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Video: A Drive Down DTLA's Broadway, 1988

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The streets are crowded--maybe more so than you see these days or than you'd expect. The marquees and the shop signs are blinking in beckoning neon. There are fast food chains, swap meets, old movie houses used as something else. Of course there's Clifton's Cafeteria. It's Broadway, Downtown Los Angeles, from the window of a car, one night in 1988.

It's kind of seductive and dazzling (maybe we can blame the music the video is set to), but it also feels like the opening credit sequence of a movie where very, very bad things are about to happen.

Is this how you think of Downtown these days? Funny how some things change, but stay the same.

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