Californians are in a kind of limbo
right now.
We know that COVID-19 cases and
hospitalizations have continued to decrease, but we’re waiting for the state’s
reopening process to run its course. We know that more vaccine doses are on the
way, but many of us are waiting to become eligible.
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Parents are waiting for schools to
reopen, but there are still debates about how to do that safely.
Sit tight, our leaders have told us.
Answers are coming. Hope is on the horizon.
Over the past year, when it has felt
as if I’m stuck in place, I’ve found that taking a walk is at least one
(admittedly literal) way of moving forward.
And earlier in the pandemic, when
parks, hiking trails and even beaches were closed and roped off, I, like a lot
of people, started walking around my neighborhood.
At some point, we got a copy of the
book “Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los
Angeles,” thinking it might be a neat, under-the-radar way to give some shape
to the meandering; the stairs connected people who lived in the hills with the
public transportation running below in the era before many of them had cars.
But soon, I started noticing friends
posting from their stair walks on Instagram. We got a second copy of the book
for Christmas. The friend I was going to regift it to already had one. On a
walk near the Silver Lake Reservoir one recent weekend, I spotted an older man
with a dog-eared copy of the book and a younger couple with a fresh volume.
It seemed that the “secret”
stairways in Los Angeles, and in the East Bay, as detailed in the sequel, were,
well, not so secret.
Recently, I talked to the author of
the book, journalist Charles Fleming, about the response to the books in the
pandemic.
Here’s our conversation lightly
edited and condensed:
Tell me about
how you decided to write a book of Los Angeles stair walks.
The first book came about, really,
because I was having health problems. I was up for my third spinal surgery in
three years. I told my doctor, I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I’m going to try this
other thing, and the other thing was walking.
It started helping. I’m inherently
very lazy, so I sort of started to make a game out of trying to locate all the
staircases, thinking there were probably 16 or 20 of them. What I found was
there were about 60 staircases in Silver Lake, and I decided maybe I’d better
just keep going.
Friends of mine would ask what I was
doing, then started walking with me. One of them eventually said, “Look, why
isn’t this a book? You write books for a living.” I said, “I’ve been walking
out here for eight years and I haven’t seen anybody.”
So that’s a long way around saying
I’ve been surprised at the interest in the book from the very beginning.
What has the
response been like specifically in the pandemic? Like when parks were closed,
did you anticipate this would be a big moment for the books?
I didn’t anticipate it at all. I am
not very entrepreneurial. I’ve led walks for years and I’ve never charged for
them. It was, “Let’s just be a community.”
In May of last year, I was starting
to get notes from people saying, “I can’t thank you enough for the book; it’s
really saved our lives. Because the gym is closed, and the tennis courts are
closed and the park is closed. I can’t take my kids to the playground and I
can’t take my dog to the dog park.”
There have been so many people
saying variations on the theme of, “I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 20
years and I didn’t even know that park was there or I didn’t even know that
lake was there or I didn’t even know who designed that house or what that
building was.”
So I got lots and lots of letters,
including one from a person in Berkeley, I think, who had a cousin. And the
cousin had met, wooed and planned to wed this woman in a relationship that had
been built around the stairs.
I won’t ask you
to pick a favorite walk. So what’s the most surprisingly strenuous walk in each
book?
I mean, Walk No. 42 in the Los
Angeles Secret Stairs — it’s the one that goes down to the old Rustic Canyon’s
Murphy Ranch. It has a pair of staircases that are over 500 steps each. It’s
wickedly, wickedly hard.
What about the
East Bay? I feel like they must be harder on average.
Yeah and I think that might be. The
Grizzly Peak walk, Walk No. 12, just goes straight up.
On the other hand in the East Bay,
the payoff — where do the stairs go? They go uphill. If you’re going uphill,
you’re going east. If you’re halfway up the staircase and you turn around, what
do you see?
Well, you see Berkeley, Oakland, the
Bay, the Bay Bridge, San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge. The views are
staggering from practically every staircase in the book. I think
the views up there are better than the views down here.
Which ones are
the most changed in each since you first published the books? (Los Angeles in
2010 and the East Bay in 2011.)
The character of Oakland is changing
quickly. So I think Walks No. 19 and 20, Lake Merritt, Broadway and Oak Glen
Park. Those have become more gentrified.
And then in Los Angeles, probably
the Highland Park walks, No. 7 and No. 8.
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