Dtla Quotes

“I propose a rebranding. Let's call downtown what is is: visceral. Downtown is passing notes of perfume and feces and wood-smoked cuisine wafting through the streets between piles of vomit left over from last night's bender. It is silence cut by sirens. It is 2 a.m. drunk shouts and 3 a.m. screams for help. It is smog-tinted sunsets framed by century-old buildings and draped with a parade of shabby tents. It is the maddening frustration of traffic jams borne of closed streets and the ecstasy of jasmine in bloom by the cathedral on a warm spring night.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“Ours isn't a perfect world. It's downtown--a gilded toilet where people defecate in the streets, where untreated crazies run amok, where Business Improvement District dispatchers get stabbed in the back, where residents gleefully attend midnight arson, where cars pin people to walls, where tourists disintegrate in water tanks, where old men get beaten to death outside their apartments.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“Los Angeles, you've got to be more than the sum of your hats.”
― Dan Johnson, Catawampusland

“You can imagine my horror when my mom parked the car on Grand and opened the door. We were dead. I already imagined the Merlot soaked claws of a thousand bums tearing me limb from limb then tobagganing down Second Street on what remained of my torso.”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar