David L. Ulin - Sidewalking: coming to terms with Los Angeles

The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream.

Virginia Woolf

There is a church I like on Cochran Avenue. Little street-corner church, adobe-style, like a mission in some minor key. I discovered it during a walk in the neighborhood, one of the interminable loops by which I mark my place in this city, east on Packard out to Cochran, south toward Pico and back around, the whole thing one vast circle, a walkabout, a songline, a way to meander my universe into being. Then one afternoon, I broke the pattern and rather than heading south, I went north, where I found the church. This morning, going against all convention, I turned right instead of left, Sven Birkerts writes in The Other Walk , describing his own inadvertent rewiring of a common saunter. Going against the grain of my usual track, seeing every single thing from the other side, was suddenly welcome. Suddenly welcome, yes, but alsofor me, at leasta means of turning the walk into a journey of discovery again. We walk, or I do, to pay attention, to see the streets, the buildings that surround us, to immerse ourselves in a world that might otherwise slip by. And yet, the paradox is that the more we walk, the less we notice, the more the passing landscape blurs to indistinction, like the backdrop in a Road Runner cartoon. Thats especially true of Los Angeles, this thirty-five-mile-per-hour city, where the very notion of the street as public space remains alien somehow. I think of Joan Didion: A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease. Shes right, of course, although what she neglects to say is just how institutionalized this process is, in a city where we can leave our homes and drive to work, to dinner, to the movies without ever stepping outside.

Anyway, the church. I fell for it from the moment I saw it, on the corner of Cochran and Packard, built into the slow slope of a hill. There was the dome of the bell tower, faded gilt, stained glass windows brown as mica, the building stretching back half a block or so, deceptive in its depth. Even more, there was the way it fit into the neighborhoodor not the neighborhood, exactly, but the block. East of the church on Cochran was what looked like a low-slung rectory, and just beyond that, a two-story apartment house, eight units maybe, pallid stucco, flat and hulking, with a red tile roof. All three buildings looked as though theyd been put up in the 1930s, that golden age of California urban architecture, utilitarian and beautiful at once. This is the California of my first infatuation, imprinted when I was eighteen and living in San Francisco, a city I once wandered like a mendicant, memorizing its sidewalks through the soles of my feet. I remember coming across block after block much like this one: apartments next to street-corner churches. In San Francisco, the buildings were bigger, four or five stories, and cleaner, framing the Marina or Pacific Heights in blinding white. Still, there was something about this streetscape, its whisper of density, which brought me back to all those peregrinations through that other city, the randomness, the serendipity of urban space. Above the buildings, the sky was hooded, overcast, San Francisco weather, as if a fog were moving in. If I squinted, I could almost see it, one city bleeding through another, an imago, an unexpected trace.