3:20pm | First, let’s define our terms. By “memorable” I mean something very particular: that which is apparent to a first-time visitor. Let’s call our hypothetical visitor Cashie.
Cashie’s experience is going to vary depending on a variety of factors, especially where Cashie roams within the 50 square miles of our fair city. But for the sake of our discussion, let us imagine Cashie spends most of his time where we expect to find that vast majority of our visitors: downtown, along Ocean Boulevard, in Belmont Shore, and on or along the water.
Will Cashie come away with a sense of Long Beach is memorable?
This question popped to mind as last weekend I visited Vancouver, British Columbia, for the first time, a visit that happened to come hot on the heels of my Pine Avenue series. And the week prior to that I was in downtown Los Angeles for the first time in years. So I’ve been thinking a lot about city life.
I love Long Beach. But when I analyze that feeling, I find it has more to do with the community of people within which I’ve become enmeshed and the little nooks I haunt than the things Cashie would be likely to encounter. Yes, Long Beach has much to offer, but how much of it is apparent to the visitor passing through?
Comparisons to Los Angeles and Vancouver — bigger cities, international cities — aren’t necessarily fair. Then again, Long Beach aspires to be bigger and better than it is, to be a city that breaks the conceptual bonds of being simply a part of “the Greater Los Angeles area.” Therefore, it needs to think big — and do big.
Big doesn’t mean just size, of course. Ideas can be big. Big ideas are necessary to help Long Beach improve. And Cashie is key.
We’re going to put Cashie up at the Hilton Long Beach, not because we’re plugging that particular hotel — though no doubt he finds it commodious enough — nor because we’re saying Cashie takes a side in the hotel’s current labor dispute (Cashie doesn’t know anything about that). We’ve got Cashie there because it’s located in a corner of the city (on Ocean Blvd. just west of the 710), which means Cashie can explore without needing to backtrack much.
First thing Cashie does is go to the Queen Mary, because, hey, it’s probably the most well known thing we’ve got. And as I know from having recently given an English visitor a mini-tour, while we residents might take it for granted, the vision of a ship like that, whether up close or from a distance, impresses. Score one for memorable. “But what’s that dome,” Cashie asks. Oh, it’s nothing. (Unless there’s roller derby going on.)
Cashie can’t help but be impressed with the Port, at least for its sheer size. He’s not going to spend any time there — it’s not so good on the lungs, for starters — but Cashie certainly will take home visions of those gigantic cranes and all those cargo containers.
Cashie returns to his hotel, then wanders up to Cesar Chavez Park. “Meh,” Cashie says, but we let him know that he’s got to venture way northeast to see some real parkland. And we’re continuing to work on it.
Cashie walks through the Willmore District and is quite taken with the Willmore itself. “Does Long Beach have a lot of architecture like this?” Cashie gasps. Um, well…
Cashie’s back on Ocean Boulevard. He strolls by the courthouse (we warn him to be careful about taking pictures, but he doesn’t see anything worth photographing), then sees City Hall. He’s puzzled by the empty space above the library, but we don’t have a comprehensible explanation for him.
Somehow Cashie splits in two so he can head both north and south on Pine. “Nice lights,” his northern half says. He likes the main bus terminal, the Blue Line, and the red buses; we just hope he doesn’t hang around too long to have his illusions of effective public transit in Long Beach dashed. Some nice restaurants, he thinks. He’s a little confused by what we tell him about the potential squelching of some of the ambiance. And he’s equally puzzled by so many vacant storefronts. But we tell him that one’s being worked on. And a tour of the Kress Lofts makes him feel Long Beach might be a nice place to live anyway.
Meanwhile, his southern half is at The Pike. And passes right by, moving toward the pedestrian bridge. He smirks when we tell him that the white sculpture thing on top is supposed to represent the roller-coaster that the City tore down. He quite likes the Aquarium, the little isthmus park and lighthouse. Shoreline Village he finds pleasant enough, if a bit quaint.
South Cashie rolls up back along Ocean Boulevard while North Cashie makes his way to the East Village. “Oh, I’ve heard of Acres of Books,” he says. Sorry, N.C., you’re too late. “So it’s just sitting there?” We try to take his mind off this by pointing out the Fingerprints/Berlin combo: he likes it — he just wonders why the downtown area of the 36th most populous city in the country seems so, um, “Is sparse the right word?” he asks.
S.C. is thinking the same thing. He loves the grounds of the Performing Arts Center, but he wonders why they’re not being put to more use. He’s stopped in his tracks, though, by the mammoth Aqua Towers. “You’re not serious,” he says incredulously. “The City allowed that to take up such prime real estate?!”
N.C. is in the East Village now. “This is an arts district?” he asks. “I mean, some of what’s here is nice enough, but….”
Cashie’s two halves reconnect at Ocean and Linden, and both are absolutely shocked to find a vacant business space at the courtyard of the Cooper Arms. Their — or now: his — attention is diverted, of course, by the Villa Riviera. Recalling some of the buildings N.C. saw on his way here, he starts thinking we must be wrong about the architecture in this city; we’re sorry to inform him that it’s all downhill from here.
Cashie’s heading toward Belmont Shore, and boy, is it a nice drive. “Look at that ocean!” He stops at the Long Beach Museum of Art and has lunch at Claire’s, atop the bluffs. “Beautiful.” But something seems amiss. “Hey,” he asks, “where are the waves?”
“Finally,” he says as we hit Belmont Shore, “some retail! And lots of dining options.” It seems more like a downtown to him than downtown did. He has a good meal, does some shopping, grabs coffee and gelato at Aroma di Roma…but he realizes there’s nothing in the way of entertainment here. For that we point him back Retro Row: {open} and the Art Theatre and…Well, there really is some good entertainment here, Cashie — it’s just hard to pinpoint a place. Did we mention Fingerprints? The Queen Mary? The Performing Arts Center? We did? Well, you haven’t seen the Museum of Latin American Art yet. Cashie checks it out and finds it first-class, not minding that the city has so little urbanity to match it.
Cashie loves Christmas lights, so he goes out to Naples and is blown him away, as he is strolling back along Ocean Boulevard. He loves Middle American crowds and big, noisy cars, so the Grand Prix is his cup of tea. He loves flamboyant pageantry and favors equality for all people, so the Gay Pride Parade is a rainbow of pleasure. He digs when a community puts on an event just for the sake of it, and so he’s glad he gets to experience a First Friday in Bixby Knolls. And then it’s time for Cashie to return to from whence he came.
Will Cashie really remember Long Beach? He saw pretty much the best we have to offer, and no doubt he came away with some favorable impressions. But is that enough?
I was in the area in and around Los Angeles City Hall for one afternoon, and it takes no imagination to see how much is there and how it might take years to unearth all the city’s treasures. I was in Vancouver for one day and was awed by the integration of nature and human achievement, by the enmeshment of history and the ultramodern.
Long Beach — simply put — cannot compete.
That is not to say that Long Beach cannot be memorable in its own right. And while I’m neither local historian nor city planner, I know that we’ve destroyed plenty that would otherwise have helped us toward that end, and I know that much that we have built (and continue to build?) is not helping.
This is a conversation I can nudge along but cannot finish. You want some potential answers, go back to the home page and click on the guy below me, Brian Ulaszewski, who’s far better at proposing ideas along these lines than I could ever hope to be.
All I know for sure is that you find a lot of hope around Long Beach that someday we will step up to the next level. Esperamos: we hope, we wait.
What will it take for us to arrive? You tell me.