Good Idea Benched
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Sidewalk amenities took a step backward last week, as a pair of benches installed last month on Main between Winston and 5th were removed. The street furniture was part of a CRA-sponsored streetscaping plan for Main street.
Business owners on the block were uncomfortable with the unwelcome uses the benches were attracting, both during the day and into the evening. Their requests led the city to remove the benches and put them into storage while they await a new home.
One can point to many cases around Downtown, from locked restrooms to the lack of benches on the City Hall south lawn, where the problems of homelessness have impacted quality of life for all.
Conceptually it's sad to see the benches go, but it also doesn't seem that it would have been too hard to see this situation in advance. Perhaps benches simply aren't what Downtown's sidewalks really need.
Update (10:30pm): As these benches are removed, new ones are added on Spring street.
LAOpera
lacitabar
jamuseum
Joe Cornish on April 24, 2008, at 07:14PM – #1
This has happened before. Benches were installed on Main Street and then removed.
I wish the complaining business owners had been interviewed for this story so that the "unwelcome uses" mentioned had been explained. I'd also like to know just which businesses complained.
I do know that I set out yesterday with Ruby and a good book. I planned to read on one of the benches and found them gone. It doesn't seem fair. Downtown sidewalks and residents really do need benches (along with drinking water fountains).
I'm disappointed.
Nirad on April 24, 2008, at 07:43PM – #2
Until we get serious about taking care of the homeless problem in this city, we will never be able to have the kind of public space we want. We need to get homeless people off the sidewalks and out of our parks so the other 99% of us can enjoy those spaces.
Joe Cornish on April 24, 2008, at 07:53PM – #3
Nirad, I'm not sure what you mean. The homeless are not radioactive. I have no problem with sitting on a bench with them or using a park that they also use. Why do you?
Eric Richardson (@blogdowntown) on April 24, 2008, at 10:30PM – #4
Joe: You'll just have to walk a little farther. New benches were installed today on Spring:
http://blogdowntown.com/2008/04/3270-as-main-loses-benches-spring-adds-them
Lauren on April 24, 2008, at 11:14PM – #5
Who cares! How about a petstore or a private school or something.
Norbie 7 on April 25, 2008, at 12:56AM – #6
Nirad, let's not go interrupting anyone's lifestyle now. And on the other hand, should anyone's lifestyle be interrupted by so much as having to simply LOOK at one of those, those creatures, well, that is a tradgedy that our downtown chamber of commerce street sweeping isolationists are going to have to directly contend with.
Frankly, I ask you, where does style lay? It lays in the illusions of the beholder I would guess.
It can be amazing what some "liberated" individuals do not want to behold and it is not the least surprising what some crypto fascist scenesters from Newport Beach will frankly admit, what they do not care about, do not want to behold (always in the center of the city so to speak).
You do not want to see it? Behold what I have: the beggar on the sidewalk in El Centro in Santiago - both of his eyes gouged out in September of '73. My best friend's boss had gone to see Nixon and Kissinger in the Oval Office. He wanted his copper mines back; Nixon said make the economy scream and bossman got his mines back all right. Nixon once spoke on television about his wife having a good Republican Cloth Coat. Do you have one of those? Why, you could have worn it to the war zone, like at the base camp in the jungle where I stood in a cage in a quonset hut every day for a year selling money orders and accepting packages to be mailed back home for the infantry grunts. And they weren't mailing home their cloth coats, I assure you.
No, you didn't have to see the surgeon, an army captain come in just after leaving the operating table a couple of hundred yards away. You didn't have to stand there and watch him go completely insane pulling money out of his billfold, talking about so much blood and gore. Nope, good Republicans from Newport don't have to think about such things and after all of the graft and horror and tradgedy and diabolical mendacity from on high these past eight years, I have no illusion as to what is going to happen to the Democratic candidate come the first Tuesday of November.
Tell you what: drive out to the west side and look up David Mamet. He and you might have a future; you two could become the finest of soulmates. With all that you've not seen in Downtown, you could provide him with some great ideas for his next series.
Sammantha on August 20, 2008, at 04:09PM – #7
This is a ridiculous article. You're saying that the "homeless impact quality of life for all." I think that is one of the most naive statements I have ever read. Let me ask you, what makes you so special? What deems you more important than someone less fortunate? Your entire article is so immaturely written and biased that I'm not what you're trying to get actross othern than the fact that you see the less fortunate as being a menace and filth. I find it startling that when business owners go boo hoo the city runs to their whims and pulls the benches. However, when the homeless cry for help they get a smirk and get lost attitude.
Downtown Los Angeles belongs to everyone, so please get this self-entitlement attitude off your mind. Our culture is collectively responsible for the homeless epidemic, and unless people change their attitudes, create affordable housing, offer good paying jobs, provide proper treatment and nurture support systems we are going nowhere. I don't hear anyonoe taking part in the solution but instead promoting the problem.