Street Photography: The Broadway Project (7/16/08)

 Since late 2006, I’ve been taking photographs of a six-block stretch of Broadway St. in downtown Los Angeles. For a photographer with an eye for detail and an affinity for the ebb and flow of urban street life, this is fertile ground. Once considered a jewel of the city, the Historic Theater District of Los Angeles, located between 3rd and 9th streets, has in recent years become a rundown stretch of partially or completely abandoned office spaces and sweatshops overlooking a retail, wholesale and informal-sector marketplace. Broadway is a veritable repository of cultural iconography, eclectically diverse yet steeped in traditional urban pathos. Once proud buildings with ornate and chiseled artifices stand as defiant monuments to the urban decay that has left many of them hollowed shells.  Jewelry, electronics and clothing shops tend to the needs of a multi-cultural working class. The music that blares out of the shops reminds you that Spanish is the dominant language on the street, but the businesspeople are from everywhere. The well-worn sidewalks are swept with straw brooms, as metal security doors are raised and lowered each dusk and dawn. With a fairly large concentration of homeless and disabled people, and its share of street hustlers and drunks mixed in among the baby-strollers, bicycle cops, small newsstands and ice cream carts, Broadway has the environment of cities in what is sometimes called the developing world. It can be boisterous; it can also seem desolate. And seminal to the work of the street photographer, you can even find banality, providing you don’t look too hard.

 

The general atmosphere is one of economic neglect and decline, but change is in the air. Perceptible improvements in the face of the district are gradually taking place.  City officials, businesspeople and representatives of various concerned parties have started a movement called Bringing Back Broadway. The goal of this group is to return Broadway, situated just to the east of the more upscale downtown, to a position of prominence as an economic and entertainment center. As wonderful as this will be for the image and economic well being of Los Angeles, all of this proposed development will likely and inevitably bring about the displacement of people that currently fill the sidewalks, or rent street level shops. Not that it’s not fun now, but the trolley cars will be back, and a new class of folks will stroll well-lit avenues, frequenting swanky restaurants and trendy boutiques. Success hinges on many factors, none more crucial than the theaters themselves, some of which feature the most dramatic architecture and interior design found in Los Angeles. They are the draw that will drive development. Of the eleven historic theaters located between 3^rd and 9^th streets, only one, The Orpheum, is fully operational. Another is in use as a Spanish-language church, while two others are used sparingly as movie houses and concert halls as they undergo renovations. Others are being used as warehouses for retail outlets that open from the sidewalk under marquis that are either neglected or have been refashioned into advertisements. In the meantime, abandoned office spaces, gutted and dusty inside buildings dating from the early 20^th Century, are being renovated into pricey lofts and condos. The turquoise art-deco style Eastern Building, where condominiums are selling for as high as a $1.9 million, stands incongruously at Broadway and 9^th streets, looking like something out of 1920s Manhattan, acting as both a reminder of the glorious past and a harbinger of the neighborhood’s projected renewed glory.  The huge, drab building next door, originally a Macy’s, is now where countless workers toil in dozens of sweatshops above an indoor swap meet. A woman working as a tailor in a shop facing the street told me with relief that since the development began, security in the area is better.