View of a Loft

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

He was so nice—so nice!—while we were lying to his face. He buzzed us into the building and then stood and chatted for tens of minutes about how great the lofts were, how thick their walls, how shiny their amenities, as his adorable little wiener dog—adorable!—kept licking at my toes. He was a happy resident, young, Asian-American, surrounded by happy young Asian-American friends. His building was all sold-out, he said, but he’d heard one unit was in foreclosure. Still, maybe we’d like the Barker Block lofts just a few streets away. 

We had come to bury the Mura lofts, not to buy them. Out past Little Tokyo, in the thick of the meandering Arts District, they rise in unbroken columns of coffee and mud, and every time we drive past them, we are filled with noble hate. This can’t be what Joel Bloom lived for, this hub of striving, conforming humanity. “Ew!” we say whenever we see one of these omnipresent bad loftages. “Gross!” we say when we see one hulking, almost always in the de rigueur shades of mustard and cranberry. But this one, this brown thing, is the biggest eyesore we’ve encountered. Good lord, that’s a graceless pile of slop!

We wanted to see inside so badly. Granite countertops? Yes, I’d imagine.

But the young man, really, had broken our stride. If he wants to help colonize the old wonderful warehouse district, if he wants to live somewhere an old wonderful warehouse once was, if he wants to walk his wonderful wiener dog and patronize the restaurant where you can get an alligator sausage, well, it’s certainly more than I’m doing. I wasn’t there either when Alex Cox was filming Repo Man around the neighborhood. I wasn’t there either when the artists showed up in the ’70s, or even the ’90s. I am not even there now.

But he is.

And his life there, where he lives and walks his dog and patronizes cute small businesses, is somehow less fitting than my imaginary life there, where I do not live and only semi-monthly buy a Groundwork chai, because I would not live there for anything less than an old, busted brick edifice that is doubtless full of decades of benzene. I would not live in these shiny condo lofts. I am better than he, and with exquisite taste. And I’m just a tourist, and a fascist at that.

There is a new Urth Caffe on South Hewitt Street. It is filled with happy Districters. They live in Barker Block, which is new and shiny (it released its second wave of units just this past weekend) but at least refitted a useless edifice instead of scraping and razing what existed before. There are beautiful brick buildings for the developer’s next phase, which must wait until this phase is all sold out, and I don’t doubt they will be ready by, say, 2040. The developers, as thoughtful as the Irvine family (which invented master planning), are putting in a restaurant and an upscale grocer for their hundreds of instant residents by Alameda and the river; a doggy daycare, for all that tells you, has already moved in.

Just one block over, on Molino Street, is a glorious retrofit from the same developer: brick painted dark gray and curving to hug the line of Mateo Street. Even their parking garage is delicious: It’s hung, several stories, with blossoming flora.

I don’t need to tell you we wouldn’t live there either.

My boyfriend and I walk and walk, whether through the Arts District or my Mid-City neighborhood, and every home we pass, we criticize. “Ew!” we say, and “Gross!” we say, as though our own curb appeal were flawless, as if my yard weren’t bordered by a chain link fence, and he didn’t live in a sty. We admire plenty, when it’s old and meets our exacting standards, from my excruciating palette demands (nothing, ever, beige, brown or goldenrod, and, if at all possible, like the Eastern Columbia building and the old Bullocks Wilshire, every structure should be aqua) to his sweeping judgments on all facades. We are snobs, tourists, fascists, waiting for the world to adhere to our elegant tastes.

Bullocks Wilshire

As we walked back from a Barker Block sales pitch—reporting undercover till it hurts—he flashed on an alternate universe, where we were actually buying a house together, where we were actually looking for a place we could live. We’ll never do it, because our egos won’t let us buy something someone else created, something someone else determined was hip, something someone else loaded with granite countertops and shiny amenities, something for the bourgeois bohemian, with emphasis on the bourgeois. And our secret fantasy building, the one we’ve chosen a few blocks from Little Tokyo, nice and scummy and with beautiful bones, is probably full of decades of benzene, which we wouldn’t have the first idea how to expiate, and if someone else did it for us, we’d turn up our nose.

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