New York Sun - August 13, 2007

 

New York Sun Editorial

The Manhattanizing of L.A.

esterday's Los Angeles Times carried a piece by one of the most provocative of urban pundits, Joel Kotkin, under the headline, "Why the Rush to Manhattanize L.A.?" Mr. Kotkin speaks of a zoning vote last week by the Los Angeles City Council that will create a denser downtown, along with efforts to expand the Los Angeles subway, "create a Times Square for Los Angeles," and "duplicate New York's 5th Avenue." He attributes the rush to campaign contributions by real estate developers, and darkly predicts, "Traffic congestion is likely to get worse."

If the Los Angeles Times is going to pose that sort of question, we're happy to answer them with some of our own. Could it perhaps be that the residents of Los Angeles decided to pursue Manhattanization, not under the duress of powerful real estate developers, but because they were tired of having to get in their car and drive an hour on the freeway any time they wanted to go anywhere? Could it be they decided that a nightlife that didn't involve drinking and driving might be a good idea? Or that density might be better for the environment than sprawl?

Mr. Kotkin left out some of the more obvious aspects of the Manhattanization of Los Angeles, from its police chief, William Bratton, to the fact that Mr. Bratton works for a mayor recently caught philandering (sound familiar?). Even Paris Hilton seems to have decamped from New York City to Los Angeles, as has Barney Greengrass, the Upper West Side "Sturgeon King" that has an outpost in Beverly Hills.

The irony is that Los Angeles is seeking to create a Times Square just as New Yorkers complain that theirs has become Disney-fied, that is, taken over by a Burbank, Calif., company. New Yorkers also complain that Fifth Avenue has been taken over by so many chain stores that it looks like the Century City mall in Los Angeles. Tribeca is blessed with an annual film festival that fills the city with people who look like characters in the movie "The Player."

Manhattan has two California Pizza Kitchen restaurants, one of which opened just this May on Park Avenue South. New York City has even started to become the scene of Los Angeles-style disasters — steampipe explosions, subway floods, a tornado ... what's next, an earthquake? The Manhattanization of Los Angeles will be complete when Angelenos start complaining about how their precious city has started to become a carbon copy of Los Angeles.

* * *