Reclaiming a Sense of Place Amid the Urban Sprawl

Just when you think you know your way around the greater Los Angeles area, a native Angeleno tells you about a swell dining spot in Norwalk, how terrific Arcadia’s Santa Anita racetrack is the day after Christmas or fabulous antiquing in Orange. Baffled when you try to visualize exactly where these places are in the Southland? Join the rest of the basin in the endless game of trying to figure out where the countless towns, cities and communities begin and end amid the seamless Southern California sprawl.

Southern California’s past reveals this identity problem wasn’t always so. Before the freeways and the endless development, smaller towns and cities, separated by open spaces, were easy to identify. And a local identity was clear when city portals were girded with neon posts, sculptural pedestals displayed civic nameplates, nearby hills were decorated with the town’s initials or arches spanned Main Streets like gaudy ID bracelets.

What these markers did was establish a sense of place for resident and visitor alike. Segue 70 years ahead. Freeways and subdivisions have filled in once rural Southern California. A populace welded to its cars is forced to describe the cityscape in visual shorthand. Many original city identifiers have been lost to progress or swallowed up by sprawl. Rarely can Southland communities be located by some distinctive landmark or entry point. This lack leaves a confused public begging for new solutions to separate and identify an urban monolith of coagulated gray mass.

So the question remains: How can these various cities, as they blend into each other, stand out and present some sort of visual ID beyond a page number in the Thomas Guide?

A quick look up the side of Mt. Lee offers one of the more successful solutions. The Hollywood sign has had an edge on city identity since the 1920s, when an advertisement for a subdivision of Hollywoodland was built above Beachwood Canyon. After the last four letters fell off in the late ‘40s, the real-estate promotion evolved into one of the most famous city signs anywhere. At one time, throughout the region there were other, three-dimensional signs flanking hillsides: a giant “V” in the Hollywood Hills for the Vine Crest development, “Silverlake” spelled out above its reservoir, even Forest Lawn announced its presence with giant cut-out letters. This was real-estate marketing, pure and simple. Yet not a bad idea, considering how Hollywood has benefited from its vintage sign.

More recently, some interesting ideas have been tried to glue the city back together. The 1984 Olympics made “bannering” a popular way to informally unify the city. Easy to install, many business districts have placed banners along their streets to single out retail areas or announce an event. But these inexpensive and temporary flags have been used to excess. Instead of setting an area apart, banners have become standard city jewelry and a blind spot for most drivers. They are not able to imbue cohesion and substance to a community.

For more satisfactory answers, Angelenos might look south to San Diego for some admirable city and community signposts. East of the city, Lemon Grove maintains a giant concrete lemon that stands, front and center, on the town’s main drag. Installed decades ago, it is a reminder of the area’s agricultural past. You might chuckle when you first spot it; but, let’s face it, it’s not easy to forget a giant lemon in the middle of the road. Within San Diego, the Hillcrest district is surrounded by several other communities that sport vintage signs along their principal avenues. Nearby, both University Park and the Northpark areas have handsome versions making direct or subtle references to local history.

In Los Angeles, similar sign pieces could be valued additions to the street-scape. Some still exist on a more modest scale--San Gabriel’s neon mission bell, for example, or Fillmore’s entry standards. So why not build on what is already here? A community could enhance and dramatize these vestiges of city signage and landmarks, or create new ones.

Whittier Boulevard, with its decorative arch on the west end of its retail cluster, is a good start. So is the Norwalk Square pylon that advertises its shopping center. Both would work better if they emphasized regional and cultural references, becoming neighborhood landmarks rather than mere signs.

What about creating entrance identifiers, similar to those that guard the various bridges that cross the Los Angeles river, at either end of the Sunset Strip, to complement the parade of billboards on West Hollywood’s fabled boulevard? Or how about replacing the Tony DeLap sculpture over Wilshire Boulevard--which no one can quite figure out--with a replica of the entry arch over the Santa Monica pier?

The city of El Monte, now in the process of redefining itself, might consider enlarging and placing on Valley Boulevard the lion sculpture that long symbolized the city when it stood in front of Gay’s Lion Farm. By putting the town’s name with the statue, a piece of history is acknowledged and the city sets itself apart from surrounding towns.

Hawthorne Boulevard, the six-lane spine that runs through numerous South Bay towns, would be ideal to line with three-dimensional city markers. For years, this corridor has been one of the Southland’s great missed opportunities for a cohesive and engaging system of visual identity. Sadly it isn’t alone. Sepulveda, Valley, Ventura and other boulevards are available to mark the cities they run through, yet they remain soulless strips in an endless urban glut.

Some towns have even chosen to hide their identity or remove icons that once worked well. Take San Marino. The town prides itself on a low-key image and signage along Huntington Drive is practically invisible--which would be fine if this soft-sell approach wasn’t replicated throughout the area. Signal Hill used to have small stylized oil derricks on the median strips of several streets leading into the city. Not any more. Now, boring squares with the city name give no indication that Signal Hill was once a boomtown, one of the Southland’s major oil producers.

But some attempts at creative signs are in the works. The Los Angeles Cultural Arts Commission is trying to weave back into the city’s fabric restored commercial architecture and artifacts. The newly refurbished Jensen’s Recreation Center sign in Echo Park and the relighting of vintage Wilshire district neon are two recent successes that have sparked community involvement and given new life to areas badly in need of sprucing up. Culver City has embarked on an ambitious program: Lacking a mountain, they installed a mini-version of the Hollywood sign on an embankment of the 405 Freeway to inform commuters that Culver City is right ahead. Washington Boulevard, on the city’s eastern edge, is being festooned with billboards, banners and new landscaping to distinguish it from its surroundings.

These ideas, especially when signs and mimetic architecture are mentioned, remain an unsavory concept in many architectural circles--viewed suspiciously, if not thoroughly vilified. Hapless city fathers and arts review boards have been brow-beaten into thinking that less is more. Lighten up. There are tasteful ways to make populist statements that aren’t necessarily vulgar pop architecture--though this is certainly appropriate in a region noted for its nonconformity.

Rather than eliminate what made Los Angeles and its neighbor cities unique in the first place, we should celebrate them. The payoff is community imagery that establishes sense of place; visitors get navigational tools they can see and understand, and Southern California begins again to look like the Southern California we all dreamed of. With a little creativity--and perhaps an oversized orange or giant dog--a region that has been battered for its anonymity could make a comeback at taking visual shape.

After all, we do have an image to maintain.