The Plains of Id

In Southern California, we tend to think of the San Fernando Valley as the prototypical American suburb, but it’s actually much more than that. For almost a century, it has served as the canvas for the evolving story of how urban American lives.

Around the time of World War I, it was quite literally the receptacle of Los Angeles’ dreams of destiny, when the aqueduct from Owens Valley began spilling large quantities of water onto the Valley floor. Between the world wars, it became a ranchette suburb, littered with 2-acre lots and chicken coops. After World War II, it emerged as the classic tract-home suburb, filled with young families escaping the city. And now it has evolved into the model of the suburb-as-city--a dense and varied place so large and cocky that it may actually secede from L.A.

The story of these changes is an important one for everybody in our region to understand, especially as the Valley moves closer to a secession vote next year. And Kevin Roderick, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and editor who grew up in postwar Northridge, deserves credit for taking on the task. Roderick is a good reporter and writer, and the resulting book is full of interesting yarns that are well-told and presented in an accessible format. (The text is supplemented by dozens of wonderful historical photos offered up in the best coffee-table style, attesting once again to the fact that Los Angeles’ librarians and historical societies have done an admirable job of retaining visual images of our metropolis’ evolution.)

For all of these reasons, Roderick’s book will be more than satisfactory for Valley aficionados who simply want to recall how Edgar Rice Burroughs created Tarzana or how Ritchie Valens brought Latino pride to Pacoima. But the book is too narrowly focused and parochial to provide much depth or insight into the evolution of the Valley and what it really means, either for Los Angeles or for urban America. In other words, in the end Roderick’s book is too much like the Valley itself. And with the secession vote little more than a year away, that’s too bad.

The author says he wants to take issue with the idea “that history doesn’t count for anything in the suburbs.” In doing so, he is attaching himself to the single most important trend in American urban history today: understanding the suburbanization of Los Angeles and using it to explain how metropolitan America has become so large, complicated and confusing. There’s a lot of competition in this arena. Some of America’s most esteemed academic historians are tackling Los Angeles these days; indeed, at the most recent conference of urban planning historians (held in Washington, D.C.) at least one-third of the papers presented dealt with postwar L.A.

But Roderick’s success in dealing with the Valley as urban history is mixed. Unlike many other writers, he does provide a good sense of the Valley as an evolving place that has a layered past, not just one postwar suburban explosion. Unfortunately, however, Roderick devotes almost no space to the larger trends, both in Los Angeles and in the United States, that drove the Valley’s growth and evolution.

This kind of myopia makes Roderick’s book sometimes feel like an expanded version of one of those local Valley newspaper editions, in which the death of an actor is big news not because he worked in Hollywood but because he happened to live in Studio City rather than Los Feliz. Such a lack of perspective may play well with readers who live in the Valley, but it won’t help them understand the real significance of their own backyard.

The traditional rap on the suburbs is that they are not “complete,” that by focusing on houses and shopping centers, they somehow lack the full range and diversity of human activities that constitute “real life.” This isn’t true anymore in most suburbs, including the Valley. No matter how varied suburbs are these days, however, they often still lack a sense of perspective. As a result, they also lack a sure sense of themselves just when they are beginning to need it.

No less than cities themselves, suburbs are created--and changed--by social and economic forces that are colossal in scale and not limited to specific locations. In the postwar years, for example, the Valley was hardly the only emerging suburban community that received national attention. Lakewood, Westchester, the suburbs of northern Orange County--especially Levittown on Long Island--were just as important, and they were all shaped by the same forces: a plethora of upwardly mobile, young, single-income families, along with an expanding economy more than willing to accommodate them. The only reason people were more interested in the Valley was the fact that it housed so much of the entertainment industry.

Roderick probably understands all this--his bibliography certainly suggests that he’s run across these larger trends--but he doesn’t convey it in his book. He makes just one mention of Lakewood and Westchester, yet he doesn’t even explain what or where they are or why they might be compared to the Valley. He describes the “population spigot,” which “suddenly opened wide, splashing couples through Cahuenga Pass”--but he spends no time explaining where this spigot was or why it was gushing so strongly or whether the nozzle was spraying in other directions as well. That would require showing that the Valley was inevitably shaped at least in part by “the other side of the hill”--a notion that most Valley residents would rather not acknowledge. Like everybody else in the Valley, Roderick finds it much easier to view growth and change as a kind of force of nature rather than as a trend that was caused partly by external factors.

Roderick’s book certainly won’t be the last about the Valley as the secession battle heats up. But because of its coffee-table format, it is likely to be one of the most widely distributed. That’s why it’s unfortunate that Roderick was not able to use this book to help the Valley’s residents shape a stronger sense of perspective about themselves. But it does represent a good start for people on both sides of the hill who must truly understand the Valley to make informed choices about its future.