Week 7 - Cypress Park and the LA River

Week 7 - Cypress Park and the LA River

After reading David Harvey's article, "The Environment of Justice" and finding an article in the Los Angeles Times about water pollution laws in the area ( http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-storm-water-20121109,0,4497794.story?track=lanowpicks),  I set out to explore the areas of LA with pollution problems.  I've heard that the Los Angeles river is extremely polluted (when I asked one of my friends to join me on my trip there he responded with, "Isn't that just one big sewage runoff?") and so this week I decided to make a trip to a neighborhood next to the Los Angeles river and see if it was a poorer community, like Harvey's article suggested.

I looked up "LA River" on the maps application of my iPhone and came upon several links to institutions that might be of interest, and the one I figured would be the most informative was titled "Los Angeles River Center and Gardens." Just as I would've guessed from Harvey's article, I ended up in a poorer area of town completely foreign to me, but I think I learned more about social difference by looking for the Los Angeles river in Cypress Park than I have on any of my other trips.

When I did find the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens, it was located on the LA River like I expected and was an information center providing education on the history and environmental issues of the Los Angeles River. The center's beautiful landscape with fountains and gardens was soothing but completely opposed the surrounding neighborhood.

When I got off the highway, I immediately noticed how different the main street, Ave 26, was to any of the main streets I was familiar with - Wilshire, Santa Monica Ave, and Sunset Blvd. all seem relatively clean with lots of nice restaurants, houses and boutiques located on either side of them. In contrast, Ave 26 was littered with trash and had mostly gas stations, fast food restaurants and car shops on the sides of the street. There were a lot more pedestrians - mostly Latino and/or unaccompanied children with their backpacks (most likely coming back from school). The cars were also very different - while high-end luxury vehicles such as BMWs, Bentleys, Lexus and  Mercedes fill the streets of Wilshire, Santa Monica and Sunset, most of the cars on Ave 26 were older models of more affordable brands like Ford, Honda and Nissan. The buses that I saw were the red buses that I normally see on highways, not the blue buses of Santa Monica that I'm used to seeing near Westwood. There were also many more of them on Ave 26 than I had ever seen on Wilshire, Santa Monica Ave. or Sunset Blvd. The abundance of police and security vehicles found in the areas of Westwood, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica were not at all as common in Arroyo Seco. In fact, I did not see one police car the entire time I was there. 

Here is an abandoned grocery cart with
 trash filled in it on the side of Ave 26.

3 gas stations, an IHOP and a McDonalds
on one corner of Ave 26. 

Here they have barbed wire fences outside of their business
 instead of hired security.

I'm embarrassed to say that in spite all of all I've learned about stereotypes and social differences, the second I saw Ave 26 and noticed all of the above differences I was terrified. I felt completely out of place as a white upper-middle class female in a poorer community that housed a lower-income demographic. Without the policing I was used to in Westwood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and other areas near me, I felt insecure and unsafe. In short, I experienced first-hand the carceral archipelago talked about in class and wanted to leave Arroyo Seco the second I got off the highway. Interestingly enough, the flourishing LA downtown district was only 5 minutes away from Ave 26. In fact, if I had stayed on the highway, I never would have seen any part of Arroyo Seco and continued on to Pasadena without noticing any poverty at all. Only after learning about the decentralization of the 4th urban revolution and reading Friedrich Engels, "The Great Towns" do I know that it was purposefully designed that way so that the upper-classes that do not want to see poverty don't have to.

It was interesting to me that the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens was located in Cypress Park instead of another community next to the river and although I have no concrete evidence, I have a guess as to why the center was located in this area in particular. Unless you pay to host a private event there, admission is free into the center and therefore most of the funding comes from Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. I was at first curious why the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy wouldn't locate this center in a nicer area to attract more visitors, but then realized that this location was probably the most affordable. As Harvey explains in "The Environment of Justice," capital accumulation and pollution are positively correlated. The article I mentioned earlier in in the Los Angeles Times further confirms this. Therefore, it's likely that the conservancy doesn't receive much funding. Upper-class citizens and large corporations are more unlikely to donate to a conservancy than to other public institutions because environmental conservation limits their ability to accumulate wealth. Also, Harvey's article claims that environmental pollution normally gets dumped on the poorer communities, so as a center trying to prevent pollution, the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens probably chose to locate somewhere that was most effected by the pollution - specifically Cypress Park.