News of the Arroyo
Title: | Imagine no cars in Arroyo |
Subtitle: | |
Date: | 2008-01-09 |
Summary: | January 9, 2008 - Larry Wilson fondly reminisces about that foggy morning five years ago when there were no cars on the Arroyo Seco Parkway. |
Author: | Larry Wilson |
Publication: | Pasadena Star-News |
Content: | Recall the morning the Pasadena Freeway was closed to motor vehicles from Glenarm to Highland Park, freeing the parkway for bicyclists and pedestrians to celebrate another way of getting around? So do I - we put a picture of the fog-shrouded start on the front page of the Star-News - and it seems in memory to have been just the other day. But Oxy prof Robert Gottlieb reminded a group of scholars and writers at a lunch on Tuesday that it was actually almost five years ago - June 15, 2003. Gottlieb was one of the organizers of the Arroyo Fest that Father\'s Day morning, and he put a photo of the cyclists and a lone long-distance runner on the cover of his new book, \"Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City.\" He told the gathering, sponsored by Bill Deverell\'s Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, that some people who see it think that he Photoshopped the picture to insert the bikes where surely only heavy traffic should be allowed. And, according to one questioner, there are Southern Californians who still wonder what exactly the morning without cars was supposed to prove. The internal combustions were back by noon that day, after all. And they\'ve been back ever since. But Gottlieb begged to differ. \"It was like when Lewis MacAdams\" - the poet, artist and environmental activist - \"first went down the L.A. River, spreading his arms and saying, `The river lives!\' Did the Advertisement river live? Well, it did in his imagination. It\'s about imagining the possibilities.\" That was my thought entirely as soon as the question was posed. I recalled the full-page ad Yoko Ono bought in a national newspaper the other day. \"Imagine Peace\" was all it said. And why not? If you can\'t imagine it, it\'s unlikely to happen. Ever since MacAdams, who for years now has run the Friends of the Los Angeles River, first imagined the concrete ditch once again becoming a real waterway, it has. People kayak its length. Birds flock to it. Imagine steelhead trout, I say. Gottlieb is an activist academic as opposed to the kind who barely keeps office hours. And he\'s oddly optimistic about a Southern California he sees as now being at the vanguard of environmental change. Unlike social movements of the 1960s and \'70s, he sees this one as being led not by the upper-middle classes but by a group that is already a plurality in Los Angeles: working-class Latinos. As opposed to an essentially NIMBY-oriented approach, he says a new movement wants more housing, not less, in the region. But it wants the housing to be affordable - and Green. He also sees reason for hope in the new emphasis on local and sustainable things to eat - \"one of the most exciting social movements in the country,\" he calls it. His forthcoming book will be titled \"Food Justice.\" And he does have hope that another Arroyo Fest will be held and that there will be more days - maybe lots of them - when what we sometimes now call the Historic Arroyo Seco Parkway is closed to cars. After rejecting a proposed Toyota sponsorship as too crazily ironic, he\'s talking to Kaiser Permanente about a possible sponsorship as part of the health nonprofit\'s emphasis on preventative care. This came after seeing a Kaiser billboard in the Bay Area: it was a Photoshopped picture of Interstate 580 with all the cars removed and just people on it. larry.wilson@sgvn.com http://insidesocal.com/publiceye |
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