I've changed my mind. While watching the newly inflamed debate in Los Angeles right now over the actual, for-real, 100% factual boundary of what is Eastside and Westside, in a city that has always had trouble defining its boundaries to begin with, I think fluidity on those definitions from here on out is the way to go.
Let's relax a little, first off. At Jesus Sanchez's new blog, an anonymous commenter called him an "idiot" for the unpardonable crime of using the term "Eastsider" in his masthead. Total dick move, come on. This kind of discourse is convincing me that Eastside essentialists need to chill out. Here's why.
The boundaries and borders and cores and nodes of Los Angeles have and always will be shifting, like the city's very culture, its competing visions of itself. Lines are continually negotiable. From what we're learning today, an early east-west demarcation seems to have been given to streets radiating in both directions from Main Street in downtown. Later on came Western Avenue and Eastern Avenue, hinting at a subsequent shifting in the poles. Who knows when or how La Brea became such a powerful line in the sand. It doesn't really matter.
Because as L.A. grows and transforms, and it's always growing, always transforming, change is the only constant. That may bother some who maintain super-strict readings of its intra-regional borders, but well, what are you going to do? I say listen to Mike Kelley:
My personal belief is that the term East Side is just the vernacular of the particular group using the term. Its appropriate if the person receiving the communication understands what is being referenced since there is no official city designated East or West Side.
The root of the anxiety for some is of course the gradual gentrification of Eastside proper. But this is how we can avoid trouble. There must be uniform consensus that defining Eastside fluidly should not erase the traditional historical cultural "Eastside" of the universal imagination, the old-school brown capital.
Just school your friends: The true Eastside will always be east of the river, but the city is big enough to have different perspectives on where East and West begin and end today, in 2008, and moving forward.
* Photo above via LA Eastside.
