Travel Blog

I’d been in downtown Los Angeles for three days and, like most conference attendees, I hadn’t seen much of downtown. Unlike most conference attendees, however, I had written about downtown, back in 2000, when I stayed at the Hotel Figueroa and every morning set out on foot – a small miracle in LA – to see the sights and interview sources, the principal one being Tom Gilmore, a property developer whose dream was to make downtown a vibrant, attractive place to live. He had already begun converting some of the lovely old office buildings into lofts.

So Sunday morning I headed off on foot again, past my old hotel now undergoing renovation, the Original Pantry Café (“Through a door that has no key, you will enter a cafe that has never closed.”) and, farther along, Engine Co. No. 28, a former firehouse-turned-restaurant that serves dishes inspired by foods from firehouses around the country.

The Central Library, an Art Deco masterpiece, and the Biltmore Hotel were two more personal favorites, the latter enlivened this sleepy Sunday morning by the shooting of a pilot for the TV series Training Day. I walked past actors playing dead in the street and police cars parked at odd angles next to manicured puddles of broken glass.

“How can you tell the real police from the actor police?” I asked a man in blue standing on the sidewalk. He pointed to his sleeve and explained that it lacked the official city seal. I thought he might say: “We’re better looking.”

Grand Central Market, a few blocks away, was no longer the visceral mercado it had been in 2000 – with bloody carcasses and hairy hooves – but you can still find, among the oyster bar and the Thai street food counter and the falafel joint and the German wurst place, a mole merchant and a maker of tacos who fills them with your choice of skin, tongue, heart, liver, kidney, snout, ears, or feet.

I crossed the street and walked into the Bradbury Building, continuing my tour of greatest hits, and found a tour guide telling his group about Tom Gilmore and how he’d revitalized the area around Spring Street. I headed over to Spring, recognizing what I thought was the building Gilmore had told me 16 years ago that he was going to live in, and found on the ground floor a rustic Mexican restaurant, a Belle Époque restaurant advertising evening jazz, and a gourmet chocolate shop that was offering free samples of chocolate chip cookies. It was part of a special Sunday promotion put on by neighborhood shops.

The farmers’ market on W. 5^th Street was a weekly event, a pleasant young woman told me across a crate of lettuces. I didn’t linger, because it bordered a place called The Last Book Store and something about the name caused me to hurry inside. Large round columns rose to a two-story-high ceiling, crowded bookshelves formed a multi-veined arrow, and overstuffed couches furnished the center. I felt as if I had walked into a photograph from the series “The World’s Most Beautiful Bookstores.”

On the second floor I was greeted by a Dali-esque bookcase from which a dozen suspended, flopped-open volumes protruded, resembling cartoon drawings of birds in flight. Making my way to the travel section, I entered a tunnel created in part by an archway of books. It was like wandering through a dreamworld Powell’s.

By the time I emerged (from the store, not the tunnel), the farmers were packing up their market, so I headed back to Broadway and entered one of the old movie palaces, now the Catedral de la Fe. An evangelical service in Portuguese was in full swing. I found a seat in the back and settled in as if for a double feature.