One from the window of my old loft in downtown Los Angeles, and another from the roof of the building. It was situated just about square in the middle between the ritzy postmodern combined-use buildings to the west, the mission district/aka skid row to the east, the imposing government buildings to the north and the industrial warehouses to the south. The building was 12 stories, almost a century old, and it was largely favored by the hip younger set that was sort of faux-yuppy, sort of maybe not. There weren't enough parking spaces down in the basement to accommodate all the tenants' cars, so there was no assigned parking; instead there were valets whose job it was to juggle the cars around as spaces became available as residents went out and came in. But anyway, living right across Hill Street from Pershing Square (formerly notorious as a gay hangout), I was used to seeing considerable spillover population from skid row, which was just some blocks away.
And it's true, once you step far enough away -- or as I like to call it, "taking the God's-eye point of view" -- what at first looked like ugly tragedy turns out to be a beautiful dramedy.
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