Holy Land

[ CLOSING OF THE FRONTIER ]

The “crab-grass frontier” is closed. There’s no place to go on the Los Angeles plain to build another suburb that will try to simulate a purified, Midwestern county seat.

There are some large (but marginal) bits of landscape on the Ventura and Orange County parts of the plain to fill in, but the shape of the region’s low-density development is fixed. It took a hundred years of selling--from the boom of the 1880s to the start of the last recession--to make Los Angeles . . . a heteropolis, fractal city, regional city, exopolis, post-modern city. . . . There isn’t a word yet to describe what we’ve made on the Los Angeles plain.

Let’s call it L.A., for economy’s sake.

None of the authors or editors of these recent books about L.A. and its discontents is comfortable with the condition of the region. My feelings are even more mixed. I’ve lived my whole life in Los Angeles County’s southeast corner in Lakewood, and I have the native’s fishlike feeling that the water, whatever it might really be, is only natural.

I’m here because my immigrant parents--my father was born in Manhattan and my mother on Long Island--were sold a thoroughly modern “minimal house” of 957 square feet in 1946 in a suburban tract that had followed Douglas Aircraft into the presumed safety of beet fields at the start of World War II.

That kind of selling to that kind of immigrant is also almost over, taking with it middle-class Angelenos’ “option to exit,” to be a founding family in a new fringe suburb. Apart from moving to Las Vegas, the choice of many Angelenos since 1992, “exiting inward” is the remaining option. That choice led a third of all new residential developments in Los Angeles County since 1990 to become gated and guarded enclaves. And that has led to the deeper fracturing of the plain on which 15 million of us (including an estimated 1.4 million to 2.1 million undocumented immigrants) have come to live.

[ SELLING DIRT ]

Because of its Catholic past, its capture in war and fear of Mexican irredentism and the racism of its American ascendancy, L.A. was a place without a center or a history. History’s replacement in L.A. wasn’t a myth; it was a sales pitch. The pitch sold the only thing L.A. had in abundance in the 1800s: dirt.

The hook to get immigrants to buy the dirt was a dimensionless commodity--health in the sunshine--and the consumer products that embodied health: bungalows, swimming pools, tans, small towns with whites-only restrictions and movie stars. William Fulton (“Reluctant Metropolis”) and Norman Klein (“The History of Forgetting”) give parallel readings of the sales pitch: As late as the 1940s, the L.A. “growth machine” of regional water agencies, chambers of commerce, land holders, merchant builders and newspapers sold small houses on suburban lots to middle-aged, middle-class men and women who wanted to live in a redeemed version of their Midwestern hometowns, with light work in an easy climate.

The Los Angeles plain, reaching from Ventura to Irvine in Fulton’s elastic view, provided the extravagant stage for this sales pitch. It is a landscape apparently so tame that a planner’s will could be imposed on it endlessly. Because of the climate, isolation at the edge of the continent and the erasure of the region’s original Native American and Mexican inhabitants, the impacts here of circumstance seemed light compared with the places from which East Coast immigrants came.

This is the reason for the famous unease visitors have about L.A.: that it’s a place where circumstances don’t matter, where you can edit out the parts you find disturbing.

The L.A. sales pitch didn’t need a center: Sunshine was everywhere, and L.A. never had a center to begin with. The pueblo of Los Angeles was founded in 1781 in political and economic opposition to Mission San Gabriel 10 miles away. After its occupation by American troops in 1846, the city was--a point made by Greg Hise (“Magnetic Los Angeles”), Klein and Fulton--a bigger cow town among other cow towns. Until the 1870s, whites in the city of Los Angeles managed their racial anxieties through the Monte boys, Texas and Tennessee squatters from the “island” of El Monte, who brought vigilante law to L.A.’s Mexicans, Native Americans and Chinese.

L.A. has always been a center-less assemblage, a kind of mosaic.

[ THE START OF HISTORY ]

The sales pitch was phenomenally effective in distracting home buyers like my parents from L.A.’s history, even from the real dangers that lie under and around the Los Angeles plain.

The success of the pitch should come as no surprise. Buyers would have to be fierce unbelievers not to have an unshakable faith in single-family houses and the conviction that a neighborhood of homes will serve them and their children best.

“Los Angeles may be a reluctant metropolis,” Fulton points out, “but it wasn’t an inadvertent one.” Hise makes a compelling case for L.A. as a product of middle-class dispersal from disquieting ethnic centers, the Progressive era’s proselytism of the social hygiene in suburbs, 50 years of federal housing policy based on home ownership and segregation and the 20 years before World War II, during which small houses like mine were “concept marketed” to potential working-class buyers.

We have the regional city we planned for. Only now the plans are going wrong. The only successes Fulton records in the 30 years in which planners have tried to reshape the region with the reach of those who operated the original “growth machine” are the victories of small homeowners over big plans. Deeply committed to single-family houses and owner equity (and to environmental rhetoric and neighborhood determinism), homeowner activists stalled the L.A. “growth machine” in the 1970s, when it turned from strip-mining empty fields for house lots and began building more density in existing neighborhoods.

Growth limits, Proposition 13 (which defiscalized residential land use by depriving cities of property tax revenue) and the spectacle of cities shutting parks while subsidizing strip malls all derive from the collapse of the L.A. “growth machine” and the failure of the political and media alliances that provided its convincing sales pitch.

No sales pitch, no “growth machine” and no place to go. Finally, history in Los Angeles can begin.

[ DEMOLISHED MEMORIES ]

We have a lot of historical ground to recover because, for Klein and Dolores Hayden (“The Power of Place”), so much of the L.A. story had been carefully edited out of the original sales pitch. Klein specifically asks us to imagine L.A. as the nation’s largest, most expensive consumer product: a controlled, domesticated and anti-urban experience whose structures of politics and law enforcement, like the “backstage” tunnels under Disneyland, were kept out of the view of middle-class buyers.

Klein provides a vocabulary for talking about the successively erased landscapes and lives the commodification of the Los Angeles experience required. Hayden speaks of the loss of a stable communal memory that follows each erasure. The loss, for Klein particularly, is cause for fury.

Erasure and memory loss, necessary for the original sales pitch, were preconditions for the last 30 years of failed public policy toward immigrants, commuters, ethnic communities, property owners, the homeless, homeowners, retailers and taxpayers.

A demolished past offers no place for perspective and no place to stand. Moshe Safdie (“The City After the Automobile”) notes that “a memorable place often occupies an important feature of the landscape, a harbor, a bay, a river delta, a lake, a hill within a town--a physical event in the natural environment.” As Klein points out, hills and their inhabitants in the center of Los Angeles have been removed within living memory. What memory can we have of a place if the place (like Bunker Hill) is ephemeral?

[ AN AGING, HIGH-PRICED CALL GIRL ]

“Any reasonably intelligent American knows,” the authors of “L.A. Bizzaro!” say in their press release, “that Los Angeles is a rotten, stinking dump.” The recycled film noir and sci-fi anti-heroes and hair-trigger tourists with which Klein populates his post-modern L.A. couldn’t have put it better.

“L.A. Bizzaro!” continues the tradition of seeing Los Angeles as a toxic playground, best observed slightly unconscious. The book is largely about body parts, cracks (wise and otherwise) and drinks. “L.A. Bizzaro!” approves of consuming them all.

Just below the cheerful pornography, however, is a satire of post-middle-class consumption in a city waiting to explode again. Anthony R. Lovett and Matt Maranian have found interesting things to buy in L.A. while they wait for something terrible to happen.

[ IS L.A. GOING TO HELL? ]

These books (even “L.A. Bizzaro!”) bracket the history of the last 30 years between fires, the events of 1965 and 1992, when some of those systematically excluded from the promises in L.A.’s sales pitch set fire to their remnant of the suburbs.

The events of both 1965 and 1992 were bred into the landscape that Hise meticulously describes in “Magnetic Los Angeles.” During the first half of the century, progressive urban planners, suburban developers and federal housing policy built the region’s decentered, and redemptive, domesticity on the most thorough segregation of any region in the nation. For Hise, the fires of 1965 and 1992 were here from the beginning.

Edward Soja (in his concluding chapter to the essays in “The City”) puts these years on the fracture zones between episodes of crisis-laden deindustrialization and re-industrialization in Los Angeles. He singles out the moments when L.A.’s branch-plant economy of large-scale auto assembly and tire making began 20 years of erasure (1965) and the moment when a nimble, small-scale economy of fashion, craft production and facility services became dominant (beginning at least by 1992). The pre-Watts economy of aspiration meant the hiring of large numbers of working-class black men (but never enough); the post-South-Central economy of desperation means the hiring of the working poor (and they are mostly women or Latinos).

James P. Allen and Eugene Turner (“The Ethnic Quilt”) trace this curve through often-neglected Los Angeles Census data. Allen and Turner report that the incomes of black men in Los Angeles reached 67% of white male incomes in 1959 but fell to 57% by 1989 (a period during which, Allen and Turner say, income gaps among races and ethnic groups shrank in other cities). The gap for Latino immigrant men widened even more. Their incomes compared with L.A.’s white males fell from 66% in 1959 to 39% in 1989. In L.A.’s new economy, after factoring in differences in education and skill, being Latino or black costs 13% to 31% of a worker’s paycheck.

[ THE FIRE NEXT TIME ]

These books ask, with voices that echo L.A.’s diversity, what the fire next time will be.

[ WAY OF THE CROSS ]

The engine widening the income gap for young African American males and all Latinos is unfettered immigration.

According to a recent National Academy of Sciences report, immigration’s effect on the national economy is neutral to slightly positive. It’s strikingly negative in California, where non-immigrant households shoulder an annual tax burden of $1,000 as their contribution toward maintenance of L.A.’s immigration-based sweatshop economy.

Immigration is strikingly positive (as Fred Siegel attests in “The Future Once Happened Here”) in places like Huntington Park. There, and throughout the ring of suburbs south of Los Angeles, immigrant labor from Central and South America is causing small-scale service and retail economies, abandoned by Anglos in the 1970s, to be reborn as lively ethnic mercados.

A porous southern border means success for some immigrants lucky enough to trade grinding labor in El Monte or Anaheim for a Latinized version of the sales pitch that lured Okies and Arkies here in the 1920s and 1930s. For a single struggling family (detailed warmly and convincingly by Dianne Walta Hart in “Undocumented in L.A.”), an unchecked flow of unskilled and undocumented labor means lower wages, more crowded living conditions and terrible uncertainty. “This life is pure tension,” laments Yarmileth Lopez, the Nicaraguan “illegal” whose oral history is the core of Hart’s story.

Lopez knows (as David Rieff once observed) that L.A. is the capital of the Third World: a world that works, just as the immigrant gateways of the 19th century worked, for unsympathetic bosses who require a painful bargain with immigrant labor. In exchange for heightened economic expectations, Lopez gives up an assured place in her neighborhood in Nicaragua and sheds the practice of her Sandinista political faith.

Siegel thinks it’s a fair trade, with the added virtue of its being embedded in the American experience. Similarly burdened by family, their religious beliefs and a reluctance to complain, L.A.’s Latinos will be processed by the immigrant bargain, Siegel suggests, into becoming like the Irish, indistinguishable American hyphenates, as likely as the Irish Americans of today to vote Republican.

Hart is less sure that L.A.’s Latinos will become “our” Irish (or Italians or Poles). Turn-of-the-century immigrant communities were stranded by federal quotas between 1924 and 1965, and new immigrants are close to homelands in Mexico and Central and South America. Re-industrialized L.A. benefits from porous borders that keep wages down; the Irish, Italians and Poles benefited from three decades of rapidly rising wages after 1940. They worked in economies disciplined by strong unions; in L.A.’s Protestant imagination, there is nothing more disturbing than a unionized Catholic.

[ PLANNING IS GOOD FOR YOU ]

Los Angeles is hard on the working poor. Jobs, transportation and recreation are never where the working poor need them. As Hise makes clear, these amenities are where the city planners put them, next to the clusters of blue-collar and white-collar suburbs on the Los Angeles plain, just as progressive-era and New Deal urbanists said they should be.

Planning a more centered Los Angeles (in Fulton’s terms) would benefit the working poor most (in Siegel’s terms). It would promote the lucky and determined into the middle class. They would, however, inevitably relocate to less dense suburbs.

Density of the sort generated by L.A.’s re-industrialized economy is good for the marginal entrepreneur who needs a market to exploit. Density is good for the visionary, like architect Moshe Safdie (“The City After The Automobile”), who believes that “a certain energized crowding” is the essence of the kind of city he prefers.

Safdie also is mindful that ordinary human dignity comes from dealing with mere circumstance. People generally aren’t waiting for a plan but make something of themselves and the places in which they live from the materials they have at hand. What they make requires a certain humility from the theorist, social critic or urban planner who is impatient with contingencies.

Contingencies are the problem with the plans Fulton describes with such energy and intelligence in “Reluctant Metropolis.” Plans are always being wrecked by the unplanned: a recession, a change in political alliances, the habits of kangaroo rats, a new technology that makes some forms of work obsolete or the decision by Central Valley farmers to sell their federally subsidized water to the Bass brothers.

The failed or half-finished plans of the last 30 years are Fulton’s proof that L.A. became a regional city only reluctantly, with the sputtering out of the old “growth machine” of suburban development. Fulton believes the region’s discontinuities should be mended by a new consensus and managed by region-wide governments with the political will to carry out plans on the scale of a William Mulholland, Henry Huntington or Otis Chandler.

It’s a fragile scaffold from which to raise big plans for a regional metropolis. And a consensus already exists in millions of not-quite-middle-class households on the plain. Unfortunately, it’s the consensus for single-family houses, small neighborhoods and the messy uncertainties of local political life that has been L.A.’s sales pitch since the 1880s.

When planners proposed greater density as part of the rebuilding of a stretch of Vermont Avenue erased by the events of 1992, African American suburbanites in the adjoining neighborhood of single-family houses rebelled. Fulton reports how they allied themselves with white anti-tax activists in the Valley and defeated state legislation that would have given L.A.’s redevelopment agency more freedom in the formation of redevelopment project areas. That success stalled densified construction in their own neighborhood, but it also delayed rebuilding in L.A.’s other burned-out zones. Then the neighborhood won Mayor Richard Riordan’s veto of the project, even though it had the lighter densities the activists had demanded. The neighborhood finally lost when the City Council overrode the mayor’s veto.

[ RUN LIKE A MCDONALD’S ]

L.A.’s growth machine always intersected local politics. In the l990s, county governments and city councils no longer stoke the machine with empty land (as both Hise and Fulton point out) but with the long-term transfer of local tax revenues to developers, contractors and consultants. This emerging growth machine generates redevelopment deals, “cash box” zoning to lure trophy retailers and companies and fantasy public projects like the MTA’s toy rail system.

Housing, of critical value to residents, is of secondary value to the small cities on the plain since Proposition 13. Housing requires revenue (for police, park programs and fire departments) and generates almost none in return. Worse, no city or county official cares if a “big box” retailer fills the space once occupied by a defense contractor that used to issue dozens of not-quite-middle-class paychecks. The goal isn’t jobs or houses; it’s maximizing the city’s share of sales tax revenue. Governments beat the competition through tax giveaways to developers and trophy retailers like Nordstrom and Price-Costco.

The Los Angeles plain is run like a fast-food franchise.

[ AN IMAGINARY CITY ]

The small cities on the Los Angeles plain were made by circumstance: the siting of a sewage plant, a payoff to a railroad official or a vision by a Mormon prophet. There are 88 cities in Los Angeles County.

Their stories are told briefly and with enormous grace (after enormous scholarship) by Leonard and Dale Pitt in “Los Angeles A to Z,” along with significant articles on L.A.’s ethnic communities, governmental institutions, culture, history and politics.

The effects of the circumstances reported by the Pitts are the burden of living here; they are the parts of our story we erase at our peril (as Klein and Hayden warn). They resist conversion into a schema (though the authors of “The City” make a convincing attempt).

We keep the distinctions between Bellflower, Bell Gardens and Bell so that we can hold on to the likenesses in our situation. A neighborhood of 400 to 700 houses can be comprehended. A city of eight or 10 square miles can be imagined. Not many of us hope to imagine the 6,000 square miles of our regional city.

Of course, this is the value of these books: that they extend the reach of our stories about L.A.

[ YESTERDAY’S CITY TODAY ]

L.A. was supposed to be the location of the future. It isn’t.

L.A. is Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City of 1898: a city of dispersed, low-density settlements and decentralized commercial centers. It’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City of 1935: a city whose plan was both noble and frustrating. It’s all the suburban cities of tomorrow of the 1950s summed up by the persistent aspirations of the not-quite-middle-class for a good job, a decent paycheck and a small house. It’s the city of 1965 from which fire erupted because of the thwarted aspirations of working-class African American men. It’s the city of 1992 that burned from the desperation of the working poor who shouldered the burden of wages in free fall. It’s the city of last night’s news: a fever dream of bodies and money in motion.

L.A. invites endless misreading--and fury--as a promised land. It never was; L.A.’s development from the beginning was a mechanism for sorting residents by race and income more rigorously than in any other American big city. But life on the Los Angeles plain at least wasn’t a tar-paper shack at the end of a dirt road in Arkansas or Oklahoma or a third-floor walk-up in Chicago or New York or even an architecturally pure tenement in a modernist superblock. L.A. was, in it’s diminished way, precisely what a hundred years of American popular and high culture had presented as the all-American religion of domesticity.

This domestic religion--this immigrants’ hope, as it was for my parents and my neighbors--has not failed completely. Its adherents are now African American, Latino and Asian-American.

[ NOWHERESVILLE ]

These books, skillfully, idiosyncratically, and sometimes irritatingly, usher L.A.’s nowheresville into history. They offer believable explanations for our preferences in housing, local government, land use, mistakes in judgment, fossilized longing and greed. They almost explain why everyone’s utopia became everyone’s dystopia so quickly and thoroughly.

Their story of Los Angeles--the city and the region--is largely the history of regret.

****

THE HISTORY OF FORGETTING: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. By Norman M. Klein. Verso: 330 pp., $18

LOS ANGELES A TO Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County. By Leonard and Dale Pitt. University of California Press: 603 pp., $34.95

THE RELUCTANT METROPOLIS: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. By William Fulton. Solano Press: 395 pp., $28.95

THE FUTURE ONCE HAPPENED HERE: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities. By Fred Siegel. The Free Press: 250 pp., $23

MAGNETIC LOS ANGELES: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis. By Greg Hise. Johns Hopkins University Press: 294 pp., $34.95

THE POWER OF PLACE: Urban Landscapes as Public History. By Dolores Hayden. The MIT Press: 296 pp., $15

THE ETHNIC QUILT: Population Diversity in Southern California. By James P. Allen and Eugene Turner. The Center for Geographical Studies, Cal State Northridge: 296 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback

THE CITY: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. Edited by Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja. University of California Press: 483 pp., $40

THE CITY AFTER THE AUTOMOBILE: An Architect’s Vision. Moshe Safdie with Wendy Kohn. Basic Books: 187 pp., $24

UNDOCUMENTED IN L.A.: An Immigrant’s Story. By Dianne Walta Hart. SR Books: 136 pp., $45

L.A. BIZZARO! The Insider’s Guide to the Obscure, the Absurd, and the Perverse in Los Angeles. By Anthony R. Lovett and Matt Maranian. St. Martin’s Press: 191 pp., $16.94