The Decline of Los Angeles

A sense of stability is generated toward a city when its older buildings are preserved. Older residents can use buildings as reference points in their lives, that there is a continuum to their existence. Youth can be show examples that though their lives seem short and useless, there is a past history which can be explored for some answers to the many questions they face as they stare into a sometime bleak future.

And for the rest of us in between, trying to survive in a city with a precarious future and a present full of difficulty, architecture preserved can be used both as a stable reference point to anchor the present and as a marker to guide us into the future. A city which does not preserve its worthy and notable past is a city adrift without a soul, floundering and grasping for quick fixes of parking lots and mini-malls.

MATTHEW HETZ

Los Angeles