Everyday Living

Blue Skies

By Eric Richardson — January 11, 2005

The Buildings Have No Tops

By Eric Richardson — January 10, 2005
1 Comment

DLANC: Is All Press Good Press?

By Eric Richardson — January 08, 2005
2 Comments

The new issue of the Downtown News is out, and the lead story (at least online… I haven’t picked up a paper copy yet) is titled ”Success and Growing Pains: The Downtown Neighborhood Council Learns That It’s Hard to Escape the Politics.” At first I wanted to blast the piece as negative to DLANC, but I’m not going to do that...

Creating Community Online

By Eric Richardson — January 04, 2005
1 Comment

I spent all afternoon today at Gospelcom, where I used to work here in Michigan. I went out to lunch with some of the tech guys and then sat around at the office keeping people from working. My time was sort of split between talking about eThreads and talking about downtown. The downtown part’s what I want to get into here, though.

A Little Love from the Downtown News

By Eric Richardson — January 01, 2005
2 Comments

The January 3rd issue of the Downtown News is now up, and one paragraph mentions this blog as one of Five Sites to Bookmark in 2005. Here’s their blurb on my site: Downtowning With Eric: Eric Richardson, a USC Communications major and a representative on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, is a fresh voice in a crowded field of urban bloggers...

Downtown: Urban Life vs. the Automobile

By Eric Richardson — December 30, 2004
3 Comments

My normal routine each day is to read the California, Business, and Sports sections of the LA Times. Leaving some sections out means I sometimes miss stories like the one that ran Monday titled ”Give Up the Suburb? Yes. Give Up the Car? No Way”. People are moving downtown, all right. But this is L.A. So they’re bringing their cars with them...

Rain, Rain, Rain, but the Lights Are On

By Eric Richardson — December 29, 2004

So I left LA for a few weeks and missed crazy record amounts of rainfall. You really need to see these pictures of a flooded 110 (linked from blogging.la). Reading stories of 4.3 inches of rain downtown (over 24 hours) I’m amazed that the power in my apartment hasn’t been touched. How do I know this if I’m sitting in Michigan right now? Well...

one last caltrans bit

By Eric Richardson — December 26, 2004

This quote comes from an article in the NY Times: But in our security-obsessed age, the Caltrans building’s spirit of openness makes it exceptional. Its vast “urban lobby” is carved through its core, sucking surrounding street life inside. What? If you wanted to suck street life inside the “lobby”, you’d have punched a...

revisiting the caltrans building

By Eric Richardson — December 26, 2004

The LA Times today comes back to the Caltrans building, talking about how some occupants think the fancy exterior led to skimping on the inside. I have heard that before, that the project’s limited budget led to the bulk of the design money going into the shell of the building, leaving little imagination to the office space inside. I don’t really...

is santa bringing more money?

By Eric Richardson — December 25, 2004

Blogging on Christmas? About actual news? Tisk tisk… Oh well. The LA Times today has an article on neighborhood council spending. It paints a (favorable) picture of how councils use their money, and quotes several council members who say that the system needs more funding. That’s a complicated issue.