L.A. IN THE MIND OF AMERICA : New Realities Are Changing the Old Perceptions

NOT LONG AGO, Allen J. Scott, a UCLA professor of urban geography with an eye for the unexamined, applied to the National Science Foundation for a federal grant to study industry in Los Angeles.

Scott thought he had a strong case. Little scholarly work had been done on Southern California’s remarkably vibrant manufacturing base, which embraces everything from textile and furniture factories that compete with Third World sweatshops to sophisticated aerospace and computer companies that push the outside of the envelope in high technology. So overlooked was the area’s industrial role that a map reflecting high-technology companies didn’t mention the region at all--although it had already become the nation’s largest high-tech center.

Scott wanted to fill in some of those blanks. His request worked its way through the agency’s bureaucracy, until it reached the foundation’s outside academic consultants. They were not so much hostile as perplexed. “They said, ‘Why do you want to study industry in Los Angeles? Everybody knows that industry in the U.S. is in places like Detroit and Buffalo and Cleveland and that Los Angeles is . . . built around the movies,’ ” Scott recalls.

The professor’s proposal had run into a wall--a new Great Divide--separating East from West: the line where the old image of Los Angeles collides with the city’s emerging reality.

Traditionally, Los Angeles has been defined for the outside world primarily by Hollywood and its attendant culture: a city of shallowness, vapid self-absorption and orgiastic materialism. Distilled to its essence in “Annie Hall,” this is the Woody Allen vision of Los Angeles, the city that defines culture as the freedom to turn right on red. Since you can now turn right on red in most places, New York’s irreverent Spy magazine recently updated the aphorism in its special issue on the city: L.A. is the place people go “to do everything they’re too embarrassed to do in Manhattan.” Los Angeles: City Without Shame.

Now, though, a noticeable upsurge in interest in Los Angeles on the part of serious writers and thinkers is challenging the stereotypes. Most immediately, this reassessment has produced a new appreciation of Los Angeles as a financial center (the clear financial leader of the West Coast, second to New York nationally); a business center (with thriving high-tech and manufacturing communities), and even a cultural center, with new museums and a bustling local arts scene. It’s the stuff of gently paternalistic “Los Angeles Comes of Age” articles. It has also heightened interest in the city’s fashion, food and art.

But, more basically, this recent reassessment suggests an entirely different way of looking at Los Angeles: as a window on the future of the country. Not a movie fantasy future, or a laboratory for pop fads, but a city at the forefront of economic and demographic change, a model of the multiracial, economically diverse, Pacific-oriented nation America is becoming. Pieces of this picture emerge in a new book by Scott; another recently published book by journalist Joel Kotkin and management consultant Yoriko Kishimoto; a cover story in the Atlantic Monthly last year by Christopher Leinberger and Charles Lockwood; a book coming this spring from the Atlantic’s Washington editor, James Fallows, and at least three other major books on the way.

“I don’t see how even thick-headed New Yorkers can indefinitely ignore the fact that in many essential ways, to the destiny of their country, it is what is happening in Los Angeles . . . that is determinative,” says David Rieff, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux now writing a book about Los Angeles.

IN THE national mythology, California, particularly Southern California, has always been on the front line of social trends. If California didn’t initiate the postwar move to suburbia, it perfected it. In the early 1960s, the campus and inner-city unrest that eventually engulfed the nation crystallized in Berkeley and Watts. The singles scene that defined the anomie of the 1970s found its purest expression in the beach-front towns of Los Angeles; it was morning again in America here first, with Los Angeles, and then the nation, awaking to a solipsistic vision of sunshine, greed and the perfect bicep.

Along the way, Southern California also came to be seen as the spawning ground for political trends. The professionalization of politics--the creation of a priesthood of political consultants--began here in the mid-1960s. The conservative backlash against the 1960s drew its first blood with the election of Ronald Reagan as governor in 1965. Environmentalism emerged as a powerful political force after the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969. In the mid-1970s, Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown sketched the first outlines of a liberalism with limits. And in 1978, crusty Howard Jarvis’ Proposition 13 heralded the dawning of the anti-government rebellion that swept Reagan into the Oval Office two years later. In the 1980s, California has pioneered the impersonal, media- and money-based negative politics that now dominates national elections.

All of these trends influenced the nation’s life in meaningful ways, but they didn’t really challenge the stereotypical view of Los Angeles. Southern California’s reputation as the nation’s social foundry only reinforced its reputation for obsessively trendy quirkiness; it remains known as the place that gave the world Valley-speak, channelers and macrobiotic gurus. Political ideas from the state often have been swept up in the same tail wind. All of Brown’s eccentricities, for example, were highlighted by his backdrop; Gov. Moonbeam was as much a parody of California’s purported strangeness as it was of Brown himself. Strangeness is as inextricably bound to L.A.’s image as sand.

That link shows no signs of dissolving. But still another new picture is being superimposed on the old, as in a photograph constructed through multiple exposures. If Los Angeles’ old image was as the hothouse for evanescent, silly trends, the slowly developing image is as the testing ground for fundamental changes in the way we live.

What are those changes? The most apparent is in the design of the city itself. Los Angeles is accustomed to criticism from visiting Easterners who ask, with disorientation and disgust: Where is the city? But, in fact, urban experts now maintain, Los Angeles’ style of decentralized development has proved to be the model for every American city that has emerged in the 20th Century, from Denver to Dallas to Phoenix. America, in other words, has grown up to look like Los Angeles, not New York.

All cities, notes Joel Garreau, a senior writer at the Washington Post and author of “The Nine Nations of North America,” “are formed by whatever is the state-of-the-art transportation at the time” of their creation. New York, Philadelphia, Boston--the great, traditional cities of the East--coalesced when the dominant modes of transportation were horses, trolleys, feet and subways; thus development had to be centralized. But, Los Angeles, Garreau says, “is the first truly 20th-Century city in America”--the first laid out to meet the demands of the automobile, with multiple centers of housing and business, and networks of freeways connecting them. Garreau, who is writing a book about the phenomenon, calls dispersed centers, such as Irvine, “edge cities”; writers Leinberger and Lockwood call them “urban villages” or “constellations” in an urban “galaxy.”

Whatever you call them, these far-flung centers linked by highways have become the rule, not the exception, in urban development. “Every American city that is growing now is growing in one and only one fashion: like Los Angeles, with these multiple urban centers, in the spider-web fashion,” Garreau says. “As a practical matter, the vast majority of the new wealth and new jobs being created in America today are . . . in these new hubs.” Even the nation’s compact 19th-Century-style cities--from San Francisco and Seattle to Washington and Boston--are emulating this style of development, sprouting new “downtowns” and population centers on their peripheries. “In Boston, they celebrate Route 128 as the home of the computer industry,” Garreau says. “But what is 128? 128 is Los Angeles.”

Increasingly, Los Angeles is also coming to be viewed as the fountainhead of a second basic trend reshaping American life: the immigration-driven transformation of the country “from a European offshoot to a multiracial ‘world nation’ . . . with ethnic ties to virtually every race and region on the planet,” as Kotkin and Kishimoto put it in their book, “The Third Century.” During the 1980s, the tide of legal immigration into this country--most of it from Asia and Latin America--is expected to match, or even exceed, the historic rush of the huddled masses from Europe at the turn of the century. Through 2010, the Southern California Assn. of Governments has projected, the Southland will absorb an average of 110,000 immigrants annually ; by then, minorities will make up a clear majority of the region’s population.

“The thing a future historian will note about 20th-Century America is immigration . . . and Los Angeles is the great place to look at what this America . . . will be,” says Rieff, whose book is tentatively titled “Los Angeles: Capital of The Third World.”

This analysis is moving beyond the familiar fact of immigration--Los Angeles as the new Ellis Island--to a sophisticated understanding of its effect. To many observers, this unprecedented mingling of diverse cultures--not the menu at Spago or the Ferrari double-parked on Rodeo Drive--has become the defining fact of life in the city. Author Ryzsard Kapuscinski argued recently in New Perspectives Quarterly, a California-based political journal, that in Los Angeles, the mold for a new American culture is being set: not the traditional melting pot of assimilating cultures, but a “collage” of co-existing, disparate ones. Kapuscinski sees Los Angeles producing an unpredictable cultural dynamism reminiscent of turn-of-the-century Vienna as Asian, Latino, Anglo and black influences interact.

To journalist Fallows, whose book, “More Like Us,” will be published by Houghton Mifflin this spring, Los Angeles most clearly embodies the creative economic and cultural “disruption”--the challenge to accepted, staid, approaches--that immigration offers the nation. “Without that kind of ‘disruption,’ America becomes a stagnant and inflexible society,” he says. “Immigration is one part of a general disruptiveness that America needs to survive, and Los Angeles and California is the leading example of how that happens.” Similarly, Kotkin and Kishimoto portray Southern California’s Asia-oriented, entrepreneurial, immigrant-fueled economy as the model for an American economic renaissance.

In that way, they see the immigrant influx reinforcing a third cutting-edge national trend most apparent in Los Angeles: the organization of the local economy into an extraordinarily dense web of small- and mid-sized companies. Although Los Angeles has large employers in industries such as aerospace, its economic base rests on smaller entrepreneurial companies in everything from high technology to textiles that spin off enormous numbers of new jobs; 95% of all Los Angeles businesses have fewer than 50 employees. Put another way, Los Angeles’ economy now mirrors its physical geography: dispersed and diverse. The centrifugal trends reinforce each other, with the physical sprawl providing plenty of space for these small companies to inexpensively set up shop, notes Richard Weinstein, dean of the UCLA graduate school of architecture and urban planning.

This distinctive pattern has made Los Angeles “a trend-setter as far as the economic structure of a metropolitan area is concerned,” says Leinberger, an urban-development expert at Robert Charles Lesser & Co. In yet another recent book, “Metropolis: From the Division of Labor to Urban Form,” UCLA geography professor Scott argues that this flexible, non-union, small-shop economy has become the model “of the new patterns of industrialization and urbanization now being laid down on the American economic landscape.” Other American cities, Scott maintains, will increasingly conform to the L.A. economic model in years to come.

Taken to one extreme, optimists such as Kotkin and Kishimoto believe that these economic and demographic forces, combined with the city’s orientation toward the Pacific, could transform Los Angeles from “ ‘Tinseltown’ into what could well be the nation’s most important city in its third century.” Less sanguine observers, such as Weinstein and Derek Shearer, professor of public policy at Los Angeles’ Occidental College, worry that those soaring prophecies overlook the real ruts in the road: an increasingly non-white school system that will have to be supported largely by whites; the potential of the city to fracture into a wealthy white elite and an underclass made up mostly of non-whites; and the growing strains of congestion, traffic and pollution that could choke off the region’s growth.

FROM DIFFERENT angles, those conflicting visions challenge the traditional, lightweight view of the city. Los Angeles may become the nation’s next great power center; it may become a new paradigm of urban dismay, and it may find itself straddling those divergent tracks--but it is no longer a place, if it ever was, whose principal ingredients are spandex, hair gel, sprouts and Coppertone.

The coming flow of books examining the city in a new light offers one flickering sign that America’s opinion leaders are ready to begin reconsidering their gauzy take on Los Angeles. “There is a lot of interest in reassessing,” says Bill Bradley, publisher of a California political newsletter, who recently signed a contract to write a book about the ways the California experience can provide a new model for America’s future. When he visited publishers in New York last summer, Bradley says, “there was a real sense among them that something important is happening out West, perhaps more important than the latest premiere or the latest hair style.”

Another sign of change is the way elite Eastern newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times now cover Los Angeles. In the Post, L.A. bureau chief Jay Mathews is in the midst of an irregular series on how immigration is changing the country; in the New York Times, new L.A. bureau chief Robert Reinhold has examined racial tensions in this city of immigrants, the controversies over growth and Los Angeles’ emergence as the West Coast capital of finance and culture.

These new images are beginning to challenge the old ones. Until recently, the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think-tank based in Santa Monica, found it difficult to convince Eastern money sources that anyone on the West Coast was committed to contemplating something more challenging than the perfect wave. “But the changed reality of Los Angeles is making a big difference in our ability to have a credible reputation with Eastern foundations and corporations,” says Robert W. Poole Jr., Reason’s president. “They see that money is coming here now, serious money, and not just the entertainment industry; they see major banks as well as Japanese banks as fixtures in Los Angeles; they see real estate being owned by the Japanese; they see national firms like Citicorp and Chase Manhattan getting their names on big buildings.”

Still, that isn’t the L.A. most of the country typically sees. Most national magazine coverage of Los Angeles emanates from New York and remains fixated on the movie business and its trendy satellites in West L.A. As one West Coast contributor to an East Coast publication put it, for editors in New York “the coast is a euphemism for the movie business.” In the book publishing industry--Bradley’s experience notwithstanding--the old stereotype hangs on even more tenaciously. In academia, as UCLA professor Scott discovered, the story is largely the same.

AFTER ALL THESE years, why is it that these cramped and myopic images are so resilient?

One reason is that, inadequate as they may be, they’re not entirely inaccurate; the stereotypes mercilessly capture one piece of Los Angeles. After all, Spy didn’t make television producers Candy and Aaron Spelling build themselves a house the size of a department store in Holmby Hills; they just recoiled from it-- when they saw it--something like Martin Sheen when he finally comes upon bloated Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now.”

Fear and envy--perennially popular motivations--also help explain New York’s particularly sulfurous disdain for Los Angeles, Kotkin and Leinberger say. Much the way mannered Boston and Philadelphia looked down on grubby, arriviste New York as it shouldered past them to economic supremacy in the 19th Century, they argue, New Yorkers now denigrate spacey, flaky Los Angeles with vigor directly proportional to the accumulating evidence of its economic prowess. That explanation for New York’s hostility has a pleasing historical weight, but to New Yorkers, worried more about subway breakdowns than global shifts in power, it feels like something of a reach. “That’s a little bit of wish-ful fillment,” says Mickey Kaus, a New York-based senior writer for Newsweek and former West Coast correspondent for The New Republic. “New York maybe should fear Los Angeles more than it does, but New York is really falsely contented.”

More tangible, and less arguable, is California’s isolation from the predominantly Eastern circles that set the nation’s conventional wisdom in politics, culture and the media. It’s easier for the Eastern opinion leaders to ignore the new realities of California--best exemplified by Los Angeles--because so few Californians are part of their world.

Consider the American Assembly, a national convocation launched after World War II by Averell Harriman and Dwight Eisenhower, which brings together economic and political leaders to chew over The Big Questions. It is now engaged in a massive multiyear study on the United States’ changing global role that will produce six books, six national gatherings and 35 regional assemblies; this is to the academic conference what “War and Remembrance” is to the miniseries. But only about 10% of the people who have agreed so far to participate in this epic undertaking are from the West Coast, says Daniel A. Sharp, the assembly’s president. “The foreign-policy network is very much East Coast-dominated,” Sharp says. “It is hard to identify as many people outside the East Coast who are thoroughly knowledgeable and influential in foreign affairs.”

Individual experts have carved out a niche on national policy from California; but even on subjects that should be California’s area of expertise, such as relations with Asia or Mexico, Eastern policy- and opinion-makers generally don’t look toward this state. “In terms of policy, California still has a long way to go before its real weight is felt in the East,” says Sharp, in a judgment echoed by several Californians.

Part of the problem is simply social. At Los Angeles parties, academics and other intellectuals jostle movie stars; at Washington parties, they mingle with assistant secretaries of state. “We don’t have as great an influence on the public-policy process simply because we are not interacting socially with the people who are prowling the halls of power in Washington,” says the Reason Foundation’s Poole.

Distance doesn’t explain everything, though. “There is nothing surprising about the East Coast attitude about all of this,” says John Gerard Ruggie, professor of international relations at University of California, San Diego, who relocated here recently from Columbia University in New York. “What most puzzles me is the response on the part of California: the lack of burning desire to do something about it. What I can’t understand is the lack of concern or interest in building up the institutions for California to have a voice in national- or foreign-policy debates.”

Ruggie, like many California boosters, laments the absence of think-tanks, institutes and indigenous publications that could offer an alternate definition of Los Angeles to the rest of the country and interpret national policy through California’s unique experiences and interests. From Los Angeles, for example, expanding economic relations with Asia looks much less threatening than from, say, Detroit; but the tone of the national debate over trade has been set by East Coast and Rust Belt voices, not Californians.

“We do not have the self-confident intellectual institutions,” Kotkin says. “There is no Western-oriented think-tank that I’m aware of projecting, not a future of the West, but a future of the country. Institutes in New York and Washington don’t think twice about being able to think for the country.”

Why in a city so huge and affluent-- with so much intellectual brainpower at its universities--is that instinct so wanting? Kaus maintains that it is because “the people who do the sort of thing that creates the conventional wisdom back East aren’t valued in Los Angeles. That may be good sense on Los Angeles’ part. But NBC president Brandon Tartikoff will always be a bigger man than if L.A. produced a syndicated political columnist like Jack Germond. If L.A. had a culture that made a big deal of people who played that game . . . it would be different. Washington and New York have that culture.”

Well, so what? Writer Leinberger argues that a city busily creating itself, such as Los Angeles, “doesn’t have as much time to worry about national trends.” But just having like a reputation for excellence in the arts, one mark of a world-class city is its influence on the intellectual and political life of a nation. After the next congressional reapportionment, California will have at least 50 seats in the House of Representatives, more than any state has ever had. Can a state so intrinsically powerful remain so essentially voiceless?

Probably not. Already, change is stirring. Established institutions such as RAND Corp. in Los Angeles and the conservative Hoover Institute in Palo Alto have always had a role in national debates; now, newer forces such as the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, the graduate school in Pacific Studies at UC San Diego, and New Perspectives Quarterly magazine in Los Angeles are providing a California slant on national affairs that challenges the picture of the state as a desert when it comes to intellectual life.

Those stereotypes die slowly, but Nathan Gardels, New Perspectives editor, sees a gradual westward “tilt” in the nation’s center of economic and political power that cannot forever be ignored by the East. “For cumulative reasons, someone like economist Lester Thurow is at MIT because he wants to be influential like anyone else; but at some point, the East becomes so much less innovative than the West that it doesn’t contribute, it’s dead,” Gardels says. “We have the opposite problem here. We have a lot of innovative thinking. But it hasn’t been able to jell yet. Once the thinking in the East becomes moribund enough, the thinking in the West will get some respect.”

That respect is still off somewhere in the future, and it won’t be won until the encrusted caricatures that define Los Angeles beyond its borders are scraped away. It may be that Los Angeles’ image will not catch up with its reality until the city itself takes the time to remake it.