The new downtown

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Gelato under a sky barely breaking with heat: Piccomolo, Weller Court, Little Tokyo. The fringe of a parade route in the middle of a festival that isn't raucous yet. Enough chairs for enough people, a dozen, maybe with a lagniappe or two.

People I know and I've read but who are also my increasingly favorite kind of people: strangers. A few I've met before though; yet I've known the voices of nearly all of them; and voices say very much, as does my own I'm sure. Others are readers---others are scribes sworn to secrecy---others are people who love talking off the record and frequently do.

Ed says, "I was wondering how it would be an 'ice-cream anti-social', until Mailander showed up." That's about as much as I've laughed all weekend.

The pistachio looks too green---which is our usual complaint about the stuff. So it's cherry-chocolate for me, utterly great cherry-chocolate at that. Later, the establishment springs for iced coffees---that was a gesture certainly worthy of a plug. Sitting in the shade all afternoon, talking like Europe, imagining ---but wait---all this continental lounging and bavader is taking place in Downtown Los Angeles? In Little Tokyo?

Thinking of Joe Scott, who was born within a few feet of this place (really) almost fourscoure ago; sometimes we have lunch down here. Joe: there's gelato in Little Tokyo; good gelato too---it may even hone in on the snow-cones!

And this is ultimately where Downtown is at right now: Joe Scott is seventysomething, Eric Richardson is twentysomething, you're just as likely to run into one as the other down here, and just as likely to hear something impassioned and telling from both, especially if you're at an age somewhere in between and can straddle generations a bit. There are a kaleidescope of blogs. There is the Downtown News but also the Garment & Citizen; there are more flavors of lofts than of gelato, even than of snow cones, even within a well-struck sand wedge of Oomasa alone.

There are also a thousand new units a year, more---units everywhere. Everyone has a favorite building, a best buy, an inside tip, a place that hasn't been subjected to the same stresses as the other places yet.

Nobody knows what the outcome will be---it's not Manhattan, that's for sure. But it's not Tokyo either. It is shaping up in a way that takes on more natives than either, filling up with natives in fact, and putting its own wax seal on them, uniquely sunshiney, uniquely Angeleno. It doesn't need to be compared to anyplace else; it is what it is.