Days 45-48 - L.A. Days

It took my second trip to California to finally see Los Angeles. And Santa Monica. Never really had any yearning to go there. It was easier, as an avowed urbanist, to just hate it unseen. As I found out (and, truthfully, as I suspected) there were aspects of the place that I was utterly fond of. Sure, there was eye-rolling audacity. And, in fairness, I was pretty jazzed when we had dinner sitting beside Jon Favreau (Queens kid; Bx HS of Sci class of '84) one night at an upscale sushi joint in Brentwood.

But there were also delightful enclaves of Arts and Crafts houses bracketed by rows of Indian laurel fig trees which are common, handsome street trees in LA. Palm trees may be more numerous, but the Indian laurel fig is more distinctive with its birch paper-colored bark and strong sinuous trunks and branches growing up in erratic directions, like a live oak--or Malcom Gladwell's hair. And the streetsigns in old LA are deco-era cobalt-blue porcelain and enamel-on-iron. The edges of municipalities are gerrymandered into irregular sawtooth patterns here, but you always know when you've drifted back into LA when these beautiful signs reappear on the poles for a block or two or seven.

Megan and I spent some time looking for the iconic, mid-century Stahl house, number 22 in the Case Study House project. We snaked our way up and down some compact car-width switchbacks up and down the road it was supposedly on in the Hollywood Hills. We could tell by the view across LA that we were close, but the house itself seems to now be behind gates to keep the likes of gawkers like us out.

And there isn't much I'll be able to say about the Getty that hasn't already been effused. If you have any interest in line or light, this is a place you must come to. Given one day, I was pleased to see it in sunlight. But I want to return in different seasons, at different times of day, to see how haze or night or a sun setting beyond the Santa Monica mountains plays with the color of the travertine, the curve of the banisters and the woody gardens.