Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Barriers, Real & Imagined Part 1

The thoroughly acclaimed Western Heights Tour is past. Receipts are being totaled, home owners are catching up on lost zzz's, docents are resting their strained larynges. But an iota of controversy remains. A primary tour focus was to raise money for permanent, landscaped, traffic-calming features--full and partial street closures.

Such a thing wouldn't raise eyebrows in Brentwood, Bradbury, or Bixby Knolls, but in anti-establishment West Adams, anything that smacks of elitism or exclusion comes under instant fire (and rightly so, I say). Several West Adams area neighborhoods (most notably Victoria Park and LaFayette Square) have already closed off streets, mostly in an effort to abate non-resident cut-through traffic. The Victoria gates (like the Van Buren Place cul de sac) block the sidewalks as well. These are not gated communities, like Fremont Place or the late/great Chester Place, with sentry shacks and restricted pedestrian access; but for some they're discomfortingly similar.

Personally, I'm in favor of traffic-calming measures. Not just for Western Heights, but for all the Near West downtown neighborhoods, from the Crenshaw corridor East, and on beyond zebra.

West Adams was especially defiled by the 10 freeway*, saddled with five on/off ramps in a measly two-and-a-half mile span: Arlington, Western, Normandie, Vermont, Hoover. Residential streets like Arlington/Wilton and Normandie were resultingly tranformed into key North-South arteries (which resulted in additional malevolence). Residents ought to be able to consider compensatory measures.

To Be Continued....

*Nobody, but nobody got sucker-punched like Boyle Heights, bearer of the 5, 10, and 60 freeways.

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