Recessions leave their marks on a city

I took a walk last week with the Ghost of Recessions Past.

I traveled back to the Great Depression, when the Los Angeles River ran unfettered and public gardens bloomed on the Eastside and parents swallowed their pride and took “relief” to feed their children.

Then I visited the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, when auto and aerospace factories closed, and more than a million people packed up and moved away, and part of the city exploded in rage and burned.

Talking to the Ghost of Recessions Past is a real downer. But like Scrooge on Christmas morning, I emerged from the experience an enlightened man.

What I learned was neatly summed up by Leonard Schneiderman, a UCLA professor emeritus who’s seen a few crashes, collapses and booms in his 81 years.

“These recessions leave indelible marks on the lives of the people of the city,” he told me. “They displace the lives of young people and detour them.”

Like past downturns, this “Great Recession” is a time of quiet suffering that’s touched nearly every family in the city.

A city and its economy are like a tree, Schneiderman continued. If you look at the cross-section of a tree, you’ll see thin rings from drought years, thick ones from wetter years.

Sometimes the city has emerged stronger and more robust from its dry seasons. After others, it has barely straightened itself up before another drought almost killed it.

Each recession has brought its own lessons and left its own legacy.

Pete Martinez, 79, was a boy during the Great Depression. He grew up in a corner of Boyle Heights then known as the Fields for its patches of empty land.

During those long, lean years, his mother raised five children after her husband abandoned the family in 1935. “We went on relief until 1941,” Martinez said.

Everyone seemed thrown together by the crisis. People in the neighborhood shared meals, and a lot of people were wearing similar government-donated clothes. “We all looked alike,” he said with a laugh.

“As I look back on it now, we were poor, but we didn’t have anything to compare it with. Everyone we knew was in the same boat.”

His mother scrambled to keep the family going. She took the kids to pick walnuts in Oxnard to make extra cash. On weekends she packed them up for a trip to Santa Monica, where they stayed with relatives while she worked in a restaurant.

The government turned the fields south of Boyle Heights into gardens. Public works projects dotted the city, including the 18-story federal courthouse downtown, a graceful stone tower that’s still the city’s most conspicuous New Deal monument.

The New Deal changed the way people thought about government. It gave L.A. social safety-net programs, including food stamps. Martinez was drafted into the Army. The GI Bill gave him the chance to go to college, though he might not have if it hadn’t been for one of his neighbors.

“Back then, Boyle Heights was integrated,” Martinez remembers. “I had this neighbor who was Asian. He told me, ‘You’re smart, you could go to college.’ An integrated community gives you a broader outlook.”

Martinez became a teacher, then a school administrator and principal at Lincoln High. His sister went to UCLA, and all three of his children went to prestigious California universities.

The legacy of his mother’s toil during the Great Depression was this: more than a dozen Mexican American middle-class families and a son who never took good fortune for granted.

“Two years ago the recession was coming and everybody was buying a home,” Martinez told me. “I was wondering: ‘How are they going to pay for it?’ ”

Booms sweep people up in their optimism. South Gate was booming when Henry Gonzalez started working at the General Motors plant there in 1955.

“I thought I’d make a little money and just work there for six months,” said Gonzalez, who had grown up Watts. He stayed for years and became a UAW official.

At one point, the plant employed almost 5,000 people. Then the old U.S. industrial economy came crashing down. In 1982, GM closed the plant.

“We had two or three suicides,” Gonzalez recalls. “There were a lot of divorces.”

The city’s Firestone tire plant closed too, and the industrial western side of South Gate became “a ghost town,” Gonzalez remembers. Most of the white people in town moved away.

It was the first of two recessions that devastated Southern California manufacturing.

In the early 1990s, cuts in the aerospace industry caused 1.5 million people to leave Southern California, said Daniel Flaming, an analyst with the Economic Roundtable. “They were replaced by immigrants.”

The Los Angeles created by the booms and recessions of the 20th century is a city of paradoxes. Our professional class is more ethnically integrated than ever. But in other ways the city is more segregated.

Today about 1 million people live in a single contiguous urban area that’s about 90% Latino -- this new super barrio includes the communities of Boyle Heights and South Gate. It’s just one of the ways Southern California has widened the gap between rich and poor.

This recession will widen the gap further.

It’s hit people with white-collar jobs especially hard. Like the reader in his 40s who wrote to me after losing his second job in less than a year.

“So far I haven’t had too many fantasies about suicide, but I can’t say that I haven’t considered it,” he wrote. “I can’t help thinking that who would want to hire me when I’m not at the top of my game.”

Unlike the young Pete Martinez in Boyle Heights, the sender of that e-mail can’t walk down the street and see people wearing the same clothes. Unlike Henry Gonzalez in South Gate, he can’t gather in a union hall with thousands of people in the same boat.

He’s suffering alone for the most part, which makes it all the harder.

These days, people commiserate on the Internet. Maybe one day we’ll call this the Facebook Recession because we can see its drama unfolding on that social-networking site.

That’s how I’ll remember this recession. I’ve been following the fortunes of friends and old colleagues on my computer screen, reading about how they’ve kept up their spirits. Some have found new jobs, others have not.

How will you remember it?

hector.tobar@latimes.com