High Rise

Attorney Gloria Allred raises an interesting point . . . health and safety problems related to dress requirements. Requiring women to wear skirts and high heels raises significant safety questions. Because traditional notions of fashion developed in a sex-discriminatory context, women's clothing tends to serve two basic purposes--to restrict women's mobility and to contort and expose women's bodies for male viewing pleasure. Skirts and high heels contort and expose, but they drastically limit women's mobility.

Having read your article on water conservation ("When the Rain Drops," Opinion, May 8), I went to my yard, turned on the sprinklers, hosed down the driveway and washed the car. Then I came in, flushed the toilet with gallons of water and took an extra long shower. How could anyone who loves Southern California do otherwise? It took a drought plus sewer overload to get our politicians to institute the present building permit restrictions (Part I, May 4). To conserve water now only speeds the day when City Hall will declare the crisis to be over and will give a green light for another round of high-rise construction--new development which will worsen our water problems during the next cycle of low rainfall and worsen our smog and traffic problems for all time to come.

Re "City plans to float deal on air rights," March 14 Amid growing calls to conserve energy, the Los Angeles City Council's vote to sell 9 million square feet of air rights in the Staples Center area raises questions of balance between air rights and sun rights. It is true that our right to sunshine is not well established in zoning law. But in view of the growing demand for air rights by developers, we all should be concerned that a future high-rise building may someday leave our own property in perpetual twilight.

It's absolutely amazing that the designs for ground zero in New York City continually focus on high-rise buildings ("Grand Visions Rise From Rubble," Dec. 19). It is almost as if nearly 3,000 people were never killed on the site. Imagine building office space at Gettysburg or the Normandy beachhead, or building a resort over the battleship Arizona. I guess the only answer is that New York City and its business and political leaders really are greedy and shallow and care about business and money over lives and history.

I found your Dec. 30 article about welded structures extremely interesting. My recollection of the testing at the University of Texas in May 1994 is that it caused failure of an expert weld during the first peak of the first cycle of a simulated moderate-level earthquake acceleration. As a retired aerospace engineer, tired of hearing the myth of "the $600 toilet seat," I find it hard to believe that E70T-4 welding material is still in use at any site, with its potential for causing many casualties during an earthquake.

Re "MTA Votes to Buy 2,095 Buses Over Six Years," Oct. 23: The people responsible for a Los Angeles transportation system have discovered that subways are hard to build. The enthusiasm, translated into an expensive high-rise headquarters, has dampened. Shoddy work, long delays and shocking overrides have made them wring their hands and scheme to skimp and cheapen--or reexamine the bus solution. Nuts! There never was a big building project that ran smoothly. I say squeeze money out of the rich, squeeze money out of the poor, put the bite on the feds, fire incompetent contractors and push the subway to completion according to plan.

All is not quiet on the NBA's dunking front, which is not exactly what the league had in mind when it elevated the dunk-offs to a lofty new place of honor on All-Star weekend. Dominique Wilkins was crowned the new slam-dunk king Saturday, and he immediately called the moment the highlight of his life. But not everyone was as thrilled with the NBA's slam-dunk championship. Larry Nance and Julius Erving, last year's champion and runner-up, both announced they have slammed their last dunk.