A week on the road: Visiting & training with California's finest, Part 1
If Downtown Los Angeles is changing from grimy to gleaming, the transition isn’t complete. As I walk down Broadway A black man with a dirty gray t-shirt and ashen skin, hair and beard pushes a laundry cart past me and a lighter-skinned couple walking into a restaurant that looks like any drink on its menu will cost more than my dinner later tonight will.
There are neon lights for The Orpheum, The Realto and other old-timey theaters kept alive by diverse acts, and ads painted ads peeling off the sides of high-rises. Downtown LA isn’t scrubbed, but it is being cultivated, and with its mix of low-end and well-heeled, and kitschy repurposing of the old, it feels like a vintage store come to life.
The marquee of Downtown Los Angeles' Orpheum Theatre, host-venue of The Eddie Bravo Invitational VI on April 24.
Graffiti-style artwork painted on a side of RVCA headquarters in Costa Mesa, CA, the site of one of MMA's most elite private training centers.
