“Sombrita” sunshade and lighting system on Gage Avenue in East Los Angeles
First things first: La Sombrita is not a bus shelter, and it was not funded with government money.
Now that we’ve got some of the frequently misreported facts out of the way, let’s get into how a prototype sunshade deployed at four Los Angeles bus stops came to dominate social media over the last week, becoming a political Rorschach test for the failures of government — thus burying a far more interesting story about how we can make public transportation more friendly to women.
The controversy erupted last week, when leaders from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation along with L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez held a news conference to announce a new prototype sunshade and lighting system at a bus stop in Westlake. In the photos, the design looked less than enthralling: a skateboard-shaped piece of perforated metal hung from a pole that looked to cast a sliver of shade over, at most, two or three people. At night, a solar-powered light is intended to help illuminate the sidewalk.
In a city where the lack of shade around bus stops is a serious problem (made worse by climate change), La Sombrita, as the design was dubbed by its creators, came off as a joke. I’ll admit, that was my first reaction. The photos of the news conference, showing a group of officials looking up at a glorified pole, quickly became a Twitter meme.
Making things worse was the public relations spin. A media alert breathlessly announced a “First-of-its-Kind Bus Stop Shade Structure” and framed it as part of an effort to bring gender equity to public transit. If you were following the story on Twitter, it was wildly unclear how exactly a piece of metal on a stick was going to help women. It felt merely like a capitulation to the habit already forced on Angelenos sweltering at countless bus stops; tucking themselves behind utility poles and praying they don’t fry their brains.
Within hours of the news conference, La Sombrita was being held up as a symbol of everything wrong with cities by observers across the political spectrum. On the left, it indicated an uncaring government doing less than the bare minimum for its citizens. On the right, it was evidence of a blue city mired in regulation — dopey Los Angeles unable to execute. “How to Fail at Infrastructure,” trumpeted a post from the conservative Cato Institute.
The real story of La Sombrita, however, is more complex.
by Carolina A. Miranda, LA Times | Read more:
Image: Carolina A. Miranda/Los Angeles Times
[ed. See also: Finding Los Angeles with Anthony Bourdain (Current Affairs) where, incidentally, I first heard about the 'Sombrita':]
"If I’ve learned anything from Bourdain’s work, this is the quote that embodies it: that we often can’t help but imagine places through the common images we’ve consumed of them. These dominant images shape our expectations, redouble our prejudices, and limit our notions of a place. Yet, when we are challenged by exciting, unsettling, or less familiar images of said places—from strip mall dim sum restaurants and Ethiopian coffee shops to vandalized “walk of fame” stars and charred Malibu mountainsides—we are forced to reckon with them and possibly even change ourselves in response. In the best episodes of Parts Unknown, that is what Anthony Bourdain and his crew accomplished. They reconceptualized the viewer’s notion of the world through Bourdain’s own reconceptualization of it.
Today, the majority of our collective media diet seems to encourage the exact opposite behavior. To photograph a particular place for social media—say, the Venice canals (L.A.) or the Walt Disney Concert Hall—is to verify that one is in the know about it as it continues to exist: undisputed in the cultural imagination. These popular photos are therefore a redundant, thoughtless act of consumption—a box to check, an unveiling of more of the same. Like the tourists at the “most photographed barn in America” from Don DeLillo’s White Noise (the only significance of which is that it is frequently photographed), they amplify a tendency that has less to do with experiencing a place than with extracting its beauty. At its worst, this behavior can destroy a place (see the Antelope Valley poppy fields trampled to death by L.A. influencers) or displace the people who live there (see the other Venice canals, where tourists outnumber locals). At best, it offers no more than the lukewarm affirmation of “likes” and “follows.”
