Street Level: Los Angeles in the Twenty-First Century

Rob Sullivan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317049173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the latter part of the C20th, a series of seminal books were written which examined Los Angeles by the likes of Reyner Banham, Mike Davis, Edward Soja, Allen Scott, Michael Dear, Frederick Jameson, Umberto Eco, Bernard-Henri Levy, and Jean Baudrillard which have been hugely influential in thinking about cities more broadly. The debates which were generated by these works have tended to be very heated and either defensive or offensive in approach. A sufficient amount of time has since passed that a more measured approach to evaluating this work can now be taken. The first section of this book, 'Contra This and Contra That', provides such a critique of the various theories applied to Los Angeles during the last century, balancing the positive with the negative. The second part of the book is an investigation of L.A. as it exists on the ground today. While political, the theoretical stance taken in this investigation is not mounted as a platform from which to advocate a particular ideology. Instead, it encompasses cultural as well as economic issues to put forth a view of L.A. which is coherent and cogent while at the same time considering its multi-layed, complex and ever-changing qualities. It concludes by arguing that sectored off and 'totalizing' visions of the city will not do as instruments of urban analysis and that only a theory as mobile as its target will do: one that replicates the polymer nature of this place. It proposes that, extending that theory to the world beyond this particular city, only a theory that models itself on the mobile and polymer nature of the world, while still retaining a sense of the actual and the real, will do as an instrument with which to comprehend the world. In doing so, this book is not only a model by which to think through Los Angeles, but as a model by which to think through other world cities.

PART I Contra This and Contra That

Chapter 1 “The Greatest Blonde of Them All”¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315611051-1

¹ This phrase is cited from Rieff: “that greatest blonde of them all, Los Angeles” (1991: 179).

Los Angeles had to be sold. For there was nothing to recommend it. Located in a remote area of the United States, deserts and mountain ranges sectoring it off from the rest of the country, with no natural harbor and only enough fresh water to support approximately 300,000 people, if the region and the city were to prosper and thrive they had to be turned into something they were not.

As a region, Southern California lacks nearly everything: good soils; natural harbors (San Diego has the one natural harbor); forest and mineral resources; rivers, streams, and lakes; adaptable flora and fauna; and a sustaining hinterland … Southern California is man-made, a gigantic improvisation. Virtually everything had to be imported: plants, flowers, shrubs, trees, people, water, electrical energy, and, to some extent, even the soils … Even the weeds of the region are not native. (McWilliams 1973: 6, 13)

And so, due to this lack of resources to lure migrants to the area, some of the most fabulous metropolitan hype and regional folderol ever to be enunciated were rolled out to hawk Southern California and Los Angeles. “It [Los Angeles] exists despite itself and is successful marketing its impossibility” (Keil 1998: xxvi). In effect, Los Angeles had to go fictional to become real, its very promotion foreshadowing its claim to be the entertainment capital of the world. “Los Angeles did not just happen or arise out of existing circumstances, a harbor, a river, a railroad terminus. Los Angeles envisioned itself, then materialized that vision through sheer force of will” (Starr 1990: 69). And a great deal of that materialization was formulated through that paramount instrument of advertising, hyperbole. Not only were there tomato plants nineteen feet high and cabbages growing into the stratosphere, but there were also:

strawberries so big that they could only be consumed by three large bites … cucumbers seven feet long; of horseshoe geraniums ‘as big as small trees’ growing in hedges six feet high … a Gold of Ophir rosebush in Pasadena with 200,000 blossoms … a grapevine in Santa Barbara that, in 1896, bore twelve tons of grapes … squash that weighed three hundred pounds … daisies that grew on bushes as large as quince trees and … lilies fourteen feet high. (McWilliams 1973: 101).

Of course all this monstrous flora must have sprouted from somewhere, and so it was that the land itself was touted as wondrous as well. During the 1880s, in the first of many cyclical real estate booms, the region was advertised with a combination that matched the exuberance of the carnival barker with the exaggeration of the pimp: “‘No happier paradise for the farmer can be found than Los Angeles County,’ the boosters declared … Its warm winters, dry summers, and clear skies create ‘a land of perpetual spring,’ and ‘a veritable sanitarium’” (Fogelson 1993: 63, 64). Bankrolled by city fathers such as Harrison Gray Otis, the legendary publisher of the Los Angeles Times whose opposition to labor became so fierce that “while fighting the unions, he mounted a small cannon on the hood of his automobile!” (Adamic 1960: 203), publicists were dispatched far and wide across the United States to hail the advantages of Los Angeles.

However, before continuing with this survey of L.A. boosterism, we should step back to set this sales pitch within its respective American and Californian contexts, contexts which serve as both models for and adumbrations of the selling of L.A. In effect, the history of the European settlement of the United States and the subsequent settlement of California is the history of one long sales pitch. In fact, many of the metaphors used to sell California were rehashes of those used to lure immigrants to the original colonies that had already been repeatedly recycled. Faced with wilderness, Indians, the harshness of a new frontier on an alien shore, and the massive task of creating “civilization” from “scratch,” the colonists drummed up the bounty of the land and the treasure of the sea as allurements for those on the far side of the Atlantic. In a letter of 11 December 1621, Edward Winslow, governor of Plymouth in “1633, 1636, and 1644” (Miller and Johnson 1963: 769, note 7), writes that:

For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affordeth variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter. We have mussels and othus [sic] at our doors. Oysters we have none near, but we have them brought by the Indians when we will; all the spring-time the earth sendeth forth naturally very good sallet herbs [salad greens]. Here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also. Strawberries, gooseberries, raspas [raspberries], etc. Plums of three sorts, with black and red, being almost as good as a damson. (Deetz and Deetz 2000: 7) ²

² Deetz and Deetz cite Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth (Applewood Books, 1963), 84.

The sense of wonder regarding the abundance of this land, the befuddled awe at the sheer scope of a “newly discovered” cornucopia, mixed in with a certain smug self-righteousness, as if providence and election had been secured and justified by sending Winslow and his fellow “saints” to Plymouth, finds it corollary in much of the literature depicting California in the latter half of the nineteenth century. For instance, one of the state’s first historians, Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832–1918):

had been driven to write the history of the West in the first place, he remembered, because he had become convinced that ‘there was here on this coast the ringing-up of universal intelligence for a final display of what man can do at his best, with all the powers of the past united, and surrounded by conditions such as had never fallen to the lot of men to enjoy.’ California, newest arena in the newest of nations, stood at the forefront of human history, and Bancroft stood at the forefront of historians (Starr 1973: 125). ³

³ Starr cites Bancroft’s Literary Industries (San Francisco, 1890) 2, 4–5.

This millenarian and masculine sense of mission, tied into a sense of individual destiny and the whole ball of wax rooted in place (in this case, California), provided bedrock for a myth that could be sold to the deracinated multitude searching for the new Eden. For, also correlated with the sales pitch for America and California was the reconfiguration of Eden, the discovery of a New Jerusalem, first in New England and then in the Golden State. “The great migration developed in this spirit,” writes David Hackett Fischer of the Pilgrim migration to Massachusetts, “above all else as a religious movement of English Christians who meant to build a new Zion in America” which would require a complete realignment of the conception of the world: “‘Geography,’ wrote Cotton Mather, ‘must now find work for Christianograph’”(1989: 18, 50). ⁴

⁴ Fischer cites Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, (1702, rpt. 1852, New York, 1967) Volume I, 42.

This salvational sales pitch for first the East Coast and then the Midwest prefigured the pitch for California. The following is an excerpt from a letter, dated 1818, from a Samuel Crabtree to his bother in England, extolling the virtues of what we now call the Midwest:

This is the country for a man to enjoy himself: Ohio, Indiana, and the Missouri Territory, where you may see prairie sixty miles long and ten broad, not a stick nor a stone in them, at two dollars an acre, that will produce from seventy to one hundred bushels of Indian corn an acre … I measured Indian corn in Ohio State last September more than fifteen feet high, and some of the ears had from four to seven hundred grains. I believe I saw more peaches and apples rotting on the ground than would sink the British fleet … If you knew the difference between this country and England you would need no persuading to leave it and come hither … Robin redbreast about the size of your pigeon (Crabtree 1999: 56).

The metaphor of a new Zion, a retrieval of Eden, a discovery of paradise renewed, as well as a realigned conception of the world were also applied to Southern California. “‘In the hands of our eastern farmers,’ observed an early American traveler” about the region, “‘this country, with its perpetual summer, would become a perfect Eden’” (Nadeau 1960: 46). ⁵ Even in the smog-shrouded 1970s, when the population of the city had swelled to some six million souls, this grandiose comparison was still deemed applicable to L.A., at least by Reyner Banham in his classic Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies: “Whatever man has done … to the climate and environment of Southern California, it remains one of the ecological wonders of the world. Given water to pour on its light and otherwise almost desert soil, it can be made into a reasonable facsimile of Eden” (1971: 31). Did it matter that a “perfect” Eden had been reduced to a “reasonable facsimile” of Eden in a little over a hundred years? Not if you are a real estate agent or a bona fide booster of L.A.; it was still Eden, even if its paradisiacal glow was tinted by an inversion layer.

⁵ Nadeau provides no citation for this quote.

The true believers among the Pilgrims conceived of the comparison to Eden not in any metamorphic sense but literally. Here was a clean slate of a continent (and then, following that, the tabula rasa of a colony)—excepting the presence of those “degenerate salvages,” the Indians, whose eventual conversion to Christianity would of course serve to underline the saintliness of the saints (Miller and Johnson 1963: 507) ⁶ —upon which to reestablish a faith tainted by the wicked extravagances of Catholicism and the sinful profligacy of Anglicanism. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, New England and the entire Eastern Seaboard of the United States had lost much of whatever paradisiacal whiff of Eden it had once possessed: crowded, polluted, roiling with people and its lands all claimed, a new paradigm of Eden was required which could fulfill the yearning of Americans, both native born and newly arriving, as a geographic sign of personal salvation and deliverance, both in the spiritual and the financial sense.

⁶ Miller and Johnson cite Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (London, 1702) Book III. The very title of Mather’s work testifies to the canonical significance of this “new” world.

The Puritans imagined the Heavenly City emerging in New England. By the eighteenth century, the millennial imagination projected itself upon Kentucky. By the nineteenth century, the white republic had rolled west to the Pacific, and the gold rush and the rise of San Francisco made California the last, best place for imagining history’s end. (Klein 1998: 24)

And so California became the sign of paradise, the site of ecstatic apocalypse, first through the reverberations attendant upon the discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in 1848, and then, once the gold had been rifled from the runnels, cricks, and streambeds of the mountains, from the land itself, as well as from the state’s (and especially Southern California’s) climate and its seemingly miraculous health- and wealth-inducing properties.

In other frontier areas, the frontier experience was debilitating, wasteful of energies, leaving exhaustion in its wake. Here, in this frontier of silver-and-gold, the experience was exhilarating, tonic, exuberant … That so much of what was happening on this unique and precocious frontier found reflection in books, and stories, and memoirs, resulted in a legend of ’49, of gold, of bonanzas, of great days. That legend is still very much alive … (McWilliams 1949: 58, 59).

Most of the first flush of the California myth redounded to the benefit of San Francisco and Northern California, as “the City by the Bay” was both the port of entry and the supply depot for the thousands of miners who came scurrying to California in search of gold, as well as the urban receptacle into which much of the wealth derived from that gold was poured. Southern California was “an island on the land,” as the region’s great chronicler, Carey McWilliams, calls it; a backwater without much water, cut off from the rest of the state by mountains and from the rest of the nation by mountains and deserts and plains, the “cow counties” of Southern California were poor sisters to her northern siblings, at least during the first 30 years of the state’s existence (California being admitted to the US in 1850). But the land boom of the 1880s, with its brash speculators bragging that they could sell wind (Fogelson 1993: 67), began to change that equation, the scales slowly tipping in a southerly direction. Still, it was the sales job that did the trick, as the region in general and Los Angeles in particular “did not so much grow as sell itself into existence” (McClung 2007: 33).

And sell itself it certainly did, its boosters promoting Southern California as a veritable paradise teeming with fruits and vegetables; a living sanitarium in which the degenerating, the decaying, and the dying could be renewed, rejuvenated, and revivified; a Valhalla offering up a haven as the final terminus for the evolution of the white race; a Mediterranean Arcadia on the scale of an Athens, a Venice or a Rome; a Utopia for the common man where Midwestern farmers weary with laboring in the fields of Iowa and the plains of the Dakotas could relocate to a sprawling metropolis, each migrant outfitted with a backyard large enough to grow sunflowers and a few ears of corn; an area redolent with a nostalgia for a Spanish-Mexican legacy which its followers claimed was as vibrant “today” as it was in 1769 when the Jesuit missionaries first crossed into California to salvage the souls of the Indians and claim the land for the Crown and the Cross; and a New Jerusalem for capitalism in which every possible benefit would be made available to the dreamers and the schemers to ply their wares. That the city was sold with a “unique amalgam of sales pitch and self-deception,” along with “an ability to manufacture snake oil and simultaneously buy it” may be one of the primary reasons why Los Angeles has been taken as a place stocked with many an addled resident, as in order to live here with a modicum of sanity people felt they had to swallow the place whole and then testify to its beneficial properties even if the medicine was smog-laced and the traffic thick enough to drown cars (Waldie 2004: 16).

Beginning with claims that strawberries as gigantic as cathedrals could be plucked from the vine in Southern California, the hoopla quickly went beyond the fantastical and the nonsensical into the surreal and the bizarre: “One Los Angeles booklet of the 1920s exclaimed: ‘The sunshine of Southern California is so beneficial, due to the violet rays therein, that scientists are endeavoring to reproduce it artificially’” (Nadeau 1960: 148–9). ⁷ Once the motion picture business arrived in L.A. in 1910 and successfully set up its “dream factories,” is it any wonder that a brand of geographically oriented salesmanship at a scope never witnessed before came into existence in the Los Angeles region? As Kevin Starr puts it in Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s, the third volume of his magisterial history of the state:

⁷ Nadeau gives no citation for this reference.

A City of Dreams, its boosters called it; for onto and into its very physical presence—its idiosyncratic, occasionally fantastic fàbbrica della città functioning as an oversized screen—was being projected at fast-forward speed a dream of romance and enhanced circumstances testifying in a very American way to the notion that imagination and even illusion not only are the premise and primal stuff of art, they play a role in history as well. (Starr 1990: 69)

This amalgamation of motion pictures and real estate meshed land values and cinematic images into a shimmering whole, swaying palm trees on the one side, swaying starlets on the other, real estate speculators in the middle, their fingers beckoning to prospective customers to come to the land where every dream could come true, only one hundred dollars down. A thing simultaneously as actual as a corner lot in a Culver City development and as illusory as the vampy gaze of a Gloria Swanson suspended fleetingly on silver screens across the world were co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: CONTRA THIS AND CONTRA THAT
• PART II: STREET LEVEL: LOS ANGELES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index