The Pastoral Los Angeles That Could Have Been

GREG HISE, BILL DEVERELL AND I ARE standing on the rim of Baldwin Hills, peering down at the great jumble of city that gallops off to the Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains. A bluish haze seems to set the towers of downtown vibrating, but the mist isn’t why we’re having trouble seeing.

Hise narrows his eyes, extends his arm and draws imaginary lines across mile upon mile of gray-and-dirty white cityscape. “What we’d be seeing,” he says, “are broad swaths of green through all that densely developed urban fabric.”

In fast-evolving Los Angeles, it’s hard enough to see evidence of the past, much less to detect, as we are trying to do, a future that never came to be.

Deverell and Hise, professors at Caltech and USC, respectively, have rescued from obscurity a 70-year-old urban plan that, had it not been suppressed by powerful elements in the city, might have made for a far lovelier Los Angeles.

In a new book issued this month by the University of California Press, “Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region,” Deverell and Hise republish and analyze the document. The plan, which bears the innocuous title “Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region,” is a breathtaking vision for the 1,500 square miles from Malibu to Riverside County, and from Long Beach to the Antelope Valley.

It was commissioned by a committee of the L.A. Chamber of Commerce from the renowned landscape architectural firm founded by Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., the designer of New York City’s Central Park, and Harland Bartholomew Associates, then the nation’s premier urban planning firm.

The 178-page report cost $80,000 and was three years in the making. It laid out detailed plans for the public acquisition of 32 miles of private beaches and the preservation of hilltops and mountains from development. It envisioned a city speckled with green playgrounds and dappled with forested parks, small and large.

It proposed connecting the new public beaches, wild recreation areas and parks throughout the county by a green spider web of “pleasure parkways”--linear parks, really--each at least a quarter mile wide, in which motorists would drive at leisurely speeds with little sense of traversing an urban area. The plan called for placing some of the parkways along the ridge lines of Los Angeles’ hilltops, such as Baldwin Hills, giving motorists panoramic views of their city and a better sense of its layout and contours.

“You could have started any place in the city and in five to eight miles been on a parkway, and then you could have driven around the whole city and never have had to get off,” Hise says.

The plan called for the acquisition and improvement of 71,310 acres at a cost of $144 million, only $2.8 million a year if spread over 50 years. Its authors argued for urgent action, as land prices were escalating and the rapidly growing population already threatened the region’s natural areas.

The report had its flaws, especially the belief that the automobile could be fitted into such a quasi-pastoral urban scheme. Its flaws, however, were not what doomed it.

The powerful Chamber of Commerce, nervous about any threat to the existing power structure, balked at the plan’s proposal for a new parks district with its own taxing authority and police force. So after a brief flurry of publicity on its release, the document all but disappeared. Only 180 copies were printed. “Politics reduced the report to rare book status,” Deverell says.

Yet some of the report’s 200-plus proposals have been realized: More beaches have been acquired for public use since 1930. Some mountain areas have been saved from wholesale populating. New parks have been established. All of this has been accomplished piecemeal, however, without the comprehensive vision of the Olmsted-Bartholomew plan.

To read the document today is to be charmed by its confidence in society’s ability to shape the future in an orderly and rational way. Stuck in traffic on the San Diego Freeway, looking up at ostentatious houses despoiling dramatic hillsides, we might pine for such foresight.

And yet.

The plan was a late child of the reform-minded Progressive Era. It hints of a certain view of the world (white, upper-class, paternalistic) that is mistrustful of the unruly spontaneity that gives a city life.

Messiness is a hallmark of human endeavor, from procreation to nation-building, and as it turned out, the Los Angeles region developed far more messily into the seductive, energetic monstrosity that it is.

The most vital and important cities are more likely to be maddening than tranquil and easy on the eyes. It’s the price they extract for having a lot of high-energy living going on in them.

If the parks plan had come to fruition, we might be standing here on Baldwin Hills gazing down at a veritable garden of a city. But it might be one that bores us half to death and might never have attracted us to it in the first place.

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James Ricci’s e-mail address is james.ricci@latimes.com