MacArthur Park Media has been live for exactly one month today, and we think we really love life on the web. LA Daily wrote about us, and so did Boing Boing. LAist, Univision, and Marketplace sent fan mail, the last of which was serious enough to make Antonio of MPM’s Tamales on the Run a national radio star on their show today. Many neighbors have written; some of the nice ones have commented. More than 1,000 people have visited MPM in this first month, a lot of them via a search for “macarthur park fake IDs” which I find amazing.

Also amazing: this photo and its makers, Louise Baker on Photoshop and Silas Dilworth on font design. I like the photo because I like the sign, and I like the sign because it lets you know that MacArthur Park still feels much of the time like it’s in the 80s. This is when infrastructural development essentially stopped here; refugees from El Salvador were arriving en masse, rent was cheap, the crime rate high, and for these and other reasons the neighborhood was left to date. So we still have signage like this, hot pink with jade and purple pop lettering. We still have Stand and Deliver murals. We still have stores of payphones, and the people who pay for them.

The other thing about the sign Westlake Mall is that it says Westlake Mall. To be clear, the neighborhood is actually named Westlake. We know this, city planners know this, so do people who work at the CRA. But people in the neighborhood, apparently, do not: when they say Westlake, they mean Westlake Street — the one just east of Alvarado. White people seem similarly confused, very often associating Westlake with Westlake Village, a suburb in the Valley, or (not kidding) The Westside Pavilion, a shopping center.

MPM loves MacArthur Park for all of its irony, this included, and we have so many more stories about this place on the way — stories of fake ID busts, Asian/Latino race relations, the future of bilingual education, and reporters’ notebooks from ride-alongs in bullet-proof vests with the Rampart Division’s gangs unit. We’re excited. We love it here.

More soon,

MPM

I taught first grade at a public school here last year and we were lucky, really lucky, to have volunteers from 826LA visit us and write with us on mondays. The tutors were in fact so thoughtful and so kind that when one of them went away to New York for a couple of weeks, she sent all 22 kids in the class postcards. The postcards had pictures of all of New York’s most iconic monuments: Union Square, the Empire State Building, maps of NYC’s transit system. Later, when Elizabeth’s job demanded all of her and she could no longer come back, I asked the kids to make postcards of the neighborhood to send to her as a thank you. We reviewed what goes on a postcard: important, sometimes beautiful things in a place. I thought they were all going to draw the lake, maybe the park with the rose garden. But in fact, only a few of them did. Instead most of them completed the sentence frame The Empire State Building is to New York as ___ is to MacArthur Park with: the Food 4 Less. Since they had never really left the neighborhood, it hadn’t occurred to them that most of the stores in the area are chain stores, and are everywhere. Marlon, author of the postcard shown above, also drew the 99¢ store, the bank, and five cockroaches, two of which are crawling on people’s heads.