Wandering Through Caracas
I spent my first four years of life in Caracas. I don’t think I really remember anything from Caracas even though I have a few mental images that could be a genuine recollection. Then I find an old black and white picture from those early days in Caracas and I realize that what I thought was a memory might have really been nothing more than my having seen the old photo. And then there are the family stories like of the monkey who came down out of the tree on the patio and ate our scrambled eggs. Who knows if that’s a memory, a story recall or some combination. I’m not sure it really matters, but what I know is that life in the tropics was a pretty messy affair. The first realization of that was absolutely a memory and it happened when we were first coming into a landing in San Jose, Costa Rica for the first time as a family. We had left Venezuela and spent a year in a combination of Santa Monica and Ithaca (two places with almost nothing in common) while my mother pulled her relationship strings to get a new gig at the institute in the tropical valley of Turrialba in Costa Rica. If Caracas had been a messy tropical place, Costa Rica was more so. I could see that in the rusted corrugated metal roofs on the shacks all around San Jose. Nothing about the tropics is neat and tidy. It is a creepy crawly humid place where people build shelters here, there and wherever they want.
Whether in the sprawl of Mexico City, on the hillsides of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas or the overwhelming crush of Jakarta, the pattern of construction is unmistakable. It clings to hillsides in ways that defy gravity and reason. In the low areas there is a marshiness that won’t end. It all gives the impression of impermanence. In Latin America in particular, I always felt that other than the indigenous people, everyone else carried a carpetbag and their colonialism was opportunistic and likely short-lived. It never looked like they were building brick houses, but rather the proverbial straw and stick houses that went up fast and lasted only so long. It’s one of the things that often occurs to me when I wonder about whether colonialism was good or bad for indigenous people. Africans hate that line of reasoning because its hard for them to agree that anything other than Black rule is good, despite the evidence of tribal brutalism over centuries. But if we ignore the issue of whether colonialism is good or bad in an absolute sense, the next question must be is short-lived rape-pillage-depart colonialism better or worse than dig-in-for-the-long-haul colonialism. There is a part of me that feels that the pillage and leave approach popularized by the Vikings is more harmful that the approach of making the new land home. The later clearly has the problem of unlikely reparations, but the former leaves a pattern of impermanence that is visible in all aspects of these countries, not least of which is in their construction practices.
Lest we think here in America that we are only ever the victors and never the vanquished, let us remember that while the English and the French were fighting over the great resource (furs and timber especially) plunder of the East, trying each to become permanent residents and thereby creating a brick house approach, in the West the Spaniards (and even the Russians in the Northwest) were very unsure of the value of a permanent installation and tended to go with the mud/stick/straw approach to life. To be sure, the areas in the Southwest were far less hospitable than anyone might consider as permanently habitable, but the coastal and valley areas of California and the Pacific Northwest were pretty sweet. You would think that someone would see value in that sort of environment and decide to set up shop for good, but not so much. The Spaniards and, eventually even the Mexicans (Spaniards 2.0) were very quick to think that the Pacific coast was only OK to visit, but not so much to live there. I know there are still some lovely estancias that had thousands of acres that now seem like an obvious dynastic multi-generational wealth-building play, but even there I am reminded that a hundred years ago William Randolph Hearst gave hundreds of thousands of acres to the State and that area of California is still just a big swath of wilderness. We should all be happy about that, but it remains no less curious.
Maybe it was that that on-again, off-again indifference to settling in to this state or maybe it was the 1849 Gold Rush mentality, but this state had developed two fundamental tenets of home ownership. First of all, you can do whatever the hell you want on your land because it is YOUR land. Secondly, you can build anything any which way you want (my architect sister and brother-in-law are already grimacing at that overstatement). It is less about individual liberty that I am struck by today and more about how people tend to build out here.
We got off on a travel tangent yesterday as we were leaving LA. Kim had read about a great cactus store somewhere in Echo Park and she wanted to go see the place. I’m the cactus guy in the family and I was OK skipping it, but she wanted to do it, so we sought the place out. To begin with, Echo Park is just west of where we stayed in West Hollywood. It has apparently become a bit of a hipster urban pioneering area. What it looked like to me was the bad side of Caracas. To begin with, LA seems to have grown up without any particular regard to the aesthetics of telephone and electric poles and wires. I despise wires and poles, they are simply too messy looking for my delicate sensibilities. Well, Echo Park is telephone pole and wire central. It is also a modestly hilly area with roads that do not follow a logical pattern, but rather follow the contours of the hills. That would be OK, maybe even pleasant, but it is always easier to build on flat land, so there is a tendency to use earth movers to flatten a lot near the road so that a strip mall or some such thing can go in. That leaves a big cut-into hillside behind. We all know that mudslides are not uncommon in California and I bet you can guess why. Yep, those hillsides get applied with a cursory layer of concrete (very unattractive) and then Bob’s Your Uncle. Well, nature has a way of telling us who our uncle really is whenever it wants to, and out here that’s when it rains.
It’s just hard to believe that in this day and age, in a City where real estate is so very valuable, people will choose to live in an area that looks like a favela of shacks and I must say, Echo Park has a bit of that look. One good rain looks like all it would take to bring the whole thing gushing down the LA River. Every house looks like a bungalow that some wannabe starlet has rented while she figures out how to get herself to Sunset Boulevard. As we stopped at one T-intersection, in front of us were two homes next to each other. One looked like a traditional steep-roofed cape and the other looked like a modernistic blockhouse. One welcomed in the surrounding neighborhood while the other seemed to want to shut it out entirely. Both were crawling with poles and wires and sidewalk detritus, making either look to be as undesirable a place to live as one could imagine. And yet, a quick glance at Zillow tells us those houses are valued at $1-2 million. Go figure.
The best I can figure is that people must really need to be gregarious and in the middle of the action to want to pay that kind of money to live in that kind of place. I don’t often wander around Los Angeles and its a good thing, since I suspect there are lots of Wandering Through Caracas topics I might land on if I did.