Urban Utility Vehicle

An interesting object dredged up from the murky depths of Echo Park lake during the renovation was not the expected murdered body like some predictable CSI episode, but the multitude of discarded shopping carts that made their way to the lake bottom.  Before the lake was drained you could usually make out the algae ridden shadow of one or two shopping carts in the shallow muck near the shore as you walked around the lake so it isn't quite the surprise it was for the workers who cleaned the lake as for those who visited the lake on a regular basis.



(photo by Stephen Roullier/Flickr)

The ubiquitous shopping cart has become the urban socio-economic entry and exit utility vehicle of modern society.  It is an entry vehicle for newcomers to the city without a car who need to get their groceries home or dirty clothes to the lavenderia, landromat.  Sometimes shopping carts are repatriated by working men and women to fill with elotes, corn on the cob, or refrescos - fruit juices, tamales or any readily available street food for the foot traffic of crowded streets. It is a survival vehicle that brings food to the table in more ways than one.  They are the poor people's lunch truck and not quite as fancy as the gentrified trucks with twitter followers you find along Sunset Blvd., art walks or after the clubs let out.  These are literally hand to mouth operations and the shopping cart is the only four wheeled vehicle in the mix.

Used as an exit vehicle in society the shopping cart serves as a recycling vehicle for many folks who have been catapulted from the workforce, the daily grind, and/or the rat race of the new economy brought to us by the global-corporation-top-feeder-driven Raw Deal, as opposed to New Deal in days of yore.  Old folks who may have faced a catastrophic loss of savings or a home, young folks chronically underemployed and running out of dreams, and the always marginalized folks who can not enter the workforce because of a disability, addiction or status all depend on the shopping cart as a utility carryall for the sum of their worldly possessions.

There are no down payments or monthly dues with these vehicles.  Nevertheless, there is a vicious repo industry to snatch back the hijacked shopping carts and return them for a bounty to their conglomerate owners, leaving behind a pile of dumped goods if your lucky.  Sometimes the cargo is confiscated with the cart in municipal sweeps leaving a poor soul or family agonizingly adrift with nothing.  So what is the story behind the shopping carts at the bottom of the lake?  Was it merely a wobbly wheel that rendered it useless and therefore discarded?  Was it a new found hope or a good job that saved someone from spiraling poverty?  Was it merely gravity at play that drew the cart, like a torrent of rain water run off, to the low lying lake from the surrounding hills?  Each shopping cart probably carried the drama and burden of a hard life at one point and then, poof, it was let go.