DTLA: The Toy Nobody Wanted

I lived in DTLA for a while. Groceries, class, sleep, and the smell that met me every morning when I walked out the door — coffee and urine, mixed.

That stretch changed how I think about cities, because DTLA is a strange place. It holds the densest homeless population in the country and some of the most expensive contemporary art in the world, at the same time. There's a concert hall by Gehry, and two minutes away, a full block of tents. Outside a blue-chip gallery, a truck selling three-dollar tacos. A little further, a Le Labo, where a bottle of perfume runs three hundred.

In most cities you have to go looking for that kind of contrast. In DTLA it was on my walk to school.