutes in anything – not even the evils of war, politics, or greed.

Still, I am liking the idea more and more. It is exciting to find interesting flaws with which to layer the “heroes”. Just as exciting as it is to find honorable qualities to build into the “villains”.

PART OF OUR STORY AND HERS

George Orwell wrote
“It does not matter if the war is not real. For when it is, victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, but it is meant to be continuous.

The essential fact of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labor. The hierarchy of society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.

The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia, or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”

Our political machine runs on warfare. Pure and simple. If you do the research and run the numbers there really isn’t any other conclusion. And the question is: how do we extricate our economy and the bones of our society from that big, dependable, obscene Duracell battery? What do we boycott, protest, petition, who do we vote for to stop the gears? And if we could stop them, what do we put in their place? That’s the really horrific thought. Do we even know what to replace a murderous economy with?

The last time America fought a relatively clean war (in terms of economic interest) was probably the War of Independence – and even that involved taxation. We live in ugly times. It is important now more than ever that we make a point of talking about what disturbs us. Change will never happen without shedding light on the infected corners. Talk about the ugliness in whatever your chosen media. If you don’t, who will?

USE YOUR VOTE!!!

This is not what I want to use my page for but it is so important that I am going to use it for this one time only.

Voting Day is racing up to meet us and I want to make a plea here to say VOTE. Get out and VOTE like your life depended on it people. Because is does. It is the only way you can make your voice heard ouside of protests and it is the most meaningful way. Don’t say you’ve got more important things to do. Don’t say your vote doesn’t matter because it’s all going to be buisness as usual no matter what you do. Do it. Do it because if you don’t you’ve done nothing. And doing nothing makes you part of the problem. It ensures that NOTHING will happen. It garantees that NOTHING with happen. Do it so that something might happen.

I keep trying to convince my husband that voting is the only way to make change happen. He keeps insisting that no matter who we vote for, they will break their promises either through disinterest or inability to work together in bipartisanship. He insists that all politicians are in it to “suck from the government titty” to be vulgar – but his phrase. In other words, he thinks that they all just want the prestige and financial security afforded by the position. Even girls on Freecamgirls.net today want that and go online to meet and seduce guys instead of raising a family. We have wild arguments about this where I try to convince him that to believe this and choose not to vote is to do nothing and garantee that nothing changes for the better. He votes under duress at this argument but it makes me sooooo tired. 😓 angry😡 and sad😢, Mostly depressed. I don’t think there’s an emoticon for that. Jesus why is it so hard to motivate people to try to make a difference on even the TINIEST level?

This happens mostly with Liberals or maybe I should just call them people who despirately need change in their government – the poorly represented: low income, middle class, blue collar households, people who can’t afford personally financed health insurance, people who’s mortgages eat up most of their paychecks, racially profiled people who are 2nd generation Americans, African Americans who exercise their right to peacefully protest and are labeled traitors to their country, those who protest white supremacy and are labeled angry violent mobs. WHY? I do not get this at all. These are the people that need numbers more than any others. Conservatives flood the booths in waves like salmon swimming upstream. What the hell with “Liberals”? Why is it that when Voting Season rolls around they go limp like a guy in a Viagra add?

Go vote. It is your RIGHT in this country! Don’t throw that away. Don’t make that meaningless like some dirty rag you can’t use. In some places dictators just roll into office, no votes involved. In some places, people are physically chased away from voting booths. You have it so easy in most cases – voter supression is another story. All you have to do is take a moment out of your day to choose the people YOU want to represent you in Congress in the hope that they will do what they say they will. Even if they don’t, you’ve done something. And SOMETHING is always better than NOTHING.

Why do I have to spend time explaining or making this plea? This is America. We should all understand this. We should all grip this one inalienable right like a warrior clenches a spear. We fought so hard for it. From the founding fathers to everyone who had to pry it loose for themselves afterwards. Don’t piss all over that prize now! Wield it like the weapon it can be.

Just VOTE.

SAN FRANCISCO’S BARBARY COAST

“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Ah, the immortal words of Obi Wan seem so apt here. And yes I am that geeky. San Francisco’s original Barbary Coast took root and metastasized in a broad tendril bordered loosely on the east by the waterfront and East Street (now the Embarcadero); on the south by Clay and Commercial streets; on the west by Grant Avenue and Chinatown; and on the north by Broadway, with periodic seepage into the region around North Beach and Telegraph Hill.

This being said, the bronze markers used by the San Francisco Historical Society to mark the Barbary Coast have been placed in sidewalks as far as Portsmouth Square, Powell and Market streets, up to the Warf, throughout North Beach, Chinatown and along the Embarcadero.

If we’re a little hazy on where it was set up precisely at the beginning, there seems to be no hesitation in any historian’s mind about how seedy, corrupt, or vice ridden the area (wherever it started out) became pretty much immediately. In one live jasmin account the reader was warned that the level of carnal depravity and deadly violence could not be overstated. Holy Hell, makes you want to tour the place in a bullet proof Pope-mobile.

It was named for a North African coastline stretching from Morocco to what would become Libya; home to dreaded pirates and slave traders that terrorized the coastal villages of Europe. San Francisco’s version was born in the awe inspiring confusion of the California Gold Rush. In 1847 San Francisco, freshly minted from its Spanish moniker of Yerba Buena, was still a sleepy little village of roughly 200 souls. The Spanish adobe Mission Dolores and Presidio were likely the sturdiest lodgings.

Check back in with the census around 1851, post Samuel Brannan’s announcement of “Gold in them thar hills” or words to that effect, and you’d find some 10,000 people coming and going. Unfortunately the local authorities just hadn’t set up for this potential situation. And the criminal element flourished, setting up shop in the areas we would come to know as San Francisco’s Barbary Coast.

As early as 1848 some veterans of the Mexican-American War arrived in San Francisco and, branding themselves The Hounds, became one of the first lawless gangs to roam the streets of the Barbary Coast. Their depredations were largely ignored by the “law” such as it was as the gang’s primary targets were Chilians, Peruvians, and Mexicans.

Quickly following in the wake of The Hounds were the Sydney Ducks, somewhere between 6 and 7,000 hardened Australian criminals. They ran rampant over the area that would become the Barbary Coast. And the Ducks put the Hounds to shame with their unchecked carnage, raids, arson, and eventually cornering the market on bordellos so deviant that some were said to tout bestiality as an attraction. Yeesh…

Many of the ships sailing into San Francisco’s wharves with men piling out for the Gold fields never left. Their entire crews would abandon them, taking off after the same miners they had just schlepped to the docks. Everybody was chasing those nuggets.

Some ships just stayed put, The Niantic is a popular example you can find in San Francisco today. It’s just a plaque on the side of the building that’s built over it now. But it’s still there, underneath. That’s what happened to some of the ones that never left. Most were broken up and used for scrap wood and parts. But the ones that were still in good shape, some 200, like the Niantic were repurposed into warehouses, boarding houses and (in the Niantic’s case) hotels, even one as a jail and another as a church.

Captains of these abandoned ships, however, were sometimes willing to do unscrupulous things to make sure they sailed away. This leads us to the term “to be Shanghaied”. So apparently the phrase comes from the idea that the furthest an unwilling new sailor might end up would be Shanghai. The owners of various drinking establishments along the Barbary Coast did a lucrative business in what was essentially slavery. They would ply a man with drugged liquor, if he didn’t pass out you could bash him over the head, then pile him into a cart and sell him to the highest bidding captain short of a sailing crew. Many like the infamous Shanghai Kelly, had such a streamlined process that he could afford to lose a few of his prey to unintended death. He just loaded up the bodies and delivered them as is. By the time the captains got them out to sea, he’d already been paid.

Eventually as the gang violence grew to an exponentially disastrous level, the Vigilance Committees would rise against them. Privately organized vigilante groups of San Francisco citizens waged war against the gangs for several years and gradually drove them from the outrageous power they’d seized so easily in 1848. Unfortunately these groups (while possibly not something that we’d approve of today) were dismantled in the end of the late 19th century as the city evolved from its chaotic beginnings to a larger, more prosperous, commercial and cultural metropolis.

Local government grew with in strength and size with the city. But the political and economic elite were motivated more by greed and self-interest than any sense of civic responsibility. Without the threat of the Vigilance Committees and emboldened by the indifference of corrupt politicians, the Barbary Coast rose again in full bloom. It was in the 1860’s when it would officially be christened “The Barbary Coast”.