A few years ago, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece that floated the idea that the City of Downey, for working class Hispanics in L.A’s Southeast region, represented a new Beverly Hills. On December 5 of this year, the New York Times published a story with the same theme.

Both are a crock. Neither evinces much knowledge of Beverly Hills, and both fail to understand Downey as a historic place that for the last few decades has steadily been losing its identity, and more critically, its vision of a vibrant future.

Let’s get the Beverly Hills comparison out of the way first. Where else in Los Angeles County, or anywhere else, for that matter, will you find the same caliber of luxury hotels with their scandalous tales, famous interviews and meetings, and headline-grabbing deaths? Where else will you find a greater cluster of high-end retail jewelry and clothing shops that line the world-famous Rodeo Drive? 

Where else will you find anything comparable to Benedict Canyon and its seemingly countless homes of the rich and famous? Where else will you find places once lived and partied in by some of the most glamorous and legendary figures in entertainment history?

The median household income in Beverly Hills, according to a U.S. census study, is $183,403 a year, in 2018 dollars, with $84,147 in per capita income.  In Downey, It’s $91,946, with a per capita average of $27,370. Not much comparison there. So why is any made at all?  Chances are, you won’t soon be reading any articles in The Beverly Hills Courier about the various and exotic lures of Downey.

Maybe it’s because Downey, as expressed in so much of its 1950s residential architecture, expresses a modern history of white affluence and comfort, a demographic fawned over by advertisers of consumer goods and retailers who banded together to create the Stonewood Shopping Center. 

To people barely scraping a living in corrupt, impoverished and badly run places like Huntington Park, Bell, Bell Gardens, Cudahy (where jetliners have dumped their fuel on school playgrounds) and the chronic civic embarrassment that is Maywood, tranquil Downey, placid Downey, boring Downey, may seem a blessed deliverance from the headaches and misery visited on families by the pathologies of drug and gang life.

The New York Times article celebrated the (unspecified) number of Latino millionaires living within the city’s precincts (less mention of the gaudy MacMansion eyesores that have propped up here and there like toadstools after rain). And no mention at all of the strong rumor of Downey as retirement haven for drug dealers who leave their distribution for other cities and Downey for the education of their kids and quiet lives for themselves (a recently retired Sheriff’s deputy all but confirmed this to me).

The NYT article described Downey as “aspirational” for Latinos (I refuse to use the word “Latinx,” not only because it’s a pretentious made-up product of the media chatterati, but because the majority of Hispanics you’ll speak with never use it). And coming from a long history of an entire continent largely cut off from the world’s attention and power-positioning, and with the psychic memory of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents having to live mostly under ruthless military dictatorships and oligarchic rule, you can see the appeal that a place like Downey would have, with its communitarian spirit, its attractive residential housing, abundant social services, and its civic and financial opportunities.

But Downey has been in decline for decades. Some of that decline is subtle and gradual, as when tablecloth dining began to disappear (Downey, unlike Beverly Hills, has no first-class fine-dining restaurant), and Macy’s men’s store stopped offering fine Imported Italian wool suits in favor of suits with cheaper materials, craftsmanship and designs.

The culture has hollowed out too. Except for an annual garden party, gone are the enthusiastic social gatherings formed to support the Downey Symphony, a large part of whose board would be antediluvian if it didn’t already know precious little about music. There have been notable defections in the past few years, like Harold Tseklenis, for example. 

The Downey Civic Theater is the largest city-owned building in Downey, but after seven years, with the demise of the increasingly popular and well-run Downey Civic Light Opera, there has been no effort to put in a professional theater group that can bring us Shakespeare, Chekhov, modern classic playwrights like Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams, or even Hispanic writers like Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Alfaro. Instead, we have a commercial Northern California management team that serially books amateur groups or, with few exceptions, B-listers on the downside of their careers. And no musicals.

The greatest scandal, of course, is the Downey Art Museum, the first of its kind in Los Angeles, axed by a vindictive blowhard of a mayor even after then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris wrote to the City of Downey saying she could find no legal reason for it to be closed.

The decline, mostly, is in quality of leadership. I’ve been a world traveler and long-term staff writer for a major American publication. I’ve lived in Downey for 42 years, most of that time because it’s only twenty minutes from LAX. In the early aught years I began to pay attention to city politics, at first out of admiration for the competence of city staff and later for appreciation of how well, particularly in times of stress (like the financial crash of 2008), the city functions.

But I’ve noticed over the past few election cycles how increasingly unimaginative and narrowly educated the city council has become, until now it seems a marginally literate, uninformed, unworldly group of status-seeking bureaucrats who remain suckers for any development deal, so long as it’s suitably ambitious. Culture as an index of civilization is of no interest to them. The future does not interest them; not, for example, the probability that in twenty or thirty years, virtually all the cheaply-built structures that dot the moonscape shopping mall known as the Promenade, will lie in ruin. 

We’re not hearing public discussion of the long-term health effects of air pollution. Downey is adjacent to the diesel-choked 710 corridor and is hemmed in by five freeways, three of which carry 20,000 vehicles a day. We haven’t heard a peep on the subject from the city. I’ve been heartened by Sean Ashton’s community outreach, and Blanca Pacheco’s effort to get out ahead of the pandemic’s effect on the city in her public service videos. I’m still not convinced that Claudia Frometa is up to the task of managing the entire city as well as District 4, despite her deep background in disaster management—which may come in handy someday. And why does she always seem joined at the hip with Pacheco whenever a publicity still depicts them both?

Outgoing mayor Rick Rodriguez was a good public servant. So was Alex Saab. If Catherine Alvarez’ refusal to speak English at the Zoom campaign debate among city council aspirants seemed a dubious choice, so are the words on her city page citing her election during “one of the most critical times in human history,” as though she were heaven-sent to deliver us from pandemic evil.

I do hope our new crop of city leaders will do something to temper the near-delusional boosterism that has characterized Downey public life for far too long—you’d think that all the gush about the Downtown Central District had elevated all three blocks of it on to world fame enjoyed by the Champs Elysees and Rome’s Via Veneto.

Millionaire Hispanics in Downey sounds nice, but as a destination city, we still have a long way to go.