LOS ANGELES
DOWNTOWN
NEWS Volume 39, Number 38
INSIDE
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Look, Up in the Sky Downtown Gets Bird Brained, as Thousands of Tiny Vaux’s Swifts Roost in the Historic Core
A Supreme Court justice speaks.
2
High times at a hemp convention.
6
PICK THE
PROS Pick football games, win prizes.
7
Getting close to a Downtown Target.
8
A bike store with an indoor track.
24
L.A. Opera goes ‘Postino.’
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31 CALENDAR LISTINGS 33 MAP 34 CLASSIFIEDS
by Ryan VaillancouRt staff wRiteR
A
s twilight falls over the Historic Core, casting a warm glow on the brick and stone buildings, Jeff Chapman cranes his neck toward the sky and waits for what he promises will be a worthy spectacle. Chapman, who works as the director of the Audubon Center at Debs Park in Highland Park, is standing on the roof level of a parking structure on Broadway just north of Fifth Street. With his brown Audubon cap and the highpowered binoculars dangling from his neck, he looks every bit the part of a bird watcher. But he seems out of place here. It’s about 6:10 p.m., and even if some exotic winged species were to fly across the sky, its call would be drowned out by the squealing brakes of rush hour buses. Then, at 6:19 p.m., Chapman perks up. “There they are,” he says excitedly. The sky above and around the Chester Williams Building, an abandoned brick edifice on the northeast corner of Fifth Street and Broadway, is dotted with a few dozen birds. In minutes, there are hundreds of them. Soon, the sky is full of the tiny creatures, which because of their diminutive size and rapidly flapping wings are often mistaken for bats. “Of course, they’re not bats,” Chapman says. “Bats are going out at night. The swifts are coming in.” Specifically, these are Vaux’s (rhymes with “foxes”) Swifts, a migratory species that travel up and down the West Coast of North and Central America, roosting along the way in groups of up to 10,000 in hollowed-out tree trunks, or as in this case, in abandoned chimney shafts. For at least the past year, the chimney of the 74-year-old Chester Williams Building has become the Vaux’s Swifts most prominent stopover point in Los Angeles, according to birders who track the species from the Pacific Northwest down to Central America. The swifts stop in Los Angeles around mid-April on their way north. They arrive again, usually starting in late August, and stay through early October as they return to warmer climates in Mexico and beyond. While the swifts may surprise new Historic Core residents, they see Swifts, page 26
photo by Gary Leonard
Jeff Chapman of the Audubon Center watches as a flock of Vaux’s Swifts descend into a chimney at Fifth Street and Broadway. The Audubon Center is organizing public viewings of the birds’ nightly roosting.
The Voice of Downtown Los Angeles