City Of Quartz Analysis

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The freeway has been a favorite metaphor for writers trying to fathom Los Angeles for so long that opinions about this town can be virtually divided into day and night views. The night watchers tend to celebrate its long streams of pale yellow light, flowing over an intricate lacework of streets, as an elegant symbol of human accomplishment.
L.A.-bashing was a thriving industry, of course, long before Fred Allen dubbed this town "a nice place to live if you're an orange." But Mike Davis' "City of Quartz" is the first major study to examine a broad range of "daytime" problems with consistent acuity. An urban-history instructor at CalArts, Davis focuses on those less flattering realities that Starr passed over in pursuit of the dream: Where …show more content…
(Frederick Law Olmstead, "the father of Central Park," saw these places as "the emollient of class struggle.") Davis, however, offers countless examples of how this city is being hardened against the poor, either through walls that isolate buildings from streets, as in the "macho, menacing" architecture of Frank Gehry, or through a lack of social services. Because downtown east of Hill St. is devoid of public sources for drinking or washing, for instance, hundreds of homeless--many of them young Salvadoran refugees--are forced to drink and wash from the sewer effluent which flows down the Los Angeles River.
The fundamental danger of these literal and metaphorical walls is a kind of racism and indifference, which Davis captures well in a description, based on a Times article, of Nancy Reagan's 1989 visit to an alleged rock-cocaine house in South Central Los Angeles.
Many of us who grew up in L.A.'s comfortable suburbs, on the other hand, were exposed to another kind of community, to be found not in the streets but in the "plaza" of popular culture. Los Angeles might appear to have less civic discourse than other cities of its size, but in fact the ideals and aspirations of this community have been defined in countless novels, films and songs, from Raymond Chandler to Randy
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