Charles Bukowski on Los Angeles

To find the proper place to write it's important that the rent should be reasonable, the walls thick, the landlord indifferent, and the tenants depraved, penurious, alcoholic, and lower-middle class. With the advent of the high-rise apartments, small courts, with their own private entranceways, have more and more vanished, and the wonderful characters that once infested these places have vanished along with them.

Charles Bukowski, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," L.A. Free Press, 1974