GELFAND’S WORLD-A belated report: The city of Los Angeles has never been much of a leader in terms of New Year's Eve parties in the public venue. We are more tuned in to the ball dropping in Times Square on coast to coast television than to anything around here. Over the last couple of New Years, the recently refurbished area called Grand Park has become the place to be, or at least it is the place that some civic leaders would like to be the place to be. I attended the Grand Park party as the old year ended and the new year began, and it was a mixed bag. Curiously, it was the LAMTA that got my vote for best performance.
The background is fairly simple. Grand Park is a fairly recent upgrade of the hillside that slopes downward from the Music Center to the back steps of the LA City Hall. It has been promoted and publicized, in spite of the fact that it doesn't have a ferris wheel or a merry-go-round, and, to put it mildly, precious little in the way of food services. On the other hand, it covers a good bit of ground and is served by rail, light and heavy, not to mention freeways and bus lines. It is a place that is fairly easy to get to without a car, if you have access to any of those public transportation lines.
For some reason, the city fathers opened Grand Park to the public for the previous New Year's Eve (2013-14), apparently not expecting many people to turn out, but wanting to show at least some effort at public celebration. To most everyone's surprise, the crowd was a couple of tens of thousands, and the system wasn't really designed to handle their needs. News reports tell us of inadequate food services resulting in long lines. This year's party, it was promised, would include lots of booths selling food, multiple bands in different locations, and a twenty-first century rendition of a light show and countdown projected on the walls of our very own City Hall.
CityWatch was represented at the event, at least by me. Figuring that going by car would be a trial, and finding parking would be like serving a sentence, I investigated public transportation. As generations of my science fair students have said, I went on the internet and did my research. I decided to look into repeating a journey I took years ago, to wit, the Blue Line. The Blue Line was one of the first of the modern MTA projects and is oddly placed for me as a harbor resident, as it serves that other harbor, the one known as Long Beach.
Still, it is the closest light rail line that could get a San Pedro resident to downtown Los Angeles.
Guess what I found out? The MTA made its system free starting at 9 PM on New Year's Eve. They promised to keep the system going all night, and to keep everything free until 2 AM. Definitely a cool idea, and as things turned out, it actually made sense.
The other thing I found out was that there is a giant parking lot at the Willow Street station, and it too was free. Ordinarily, north Long Beach is kind of a long way to go for park and ride, but December 31 was a piece of cake as long as you stayed out of the downtown part of Long Beach, which was hosting a party of its own.
What was unusual for Los Angeles was that the rail lines were full of people on their way to the party. The Blue Line got to the Purple Line, and there were hordes of people in New Year's Eve raiment (another one of those words I've been looking for a place to use all these years). There were families with children, and couples, and lone wolves, and young women dressed in party clothes. We were all of course freezing, because it was about the coldest night in living memory, but still it was kind of fun.
And when we got to the Red Line station, there were more thousands of people.
And Grand Park was packed.
One thing I will say for the city fathers, they did figure out to line an entire block with porta-potties and hand sanitizer stations.
Grand Park has a Starbucks, and this being such a frigid night, there was a line around the side of the building and running another hundred people or so along the back.
There was, in fact, a food court lined with lots of food booths. It was curiously dark. Perhaps this was somebody's idea of not interfering with the lights projected onto City Hall, but it was a strange experience nevertheless. And the lines were endless. So I took a walk a little further down, towards another collection of food booths.
I never got any food at the Grand Park fest, but I did run into what we used to call a blast from the past. There was a small collection of people who were there to protest. One of them had what he described as a 750 watt projector. It was powered by an automotive battery, and it threw a bright light on the side of the new LA Police station. And the messages it projected were out of some 1960s incarnation. "Disarm the police" it said. In a more modern vein, that message alternated with "Black lives matter." One woman walked around with a cell phone video camera, reciting her own narrative of how bad the sheriffs are.
One sheriff deputy walked up to the people with the projector and suggested that they were doing something against the rules. He was repaid with some fairly aggressive and rude words from a couple of people. It seemed strange, this being a night when total strangers were offering me hugs and telling me "Happy New Year." And here was a man telling the deputy to f**k himself.
It all seemed a bit dated, and I was impressed to see that the deputy kept his own cool. When I spoke to the deputy, he interpreted the attitude of the protesters towards himself: "I'm less than human because I'm wearing a uniform."
That kind of said it all, in an evening where most folks were trying to create a public camaraderie that is ordinarily a lot more thin.
By then, it was nearing midnight, and the giant countdown was being projected in lights on the side of the City Hall. It hit midnight, and the light show on the side of the City Hall was of some sort of luminescent waterfall or the like. And right in the middle of the official light show, there was the competing projection by the protesters of "Disarm the police." And there were ten or twenty thousand people yelling "Happy New Year" and singing and kissing, and noticing the protest without really feeling it.
So Los Angeles was a center of freedom of speech and without official violence that I could see, in spite of the taunts of the protesters.
I kind of wondered whether there is some kind of legal principle that would make light pollution a chargeable offense, particularly when it was fully intended to interfere with an official public event. No matter, because the authorities kept their cool, and nobody else much noticed.
And then there was getting home. It's hard to describe the Redline station packed solid with people, all trying to get down an escalator and get to the track level below. Somehow I made it, and when the Purple Line arrived (my link to the Blue Line), everybody who wanted to get on managed to get on. I may have to rethink my views on the carrying capacity of these devices.
The Purple Line, for the two stops I rode, wasn't bad, although it has all the plusses and minuses that light rail enjoys. The Blue Line was a different matter. First of all, it's starting to show its age, and it's a slow journey at best, counting fifteen stops between the 7th Street station and the northern end of Long Beach. The journey was also made more interesting by the fact that a couple of people had obviously had a little too much to drink, and one got downright belligerent in an entertaining sort of way. Peacemakers intervened, and everyone got where they were going. Still, it is an event, if not exactly an amusing adventure, to be confronted with human unpleasantness on a conveyance where you are basically trapped among wall to wall people. But somehow things got sorted out, peace won out, and everybody got off saying Happy New Year to total strangers.
As I said above, the LAMTA gets the award for opening its system to the public for free, and hosting its own citywide party.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 4
Pub: Jan 13, 2015
