COVID-19 and The Battle for Los Angeles

It’s only been a week since life came to a screeching halt. Over the past week, living rooms have transformed into substitute offices, kitchen tables into active daycares and bathrooms into temples of sanctuary. Brick & mortars have closed their doors, the beaches and hiking trails no longer have footprints on them, and the smog has evaporated. But as the City of Angels comes to grips with its new reality, its LA’S missing idiosyncrasies that make this city feel more destitute than ever.

What makes Los Angeles, Los Angeles? It’s more than the Hollywood Sign, the Santa Monica Pier or the 88 municipalities that jigsaw together to form one metropolis.

With one week of social isolation under our belt, it feels like LA has morphed into a backwards version of itself as if we’ve fallen into some parallel universe. It’s been raining non-stop, gas is cheap, and people are walking EVERYWHERE. But it’s the noticeably absent peculiarities that have left the town feeling like a shell of what it used to be. 

First, there’s no Hollywood to be found. The entertainment industry is about as dead as silent film. There are no candlelight dinners interrupted by a reality show fight, no grip trucks blocking valuable metered spaces and no white-haired motorcycle cop standing idly by while crew roll a carts of multi-colored gaff tape. The Sunset Strip is deathly quiet. The ghosts of Corey Feldman and Angelyene’s pink corvette haunt the valet of The Standard and the cotton candied tables of Saddle Ranch. The echoes of celebrity name dropping whisper past the chipping paint of stucco nightclubs.

The freeways are lifeless rivers of barren concrete. No more multi-hour 6-mile drives. The 405 is empty of its of swarming bumper-to-bumper traffic hive. Vanity plates sit in garages in vain with no drivers to amuse, and “annual passholder” stickers prove worthless with no Disneyland to attend. Gone are the fingers pointing, the angry glares, the honks, the impulse to cut off everyone on an off ramp or adrenaline rush of driving solo in the HOV lane.

The emerald mermaids of coffee shops no longer glow. The “But First Coffee” signs are missing their hum of neon. No more soy one-pump chai lattes. Café chairs are dust collectors of struggling writers while 96-ounce carboard carriers beg to be carried to an off by an office assistant.

The beautiful people are starting to turn ugly. Plastic surgery offices and Botox clinics have frozen their businesses more than faces. Thousands of duck lips are on the verge of deflating. There’s no sassy gossip or thousand-dollar blow outs… therefore the cougars of Manhattan Beach are hibernating, holding off on hunting for cubs.

The beaches are now just a desert that buffers the ocean from boardwalk. The eccentricity of Venice is locked away like a freak show. The electric guitar Rastafarian no longer skates past the pop-up tents of dorm room art collections. Local flowers get a reprieve from being woven into influencer crowns. The wide brimmed fedoras, wool beanies and designer yoga mats have been replaced by surgical masks, latex gloves and bulk wrapped toilet paper

Organic brands have been placed by generic ones. Healing crystals yield way for the burning chemicals of Lysol and Clorox. The fad of Health and wellness is over. Farmers markets, Korean BBQ sushi bars and taco trucks have been curbed for $1.99 pasta and canned tuna. The multi-cultural foodtropolis is just a skeleton of what it used to be.

They say if you turned the world on its side and shook it, all the loose pieces would fall into Los Angeles -but now it seems all those pieces are missing too.

I miss all the things I love to hate or hate that I love about LA. I want my fellow Angelenos to be cautious to get through this pandemic as safely as possible… but I’m also hoping this time passes quickly because I want my city back.