Public Space in the Age of COVID-19
April 2020: Walking Home, Los Angeles
On a Friday in late April, John and I walked home from work. A mundane thing to do, if it were New York City pre-COVID-19. But we are Angelenos, and our walk took some planning. The 5.5-mile distance from the Arts District to Silverlake was mostly uphill and would take around 100 minutes to traverse, we wanted to be in time for a late dinner with our kids, and we had to drive in together that morning — just so we’d still have a car at home over the weekend. We needed walking shoes and extra clothes; because we Zoomed so much each day with our upper bodies visible onscreen, we couldn’t wear T-shirts all day long. We had laptops and drawings, wallets and keys and water, masks at the ready and caps on our heads. A lot of effort just to get home and burn some calories in the process. But John had figured a few weeks earlier that he liked the idea of experiencing LA — our city — in the same way he’d experienced others on his travels. After hearing about his first few walks, I joined him.
We looked out of place when we set off, like a couple on a jaunt up to Yosemite Falls (a Memorial Day weekend tradition that wouldn’t be happening this year). I was jumpy and a little impatient, but there was something resembling a smile on my face. As we made our way from the Arts District through Little Tokyo towards Grand Park, I recognized what I felt as excitement, but with its defining exuberance subdued by guilt. The excitement was what washed over me whenever I visited a bustling, crowded, and unfamiliar city for the first time. And the guilt? There were many reasons to feel guilty about experiencing anything that resembled “happy.”
I wasn’t disappointed. Yes, we were, and are, in the middle of a pandemic — and the city wasn’t bustling. Nor was it crowded. In some places it was eerily empty. I hoped that I would remember how alone we were at times, because I knew that as soon as the pandemic was over (but would it ever really be over?), we would forget that loneliness. So in this way the city was unfamiliar — it was startlingly new — and that first walk was remarkable to me. Every segment of sidewalk held a discovery, every block a previously unnoticed treasure. My favorite was a perfectly crafted and meticulously designed fence bounding the property of a Victorian house in Angelino Heights, that from a distance looked to be constructed of typical 1x dark wood slats but on closer inspection proved to be made out of crisply painted and perfectly spaced and leveled steel plate. Plus so many neighborhood churches marked our way, each with its own singular and intimate presence. So many churches! We paused at all of them, sensing how much of their surrounding communities’ souls they must be responsible for safekeeping, inside their now-shuttered doors.
The walk was a study in contrasts. Whereas Grand Park was devoid of people, Echo Park was teeming — with couples, roommates (or so we assumed), and families picnicking on the lawn six feet apart (or not); joggers and cyclists. There was life, and there was emptiness. I saw symbols of hope, and ones of doom. There was vibrant color next to rainbows of dull and variegated grays. There were smells so enticing they made us reel coming from taco trucks parked on Sunset; others were indescribably awful, reeking of waste and darkness and fear. There were people who grinned at us through their masks as they passed, wanting to acknowledge with their smiling eyes our new commonality; there was also the young couple who, approaching us on the same side of the street, stopped at around 25 feet away and loudly asked us if we were planning to stay on “their” side. Silently, we crossed. Strangely, neither of them was masked; both John and I were.
Of course the walk was a chance for the two of us architects to stop whenever we felt the urge to look closely at a stair, a façade, a garden, or a sign. Some buildings, the tops of which we recalled seeing from the freeway, now confronted us in full naked frontality. I didn’t take any photos on that walk, but they were stacked up inside me to the point of overflowing by the time we reached our own front door.
Already by then, the idea that things would quickly return to normal was a thing of the past, a remnant of our first confused days of naïve and unformed thinking. We had passed through the initial phase of denial. There had been incredible photo essays in The New York Times and LA Times that revealed the stark and majestic beauty of our cities’ newly-abandoned public spaces. These images reinforced how sublime and powerful manmade physical environments can be. They also gave rise to an unease: What if our new reality, in whatever unpredictable form it takes, were to send humanity down the path of thinking that our public spaces aren’t as important as we know they are? Design has always been a hard sell and now, in the first throes of a major recession, on the brink of possible economic collapse, and confronting (whether directly or secondhand) a sadness and despair so mighty as to be unimaginable until it was too quickly upon us, design’s transformative potential could fade into the background. Just when recognition of its magic is needed most, to shape our unknowable physical future.
For one who believes that public spaces have always been undervalued, our 100-minute walk home was reassuring. By virtue and magnitude of the emotions it triggered, it proved to me that our shared spaces are even more important than before. In fact, a whole new set of challenges is about to be dumped on the designers of public spaces, and how they are addressed will set the tone for how our cities evolve, are used, and will be maintained. There is a simpler way to put it: If in this new pandemic age we need more room to stand, walk, work, play, talk, love, hate, and connect, then each of us will take up more space — not less. Our bodies will spill into every possible crevice; outside the confines of our homes, it is the sidewalks, streets, plazas, parks, stadiums, schoolyards, and other civic arenas that will have to receive and sustain us. But: How? We know that out of crises emerge new possibilities — that is the way it has always been. But it seems difficult to imagine, now, here, in this unsettled state we find ourselves. Spaces, neighborhoods, cities…they are unwieldy, unyielding, and loathe to change. But we have to make it happen. Otherwise we really are doomed. Yes. We are.
