Veteran Downtown Economic Developer Hal Bastian of the DCBID Will Lead PERSPECTIVE GROUP No. 7 on HOUSING- Wednesday, November 4 from 6-8PM

Photo of Chapman Building at 8th and Broadway in Sept 2006 by Maryam Hosseinzadeh

The seventh HABEAS LOUNGE perspective group will explore housing in downtown Los Angeles. The real estate bubble of the past ten years helped to solidify downtown's redevelopment and the bubble's pop is having an effect on downtown too. Completed projects are facing major challenges in leasing and sales, eight projects have gone into bankruptcy protection, and more are still under construction. The housing market in DTLA is changing, but how and what will be its future. Could these economic changes in fact be leading to a more economically-inclusive downtown? What are your thoughts?

Mapping Workshop no. 6 - Mapping Fear - Saturday, October 31, 2-4PM

Photo by Ismail Farouk

On Halloween, map wrangler Katie Bachler will lead a walk where we will attempt to explore and map fear - fictive and actual, spatial and emotional - in downtown Los Angeles.

From places with reputations as "haunted" hotels like the Alexandria to dark tunnels, Skid Row and our fear of "the other", what places in the city make us feel fear? Does remedying this always come down to mechanisms like the Safer Cities Initiative, gentrification, an increase in police patrols, and installing street lights and security cameras? We want to discover how feeling scared manifests itself in DTLA's places and its community formation, and we need your help!

Perspective Group No. 7 - HEALTH CARE IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - Wednesday, October 28 from 6-8PM

What are the medical issues facing those who live and/or work in downtown Los Angeles today? For downtown residents and employees, what do you do when it comes to taking care of your health and well being if you are insured? Uninsured? Underinsured? Where do you go for preventative care or alternative health care? Do you have a favorite acupuncturist, gym or dentist in your office building? What happens when there is a worker's comp claim or emergency? What about food?

Join us in our discussion on Wednesday, October 28 from 6-8PM when we explore health and health care in downtown Los Angeles.

HABEAS LOUNGE_Newark New Jersey

HABEAS LOUNGE makes its Newark, New Jersey debut at Rupert Ravens Contemporary, as part of the exhibition VESSEL. Join us for the opening reception, Friday October 23, 2009, 8 - 11 PM.

The opening night is part of Newark Art Council's Open Doors City Wide Visual Arts Celebration.For this edition, the former "Furniture King" will once again be infused with its original mandate to showcase and celebrate objects which bring society together, with the LOUNGE initially serving as a still life in the display window. Mid November the LOUNGE becomes active with dialogue events addressing city life.

Mapping Workshop no. 5 - Emotion - Saturday, October 24, 2p.m.

What places in the city are unexpected vessels of emotional memory?

Where does the built environment evoke an emotional response within us and why?

How do we navigate the city based on intuition? How do we re-locate the feelings behind places that have an emotional resonance to us, individually or as a society?

At this 2-hour workshop on Saturday, October 24 from 2-4PM, we will be exploring DTLA to gauge emotion and the ways places make us feel. Some emotional sites in the city are choreographed, while others emerge organically.

Notes On Time Mapping

1) "I will be there in 20 minutes"
2) We negotiate the space of the City of LA using time and not distance
3) There are certain times of day when you should not drive to the Westside, where a 12 mile trip takes one and a half hours.
4) Differing time truths of inhabitants of the city
5) Psycho-temporal geography

Last Saturday, we explored mapping DTLA and temporal geographies from a time-based perspective. Some participants walked, some drove, others took public transportation. Specimen collections by all groups took place at a specific time, 20 minutes after we left the headquarters of the HABEAS LOUNGE.

Navigating the city with an eye on time signifiers, the walking group noticed numbers and clocks. At a specific street corner where everything was open for 24 hours, memory was triggered towards a nighttime version of the city. Our driving mappers had a consumer time experience (spending money = spending time?) : American Apparel was 20 minutes away! And our public transportation mappers had their journey prematurely put on hold at the end of the DASH line- standing still for the most part - idling at a stop light -waiting for a bus that never came - observing the different modes of transportation passing them by in the bike lane, on the sidewalk and in the street - and then with no other option short of hitching- walked the four blocks back to our starting point.

Our divergent paths made plural patterns on the wall map - circles for wait time, multicolored paths for the varying ways back to the LOUNGE, and detailed notes on interactions/observations.

Come check out the paths we took and the maps we derived from this past Saturday's time-controlled experiment/adventure. Then, visualize your own time map, think about your perspective, draw it out and make your contribution to the wall of maps at the HABEAS LOUNGE.

Downtown's LGBT Community Is The Focus Of HABEAS LOUNGE Perspective Group no. 6

The LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) community in Los Angeles has a vibrant history, dating to before NYC's Stonewall Riots of 1969. Los Angeles was home to many of the first leaders, organizations, publications and protests that gave birth to the LGBT movement in America. Often overshadowed by other cities, Los Angeles' role in the LGBT movement is as strong- if not stronger- than that of any other city in America. For our sixth Perspective Group on Wednesday, October 21st, 6-8PM, we will examine this history, share current realities and envision possible futures of an LGBT Downtown LA.

The discussion will be led by Russell Brown, President of the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council, and organizers behind "LAvender LA": Thomas De Simone, Melissa Lopez and Teresa Wang. LAvender LA is a two week display of the history of LA's LGBT community opening November 8, at 114 W. 5th Street in Downtown L.A. More information on LAvender LA can be found at http://www.rootsofequality.org

HABEAS LOUNGE is located at the brookfield>arts art space on the middle level of the 7 + FIG shopping center at 735 S. Figueroa, DTLA 90017.

Free parking available with validation at the 7 + FIG parking structure, located off of 8th Street just north of Figueroa.

Wednesday Perspective Group Recap - Discussion On DTLA Art Galleries

Last Wednesday night, the HABEAS LOUNGE Downtown Perspective Group No. 6 focused on the evolution of Downtown Art Galleries and the history of the monthly Downtown Los Angeles Artwalk. Bert Green, a downtown gallery pioneer and principal of Bert Green Fine Art, shared his story of moving his gallery from Los Feliz to downtown and founding the DTLA Artwalk.

In 2004, Artwalk was founded as a means to activate the sidewalks of Spring and Main Street between 2nd and 9th in Downtown's Historic Core, an event that was created to draw greater pedestrian life to the streets south of Bunker Hill. Newly founded galleries formed the logical nexuses of the walk, which has grown to an audience of 10,000 crowding the streets and sidewalks.

The marketing of downtown as a safe residential/recreational destination with edgy glamour has played into the recent success of Artwalk. En masse and with the security of the crowd, Angelenos new to downtown are introduced to the area and get to experience its unique history as well as see in person its much lauded revival. Factors such as the 1999 Adaptive Reuse Ordinance passed by the City of Los Angeles, the real estate bubble, and the presence of adjacent public transportation have helped to grow the walk. These same factors, in fact, which have helped to simultaneously grow downtown's "livability" and drive investment into the area. The Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, for example, expanded the availability of vacant, low-cost (and even occasionally free) ground floor units as property owners attempted to give a lived-in, "hip" feel to their rehabilitated buildings that could not yet command high, ground-floor retail rents.

These factors- particularly that of downtown reinvestment and public transportation- contrast with the late 1980s heyday of the Arts District, south of Alameda and also adjacent to Skid Row. Will the galleries of Gallery Row survive past their leases? Or will they soon be replaced by restaurants and bars less likely to have a community building effect in DTLA?

Mapping Workshop no. 4 - Time (lets make new time) - Saturday, October 17, 2p.m.

In this Saturday's mapping workshop we will examine the multiple speeds of traversing the city of Los Angeles. Participants will begin at the HABEAS LOUNGE and utilize various forms of transportation to move out into the city for a specified amount of time (20 minutes). Modes of transportation will include bus, metro, walking, driving and biking.

Distance as time, time as motion-- do our bodies move? How do we frame the urban landscape through glass?

Aesthetic experiences , voyeurism, bodily motions will all be mapped onto concrete notions of the city.

Mapping Workshop no. 3 - Green Space (the myth of nature in the city) - Saturday, October 10, 2p.m.

Come out tomorrow from 2-4p.m. to investigate the meanings of nature in the city of Los Angeles. We will walk out into the city to look for green growth between the cracks, learn about edible plants in downtown, and un-earth the myth of the California palm tree. Look for urban wild-life and document official parks as well as unused empty lots given over to green growth that turns dry and yellow. From personal perspectives on nature to places that the city deems a 'park' will be explored via hand-drawn mapping on the walls of the HABEAS LOUNGE.


Meet at the HABEAS LOUNGE at 2pm on Saturday, October 10.

Park at the 7 + FIG parking structure, located off of 8th Street just north of Figueroa.

Free 3-hour parking validation.

Downtown Smell Workshop

Last Saturday at the HABEAS LOUNGE, we charted an olfactory path through the city. We wandered the city and its smells, relishing in the complex chemicals emanating from a pharmacy, the rough wood of a city tree, a broken bottle of champagne, and the warm moist air coming through the subway grates. We also had a blind smell test at the local restaurant Botega Louie.

We returned to the LOUNGE to document and map our adventures in smell, sharing and visually representing the scents we encountered which evoke the variety of experiential journeys available when deeply investigating DTLA at a sensory level.

photos by Linda Pollack

Bert Green to Lead Perspective Group no. 4- Through the Lens of Downtown Art Galleries

Come join us on Wednesday October 14th, 6-8 PM, for the next Downtown Perspective Group with the focus on Art Galleries. Bert Green, of Bert Green Fine Art will kick off the discussion and you are welcome. Above is Bert Green's rendering of his downtown LA, made at the HABEAS LOUNGE. What is yours?

Card board edition of HABEAS LOUNGE now on view!

Visitors to the LOUNGE these past weeks have noticed that the original red LOUNGE has been replaced by stacks and stacks of card board. For this edition, LA based sustainable architect Nina Barbuto has recreated the LOUNGE from used cardboard. We are VERY grateful to area merchants, and even those on the westside, especially Helen's Cycles for their used bicycle boxes.

Says Nina: The material cardboard finds itself in everyone's life at some point. It's the box you open to find a new thing in the mail or from the store. It's the box you packed all your things in that define you as you move to a new home across the street/town/country. It's the box that now is your home in the Second Street Tunnel. Protector, trash to treasure, cardboard lends itself with its embedded structural system to hold us when we are down and keep our futures safe. So this recycled cardboard couch can hold you as you converse and connect over politics and culture.

Below - the original HABEAS LOUNGE in 1 NY Plaza, in Manhattan's Financial District February this year, with the focus on the economy.

Caryn Hofberg's story of Discovering Downtown

Wednesday evening HABEAS LOUNGE delighted in hearing Caryn Hofberg's adventures moving downtown from the Westside, as part of our Downtown Perspective Group encounters on Wednesday evenings. Caryn, a Los Angeles native, is a relative newcomer to downtown but in a short time she's creating waves. Eleven months ago she was delivering lamps to a client at the Eastern Columbia Building, as part of her work as an interior designer, the first time visiting downtown in years. She was hooked. Two months later she was living downtown. A few months after that she thought "Im going to open up a store"! (drawing on her past worked with preowned and vintage and flea markets). Four months later FLEA opened its doors on 6th Street. A few people opened up spaces shortly after. "It's so great down there - its really a small dense area of people coming together. You see familiar people, its really friendly" says Caryn. Next she was envisioning "this whole street being something amazing - this could be a whole destination - and thought - ok - I'll organize it. I went out and started talking to people, and discovered other people who were interested in the same thing". And so were the beginnings of 6th Street Business Association. HABEAS LOUNGE applauds Caryn and the Association for fostering a pluralistic down town Los Angeles.

Downtown LA Art Walk @ HABEAS LOUNGE

Come out to the Downtown LA Art Walk this Thursday October 8th at the HABEAS LOUNGE. Ofunne Obiamiwe of Republic of Peace will be providing the acoustic navigations.

We are a stone's throw from 7th Street/Metro Center, and if you must...we have validated parking in 7+ FIG parking structure, entrance on 7th and 8th Streets, west of Figueroa.

Flea's Caryn Hofberg leads HABEAS LOUNGE Perspective Group no. 3 - DTLA Small Businesses, October 7, 6 - 8 PM

This Wednesday our third Perspective Group will focus on downtown LA's thriving small business scene, and features Caryn Hofberg, Proprietress of Flea, DTLA resident and advocate, and one of the people behind the recently launched Sixth and Main Merchants Association. Caryn will kick off the discussion, sharing her vision and experiences navigating our downtown.

Check out the recent article in Los Angeles Downtown News about the thriving businesses along 6th and Main Street.

Are you interested in DTLA? Are you a small business owner, or thinking of becoming one? Are you a fan of small businesses and the dynamic pluralism they bring to urban life? Then come out Wednesday, 6 - 8 at the HABEAS LOUNGE and be part of our dialogue.

HABEAS LOUNGE Perspective Groups are part of "A Pluralistic Downtown Los Angeles Investigation", a series of explorations through maps and encounters, which will build a framework for the ideas and exchanges about our shared city.

Mapping Workshop no. 2 - Smell

Workshop! Saturday October 3 2-4pm

Join us for our mapping workshop as we discover SMELL in DTLA!

Our sense of smell is the most primitive way we relate to the world. We process smells in our limbic systems, which are tied to our most pre-linguistic impulses and ways of remembering and navigating. Our central nervous system is directly linked the limbic system, so as we experience the world olfactorally, it is pure sensation, not coded through the hippocampus into linguistic experience. Direct experience, often why we have trouble placing an olfactory experience.

The city! A city is a system that emits odors and vibrations, secrets under myths of grids and glass, insides and outsides. What if we navigated the city by our noses (our bodies). Ants travel on scent trails (maps)--- What will we remember? We are all slightly synesthesiatic, smells conjuring colors, sounds relaying touch---

Come congnitively map the seemingly familiar routes of downtown los angeles, the derive of the sensory will guide you to trash molecules, locking to your cells, or the sweetness of california sage in the cracks.