ghost of clifton's past

Easter Sunday was celebrated with a risen Jesus and a trip to Clifton's Cafeteria downtown. I make no secret about my love for downtown Los Angeles even though it is a shadow of its former self. In between tiendas, botanicas and the Fallas Paredes, there are the skeletons of historical buildings that perhaps shudder at the fact that they are now storefronts for the peddlers non-deco and un-gothic goods.

In a city that is hellbent on destroying whatever brief history it has, the buildings on Broadway are still very much alive to me. They represent a time gone by and one that we most likely will never see again. Overnight, the City of Angels changes and the skyline takes on a new shape that not only erases the past, but stomps on it with steel-toed boots and never looks back.

Clifton's, on the other hand, is one of the last places in the city that is like walking into a timewarp. I feel its loneliness. If it were a person, it would be a World War II vet standing in the middle of a bunch of pink-haired punk rockers and cheap cowboys with bad boots from the mountains of Mexico. He would look around and wonder "What the fuck happened to all of my friends and where the hell can I get a beer?"

Most of downtown along Broadway is very much alive. In spirit, in history, in my memory from what I've read in books and seen in old photographs. I surely cling to that time and wish to God that one day the sun would rise and the whole avenue would be reborn looking like 1939. The ghosts and the spirits of those that knew the place are alive and well looking out of the windows down on Broadway. Waiting for buses, trolley cars or walking back home. Stopping off at the Broadway Bar for a drink before taking the elevator up in the Eastern Building. I bumped into one the other day like a ghost train gliding down the tracks and could only mouth, "take me with yoooou."