Like the narrator of Italo Calvino's novel "Invisible Cities," I felt I was wandering a city with a history largely unknown to me. So I taped a passage from that book to my Times cubicle:
"The city … does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps…."
These days, just about everywhere I go in L.A., I feel history written in the landscape. L.A. is getting older. And when I go home, to the blocks where I grew up, I see the imprint left by generations of Angelenos.
(excerpts from a commentary by Hector Tobar, L A Times)
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