St Patrick's Day 2012 showed itself to be a rainy one, with a storm coming through in various strengths throughout the day.
Around lunchtime several LAPD patrol cars zoomed up Main Street to converge somewhere (possibly near City Hall) What later turned out to be an OccupyLA protest was dispersed some tweeted with "unnecessary violence." Since I wasn't there I can't comment on what happened, (we were having lunch with a neighbor friend when LAPD were zooming up the street).
A couple hours later we heard voices chanting.. a small group of protestors were marching down Main Street against the flow of traffic.. I got my iPhone taping just as they passed our building.. sorry about the quality.. I didn't want to open the window since the cats were nearby.
An average weekend (or weekday) will find traffic stopped on Main so that filming of some kind can occur. I get so many FilmLA notices (one must subscribe to email updates as the posting of FilmLA notices are erratic or non-existent), I'm not sure if this was an 'action' shot or just a messed up car commercial.
If you see the video the car is being driven South-bound on a normally North-bound ONLY Main Street. Basically all day long traffic is stopped, shouting occurs to silence the neighborhood and then a 'take' is shot, then repeated several times over several hours. Most people who live downtown are familiar with this as it seems Downtown LA is the location for any number of programs, (like CSI: NY or Castle) commercials and movies (too many to name).
This one was fairly innocuous, as far as noise and light (night shots can often be bad as giant spotlights are shone into buildings as they light the block up and shooting on sidewalks can be annoying if you have some jerk PA trying to tell you you can't walk on your own sidewalk out of your building). I can't speak for anyone dealing with the traffic stoppage though.
Being close to a Fire Department in a true emergency is good thing. This can be attested by the many calls that seem to go out around our neighborhood whether at the Alexandria around the corner, or the warehouse on Winston earlier this year.
Regardless what the reason, I remind myself daily how important these guys are & what an excellent job they do. So tonight rather than get frustrated with the loud interruption to my viewing of "White Christmas" (it's not as if it's not available on DVD) I went downstairs to investigate.
Initially there were some four or five vehicles.. including 2 large ladder trucks gathered around the corner on 4th Street, down below on Main in front of the Hellman Building and the future location of the Medallion. From the vantage of the loft I could see folks running up the sidewalk to Pete's Cafe to get a closer look.
"purple shirts" were securing the intersection on either end of Main Street at 4th as well at the corner at Winston.
checking out the scene
several firemen had gone up the ladder to observe one of the units (my best guess).
City Hall can be seen shining in the background as the Fire Department work on retracting the ladder.
With everything seeming A-OK the LAFD eventually wrapped up and by the time I returned to the loft, they were well on their way to whatever came next.
Oh, and eventually my girl Kiki Cat & myself got back to watching "White Christmas" with limited interruption.
Happy Hanukkah & Merry Christmas & thank you to the LAFD & all our Public Safety folks who protect us all day & night.
