In a promotional brochure for the El Royale Apartments published in the 1920s, prospective residents were promised a modern form of luxury: “Here you will live in a cultured, home-like atmosphere with all the facilities that the laboratory of the scientist and the palette of the painter can produce for your comfort and pleasure.”
Have you ever wondered how some places enter our lives long before we enter theirs?
The first time I landed in LAX, nothing resembled the city I had built in my head. The veiny freeways pumping thick traffic and winding like topography lines. Buildings so shockingly ordinary they felt almost confrontational, like they had given up long ago, bleached and buckled by the sun. I kept looking for an LA that was nowhere to be found. I truly wondered if I had come to the wrong place.
Nothing between landing at LAX and the gray USC dorm where I spent my first night resembled the Los Angeles I thought I was moving to. That city seemed to exist somewhere else. I was completely incredulous. For a brief moment, I wondered whether I had made a mistake. Fortunately, I stayed long enough for the city to reply back.
I began passing buildings that rubbed down my disbelief. I call them small acts of reconciliation. More like tiny. I don’t remember which building first made me think, this must be Los Angeles, but I know El Royale was high on the list. Long before I ever stepped inside, when I knew it only from driving on Rossmore every once in a while, the building personified a version of Hollywood that felt slightly out of reach, suspended somewhere between screen and projection. Apartment keys passed between actor hands. The green sign floating above the roofline, drawn in romantic Art Nouveau curls against the sky, like a lighthouse in The Great Gatsby.
You know the feeling: a place becomes familiar long before it may become part of your life. You pass it. You glance up at it. You build a private mythology around it. Then one day, unexpectedly, you walk through its front door.
Years passed. Many. A dear friend happened to move into the building. She later organized a private exhibition there and invited me to participate with a few paintings. Through her, the building slowly became something more than an image. Hallways. Doorknobs. Stories. Ghosts. Views. Dogs. And now, thanks to that same generous friend, we are preparing to host our first painting session there.
It’s funny how life dribbles you forward in the most improbable ways. Yes, sometimes dreadfully, unpleasantly. Not this time. A building that once belonged entirely to our imagination becomes a place where we will spend a Thursday evening painting with friends.
Those kinds of conversions are never entirely accidental, by the way. Things don’t simply happen on their own. Places enter or leave our lives through people first. Through conversations. Through listening. Through random acts of acceptance, rejections, offerings being corresponded, or declined. All of it composts, compounds, the good and the less good.
If there is something LA continues to show us after all these years, from our perspective as nomads relying on the kindness of strangers, it is that fantasy and fact stand unusually close to one another here. Perhaps uncomfortably sometimes, but at least closer than in any other city we have ever known.
Each journey from “what the hell is this place?” to “How am I lucky enough to call this home?” has its own story. Life experiences have a peculiar way of sedimenting. What may feel random, most of the time uncomfortable, may reveal its final shape later on. Rewards, if there are any, rarely arrive when expected. Years stack up. People drift in. Doorknobs turn, one way or the other. Doors swing, one way or the other. One introduction may lead to an old parquet floor, a vaulted ceiling, a centenarian cypress tree. Looking back, it is amazing to see how many things had to happen for this Thursday evening to come to reality.
By the way, one of those things was bidding The Everly goodbye.
Anyhow, this Thursday we will carry our easels through a door that has spent years existing only in our imagination. That alone feels worth celebrating.
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