[ 1 9 2 6 ] Today Los Angeles exempted by popular vote its new City Hall from the prevailing 150-foot building height limit, so it could climb up to almost three time that height, equivalent to 32 stories, and fix the then unremarkable skyline. Two other buildings were also exempted: the Hall of Justice and the United States Post office. Both of them were built substantially lower than City Hall, and so did not challenge its pre-eminence. The 150-foot limit, first set in 1911, remained in effect, primarily because of earthquake fears, until 1956 when it was lifted by an amendment to the city charter. As a consequence, skyscraper construction bypassed Los Angeles which alone among majore American cities has nothing to show of the national crop of several generations of highrises. (Entry No. 1)
He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room alone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world silence. (Entry No. 2)
The health-seeker who, after suffering in both mind and body, after vainly trying the cold climate of Minnesota and the warm climate of Florida, after visiting Mentone, Cannes, and Nice, after traveling to Cuba and Algiers, and noticing that he is losing ounce upon ounce of flesh, that his cheeks grow more sunken, his appetite more capricious, his breath more hurried, that his temperature is no longer normal . . . , turns with a gleam of hope toward the Occident. (Entry No. 3)
A place which lends itself so readily to transformation is by its very nature a fragile environment. Casual Southern California living hinges at best on a harmonious interplay of cool ocean breezes and warm desert air. A protracted period of Santa Ana winds, when air is drawn down and baked on the mountain slopes then suffused over the lower lands, can be disastrous, as can an overly wet rainly season. Rain usually appears in good amounts (often causing landslides) in the winter months, but when it does not (and it often does not) water must be hoarded in almost every areas except Los Angeles, which in the early part of this century literally bought the Owens River Valley to the north and dried it up in order to get a constant water supply from the High Sierra. (Entry No. 4) |
