I live in Koreatown, Los Angeles, CA. If I were to walk away from my keyboard and down the four flights of stairs to the sidewalk in front of my building on Normandie Avenue, it would take me about three minutes to walk to the Ambassador Hotel, where Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy in 1968. It is directly across the street form where The Brown Derby used to stand, but was demolished after the devastating Northridge Earthquake of 1994 ruined the structure and changed the face of Wilshire Boulevard forever.

Now it seems change is coming to finish its job here in Koreatown. Sadly, the self-same quake that ruined the hat reached all the way across the busy thoroughfare, and The Ambassador, which has been closed for business since 1989, was damaged beyond use as a public building of any kind. Since then it has served as a popular location for filming and even a local parking lot, but little else. Today it is an obscure presence, its sprawling grounds brown, its notorious club, The Coconut Grove long silent, its famed bungalows crumbling under the weight of their own materials. Soon, it will be torn down to make way for a badly-needed high school for the Koreatown, or Mid-Wilshire neighborhood that has become the most densely populated in the entire city, plus a little extra space for retail which it seems might be targeted to a general, English-speaking clientele, in contrast to the majority of Seoul-Style, strictly-Korean establishments that dominate the area (It is Koreatown after all.)

It puts me in mind of one of the things that makes Los Angeles a truly great city, and perhaps the most American of all cities. Liberals run this city, yet most lefties would instinctively balk at a move like tearing down the Ambassador (it could be salvaged at great cost.) Here, things are different. This is a living city. Here, the most relevant, the most modern use of the land takes precedence over the history of the way the land was used in the past. Can't the country tolerate one city that is willing to tear down the past if that's what it takes to make way for the future? Wouldn't we all have a new school built in the most crowded part of the city and maybe even a small retail space that caters to the two thirds of the neighborhood's population that do not necessarily speak Korean? (The vast majority come from Mexico and El Salvador, so I suppose the signs should be in Spanish.)

L.A. has it's problems to be sure, but I have learned to embrace this city's willingness to make difficult decisions that ultimately find more weight in its future than in its past. Progress IS the future, and we're progressives right?