FOREST LAWN, that sweeping, green glade of dead people, is 100 years old, which means that in Los Angeles terms, it's in the seriously old category, along with Musso & Frank, the Century City mall and Cher.
Old-timers in the Southland will often turn a squinty gaze at our urban landscape -- a "Nails by Yuki" strip mall, perhaps, or the most recent Quizno's -- and rasp out a sad, whispery "This used to be all orange groves, you know?" And most of the time, they're wrong.
There were orange groves here and there, of course, but most of Los Angeles County was a parched, dusty, empty-lot kind of desert, dotted with oil wells bobbing slowly in the dirty sunshine.
When I moved to Los Angeles, way, way back in 1988, a person could glide down Montana Avenue in Santa Monica and choose between two scruffy gas stations, a couple of local grocery stores and an actual hardware store, the kind we used to have before the Restoration.
Now, of course, the gas stations are gone -- one's a yoga place and the other is a ... wait, the other is a yoga place too. And forget about the hardware store. Put it this way. If you have $75 burning a hole in your pocket and what you really want is a scented candle, pop on over to Montana Avenue and go crazy.
Not that I'm complaining. Where I live, in Venice, the main drag of Abbott Kinney Boulevard, which used to be mostly metal-stamping warehouses, auto body shops and creepy, windowless stucco boxes, is now yoga places, antique shops, scented candle emporia and ... well, more yoga places.
Again, no complaints. Changes -- upgrades, really -- are all for the good. This kind of thing comes under the heading of what we in Los Angeles call "getting some work done." You know: getting the wrinkles and the sags and the bags lifted, smoothed over, sanded down, beautified. "We don't say, 'lifted,' " a plastic surgeon friend of mine told me a few years ago. "We say, 'refreshed.' " As in, I think your eyes could be refreshed -- along with your neighborhood.
Montana Avenue: refreshed. Abbott Kinney: refreshed. Farmer's Market: BeGroved. Hollywood and Sunset: Highlanded and ArcLighted. So this isn't a new phenomenon.
