The Vultures

Gone are the days of the conventional wisdom, where the outer city rings of suburbia were seen as an escape from the blight of a rotting city center. Now the rot has permeated, and scattered all throughout the southland lie tattered and decrepit shopping centers, barely clinging on to life. At least, that’s the impression you’d get from seeing what’s captured in the photo, but that variety of rot, of dereliction, has a fairly short shelf life in Southern California. It wont be long until, just like every other shuttered shopping center, the walls will come down and in it’s place will rise a new collection of condominiums. Some places tend to be more hospitable to that sort of construction, after all there’s hardly any charm worth preserving in an 80’s era suburb, much less the ones from the 00’s, but the 60’s style of this shopping center is a bit different. And actually, I got it wrong, there won’t be condo’s coming up to replace the shopping center, just another fresher shopping center. That is a good thing. An old shopping center, one which deters customers is being phased out for a new shiny one, one which attracts passing motorists, not an uncommon occurrence at all. Maybe that’s why this stands out to me, because when every coat is shiny, you start to appreciate the patina, even though it’s rusty. But you take a moment, and realize the empty lot across the street has a bulldozer and it’s just been sold, and this shopping center isn’t dead and boarded because the businesses closed, it’s that way because they were evicted, because the property is also going to hit the market. Maybe it’s former occupants will even come back. Doubtful, because despite the fancy exterior, something about 40-70% rent hikes aren’t terribly enticing to upholstery shops. But so what, the real estate market is hot, and the Los Angeles metro area is not failing like the rust belt, things get renovated, and businesses change and move and fluctuate with the market. But there is still a rot, and maybe a more pernicious rot than poverty and poor maintenance. It’s vultures swarming the corpses and feasting on the remains. It’s the Starbucks and the Norm’s and the Denny’s. There is no small town in So-cal. There are no towns in So-cal. There are different jurisdictions and districts and police departments, and some cities have marginally different tax rates, but there is no separation. You can read about local histories and their development, and understand what made each little area unique, especially as compared with Los Angeles. Now, Whittier is apart of the same mass as Pasadena as Santa Monica, and every place has the same strip malls with led lights and all the same chains, maybe one place has more Mexicans and the other has more Asians, but the differences end there, and the soul that defined these places has withered away faster than the factories did in Gary Indiana.