Last Sunday, a writer from a certain New York newspaper described being frustrated in his search for the “essence” of L.A.

“Something escapes me about Los Angeles,” Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote after driving around Culver City, pondering the storefronts on Venice Boulevard and the Hollywood sign on the horizon.

New Yorkers have long been perplexed by L.A. Three decades ago, in the film “Annie Hall,” Woody Allen famously said: “I don’t want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.”

I’ve been waiting for years to tell Woody that the spirit of L.A. can’t be found at a traffic light. Nor will you find it in the debris at the edge of the freeway or at four-way stop signs, which are other places Klinkenborg went looking for it.

In search of a way to get at L.A.'s true nature, I called Tomas Benitez, an art maven and writer who’s worked in L.A. theaters and galleries.

Benitez is a native Angeleno and an old soul who grew up in 1950s Boyle Heights and South L.A. among blacks, Jews and people of Mexican, Italian and Japanese ancestry. In the 1960s, he rubbed elbows outside the Whisky a Go Go with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

“Finding the essence of L.A. is not meant to be easy,” he told me.

Still, he said he believes he stumbled upon the secret of L.A. one evening in the 1980s, when he drove with his young daughter from the Eastside to the Pacific Ocean, almost 30 miles along old Brooklyn Avenue and Sunset Boulevard.

It was a journey that began with a greasy sandwich in the San Gabriel Valley, taking him past taco stands, transvestites, iconic nightclubs and faux Roman villas.

“On that drive, we saw the world change 10 or 15 different times,” he told me.

It seemed to me Benitez was on to something. To really know it, you have to keep traveling between our north and south, our east and west, our glitz and our grit. You have to discover new L.A.s for as long as you live here.

That’s because L.A. is really numerous cities in time and space, some of them layered on top of each other.

Near its center and in that amorphous area many people inaccurately call “the Eastside” is the old city, which grew up around the junction of the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco. It’s the time-worn L.A. you see in neighborhoods such as Echo Park and Watts. For me, those places are the baroque heart of the city.

Photographer Tony Di Zinno lives in this Los Angeles, in Lincoln Heights, in an 1888 brewery that’s been converted to lofts. It’s a creaky building of brick, tin and wood, with dramatic vistas of downtown skyscrapers and a vast rail yard where locomotives and boxcars join up in thundering collisions. Many artists live in his and other neighboring industrial buildings, he told me:

“The people here are longing for something. We’re looking for something authentic, precious or romantic.”

Di Zinno was born in Cleveland. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I thought L.A. was Muscle Beach and Hollywood.”

When he first came to L.A., he lived in Venice and got used to a certain Westside-centric view of the city. “The elite thinks there’s no real life east of the 405,” he said.

My sense is that a lot of outsiders see L.A. the same way, at least initially. The Westside Di Zinno is referring to isn’t a place — it’s a state of mind. It’s the way you think when you live in the L.A. that aspires to be a global city, the L.A. that collects Rembrandts and Greek statues, the L.A. whose residents believe they inhabit a sunny playground by the sea.

That L.A. exists in many places besides the Westside, of course, although most newcomers first encounter it long before they get here — in television and film. Eventually, they’ll find in neighborhoods west of La Brea a city that looks like that fictional L.A.

These days, Di Zinno enters the newer, more affluent L.A. to meet clients, and he passes through it on his way to LAX and assignments in places like Monaco and Afghanistan. Then he returns home to the brewery and the older L.A.

Heading to nearby Dino’s Burgers on Main Street, he finds a group of low-rider aficionados gathered outside. He loves the feel of the place — just as cosmopolitan, he thinks, as the other half of the city, but without the pretensions. “I’ve got everything here, all around me,” he said. “Chinatown, Little Tokyo, East Los Angeles….”

The older L.A. where Di Zinno now lives has always been a place of cultural mixing. It was the last stop on the wagon trails across the continent. Today, it seems to me, it’s still a rough-and-tumble Western frontier town writ large. It’s the city that was torn by ethnic and labor riots in 1871, 1913, 1943, 1965 and 1992.

I grew up in that older L.A., but always had an eye on the west — among other things, my father worked at the Beverly Hilton. Tomas Benitez also traveled routinely westward into the glitzier city — with his mom to shop at I. Magnin on Wilshire, or with his father and stepmother for dinner at Perino’s.

Each of those cross-town journeys, Benitez said, “was like going out and hanging out in another corner of the world.”

That’s the L.A. Benitez wanted to show his 8-year-old daughter Tara on that long drive down Brooklyn and Sunset — the movie stars and the wannabes, the barrio and the mansions all joined together.

Benitez was returning home, but Tara was born in St. Louis and had never seen L.A. They had just arrived at the family’s new Eastside home after a weeklong drive. But Tara wanted to see the ocean, so they got back in the car.

After a quick run to the Hat in Alhambra for a pastrami sandwich, they got on Sunset and reached Olvera Street with its mariachis and brightly colored wares. They cruised through Hollywood and saw odd people on the sidewalk. “That girl looks like a guy!” Tara shouted. “That girl is a guy!”

They passed the huge billboards on the Sunset Strip and the Beverly Hills Hotel — “It was a place out of a movie, but it was real,” Benitez said. Finally they reached Pacific Palisades and the ocean, where Tara put her feet into the water around midnight.

“That drive was all about L.A.,” Benitez told me.

That makes sense to me. Los Angeles is a city built of many messy collisions. The confusion, delight, loathing and bliss you feel when you take the time to truly see it — that, to me, is the essence of Los Angeles.

hector.tobar@latimes.com