Different Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a polarizing city and Wayfaring will show you one different side of the city. To some people the city is a paradise with its beautiful beaches, luxury hotels, bars and nightclubs. To others it’s a look of apocalypse with its air pollution, earthquake and wildfires. Los Angles is a kind of place that even though some people refuse to visit.

In order to understand the whole picture of Los Angles you have to understand how the city flows of its local landscape. Once you find out how the city operate – how it form a system – you will see the beauty of  it.

First of all I will begin from wastewater plant El Segundo. It’s actually the third largest plant in the country – behind Chicago and Boston. The city even offers tours to El Segundo, which is a great place nestled between LAX and Chevron refinery. You have got the Pacific Ocean to the west and  LAX to the north. You can even seen where its pipe extends. Then I offer you the other end of spectrum – Mt. Wilson – an observatory and antenna fields. It’s cool up there with a forest of huge antennas and you can run among the trees and the towers.

Another interesting building to visit is One Wilshire – a classic modernist Skidmore, Owings & Merrill building, at the crossroads of Grand and Wilshire but it called the most connected building on the West Coast in terms of internet bandwidth. It a telco hotel as well and has connections directly to Pacific submarine cables. In other words, it infrastructure, but it  also architecture. It got floors and floors of computers and then, occasionally, some lawyer office.

One of my favorite places is the gravel trench in Irwindale the Durbin trench and the Vulcan trench. Those are two adjacent gravel trenches in this huge complex of trenches, where much of the gravel out is that one, which the structures and the freeways in Los Angeles get made.

In this picture is the Cascades, which are a registered State Histor-ical Landmark. They are where the 338-mile Owens River Aqueduct terminates, bringing fresh water to L.A. The aqueduct construction, which finished in 1913, is a fascinating and murky tale of government corruption and outright theft. Los Angeles is, after all, maybe more than other cities, a complex blend of physical facts and interpretive fictions.