Yes, which is what I was trying to say in post #22. It’s for this very reason that the dingbat neighborhoods of East Hollywood became nuclei of various immigrant communities. My former dingbat is in both Thai Town and Little Armenia—the two largest communities of those respective countries outside of the countries themselves. The area has heavy pedestrian traffic, and I walk on errands as much as I drive. It was for this reason—as much as for tourism–that the subway was built under Hollywood Blvd., with stations at both Vermont and Western, in addition to Vine.
And while, from the street, dingbats may seem alienating and car-oriented, the East Hollywood dingbat has become—as a result of historical accident, if nothing else—something quite different. Because the first generation immigrant families typically have lower car-to-person ratios, and higher person-to-apartment unit ratios, entry and egress to the building is heavier through the front entrance than the garage. This is usually the pool courtyard, too. In my dingbat–especially in summer when the non-air-conditioned interiors of apartments are nearly unbearable for congregating—the landings and pool-sides become gathering places for adults and children equally. The Armenia babushkas sit on the balconies, drinking [del]Turkish[/del] Armenian coffee and gossiping about who-knows-what while their grandchildren play with the Salvadorean and Korean kids in the pool. The Guatemalans next door always invite everyone to their parties, so no one will complain about the punta and reggeton blaring late into Saturday night.
The summers can become maddening, because all the windows are open, with all the sounds and languages that they release into the courtyard, and the concrete surfaces of the pool areas echo unrelentingly. My dingbat’s pool area is side-by-side with the next-door dingbat. They tore down the wall separating them so that one adult could always be on duty watching all the kids of both buildings in both pools, by some kind of rotation they somehow worked out at a big meeting one Sunday night. By the middle of the day on Saturday, I sometimes just have to walk away to the relative quiet of Griffith Park to think straight. However, I will say that, as a linguist, it’s pretty interesting for me to hear how the children code-switch from their native languages to English with each other, and back again to their native tongues, to let their parents know what’s going on.
In any case, the dingbat, which may seem from the picture that spark240 posted above to be a set of architectural features that by design are meant to alienate, has become within its plaza-like interior–by sheer immigrant will–something that actually humanizes and binds (as spark240 says), in more than a purely spatial sense, all these differences brought together from all over the world by chance into these low-rent neighborhoods. And honestly, I much prefer it to the typical West Hollywood dingbat, with its quiet, staid, antiseptic, and–well, boring atmosphere of muy muy. Yeah, the dingbat ornaments might be tackier on the eastside, and the names more comical, but the human interactions they have given rise to is more public. And the foods you can smell are just so. much. better.