How the closure of the closet marks a decline of La Civic Life

Los Angeles closer closed Earlier this month. After decades of opening 24 hours a day, serving tens of thousands – perhaps even hundreds of thousands – dinners and acting as a centralization site of political and cultural life in Los Angeles, the restaurant is now sealed with “closed” signs and has already become a magnet for vandalism.

Many restaurants come and go to every big city, and the death of the closet is obviously the result of a complex dispute over the responsibility of the trust that controls it. These things happen.

But the closet was not just every restaurant, and its passage touched a chord with people in a way that most dining establishments do not. His disappearance speaks of bigger changes in California and the nation, and is not necessarily better.

Many cities have something that is approximately what was the Los Angeles closet: a place to gather where politicians and activists and lobbyists and journalists can gather and appreciate each other over or outside their work. Paris has its cafes, Washington has UnhappySacramento has Frank fatS Show yourself during lunch or an hour for dinner and you can count on the people who consist of a civic culture.

The closet became this place for Los Angeles in the 1990s, when Richard Rordan was elected mayor. Rordan also owned the closet.

So the closet was initially a place to catch up with Rordan, as well as a way to understand it better. Rjordan paid well to the staff and the treasure of the loyalty he received and returned.

When the City Council discussed an ordinance on salaries, Rordan opposed it, feeling that it was too restrictive and could remove jobs for the initial level. Proponents of the measure accused him of being unhappy, but they misunderstood Rordan’s opinion of the question. He believed in a living salary – the proof was the closet – he just didn’t believe the government imposed it.

There was no better way to gain an idea of ​​Rjordan’s policy or priorities than to dine with him in the closet. In addition, by the way, he offered glare for his eccentricity: if he told me once, he told me thousands of times that it was clever to order bacon well because he was cooking for longer, melted the fat and thus would protect heart disease.

Thank God he was a mayor, not a health officer.

But the closet’s contribution to Los Angeles was not limited to his windows in Rordan. This has become one of those places that gave rise to a civic life.

The cafe to the parliament

The importance of institutions that deliver such gifts were recognized at least after the writing of Jurgen Habermaas, the German philosopher who understands the importance of the 18th century. “sphere“In analyzing the cultural strains that allow democracy to root and flourish. desperately necessary protection of liberal democracy“A thousand small sanites,” include the idea that the collection places deliver the rich soil in which democratic institutions germinate and grow.

As Gopnik says, “Parliament can be as strong as the cafe next to it.”

The closet was this place. He hosted snacks and lunches and jams on a late night. I attended police pension parties there and met countless sources there for lunch, just to encounter other sources of exit.

It was not about food, although the food was not bad. I once ordered a fruit plate and my lunch companion looked. “They are not known for their fruit plate,” he said, and accurately. The hash browns were better.

It was a rare place in Los Angeles – rarely in every city, but especially one as it atomizes like LA – gathered those with a business in front of the government under one roof to share food and meet each other. It helped that the closet was open all the time.

Read more: LA’s quality of life has a record low, a study shows. Why political leaders should not ignore this

And if the parliament is as strong as the nearby cafe, then the death of the closet signals rough water forward for the parliament of the second largest city of the country. We are already at a time when different figures almost do not speak to each other, where democratic socialists are as annoyed by the centrist Democrats as by the Republicans, where separation is cultural and deeply political-in now they are not seen as differences between public-minded people who share the desire to improve their communities.

It is a dangerous territory and reflects up and down in today’s American political system as true of congress as it is on California PolicyS

This is where the intermediary institutions once helped. It is more difficult to demonize your political opponent if you are in the same bowling league or PTA. The differences in opinions are less big when you accept that the person on the other side of this disagreement shares your love for basketball or observing birds – or bacon.

Coffee houses are where these points of the general are found, where opponents share stories about their children or their favorite foods, and not lobby charges in public hearing or deposits.

It was the closet, and Los Angeles was better because of it. Rordan knew it.

The neighborhood around the closet was quite heavy in the mid-1990s. Rjordan and others had dumped the Disney Long Term Project, and he turned to his overdue completion, bringing a new life to the hopper Hill and the Civil Center. But the southern part of the city center remained thread.

Then came the proposal to build Staples Center and its surrounded entertainment complex. He offered a great promise – as he was delivered enough – but he created a potential conflict for Rjordan, as the successful completion of the project is expected to increase tourism and energy in the area around the closet. The mayor withdrew from the negotiations on Staples (this is back when a whimsical ideas such as a conflict of interest and the rule of law are still relevant).

But there was another option. Rordan could sell the closet by removing any conflict. Why, I asked him in the midst of these negotiations, he just got rid of the closet?

He did not hesitate. “I prefer to give up the mayor,” he said.