Escape from NY
The article below was originally published by the NY Times.
Los Angeles and Its Booming Creative Class Lures New Yorkers
By Alex Williams
It started with Instagram. Or maybe it ended with Instagram. Last fall, Christina Turner, a fashion stylist in Brooklyn, was dreading another New York winter in her cramped, lightless Greenpoint, Brooklyn, apartment while gazing longingly at the succulent gardens and festive backyard dinner parties posted on social media by her friends in Los Angeles.
“I’d see all these old familiar faces of friends I once knew in New York, all seated at the same table,” said Ms. Turner, 32, who goes by the professional name Turner.
She could resent them, or she could join them. So in November, Ms. Turner dumped her furniture on Craigslist, piled into her battered Honda Accord and headed west, not stopping until she found a light-filled two-bedroom cottage in Echo Park, a neighborhood in eastern Los Angeles that is a magnet for young creatives.
The wagon train mentality, it seems, is taking hold among the L train set: Go west!
In an era when it has become fashionable for New Yorkers to grumble that their own city is becoming a sterile playland for the global-money set (Dubai with blizzards, basically), Los Angeles is enjoying a renaissance with a burgeoning art, fashion and food scene that has become irresistible to the culturally attuned.
Hamish Robertson, an artist, with his wife, the writer Andi Teran, at their home in Los Feliz. Credit John Francis Peters for The New York Times
As a result, the old New York-Los Angeles rivalry is changing, at least on the East Coast side of the equation. No longer do in-the-know New Yorkers reflexively parrot sneers like the old Woody Allen line, that the only cultural advantage of Los Angeles is the right turn on red.
In some quarters, the scorn that New Yorkers once piled on Los Angeles is now sounding like envy.
Indeed, Los Angeles has seemingly become the flight fantasy of choice for the likes of Ms. Turner, who insists that anything good she was giving up in overpriced, overstressed Brooklyn is already in place on the booming east side of Los Angeles: the in-season Zambian coffee outposts, the galleries, the vintage clothing boutiques.
With that area’s scruffy bohemian spirit and laid-back mood, she thinks she had found the best of her New York life without the migraines. “It’s like grown-up version of Williamsburg,” Ms. Turner said, “without the gray cloud.”
To anyone old enough to have seen “Annie Hall” on the big screen, such a notion sounds like apostasy. For generations, Los Angeles served as a punch line to any self-respecting New Yorker. “Just a big parking lot,” as John Lennon reportedly said; a “triumph of the garish,” as Paul Rudnick wrote. Andy Warhol claimed to embrace the city, but only because “everybody’s plastic.” “I love plastic,” he added.
In 2000, the “Sex and the City” characters ran off to Los Angeles for a two-episode romp in the sun, but ran screaming from the vapid wasteland of bottle blondes, D-cup implants and overzealous Brazilian treatments. (“The next day four New Yorkers left L.A. a little lighter,” Carrie concluded. “Some of us had lost our hair and all of us had lost a little dignity.”)
But reflexive New York snobbery has gone out of vogue, even among influencers for whom New York is an identity.
Moby, the techno pioneer who was born on West 148th Street and molded by the East Village, confessed in the The Guardian last year that he had not only moved to Los Angeles, but become such a “clichéd Angeleno” that he taunts New York friends with photos of himself by the pool in February.
“I was so accustomed to the city’s absurd cult of money that it took me years to notice I didn’t have any artist friends left in Manhattan,” he wrote. Los Angeles, by comparison, is now where young artists “can really experiment, and if their efforts fall short, it’s not that bad because their rent is relatively cheap and almost everyone else they know is trying new things and failing, too.”
Lena Dunham once told Vogue that she could spend only two weeks in Los Angeles before starting “to get a very sad feeling,” but recently paid a reported $2.7 million for George Peppard’s former Hollywood home.
No less a New York mascot than Fran Lebowitz, whose jaded, cigarette-sucking visage may as well be inscribed on the city seal, also confessed to a change of heart about Los Angeles.
“L.A. is better than it used to be, New York is worse than it used to be,” Ms. Lebowitz said at a recent Vanity Fair party for the Tribeca Film Festival. The quality-of-life campaigns under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg swept away so much that was gritty, quirky or exceptional about the city, she said, and as a result, “New York has become vastly more suburban,” while “L.A. has become slightly less suburban.”
This is not a trivial point. Los Angeles is widely acknowledged to have become strikingly more cosmopolitan in recent years.
The art scene, for one, has exploded. More than 50 galleries have sprouted since late 2013, reported the alternative newspaper LAWeekly, which notedthat the scene is starting to fan out from Downtown and central Hollywood to new terrain like West Adams, Leimert Park and Culver City.
Ann Philbin, a former New Yorker who is the director of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, said that while New York remains the commercial hub for the art market, emerging artists and recent art school graduates are increasingly migrating west.
“Many people say that there are more creative people — visual artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers — living in Los Angeles than there are in any other city in the world, and I feel it,” Ms. Philbin said. “It’s like New York in the ’80s. There is a huge, growing community of artists here.”
A similar renaissance is underway in fashion. Hedi Slimane, the creative director of Saint Laurent, moved the fashion house’s studio to Los Angeles, while labels like Band of Outsiders and Rodarte spearhead a homegrown design scene.
The fashion A-list is turning its sights west, thanks to spectacles like Burberry’s recent runway show at the Griffith Observatory, which drew 700 guests, including Anna Wintour and Elton John.
“Los Angeles was once just a city of jeans, but it is quickly becoming a high-fashion town,” said Joe Zee, the editor in chief of Yahoo Style, who now splits his time between the cities. “There was such a snobbery about L.A. with New Yorkers before, but that tide has really changed.”
Far from the red carpets and glitz, entire neighborhoods, many clustered on the city’s east side, are undergoing a much-documented haute-boho revival.
Bearded young New Yorkers can snap up brioche tarts at Proof Bakery in Atwater Village, visit gallery shows at Shepard Fairey’s Subliminal Projects in Echo Park, or settle in over barrel-aged rye cocktails at Bar Stella in Silver Lake, and scarcely realize they are more than a stroll away from McCarren Park, except for the 70-degree sunshine tickling their cheeks in February.
No wonder a new generation of restless New Yorkers is starting to heed the Los Angeles siren call, and not just aspiring actor-waiters, as in years past.
“New York feels like it’s all about ‘making it,’ ” said Julia Price, a musician and former Manhattanite who is in her 20s. “L.A. feels like it’s all about making things.”
