Saturday, November 25, 2006

LA Observed Video Blogger Covers Gold Line Tunnel Event


If you want to know what is really going on in LA, then LAobserved.com is must reading on a daily basis. Kevin Roderick has broken new ground and brought on Jacob Sobaroff on his staff to get out and record LA with his new High Definition Video camera. Jacob made a splash recently with his excursion out to the new State Cornfield Park in which you see YouTube meets Huell Howser. In his official debut with LAobserved in the field, he interviews Mayor Villaraigosa at the Gold Line tunneling event. Even though I can link directly to the video on YouTube, please read and view it from LAobserved here. For those of you who have YouTube blocked at work, you are just going to have to watch the videos from home. My cameraphone picture shows the Gold Line construction above ground construction, as it crosses the 101 leaving Union Station.

When I first proposed to MTA to promote transit and cultural tourism in 1999 on the Internet, their response was that they only cared about work-related trips on transit. When MTA decided to fund the ExperienceLA project in 2001, they were beginning to realize that they needed to promote destinations on Metro, and thus, when ExperienceLA debuted with the opening of the Gold Line to Pasadena in July 2003, Metro was on a full marketing blitz with destinations. The Gold Line to Pasadena helped people to rediscover "main street" South Pasadena. Thus, when the Gold Line extension opens in 2010, it will bring cultural visitors to Boyle Heights who will have a chance to explore the community of today and to find reminders of JewishLA from long ago such as the Breed Street Shul.

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