This week I decided to visit the city of Long Beach, more specifically the downtown commercialized area. This was my walking adventure. I explored Belmont Shore, Pine Ave Pier and the Pike. Throughout these areas, the traffic was always hectic. However, the traffic only consisted of automobiles. I never once saw some type of public transportation around. I saw people waiting for for public transportation but I never saw it really pass by. I thought this was strange because it has many businesses and residential areas, I would think people would need the public transportation to get around. I saw downtown Long Beach as a different version of downtown compared to Los Angeles or other cities that have commercialized centers. I know Long Beach is a very large city therefore I feel like I can't really say that Downtown Long Beach would be the center for Long Beach. Especially the geographic location of downtown Long Beach is right next to the beach and no where near the rest of the Long Beach residential areas. This area of Long Beach also had a different type of residential area. It consisted of many apartments and not as many homes. If there were homes they would be located 2 or 3 blocks away from the madness of the city. There was also a lack of parking near the residential areas around downtown due to so much business around. So essentially, it's hard to imagine this area to be considered as Long Beach's center. I would consider Long Beach to have the more modern way of looking at centers that we discussed in lecture, which is the home is the center and work as the outer zones of this center.
Belmont Shore consisted of a long strip of clothing boutiques, restaraunts, bars and random businesses, mainly known as 2nd street. This street is unique because all of the stores are made differently in terms of architecture. There are also a lot more natives to the area than tourists. I always felt lost as I walked around, while all the other people seemed to know where they were and wanted to go. This area also seemed to represent as a place that people would meet up to have lunch, have a drink or two, it was very modern and had a local feel to it.
I also went to visited The Pike and Pine Ave Pier. These two areas consisted of local eating areas, movie theater and boats. This wasn't as populated with people around 5:30 when I went, but as it got darker, cars started to roll in and it seemed the nightlife is bigger in this area. Downtown is very commercialized with some type of business left and right. There were boats that offered cruises, whale watch, and sight seeing.
Lastly, there were many random parks around Long Beach, open space where people could go and sit and do whatever they want. I saw people sitting on the benches eating dinner, I saw people exercising and others simply enjoy the ocean view. Overall, I had a great experience in downtown Long Beach, enjoyed the craziness of the city and saw what it was like to not consider this commercialized area as not the center of a city. The home is definitely more of a center and downtown is simply a place where people go to work and to find some type of entertainment in their lives.
Long Beach is the closest popular city to where I live, so often I just reference that as my hometown to people. Long Beach is very interesting in its industrial geography. It is a stark contrast against the very next beaches over of Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, Bolsa Chica, and so on. It is one of the only beaches where you see the oil drills and man made islands. It is not a clean or pretty beach. The city away from the industrialized oceanfront though is beautiful draws a lot of people to it as a place to shop, eat, and bar hop. It is one of the few beach cities where one sees the contrast between industry and working class and the ocean. In class we talked about locating different classes of people. In Kling, Olin, and Poster’s Emergence of Postsuburbia, the text analyzes Orange County. As they go through the various cities and the demographics of each, they also note this interesting example:
ReplyDelete“Similarly, the economic elite sets cosmopolitan tastes in car ownership, clothing, and food that many others emulate on a less opulent scale. For the affluent residents of the South County, cosmopolitan consumption may be marked by driving a German car, wearing Italian shoes, and dining in a French restaurant with other affluent whites. For the poorer residents of the Central County and North County, cosmopolitan consumption may be marked by having dinner in a Thai café that has a predominantly Thai clientele.”
Long Beach can be compared to this same example in the demographics of the city itself. However, it is one of the few cities where there is true diversity among people and among socioeconomic groups. There is a large student population from Cal State Long Beach and Long Beach City College, older retired people, middle-aged businesspeople, large LGBT population, families, and so on. It is a small space where one truly sees diversity. However, the one place of drastic poverty is north Long Beach, the place we hear about in songs from artists like Snoop Dogg and Sublime. This area has poor school, very few parks, and no social scene. As Downtown Long Beach as the industry, it still has the Pike to invite visitors. North Long Beach is largely ignored and most people do not even realize that area is part of the city. It would not be surprising if the affluent part of Long Beach chose to divide from this poorer north Long Beach portion. The affluent area would of course still include the industry of factories and oil drilling, collecting their revenue to fund itself, leaving north Long Beach with no big source of revenue.
Long Beach is successful in the amount of true diversity one sees on any given street. However, there are clear disparities among the distribution of the city’s resources. The state funded university is in the most affluent area of Long Beach, but as you go further away from CSULB, social disparities are apparent. As we saw in Majora Carter’s “Greening the Ghetto,” the effects of parks is vital to the welfare and futures of residents. However, tourists and more affluent locals most likely do not travel through north Long Beach, leaving the problems of the community there ignored. They can hop on the freeways and completely bypass north Long Beach, which only borders with poorer cities of no attraction to them.
I really like how you travelled to the different locations in Long Beach and pointed out the fact that the industrial center is apart from the cultural center. Long Beach is a vital city full of diversity and it allows for a culture unique from surrounding cities.