In THE last six months traveling the city and its unincorporated parcels, Kletzky has seen it all: painted-green islands, crowded-with-benches-billboards-and-electric-box islands, neglected islands, in-construction islands, even gated islands. Some islands are only to be jogged or walked on -- no sitting, no loitering. "There is an island in West L.A.," says Kletzky, "that the city paid $28,000 to put a fence on to keep out the homeless."
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Against The Flow
Claiming L.A.'s traffic islands as national parks seems farcical. But Ari Kletzky has a serious purpose.
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Some are lush with palm and pine trees. Others seem to exist solely as the home to some city generator or mysterious energy source.
Kletzky pauses at the islands that call to him -- those, in particular, that offer a steady flow of traffic, either pedestrians or drivers. "Not in the middle of the block," notes Kletzky, "unless there was pedestrian traffic or a T-intersection." He puts up a sign or two, and, should he spot a driver idling at a traffic light who has left a window open a crack, he slips in a card, which asks a question and plants a seed: "Who should create public space?" The card directs drivers to the Islands website, where respondents are then invited to an activity -- making art, discussion or performance -- on a traffic island.
Kletzky is full of stories about the islands and his interactions with the people who wait there for their buses, ask for change or sell flowers or food. He has received e-mails from folks who note gathering spots -- schoolgirls who have identified a "signed" island as a designated meeting place -- and has invited some of those interested to talk, over coffee and muffins, "about the nature of L.A.'s built environment." The islands, he's learned, are often microcosms of neighborhoods they are a part of, full of clues about an ever-evolving place where class, race, culture and language intersect. And the only way for someone to see it is to become part of it, interact with it, he explains, by making a trek to an island.
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An island divided
On THIS particular spring morning, when Kletzky arrives at the island at Glendale Boulevard and Berkeley Avenue, toting his bulging backpack, a camera and two Coroplast signs, John Emerson, one of the island denizens, is stationed there. He calls out a greeting: "Hey! Whussup, Sign Guy?"
