Alleys

Neighborhoods no longer have alleys. I am not sure when this practice stopped, but when I was growing up on the west side of LA, alleys seemed to be the norm. Of course they were handy, acting as sort of a service bay for homes, sporting trashcans, garages, and boats, but they also offered unlimited opportunity for exploration. This is to say that gangs of ten year olds on bikes could travel by alley across Santa Monica and much of WLA in a constant dragnet of discovery, scavenging through the detritus of other lives, feasting on treasures that were someone’s trash. Even walking home from school could be more interesting via alleyway.

Alleys brought us our first introductions to Playboy or the sketchier Rapture…sort of a precursor to Hustler. Alleys occasionally provided us with not-quite –empty bottles of booze, various contraptions and machine parts that were bound to come in handy once we dragged them home. Often the treasures were limited to a single-use event, like the chance to rocket down a nearby hill in an old baby stroller, or the time that we found in one pile, a bag of old golf balls and a tennis racket.  (It is amazing how efficient a tennis racket can be in launching golf balls off of the Palisades cliffs.)

At a time of life when curiosity was ripe, alleys gave us glimpse into other lives, ammunition for adventure, and generally an entertaining thoroughfare from point A to B that guaranteed privacy from the adult streets, a constant element of surprise, and the occasional opportunity for mayhem…such as a full case of discarded spray paint, though that one did not turn out well.

So if the neatly trimmed front lawn offered the world a façade of stability and order, the alley was a better glimpse into lives. Trash speaks volumes and we were avid researchers.

Kids today do not have alleys to explore. There are none in the small town north of LA where I now live. Even the old alleys of Santa Monica changed radically when blind development erased hundreds of California bungalows across SM to replace them with apartments. Suddenly the alleys became crowded, much protected spaces, where people carefully locked up their trash from each other, wedged their vehicles into every space, and stared down suspiciously from apartment window, for fear that some homeless person might covet their trash…or sleep in it.

Like much other, alleyways are a thing of the past and, of course, ten year old kids now have their lives circumscribed for them in an endless array of organized activities. But once there were alleys and the memories of my childhood are richer for them.