MEMORIES RAZED IN `IMPROVED' L.A.

Byline: ROBERT WEIBEZAHL Local view

A few weekends ago I was in the old neighborhood and thought it would be fun to show my 11-year-old daughter the apartment I lived in when I first moved to Los Angeles 21 years ago. It was gone. In its place stood an outsized condo complex of vaguely Moorish design.

Anyone who has lived in L.A. for any amount of time is probably not surprised by this topographical transformation. This city, like its inhabitants, has an implacable reputation for reinventing itself. More than one building that has gone up during my time here has already come down, replaced by something newer, larger, hipper -- if not necessarily better. LACMA alone has been reconfigured more times than a certain pop star's facial features.

Proponents of this kind of progress will tell you that it keeps the city exciting, moving forward. We are a city that needs more housing, they say.

These assertions may be true. I will be the first to admit that much (though not all) of what is torn down has little value from the standpoint of architectural preservation. My tiny over-a-garage apartment that is no more had all the charm of a 1950s roadside motel. Besides, the little slice of Brentwood-adjacent, where it had managed to hold on longer than I had expected, had long before lost what little charm it had -- about the time they tore down the neighborhood Ralphs and built a hideous brown high-rise monolith in its place.

Quite by coincidence, the same weekend we discovered the apartment had been razed, my daughter showed me Google Earth. As I zoomed in on my hometown back east, I found the roofline of the first house I lived in as a child, only slightly altered by the addition of a room out back. Across the street was the neighbors' swimming pool. A little to the west was my old Catholic grammar school. My high school was still on the edge of town, nestled among houses once occupied by the families of my now-scattered classmates. Could I track down these same kinds of memories if I had grown up in Los Angeles?

Should I just accept this urge for the ``new'' as a Western phenomenon, like sagebrush and earthquakes? Perhaps yes, if it weren't for the fact that on recent family trips to San Francisco and Albuquerque, we ate at restaurants my wife frequented as a student in those cities almost three decades ago.

My daughter is a native Angeleno. Obviously, she will never know the Los Angeles I have known. Things change. In many ways, that is not all bad. But 20 years from now, will she recognize the city of her youth?

The most precious -- or at least the most interesting -- part of a city's history is made up of the individual histories of those who live there. Perhaps I feel this way because I am originally from the shabby East Coast, where the idea of progress is a new sign at the Texaco, but I suspect I am not alone in believing that our psychic connection to whatever place we call home is diminished when its touchstones disappear -- even if those touchstones are nothing more than the local pizzeria and carwash.

I sense my personal history being erased whenever a building is razed, or a restaurant closes, or another mom-and-pop store goes under. And each time, a small piece of L.A.'s larger history is also brushed away with the dust left behind by that remorseless eraser we call progress.