By George Hobica, Tribune News Service

Did Dorothy Parker, the steadfast New Yorker and celebrated wit, once wisecrack that “L.A. is 72 suburbs in search of a city,” or is the quip merely attributed to her? Whatever the case, it is a fact that “Brave New World” author Aldous Huxley in 1925 called L.A. “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis,” both disparagements implying that the city is an amorphous amoeba without a nucleus.

Why all the shade? Sgt. Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb in the 1960s crime procedural “Dragnet,” knows better when he informs us over the establishment shots, in his I’ve-seen-it-all monotone: “This is the city. Los Angeles, California.”

What we are seeing in those opening moments is downtown L.A., where Los Angeles began on September 4, 1781.

Downtown, in its

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