Best Parking Lot for Hollywood Hydes

(Illustration by Ronald Kurniawan)

Related Content

• What's In Season at the Farmers Market: Early Green Garlic From ABC Rhubarb and Bih Shan Farm
  March 1, 2013
• Henry Rollins: The GOP's Disdain for Women Is Appalling
  February 7, 2013
• Los Angeles Has America's Most Polluted Air?
  April 25, 2013
• What's In Season at the Farmers Markets: Cherimoya from Rancho Santa Cecilia a Cherimoya Primer
  January 20, 2012
• Byron Adams, Bill Rosendahl, Stevie St. John and L.A. Gay Equality Warriors Stunned, Thrilled by Obama 2013 Inaugural Promise
  January 22, 2013

More About

• Hollywood Hydes
• Hollywood
• Selma
• El Centro

Best Parking Lot ?for Hollywood Hydes

“Have some chocolate to go with the extra parking space you took.” So read the note. Perfectly centered, in a large and elegant ink-jetted font . . . bordered with chocolate syrup and stuck face-down on my windshield, directly in the driver’s line of sight. I was unremarkably street-parked next to Hollywood’s 101 Coffee Shop at the bottom of the Hills.

Months earlier, in the same neighborhood, a veritable essay was stuffed under my wiper, welcoming me to the “Asshole Parkers Club.” The writer’s foaming-mouth fury was palpable in his increasingly angled and unruly hand. (A motorcycle parked in front of me had since departed, leaving the note writer to assume that I’d committed the vile sin of leaving 3 feet of 90068 curb vacant.)

Otherwise-genial local Jekylls become horrible Hollywood Hydes while parking, and Bally’s gym on El Centro Avenue makes a prime spot to witness this mutation. Bally’s multilevel garage spirals next to the main building, meaning that the first vacant space you come to is not necessarily nearer to the gym’s entrance than those higher up. Yet patrons will halt and hit the hazard lights at even a flicker of human activity near a parked vehicle. Traffic gets backed up out of the structure, sometimes snarling the intersection of El Centro and Selma avenues, while drivers drool over the possibility of a lower-level spot, with a dozen spaces gaping but a few feet away.

Bear in mind that this is a place where people come to exercise. Yet our parking psychosis is such that we’ll literally stop traffic to (maybe) save 20 steps on our way to . . . the step machine. (For the really far gone, there’s also an elevator up to the stair machine.) Our conditioning to covet convenience trumps all, and, even for gymgoers, the concept of incidental exertion is apparently an anathema.

BALLY'S TOTAL FITNESS1628 N. El Centro Ave., L.A., (310) 916-8659