Review: Tom Explores Los Angeles

By: John Bozic

Summary:

     

          Tom Explores Los Angeles is an expression on how modern society embarks on what was created long before they were, and how they utilize it or how people involve it in their daily lives. The host of the YouTube series is Tom Carroll, and in each episode, he visits a different historic site of or around Los Angeles and digs into the history on what happened when that particular building or park first opened and how it made it this far in time.

          Tom is not like many people his age, how he dresses is what got my attention, and why I write about him today, how he can influence others on what he choices to do, Tom visits and explores places that were once new and exciting, places that brought people together, and now see's them bypassed because of a new attraction, and seems like the only person who still cares. How he dresses brings out that side in him, the hipster-look to many, but the horn rim glasses and phosphorescent white teeth that was how all the men in the 30s, 40s,50s, and 60s, that many of the places Tom goes where popular dressed.

          The attention to detail, not one fact is forgotten when exploring the city of Los Angeles, and the people he meets, shows that if he only sees the person featured in a show for a minute, he acts as if he's known that person his entire life.

          The videos he has published so far have a respectable amount of views, but one in particular has nearly 40,000 views because it focuses something that is very demanding in the news these last several years, the death of the American shopping mall, and what it means to the economy of the city it's centered in and the people that are affected. That video is about the Hawthorne Plaza, in Hawthorne, California, right outside the city of Los Angeles, and show how gutted the inside and how immortalized the plaza was since it closed in 1999.  Tom then goes on about the general history of the modern shopping mall came to be was Southdale in Edina, Minnesota and the Austrian architect, Victor Gruen, and his vision of modern-communal shopping.

Clips:

          The video of the Hawthorne Plaza, really the only video of the mall that is so detailed and embarks on the exploration of erstwhile enclosed malls.

Thank you for reading and remember to ask questions and comment below.

-TTTM