81 to Infinity: Those stairs smell like piss

Boy, do those Angels Flight steps smell like piss. It's like some kind of horrible urine distillation process: people piss on the stairs up near the top or mid-way up the stairs, smiling with a very rich satisfaction as they watch their pee stream down the stairs, to puddle at the bottom of the stairs with all the other former rivers of pee. There, the communal pool of pee sits in the Los Angeles sun, burning off, sinking into the concrete, being distilled down to a pure, powerful essence of piss. You reach the bottom of the stairs and walk through this piss miasma -- it's like being hit in the face.


Angels Flight when it was working, with the piss-smelling steps down to Hill St. on the right.

Why are people always pissing on stairs? Stairwells in apartment buildings back in New York often used to smell like piss. Now that I'm thinking about it, I guess it makes sense. It's slightly more hygienic than just pissing in the hallway or the middle of the lobby. At least the pee doesn't sit there pooling in front of you: it streams down the stairs. And in building stairwells, you get the added element of some privacy.

This isn't at all what I intended to post about. Maybe next time I'll offer a review of the execrable programming they force upon us on the bus TV screens: it's like Clockwork Orange.