Rosecrans Baldwin's "Los Angeles Is a Fantastic Walking City. No, Really"

Photo by Adall Schell

I just finished reading Rosecrans Baldwin’s “Los Angeles Is a Fantastic Walking City. No, Really” in this week’s New York Times Magazine. What a great piece! Baldwin’s subject is Rosecrans Avenue. He writes,

At first glance, Rosecrans is not awe-inspiring. Rosecrans Avenue is just over 27 miles long, running east from the beach through South Los Angeles to the Orange County town of Fullerton. As one of the city’s major avenues, it’s among the few manufactured things here big enough to span the region’s disparate parts. I’ll take a walk or drive on Rosecrans — or Vermont, or Pico — and loop in and out of side streets, watching one neighborhood morph into another, not necessarily for the pleasure of it but to absorb all there is to see. Hand-painted business signs change from Spanish to Korean. For a block or two, restaurants suddenly advertise Creole specialties, reflecting Cajun roots, only to revert the next block to ubiquitous fast-food joints. I’ll walk past squashed-together homes, families hosting driveway parties, a BBQ business tucked halfway down a nondescript alley. Amid all this a sense of low-key peace prevails, along with a shared notion of tolerance — minding your business in clear sight of your neighbor’s. Honestly, the only other way I know how to encounter so much of Los Angeles, to see so many of its diverse communities coexisting, is to go to the beach.

Baldwin’s descriptions of Rosecrans evince an avid flâneurial sensibility – exactly the kind I relish. My favorite part of his piece is his account of walking a portion of Rosecrans in Fullerton:

Previously, for thousands of years, this was the homeland of the Indigenous Tongva people. The yellow cliffs of the Coyote Hills were on view in the distance, but my eye was on nearer details. A 90-minute ramble revealed L.A.’s familiar extremes: big houses alongside dingbats, the shock of the unexpected coinciding with numbing dullness. But I also saw small green parks, southern views of the basin and an older-women’s jogging group all wearing sun hats that looked like huge black shells. I finished at Rosecrans’s eastern terminus and got a burrito. There was a feeling I’ve experienced only in Los Angeles: I was in the middle of nowhere and at the center of everything, all at once.

I love that detail of the “older-women’s jogging group all wearing sun hats that looked like huge black shells.” 

Baldwin’s writing is new to me. I see he’s written a book on Los Angeles – Everything Now (2021). I think I’ll check it out.