Grand Slam, Part I

(Editor’s note: Longtime Los Angeles political activist and author Gary Phillips, who is an infrequent contributor to The Rap Sheet and the editor of the new anthology Politics Noir, appeared as master of ceremonies last night at an event focused on the gentrification of urban areas and the affect that’s having on crime-fiction storytelling. What follows is the first, setup part of his two-part report on that convocation. He promises that the second installment will appear on this page on Sunday.)

So it was about 20 minutes to eight last night, Thursday, in downtown Los Angeles at a space converted into an art gallery--Gallery 727, to be precise, on South Spring Street. We were right around the corner from the Cecil Hotel on Main. The gallery and the Cecil are in a part of town that once--way back when trolleys still snaked across the L.A. landscape--was booming, then decayed, then become the province of SROs, that is Single Room Occupancies. These are residential hotels that displaced Vietnam vets and now even some Iraqi war vets call home, as do folks on low incomes or General Relief. GR. We are on the border of Skid Row--a term, it seems, that was coined in The Rap Sheet’s hometown. In L.A., Skid Row means where the homeless reside, maybe getting shelter in the Midnight Mission or the Weingart Center. But those without means, and those who are members of the working poor, are getting pushed out as sweatshops and funky old buildings are converted into trendy, pricey lofts. Urban pioneers are moving into this district now, some of them finally swayed by the complimentary Mini Coopers that come along with signing long-term leases.

What kind of joint is the Cecil? It’s in an area of town that also includes several aging hotels, such as the Alexandria, where the City Attorney’s Office has ordered its owners to find the tenants they illegally evicted and pay them their legally mandated relocation fees.

The Cecil’s new owners, like those of the Alexandria, are part of the real-estate development set that’s bringing in the cool bars and eateries for the “cool” crowd relocating to downtown. They maintain that their properties are no longer SROs, but are now fit for the swells. However, one recent patron had this to say at TripAdvisor:

i turned up at the cecil hotel for a 3 night stay, and the lobby area seemed nice but as i approached my room things got worse! the door ... looked like it had been kicked in and had several bolts on the door that was un-nerving! despite the loud noise outside i slept ok the first night but [the] was second was more like a horror film. i was awoken in the middle of the night by a cockroach crawling across my face, and then finding around 10 more in my bed with me! i then found the room was swarming in them! i checked out soon after, and the hotel staff did not even seem concerned! The outside area was also the dodgiest place i’ve ever been to! do not go here!

Whatever. Downtown is a battleground of gentrification versus affordable housing. Not too far from Gallery 727, where we’re wondering whether people are going to show up for the night’s Write to the City event, billed as L.A.’s first writers’ slam on gentrification, is the L.A. Convention Center. Book Expo America (BEA) is being held there through this weekend. The Convention Center is located next door to Staples Center, which is not only building “Staples World” (well, really, it’s called L.A. Live), but is where the Lakers beat the Spurs last night, baby! Legitimately too, unlike that blatant Derek Fisher foul they got away with in Game Four in San Antone.

So anyway, months ago when Write to the City was in the planning stages, it was to be tied to BEA being in town. Mystery writers Sara Paretsky, Denise Hamilton, Gar Anthony Haywood, Robert Ward, and yours truly (as MC) were recruited. Additionally, non-genre writers Nina Revoyr (whose Southland was, though, nominated for an Edgar Award), Luis J. Rodriguez, Rick Dakan, Larry Fondation, and Jervey Tervalon (with whom I co-edited The Cocaine Chronicles) agreed to be in the mix. Months of e-mail messages, meetings, initially sought venues that turned out to be too expensive or unwilling to host the event, securing this or that permit, sending out press releases and e-blasts to this or that list, writers forgetting when the gig was, panicked last-minute cell-phone calls--all of it led to this point, at 20 minutes to eight last night. That was the point at which my wife, Gilda Haas, who’s also the executive director of a grassroots organization called Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE), Ramsey Kanaan, founder of the radical publishing and distributing collective AK Press (but now with PM Press), and the rest of the event personnel were sweating, despite the chill of the evening, nervous that nobody was going to show for our event, after all ...

(Part II of this report can be found here.)