So this week I undertook the walking portion of this blog assignment. On Halloween, I went to West Hollywood. The annual Halloween festival in West Hollywood is the biggest Halloween festivity on the West Coast. From what was being said at the event, West Hollywood becomes the seventh largest city in California on that night.
Now time to talk about West Hollywood on every other day of the year. West Hollywood's main defining characteristic is it's dense gay population. Similar to The Castro in San Francisco or Chelsea in New York, this area has an extremely apparent gay influence on the appearance and culture of the city. What is unique about West Hollywood (typically referred to as WeHo) is that it is in fact its own city. Unlike the Castro or Chelsea that are just districts. This has to do with Los Angeles' sprawling landscape that would allow for an entire city to have this influence.
What I would like to discuss in this blog post is the way a social group of people can selectively create a space for themselves. Of course, this is common with racial groups such as Chinatown and Little Iran. Yet the formation of West Hollywood as a gay mecca is very unique. Truthfully, most aspects of the city has some form of gay identify quality. For example, the crosswalks are painted rainbow and even the police cars have rainbow formations on them. While walking around the parade, these adornments were impossible to ignore.
Seeing as there is no reading this week for me to relate back to, I will try to explain the most recent topics we have learned in class to discuss this city. In terms of centers and peripheries of a city, West Hollywood most certainly has a cultural and economic centre. On the main boulevard, Santa Monica Blvd, is where the parade took place. This main strip holds the cultural source of the city. The street is lined with nightclubs, restaurants, and shopping. Surrounding these area, there is the fire station, police station, and the city hall. This is an example of a city with a city center, this model strays away from the postmetropolitan model of not having city centers that are heavy in the commerce of the city. This model is very apparent in LA due to its heavy dependence on automobiles and lack of public transportation, have made citizens redefine where they center their lives among the city. Therefore, West Hollywood is extremely unique in not only its cultural infrastructure, but its physical infrastructure as well.
This is a picture I took the famous Rainbow bar. I was quite difficult to capture a picture of just a normal space in West Hollywood that wasn't surrounded by people not dressed appropriately for the academic nature of this blog post.
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