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Introduction: Nostalgia I

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The impulse toward a synchronic emphasis on 1920s Broadway disregards all the intervening decades, skipping over much of the Great Depression, the Second World War and downtown’s “white flight.” Furthermore, focusing on the period of the street’s greatest popularity with white Angelenos, enables the quick dismissal of the historic and current presence of black, Latino and immigrant audiences downtown. This notion of Broadway’s past obscures the fact that small sidewalk and stall retail businesses serving a predominantly Latino clientele are now financially suffering and that Latino audiences long supported downtown ethnic theaters until 1952. A return to 1920s Los Angeles on Broadway is impossible. Despite an inability to restore Broadway to a bygone historical era, preservationist impulses motivate city politicians and the Los Angeles Conservancy to focus on rescuing the material vestiges aligned with the glamorous 1920s era. Popular rhetoric around Broadway’s past mirrors the nostalgic’s “longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.”


Every Saturday at 10:00 a.m., the Los Angeles Conservancy holds a walking tour of the Broadway Historic Theatre and Commercial District. Groups of around ten participants meet at a movie theater on one end of Broadway and are then led on a three-hour walk by a docent to the district’s east end, at Olympic. Together, group members look up at the notable architecture of old buildings, along with their empty upper-level floors. Or they look down at examples of ornate terrazzo entrances that visually interrupt sidewalks marked by blackened gum stains. Armed with historical details about each building and a binder full of printed archival images, the Conservancy docent leads tourists not only through space, but also through time. Instructions for how to look on a walking tour, provided in the LA Conservancy’s “Kid’s Guide to Broadway,” suggest movements common to detectives that tourists are encouraged to imitate: “Look Up! Look Down!” “Look for Dates,” “Look for Ghosts,” and “Look with a Preservationist’s Eyes.” These commands reveal our fascination with discovering the authentic details that connect the present to a lost past, coupled with the question of how to return material structures to some “former glory.”
 
Svetlana Boym describes this impulse as a form of restorative nostalgia, which “does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition.” This approach to the past is most concerned with reconstructing it as whole and coherent. It is unfettered by memories that stray from this unity or that would fragment the past. Certain about history’s meaning, proponents of restoration “propose to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.” With examples from practical situations of restoration, Janna Jones points out how a restorative sense is catered to by the hard work of preservationists who “rather than uncovering the past…create an illusion of a credible material past.” These illusions function differently in a movie palace than in a museum because the former is constrained by its need to function effectively in the present as a business.

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