A car sped by and the driver inside shouted “Ho! Ho! Ho!” It was more mocking than friendly
Park. And it’s still in the center of the city, both geographically and metaphorically, tucked between U.S. Immigration Court, the Art Deco tower of the Oviatt Building, a subway station and bus lines that reach to the edges of the city. On my visit to Pershing Square this week, I emerged from the Metro station and found three girls flipping the bird to someone inside a No. 2 bus. They laughed and walked down Hill Street, past the spot where police drop off a bag of money for Dennis Hopper in the film “Speed.” Hours later, at the opposite end of the square, I listened to the poetic language of three skateboarders. “Ollie up, one-eighty up, half-cab off,” called out Travis, 25, who then tried to perform that trick on the concrete stairs.
His skateboard spun in the air, struck a stair and then fell to the sidewalk, though he couldn’t quite stick the landing. The legendary L.A. writer Carey McWilliams wandered through Pershing Square in the 1930s. He listened to boys hawking newspapers with crime news — a USC football player charged with robbing a bank — and found a group of men watching a “frowsy blonde” singing a gospel hymn. “Here, indeed, was the place for me,” McWilliams wrote in a passage etched into a Pershing Square wall. “A ringside seat at the circus.” My sense is that the Pershing Square circus is tamer than it used to be. But it’s still a place where the crosscurrents of many different L.A.s meet and mix. Kathy Casper, 52, a homeless woman originally from Long Island, arrived in L.A. from Arizona a few months back, having been hit hard by illness and the recession. “This place is more personable,” she said as she sat on a bench. “I lived in New York. I couldn’t be homeless in New York. This is sort of like being there but not as cold.” Leroy, the man on her left, was from Georgia. On her right was Reifsteck, who spoke of his travels — to Las Vegas, El Paso, Tennessee. Listening to them, and reading those McWilliams lines, it occurred to me that transience has always been part of the American character, and that L.A. may still be the capital of American wanderlust. Pershing Square is still a good place to observe the comings and goings of this free-spirited city. Just before the rink closed at 10 p.m., I found Santa 31