Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 3

Bus Ride to Downtown LA and back to Westwood

This past week, I took the Metro bus for the first time with Bekah, who is also enrolled in Geography 151. We took the 2 around 4:00 PM, which took us from right off of campus, down Sunset Boulevard, through Beverly Hills and Hollywood, and into downtown LA. The bus ride there was fairly uneventful with a sparse group of people on the bus at any one time. It seemed as though this time of day was an “off-time” which accounted for the absence of a large crowd. I gathered that the reason for this was that people were at work during this time, and because (at the beginning of the bus ride through Beverly Hills) wealthy people don’t often tend to take the bus.  As the bus ride went on, I observed a diverse group of passengers most riding the bus alone, all different races, ages, and classes, getting on and off the bus at various stops, just going on with their days. I saw few interactions from person to person: one girl in front of me made faces at a baby boy looking back at her, and the baby was very amused; I also noticed two guys who seemed to recognize each other from across the bus, and had some small talk. But for the most part, all of the passengers kept to themselves and were just trying to get on with their day. Because there were so few people on the bus to observe, I instead looked at my surroundings outside of the bus. I realized that almost the whole bus ride there were no residential areas; it was all commercialized, which I will go into later.

This is a picture I took on the bus ride downtown, of a mural I admired.

The Metro 2 bus dropped us off in front of Grand Central Market and we walked around for a short period of time, and at 6 o’clock PM, we boarded the Metro 20 bus, as directed by our previous bus driver. This bus route was all down Wilshire, and because it was later in the day, when (I assume) people were getting off work, this bus ride was crowded and a bit more eventful than the first bus ride. The first incident I witnessed featured a woman who got on the bus while screaming into her phone. I believe it was something along the lines of “B****, f*** you, whatever, whatever!” and she continued to repeat herself several times. Through inevitable eavesdropping, the whole busload of people learned that the person on the other end of the phone was her now ex-boyfriend who had evidently cheated on her. This woman proceeded to call a few of her friends to vent to them and ask if she could stay with them since there was “no way she is going back to living with him.” The second piece of drama I witnessed included two older African American men. One of them had just boarded the bus, and I heard him say to the other man, a Vietnam vet (according to his hat), “We both n****s, I don’t like you just like you don’t like me” and since I couldn’t hear the vet, all I heard continued as follows: “I’ll take you out right here! . . .You ain’t gonna fight me! . . . You in a wheelchair! . . . I’ll get off right here and beat your a**!” The yelling man seemed very eager to fight the other, and he stormed off the bus at the following stop, while the man in the wheelchair shook his head. The third little episode was probably the most calm, but still worth mentioning: a man having a conversation over the phone began yelling at the person on the other end, saying “don’t ask me those questions!” and went on very angrily, at which point I put in my earphones to tune him out and listen to music. I was getting tired of the commotion and was ready to get home. I would have tried to record what I saw on the bus, but my phone was dead at this point. To give an idea, I found the following YouTube video that starts out with a couple incidents on buses that reminded me of what I saw/heard:

If nothing else, these two bus rides (primarily the second bus ride) demonstrated the obvious fact of social difference in the LA area. As discussed in class, individuals are distributed according to "residence and occupation" into "natural economic and cultural groups." I presume that most of the individuals I rode the bus with had similar occupations in terms of wages and lived in the same general area since they were all on the same bus route. According to the previously stated idea, then, these individuals would be placed in their economic and cultural groups, likely with some overlapping of groups. Once again, what I'm taking away from this experience is all relatively loose speculation, but it seems to relate closely to the ideas we've discussed in class.

Although the entire LA area doesn’t directly translate to the “series of concentric circles” idea presented in “The Growth of the City” by Ernest W. Burgess, some of the ideas resonate. According to the “growth of the city” idea, the center is the downtown area, which provides jobs for several people, and the part of Sunset Boulevard, as well as Wilshire and downtown LA, what I observed seemed to do just that—these areas are filled with restaurants, clothing stores, hotels, strip clubs, night clubs, museums, movie theaters, etc. Outside of this inner circle is another circle inhabited by workers who desire to live within easy access of their work. Although this area I mention may not be a perfect circle, I believe the idea still translates to these areas, as the passengers of the bus, I presume, live near where they work. It seems likely that the majority of the people I saw on the bus were those who lived in the general areas near the bus stops where they got off. 

Overall, my bus rides were a completely different experience from what I am used to, and I am glad to have had my eyes opened to the social difference in separate parts of LA, since it can be so very easy to get stuck in this little Westwood bubble for so many UCLA students (especially those without cars, like me).