Back in the day Selma used to a be a place where young men, inspired
perhaps by Midnight Cowboy, hung out
and plied their trade. There’s still a YMCA in the street, but you can’t stay
there these days however much fun it might be.
This is John Rechy below on the steps of the First Baptist Church of
Hollywood, which has stood on Selma in its present form since 1935.
Currently Selma is the site of all kinds of development and
redevelopment, and I dare say a truckload of “gentrification.” Restaurants close and are replaced by new
ones that don’t necessarily look any better than the old ones, but presumably they
have a better business plan. There’s a stylish
barber’s shop, a store that sells only vinyl, and there used to be a tent city
of homeless people, but they were recently moved on by the cops.
There’s some curious stuff on the sidewalk:
Some curious window treatments:
And there’s this, which may be the best reason for walking along Selma
– an amazing example of scarcely improvable, ramshackle, improvised urban
infrastructure. It may possibly be a
Thomasson (op cit) although possibly not because this thing, however ramshackle
and improvised, is actually functional.
As I hope you can see in the above pictures (one mine, one from Google), and I know it's not easy, it’s essentially, two telegraph poles stuck together. There’s one big, tall, fully-formed pole,
supporting wires that run high across the street, and then there’s a
shorter pole attached to it, accommodating wires that run in a somewhat different direction at a lower level.
Two big, tall, fully-formed poles might have seemed the way to go but apparently
the powers that be couldn’t find an extra pole of the required length. They ended up with one that was shorter than
the other, that wouldn’t even reach from ground level to the required height of
the wires running crosswise.
So what would you do? Well, what
they evidently did was attach the short pole to the big pole but they had
to hold it three or four feet off the ground. In order to do that they used brackets and
then a length of lumber for support. But
even the length of lumber proved too short and so they put a lump of wood
underneath that as a shim.
It’s wonderful. It works, I guess. And frankly this is the way I personally do “handyman”
projects – ham-fisted but functional. You
might imagine the powers that be in Hollywood would operate with more style and
skill. The fact that they don’t is
somehow charming but also unsettling. Is
the whole of Hollywood held together with wire and string? I think we all know the answer to that one.
