Fashion District

Imagine a street where you can find side by side boutique stores with pretty dresses, designer shoes, unusual exotic frocks, vintage hats and handmade jewelry. And imagine that interspersed between these stores are little coffee shops and eateries just to give you extra energy for your epic shopping spree. Now, imagine a neighborhood where you get street after street like this—as if the stores of ten hyper-cool, gigantic, cosmopolitan malls had released their stores and let them flock to this urban neighborhood. Well, this is LA’s Fashion District—an unbelievable smorgasbord of clothing and accessories on a scale that only the premier West Coast city of the Americas can offer. Whether it is a dress made in Bahia, Brazil, or the latest Candies shoes, you can find them here. In fact, there are so many stores that I could spend hours listing and talking about them. As a matter of fact, I could start a blog, adding a new store with a new review each day, and probably have steady work for the better part of an entire decade. So, let us just say that if you are a shopaholic, this is where you go to o.d.

Now, I would not recommend living here. Although about 2,000 people call this small area home (it’s a little less than one square mile total), when I think of the fashion district, I think of it as a wonderful place to go and buy cool new shoes. But I would definitely not want to have apartment here. First, it really feels like a commercial district. Apartments might be hidden above storefronts, but those aren’t really very appealing places to live. Also, this place is packed—especially on weekends. Traffic is like a barely moving parking lot most of the time.

In addition, crime is a problem in the area, as is obvious by the metal curtains that descend in front of the glass storefronts every night, making you feel as if you are Luke Skywalker flying through the canyons of the Death Star. (I just thought I would throw that reference in for you Lucas fans out there who could care less about fashion unless it involves hair bun ear muffs—which by the way, you can probably find somewhere in this neighborhood).

Towards the edges of the neighborhood, things get pretty industrial with large warehouses lined with delivery trucks just adding to the overall traffic in the area.

There are also some churches in the neighborhood—vainly trying to draw people’s attention way from infinite worldly temptations that glut this area—and even an oddly placed elementary school, 9th Street Elementary. 9th Street, by the way is a bit of a mixed bag. If you take purely the scores of students from this school on standardized tests, it ranks very poorly with less than half being proficient in math and only a quarter passing the English portion of the STAR test. If you look at the effect of the teachers on these students according to the LA Time’s value added analysis, you find that the six of the eight teachers score very well—meaning basically that the teachers are doing the best they can with students from an area that has other community problems, such as second language issues.