The There There

Our ruined bourgeois paradise strains under Henry Adams’ iron law of the acceleration of history. His own past he found barely comprehensible as a narrative of political forces, and he despaired of the greater velocity of the 20th century just beginning. Adams was right about making sense of a life lived in a regime of speed. Our past in L.A. dwindles incoherently, rushing from us like a landscape seen in the rearview mirror of a fleeing car.

Can any part of the past be of use to those of us who are along for the ride, except as nostalgia or (as it had been for Adams) as irony? Angelenos are uncertain if they want a history with all of its complexities and claims against our ability to reinvent ourselves endlessly. We do a lot to obscure or ignore the past that manages to cling to places in L.A., as though barely holding on. Given our ambivalence, L.A. is better understood as existing in a perpetual present where we stay perennial tourists and never become its citizens.

L.A.’s unique amalgam of sales pitch and self-deception--our ability simultaneously to manufacture utopian snake oil and innocently buy it--generally preempts history, but not entirely. L.A.’s stories bleed through their packaging as if they knew how much we needed them. In Judy Wright’s history of the town of Claremont in the Pomona Valley (about 30 miles east of Los Angeles), the stories are often naive but as often well-informed (she was a planning commissioner and City Council member before becoming an amateur historian). Her stories are accompanied by page after page of photographs of heartbreakingly beautiful houses. Most are from the turn of the century, and most of them are still there, still the houses of Claremont’s fortunate residents who can be nostalgic about their paradise of the ordinary without irony because they manage to live in it too. They live in a town whose history is a fractal of L.A.’s, a fragment that faithfully reproduces our shared longing for a familiar place.

Claremont, first, was the landscape of the Cahuilla Indians. After 1771, it was an outrider property of Mission San Gabriel, processing the Cahuilla through imported European beliefs and diseases and the landscape through imported horses, cattle, sheep, goats and swine. Next (after 1834 and the suppression of the missions), it was the Rancho San Jose, an immense and indifferent Mexican domain of buttes and arroyos within which the cities of Walnut, San Dimas, La Verne, Pomona and Claremont are situated. After 1846, it was U.S. occupied Mexico, and its haciendado owners were replaced in the 1860s by a succession of disappointed American speculators and part-time agriculturalists in a land of little rain and no ready capital.

To these Americans, the Pomona Valley was an alien wilderness, nothing like the industrializing New England that many of them came from, even less like the Emersonian landscape of farms and villages that their nostalgia for New England evoked. “Nothing but jack rabbits, sagebrush and no water,” one of them said, and photographs from as late as 1887 show the site of Claremont as a featureless plain walled by treeless hills. Like much of Southern California in the early 1870s, the Pomona Valley was reduced to essences--sun, air, dirt and water (if you could find it and hold onto it). This was an explosive mixture. All that was missing was speed.

The Southern Pacific Railroad brought the first burst of acceleration in the mid-1870s, making the valley part of a transcontinental economic network. The SP made places in the valley for its own profit and where it wanted them, and these arbitrary beginnings helped build sprawl into L.A.’s empty landscape. The locomotive-driven pace accelerated even more in the mid-1880s, when the SP monopoly on tourism and immigration was broken by the Santa Fe Railroad’s new line to L.A. The Santa Fe’s right of way was paralleled by thousands of acres of more or less worthless land with which the Anglo owners of former ranchos had energetically bribed the railroad to build the line there and not elsewhere. That began L.A.’s 100-year whoring for growth.

The railroads boomed Southern California in the magical year of 1887. One-way fares from the Midwest to Los Angeles dropped below $5, dozens of speculative towns were platted along the SP and SF lines by “improvement” companies controlled by the railroads (and some mere swindlers) and far more than $100 million in paper transactions changed hands. The market was dot-com hot for a year, then it collapsed with the speed of a train wreck.

The boom and bust of 1887-1888 was the first of many (citrus, health seeking, tourism, movies, suburban housing, aerospace, the Internet) that would overwhelm Southern California at 10-year intervals, each overlaying the one before it and making places like Claremont, which ended the first boom year with a wood-frame hotel, a few houses built Potemkin-style by the land company to convince buyers that a town existed and a map that showed a grid of right-angle streets extending into white space. The hotel became Pomona College, the empty lots were its first endowment and the map remains a mirror of American dreams.

The dreams mingled convictions about the health of Claremont’s climate (“free from frost and fogs”), the moral vigor of its residents (almost too self-reliant Congregationalists) and the fate of the white race. As one booster put it, Claremont was “the mountain home, the place of rest, the sanitarium.” In his haste he elides the themes of domesticity in a wilderness, relief from manual labor and fear of infection that pervaded a new style of faith among transplanted Protestants. Their resistance to urban life shapes L.A. still.

You came to Claremont to live among high-minded teetotalers (the first drinks in town weren’t served until the 1960s), who might also be “lungers” (suffering from tuberculosis), real estate speculators, college professors, social hygienists and proprietors of an orange grove. From the shade of their bungalow porches, they could watch gangs of young Mexican men working beneath the glossy dark leaves of the orange trees. The work was overseen by an older mayordomo. In the packinghouse, run by an orange growers’ cooperative, the work was done by Mexican women. They might be recent immigrants or longtime residents of Claremont’s or Pomona’s barrios (they commuted to the packinghouses on the Pacific Electric trolley). During World War II and until the mid-1960s, they might be bracero labor shuttled by contractors north and south of the border with the seasons and the crops.

The mestizo in Claremont is an equivocal figure, whom Wright cannot fit among the capsule biographies of the town’s college presidents and health-seeking benefactors. Dressed in folklorico costumes picked up in Mexico by the city’s aesthetic elite (the wives of professors and the widows of the rich), Claremont’s Latinos sang and performed in the Padua Hills Theater. Or, dressed in rough work clothes, they anonymously lifted arroyo stones into the foundations and fireplaces of Claremont’s Craftsman-style homes. Dressed in suits and long dresses, they married (in a church demolished to improve traffic circulation), baptized their children and mourned their dead in an anti-Claremont where Anglo high-mindedness and social uplift only sometimes penetrated.

And then that Claremont was gone too, weakened by the Depression and World War II (which planted new industries in the valley) and erased by the suburban boom of the 1950s and 1960s, which replaced orange groves with Cliff May-designed ranchettes.

Claremont accommodated this speed and resisted it, in ways that anticipated the anti-growth movements of California cities today and the solutions New Urbanist planners apply to the current problems of place making. Claremont saw itself as a middle-class college town with a New England heritage and devised strategies to maintain its self-definition--a master plan going back to the 1920s, an independent planning commission and the requirement for a super-majority of City Council members to overturn the commission’s decisions. The habits of Claremont--told first as stories and remade as public policy--fostered a vibrant ethic of community involvement and a politics of neighborhood NIMBYism. Both shape the city still.

Change accelerated through the 1980s and 1990s. Claremont got bigger, struggled with mixed results to manage its growth, shed some of its aspirations to be someplace other than L.A. and endured the state’s plunge into recession (as all suburban cities tried to) by tying its finances to the generation of retail sales tax. The population got older (24% over age 55), a lot younger (refilling schools that had been partly empty) and became about 30% non-Anglo.

Several imperfect Claremonts remain, even as more change overtakes them. They look a lot like the several L.A.s in which we seek to live, in their uneasy fragmentation, the growing disparity between the middle-class and those who are not, and in their beauty as material memories.

“To stand in Bridges Hall of Music,” notes Wright, “in a house in the Russian Village, or in Denison Library is to stand in the same physical environment as those who lived before us. We may think that such items as the stone curbs, the levees in the Pomona Valley Protective Association acreage, the mural in the post office, or one of our last original eucalyptus trees are insignificant, but these are parts of our culture that accumulate to create the essence of our existence. These ‘things’ tell us their stories.”

Wright’s stories of Claremont, told without regret, tell us that the power of the past is not to make us more informed but more whole. Memory is an act of courage in our L.A., even if we do not fully understand the stories we tell. Memory is sabotage against the regime of speed.

It’s an act of faith too. Sitting on the patio of a perfectly ordinary tract house in Buena Park not long ago, I listened to an elderly Algerian immigrant tell a Taiwanese businessman and an Alsatian insurance executive stories about his new home in Temecula in Riverside County. He spoke of its sun, air and dirt (and its wine, rather than water). He could not find the right words in English, apologized and continued in the French he knew better. He said that he thought of his place (as we might all wish of L.A.) as having a soul. *