Right Coast, Left Coast

By Jim McDermott
Art by João Fazenda

NY’s urban canyons or L.A.’s Pacific sunsets: Is your coast clear?

When I first moved back to New York in 2021 after 11 years away, I had the same experience over and over. Someone would ask where I’d moved from. Los Angeles, I’d say. “And how was that for you?” they would query, with a carefully modulated neutrality, like you might ask someone who they voted for in the last election.

For many Angelenos, New York is a great place to see theater and get away for a week. For many New Yorkers, Los Angeles is not a great place for anything.

But then, no matter what I said — it always amounted to “I really liked it” — their internal reserves of self-control would break down. “I could never live there,” they’d say in low voices, shuddering with a barely repressed horror.

While there are many New York natives who live in Los Angeles (and I suspect relatively few Angelenos who live full time in New York), I know few who love them both. For many Angelenos, New York is a great place to see theater and get away for a week. For many New Yorkers, Los Angeles is not a great place for anything. 

To be honest it mystifies me. I’ve lived and moved back and forth between the two places for the last 20 years, and at this point it’s hard to describe where one ends and the other begins within me.

NY vs. LA illustration of city landscapes

A City of Textures

I walk a lot when I have phone calls to make in New York. It’s actually a practice I picked up while driving Los Angeles. When you know you’re going to spend the next hour (or two) in a car, phone calls seem like a good use of time. (In Los Angeles my office was basically my car. In New York it’s my backpack.)

One thing I’ve had to learn in New York, and still don’t fully appreciate, is that unlike when you’re driving from Marina del Rey to Pasadena, when you’re walking Manhattan you are surrounded by sounds that people on the other end of the call hear but cannot fully understand. “Where are you right now?” my parents always ask me eventually when we talk, usually with a certain “… because it sounds like there is a firetruck headed directly at you” kind of concern. Meanwhile I haven’t even registered the ambulance that’s just passing by.

Some might read that lack of awareness as indicative of a certain numbness required to survive here. But I think it’s more that all the sounds, images, even odors of the street are part of the texture of life here. New York is like the combines that artist Robert Rauschenberg became known for, a hopscotch of found objects that might be off-putting on their own yet somehow together create something vibrant and alive. When I first moved to New York to work as an editor at the Jesuit-founded America Magazine in 2004, the outer wall of the fifth-floor chapel in our building overlooked 56th Street. All through the Masses we would have in that chapel, you would hear the sounds of the city floating in. Sometimes it was hilarious. I’ve definitely listened to words shouted back and forth that I never expected to hear in a Catholic church. There’s nothing like a taxi cab laying into his horn to disrupt a solemn homily.

In Los Angeles my office was basically my car. In New York it’s my backpack.

But even at moments like those, I found the experience profoundly reassuring. So often Catholic churches are imagined as separate from the world. We even build them to look like castles, as though to protect or isolate ourselves. Meanwhile at America’s chapel, even though we were five stories up, it felt like we were in the midst of it all, and everything and everyone was welcome and invited.

In New York, we each become part of the texture ourselves, found art for one another. During the pandemic, even though I had by that time been living in Los Angeles for a decade, I still found myself drawn to movies set in New York. After a year of wandering our lonely and abandoned LMU campus, I longed to be in a place where even in the midst of a plague I might be able to walk around and see so many faces.

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the outdoor seating of a local coffee chain, which even after two years of being back in New York I continue to call Tanner’s, despite the fact that it has none of the mellow beachy vibe of that L.A. coffee franchise. If I stop typing I can hear the bass rumble of a truck somewhere nearby, and, as ever, honking in the distance. But rather than noise, to me they’re like Christmas lights, hanging color on the world.

The phone rings. It’s a friend. We start talking. Then, laughing, he says to me, “Can I just ask, where are you right now?”

Driving with the Apps Off

I first moved to Los Angeles in 2010 to do a screenwriting degree at UCLA. A couple years after I finished my MFA, I hit a rough patch. I’d just spent a year working on the staff of a television show, and the year and a half before that writing a pilot for a network — both very good things. But with the chance to finally take a breath, my spirit collapsed like an untied balloon. (I could just about hear the raspberry-like “Pfffttttt” as it whipped around me, releasing air.) Pretty much all I did for months was sit in coffee shops reading Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series. And when I couldn’t do that anymore, I took to driving around the city with my Waze app off.

For the 11 years I spent in Los Angeles, Waze was so central to my experience. Whereas in New York you can step outside and allow the current of people to simply take you away, in Los Angeles I always left home with a destination, usually multiple ones. My life each day was a pre-planned series of stops that would finally bring me boomerang-like back to home. In some ways Los Angeles was less a city than a name for the area that encompassed those destinations, the void through which I moved from one to the next, like hyperspace in Star Wars, but with freeways and strip malls in place of streaking white lines.

Driving with the Waze off that year of the black dog (or at least a pretty grey one), I made discoveries — a pretty neighborhood in Culver City that I grew to love to walk; a great little taco joint in Redondo Beach where they had a self-serve selection of six different salsas; the lush, noir-like darkness of South Robertson Boulevard, which words can’t fully capture. I also found myself returning to places that once delighted me, like the five-minute express car wash in El Segundo where the blue-green foam soap makes you feel like you’re underwater. (My parents still laugh at the fact that when they came to visit Los Angeles, the El Segundo car wash and Disneyland were pretty much at the top of the list of places I wanted them to see.)

NY vs LA illustration of food and drink

But more than anything, in driving around without a plan I found myself becoming more present to the city itself, more aware of it as a lifeform of its own, to be experienced, delighted in, surprised by. In a way, Los Angeles is like the Outback of Australia, or, come to think of it, like a relationship with God. You never fully grasp or master it. At some point you simply have to surrender to its wild and sprawling diversity.

The New York Times Presents: Los Angeles

Soon after I moved to Los Angeles in 2010, the Jesuit-founded America Magazine asked me to be a local correspondent, writing dispatches about church and society in California. Readers of America would often complain that we might as well call our magazine “New York,” because that seemed to be the only part of the country we editors were ever interested in talking about.

In point of fact, it’s just about impossible to live in New York as a writer and not write about it. Every time you step outside your door, at just about any time of day, there is some kind of street carnival or drama unfolding in front of you.

In addition to giving me the chance to talk to interesting people and learn about so many parts of California, working as a correspondent for America opened my eyes to the often ridiculous way that East Coast journalists report on life in L.A. An article in one of the national papers might be about the Pacific gray whales berthing in Long Beach, some new trend in Gen Z-owned bars in Los Feliz or religious devotional practices in South Central. No matter, it would still end up including random references to earthquakes, recent lifestyle trends, Hollywood celebrities, and, of course, traffic.

NY vs LA illustration of traffic

There’s no question that traffic is an issue in L.A. But as strange as it seems to outsiders, or how much journalists like to fixate on it, the truth is you get used to it. In fact, I’d say most of the time I enjoyed driving in L.A. My car was my desk, my entertainment system, and, paradoxically, my quiet place of escape. Ribboning out over our communities like far-flung strands of spaghetti, our freeways give us perspective and freedom. At ground level we live and move through what at times can seem like monotonous, sun-saturated endlessness. Rising onto the 405, the 101, the 10, even in bumper-to-bumper traffic, we soar.

West Coast Catholic bishops that I interviewed in those years would always talk about the ways in which media and church folk alike routinely mischaracterize their communities, or simply forget they’re there entirely. At times their stories reminded me of a conversation I once had on my way from Melbourne, Australia, to the country’s west coast to spend Christmas with the Jesuits in Perth. “Why are you going all the way over there?” an Australian friend asked me, gobsmacked. I didn’t understand what he meant; it was maybe a three-hour plane flight. “Yeah, but there’s nothing in between,” he said.

There’s a lot between Los Angeles and New York. But over the years one of the things I came to relish about living in L.A. was that sense of the rest of the country existing more or less at arm’s length, far away. Maybe it’s because California is more or less self-sufficient, with an economy larger than most of the world’s and 10% of the U.S. population. I think for me it also had something to do with the fact that much of the rest of the country these days seems to exist in a bizarre parallel universe politically. Two days after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, I flew to Chicago to see my parents. I spent the entire weekend feeling vulnerable and anxious around strangers. No matter that many Chicagoans were reeling just as hard as I was, or that plenty in Southern California were rejoicing at the results. Los Angeles was home. Los Angeles felt safe.

The world feels so much closer in New York. It’s not because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, though that idea often gets a run in the press. It’s not a matter of threat or danger at all, but community. We might shout expletives here at the jerk who rams his way through us to get onto the subway, or at every passing cyclist who ignores the rules of the road — no matter what you might hear, by far the most serious threat to life in New York is delivery people on motorized bikes. I fully expect to be discovered run down in a bike lane at some point, my body covered in hot wings and ramen. Still, there is a sense in New York that we are all bound together by our willingness to fight through the crowded subways, the tiny apartments, the high cost of living and so many other things to be here.

Even after years of living in the city, newcomers often express reluctance to declare themselves New Yorkers. I feel that way myself. It just doesn’t seem like you’ve earned it. But in my experience New Yorkers open their arms to anyone who has decided to make this their home, or even just to visit with an open heart. We say we hate tourists, and when we’re forced by some horrible trick of fate to travel through that midtown Hellspace known as Times Square filled with gawkers and adults dressed in dirty costumes, we most certainly do. But watch how a New Yorker lights up when a visitor starts talking about their experiences in the city. It’s the secret that most people don’t know about the city’s residents: As rough or belligerent as we may sometimes be, our most fundamental instinct is to treat strangers as friends.

Transfigurations

About a year after I moved to Los Angeles, I invited a bunch of my classmates from UCLA, where I was studying screenwriting, to a party I was having at LMU. I was surprised at their reactions to the campus. “It’s so quiet up here,” one of my friends marveled, looking out over the city and the ocean from the bluff. “How is this even L.A.?” another said.

The bluff at Loyola Marymount — it’s such an essential part of how I think about my years in Los Angeles. For as much as our city is known for the hills on which the Hollywood sign stands like a billboard for whatever dreams of success you bring here with you, most Angelenos live in places where you don’t have the luxury of the kind of view of even your typical New York walk-up, let alone that of LMU. It’s the reality of living in an earthquake zone; you simply can’t build “up” in the way that you can in the East.

From the bluff at LMU, the city of Los Angeles is transformed into something different than what we see on the ground. The German theologian Karl Rahner said that God is like the horizon against which we are able to see ourselves. Los Angeles from the bluff is like that, an invitation into silence and contemplation, a world that somehow helps us see ourselves.

It’s the same at the ocean. How many early evenings did I spend walking the sidewalks of the Playa del Rey beach beneath LMU, or standing at the end of the Santa Monica pier, getting lost in the endless blue of the Pacific? As the setting sun began to disappear in each place, everyone would stop what they were doing and simply stand there, voices hushed, like we were watching something huge and wondrous passing by.

Every once in a very long while there will come a moment when the sun sets perfectly in line with the canyon of one of our streets in New York City, too. And just as in Los Angeles, the whole world comes to a halt to see the buildings and people transfigured in hues of rose and orange, purple and blue.

NY vs LA of sunrise and sunset

It’s true, there are many ways in which New York and Los Angeles are different. New York is skyscrapers that sculpt the sky. Los Angeles is bungalows that ornament the earth. New York is Broadway. Los Angeles is Hollywood. New York is pizza and cocktails. Los Angeles is burgers and guac (and also cocktails).

But at the end of the day, we’re all standing there, looking out on the world in wonder.