Scenes from Another World

I spent the other day walking around Downtown LA with my roommate. She's writing an article on the LA subway and the tourism possibilities therein. I lived in Downtown LA for my lost year between college and grad school, crashing on my dad's couch at the Brewery. I know my way around Downtown pretty well so I came along to navigate. The night before we talked about various ways in which we might tackle the trip; how we might balance well known monuments and attractions with more obscure delights. In mapping out the route, I realized we'd be passing pretty close to 7th and Broadway in the Jewelry district and its singularly bizarre local eatery: Clifton's Cafeteria.

Founded by a man named Clifford Clinton whose personal portmanteau lends the restaurant its name, Clifton's is the closest I have gotten to wandering into David Lynch film.

Imagine a world built in the same mode as Disneyland: 50's clean cut, white washed optimism with a stern but caring religious undertone, delighted by the endless possibilities of the human imagination. Only, instead of the expensive flagship of an entertainment empire, its a red-headed stepchild of a backwater, underfunded, unable to keep up with changing aesthetics and dilapidated. I'm sure at some point Clifton's was the place of wonder and hope it now mockingly reflects. Those days are long past, however.

What remains is a strange kind of shell. It's dilapidation is not so much haunting as pitiable. It I've been to run down amusement parks and off-brand Chuck E Cheese's where the failure of its animatronics and the general decay of its decor made the experience as eerie as a Diane Arbus photo. Clifton's real appeal however, is in the strange pathos it seems to generate. It's hollowed out interior is still remarkably earnest. And its this earnestness that makes it so very upsetting.

Supposedly modeled after the Brookdale Lodge, a family friendly vacation resort nestled deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, the interior seeks to present itself as a welcoming sylvan escape from the hectic world of wholesale jewelry just outside its doors. A poorly carved, faux-fur covered moose leers out of an awning just past the main entrance. The walls are covered in dark wood paneling, carved to look like tree trunks. A neon cross crackles atop a tiny "chapel" seemingly built into the impressive mountain rocks.

The upstairs is paneled with a series of yellowing, backlit, window-sized photos depicting the African Savannah, the Grand Canyon, Haight-Ashbury. Sitting by those lucigraphed pictures is meant to transport a diner to the faraway land it depicts. One really might be eating in the middle of the Madagascar Jungle or on Pennsylvania Avenue just down the street from the White House.

Entering the aforementioned chapel, a claustrophobic camera obscura-- too small to stand up in fully with a diorama of a woodland scene built into a glass tank set in one wall-- one can, with the push of a button hear the voice of a man long dead, with the slightest hint of a Tennessee Ernie Ford twang, read poetry praising both Jesus and the woods while canned birdsong plays, deafened by the whispering of ancient static. There's nothing sinister in the message, just the honest naivete that one could have a profound religious moment, not just by observing the majesty of the woods, but by observing its facsimile in the confines of a theme restaurant, while listening to the cheerful droning of sub par poetry being read aloud. A sign on the door cautions you to close and latch the door so that you can have more privacy in the chapel.

So it's not so much that Clifton's perverts and distorts its original intentions. It just falls magnificently short, while failing to appear hollow in the process. My mother, who first introduced me to Clifton's as a teenager, told me that her own mother used to bring her and her twin sister to the place after a day of shopping downtown. I can imagine that, in the mid 50s, as a seven or eight year old, one might be enchanted by it. But now, years past its heyday and nonetheless undaunted in its message it invokes the kind of nostalgia that is thoroughly painful: the return to a childhood favorite and realization that it would never again fulfill that same needful desire.

Clifton's was never my childhood joy. It was barely my mother's. It doesn't make me personally nostalgic. Instead it's a kind of nostalgia for the world at large. Here is a place that has fallen through the cracks of modernization. It's a portal into a world that the world has forgotten but still yearns for. It cannot fulfill the promise of its credo, but it makes one keenly aware of the lack.