We were staying in the central city area, where the street grid was laid out far before the age of the automobile. As a result, most of the so-called "streets" looked to my West Coast eyes like narrow alleys; nearly all of them are single one-way lanes, often with parking on just one side, or neither side. Over and over, we'd make a turn into what I took for a driveway, only to tool along for blocks on what turned out to be what the locals consider an actual street. And of course the impression of crowding is very much enhanced by the towering office buildings looming on all sides, which are also unusual to my LA-accustomed eyes; we keep our skyscrapers in one tiny area downtown, where nobody ever goes. :)
This especially struck me when I got back to LA last night. As my taxi headed up La Cienega, I was very aware of how wide it was, how low the buildings on either side were, the broad sweep of the sky above, the Hollywood Hills ranged across the horizon ahead of me. It felt open, expansive. And then I remembered returning from a previous Kaaba in Tucson, a city of enormously broad boulevards and low, isolated buildings set in sprawling lots. Coming home from that trip, on that same stretch of La Cienega, I was impressed by how close together the buildings were, how they crowded the street, many with two or three floors, all nestled tightly around the narrow, traffic-thick lanes of the road.
Amazing how little of the unusual it takes to make the ordinary seem new again.
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