The case of downtown L.A.'s vanishing hotels
It looked like trouble. Or maybe it looked like the stuff that dreams were made of.
The street was dark and the lighting was eerie as the hard-boiled book publishers from New York gathered outside an old factory building in downtown Los Angeles.
They eyed the crowd that had massed inside. Some of the dames looked like femme fatales; some of the guys looked like saps.
Finally, one of the New Yorkers spoke:
"To see this many people turn out for a literary event and then to combine it with a gentrification event, which is even harder to get people to come to. . . ." Johnny Temple, editor of Brooklyn-based Akashic Books, shook his head and smiled. "It's phenomenal."
Temple was one of about 200 people who jammed into the newly gentrified, snazzily decorated g727 Gallery downtown Thursday night.
They came for a genre-bending literary salon that teamed some well-known mystery and noir writers -- Sara Paretsky and Denise Hamilton -- with local tenant organizers. The goal was to raise awareness about the effects of gentrification.
Gilda Haas, executive director of the L.A.-based tenants' group Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, said the pairing was a natural. Tenant organizers from her group and others are fighting to preserve housing for the poor, who they say have been displaced by the massive wave of gentrification that has swept through parts of the city in recent years.
Meanwhile, the forces of redevelopment also push at noir writers: Without the gritty city that is the setting for their fiction, what would they write about?
Or, as the tenants' group put it: "Can you imagine Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe hanging out at a gastro-pub? Or Dashiell Hammett writing 'The Maltese Falcon' from a luxury loft?"
Haas, who is married to noir-novelist Gary Phillips, conceived the event, she said, after reading one detective novel after another in which gentrification served as a major plot point. Though the economy has slowed and the housing market is in chaos, her group's organizers say gentrification continues to push at poor people living in the city's core.
A hip, urban crowd streamed into the Spring Street gallery, which salon organizers described as being "on a block full of contradictions . . . in the shadow of lofts and skid row." After buying drinks from the "Noir Bar," the crowd settled in for hours of readings.
Even a patsy wouldn't have had a problem picking the novelists in the lineup.
