Brian O'Neill: Beach Boulevard

"This book is a visual diary of sorts — out of the past, and through the present.

Pink hues begin to meld with the sea haze along the beach as the sun sets over the site of the old high school, now replaced by common establishments. Two young women wait for a young man, circling a street corner on their bikes as another day begins to pass tonight along the beach.”

“This area was once orange groves and oil fields as far as the eye could see. What now fills the horizon? Further inland, homes hide behind ten-foot brick walls, trying to remain in the shade. And, at the end of a long day of walking the hot pavement and breathing the fumes of individual liberty, a rare young man tells the tale of his false imprisonment and asks where the pier is — so that he can retrieve his backpack and dog. I tell him, follow along Beach Boulevard.”

As a sociologist, I am trained to classify and to document the world – to distinguish between types, and to apprehend the logic of the inhabitants of a differentiated, unequal world. On the minimal adventures that constituted the basis for Beach Boulevard though, my aim was more like discovery. Indeed, Beach Boulevard itself – that 50 mile stretch of pavement between the Pacific Ocean and the San Gabriel Mountains was a veritable foreign land to me, having grown up in the great industrial pasture called “the Midwest.”

Hence, beach boulevard served as my central axis of orientation in this place without a center. And along the main artery of the great superorganism of Southern California, I encountered its many capillaries of low-rise apartments, condos, strip malls, fast food eateries, and highways piling up to the ocean. As Kem Nunn wrote, one desert confronts another, the “city” squats “at the edge of the sea…dwarfed by the immense thing that lay before it.”

I was, and remain, completely fascinated by this region, as a phenomenon and historical condition.