Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles

by David L. Ulin

Overview

In Sidewalking, David L. Ulin offers a compelling inquiry into the evolving landscape of Los Angeles. Part personal narrative, part investigation of the city as both idea and environment, Sidewalking is many things: a discussion of Los Angeles as urban space, a history of the city’s built environment, a meditation on the author’s relationship to the city, and a rumination on the art of urban walking. Exploring Los Angeles through the soles of his feet, Ulin gets at the experience of its street life, drawing from urban theory, pop culture, and literature. For readers interested in the culture of Los Angeles, this book offers a pointed look beneath the surface in order to see, and engage with, the city on its own terms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520273726
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/06/2015
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	152
Sales rank:	1,096,599
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of eight previous books, including The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is book critic, and former book editor, of the Los Angeles Times.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Street, Haunting
Los Angeles Plays Itself
Falling Down
Sidewalking
Mapping History
Miracle Mile
A Walker, in the City

Editorial Reviews

"David Ulin’s Sidewalking opens LA up for all of us—locals or not. A quietly stirring book, this should be on your must-read list. . . . I loved it and can’t wait to read it again and again."

The Rumpus - Anna March

"In Sidewalking, Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin wanders L.A.—along Wilshire, around Bunker Hill, through the Grove—and as he does, he ponders the city’s fading past and emerging future. A self-described 'reluctant Angeleno,' Ulin, who moved here from New York in 1991, brings a sharp eye, a good pair of legs, and a sensitive thoughtfulness to the subject of urban sprawl. Ulin’s musings are immediately relevant, covering everything from the Metro Purple Line extension to Rick Caruso’s proposed downtown trolley to Councilman Jose Huizar’s Bringing Back Broadway campaign."

Los Angeles Magazine

"In a series of fascinating, at times impressionistic, disquisitions [Ulin] unlocks some of Los Angeles’s “hieroglyphic” secrets. Step right up then for Ulin’s tour of Los Angeles, a diffuse city full of 'nonlandmark landmarks.' . . . The pleasure of Sidewalking is watching Ulin contextualize each place by considering the way its history is preserved, effaced, or buried under the surface."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Matt Seidel

"Walking in Los Angeles is not an oxymoron. In this revealing meditation on what it means to pound the pavement in the City of Automobiles, book critic David L. Ulin observes a Los Angeles that many of us didn't even knew existed. . . . Thoughtful and poetic, Ulin's small volume proves there is more to the City of Angels than just beaches, movie stars and abundant sunshine."

Chicago Tribune - June Sawyers

"In Sidewalking, David Ulin brilliantly reflects on the city as experienced by someone with a need to walk, a need to savor streetscapes, registering signage, vistas, vegetation, fellow citizens. And while Ulin walks, he thinks: processing traces of history, architectural styles, street plans, demographics, changes. A longtime L.A. Times book critic, Ulin, intimately familiar with the best that’s ever been written about this sprawling, layered city, also artfully folds in the perceptions of others. Memories, observations, bygone L.A., 21st-century L.A.—Ulin’s superlative tapestry makes this the latest of great literary takes on the City of Angels."

Bookish

"The moments of true beauty in this shortest of books are precisely when Ulin reminds us that the everyday texture of Los Angeles . . . already functions like a quantum field out of which distant influences, disorienting urban rebirths and half-remembered cinematic cameos are constantly emerging. It is a city of 'seismic existentialism,' he wonderfully suggests, whose ground is shaken not just by earthquakes but by the seemingly endless eruption of alternative urban forms, often successfully breaking through."

Los Angeles Times - Geoff Manaugh

2015-08-18
Writers love New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. They do not ignore Los Angeles, but love is often in short supply, writes book critic and former Los Angeles Times book editor Ulin (The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, 2010, etc.) in this mostly affectionate, rambling exploration of his adopted city. Catching the literary world's attention in the 1930s as the soulless, neon-lit slum of Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler, LA has grown into the endless urban village laced by crowded freeways and empty sidewalks of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, perhaps doomed to become the grim dystopia of Blade Runner. This is not much of an improvement, Ulin points out while admitting that observers still see Los Angeles as "the end of the line, the place where the myths of possibility and reinvention butt up against the edges of the continent, and the vanishing point of the horizon becomes the vanishing point of the known world." In fact, traditional urbanism is well-established, in the form of mass transportation, tall apartments, and a rejuvenated downtown. "To live here," he writes, "is to play an elaborate Situationist game of psychogeography." Ulin mostly approves of changes, but he remains fascinated with the vast, quasi-dream city packed with architectural oddities and fake neighborhoods (Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm, The Grove) built as purely commercial enterprises. In this brief but engaging book, the author chronicles his wanderings through the streets and his conversations with friends, entrepreneurs, and officials, and he makes it clear that he has read every book and seen every movie on his subject. Those who know the city will have the advantage, but Ulin casts his net widely, so most readers will enjoy his observations of Los Angeles in literary and popular art as well as his thoughtful personal views.

Kirkus Reviews