Walking Through the Ruins

The Society for Commercial Archeology has encamped in Los Angeles. Its members have come to examine the geegaws that made our city famous, architecturally speaking: the giant doughnut in La Puente, various bowling lanes sporting the luau concept, perhaps Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank.

In other words, they have come to scrutinize the usual suspects. Larry Gordon reports in The Times that about 200 persons are expected to gather for the five days of bus tours and conferences. As Gordon says, the society will offer up Los Angeles as the premier city built for and around the automobile, a place that produced a unique blend of “the serious and the wacky, the gorgeous and the tacky.”

OK, so be it. One more group wants to come and wallow in the 1950s’ version of L.A., that’s fine by me. Not for nothing did we invent McDonald’s, the freeway-as-we-know-it, the television sitcom, the garden apartment, the cul-de-sac, and the idea that the South Seas could be transformed into a design motif.

No, not for nothing. We got famous for it. It began in the early ‘50s with the big spreads in Life magazine--”The City of the Auto,” Life called us--and never died away. Pretty soon, TV spread the look of L.A. around the world.

In 1971 Reyner Banham first began to take the city seriously in his loving book, “Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies,” which began, “Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape” and then proceeded to catalog every eccentric nook and cranny in the city.

Actually, you could argue that the geegaw business started even earlier. In Aldous Huxley’s 1939 novel, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” the book’s hero drives up to an L.A. restaurant shaped “in the form of a seated bulldog, the entrance between the front paws, the eyes illuminated.”

I wish that restaurant had survived. See how infectious this stuff can become? But this 50-year-old view of Los Angeles, repeated so endlessly, does contain a problem. Simply put, it no longer pertains.

The bulldog restaurant, see, is gone. So is the Brown Derby, Chicken Boy in downtown, and all but a tiny handful of the Googie-style coffee shops and luau motels. The few remaining examples seem to sit on the street as artifacts of an earlier age. Museum pieces. Tourist material for the likes of our friends the commercial archeologists.

Gone, all gone, in any real sense. We don’t make new Chicken Boys anymore. We aren’t making any new freeways for that matter, either. In all the city of Los Angeles, not one McDonald’s golden arch remains. The new McDonald’s have grown so modest they could have been designed by a committee of retired Rotarians. Drive down Ventura Boulevard today, or Santa Monica Boulevard or Wilshire and you will witness a nearly total absence of what we once called “car culture” symbols.

What’s happened to L.A.? I have a radical thesis to offer: Los Angeles, in subtle ways, has begun to reverse itself. It has retreated from the car culture it invented and begun to move toward a new style that no one has yet named.

Note, for example, that certain of our districts have begun to look suspiciously like walking neighborhoods. The most famous are Pasadena’s downtown, a large chunk of West Hollywood, and Santa Monica’s promenade. But you can find other examples in Studio City, in Burbank, or the Korean section of midtown. People come to these districts to hang out, watch each other, stroll, grab a bite at a local restaurant. Just like they do in real cities.

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When I first arrived in Los Angeles in 1972, none of these quasi-walking neighborhoods existed. The downtowns of Pasadena and Santa Monica had been abandoned to the bums. La Brea and Melrose in West Hollywood offered bleak landscapes of failing auto parts stores and peep shows. If you had business on one of these streets you drove up quickly, concluded your transaction, and drove away.

Yet, even in their new incarnations, these enclaves do not really look or feel like urban neighborhoods of any other city. Los Angeles has put some sort of twist of them that’s hard to define. You still drive to them, after all, and you still drive back. It’s the languid, hanging out, in-between time that has changed.

And in many cases, the hanging out is done by people from the neighborhoods themselves. They may still drive, but they don’t drive far. L.A., in its old age, has put a great premium on short drives.

Whatever you call this evolving style, it symbolizes a city that has reformed itself dramatically. Personally, I like the new city much better than the old one. It seems, in some ways, to have slowed down. And people always get along better when they’re walking rather than driving.

Half a century ago, Los Angeles was telling the world something about the future when it created a new kind of city out of freeways and geegaws architecture. Within a short time, many cities would come to look suspiciously like L.A., at least in their outlying areas.

Is L.A. now carrying a new message to the world with its reformation? We don’t know yet. But it’s an interesting question to ask. Maybe the next conference of commercial archeologists could look into it.