Resident Tourist: Self-Guided Tour of Union Station

So Cal has long been the model resort town for the rest of America. What was once a destination for the sick from the Midwest later morphed into a fabulous getaway for gum-chewing tourists from everywhere else. Over 9 million people now live in greater Los Angeles, with their x million backyards and x million backyard pools. Having perfected the backyard resort in the midst of a (fragmented) city, we sometimes need to be reminded to venture beyond our familiar fortresses. As we Angelenos rediscover our public spaces, we enlarge our sense of what home is – and start to think of L.A. as one big 400-square-mile backyard to explore. As each street is connected to the next, in a fascinating, sometimes gritty matrix of wonders, you’re never very far from home.

Alpine Butte Wildlife Sanctuary

East Ave. O, Lake Los Angeles (Between 130^th & 135th St. East)

Blalock Wildlife Sanctuary

14101 Valyermo Rd., Pearblossom (Between 141st and 146th St. East)

Big Rock Wash Wildlife Sanctuary

11550 East Ave. O, Palmdale (Between 115th and 120th St. East)

Butte Valley Wildlife Sanctuary

East Ave. I, Lancaster (Between 190th & 200th St. East)

Desert Pines Wildlife Sanctuary

200th St. West and Ave. G, Lake Hughes (Between 200th and 205th St. West)

Carl O. Gerhardy Wildlife Sanctuary

240th St. East and Ave. N, Lancaster (Between 240th and 250th St. East)

Mescal Wildlife Sanctuary

238th St. East and Hwy. 138, Valyermo (Between 238th and 243rd St. East)

Theodore Payne Wildlife Sanctuary

235th St. East, Llano (Between Ave. U & V / 1 mile north of Palmdale Rd.)

Phacelia Wildflower Sanctuary

200th St. East, Hi Vista (Between Ave. C and D)

Information on L.A. County parks, gardens and trails: http://parks.lacounty.gov/Parkinfo.asp?URL=ParksGardens.asp&Title=Parks%20Gardens%20&%20Trails

You never really know a place until you’ve explored it on foot. If you’re fit enough, you can get a deeper knowledge and sense of ownership by embarking on a long walk down one of L.A.’s historic boulevards. Some people pick a new street every week, or every month, and post the pictures they take on their blogs. Others have formed groups and go on safaris to the furthest reaches of the city. However you arrange it, there is something funny and interesting about preparing for the journey, packing the water and food as needed, and making your way purposefully down the sidewalk. To the average person you just look like a pedestrian. But the secret truth is you’re on a mission – you’re an Urban Explorer. Just bring a map, small notepad, camera, sunscreen, light provisions and a hat. Pith helmets are optional. And, if exhaustion sets in and you can’t make it all the way to your destination, just hop on a city bus or subway and roll back to where you started.

Random Stairwalks # 1

Berendo Stairway

Los Feliz
Between Cromwell and Bonvue avenues at Berendo Street
Extremely Steep

Lovely ornamental concrete details, plus curves and benches. At the top, walk east to the 4700 block of West Bonvue Street and continue to climb to Glendower Avenue--an additional 214 steps, but worth it for one of the loftiest views of the Los Angeles Basin.

*

Bradbury Building

Downtown L.A.
304 S. Broadway
Easy

Five stories' worth of wrought iron balconies, open elevator cages and twisted staircases. The skylight illuminates the pink marble and yellow-glazed brick of this spectacular 1893 office building. The building provided key interiors for the film "Blade Runner."

*

Cove Avenue Stairway

Silver Lake
Midway between Apex Avenue and Silver Lake Boulevard
Moderate

Among dozens of Silver Lake stairways, Cove Avenue is a jewel. Its shallow risers ascend through cedar and eucalyptus and arrive at a small meadow of gazania flowers--a peaceful spot to sit and admire the turquouise water of the reservoir.

*

Music Box Stairway

Silver Lake
Between Descanso Drive and Vendome Street at Del Monte Drive
Moderate to steep

Los Angeles' Odessa Steps. Where Laurel and Hardy tried to move a piano in "The Music Box" (1932), the stairs are now shady and overgrown in contrast to the starkly sunny L.A. of film and memory.

*

The Watercourt

Downtown
Between 3rd and 4th streets, east of Grand Avenue
Moderate to Steep

The Watercourt at California Plaza is the nexus of the greatest assemblage of stairs, escalators, pools and fountains in the city. The newly reopened upper station of Angels Flight provides a spectacular entrance and a superb view of downtown.

*

Radio Walk

Franklin Heights
Between Franklin and Deloz Avenues
Steep

A long, exquisite, west-facing stairway with views of Griffith Park and Hollywood. It feels so high up. . .because it is. Church bells, mockingbirds and wild parrots can be heard as you pass beneath the tree canopy. Return by Prospect walk, an adjacent stairway to the south, with even wider views.

Early Morning Sunset Smells

Bunker Hill: A glimpse to the south, the filigree and narrow clapboards of century-old houses, eternal weeds . . . and the first smell of the day, clouds of charred meat from Barbeque King. Figueroa: Pre-smog-induced sinusitis, and even the cooking smells from not-so-great eating places don’t seem to stink yet. Passing buses smell like field trips, or adventure. Where old buildings have come down, empty lots recapitulate with vintage hollyhocks, roses, wild tobacco, fennel, weeds, trash. Douglas: Down into Echo Park, Barragan’s is whipping up breakfast. And a swirl of smells! Celaya’s baking bread. Ho Ho Fish and Deli begins a new day of putrid fish reek. Nayarit’s chips frying up for the lunch rush. The florist and Taix restaurant anchor the bridge over Glendale Boulevard, but the air is balmy with exhaust, pee, Burger King and donuts. Alvarado: The familiar fumes of Burrito King. Beans give way to patches of mint and cascades of morning glories, a psychedelic sheen of blue-violet as one passes Epitaph Records and Cafe Tropical.

Silver Lake: The frankincense of scorched coffee and decades of ground-into-the-street garbage. Crossing the street, one is greeted by a mingled bouquet of Mexican food (Corina’s) and laundromat effluvia. Bus musk increases, a noticeable nosegay that lingers near walls painted with the Virgen de Guadalupe. Micheltorena: Crack apartments and wet sidewalks in front of the cleaners, and a chemical toilet whiff pirouettes in your wake. An odoriferous produce place. At Millie’s, a mound of potatoes is grilling, but where’s the coffee and the bacon? Sensing the incompleteness, helpful poet Iris Berry extends her arm to sniff. Soap? "Irish Spring." Maltman: More donuts, in a window, with faded icing. So much grease, and thoughts of low-paying office jobs. Sunset Supermarket, with the oft-repeated chord of soap, produce, crappy baked goods and putrid meat. This incense of defeat follows one, appropriately, past Glaxa and the Crest. Lucile: Rows of boutiques, with their spicy tinkling. At the pet store, the optimistic whiff of small animals and cedar shavings. A distant brushfire eclipses the geranium bush. More tacos. More donuts. Seems like all the Mexican eateries open early, and the fresh pots of beans smell good. Sharp sounds seem to meld with sharp smells, like the jacket of a rifle shell. Brakes, parrots, orange peels, Lysol. A gust of tacos, magic Ã£ supplies, exotic cigarettes, Barbasol. Sanborn: Still no hint of coffee. Lots of anonymous trash blowing up from Santa Monica Boulevard. Fountain: KCET and — surprise — more donuts, more hamburgers, and fertilizer. Will the essence of donut never disperse? (Are we doomed to navigate by fast food places, chain stores and big ugly junk?) Hillhurst: 10 streets, 10 stenches. Yet a few flute notes of laurel leak down from Griffith Park, gilding despair with fairy dust. The intersection at Western(deemed most likely to host an accident) spews an impressive nebula of greasy funk — McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr., two supermarkets and lots of poor-running cars. The Metropolitan (Darth Vader) Hotel shares the breeze with Denny’s — efficient, eggy and piquant with freeway exhaust. But just north of here, numerous earthquake-ravaged empty lots grow shoulder-high with weeds — trees, really — antique roses, hollyhocks, jimson and eugenia, a pleasant chaparral spice that lilts over to Sunset, returning it briefly to its original Old Hollywood smell. Gordon: The Old Spaghetti Factory, smelling inexplicably like Doublemint. Vine: The Home Savings fountain makes a spray of eau de Drano ’n’ Liver. Cherokee: Crossroads of the World and the Weekly offices.

Desolate workers festoon the patio with garlands of cigarette smoke. We’re right in Motel Alley — hundreds of ’em. Daily melodramas of drugs, sex and suicides are visible from the streets, as well as on the local news. The imagined smell of Pine Sol and side arms. Highland: Hollywood High, redolent with Carl’s Jr., McDonald’s and Beef Bowl nearby. Orange: In & Out, IHOP. No other smells are possible at this time. Please inhale later. La Brea: Same shit. Burger King, Pollo Something, Wendy’s, rivers of french-fry grease. More motels. Poinsettia: At Guitar Center and Sunset Grill, lemonade, pee ’n’ music biz. Stanley: A storm drain continually filling with water from a nearby fountain, creating a permanent rotting-jungle smell, though on a good morning it just reminds me of Pirates of the Caribbean. At Crescent Heights, the friendly smell of Wolfgang Puck’s barbecued-chicken pizza perfumes the resurrected Marlboro Man. So many famous places. The Argyle, the Riot House, the Comedy Store (Ciro’s), Pink Dot. La Cienega: All I can smell are clutches going out from cars clinging to the hillside waiting for the light. Further down, Sunset Plaza: Oddly, no food smells here, just designer cologne and hair goo. From Turner’s Liquor, essence of bubble gum; from Duke’s, burnt toast, of course. Doheny: Hamburger Hamlet and the long stretch of Bev Hills. Miles of oleander bushes — would the owners have planted so many if they’d known that ingestion of a single petal causes instant cardiac arrest? Alpine: Dirty Disneyland, long-deserted, and a refreshing aroma of sun-baked weeds. Rexford: Mass watering of park lawns. Beverly Drive: The famous pink hotel, surrounded by beds and hedges and rows of nauseating flowers. By the time one reaches Whittier, the Boulevard is changing character, into a curvier, hillier, narrower race course — experienced via car, a stomach-churning thrill ride; by foot, a dangerous smog-and-laurel-bathed thrill ride. Close to UCLA even the sidewalks disappear, and ranks of oleander tower above dirt paths, punctuated by light blue plumbago. Pretty, but acrid. Veteran: Sidewalks reappear, along with lawns, fences, flowers that smell good. Bel-Air freshened. At Sepulveda, at the 405, a halt. We know Sunset continues to its end, and we know what that smells like. The rest is, you know, ocean, bushes, blood trails — but no donuts.

South Coast Botanic Garden

The often-overlooked South Coast Botanic Garden contains more than 150,000 trees and plants in its 87 acres, making it a worthy day trip for those who enjoy visits to the better-known Descanso Gardens and Huntington Library. Just to stroll the grounds, doing little more than gazing at the scenery, is incredibly therapeutic. Of course, there are rewarding directed activities as well: Gardening, birding and drawing classes are offered along with concerts, plant sales and lectures. You could do worse things to your psyche with the $8 admission cost than walking peacefully among the flowers at this “jewel of the peninsula.” 26300 Crenshaw Blvd., Palos Verdes Peninsula. (310) 544-6815, southcoastbotanicgarden.org.

The Bridges of L.A. County

Let us now praise famous spans.

Standing on Mount Hollywood after two days of autumn rain, I can make out distant objects that I never see all at once, looming like pieces on a giant Monopoly board. There is something sinister in such an encompassing view. We are supposed to be in our frame of reference at all times yet now I get a telescoping feeling of both largeness and tinyness. Beyond the Capitol Records tower lie Century City, Baldwin Hills, the striped stacks of the Hyperion Plant in El Segundo and somehow, 30 miles away, the Vincent Thomas Bridge.

We love our bridges in Los Angeles, emerging, as they do, infrequently and each with its certain character, providing its brief whee! entertainment before we are just as suddenly back to driving L.A.’s prosaic grid. We love them even when they feel static, bleak and unforgiving; but they are also comfortingly stable, radiant and familiar. The Vincent Thomas launches itself above San Pedro Bay into space, a transition from street to span, earth to air and back — a perpetual state of becoming. It is a perfect expression of movement and a pleasing, emerald symbol of Los Angeles. This isn’t nowhere,says the bridge. You were there, now you are here, and I brought you across.

First Street, Fourth Street, Sixth Street and the rest: Thousands of children ran across them, and returned to Los Angeles as old men, scuffing along in the sun, or blurry women seen from far away, carrying sacks and babies. Sweet-tempered, generous, expansive: We are large,say these bridges. We transport multitudes. Look east over the Macy Street Bridge, with its Beaux Arts towers that bring to mind heroic stelae at the gates of a conquered city. Every concrete fillip and curve contains bits of the conversations of engineers, idealists, developers, designers, dialogue from the movies and cusswords in 20 tongues. Macy Street Bridge is almost our version of the Brooklyn Bridge, the way it connects the main borough with the older neighborhoods across the river and our old Brooklyn Avenue, now renamed for Cesar Chavez.

The noir look and atmosphere of ennui are inescapable. Watch the strings of streetlights come on at dusk. Dim, homely jewels casting spokes of shadow around skittering taxis and El Dorados rumbling off into the darkness of Boyle Heights.

We also know what is beneath any bridge without looking — the adobe, the sand, the nameless artifacts, seismic swellings, imperceptible slither and ooze, grit, grime and various household objects. Climb down to the L.A. River, near the Glendale Narrows. Perfumed with auto exhaust, spandrels appear looming, monstrous, with terrifying shadows. Oceans of concrete were poured and calcified here, looking vaguely anthropomorphic. The river bottom slick in its carpet of slime. The gray-green, scented plasma of the river.

Formerly the Buena Vista Viaduct, the North Broadway Viaductwas once the far end of Buena Vista Street, nee Calle de Eternidad, just north of a vanished cemetery in present-day Chinatown. A good place to stand is above the old irrigation ditch, the Zanja Madre, buried somewhere beneath the glistening green of the Cornfield. This is one of the truly hallucinatory spots of L.A. You can see the North Broadway Bridge a quarter mile off, where the river turns and heads downtown. Approaching the bridge you notice that its light standards are topped with a black fuzz of pigeon spikes like iron hair. The bridge is so glaring and arid, and longer than you thought, that halfway across you think you’re starting to disappear.

Off in the middle distance, Lincoln Heights is colored exactly like Dragnetreruns or old color snapshots — everything pale blue and raw umber, or a mixture of both. Seen from the train, the bridge displays its ornamental, empty balconies; complete the crossing and it is merely an abject slump anchored by a sort of cairn of trash. The sense of disappearance is complete.

The Franklin Avenue Bridge. The famously fairy-tale entrance to Silver Lake’s back yard, commonly called the Shakespeare Bridge, seems to lead right to Disney’s Snow White cottages and the canyons where the clever elves live. Gothic turrets punctuate the all-too-short ride above the gorge, an active fault that routinely lowers property values with its movements. One keeps one’s hands inside the vehicle at all times.

The Glendale-Hyperion Viaduct. A graceful curve that swoops out from the Silver Lake Hills and descends into Atwater Village, glimpses of Forest Lawn and the Verdugo Hills beyond. With its cunning tangle of connector viaducts underneath, it is uniquely beautiful, placid and airy. “1917 Victory Memorial 1918,” reads the commemorative facade, which, up close, looks like a queer old cemetery monument. Great architecture for the Great War.

Travel east to Pasadena, where the Colorado Street Bridgearches its back over the mysterious Arroyo Seco. Another elegant S-curve that begs you to cross it. Spectacular arches rise 150 feet from the canyon floor. Its sheer beauty is weighted with the dusty memories of suicide, giving it its sardonic nickname, Suicide Bridge. Hike down to the massive footings and you will find recently uncovered trails and steps made from river rock. Paths lead north and south to faraway historic canyons and landmarks. That feeling of tinyness again.

The last small secret bridge hides above the prettiest unpaved part of the Los Angeles River, in the Glendale Narrows. The Sunnynook Footbridge can be found by walking behind the Griffith Recreation Center’s tennis courts. Follow the dirt path, cross the cage-like bridge over the Golden State Freeway and there it is: A narrow open structure supported by huge wooden pilings where you can gaze down at thick river grasses, trees, boulders and swirling water. Hundreds of bird species and various other creatures throng this, the most vital stretch of our river.