Montana Ave, Santa Monica. Something typical for LA. I noticed this area for the first time only when I had to go to Pacific Palisades past the borders of Santa Monica and recently on the way to a friend’s place around there. In Santa Monica the focus is 3rd Street promenade, a pedestrian zone hardly to escape. It’s like a magnet absorbing the entire locality, as it seems. It’s where on a Saturday afternoon hordes of people cross the street when red for traffic. But it only seems there’s nothing else. Force yourself to resist the crowd and pursue your way further past this area and suddenly you find yourself on Montana avenue. You notice neighborhood environment, shopping, meeting, dining, drinking etc. along the street, locals, no casual shopping tourists as on the promenade. It’s cultivated as seen on the web-page. And it’s Los Angeles. This very strong focus on a local place, a neighborhood, a specific identity. LA is a puzzle of these distinctive areas. Santa Monica’s promenade and right beside but totally separated Montana Ave. Normally you can’t identify it simply by a street name, it’s harder to define. Remember the Palms neighborhood council. Or a co-worker who lives in Hollywood and draws a line at Highland Ave: East of it is live, west of it the hype you don’t care. Small personal preferences. I remember the referent at the cornfield event who was talking about the characterization of LA as once clearly separated smaller scale cities and towns. When freeways and cars were introduced this constellation lost that scale and was transformed to new entity experienced in a very different way. So these relations to locality like Montana Ave can be understood as specific places in the sense of the origins of the city.