the griffin avenue preemptive nostalgia tour
1. take a walk My new thing is walking home. I’ve done it three times now, first because the Gold Line was broken, later because it seemed more efficient than driving to the gym. On Tuesday I took a new route up Griffin Avenue, which runs through Lincoln Heights, Montecito Heights , and the southeast side of Highland Park. The day was too hot, but the light was perfect, that pinkish gold that filmmakers love. The houses in Lincoln Heights wore their decades in layers. Shingles, stucco, rickety bedrooms built over carports. The makeovers got nicer and more up-to-code as I moved north. Walking a long street is always a series of ethnographic studies, as you make your way through waves of immigration and gentrification. House on haunted hill. I discovered that the grassy no-man’s-parkland near the Arroyo is where old TV’s go to die. The whole walk, I felt like I was witnessing the last of something. Maybe because history was so compressed all around me, maybe because re-urb...