Secession’s Seductive Undertow

Los Angeles may be just a few months away from being dismantled. in one November day at the polls, the nation’s second-largest metropolis could lose half its territory and become, at least in the big-city big leagues, a mere shadow of its former self.

While pollsters and pundits attempt to measure the pulse of the city, it’s unclear how many Angelenos care about this deeply. What is clear is that secessionists, once written off as crazies, are energized and mobilized and seem to be striking a chord. They argue that outlying parts of Los Angeles don’t get their fair share of city services. They rattle off statistics--the San Fernando Valley has fewer police officers, some parts of Los Angeles have more libraries, the city isn’t repaving their streets, trees are not being trimmed. In the coming months, Angelenos following the debate could easily drown in statistics and city budget number crunching. But dollars and cents aren’t what makes secession so seductive.

The real allure is in this pitch: Los Angeles is too big. Smaller is better.

Secessionists hold that idea up against their own experiences and it seems to fit. It capitalizes on a yearning for simpler times, for a chance to be heard without shouting so hard, for respite from the big-city problems lapping right up to suburban front doors. People want to catch their breath in a place where change can seem relentless. They want to feel more in control.

Countering that powerful emotional draw is difficult. The city’s sheer size--about 470 square miles--is overwhelming. Its City Council members each represent nearly a quarter million people. Its mountains and freeways cut parts of the city off from each other. Making a sprawling, multicentered city feel united is no easy task.

This is a city, after all, whose very history may argue against deep communal bonds.

Los Angeles grew from a small, sleepy town to a big city not because of its natural assets. It didn’t have many. Unlike San Francisco or Seattle or New York, it didn’t abut a big natural harbor or rivers that made it a perfect center for manufacturing.

Los Angeles grew because its boosterish leaders willed its growth. They fought hard to make the railways land at their doorstep. They brought in water to turn a desert into something more lush and inviting.

Cities whose growth was driven by their rivers and harbors quickly developed strong downtown centers, dense with people whose livelihoods depended on location. When the downtown areas filled with people, buildings grew taller to accommodate them. Even today in New York, Boston and other cities, residents rub shoulders in crowded subway cars, on busy downtown sidewalks, in elevators. Lives in densely built, more traditional cities are full of close encounters and shared experience.

In Los Angeles, skyscrapers and huge apartment buildings are more the exception than the rule. People don’t have to do so much sharing. They can more easily exist in their own bubbles, seeing their fellow citizens from behind car windshields, rarely encountering crowds except at ballgames or concerts.

They can do so because Los Angeles grew out rather than up. Downtown Los Angeles was still a pretty new place when a vast network of electric railways made living outside the center easy. There was open land all around, and the city’s leaders, many of whom were also land speculators, encouraged people to settle on the outlying lots they were promoting. Streetcar owners were developers, too, and they made it easy to commute from new subdivisions to downtown jobs.

Then the automobile caught on, and by 1920, the city’s still young downtown was jammed with cars. Streetcars whose rails shared the crowded streets began moving more slowly in traffic. Rather than battle the congestion and the higher downtown property costs, industries and businesses moved to residential neighborhoods. Railway lines, losing their riders, were dismantled. Before long, the old downtown was just one of a number of business districts, not a true city center.

Los Angeles’ rapid growth occurred not organically but through large-scale acquisition. Without a natural harbor, the city wanted to create one, so in 1906 it obtained a shoestring of land between Los Angeles, San Pedro and Wilmington, and then wooed those communities in 1909 to join the city.

The city needed water to expand. It was imported, and doled out only to those communities willing to join it. Hollywood came aboard in 1910. The San Fernando Valley was annexed in 1915.

Dozens of other communities joined, too, out of expediency more than love. “They were over the barrel, so to speak, and the barrel contained water,” says Michael Dear, director of the Southern California Studies Center at USC. “This is a place that has been patched together.”

The city’s political structure mirrored the sprawl. From its earliest days, L.A. was proud to be different from older, grimier, more crowded cities. Instead of the big-city machine politics of many Eastern cities, which were ruled by powerful mayors, Los Angeles spread the power around. City Council members had more clout here, the mayor, less. It is all very democratic, but a government of council members who are primarily beholden to their districts dilutes the notion of shared interests.

Without any common city center, many Angelenos focus on the parts of the city that are central to their lives. They have a cult of hearth, a devotion to their own homes and neighborhoods. They don’t turn out in large numbers to vote. Many wouldn’t recognize the mayor if he passed by them.

A large number of Valley residents say they rarely venture over the mountains to L.A. “I call everything over the hill downtown,” says Rosalind Boyd, who has lived in a small bungalow in the Lakeview Terrace section of the northeast Valley for 30 years. “I don’t know anything about L.A. They give me an address, I get on the freeway to that address. If they say ‘Detour,’ my heart skips a beat. And you know I can run all over the Valley blindfolded and find my way.”

The city is so vast that even lifelong residents drive with phonebook-sized road atlases. Those who drive long distances regularly do most of their traveling on freeways, monotonous miles of cars and concrete. It gives them little sense of the communities they are passing through.

In the end, a city assembled by patchwork and governed district by district, whose residents are familiar only with their own small piece of the whole, were never glued tightly together in the first place, and may now break apart.

In Hollywood, secessionists dream of a small, stylish city, its old buildings and grand boulevard restored to their former glory. They see tourists strolling down sidewalks, drawn to a place that lives up to the glamour of its name.

But it’s in the San Fernando Valley where the desire for secession has its deepest roots. Valley voters will additionally choose a name for their would-be city when they go to the polls Nov. 5. Even if secession doesn’t pass, the vote will serve as a record of their hopes. In a public meeting in April, more than 100 secessionists showed up to narrow the choices to five. Their mood was jubilant, their rhetoric revolutionary.

One man suggested Valparaiso--Spanish for Paradise Valley. A woman gave a fiery speech about her choice: Liberty Valley. The overwhelming favorite was simply San Fernando Valley, a place people said they’d be glad to call home. The feelings were summed up by one man who reminisced about being young in the 1960s, when “the Valley was the Valley and you lived in the greatest place in the world.”

Secession leaders pushed hard for the most fanciful choice--Camelot, which also made the list and may be the most fitting. For others, the fairy-tale aspirations of the name evokes laughter. Camelot, they say, is a far cry from the Valley’s 222 square miles of endless tract homes, mini-malls and gated McMansions.

But desire often isn’t rooted in reality. Supporters of secession are full of desire--to turn back the clock, un-build the ugly buildings, create cozy town centers with lots of green spaces where they can walk with their families to restaurants, recreation centers and shops. This is the dream of the future that hundreds of activists came up with when the nonprofit Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley held meetings to create Vision 2020, a road map for the Valley’s next two decades.

It’s a vision that sounds a lot like the past, and that’s just what appeals to Dana Berg, who last year moved from Chatsworth to Portofino, a luxury gated community in Porter Ranch. Her new place is on the edge of the edge, pushed up to the very border of development at the foot of the Santa Susana Mountains. Raised in the Valley, she’s now come as close to leaving it as she can without actually doing so.

Other longtime Valley residents are heading out to newer suburban havens in Calabasas, Santa Clarita, Valencia and Simi Valley. Berg understands the impulse--to escape the graffiti and the petty crime and the sense that big-city problems are heading their way fast.

She thinks secession just might stop all of that. “I feel that by living in the Valley my whole life, growing up and seeing how things have changed, I just don’t see good things happening.” She reminisces about the old days on her Chatsworth street, where neighbors mixed margaritas and sat out together watching their children play. “With the economy, the house values dropped low, and different types of people moved in. There were problems with drugs, with noise, with loud people up all night,” she says.

The Bergs have season tickets to the Lakers. They zip into downtown Los Angeles for games, then zip out. Otherwise, Dana Berg has all she needs nearby. She can drive a few minutes to the Starbuck’s at the Porter Ranch Town Center, a strip of shops that includes a sushi restaurant, a Wal-Mart and a Toys ‘R’ Us. For dinner out, she and her husband like to head farther west to Calabasas. Berg would be pleased if the Valley seceded and were remade to resemble Calabasas or Porter Ranch--clean, new, controlled developments occupied by fairly affluent families.

Others in the Valley see Burbank or Glendale as the model for the future--older, independent, small cities within the L.A. area that seem a little better tended, a little more user-friendly than their neighbor.

Whatever the ideal, a lot of residents want the Valley to be a place that celebrates itself, instead of being continuously sneered at from over the hill. They see secession as an opportunity to redefine the Valley not as a bland suburban slice of Los Angeles but as something positive and distinct. They’re sick of being Los Angeles’ New Jersey.

“People say things like, ‘She looks very Valleyish,’ ” says Jan Zuchowski, 49, who grew up in Van Nuys and now lives in North Hollywood, within walking distance of her Orthodox synagogue. “They hear where you’re from and you’re identified as Valley, which isn’t always meant nicely. But I like the Valley. I like the smaller, the closer. I hate the traffic in the city. I feel like I’m part of a small community.”

So many dreams are wrapped up in secession that satisfying them all would be a tall order. Creating a new Valley city could be exciting--a new mayor sworn in, a new city council convened for the first time. For secessionists, the act of taking on a huge city and winning would be tremendously empowering. There would be a sense of new energy, of people taking control of their own fates, of plans to start transforming the Valley.

A new city of Hollywood would start life as a small place. The same can’t be said for a Valley city. It would be nearly the size of Philadelphia, and in some places just as urban. It also wouldn’t be new. It’s filled with old buildings and old problems. Parts of the Valley are densely packed. One-third of Valley residents are foreign-born. People, including new immigrants, would still keep moving in. Would the crime rate fall? Would the Valley free itself of traffic jams? Could it be transformed into a place of cozy town squares with cafes and shops and lush, green parks? Would everyone agree on which community was first in line for a fix?

Would residents eventually find their desires still being unmet? Would the wealthier West Valley want to split away from the poorer East Valley? Would Porter Ranch then want to break away on its own? Maybe one day every neighborhood in L.A. will be its own independent entity, with nary a metropolitan government in sight.

Maybe splitting a city that never was tightly stuck together is a good idea. Maybe new, smaller cities would be better. Or maybe it would be like yanking a loose yarn on a sweater, pulling and pulling and not knowing where to stop.

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Nita Lelyveld is a Times staff writer covering the secession movement.