Big City, Small Towns

No one lives in L.A.

That statement might be disputed by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, which estimates that, in fact, about 8.6 million people live in Los Angeles County--3.4 million of them in the city of Los Angeles, 4.2 million in other incorporated cities and 1 million in unincorporated areas.

But the Census Bureau’s figures are examples of facts that can be accurate without necessarily being true.

To reiterate, no one lives in L.A.

Who would want to, really, considering the images the name L.A. conjures up?

L.A means smog and traffic. It means gangs and drive-by shootings, and freeway shootings. L.A. means hustlers and weirdos and cult murders in the canyons. Used in adjective form--as in, “That’s so-o-o-o-o L.A.!”--L.A. means superficially trendy, devoid of substance, heat without light.

And it’s so big.

It sprawls over mountains, down valleys, across concrete-lined rivers. It bridges climatic zones. It has more than 45,000 different streets. You can drive more than 30 miles through the city without ever leaving Sepulveda Boulevard, and pass through almost every conceivable ethnic, cultural and economic strata along the way. It’s a metropolis so vast, so jam-packed with bustling humanity that it requires two, and soon three, telephone area codes.

How could anyone live in such a large and confusing--and thus potentially threatening--place?

The answer is, we don’t.

Instead, we secede psychologically.

We mentally move ourselves out of L.A. and into smaller, safer, more manageable places--places like Silver Lake or Lomita or Echo Park or Burbank or Granada Hills or Brentwood or Baldwin Hills or almost any other of the 86 incorporated cities and 188 unofficial communities in Los Angeles County.

And we tell ourselves that, while we may be forced by ambition or circumstance to work in The Big City, we actually live in Small Town, U.S.A.

It’s a phenomenon familiar to psychologists, urban planners and readers of the “At Home” community profiles in the Real Estate section.

Again and again in interviews about their communities--even communities that lie within the boundaries of the city of Los Angeles--residents describe the communities in terms that make them sound as if they were situated in North Dakota instead of in the second largest metropolis in America.

Examples:

--”It seems like a little country town,” a Studio City resident told a Times writer in describing her San Fernando Valley community.

--”It’s almost small townish here,” said a Northridge resident.

--”It’s like living in a small town,” said a Woodland Hills resident.

--”Highland Park has a small-town atmosphere,” said a resident of that community situated just a few miles north of downtown L.A.

--”Warner Center has a small-town atmosphere,” said a resident of that San Fernando Valley community.

--”It’s still Small Town, U.S.A.,” said a resident of Westdale, in West Los Angeles.

To hear the locals tell it, everyone in L.A. lives, not in a city, but in a village, a hamlet, a burg.

Even people who might otherwise see themselves as cosmopolites seem to share that yearning to live in Small Town, U.S.A. For example, even the entertainment industry maintains the fiction that it is centered, not in L.A., but in a disproportionately star-studded but nevertheless small town called “Hollywood.”

Some L.A. residents go to great lengths to reinforce that small-town feeling, and will bitterly fight any perceived attempt to diminish it.

For example, a few years ago, residents of Atwater, a small L.A. district adjacent to Glendale, were incensed when the city put up signs identifying the district as simply “Atwater.” They insisted that the proper name was “Atwater Village.”

A small matter, you think? Nothing to get excited about? Maybe not to you.

But according to Eric Ludwig, president of the community residents’ association, Atwater residents “erupted in cheers” when it was announced at a meeting that the city had agreed, after months of negotiations, to put up new signs designating the district not as plain old Atwater, but as “Atwater Village.”

“That really solidified the notion of togetherness” among Atwater residents--pardon, Atwater Village residents--Ludwig said. “If I say I’m from Atwater Village, it gives me a certain identity.”

Besides, he said, the community really does have “a village environment.”

But it’s not just Los Angeles residents who practice psychological secession from The Big City. Those of us who live in incorporated cities or unincorporated areas within Los Angeles County do it, too. Our Town may be distinguishable from the surrounding megalopolis only by a few lines on a map, but we also tell ourselves that we live in Small Town, U.S.A.

“It still has that small town atmosphere,” said a man who lives in Culver City, which is almost completely surrounded by the city of L.A.

“It feels like a small town,” said a denizen of Santa Monica, which at 97,000 people, is bigger than the biggest cities in Delaware, Montana, Wyoming, Vermont, West Virginia and both Dakotas.

“It’s the last of the small-town communities around,” said a resident of El Segundo--a claim that, as we’ve seen, might come as a surprise to residents of Culver City and Santa Monica.

There are, of course, advantages to small-town life, L.A. style. Since we live in these Small Towns, U.S.A., we are by definition free of the evils attendant to the modern Big City. We may have to deal with Big City problems when we venture Out There, but when we come home, we mentally cross a moat and pull up the drawbridge behind us.

Smog? Traffic? Crime? Not in my Small Town, U.S.A.

“We don’t really have much of a smog problem in Duarte,” said a resident of that city, situated in the consistently smog-covered San Gabriel Valley. Sure, he said, Monrovia or Azusa may have a smog problem, but “we’re in kind of a pocket here in Duarte.”

“Burbank remains kind of like an island in the megalopolis,” said a resident of that city, specifically referring to the relatively low--the key word here is relatively --crime rate in his small town.

“I moved here to get away from the noise and the traffic,” said a resident of Westchester, situated near Los Angeles International Airport--not an area that is famous, among non-residents at least, for its peace and quiet.

Of course, part of this reluctance to admit the existence of urban problems in Our Town may simply be a normal aversion to sullying one’s own nest.

Residents of a given community may mutter darkly among themselves about increasing traffic, or crime, or smog, while offering an outsider a far sunnier picture--particularly if that outsider is going to put their words in the newspaper. There are, after all, property values to consider.

But beyond that, there also seems to be an acute case of what might be called “urban denial” involved here. And if Our Town does show undeniable signs of some urban problem, the common response is to insist that it is a slop-over from the metropolis, not a home-grown product.

--”You see a few gang members in Commerce,” said a resident of that city, “but that’s because they come over here from East L.A.”

--”Most of the traffic problems in Tujunga are because of all the new development in Sunland,” said a Tujunga resident.

--”The only reason we have smog in Pasadena is because it blows up here from the city,” said a Pasadenan--as if there were no internal combustion engines north of Huntington Drive.

But even though we want to live in Small Town, U.S.A., none of us wish to be rubes. We want to be freeway-close to The Big City when it beckons.

No problem:

--”Downtown L.A. is there when you want it,” said a resident of the aformentioned bucolic district of Westchester. “We had tickets to the Music Center for years. But the rest of the time we’re off here in our little corner.”

--”We wanted to find more open spaces,” said a man who found what he was looking for in Northridge. But he quickly added that, open spaces notwithstanding, Northridge “is convenient to everything.”

--”The darkness at night makes you feel like you’re far away from the city,” said a Woodland Hills resident. “But in six minutes you can drive down to Ventura Boulevard.”

Small-town living and six minutes from the mall! It’s the best of both worlds.

Why do we do this? Why do we seem to reject the city even while we’re living in it? Why do we insist, contrary to all the evidence, that we live in Small Town, U.S.A.?

According to Andrei Simic, a USC urban anthropologist, we may prefer to identify with small towns for the same reasons that ducks fly south in the winter and salmon swim upstream to spawn--instinct.

“You have to remember that for 90% of mankind’s existence on earth he lived exclusively in small groups,” Simic said, pointing out that the city is a relatively recent invention and the L.A.-style megalopolis an even more recent one.

It may be “instinctive,” Simic said, for people to “want to break (a city) down into units that are more manageable, and with which they can identify. . . . I think people need that.”

According to Allan Heskin, head of the urban planning department at UCLA, that need to break down the metropolis may be especially necessary in an urban area as large as this one.

“Most people really don’t have a firm conception of L.A.,” said Heskin, adding that in experiments with “cognitive mapping”--that is, asking people to draw maps of their surroundings--most people could not even begin to draw a map of the city of Los Angeles.

True, in a city that is a tribute to the gerrymanderer’s art, and in an age when people can graduate from high school thinking that Brazil is a place in Europe, the widespread inability to draw a map of L.A. may not be too surprising. But the point is that people can draw maps of their own small communities with considerable accuracy; L.A., on the other hand, is simply a vast, unfathomable sprawl.

“People need to identify with someplace,” Heskin said. “The scale of L.A. could make it necessary for them to identify with much smaller areas.”

Tridib Banerjee, an associate professor of urban and regional planning at USC, agrees.

“The theory has been that the sense of community was declining in American cities,” Banerjee said, “but I think that’s changing.”

“The notion of living in a village or a small town, even if it’s only symbolic, may give people an increased sense of place. The more Los Angeles becomes too big, too vast, there may be a growing tendency to find ties within a locality.”

Is there anything wrong with this attitude? Would we be better off if we all saw ourselves as citizens of one giant community instead of a bunch of little ones? Or should we officially recognize our need to live in Small Towns, U.S.A., and further break up the L.A. metropolis by making all of our many “communities” legally as well as emotionally separate from the rest?

Identifying with a small community “is a good idea,” says Irene Goldenberg, a UCLA family psychologist. “It gives you a feeling that you have some power over your life,” Goldenberg said, adding, however, that “if it causes you to totally deny the existence of real urban problems, problems of which you really are a part, then it’s not helpful.”

USC anthropologist Simic agrees. “If by instinct we need to identify with small groups, we also have a whole hierarchy of groups that require varying degrees of loyalty”--that is, family, friends, community, city, state, nation and various gradations in between.

If our only loyalties are to the small groups, Simic points out, it can be “divisive,” adding, “There are some areawide problems that have to be managed as a whole.”

In other words, it probably would be a bad idea for all 188 unofficial communities in Los Angeles County to separately incorporate, as Diamond Bar recently did, as Malibu is trying to do. Having 86 separate incorporated cities in the county already poses problems in terms of police and fire protection, mass transit programs, pollution control, and so on. Increasing that number to 274 legally separate cities probably wouldn’t help matters.

On the other hand, while there may be some common goals behind which we can all unite--the continuing need for water from Northern California, for example, or the desirability of the Lakers winning the playoffs--we probably shouldn’t expect that we can somehow completely subordinate our local concerns to the needs of the metropolis as a whole.

Residents of Mar Vista or Bel-Air, for example, are not going to suddenly overcome 100,000 years of genetic imprinting and start worrying as much or more about what’s going on in Tujunga or Harbor City as they do about what’s going on in their own communities.

So we may have to simply muddle along as we are, a crazy quilt of villages and hamlets and small towns, pressed cheek-to-jowl within the metropolis.

Within the metropolis, but not necessarily of it.

There is one small change we could make, however, in recognition of our obvious need to believe we live in small towns. And it could be accomplished without great cost and without creating administrative havoc.

We could take our cue from the good people of Atwater--again, pardon, Atwater Village-- and simply put up some new signs.

Instead of having signs that say “Entering Los Angeles,” we could have signs informing residents and visitors alike that, regardless of the vast urban sprawl laid out before them, they actually are entering “Small Towns, U.S.A.”