I went on a walking tour of waste management facilities in Vernon/DTLA
This past weekend, one of my favorite bike groups, Infrastructure.LA, ran a walking tour of a region in Vernon and the southern part of downtown LA where there are a lot of waste management facilities. I always love the events this group runs - they show me a side of the city that I will never, ever see anywhere else. I love it.
We hit up a couple waste processing and transfer stations, both owned by the city of LA and by private companies:
A lot of the walking tour took place in Vernon, a truly bizarre part of the greater LA area notable for its extreme industrial focus and its elaborate levels of local corruption.
One of the highlights was visiting a gigantic plant which processes cooking oil and butchery waste. It had a massive gyre of vultures, crows, and other birds circling above it - a truly weird vision to approach from a distance. The closer we got, the huger I realized the birds were. We then were stopped in the road on the approach to the facility by a security guard who thought we were trying to enter it. He stood there watching us, perplexedly stroking his chin, while the tour guide read out a series of facts about the facility and its business.
When we started walking away, I went up to the tour guide to thank him for being as normal as he was about our presence there. I tried to explain what we were doing and why we wanted to see places like this... he then crankily told me, "That guy just read a bunch of stuff off our website! If you REALLY want to know what goes on here, you should talk to the general manager and get a tour!!" I loved that. My favorite part of the trip, genuinely. Thank you, mysterious security guard!
Another highlight was stopping by the LA river to look at a massive flock of seagulls and vultures resting in the shallow water. There were hundreds of gulls and a few huge vultures roaming around amongst them. The Amtrak line went by overhead, and the Surfliner passed while we were standing there. Great shit. The city rules, actually.
I took a ton of photos. We saw the kind of monumental industrial facilities that I always feel would make great videogame asset inspiration, and we noticed some great graffiti. We walked past both the kind of massive trash processing facilities that the city puts out press releases about... as well as small ones which may be processing illegally-acquired copper wiring?? Here's one of the biggest ones we walked around:
If you are in LA, I highly recommend checking out this instagram account and bringing yourself to one of these events. There is already another walking tour - this one 6 miles--planned for a few weekends from now.