And I still get this feeling
There's more trouble ahead
So never mind the bad news
Let's have the good news instead
Inglewood, CA is one of those cities within an even bigger city that seems like a lonely stepbrother to the perceived glamour of Tinseltown. Most tourists that visit the L.A. area spend their time in Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. What they see are beautiful beaches, $400 Gucci bags, and John Wayne’s handprints. They go to trendy restaurants owned by Wolfgang Puck, and they take pictures with the Hollywood sign in the background. Their tourist route is a small world that is non-representative of this huge city.
If you really want a complete picture of L.A., be sure to visit the city of Inglewood and its environs. I have traveled there many times by bus and in a car, and I never cease to be amazed when I visit this predominantly African-American and Latino part of town.
Last night, I traveled to Inglewood from my ghetto in East Hollywood. The cause of my travels? The Metallica concert at the Forum. The ‘Fabulous’ Forum, as it is known by L.A. locals, is an indoor arena that was built in the 1960s and is the former home of the L.A. Lakers and the L.A. Kings. Both of those teams have ‘graduated’ to the behemoth Staples Center in downtown L.A. and now the Forum, which is owned by a church, hosts a variety of events including heavy metal concerts.
Even though the Forum is much older than the Staples Center, I highly recommend the Forum over the Staples center for any event. The Forum is very small compared to the Staples Center, so anywhere you sit in the Forum is a good seat with a good view. In contrast, if your seat at the Staples Center is up high, the people on the court or on the stage look like ants. Furthermore, the Forum has more character and history than the corporatized and sanitized Staples Center. The Forum feels intimate, plus the bathrooms are underground.
While the concert itself was very entertaining, what with Metallica’s outrageously thunderous & galloping music, shooting flames, crazy lasers, pumping fists, bouncing cleavage, head-banging heads, and 6 separate mosh pits composed of colliding young people as if in the eye of a hurricane, it’s the journey to and from the ‘Fabulous’ Forum that’s most subtly intriguing.
Driving the streets of L.A. (not the freeway, I might add), you will notice an immediate difference in traffic as soon as you are south of the 10 freeway, heading into the belly of South Central. Traffic north of the 10 and west of the 101 is absolute stop-and-go chaos during rush hour. In order to avoid the ridiculous clusterfu-k that is west-central L.A., Supernova took as many side streets as possible on his way to the Forum.
As soon as one gets south of the 10, the whole ambience changes. Traffic becomes sparse, the street lighting is dimmer, and the commercial storefronts are like those of some town in the hinterlands. The most common sites in this part of L.A. are independent hotels (with names like The Snooty Fox, and the Stallion), liquor stores next store to Baptist churches, auto shops, and the ubiquitous fast food restaurants. Indeed, most of South Central L.A. looks like a very large, vast swath of neglected, decaying, urban blight that is in dire need of redevelopment and intensive care.
Considering South Central L.A.’s history of gang activity, drive-by shootings, and high crime rates, one is tempted to make sure the car doors are locked while weaving to avoid all the potholes and ruts in the road. In many ways, it’s like driving through the Wild West. But families do live here, and as I made my way to the Forum, I noticed that holiday lights adorned many homes.
On my way back to East Hollywood, I drove north on Western Ave. During that 8 mile length of road, I passed by only two major supermarkets (Ralphs and Food for Less), both of which were closed. In contrast, nearly all supermarkets north of the 10 freeway are open 24 hours a day. Moreover, I saw not one Starbucks or big box store (i.e. Walmart, Bestbuy, Target) in L.A.’s urban desert.
Those independent hotels I mentioned earlier had big signs bragging ‘Telephone & Color T.V.’, or ‘Jacuzzi’. They must be old hotels if they’re advertising to prospective clients that they have a phone and T.V. I wondered how many of those hotels housed month-to-month residents or couples doing dirty dancing by the hour.
If you don’t have a car while site-seeing in South Central, no problem. Supernova has traveled through this part of L.A. many times on a bus. In fact, bus travel is preferable if you want to be able to gaze out the window at your leisure where you can contemplate the abundance of abandoned shopping carts, graffiti, fast-food outlets, ancient railroad tracks, and the overall colorful character of an L.A. that really is off the beaten track.
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