Thirty miles away, the Malibu coast-where hyperbole meets the surf-basks in altogether different weather. Amid hundreds of acres of molten asphalt and concrete there is scarcely a weed, much less a lawn or tree. Shirtless young men-some with formidable jail-made biceps and mural-size tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe across their backs-monopolize the shade of tienda awnings. Anxious mothers swab their babies’ foreheads with water while older children, eyes stinging from the smog, cry for paletas: the flavored cones of shaved ice sold by pushcart vendors. Suffocating in their tiny rooms, immigrant families flee to the fire escapes, stoops, and sidewalks. Outside air-conditioned skyscrapers, homeless people huddle miserably in every available shadow.Īcross the Harbor Freeway, the overcrowded tenements of the Westlake district-Los Angeles’s Spanish Harlem-are intolerable ovens. Downtown is usually shrouded in acrid yellow smog while heat waves billow down Wilshire Boulevard. Late August to early October is the infernal season in Los Angeles. John Russell McCarthy, These Waiting Hills (1925) “Homes, of course, will arise here in the thousands. Mike Davis | Ecology of Fear | Metropolitan Books | September 1998 | 20 minutes (5,921 words) Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
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