LA146;s fine, but the sun doesn146;t shine

If there8217;s one thing the native residents of Los Angeles can8217;t stand, it8217;s condescending New Yorkers8230; Here they come, the Tina Feys, the Jon Stewarts and the New York Times reporters, sneering at LA8217;s non-existent public transportation, its incomprehensible freeway system and its bed-before-nine suburban-ness, before jetting back to their glittering, never-sleeping Manhattan playground8230; I think Angelenos should just relax. So what if New Yorkers think LA is unbearable? New York may have the edge on excitement, but it8217;s also noisy, filthy, crowded, rapaciously expensive and by turns too hot and too cold8230;

Alas, this view puts me in a minority in LA. Angelenos want to compete. Hence the reason why the city8217;s most famous architect, Frank Gehry, put his name to a 3 billion mega-development to transform LA8217;s historic but unloved downtown area the financial district into a mini-Manhattan8230; The Grand Avenue Project was conceived to give LA nothing less than its very own Central Park. A similarly ambitious project, the 2.5 billion LA Live complex, was also devised for the other side of downtown. Its goal? To give LA nothing less than its own Times Square. In many ways, all this is great news for LA. But the timing of LA8217;s decision to out-New York the New Yorkers has been terrible8230; And for Angelenos, utterly infuriating. After all, everything would be fine if not for those catastrophically overextended bankers on Wall Street. New Yorkers, in other words.

Excerpted from a comment by Chris Ayres in 8216;The Times8217;