by John Hawkins, President and CEO, The Club
This month’s cover story has really gone sideways. On purpose!
As Los Angeles continues to negotiate the historic pandemic in this third month, the Alive! editorial team wanted to show the City hard at work and moving forward while still dealing with the current realities of social distancing and work safety.
How to show that dual reality?
StreetsLA – the new name for Public Works’ Street Services Division – had the cool idea of taking advantage of the lighter traffic to repave major arterials more efficiently. So we set up a visit – safely of course – with Assistant Director Keith Mozee on Sunset Boulevard to see how StreetsLA is coping. Naturally our Director of Marketing, Summy Lam, took lots of awesome Alive!-exclusive photos. And some of them, to capture the reality of social distancing, had to be
horizontal.
It was the idea of Alive! designer David Jamgotchian to flip the cover on its side for the third time in the history of our current version of Alive!. David was right – showing the distance with which the StreetsLA team has to work is dramatic. Showing is telling.
So, we thank both of the StreetsLA crews who welcomed us, to Keith Mozee, and to Paul Gomez who set it up.
Speaking of the pandemic, on our back page this month we reprint a History Comes Alive! column we ran in 2015 about the City’s previous pandemic, this time from the flu, 1918. City Archivist Michael Holland reminded us that we had printed that column, and this might be a good time to reprint it. Right you are, Michael. (And feel free to send in more columns!)
As I write this, the Club is continuing our Club Care Calls project, this time calling all 50,000 active members. It continues to be an incredible project. Look for that call, if you haven’t received it yet.
As we head into summer – hard to believe, isn’t it – I remind you to keep safe, to wear those masks for the sake of others, and to continue to value those close to you. You matter to us.
— John
