A City Desperately Seeking a Civic Identity

On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles is struggling to tell a new story about itself. Many in the San Fernando Valley, San Pedro and Hollywood represent ground zero in a campaign to break up Los Angeles into several smaller cities. The tale they are telling the world is that Los Angeles is on the verge of voluntarily putting itself out of business.

Flourishing cities require publicly accepted narratives of themselves. These stories do not have to be totally coherent and all-encompassing, but they do have to project a civic self-image that gains at least partial assent among city residents. Over time, they can be enforced and reinforced by art. In telling the story of their cities, for example, Honore de Balzac intensified the identity of Paris for all time to come, as did Charles Dickens for London, Alfred Doeblin for Berlin, Alberto Moravia for Rome, Lawrence Durrell for Alexandria, Edith Wharton and Louis Auchincloss for New York, Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell for Chicago, Frank Norris and Jack London for San Francisco. In this regard, Los Angeles should, at first glance, be considered more than amply endowed. This is the city, after all, analyzed and refracted through the literary lenses of Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, John Fante and James Ellroy. Over the past 20 years, moreover, there have been dozens of L.A.-centered motion pictures.

Yet, neither the novels of Chandler or Ellroy nor any of the L.A. films bespeak a city of accepted public identity. Far from it: They suggest a city whose only coherence is its incoherence, its fragmentation into a myriad of private worlds, brought together into one sprawling urban landscape, true, but rarely, if ever, cohering around any accepted cluster of civic symbols.

The Los Angeles story, in short, is subtle, indirect, elusive. Many outsiders doubt whether any coherent version exists at all, beyond that of Hollywood, now flirting with secession. From this perspective, both local planners of the Democratic National Convention and the city’s mayoral candidates are challenged to establish even a momentary illusion of shared public identity.

No city in the country has been so dominated--indeed, created--by boosters and boosterism than has Los Angeles. The booster story, quite legitimately, assembles the best aspects of the past and present and the best possibilities for the future, arranges them around a central imagery, then projects this amalgam of fact and dream, reality and wish, as a developing narrative that must inevitably continue to happen. In the 1910s and 1920s, Los Angeles used boosterism to leave behind its provincial identity and launch itself into national status. Historians and critics, also quite legitimately, have a field day in discerning the grim and ambiguous realities boosterism left behind: the racism of the city, most notably, its underlife of psychological damage and crime, its lack of institutional depth, the greed of its controlling oligarchy. But no matter: The booster story was told and the job of building the city got done.

Yet, even the booster spirit is in trouble. Two years ago, for example, the City of Los Angeles announced an ambitious program for the millennium. There would be a light show above the city, visible for hundreds of miles, big-star entertainment and dancing in the streets. As it turned out, most Los Angelenos ushered in the millennium privately, because, in private circumstances, they would know where they were and would have a coherent story to tell themselves.

As the failed public millennium celebration suggested, Los Angeles is currently in the process of moving from one accepted public narrative to another. In this process, the city is not alone. San Francisco, for example, as its recent mayoral campaign showed, together with its own tepid response to the millennium (a half million were expected; 20,000 came, or so went the official count), can no longer tell itself the tale that it is the dominant economic, psychological and cultural center of the Bay Area, the cynosure of all eyes. San Francisco is, rather, an embattled town of slightly more than 800,000, many of whom can no longer afford to live there.

Even California, as a whole, is experiencing a redefinition of identities. The state initially envisioned, for example, a three-year-long series of celebrations and commemorations, supported to a significant degree by private funds, in honor of its 150th birthday. Two separate administrative teams tried to put the commemoration together before it dawned on most people that California was too vast, too multiple, too fractionated in its meaning to allow for any single three-year statewide program.

At present, there is no dearth of significant stories being told about Los Angeles, although none of them is comprehensive enough to constitute an agreed-upon public identity. In building the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the archdiocese is telling a story about Los Angeles being a profoundly Roman Catholic city. The Museum of Tolerance, meanwhile, suggests the city’s equally deep Jewish roots and consciousness. The completion of Disney Hall atop Bunker Hill points to Los Angeles’ century-old love affair with music, choral music especially, and the performing arts. The retrofitting of City Hall at the cost of tens of millions evokes a Los Angeles still possessed of the coherence of an urban body politic, despite secessionist mutterings all around. The Alameda Corridor and the debate regarding expansion of the Los Angeles International Airport are chapters in a much longer narrative, going back to the stagecoach and drayage wagons established by Phineas Banning in the 1860s and the creation of a deep-water port in the early 1900s: a story about Los Angeles as Crossroads City.

So, too, are the five major candidates for mayor endeavoring to evolve a Los Angeles story they wish to tell voters. But, so far, their ideas sound more like personal stories. Real-estate broker Steven L. Soboroff says Los Angeles needs to sustain the efficiency-oriented imperatives of the Richard Riordan years. City Attorney James Hahn and Councilman Joel Wachs contend that experience in local government is as necessary as experience in the private sector. Former Assembly Speaker Antonio R. Villaraigosa and Rep. Xavier Becerra tout their state and national political experience as relevant to Los Angeles’ future. On a more disguised level, the candidates will be telling narratives regarding their own ethnic identities and the validity of those identities either to come to or keep power.

No candidate, however, can tell, at least publicly, an exclusively ethnic story; for whatever its uncertainties in the matter of public identity, the citizens of Los Angeles have already been warned--witness the flap over Supt. Ruben Zacarias’ ouster by the L.A. school board--that this city, unlike Chicago, cannot sustain a high level of ethnic conflict or even suggestions of ethnic hegemony. That is why, in part, Villaraigosa and Becerra have veered away from a triumphalist Mexican American story as from the plague, knowing it will not produce the next mayor.

Nor can any of the mayoral candidates rely overmuch on a Hollywood story. As far as local life is concerned, Hollywood--meaning show business--remains a bust, structured by an indifference born of rejection in the early years of this century, when movie people were treated like trash and, not wanting to be trash, began to treat themselves as semi-sacred royalty.

What will this new Los Angeles story be? What will it take to bring the citizens of this city once more into the public square as both a physical and symbolic place? Can all these multiple L.A. identities be made to cohere, at least as a mosaic, if not a unified-force field? All politics is local, but how do we do local politics, what local stories do we tell, when our localism is also global? For the time being, at least, we have the L.A. movies and detective stories that tell us again and again that the City of Angels is a shifting and uncertain place. *