Forget It Jake, It's Not Really Chinatown

I'm glad the issue of Chinatown's authenticity/worth has been raised, as it perfectly embodies the tragically distorted world view of so many New Yorkers. Before I put Chinatown in context, let me say something bold. Schocking, even. This is gonna be hard for NYers to take, but I'm just gonna put it out there:

LA is not NY.

Omaha is not NY. Lima is not NY. Mexico City is not NY. Florence is not NY. Paris is about as close to NY as another city can get, or I suppose London (I've never been). But no city is NY. The entire problem with New Yorkers is that they view every destination in relative terms to their own city. So when some aspect of another place does not measure up, or differs in a way they don't like, they condemn it. It's silly. It's tunnel vision (the Lincoln Tunnel?). It's sad.

But the real issue here is the argument that because LA lacks so many of the fundamentals that define NY, and many other major international cities, it is not a "real" city. This is the crux of every outsider's complaint with this place (where, by the way, it's a temperate 62 degrees right now in the middle of December). And this is where disapproving outsiders miss the point.

LA is not like most, or any, other cities. Maybe it's not actually a "city." Maybe it's just a sprawling collection of little neighborhoods with no real core, or identity -- except that if you walk into a bar on a Thursday night, odds are the girl next to you is from Iowa. But LA doesn't care. LA doesn't want to be NY. LA doesn't aspire to reach the elevated state of city-dom that would earn the approval of New Yorkers and international snobs alike. LA doesn't really know the rules of urban greatness, and if it does, it's too busy trying to make it in the movies to care. It's one-of-a-kind, and if it operates on any rules or ideals, they're not the same ones that govern places like NY or Paris or even San Francisco. To sum up, LA is unashamedly itself.

You don't have to like it. But to judge it in comparison to NY, or some "ideal" of urban perfection, is to view the world in some one-sided, boring paradigm that essentially cuts off the endless possibilities of seeing and enaging the world in new ways. It's typical New York -- tragically unimaginative.