http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-050106immig_lat,0,6938733.story?coll=la-home-headlines
The... bizarre... line is in the second graph:
Immigration Dissent Sweeps L.A. and the Nation
By Michael Muskal, Times Staff Writer
4:06 PM PDT, May 1, 2006
More than 300,000 undocumented workers and their supporters demonstrated today in Los Angeles and flexed their political and economic muscles in support of an overhaul of national immigration policy.The demonstration was smaller than the weekend rally that attracted half of a million people to City Hall in March. But tens of thousands more demonstrated in the city's neighboring areas and a protest now underway along Wilshire Boulevard was drawing thousands more....
... Those congregating in front of City Hall had marched blocks through downtown, where seldom is anyone seen walking.
Excuse me???
The march to City Hall started at Olympic and Broadway and marched the length of Broadway until it reached City Hall. So this writer is saying they marched down the heart of Broadway, where - he claims - no one is ever walking.
Now to say that people are seldom seeen walking in any part of downtown is clearly not true - but to state that seldom is anyone seen walking along Broadway - one of the most pedestrian packed streets in the entire city - is something so mind-staggeringly wrong ... it could only be found written in the Los Angeles Times.
That's really true and just really sloppy writing based on preconceived notions on their part.
ReplyDeleteClearly this guy lives in Santa Monica or Valley Glen or some other place which has about as much familiarity with the central city as someone from Des Moines or Syracuse would. Either he drives his SUV to the Times Bunker on First Street and never looks out his office window, or just does all his work from his home in West Hills or Belmont Shores.
ReplyDeleteThese are only explanations I can think of for the insanely wrong statement that "seldom is anyone seen walking" in downtown Los Angeles. True, not as many people walk here and our downtown is smaller than those in New York and Los Angeles. But I'll stack our downtown against Denver, or Dallas, or Houston any day, as far as street life and pedestrians.
The point is: if people in our own city, writing for our own paper of record, continue in perpetuating this trope about "nobody walks in L.A. where car is king and it's 100 suburbs in search of a city", how can we possibly erase this wrong-headed meme from the collective unconscious?
Nose to the grindstone time.