Tag: Architecture

Power Lines Around Los Angeles: Isolation, Interconnection, and Aesthetics

Boom California on May 21, 2020

Daniel Wuebben

Historically, California’s overhead electric lines have been pushed to the margins of the built environment and, when possible, physically buried out of sight; now, the webs over our heads are central artifacts in the broader struggle to avoid climate catastrophe and enact climate justice.

Power lines are sites of tension. They have simultaneously proliferated electric currents across California and faded in popularity for over a century. In 1913, when Southern California Edison opened the Big Creek Power House No. 1 and sent hydroelectric power at an unprecedented potential of 150,000 volts across 241-miles to the Eagle Rock substation, the Los Angeles Times envisioned “a hand robed with lightning” stretched “across the gulf of valleys and mountains to the doors of this city.” Contemporaries may have viewed the new, soaring steel transmission towers that began in the Sierras, crossed the Tejon Pass, the Newhall Pass, and then descended into the valley as hands, “robed with lightning,” but by the second half of the twentieth century, most Angelinos associated overhead power lines with industrial blight. Wires, poles, and lattice steel towers made aesthetic intrusions on otherwise beautiful California landscapes. In recent years, another negative inflection has been laced onto the lines. Long, energized wires are potential tinder boxes. Instead of hands robed with lighting, the unpredictable arcing of energized lines swaying in the wind and warmed by climate change has unwittingly ignited dry vegetation and sent waves of fire across mountains and valleys to the doors of Los Angeles.

Big Creek, 1913. The first power lines in the United States to use all lattice steel towers. “Stringing wires on the 243-mile long Big Creek to Los Angeles 150,00-volt transmission line,” 1913, Bishop G. Haven, Southern California Edison Archive, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

However, California’s electric infrastructure will, for the foreseeable future, remain fire hazards and lynchpins of climate justice. Efforts to decarbonize and bring more renewable energy sources online requires wires. Indeed, along with wind turbines and solar fields, long-distance, high voltage transmission lines must be built to “”unlock a renewable energy bounty.”[1] The clean energy transition demands transmission. However, gaining public approval for new transmission projects is difficult, especially as the tightrope of electric transmission spans a physical and political landscape charred by wildfires and threatened by blackouts. What can the history of California’s transmission lines offer during this pivotal moment of energy transitions and climate activism?

One can hope that policy makers and affluent communities fighting for clean energy will not shift the burdens of transmission infrastructure into sensitive ecosystems or onto communities already poised to bear the brunt of climate change. The history of infrastructure in California dampens such hopes, but overhead lines have long evoked ambiguous responses. Select lines have been viewed as safe, controlled “lightning”; however, the majority are unruly and sprawling. Some lines have been framed as beacons of progress, others as icons of blight. The lines in our landscape may be viewed as revolutionary links of a technological wonderland or banal webs choking life from the environment.

The following considers some of the historical forces and visual associations of electric lines around Los Angeles. I am not a power lines apologist and am not certain what might incite utilities to repair the thousands of miles of existing lines or the public to accept the new transmission that might be built. Here, I frame specific lines as emblematic of the isolation, interconnection, and aesthetic conflicts in the broader power network. These lines also happen to be on the route between Santa Barbara, where I lived from 2011 to 2015, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, where I completed research for Power-lined: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind.

I recently returned to the area and retraced my regular route. It begins and ends with the 101 and a series of smooth, seaside curves that mirror the silky bottom turns surfers make on breaking waves beyond the rumble strips at Rincon Point. After Ventura, one may continue southeast on the 101, over the Conejo Pass and through Thousand Oaks; or, take the longer route east from Ventura and through the Santa Clara River Valley, the self-claimed “Citrus Capital of the World.” Here, I turn east, make a detour towards Ojai, and then continue towards Pasadena and San Marino. I head back on the 101 through Hollywood and then north to Santa Barbara to complete the circuit.

Isolation: Telegraph Road and the Thomas Fire

In 1853, the first telegraph line on the Pacific Coast was strung across the branches of living pine trees. The single wire spanned 23 miles between the northern mining towns of Nevada, Grass Valley, and Auburn.^[2] San Francisco was connected to Los Angeles in 1860, less than a year before the transcontinental telegraph line linked California with the East.^[3] The line strengthened coast-to-coast correspondence, but, for most of the nineteenth century, California’s geographically isolated mining outfits, ranch towns, and agricultural settlements sometimes hung together by a mere telegraph thread. Despite growing inter-state communication between San Francisco and other Western cities in the 1850s, the intra-state network remained sparse. In the 1860s that telegraph finally began to spread south in California, reaching Los Angeles in 1860 and San Diego in 1870. James Schwoch’s excellent history, Wired into Nature (2018), considers these environmental pressures. He explains how gold mining and the Civil War spurred the need for telegraph lines in California while difficult terrain and snowstorms in the Sierras hindered this spread.[4] Another challenge was the fact that, even for a state teeming with timber, it was difficult to obtain relatively cheap and easy to move telegraph poles. In the 1860s, groves of Blue Gum Eucalyptus, a species imported from Australia, provided poles for telegraph lines.[5]

California’s relative lack of telegraph lines during the period of late-nineteenth-century occupation and development may be why, in 2020, it appears to have more streets, avenues, and roads with the name “telegraph” than any other state.^[6] Over a century ago, a single telegraph line was a noteworthy feature in the middle landscape between wilderness and civilization. Compared to the glut of wires on the Eastern seaboard, a telegraph line in California seemed significant. The lines did not intersect multiple streets of neighboring towns or even connect every district in the cities; rather, the telegraph line was often erected alongside an existing thoroughfare, such as “Telegraph Road” in Los Angeles, which runs diagonally from Beth Israel Cemetery at Olympic Boulevard to Imperial Highway in La Mirada. Collectively, “telegraph” street names may be considered holdovers from an age when new (or at least newly named) dirt roads, stagecoach trails, train tracks, and telegraph wires made collective imprints on the California landscape.

Telegraph Road in Fillmore, CA. Various sections of Telegraph Road connect Castaic Junction to Ventura. Photograph by author.

Twenty minutes after I veer off the 101 and onto Route 126, I reach Santa Paula where West Telegraph Road, turns into East Telegraph Road and then continues as Old Telegraph Road. As it appears and disappears, Telegraph Road splits through orchards and nurseries, sometimes overlapping with 126 to arrive in downtown Fillmore. Here, the Fillmore and Western Railway declares itself “Home of Movie Trains” for film and television productions.^[7] The telegraph and railroad arrived here in tandem in the late nineteenth century. Film and television crews from Los Angeles still use the railway’s collection of historic train cars and depot scenes to create the illusion of the past. Of course, real telegraph lines and poles are nowhere to be found, but telegraph poles and wires have been a crucial backdrop and narrative device for the Western genre.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, as Los Angeles was wired for power and the lights of the American movie industry flickered to life, director D.W. Griffith used telegraph lines—and telegraph cutting—to signal a sudden isolation of protagonists in two of his more famous short films, The Lonedale Operator (1911) and The Girl and Her Trust (1912). Wire cutting heightens the tension of a pending attack as the characters can no longer send for help. The trope was repeated in the opening scenes of Stagecoach (1939) as well as Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). In the Western, focusing on the single telegraph pole or wire, which the viewer knows can and probably will be broken, evokes the terror of isolation. Wire cutting, loss of telegraphic communication, and the fear felt by the fictional Western characters seems quaint in comparison to the sudden, widespread, and sometimes deadly loss of electric power that has accompanied some of the state’s recent wildfires.

Instead of continuing on Telegraph, I turn up 150, or North Ojai Road. This two-lane road is flanked by wooden utility poles, ranch style homes, and a blend of fan palms and eucalyptus. The valley widens. Goldenrod and chaparral pour down the hills. Soon, I arrive at my destination—Anlauf Canyon Road. On Monday, December 4, 2017, at approximately 6:14pm, the cables which stretch from the poles lining 150 towards a family ranch in Anlauf Canyon swayed and then struck one another resulting in “line slapping.” According to the Ventura Fire Department Report, “phase to phase contact on several spans of [these] power lines” caused “molten aluminum particles to fall to the ground,” which then ignited sagebrush in the dry streambed.[8]

California is crisscrossed by thousands of miles of power lines. Many intersect difficult terrain, pushed away from parks, schools, family homes and sensitive habitats. For various reasons, electrified lines start thousands of small fires each year. Some rural lines are poorly maintained, some crowded by overgrowth, and some susceptible to being jostled out of position by the warmer, faster winds incited by climate change.[9] In recent years, vulnerable or faulty equipment have ignited California’s most catastrophic blazes.

When an iron hook holding up a 115,000-volt line owned by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) snapped on the morning of November 8, 2018, it ignited what was later named the Camp Fire, the deadliest fire in California’s history. An investigation revealed that PG&E “knew for years that hundreds of miles of high-voltage power lines could fail and spark fires, yet it repeatedly failed to perform the necessary upgrades.”[10] In October of 2019, after PG&E preemptively shut off power across the northern part of the state, a broken jumper wire started the Kincade Fire. These utility’s culpability for these faulty and exposed lines is part of ongoing lawsuits. To insulate itself, PG&E has filed for bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Southern California Edison—who owns and controls the lines running through this bucolic canyon near Ojai—is fighting its own legal battles regarding the Thomas Fire and the Montecito Mudslides.

What started with this seemingly simple line spread, scorched 282,000 acres over forty days. The fires directly caused two deaths and destroyed hundreds of structures. The tragic catastrophe and heroic effort to fight the fire has been explored, both in gripping journalism and stunning multimodal photoblogs.[11] Meanwhile, locals on the outer edges of the fire footprint are planning a memorial to the many victims and heroic first responders to the mudslides that ripped through Montecito on January 9, 2018.

Two years after the fire and mudslides, I stand on edge of 150 and look East over Steckel Park towards Anlauf Canyon. No sign or memorial will be placed here. I hear the creek gurgling below, see rich and verdant shrubs, and watch the waxy leaves of the Cottonwoods flickering like an organic strobe. This quiet canyon seems like the scene for a Western, a garden seemingly detached from the sprawling metropolis to the south or the devastation wrought in the rich hamlet to the northeast. I know the isolation is illusory. The sensation of being “cut off” from the beautiful vistas of the 101 and the bustle of Los Angeles can be almost instantly collapsed by a loose cable, especially in this age of dryer winters and warmer winds. Decades of damage has exposed our networks to nature’s wrath.

Charred tree on Highway 150, or North Ojai road. Photograph by author.

From the shoulder, I photograph some of the visible remnants of the fire, including charred poles, some of which are spray painted with an X. It’s unclear if they have simply not yet been replaced or will continue to be ignored. A series of scorched tree stumps line the opposite side of the road and above, I can see the cables with a hint of green, clearly shiny and new. I imagine most of the drivers that zip past me on 150 do not differentiate between the replacement poles and wires and the original, broken infrastructure. When the fires are controlled and the power returns, how do we notice the lines that ignited it? Why should the technological source of our tragedy be replaced? Why not let them hang there like obsolete telegraph poles alongside train tracks? For me, the electric lines, visible and disappeared, are salient. Maybe the locals see them too. Maybe the experience of the Thomas Fire has led them to see overhead wires as threats, as reminders of how easily the landscape around them could ignite and leave each tiny ranch or small town an island isolated by a sea of flames.

These wooden poles, insulators, and cables that run towards the Anlauf Canyon site where, December 4, 2017, power lines swaying in high winds cause sparks to fly and ignited the Thomas Fires. Photograph by author.

Intensification at Newhall Pass

Twenty-five miles east of the Fillmore, California Highway 126 reaches Castaic Junction and U.S. Interstate 5. This north-south interstate parallels the Pacific coast from the Mexico-U.S. border at San Diego to the Canadian border in Washington State. In the rocky landscape around Castaic, the 8-lane artery of I-5 is crossed by distinct packs of overhead cables and flanked by soaring transmission towers. To the north, I-5 rises through the Tejon Pass and continues into the Central Valley. In the span of sixty miles, the interstate is crossed by six major sets of 345 kv lines and three sets of 500 kv lines. The 500 kv lines are part of the Path 26 electric power transmission corridor, which runs from the Vincent Substation in Palmdale towards Midway station near Bakersfield. Midway, an industrial plot surrounded by vineyards and almond orchards, connects Path 26 to Path 15. Midway station is a node in the Pacific Intertie, a gigantic infrastructure that, like Interstate 5, stretches thousands of miles across the entire backbone of the continent. Few Californians likely know anything about the Pacific Intertie, but everyone, it seems, has had an experience with the I-5. One can physically engage the I-5, drive from Mexico to Canada on a border-to-border cannonball run in just about 21 hours or, be stuck in rush hour traffic for what feels like days. Meanwhile, no person travels the Pacific Intertie; instead, electrons move border to border in a matter of seconds.

“Men changing insulators on tower in Kern River Canyon,” 1916, Photographed by Haven G. Bishop, Southern California Edison Photographs and Negatives, Huntington Digital Library, San Marino California

I turn on I-5 south towards Los Angeles. Transmission towers dissect the hills dotted with oak and chaparral. Near the exit for Magic Mountain Parkway, three side-by-side sets of lattice steel towers and two of the “portal” designs carry a cluster of twenty-seven dense cables overhead. Lines and poles repeatedly flicker into view between the palm trees and strip malls that flank the interstate. Two miles behind the Wal-Mart at exit 168 are the remains of the Pico Canyon Oil Field, site of the first commercially drilled oil wells in California and longest operating well in the world, having been tapped in 1876 and capped 114 years later, in 1990. Nearby marks one of California’s first oil refineries and pipelines.[12]

To appreciate the approach to my final destination, I turn east, cut through Santa Clarita, and park at the end of Newhall Avenue near Whitney Canyon Park. The pamphlet for this 442-acre open space boasts “outstanding examples of coastal sage scrub, oak woodland, chaparral and riparian corridor vegetation, with year-round springs and at least ten sensitive species.”[13] While the ecosystem deserves praise, the parks’ hills are visually dominated by lattice steel towers and swooping cables. I ascend the path and stand next to one of these massive specimens. A hawk circles, too close to the lines, I think, and then glides towards the summit.

In fact, wildlife—not wildfires—used to be the cause of California’s power outages. In a fascinating article on the confluence of electrical engineering and ornithology, Etienne Benson tells the story of how, in the 1920s, Southern California Edison employees traced the sudden short circuiting of certain power lines in this area to the streams of feces that hawks released as they launched from their perch on lattice steel towers. The engineers used pans, poles, and shields to break the conductive “streamers” of bird excrement before they draped across the energized lines and caused a flashover.[14]

Note on the negative reads: “There is no evidence of any burning. Farmer has never seen or heard of any arc.” This may have been part of an investigation regarding an outage. In the 1920s, when the line was upgraded to 220kv, a series of unexplained flashovers were eventually linked to bird feces which splayed across lines, causing them to arc and often incinerating any evidence of the effluent. February 23, 1915. Southern California Edison Archive, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

The hawk above me does not release—or at least onto me. It continues in an ungeometric gyre. I listen to corona discharge dissipate in the breeze. I remember that the electrons charging these lines were likely generated by falling water in the Sierras and arrived only to dissipate here, in this lush corridor between the Santa Susana and San Gabriel ranges.

Whitney Canyon Variety, Photograph by author

If there were such a thing as a park dedicated to the viewing of power lines around Los Angeles, this could be it. The dirt trails curve up and around small canyons and copses to different perspectives on unique tower designs, some L-5s 500 kv, others with more slender frames, fewer arms, lower voltages. The few mountain bikers, hikers, and families I pass do not seem to mind the towers, but I wonder what other purposes, beyond their function, these forms might serve? I am reminded of Leah Glaser’s claim: transmission towers can be “valuable cultural resources with a crucial story about the impact of long-distance power.”[15] Unsurprisingly, the pamphlet does not tell that story.

The story of these towers would, in my mind, be the story of the “white coal” captured in the Sierras and extended to Los Angeles. Here, in 1906, the world’s first lattice steel transmission towers were used to transmit high voltage power. 1,140 lattice steel towers ranging from 30 to 60 feet tall carried what was at that time a record line with 75,000-volt potential from Kern River No. 1 across 118 miles to Los Angeles. As transmission voltages increased, taller and wider steel structures would replace wooden poles and H-frame structures across the United States and the rest of the world. In fact, California engineers initiated many global advances in power technology during the first decades of the twentieth century. As James C. Williams explains in Energy and the Making of Modern California: “By 1914, their success resulted in California having more long-distance, high tension transmission system that any other region in the world.”[16] Of course, the power systems stretched across the great expanse of the Sierra range, but the bulk of them funneled into San Francisco and Los Angeles. With its natural barriers to the north, lines coming into Los Angeles narrowed into bottlenecks. Nowhere is this more evident than at Newhall Pass.

Newhall Pass was the final gateway on the long journey from the eastern United States to Los Angeles. In 1854, Phineas Banning cut down an existing trail through these mountains by 30 feet to allow wagons the ability to more safely descend. In 1862, Edward Beale acquired a toll road franchise and made another 60-feet gash that was known as “Beale’s Cut.” The Newhall railroad tunnel went beneath the pass in 1876. The new tunnel provided Southern Pacific a direct line to Los Angeles and, with the ensuing and nearby oil boom, Newhall Pass became an inflection point for Los Angeles’s movements of oil, freight, water, and power.

Los Angeles Aqueduct Cascades, 1913, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

I return to my car, drive through the corridor, and in seconds I am on the other side of the ridge. The geography is similar, but it feels like a different world. Here, packed into just over one square mile on the northern edge of Los Angeles county are the remnants or active features of the Ridge Route, the Sierra Highway, Interstate 5, the Antelope Valley Freeway and dozens of off ramps, flyovers, and interchanges. These concrete bands overlay two railroad tunnels and pass beside the first and second iteration of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Cascades. When this notable conduit first opened in 1913, 40,000 people gathered to hear William Mulholland dedicate the engineering feat and to release the flow of water with the famous words, “There it is. Take it!”

Flanking these overlapping tunnels, roads, pipes and chutes are sweeping packs of power lines. I follow the lines as they sweep over a hundred or so brand-new condos which have cardboard and plastic packaging hanging from their flawless garages. Besides one of these sparkling new homes, I notice a half acre burnt patch of recently planted sod grass. Here too, nature has reclaimed parts of the plastic buffer. I exit my rental car, climb up beneath a lattice steel transmission tower, and watch the hypnotic gush of the cascade.

From this vantage point near Newhall Pass, one might behold the latest iteration of what Christopher F. Jones calls “landscapes of intensification” which he defines as “material transformations of the natural environment that unlocked a world of ever-increasing energy flows delivered at ever-decreasing prices.”[17] The transport of energy across this intensified landscape includes transmission lines, which transport electrons. A further level of intensification occurs where these lines intersect other infrastructures.

If Whitney Park is a place from which to view power lines that rise and reach across mountains, Newhall Pass and Sylmar—with its substations, pipelines, aqueducts, warehouses, trucking yards, new homes, and array of industrial glut—may be the site to view the consolidation of material and financial power as its siphoned to and from Los Angeles.

The Portals

After revisiting materials in the Huntington Library stacks, I race through Pasadena towards Hollywood hoping to get beyond the 405-101 interchange before the yellow lines on my map app turn to the thick red of traffic. Like the crowds of isolated drivers around me, I pass countless lines, insulators, poles, and towers. Most are easily ignored and difficult to remember. In fact, in the 1970s, artist R. Crumb created a photo album filled with pictures of California’s street lights, poles, and other overhead infrastructure because, as he explained, “People don’t draw it, all this crap, people don’t focus attention on it because it’s ugly, it’s bleak, it’s depressing…The stuff is not created to be visually pleasing and you can’t remember exactly what it looks like. But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life.”[18]

Amidst the “background reality” of Los Angeles, one series of transmission lines and distribution poles are not as bleak and they do stand out—the Dreyfuss designs.[19] In the late 1960s, in response to consumer outcries against the negative visual impact of power lines, Edison Electric Institute and Southern California Edison pioneered an industry-wide effort to improve the aesthetics of tower designs, to sway public opinions, and to avoid the astronomical costs of undergrounding. They commissioned Henry Dreyfuss, the “father of industrial design” to create a series of aesthetic models to merge the function of high voltage transmission with sleek, modernistic forms. The results initially took the form of a book, Electric Transmission Structures and a short film, Towers of Tomorrow. Both book and film showcase Dreyfuss’s 26 designs for poles and towers. In his introduction, Dreyfuss dreams: “When transmission towers are given the same purity of expression given great bridges, they, too, may be acclaimed as a Twentieth Century art form.” Dreyfuss also narrates Towers of Tomorrow, which features photographs of models against the backdrop of various projected landscapes. Dreyfuss guides viewers with comments related to the innovative features of the new towers such as, “The curve elements are important as they contribute strength as well as well as visual grace.”[20] Overall, the models show Dreyfuss’s preference for “robustness and seamlessness” and structures which would be “sturdy and unified-looking in contrast to their spindly predecessors.”[21]

Dreyfuss and Southern California Edison tried to convince the public that these “esthetic” towers made positive impacts on the visual landscape, but the campaign was not entirely successful. One recent review notes, “[Dreyfuss’s] work was to be the first and the last cooperative attempt by industry to create new aesthetic structure designs.”[22]

While not exactly new, three distinct types of Dreyfuss power lines remain visible in Los Angeles. The “Starburst” for 69 kv poles features six cantilevered insulators spread out like a starfish. Their most famous placement is along Hollywood Boulevard. The “Sunburst” is a more remarkable design and is used for higher-voltage transmission. The “Sunburst” is a sleeker, more streamlined version of the typical lattice steel transmission tower. Two prototypes were erected near El Segundo in 1967 and thirteen more were put into place the following year. These remain the most exemplary of all Dreyfuss’s transmission line designs, although the dull brown variation is more common.

“Sunburst” 66kV double-circuit pole design, Photographed by Art Adams, Southern California Edison Photographs and Negatives, Huntington Digital Library

Today, I visit the third of the Dreyfuss designs that remain in the area; the “portal.” In 1972, Southern California Edison described the portals as having “bold, simple silhouette” which is “very impressive at close-up viewing as well as at a distance. Its vee-string insulators are always orderly, even under minor side loads.”[23] One such example is visible above the Conejo Pass.

The Conejo Pass provides a fitting exit for my discussion of Los Angeles’s wired landscapes. Southbound on the iconic Highway 101 from Ventura, trucks lug up the right lanes of the 7% grade while more nimble vehicles whip by on the left. Older cars, I know from experience, are prone to overheat during this steady, 3-mile ascent. Northbound from Los Angeles, semi-truck drivers must have their brakes inspected before descending. Next to the brake checkpoint, just beyond the peak of this steep pass, two formidable pairs of brown concrete pylons are stamped into a rock outcropping like indestructible carpet staples. Twelve cables span the 1400-foot gap carrying 220 kV over the banking traffic. To the east, the lines extend towards to the Los Angeles suburb of Moorpark. To the southwest, they are crossed under by Edison Road, a dirt path that snakes beneath the lines and allows crews to access these pylons and the subsequent lattice steel towers. The portals help to transmit electricity through the mountains and then slope towards the Ormond Beach natural gas power plant on the edge of the Pacific. With its 1,516 megawatt capacity, Ormond Beach is the third largest power plant in California. Due to its age, and newer energy regulations regarding the use of ocean water, Ormand Beach was supposed to shut down in 2020. However, because of concerns about grid reliability, it may remain open for one to three more years.

I leave the car at a dead end in Newbury Park and take the trail I found online and which was posted by rock climbers who come here to scale the Conejo boulders.[24] After a short hike, I’m standing next to the portals, looking down at the 101.

These structures do more than provide physical support for invisible currents. In addition to their aesthetic posture, the specific context for these portals is also fitting, as they strike at the etymological roots of “pylon.” The word “pylon” comes from the Greek word for “gate,” and French archeologists originally used pylon to describe the monumental, side-by-side gateways placed near Egyptian pyramids and temples. For millennia, massive pylons have flanked and decorated prominent entrances, pathways, bridges, and ports. Presently, “pylon” also connotes smaller markers (e.g. “traffic pylon” and “end zone pylon”), tall poles used by airplanes or ships for navigational guidance, and, especially in the United Kingdom, electric transmission towers.

The pylons above Conejo Pass transmit electricity and mediate a visible exchange with landscape. They are portals. They are thresholds. They are visible tokens of the millions of miles of electric lines that, over the course of a century, helped transform this relatively rustic, arid, inhospitable area into one of the most powerful, diverse, and iconic regions on the planet.

Power lines are sites of tension, physically and culturally. While my interest in the history of technology attracts me to different lines like these, these portals have also come to signal my own entrances and exits, flights and perchings in the state of California. I wonder if others might feel the same. Just before I returned to make this tour, the LA Times published an opinion piece urging the California Public Utilities commission, PG&E, and SCE to come up with a plan for the “immediate inspection of all the power lines in the state, starting with those in the high-fire risk areas.”[25]

This has been more like a strange tour compared to the inspections required to keep residents safe during the next fire season. In addition, convincing the public to accept the transmission lines (and corresponding costs) or new transmission will be difficult. For now, viewing unique single slivers in the vast and complex power systems reminds me of the interplays between California’s history and future of electric power, engineering and environmentalism.

Notes

[1] Jeff St. John, “7 Transmission Projects That Could Unlock A Renewable Energy Bounty,” GreenTechMedia, 9 April 2020, https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/9-transmission-projects-laying-the-paths-for-cross-country-clean-energy

^[2] James D. Reid, The Telegraph in America:Its Founders, Promoters, and Noted Men (New York: Derby Brothers, 1879), 498.

^[3] Alice Bates, “History of the Telegraph in California,” The Historical Society of Southern California Vol. 9.3 (1914), 181-187.

[4] James Schwoch, Wired Into Nature: The Telegraph and the North American Frontier (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018).

[5] James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, University of Akron Press, 1997), 42.

^[6] Some of the most well-known “Telegraph” streets in California are “Telegraph Road” which crosses greater Los Angeles from La Mirada to East Los Angeles and “Telegraph Avenue” which passes from downtown Oakland to the campus of University of California Berkeley. Lesser-frequented telegraph paths are the “Telegraph Road” in a remote stretch of mountains in Midpines, “Telegraph Hill” in El Dorado Hill, “Telegraph Blvd” in Marina, “Telegraph Ave” in Folsom, “Telegraph Place” in San Francisco, and “Telegraph Drive” in San Jose. There are also Telegraph Canyon, Telegraph Peak, Telegraph Hill, Telegraph Ridge, and Telegraph City, named for its location on the line 33 miles east of Stockton and 30 miles west of Sonora.

^[7] Richard Verrier, “In Hollywood, All Trains Lead to Fillmore,” LA Times, 20 July 2010 http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/07/in-hollywood-all-trains-lead-to-fillmore.html

[8] Joseph Serna, “Southern California Edison Power Lines Sparked Deadly Thomas Fire, Investigators Find,” LA Times, 13 March 2019. Ventura County Fire Department Report, https://vcfd.org/images/news/Thomas-Fire-Investigation-Report_Redacted_3-14-19.pdf

[9] Alejandro Borunda, “Climate Change is Contributing to California’s WildFires” 25 Oct 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/10/climate-change-california-power-outage/

[10] Katherine Blunt and Russell Gold, “PG&E Knew for Years Its Lines Could Spark Wildfires, and Didn’t Fix Them” Wall Street Journal 10 July 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-knew-for-years-its-lines-could-spark-wildfires-and-didnt-fix-them-11562768885

[11] American Wildfire Experience, “Thomas Fire,” Accessed at https://www.mysteryranch.com/thomas-fire

[12] Stan Walker, “Brief History of Oil Development in Pico Canyon,” http://www.elsmerecanyon.com/picocanyon/history/history.htm

[13] Mountain Recreation and Conservation Authority. “Whitney Canyon Park.” CA.gov, https://mrca.ca.gov/parks/park-listing/whitney-canyon/

[14] Etienne Benson. “Generating Infrastructural Invisibility: Insulation, Interconnection, and Avian Excrement in the Southern California Power Grid.” Environmental Humanities Vol. 6.1 (2015), 103-130.

[15] Leah Glaser, “Nice Towers, eh? Evaluation a Transmission Line in Arizona,” Cultural Resource Management, U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Vol. 20.14 (1997), 23-24.

[16] James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California, 187.

[17] Christopher F. Jones, “Landscapes of Intensification: Transport and Energy in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic, 1820–1930” The Journal of Transport History, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Dec 2014).

[18] Reznik, Eugene. “R. Crumb’s Snapshots: Source Material of the Legendary Comic Artist.” TIME, 30 Sept 2013. http://time.com/3802766/r-crumbs-snapshots-source-material-of-the-legendary-comic-artist/

[19] Levy, Eugene. “The Aesthetics of Power: High-Voltage Transmission Systems and the American Landscape.” Technology and Culture Vol. 38 No. 3 (July 1997), 575-607.

[20] Towers of Tomorrow. 15 min. New York: Jack Brady Productions, 1968.

^[21] Russell Flinchum, Henry Dreyfuss, Industrial Designer: The Man in the Brown Suit (New York: Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and Rizzoli, 1997), 174.

[22] Tikalsky, Susan M. and C.J. Willyward. “Aesthetics and Public Perceptions of Transmission Structures: A Brief History of the Research.” Right of Way (Electric Power Research Institute, March-April 2007), 28-32.

[23] Southern California Edison, “Design Guide: Aesthetic Guidelines for Electric Transmission Lines,” Southern California Edison, Rosemead, CA, 1972.

[24] “Conejo Boulders Climbing,” MountainProject.com, https://www.mountainproject.com/area/105850674/conejo-mountain

[25] “Power Lines Are Still Starting California Wildfires” LA Times, Opinion, 29 Nov. 2019, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-11-29/fix-california-wildfires-utlities-and-fire-starting-power-lines

Daniel Wuebben Ph.D. is the author of Power-Lined: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). His research on floral codes, viral literacy, and surfing has been published in academic journals such as Victorian Literature and Culture, Computers and Composition, and Symplokē. He lives in Segovia, Spain, and in July 2020 he will begin a two-year Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship with the Ciberimaginario Group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. His project on “grid literacy” engages electric rhetoric and transmission’s role in the energy transition.

Copyright: © 2020 Daniel Wuebben. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Poetry

Los Angeles County Jail Sonnets #13

Boom California on February 28, 2020

Yago Cura

Don’t talk about commissary on commissary day,
or the Liege of Hot Water will snatch that privilege
due to dues you have not yet paid with the makeshift bridge
of comfort afforded by municipal strangers scrubbing trays

in Waterworld, or emptying pod bins in the trash barracks,
buffing sparkle paste into the loam of county corridors trill
with linoleum hinges of time-served, suspended sentences or recognizance
released into the streets like a dirty, old tryant of schillings.

When you write your man, don’t write another dime’s name.
Watch out if your bunky tends to hide, she could be cooking Pruno
or assaulting another female in there when you at class, on your dayroom-game.

Read your book with one eye on the rec room, read the space
like a text, like a cipher armed with ominous nuance, like scratch-ticket loot
spent on roses, graduation bears, gas-station sunglasses, lipstick-tazers.

Yago Cura is an Argentine-American librarian, poet, pedagogue, and freelance simultaneous interpreter. He has been a public librarian for Los Angeles Public Library since 2015, and is currently the President of the Los Angeles chapter of REFORMA. He edits the online literary magazine, Hinchas de Poesia.

Copyright: © 2020 Yago Cura. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Articles

American Empire and the Landscapes of Los Angeles

Boom California on January 9, 2020

Jessica Kim

A drive through contemporary Los Angeles reveals American empire embedded throughout its urban landscape. “Imperial capital” likely conjures visions of eighteenth or nineteenth century European cities—London, Paris, Madrid—rather than twenty-first century Southern California. However, from Lisbon to London to Los Angeles, we encounter empire in the architecture, monuments, and even suburban gardens of these imperial centers.[1] In Los Angeles, nineteenth-century Mexican resources, extracted through imperial schemes, are fixed in the city’s iconic sprawl. This wealth, extracted through imperial plans and regimes in Mexico over the past century and a half, became manifest in the Los Angeles landscape. As explored in my recent book, Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865-1941, white investors and settlers in Los Angeles believed that for their newly acquired western city to grow, they needed an expansive hinterland or empire.[2] Los Angeles would boom, they argued, if it took in “tributary territories,” from Southern California, to Nevada, to Arizona, and, notably, to Mexico. Angeleno investors who sought opportunity in Mexico also bequeathed the city with tangible remembrances of their wealth.

Before turning to the city’s imperial landscapes, how did early Anglo migrants to Los Angeles envision the role of their new city in the world at the end of the nineteenth century and dawn of the twentieth? Take, for example, Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and enthusiastic investor in Mexico. With his son-in-law Harry Chandler and a small group of other investors, he owned almost a million acres of agricultural land in Mexico at the turn of the century and counted Mexican President Porfirio Díaz a close personal friend. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Otis and his newspaper also served as some of the staunchest and most vocal proponents of regional growth, north and south of the border. As he built a newspaper and real estate empire, Otis imagined a spectacular and distinctly imperial future for Los Angeles. In his words, the city would become “a mightier Pacific empire, with a population numbering millions where now we see only thousands, and possessing a measure of wealth, civilization and power now inconceivable.”[3]

In keeping with this belief, Otis embraced American empire and its corollary racial hierarchy, in which Anglo American purveyors of empire argued it was their burden to govern and “uplift” nonwhite peoples. From Los Angeles, he requested an army appointment immediately after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and won his military ranking of brigadier general during his tour in the Philippines, where he helped oversee a bloody repression of Philippine nationalists and vocally declared his distaste for the territory’s nonwhite population. Bellicose editorials penned by Otis and his staff supported the expansion of American commercial interests and political control into Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Panama. During his time in the Philippines, Otis declared to readers of his newspaper that the archipelago “must remain absolutely under American control…some of them [are] still in a state of savagery.”[4]

Otis exported a portion of this imperial vision to Mexico, where he bought a substantial investment property in 1904. With a syndicate of other Los Angeles investors, he purchased the Colorado River Land Company (CRLC), directly south of the California-Baja California border. Otis also leveraged support from the Mexican federal government through his friendship with Díaz, who welcomed American investment dollars in Mexico during his tenure, between 1876 and 1910. They corresponded regularly about the advantages of U.S. investments in Mexico and shared a perspective on the strict control of labor. Both were staunchly anti-union. After observing Diaz’s brutal suppression of several strikes in Mexico, Otis suggested utilizing Díaz’s union busting tactics in California and the West. Otis also regularly welcomed high ranking officials in the Díaz administration to his home, which he dubbed the “Bivouac,” in reference to his days in the military.[5]

Image of Otis’s home just after its completion in 1898. The house was completed at the same time Otis was serving in the Philippines and he dubbed the home the “Bivouac” or military encampment. Image 000100, Los Angeles Times Company Records, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Otis imbued his imperial outlook into the buildings he constructed in his hometown. In military parlance, “bivouac” refers to a temporary camp constructed by soldiers. Although his home was a solid and permanent structure in the then-fashionable MacArthur Park neighborhood, Otis imagined it as his military encampment. In it he created a “war room” where he proudly displayed weapons and memorabilia collected during his time in the military, including rifles, knives, swords, a pith helmet, and a large framed photo of himself in uniform. The architecture of the “Bivouac” also bears significance. The façade is distinctly mission revival, an early example of the architectural style that would sweep across Southern California and allow Anglos to link “Spanish architecture, the suburban good life, and racial hierarchy.”[6] In the naming of his newspaper headquarters, Otis also inscribed his imperial and militaristic worldview on the Los Angeles landscape. The Los Angeles Times building, from which he vociferously advocated for an American and Los Angeles empire, he dubbed the “Fortress.” Otis ruled his economic and publishing empire from this building, reinforced with granite against an attack he was sure lurked outside its walls. In case of conflict with labor unions, Otis stored fifty rifles in a tower room and a case of loaded shotguns next the managing editor’s desk. He also conducted military drills in Times offices.[7]

Otis even incorporated his imperial and martial mentality into his home decor. Pictured here is the war memorabilia room at the “Bivouac.” Image 000092, Los Angeles Times Company Records, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Image of the Los Angeles Times building just after it was bombed by trade unionists in 1910. Otis dubbed the headquarters of his newspaper “The Fortress.” C. C. Pierce Collection of Photographs, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Unfortunately, neither Otis’ home nor the original Times building still stands. Labor activists bombed the Times building in 1910, hoping to undermine Otis and the city’s rabidly anti-union newspaper. Union activists sought, through dynamite and fire, to literally blow the Times building out of the city’s topography. The ties of empire, labor, and dissent are also intricate here—Job Harriman, the defense lawyer for the Times bombers, would also defend Mexican revolutionaries Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón. Credited as the intellectual spark for the Mexican Revolution, the Flores Magón brothers critiqued American investment in Mexico generally and Harrison Gray Otis directly and were arrested and imprisoned in Los Angeles at the urging of the Times owner.[8] The other building, the Bivouac, Otis donated to Los Angeles County with the stipulation that it be used in perpetuity to “promote the arts.” The county founded the Otis Art Institute in the general’s former home but eventually tore down the building to construct a bigger facility in the 1950s.

The street corner in front of Otis’ former home, however, still bears witness to his martial mentality and imperial aspirations. Shortly after his death in 1916, son-in-law Harry Chandler organized a group of friends to raise $50,000 to hire an artist (and Russian prince) to immortalize Otis in a statue, placed just steps from the “Bivouac.” Cast in bronze, Otis wears his military uniform and, reminiscent of conquistadors and adventurers who preceded him, points vigorously at landscapes beyond his street corner.[9]

Statue of Otis, center, dressed in his military uniform. The statue stands across the street from the location of his former home in MacArthur Park. California Historical Society Collection, University of Southern California Libraries.

Other figures in Los Angeles history also staked out commercial empires in Mexico and then marked their imperial exploits on the city’s landscape, including oil titan Edward Doheny. Doheny was at one point the largest oil producer in the world, one of the world’s wealthiest men, and was one of the first to drill for oil in Mexico. By 1894, Doheny controlled the largest portion of Los Angeles’ emerging oil industry. Due in large part to his efforts, in the first two decades of the twentieth century the Los Angeles region became one of the world’s most important oil producers. Wells sprinkled across Southern California produced 20% of the world’s supply by World War I. [10]

Eager to apply his petroleum knowledge in other locales and to reap further fortunes, Doheny looked eagerly to extend his corporate empire beyond the environs of Southern California. In fact, it was Doheny who first exported the oil expertise developed in Southern California’s oil industry to Mexico. In 1900, Doheny took his first trip to Mexico to prospect for oil near Tampico in the State of Tamaulipas on the Gulf of Mexico. In his first decade in Mexico, Doheny produced 85 percent of the oil extracted in the nation and emerged as the largest independent oil producer in the world.[11]

He also held that pulling the fuel of the modern era out of the earth was an endeavor that would propel Mexico towards modernity and civilization. Like many American empire builders, he saw his investment in Mexico and dealings with Mexican workers as both a civilizing force and a way to enrich himself. His job, as he saw it, was to make a fortune while simultaneously “uplifting” the non-white workers he employed in Mexico. As he testified to congress regarding his treatment of his Mexican employees: “We must be patient with the ignorance and the lack of initiative in the Mexican peon. They do not learn by instruction but must be taught by example…the greatest thing we can do in Mexico is the example which our workmen present to the Mexican of how to work, how to live, and how to progress.”[12]

Doheny brought the bulk of his fortune back to Los Angeles and became integral to its development. He had already sparked the city’s oil boom and helped establish one of the region’s most lucrative industries. He helped to develop the City of Beverly Hills. He gave generously to the University of Southern California, located just a few blocks south of his lush complex of mansions at Chester Place, the city’s first gated community. A devout Catholic, Doheny also gave millions of his oil dollars to various Catholic churches and causes in Southern California—as much as $100 million over the course of his life in Los Angeles.[13]

His home, particularly the structure of the greenhouse, was a brick-and-mortar paean to his oil empire. Life at his lavish estate in Chester Place included a private bowling alley, a small private zoo, and this greenhouse featuring an indoor pool large enough to float a canoe. Doheny filled the greenhouse with Mexican plant specimens, carefully moving plant samples from Mexico’s oil regions on his private rail car that ran regularly between Los Angeles and Mexico’s eastern coast. Some historians call this practice—transplanting plant specimens from a colony to an imperial center—“botanical imperialism.”[14] In other words, it was not a simply an interest in gardening that led Doheny to transplant botanical specimens from the Tampico oil region to Los Angeles. During the age of empire, cultivating plants from colonial outposts was intimately bound up in processes of conquest, acquisition, power, and ultimately, display.

The greenhouse and pool, including the canoe and Mexican plant specimens, in Doheny’s Los Angeles home. Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

The Spanish-language press in Los Angeles did not miss the fact that Mexican resources paid for his opulent presence in the built environment of Los Angeles. In a scathing critique of Doheny published by La Prensa (a Los Angeles-based Spanish language paper), an anonymous author observed in 1919: “Where did his colossal fortune come from? Simply from Mexico…the whole fortune accumulated by the ‘parvenu’ Doheny has come from Mexico without the least benefitting the country. On the contrary, every dollar coming from the Tampico Oil Fields is invested in the United States and especially in Los Angeles where he has a palatial mansion which attracts attention through a lavish display of oriental luxury.”[15] Mexican Americans in Los Angeles were well aware that Doheny’s exploitation of Mexican mineral resources and labor had translated into astonishing displays of wealth north of the border.

Doheny’s Mexican fortune also constructed the library, in Spanish colonial style, at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, just north of Los Angeles. In addition to the building’s Spanish colonial architecture, the library’s facade is based on the Metropolitan Cathedral, the church located in Mexico City’s central plaza and the largest cathedral in the Americas. This mirroring of Mexico in Los Angeles, paid for by Mexican resources, is more than just symbolic. Los Angeles is a twenty-first global metropolis because its early promoters and investors oriented the city towards Mexico, the borderlands, and empire at the end of the nineteenth century. That a replica of a Mexican cathedral stands in Southern California, built with wealth wrought from Mexican oil, is the result of imperial design, not chance. It demonstrates the power of changing the landscape as part of strategies of empire—the Spanish built the original cathedral literally on the center of the Aztec empire. Doheny’s fortune replicated it in the seat of his power—Los Angeles.

St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California, just north of Los Angeles. The building’s architecture is Spanish colonial and the façade to the right is based on the Catedral Metropolitana in Mexico City. Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

The Catedral Metropolitana in Mexico City, the largest church in Latin America. The smaller chapel on the right served as the model for the library at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California. The Doheny family provided the funds for the construction of the library. “Catedral Metropolitana Mexico City (1)” by Carl Campbell is licensed under Creative Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

While empire is embedded across the greater Los Angeles landscape, we can also find resistance to American imperial projects built into the city’s infrastructure. Take for example, a public art, and in many ways a public history, controversy over Los Angeles and empire that erupted in 1932. Los Angeles city leaders, notably white, had just finished an overhaul of the city’s historic core, known as “Olvera Street.” Chandler, now owner of the Los Angeles Times, and Los Angeles promoter Christine Sterling spearheaded the effort. They remade the oldest part of Los Angeles (a historically Mexican and Asian neighborhood and what they described as a “slum”) into a bucolic and entirely fabricated Mexican village.[16]

Over the course of his life in Los Angeles, Chandler aggressively promoted the region, calculating that a growing city would benefit both his newspaper and his extensive real estate investments. Promoting the city paid—toward the end of his life in the 1940s, the Times estimated that he was the eleventh richest man in the world. Part of his portfolio included holding on to the million acres of property that he and his father-in-law purchased at the turn of the century for almost forty years.

Part of the renovation of Olvera Street, begun in the 1920s, included inviting the famed Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros to paint an 80-foot mural on the side of the neighborhood’s Italian Hall. A veteran of the Mexican Revolution, Siqueiros had worked with Diego Rivera on mural campaigns in Mexico City and considered art a political tool and vehicle of revolutionary thought. Siqueiros also believed that revolutionary art should be truly “public” and had just developed a new type of paint and painting technique that would allow murals to be done outdoors and on the sides of buildings, where anyone could see and appreciate them.[17] Chandler and Olvera Street renovators expected Siqueiros to paint something “exotic and picturesque,” in keeping with the recently revamped neighborhood.[18]

Instead, Siqueiros chose the history of European and American imperialism in Mexico as the dramatic subject for his mural, América Tropical. Through images of toppled pyramids, he gestured to the violent Spanish destruction of indigenous culture and society. A bald eagle, symbolizing the United States, hovers over the crucifixion of an Indigenous man. To the right, revolutionary soldiers crouch, training their rifles on the eagle. Significantly, the mural faced Los Angeles city hall. Aimed at the seat of power in the city, the mural embodied a scathing critique of not just American imperialism in Mexico and Latin America, but a critique leveled at the city itself and its role in promoting the interests of American investors in Mexico.

Siqueiros’ América Tropical shortly after its completion in 1932. Los Angeles Examiner Photographs Collection, University of Southern California Libraries.

Chandler, Sterling, and their partners in the Olvera Street renovation, including municipal leaders, immediately had the mural whitewashed. Critiques of empire had no place in their bucolic reimagining of Mexico in Los Angeles’ historic core. Less than six months after it was unveiled in 1932, the entire mural was covered in a thick coat of white paint. Calls for restoration began in the 1960s with the rise of the Chicano Movement but it was not until the 2000s that restoration work began in earnest. The Getty Foundation (endowed by the oil fortune of the Getty family) funded one third of the project with the City of Los Angeles covering the remainder. Ironies abound here—major funding for the restoration came from just the type of capitalist enterprise that Siquieros, a committed communist, could not stand. And city government, key in having the original covered in 1932, paid for the bulk of the restoration during the early 2000s.

Ultimately, finding empire and anti-imperialism embedded in Los Angeles’ infrastructure is more than simply a reflection of some historical or economic and imperial trends. Instead, the examples explored here advanced certain ideologies and narratives about the past and the present. Public space and urban landscapes became a place of conversation and dialogue and sometimes even violence about urban growth and the advance of American empire and capitalism from the U.S. west and into Mexico. There were military and martial components of this ideology—as seen in Otis’s impact on the Los Angeles built environment. As he and Doheny also asserted through their infrastructure, this advance was racialized. They maintained that empire could unfold from the U.S. West and into Mexico and the Pacific precisely because whites where superior to nonwhites. Finally, labor activists, artists and critics of these imperial projects used or attempted to use public space and urban landscapes to push back against more dominant narratives. The bombing of a building or the south-facing brick wall and a new type of mural paint served as the tools to call the historical and contemporary narratives about a Los Angeles deserving of imperial reach into Mexico into question.

Empire continues to shape Los Angeles landscapes. Take for example that the neighborhood surrounding Harrison Gray Otis’s home and the statue of him is now a center of the Mexican and Central American immigrant community in Los Angeles. It was precisely the type of imperial and commercial ventures that he promoted that resulted in economic displacement of Mexicans and Central Americans over the last century and caused them to seek refuge in the United States. If we consider the history and topography of the MacArthur Park neighborhood, past and present, we unravel the history of empire and its consequences over a century, all within a block. An empire builder and advocate of extracting resources in Mexican and Latin America, stands in the midst of a neighborhood of migrants, many displaced by that history but also creating something new—a vibrant immigrant community in a space suffering from decline and disinvestment since the 1960s.

As Dolores Hayden called for in her pathbreaking book, The Power of Place, it is imperative to “read” or analyze urban landscapes as historical texts, situating ourselves deeply in urban regions and neighborhoods, analyzing urban space as the result of human history and human struggles on particular landscapes. In other words, we must ask questions about how relationships of power or categories and identities of race, class, and gender shape how cities are designed, constructed, occupied, appropriated, desecrated, and admired. In short, social and economic history and urban landscapes are intertwined.[19]

In a moment of intense public debate over historical monuments, historians are interrogating the narratives we tell—or fail to tell—in American landscapes. As in the vigorous recent debate over Confederate statues, historians of California and the West are reconsidering how western monuments and landscapes can tell a fuller and more nuanced story about social conflict and inequality, particularly those rooted in race, ethnicity, conquest, and empire.[20] The remnants of these stories in Los Angeles are all around us—just look up.

Notes

[1] Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds., Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display, and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). See also Philip J. Ethington, “The Global Spaces of Los Angeles, 1920s-1930s,” in Gyan Prakash and Kevin M. Kruse, eds., The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

[2] Jessica Kim, Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865-1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

[3] Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt, Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers, and Their Influence on Southern California (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977).

[4] “Interview on the Philippines,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1902.

[5] “General Otis Pleased with His Trip to Mexico,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1902; Letter from Harrison Gray Otis to Porfirio Díaz, December 19, 1903, document 000430, legajo XXIX, Coleccíon Porfirio Díaz, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.

[6] Phoebe S. Kropp, California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). See also William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of Southern California Press, 2004).

[7] Errol Wayne Stevens, “Two Radicals and Their Los Angeles: Harrison Gray Otis and Job Harriman,” California History 84, no. 3 (2009) 44-70.

[8] Ibid.

[9] D. J. Waldie, “The Newsboy, the General, and the Lost Soldier of MacArthur Park,” https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/the-newsboy-the-general-and-the-lost-soldier-of-macarthur-park.

[10] Martin Ansell, Oil Baron of the Southwest: Edward L. Doheny and the Development of the Petroleum Industry in California and Mexico (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998); Margaret Leslie Davis, Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Dan La Botz, Edward L. Doheny: Petroleum, Power, and Politics in the United States and Mexico (New York: Praeger, 1991); Myrna Santiago, The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

[11] See Davis, La Botz, and Santiago.

[12] Statement of Edward L. Doheny, Investigation of Mexican Affairs, Hearing before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 1919.

[13] See Davis, Ethington, and LaBotz.

[14] Rebecca Preston, “‘The Scenery of the Torrid Zone’: Imagined Travels and the Culture of Exotics in Nineteenth-Century British Gardens,” in Imperial Cities, edited by Felix Driver and David Gilbert, 194-214 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).

[15] Translation of article published La Prensa, Los Angeles, April 12, 1919, box 34, Bergman Collection, Huntington Library.

[16] William Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Kropp, California Vieja.

[17] Emily MacDonald-Korth and Leslie Rainer, “The Getty Conservation Institute Project to Conserve David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Mural América Tropical,” Getty Research Journal, no. 6 (2014) 103-114.

[18] Quoted in Kropp.

[19] Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995).

[20] See for example the important op-ed by Laura Dominguez, “Trump’s Stance on National Monuments is Straight out of the 19^th Century,” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-dominguez-antiquities-act-trump-monuments-20190222-story.html.

Jessica Kim is an associate professor of history at California State University, Northridge and the author of Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865-1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).

Copyright: © 2020 Jessica Kim. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Reviews

California Calls You

Boom California on November 26, 2019

Leslie Lodwick

In 1919, then unemployed Viennese architect Richard Neutra had not yet immigrated to the United States and was disillusioned from his military service in World War I. So the story goes, Neutra saw a bright travel poster in a gray Zurich train station whose text spelled, amidst palm trees and glistening blue water, “CALIFORNIA CALLS YOU.” It was then that Neutra, who would become one of the most influential twentieth century architects in Southern California designing dozens of private homes and public buildings throughout the Greater Los Angeles area, was first called west. Nearly ten years later Neutra, and countless others, ultimately heeded the call to California as a promised land of pure sunshine, curative climate and good health—a place that could cure all your ailments. Lyra Kilston’s Sun Seekers (Atelier Éditions) traces the often-intersecting characters who took up this call—architects, artists, designers, sanitorium operators—as well as those involved in the return to nature (Zurück zur Natur), utopian, and healthy body movements in the US and Germany, in order to try to figure out the origins of that quintessentially Californian relationship to health, body, nature and technology.

schindlerandneutrafamily_adc_100_213_p_20 copy.jpg

Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler, Dione Neutra, and Dion Neutra, at the Kings Road house they briefly shared, West Hollywood, California. Courtesy of the R. M. Schindler papers, Architecture & Design Collection. Art, Design & Architecture Museum; University of California, Santa Barbara

As a self-described fourth generation Angeleno, Kilson’s stake in the game often reads like a reconstruction of a personal history of “California-ness.” As she roots her own familial connection to a California lifestyle based around fitness, diet, celebrity, technology and industry, Kilston looks for the link between these disparate ideas in order to historicize a California whose identity is also seemingly premised on a perpetual quest for the contemporary, the new, the innovative—a certain subconscious refusal to be historicized. Kilston contextualizes Californian lifestyle as part of a larger simultaneous movement in Europe and the United States which found a foothold in California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Due to its oft-mythologized Spanish colonial-era reputation as a space capable of healing through space and climate alone, people began to congregate in California in order to collectively devote their lives to healthy living. Somewhere between art book and academic text, Kilston’s robustly researched volume is conversational in tone, richly illustrated and accessible to wide audiences, and sheds new light on the inspirations and contexts for the already widely told tale of California modern architecture. Kilston forges a link between health seekers and modern architecture that articulates a construction of California-ness itself, which instead of functioning as merely a happy backdrop to movements around healthy living, demands its own story be told.

Boys sunbathing circa 1928 at an open-air “preventorium,” a school for “pre-tubercular” boys that opened in 1922 in Pasadena. source: Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

Early in her research for the book, Kilston discovered references to a ‘Highland Springs Resort’ just outside of Los Angeles, in Beaumont, CA in the pages of a one-hundred-year-old newspaper. The newspaper described a resort which claimed to be based on the austere principles of an obscure German dietician named Arnold Ehret. Dr. Ehret promoted a disciplined personal regimen of “no caffeine, alcohol, meat or processed foods, daily exercise, sun baths, and regular bouts of fasting to clear the body of toxic, disease-causing matter.”[1] With followers claiming cures, Dr. Ehret amassed tremendous popularity and arguably influenced modern health and lifestyle movements. Kilston traveled to the still functioning resort (and one-time summer camp—my own former sixth grade camp!) to look for lingering traces of the early health movements or Dr. Ehret’s teachings, but found it instead transformed to a soon to be wellness center and working educational farm; disappointingly no one there had ever heard of Dr. Ehret. Kilston offers this anecdote to introduce the purpose for writing this text: California may be discursively hyper aware of its existence as a mecca for all things “healthy,” but it has a short, often revisionist, memory when it comes to its own history and formations. Kilston argues that this California story of healthy living begins with the tuberculosis epidemic which primarily affected residents of dense urban areas in continental Europe and the East Coast of the US in the late nineteenth century. She traces a fascinating history of the sanitorium movement in Europe and the northern United States in which doctors promoted healthy lifestyles, natural light, sunbathing, exposure to fresh air and restricted diets as cure for early stage tuberculosis (which, in reality, had mixed success). European architects responded in turn by articulating that buildings too, when placed and designed correctly, could aid in recovery and thus designed dozens of sanitoriums, notably Alvar Aalto’s Paimio Sanatorium in Finland, the Klinik Clavadel in Davos, and Jan Duiker and Bernard Bijvoet’s Sanatorium Zonnestraal (whose name means ‘sunbeam’) in the early twentieth century. This was taken up in the Sanitorium Belt, an unofficial area of land stretching from San Diego to Los Angeles which showcased dozens of sanitoriums believed to have architecturally curative properties (sun roofs and skylights, large windows, local materials meant to connect to nature, planned vistas, and painted in calming colors).

HealthHouse_gri_2004_r_10_b0077_f005_7_761_10

View of the Lovell ‘Health House’ designed by Richard Neutra. Photo by Julius Shulman. © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute

Health seekers from mostly Germany and the US, often doctors or naturopaths who had contracted tuberculosis themselves and believed that California’s climate itself when harnessed through a building could cure the disease, built and operated dozens of these sanitoriums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the primarily agricultural Los Angeles area. Kilston notes that Richard Neutra’s later 1929 Lovell Health House was built in the spirit of these European and California sanitoriums for health and also indicated a Le Corbusier-ian desire to design the home as a “machine for living”–the implication for both Le Corbusier and Neutra being healthy and correct living.[2] She marks a rupture in modern architecture when “healthy lifestyles” became linked to daily life and spaces for daily activity, and were no longer just something to think of in the context of disease; healthy, disease-free lifestyles could now be for everyone through means of prevention (like diet and exercise) and through homes, schools and other buildings which would harness the healing powers of the natural landscape and climate. It was in this moment that a healthy lifestyle became foremost preventative as opposed to curative, and therefore accessible to all who sought it. Kilston spends a fair bit of time describing the concurrent trends in modern architecture in both Europe and California and suggests that architect Neutra himself was the link between nearly identical health-related movements within architecture in both Europe and California. The second half of the book is dedicated to a cast of characters crucial in defining the sun seeker movement in California: the hermit in Palm Springs, the Nature Boys, the raw vegetarian cafeteria owners and cookbook authors in downtown Los Angeles, the German Zurück zur Natur movement, eugenics scientists, exercise regimen developers, those with beards and a certain idealized cooptation of indigenous lifestyles as manifest in both German and Californian social organizations. She knits together otherwise disparate characters and groups in Germany and California and suggests their reciprocal relationship is an often unremarked upon component of the California identity of health and the “natural.”

The Nature Boys in Topanga Canyon, California, August 1948. source: Estate of Gypsy Boots

Sun Seekers offers a relatively comprehensive narrative of the construction of the mythologies around “healthy and natural lifestyles” and offers hints at the psychological motives of health seekers flocking to California while proffering a specific reflexive relationship between Southern California and Germany. Kilston acknowledges the grotesque, the obscene, the weird, and the cult-like within the construction of the healthy lifestyle narrative with neither reverence nor disdain. Instead, Kilston suggests that a false dichotomy between nature and civilization creates something special for those who struggle to reconcile it and suggests that this is perhaps essentially Californian; this concurrent search for the “machine in the garden”[3] and the purely “natural” is the paradoxical Californian trope that inspires and repels, and its quite complex lineage and European roots suggest there is actually more to the story, which this text just only begins to scratch the surface of.

As Sun Seekers toes the line between art book and academic text, some might suggest its audience could be more clearly formed were it to more clearly identify as one or the other. On the contrary, though Kilston’s limited framing can feel sparse, it does allow the text to fill a niche in writing about architectural history. That is, it is neither pedantic in tone nor does it assume a cultivated relationship to design itself, but instead offers a reading of architectural spaces which argues for their integral role in social history and in constructing collective mythologies/discourses, while inviting readers to take up the relationship between the built environment and the construction of Californian identity in a clear and joyful tone. Possible extensions of the text might consider a more explicitly political lens through which to consider this relationship between German and American health seeking and architecture movements, particularly their mutually shared relationships with colonial and territorial expansion and racism which are arguably integral to foundations of the respective movements themselves. Likewise, the definitions of “nature” and “the natural” are wholly untroubled and suggest a universalized understanding of how these various actors involved with the narrative interpreted conceptions of “the natural,” which I suspect, is not the case. Kilston does briefly allude to both the roles of race and colonialism and the arbitrary construction of nature in the construction of Californian identity, but her analysis ends there. Instead, Kilston frames and names the ways in which the persistence of a certain kind of California exceptionalism is discursively insisted upon and Sun Seekers offers some clear pathways to unpacking that exceptionalism through making clear the limitations of a supposed a-historicalness of healthy living and relationship to nature. That Californian aesthetic of a sunkissed natural world of innovation, ingenuity and healthy living is a construction much older, and much more complicated than it seems.

Notes

[1] Lyra Kilson, Sun Seekers, pg 6.

[2] The Lovell Health House was designed by Neutra for physician and naturopath Dr. Phillip Lovell as a house whose spaces themselves would contribute to physical health of inhabitants.

[3] Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. The “machine in the garden” refers to the tension between the pastoral ideal of the natural American landscape with industrialization and its need for land, constant expansion and natural resources.

Leslie Lodwick is an educator, historian and doctoral student in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research is concerned with issues of race, gender and education in histories of 19th and 20th-century architecture, planning and design. Her work also explores the visual culture of childhood, school, and play. She is assistant managing editor of Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal.

Interviews

Curating History in Southern California and Beyond

Boom California on September 26, 2018

Editorial Introduction: Midway through volume 100 in its present ordering, Merry Ovnick has overseen tillers of California’s historical terrain as Editor of Southern California Quarterly for fourteen years, curating regional historical scholarship for readers eager to learn the shared history of this remarkable place. Published first in 1884 and running for 134 years as the scholarly publication of the Historical Society of Southern California, SCQ explores “the history of Southern California, California as a whole, and the American West.” Ovnick’s own expertise, though, is Los Angeles; specifically L.A.’s residential architectural history. Boom Editor Jason Sexton and SCQ Book Reviews Editor Allison Varzally sat down with Ovnick earlier this summer in a residential setting on L.A.’s Westside—not far from where Merry grew up—to conduct this interview.

Boom: It’s always good for Californians to come back to their roots. And having this conversation here is probably special because this is where you grew up, about two blocks from here. What is it like coming back to the old hood?

Ovnick: Well, I don’t come very often, and it was quite different during those days. We started school at Short Avenue Elementary, just around the corner, and we were its pioneer kindergarten class. At the end of this block was all fields—agricultural land, where beans and celery and things like that were farmed. They’d been Japanese farms before the relocation and in my earliest memory they were Mexican farms. This is home.

Boom: This is home, but now you are in the San Fernando Valley both living and teaching. But going back to your growing up years, what was it like growing up in L.A.? Were your parents from Los Angeles?

Ovnick: I don’t know what to compare it with, but it worked out. My parents came from Kansas and migrated during the Depression, and my dad worked at Douglas Aircraft during the war.

Boom: Now you are a historian interested in regional history, and have been editing Southern California Quarterly for fourteen years. When did you begin to think about California as a place? And specifically, to think of Los Angeles as a place?

Ovnick: I don’t think as a kid you think of such things. It’s just home. That’s what you know. You may travel, but then you come home and home is normal. Unless you’re a child whose parents moved around a lot so that you can understand how different a culture or lifestyle might be in different places, I don’t think you think comparatively. At least, I didn’t. We moved to Santa Monica when I was ten, but that was still local. And we did some camping things. Every so often we trekked to Kansas to visit my grandmother. But that was it.

Boom: What were your preferred hobbies or pastimes as a kid? Were you reading a lot? Nonfiction? Were you interested in history from the beginning? Or were you studying space?

Ovnick: Oh yes, I was a terrible bookworm. We went to the Venice Library, which was an Arts and Crafts style building at the time. By fourth grade I had read every book that I could in the children’s section. So the librarian—whose name was Faye—kindly said that I could use adult books as long as she or my mother approved of the books. I would get historical fiction things, and then the main character would snuggle up to somebody (graphically described) and I’d wonder, “Why would they be doing that?” But I knew better than to ask my mother. She would never let me read again. So I had to grow into with this mentality of, “Oh, now I understand the things that I had read.”

Boom: What led you down the career path into becoming a professional historian?

Ovnick: Well, I decided when I was thirteen that when I grew up I wanted to be a history professor. Mainly, in those days, history meant princesses and castles and that sort of thing. But I had understood that history professors got to teach what their favorite subjects are and they got to do research on those subjects and they could just dwell on this world that I had come to enjoy. The “history of what” changed as I grew older and a little more perceptive, outside of the princess mold.

Boom: Did you have inspiring history teachers?

Ovnick: No, it was books. And so public libraries meant a lot.

Boom: So what led you to become, then, not just interested in history but specifically a scholar of Los Angeles?

Ovnick: Well, I have an interest in architecture. I’m not sure exactly how that started, but I’m interested in buildings. The other was that as an undergraduate, at Santa Barbara then at UCLA, my field was Japanese history. That was my interest. I decided that to do graduate work I would need language and would have to go to Japan to do research. So, when I was proposed to I originally said “no,” causing a big flap. Then I said “okay,” but here’s the condition: I would get to do graduate work in Japan. My husband said “yes,” and we got married. Then he said he lied and I could never go. So I had to think about what I wanted to do when I eventually took up graduate studies in the U.S.

Boom: Was there a gap there at all? When you discovered you weren’t able to go to Japan to study where and what you wanted?

Ovnick: It was quite a crisis, and lasted a long time. I’ve now since been to Japan and enjoyed it very much. But at the time I figured California history has the Asian-American component, which was the next best thing.

Boom: Southern California Quarterly is more than Southern California history and more than California history. It includes the Far West, the American West, and the Pacific.

Ovnick: I’ve had articles on Hawaii, and there’s one in our Fall 2018 issue about British Columbia. But that article does mention there’s a parallel with what’s happening further down the coast.

Boom: But taking you back to 2005, when you took the helm as editor of the journal, why did you volunteer to take it up?

Ovnick: It was because I had done the book review editing at first. Clark Davis had been groomed to be the successor to Doyce Nunis (who was the editor for forty-three years), and started by becoming book review editor. The journal had fallen into trying times, with grammar errors, typos, and other things that the editor had missed. That was painful for Clark, who was quite the diplomat, to work on the book reviews when the journal was in such sorry shape. So we talked about it and I was the intern coordinator for the history program at CSUN. So, I said how about I get interns who are dual English/History majors and set them up under Doyce as copy editors? Doyce, who was missing teaching, would love to have the tutelary role and there would be an extra pair of eyes without Clark having to say something.

So, we did that for a while and that worked out well. He loved handling the interns. He had two interns and they both went on to Ph.D.s later. Then Clark died very suddenly at age thirty-seven—a tragedy for all who knew him. That then left a gap. That’s why I was moved in to be book review editor, and Doyce later retired as editor two years later.

Boom: Among the many exceptional articles you’ve published in SCQ, do you have a favorite?[1]

Ovnick: No—usually the one that is latest is my favorite.

Boom: So you didn’t have any doubts about assuming the editorship? Because it’s one thing to be book review editor, but a much grander responsibility to be the editor. What was the transition like? Can you describe what you see your role as editor being?

Ovnick: I work approximately twenty hours a week on the journal. At first it was very, very difficult and it was also just as I was starting to turn my dissertation into a book. So that got put on the back burner and it never got done because I do this instead.

The role of editor is a dual role and there’s a conflict between the two. One, the editor is the conduit for the author. The author has done the research, the analysis, the writing, and this is how the work gets out to the public. It also builds her CV and helps her survive “publish or perish.” So, the conduit role is one where the editor just helps the author shape things, getting them to publication.

The other role is to serve as the guardian of the history discipline’s standards. You’re the one who decides what the public should read and what kind of integrity it should have. So the conflict is, if you really need articles for the next issue and you have a poor article but you really need an article, do you relax the guardian role? One of the safeguards is the peer review process which we rigorously enforce. But even so, there’s that pressure from the two sides.

Boom: And at certain times has it been harder to secure potential articles?

Ovnick: I’m in one of those situations right now. I have one article that has to be totally revised and the author is incapable of doing so. I’ve worked on him for two years to get this wonderful research into publication shape and he can’t do it. I’m going to just shepherd this along. But that’s only one article out of the three that make up an issue, so I’m in one of those desperate spots.

I have actually had several times where I’ve needed to step in. Doyce admitted that many times he solved this “not having an article ahead” in one of two ways. Either he wrote an article himself and published it and admitted that he had not sent things out for review for several years because he thought he was capable of reviewing everything himself. The other way he solved it was to just not produce that issue. Instead of volume or issue one, two, three, and four for the year, he’d have one and two, then a combined three and four, which he got complaints about from people who were paying for a subscription. They got this type of reaction fairly frequently. During my tenure, though, we’ve never missed an issue, and we’ve never been late in fourteen years.

Boom: Obviously “quarterly” is embedded in the name of the Southern California Quarterly, but have you thought about—given the pressures of producing in such a regular fashion—producing less frequently? Like maybe once a year, or even twice a year?

Ovnick: In the early years of the journal, it was an annual publication in the very beginning. But that hasn’t come up with the historical society. If it does, we could do that. So far it hasn’t.

Boom: And is there significant direction that comes from the historical society?

Ovnick: Well, the money comes from them, and this is their most costly item. So, it’s a crisis for them, they’ve been doing a big fundraising job just to support the journal. We recently received a bequest.

Boom: That’s reassuring. Can you say anything about that?

Ovnick: As a bequest, it’s a will, and becomes active upon the passing of the donor, which is hopefully a long time from now.

Boom: We did spend some time going through the various issues you’ve produced as editor, and noticed a couple of innovations, like “The Historian’s Eye.” Can you tell us about that?

Ovnick: I did a number of those with the help from others. One of them was someone from the Auto Club, and one was from his wife, who is the historian or archivist at City of Hope. They asked to do them, and I have another author who suggested that we do little bio sketches. His first suggestion was Mira Hershey, you know, of Hershey Hall at UCLA, an early feminist who had money.

Boom: One of the images depicted folks getting into a street car and you brought up the theme “chivalry.” How do you choose images? And what are you looking for?

Ovnick: Just something interesting. I have to be careful to ensure it’s not just some image I like. I did this in the classroom, things like that chivalry one when you notice what the ladies are wearing, they have to step up fairly high to get off the dirt street and there’s that white dress dragging on the dirt street. Various little things like that.

Boom: In some decisions you’ve made of what to publish in Southern California Quarterly, what you’re highlighting isn’t your area of research, it’s rather a curatorial area of interest. I’ve noticed that during your tenure. I [Jason] remember the previous editor of Boom, Jon Christensen, with an issue of Boom we were working on where I said I didn’t want to strong-arm things related to my interests and views, to which he responded that I’m allowed to do some of that. But I noticed you haven’t really. You’ve focused mostly on racial, international, socio-political history, and social histories.

Ovnick: Yes, I admit that there’s probably more architectural articles early on because somebody would know me from my architectural interests and submit an article here rather than somewhere else. Likewise then for Japanese-American history, which I’ve probably done more than is quite even-handed. I have another one coming up in the next issue.

Boom: So, let’s bring us back into the areas you’ve published on, especially in L.A., and California, as these things also reflect some of Boom’s concerns related to the future of California. How do we curate this place and what’s here? From your work on residential architectural history, does Southern California have a best style of architecture, one most fitting for this place?

Ovnick: Well, the Spanish Colonial, which was deemed to be appropriate because of a romanticized version of a Spanish past. But I’ve seen Spanish Colonial houses in Utah and Wyoming where somebody just liked that style I guess and there it was. So that’s one we’ve appropriated.

Also, the California Bungalow, which was my dissertation topic. I have a particular soft spot for that. The Craftsman magazine, which was published in the East, after 1908 had a crisis where they let their entire art department go. There were drawings of ideal interiors that sold their style of furniture, but they had to fire their art department. They then became reliant on people near and far to send them photographs to use as illustrations. A great share of the ones that came during that period came from Los Angeles with photographs of small to large houses in the Arts and Crafts mode. But they were redone for California, with lightweight material, not the winter roofs or snow-shedding roofs or insulated walls. They featured the indoor-outdoor life with sweeping porches and cross-ventilation, and on-site trees intertwined with the house, that were indigenous to California.

It became The Craftsman look because of their lack of an art department. I later tracked down some of those houses and found them by looking through Ancestry.com and finding out where that architect’s address was. There is something about the appropriateness of that style for California.

Boom: Why do you have this kind of affection for the Bungalow style?

Ovnick: It just looks very cozy and comfortable. I wouldn’t mind living in one.

Boom: Does your own house reflect your architectural passions?

Ovnick: No, which of course destroys the entire premise of my first book.[2]

Boom: Your book and one issue of Southern California Quarterly noted the cross-pollination of East and West characteristic of Southern California architecture, which has also been characterized by experimentation and reinvention. Isn’t that a luxury, perhaps one that we’re not going to be able to afford much longer?

Ovnick: Oh yes, and the single-family residence is an albatross.

Boom: Okay, well that brings me to another question. Is a house an investment?

Ovnick: Absolutely. When you look at the early advertisements, they promised that when you buy a tract house in the 1920s it will double in value in a number of years. It is an investment and you could buy the empty lot next door and hold onto it, because the value of that land and that tract is bound to go up.

Boom: We can probably safely conclude that for twenty miles of coastal California, but what about the interior? The Central Valley, the Inland Empire?

Ovnick: Inland Empire has its own background because of the citrus boom and the railroads coming in there and other things. It might be special. For the Central Valley, Bakersfield and Fresno have taken the prize recently of being California’s fastest growing cities. I’m glad though that I don’t live in the Central Valley. It’s hot enough in the San Fernando Valley.

Boom: In some of your research you’ve shown that some developments here have been borrowed from elsewhere, especially from the American East. But have we and could we be developing ideas for residential housing from the Far East more then we have? Like Japan?

Ovnick: Well, the indoor-outdoor house with sliding panels is the Japanese aesthetic of simplicity. Those have influenced our architecture.

Boom: I [Allison] was also wondering how we might incorporate the density of Japanese cities, where they seem to be able to house a lot of people in very little space. I don’t know what that means if you don’t have the single-family home that has defined Los Angeles, but if we move toward that model of densification and more clustered living….

Ovnick: It could be, but you know what works in Japan is partly because of a cultural thing about privacy. You may have people very close together, but you’re very quiet and you don’t air your arguments because it just would not do. There’s a whole cultural thing that has to happen. You can’t just import the buildings from another culture and have any luck.

Boom: Of course, residential architecture relates very much in the title of your ’94 book, somewhat hidden in there is an echo of the California Dream. How that relates to the “working man,” buying a home in the post-war world. But how does the California Dream manifest in Los Angeles residential architecture?

Ovnick: In that case, how do you distinguish the California Dream from the American Dream? Success and being ahead of your parents’ generation was it, and the expectation that each generation would do that. Even if there’s a ceiling now that makes it not so likely. All those people who moved out here weren’t California-bred people to begin with, they came from Iowa or wherever and had an American Dream that they could realize in California.

Boom: I think a single-family detached house was part of that dream, so maybe that dream is changing as it becomes impossible to attain.

Ovnick: It needs to. Otherwise it becomes a disappointment. I think that’s a good thing to discuss in Boom particularly. In the world of Internet and Facebook and other things, that dream may be very real. There are all kinds of savvy people who can expect to make hay while the sun shines. But as a general thing, and when you have a classroom full of elementary school students, do you hold out that dream for them? For everyone, of every color, of every part of town or immigrant background, or in whatever economic situation? There needs to be some readjustments.

I was talking to somebody in Paris about this recently, who was in awe that I came from Los Angeles, and asked, “What is Los Angeles like?” I said, “Well, we have 55,000 homeless that live on the streets,” and he was aghast. He asked what is being done about that? And what can we answer?

Boom: You’ve written on post-war Los Angeles, a long seventy-year moment that might be coming to a terminus soon, reflective of what we’re discussing. Could you thematize what’s happening in Southern California during those decades?

Ovnick: I think it was a turning point for gender issues, for one thing. Men had gone off to war and being macho was very much a part of it. Women might be Rosie the Riveter and they might have been capable during the war, except when you look at the ads. The Office of War Information monitored advertisement, and I have a small collection of ads from wartime popular magazines; they had the young woman with the stylish hat and her pocket book asking, “I earned it, why can’t I spend it?” Then, the stern response that she ought to save it for the home front and postwar when the boys come back from oversees and make new starts. The patriotic thing to do is to save your money, buy war bonds. There was this sense of women doing their part for the home front as just part of being the little woman helping the man. It reinforced a gender ideal that had been moderated in the ’20s and ’30s that has been reinforced as a macho thing.

The final chapter of my book where I deal with this happens to be my favorite chapter, but because nobody had done primary research on World War II at that time, I had no secondary sources. Everything had to be primary. Looking at the expectations for housing after the war, you know, “When I get home from this war I’m going to build a house and have hot running water and I’m going to have…,” and so on. They spun big dreams during the war about the house that they and Rosie the Riveter were going to move into at the end. Then the building trades and architects and building material suppliers and others were all busy gearing up for postwar, how they were going to change from making war items to making things for a housing boom that fed that dream or would make it come true for people.

There was such uniformity in the news that you also couldn’t show a picture of the coastline because a Japanese submarine might notice that a little notch there, which might lead directly to a war plant. With all those cautionary holds on what could be published, it’s no wonder that my parents and Archie Bunker and many others had such black-and-white, good-and-bad views that fit the Cold War. It was good guys and bad guys, and we were the good guys. It was just so sharp and clear—that generation spent their youth not seeing anything except black-and-white.

Boom: But the ’60s and ’70s started to challenge that.

Ovnick: Absolutely. It was their kids in the ’60s who saw grey and objected to Archie Bunker’s views—generational conflict as of about 1964, when the war babies grew into teenagers.

Boom: And how is that shaping the residential architecture? Thinking of young people living outdoors. Breaking free of their parents’ homes.

Ovnick: They turned their tie dye stuff into boutiques and joined the middle class.

Boom: And after the wave of white Buddhists moving to Japan and coming back….

Ovnick: That’s actually what this upcoming article is about—a person whose last name was Goldwater, who was the second cousin of Barry Goldwater, and who was a Buddhist priest during the war.

Boom: So the religious architecture in Southern California—especially Los Angeles churches, temples, mosques—especially if said communities are moving around a Buddhist temple, for example, how did religious architecture shape Los Angeles during this time, and is it having any influence on residential architecture?

Ovnick: Unfortunately, my book was just on residential architecture. But from the Society of Architectural Historians, which I’m heavily involved with, we do tours of churches and recently toured one by Ernest Coxhead that was where Cesar Chavez first raised the challenge over on the east side of Lincoln Heights. We look at church architecture, but is it a case of L.A. shaping the architecture or is it architecture shaping the people that are in it? For example, the Hompa Hongwanji temple, right across from the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), which has the traditional arch which faces outward and is now owned by JANM; it’s made out of concrete but it echoes the thatch roof of tradition, including echoing the cedar wood graining that a traditional Buddhist church in Japan would have had because it was built during the 1920s by an Anglo architect and some of the touches are neo-Egyptian because it was a stylish thing and the architect worked in theatrical things. I don’t think that’s new or unusual.

In Savannah, Georgia, there’s a Jewish synagogue that was built in the 1840s in Gothic Revival style. You know Gothic, with that window that’s split into two smaller Gothic arches, symbolizing the Trinity. The rose window with the twelve leaves to represent the twelve disciples. Those have iconographic meanings, but this was a Jewish synagogue and it was built in neo-Gothic because that was the stylish church-like architecture, and this was an affluent membership who were movers and shakers in their community and they particularly wanted a Jewish “church” that would fit in with other churches. They didn’t want to look strange. So, whether a time and a culture shape the building, or the building then shapes the culture—I mean, I doubt many people who went to that “church” thought about the nativity and the twelve disciples.

Boom: So, they like the style and don’t necessarily care where it came from.

Ovnick: I wrote and published in California History on motion pictures and how motion picture-making affected architecture in the 1920s, in the silent era. Without sound, the actors and cinematographers had to do other things—if the story was about a princess and a castle, the very first scene had to show the young lady, probably with a coronet on her head and crenellations on the top of a wall behind her, and maybe a moat. Then movie-goers would realize this was about a princess and didn’t have to have a big discussion. Things like style references that make a setting were exaggerated and clear to read in the silent film era. In the 1920s we get the little castles and Tudor houses and the Spanish Colonial. All these easy to read make-believe backgrounds. Then, likewise, cinematographers used heavily rusticated surfaces so light and shadow would play off them so they wouldn’t look too flat in the kind of film and lighting they had at the time. We had those exteriors with what they called jazzed stucco, the troweled-on stucco that were supposed to look like adobe houses (that never had such a rough looking job) because light and shadow worked. Other parts of the house like columns or door arches or whatever had to be projected in a certain depth, so they cast light and shadow.

Our culture changes, and of course movies are shown nationwide. So you see make-believe architecture in Utah and Wyoming, and you see that heavy use of shadow and texture on buildings—it “took” across the country. It took especially hard here because this is where movies are made. So many people are in the industry, and in fact many of the set designers in Hollywood were also doing residential architecture on the side.

Boom: There’s a great chapter in Day of the Locusts that talks about the crazy diversity of architectural styles that come back in the movies. And we keep telling ourselves stories, projecting. The last line of your book captures this, where you conclude that Los Angeles is “a durable dream.” A beautiful line. But in light of things like the current enormous homeless crisis, do you still believe that Los Angeles is a durable dream?

Ovnick: As a matter of fact, I wrote that book so long ago that I’d forgotten all about that last line. In 1994, who could predict the Northridge earthquake, which hadn’t happened when I wrote that.

Boom: But it’s interesting how just a couple years after major riots that make people doubt whether this region is sustainable.

Ovnick: That’s not maybe just this region. Polar ice caps are melting and other things. People in Venice are doing these elaborate mega-houses on these tiny lots. Society of Architectural Historians was showing one of these houses and the architect was telling us that one of the things she had done was to look at the underground water flow, because it was basically on marshland, and at the topography. So, she built hers in a part of Venice that was several feet higher and away from those underground stream flows, which are ancient stream flows. She wanted to build a one hundred-year house, so it would be there for her kids.

Boom: Forward-thinking. And do these kinds of questions shape your work as editor of SCQ?

Ovnick: You never know what the next article is going to bring, and it’s going to be on some topic you’ve never addressed before hopefully because if it’s something you’ve done already you don’t want it. Each piece needs to contribute something, and every one is a learning experience from an editor’s point of view. I learn things every time, and if I didn’t, then there’s probably something wrong with the article. So how significant is it? What kind of insights does it give on things like homelessness and earthquakes and all those other things, or perhaps on a path that can be constructed? We look at things with a more empathetic eye because of a particular historian’s work, and that has an impact on our current times. It’s not that history repeats itself, it’s just that we open up our mind when we read history, which is a human subject. We’re gaining a wider understanding of our fellow men and women.

Being an editor, then, is like having your finger on a pulse of what’s out there being done and what its possibilities are when it reaches a reading audience. I think that was one of my biggest accomplishments was to get SCQ online. At the beginning, before there was a regime change at the Southern California Historical Society, there used to be a board that I spoke to on multiple occasions about the importance of going online, and their eyes would just glaze over since they were absolutely uninterested, didn’t want to think about it, and didn’t want to know the mechanics of how this could be done or who could do it. It was like talking to the wall.

As the board eventually changed and got some newer members, it happened. I think an all-print journal is not a viable entry. I’m old, so I like reading things in print, and I like having the covers, and enjoy working on the covers. But I know that print things are a dying breed. Whether you can reach an audience, the right audience or a big enough audience with what you put online, that’s a concern.

I think one of the solutions is a journal like ours that has multiple subjects. Every issue has a real diversity of topics that are there, even when they’re a set. But even as a set, each article expresses different viewpoints. A person who’s reading something they got online and sees the title of the article above and below might be intrigued and might read things they wouldn’t otherwise. But if it’s not in that very journal issue as something that might be important to them, are they going to go back and look at past ones? So, one of the concerns of the marketing people at UC Press is how to keep reminding people of good stuff that’s in the past issues. Doing special online issues introduce readers to something covered back in 1920 or 1942 that might be of interest work to send people looking backwards.

Boom: Deeper into the archives, and the online archives.

Ovnick: That’s a possibility, and I hope it works. The current president of the HSSC reached out to four grad students at three different institutions and got them to do bibliographic essays on subjects like Native Americans. They looked through back issues of SCQ and put together a bibliography of articles that have been done on a particular subject. They did one on the mission, noting the articles on the mission era back in the 1920s were romanticizing the padres and the adoring Indians. Then in the 50s they were doing thus and so, which leaves a track that they’ve analyzed. How we change how we view the past, missions being a particularly good example, puts us in mind not to just think in black-and-white, but enables us to think critically about what is the “historical truth.” Twenty years later, something else was the “historical truth.” I think that’s broadening, and it will hopefully work to send others to past issues of SCQ.

Boom: I think that’s something that is hard for undergraduates to grasp, the idea of historiography. That the interpretations change by what you’re reading.

Ovnick: And why does it change? It’s very important. The journal is a form—both SCQ and Boom—of public history. Because they reach out not just to the profession, but to a wider public. And I think that’s very important.

Notes

[1] Out of an extensive list of well-written articles, reflecting good research, and worthy contributions to their fields of history, there are a handful that stand out for their ground-breaking discoveries, exceptional research depth, and insightful analysis. Dr. Ovnick is especially proud to have had a hand in bringing these to publication in the Southern California Quarterly during her tenure (2005-2018; volumes 87-100):

Scott Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles in 1870-1871: The Makings of a Massacre,” SCQ 90.2 (2008).

Kelly J. Sisson, “Bound for California: Chilean Contract Laborers and ‘Patrones’ in the California Gold Rush, 1848-1852,” SCQ 90.3 (2008).

David Igler, “Captive-Taking and Conventions of Encounters on the Northwest Coast, 1789-1810,” SCQ 91.1 (2009).

Emily Bills, “Connecting Lines: L.A.’s Telephone History and the Binding of the Region,” SCQ 91.1 (2009).

Kim Hernandez, “The ‘Bungalow Boom’: The Working-Class Housing Industry and the Development and Promotion of Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles” SCQ 92.4 (2010).

Hillary Jenks, “Bronzeville, Little Tokyo, and the Unstable Geography of Race in Post-World War II Los Angeles,” SCQ 93.2 (2011).

Patty R. Colman, “John Ballard and the African American Community in Los Angeles, 1850-1905,” SCQ 94.2 (2012).

Mary C. Greenfield, “Benevolent Desires and Dark Dominations: The Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s City of Peking and the United States in the Pacific, 1874-1910,” SCQ 94.4 (2012).

James Tejani, “Dredging the Future: The Destruction of Coastal Estuaries and the Creation of Metropolitan Los Angeles, 1858-1913,” SCQ 96.1 (2014).

Andrea Geiger, “Reframing Race and Place: Locating Japanese Immigrants in Relation to Indigenous Peoples in the North American West,” SCQ 96.3 (2014).

Erica J. Peters, “A Path to Acceptance: Promoting Chinese Restaurants in San Francisco, 1849-1919,” SCQ 97.1 (2015).

Benjamin Cawthra, “Duke Ellington’s Jump for Joy and the Fight for Equality in Wartime Los Angeles,” SCQ 98.1 (2016).

Barry Read [3-part set], “Building Mulholland Highway: The Road to Mulholland Drive. Part I: The Campaign; Part II: Construction; Part III: After the Celebration,” SCQ 99.1-3 (2017).

[2] Merry Ovnick, Los Angeles: The End of The Rainbow (Los Angeles: Balcony Press, 1994).

Copyright: © 2018 Merry Ovnick, Allison Varzally, and Jason Sexton. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Articles

A Traveler Comes to a Bridge

Boom California on February 24, 2018

D. J. Waldie

You are looking west from the white bluff of Boyle Heights, to opposite bluffs, backlit by an autumn sunset, mid-October 1877.[1] A panorama of green shadow—grape vines and fruit trees in apple-pie order—fills the valley below, tessellated by farm roads and a rail line that binds the right bank of the river to its left and Los Angeles only recently to the rest of America.[2] Northwest of the bluffs, between the mesa of East Los Angeles and the lip of Reservoir Ravine, thick with white sage and thyme, a ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains that rises behind the city is split by a gap. The Los Angeles River runs through it. Sycamores and laurels step down to the stream. Willows and tule reeds touch the water. Herons wade for fingerling trout and toads that will one day give Frogtown its nickname.

South of here, the Los Angeles River is slower, wider, braiding, making and unmaking gravel islands, and wandering into and out of orchards and vineyards and finally out of anyone’s caring. There is no Fourth Street descending from the heights to the east bank of the river with its own orchards and rows of vines. There is no Fourth Street Bridge across the river.

The falling afternoon light strikes the cupola opposite of the new high school on Fort Moore Hill.[3] It strikes the cross on the new Cathedral of Saint Vibiana and the tower of the county courthouse. The valley is filling with night. The city’s 136 gas streetlights are being lit.[4] Still in sight are the three bridges that finger across the river: a railroad trestle northward, and southward the Aliso Street Bridge. Between them, a slab sided, pitch roofed, wooden bridge, lit with kerosene lamps, stolidly crosses at the river’s narrowest point. No one calls it the Macy Street Bridge. It is just the “covered bridge.”[5]

From the crest of Boyle Heights all of this is visible—bridges, ridge, river, roads—even the loom of Catalina Island, like a band of fog on the southern horizon. It is near the end of that time when all of Los Angeles can be taken in one long glance.

February 16, 1887, looking south from the trestle of the Southern Pacific Railroad, every river crossing, except for the covered bridge at Macy Street, has been damaged by yesterday’s storm. Part of the trestle fell during the night. A stone bulwark, put up last year, collapsed. The trestle of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley Railroad stands, but a hundred feet of its western approach washed away. The eastern end of the Downey Avenue bridge went into “a howling chasm” when the riverbank was undermined. A thousand feet of levee further south is gone. The foot of the Aliso Street Bridge disappeared, a hundred feet of streetcar track, “still attached to the western stump of the… bridge, trails disconsolately down the river.” Gaps, with the river running through, separate the western and eastern ends of the First Street Bridge from solid ground. Without all of its bridges, western Los Angeles is nearly cut off. Although the storm passed this morning, at 4:30 a.m. the “hoarse roar of the river, audible all over the city,” continued to frighten residents.[6]

They had good reason to be frightened. The river had flooded in winters of 1782, 1811, 1814, 1825, 1851, and 1861. After the flood of 1867-1868, water lay over the Cahuenga Valley for weeks, with the hills of west Los Angeles like islands in a sea. Flooding in 1876, 1884, and 1886 (with several deaths) began the river’s channelization that will try to confine it to an “official bed” (which is only some lines drawn on a map).[7]

The river will flood again in 1891, 1898, 1914, 1917, 1921, 1924, 1927, and 1934 (killing 40 in La Cañada). It will flood catastrophically in 1938 (killing forty-five in Los Angeles alone). Even after 1938, when concreting the channel begins, portions of the Los Angeles River will flood in 1943, 1956, 1969, 1978, 1980, 1983, and 1995 (eventually killing a total of twelve in all).

Ruined railroad bridge shows the result of flooding along the Los Angeles River in 1914. Phot courtesy of the Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles Public Library, 1914.

December 4, 1891, looking north from the First Street Bridge, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times pauses in his streetcar tour of Los Angeles.[8] Above him is Boyle Heights, “on a high mesa which terminates in a bluff, at the foot of which the river formerly ran.” This, he tells his readers, is the city’s most “airy and healthy residence section.” Elevation, he says, is important from “a hygienic point of view.”

An elevated point of view is important because of the persistent flooding of the Los Angeles River, something the reporter leaves out of his description. The heights are doubly “hygienic” because their uneasy residents are safely across the river from the tenements of Sonoratown and Chinatown, and the immigrant Italian and Russian neighborhoods around the old plaza.

The reporter has one regret as his tour of the city ends (and he will not be the last to feel it). “Much of Los Angeles is almost a terra incognita to many of our residents, in spite of the fact that rapid and frequent transit has to a great extent annihilated distance.” The reporter takes a last look at Boyle Heights. “The large brick building on the crest of the bluff, which is almost as prominent a landmark as the high school and the courthouse, is the Catholic orphan asylum. The rays of the setting sun cause the gilt cross on its summit to shine out like the evening star.”

January 12, 1905, looking east from the newly built Fourth Street Viaduct, the members of the city council’s bridge committee (here to approve the work) can see the trees of Prospect Place and the houses along the crest of Boyle Heights. At their feet is acreage to be developed, now that the carriageway of the new viaduct connects the heights to the downtown business district.

It had taken ten years of political pressure by Isaac Van Nuys, Moses Sherman, James Lankershim, William Workman, and other men with a stake in real estate to engineer the transformation of this acreage into house lots and storefronts. Workman, former mayor and now city treasurer, had reminded the members of the bridge committee that the river lacked a vehicle and pedestrian crossing between First and Seventh Streets, a distance of a mile, and those who live in Boyle Heights and beyond “were of necessity greatly inconvenienced.” The lack of a bridge greatly inconvenienced Workman. The profitable development of his fifty-five acres of floodplain below Boyle Heights depended on building the Fourth Street Viaduct. Workman depended on the sale of lots to wipe out years of debt.

It had taken some weeks of city council politics to get construction of the viaduct started. The sale of municipal bonds in 1903 had raised $100,000, which was not enough to repair old bridges and build a new one. The city engineer advised city councilmen to spend the bond revenue on repairs. He was skeptical of the proposed Fourth Street Viaduct. “It winds around like a snake, and I doubt if it would be satisfactory if finished,” he complained. The councilmen traded votes, cut appropriations for the promised bridge repairs, and the city engineer was overruled.

The sinuous geometry of the Fourth Street Viaduct, required to connect the offset ends of Fourth Street in the Arts District and Boyle Heights, was labeled “basically intolerable” by the Federal Highway Administration’s National Bridge Inventory in 2014. The Fourth Street Viaduct over the Los Angeles River was built in 1930-1931 with seismic retrofitting in 1998 that gave the structure improved lateral stability. Image courtesy of Library of Congress, Historic American Engineering Record Fourth Street Viaduct, HAER No. CA-28.

It had taken the J. D. Mercereau Company seven months to build the viaduct. The footings of the western end lay at Santa Fe Street, followed by 200 feet of wood trestle connecting to five wood and steel spans over the railroad tracks on the west bank and 300 feet of steel truss to cross the river, plus another 500 feet of wood trestle over more tracks to reach the edge of Boyle Heights where Workman’s acreage waited to be developed.

The new Fourth Street Viaduct is 2,000 feet long. It has a six-foot-wide footpath for pedestrians who now have slightly more than a mile walk from Boyle Heights to reach the freight depots, warehouses, and factories that crowd the western bank of the river. The viaduct has a twenty-foot-wide carriageway for farm wagons and shays, and increasingly also for motorcars.[9] The Tourist, the first automobile to be manufactured in Los Angeles,[10] is the most popular; 2,692 will be built between 1902 and 1910. The new bridge across the river is paralleled a few feet away by its twin—the Los Angeles Traction Company’s steel trusses erected in 1898. The spindly supports and thin girders of the two bridges—emblems of an unpretentious, readymade aesthetic—will soon be described as ugly.

Beneath the tracery of wood and steel beams, the river sprawls. Dry most of the year, the riverbed is a tumult of sand ridges and gravel flats, some of them mined to make concrete for the tall buildings that have begun to crowd Broadway. At the foot of Boyle Heights, the bed of the river is a dump where the city’s garbage and its trash are hauled, some of it to be set afire, the rest to be raked through by the hogs that belong to a Mr. Clemmons. He sells the hogs to the city’s abattoirs. The city’s butchers sell the pork as “the finest corn-fed.”[11]

A traveler comes to a bridge. As the traveler starts to cross, one foot is still earth bound. Empty space is beneath the other. The next step requires trust. The traveler is uplifted less by concrete or masonry and more by forces kept in balance with the void waiting below. The bridge seems static, but every footfall must be absorbed, its effects distributed by tension or resisted by compression. The bridge responds. Its span springs to the traveler’s step in order to seem unmoved.

The traveler is unimpressed by the daring that manages hidden forces to make it possible to walk above the earth. The traveler prefers to see a sculptural gesture, a vault from known to unknown, and a hope. But a bridge also marks faithfulness and a constraint. Mid-stride, the traveler cannot veer off the bridge to wander along the green bank of the river passing under. The traveler cannot choose a new path of desire. No meanderings on a bridge. The traveler can only depart from one commonplace and return to another—mid-span, exposed at the space in between. There is no refuge on a bridge. A fleeing traveler can only run back to what was left or run toward whatever is ahead.

The traveler pauses, leans against the parapet, and takes in the elevated view. A bridge affords perspective but also detachment. What happens under the bridge happens without the traveler’s intervention. Water flows or trains pass or cars make their way below. Above, the traveler is more than suspended. Daydreams of flight await on a bridge. So do nightmares of vertigo, of falling, and of suicide. The bridge itself is vulnerable if the balanced forces that keep it standing shift. Every bridge is uneasy. If a bridge falls, what seemed a trivial gap becomes a barrier again, and the landscape the bridge assembled disconnects. Overcome a bridge, and communities at either end are estranged. A bridge is a promise that a broken world can be whole.

(Although every bridge inevitably goes somewhere, not every bridge is necessary. Mere connection is not sufficient reason to build a bridge. Sometimes separation is better.)

The traveler knows only the upper half of a bridge. Unlike most structures, bridges have an above and a below that are intimately joined, but separate, places. Rising from its piers is a different bridge, secretly and elegantly utilitarian. The footloose traveler could abandon the bridge’s flow and settle underneath with others who have given up progress toward the destination imposed on those overhead. Instead of support, the poetic interconnection of uprights, struts, and parabolas arching overhead—beauty more legible to the homeless and the urban forager—could be shelter. The traveler could exchange a vista on top of the bridge for an encampment under it.

Instead, the attractive force of the opposite end of the bridge—its constant offer of novelty—leads the traveler on a contradictory path, perpendicular to the events and possibilities under the traveler’s feet. The bridge has taken the traveler to a phenomenological encounter only to take the traveler from it.

The public demands a harmonious and graceful design, Louis Huot tells readers of Architect and Engineer magazine.[12] Huot is a member of the city’s Department of Public Works under Chief Engineer of Bridges Merrill Butler. (Butler will oversee the engineering of six river crossings between 1924 and 1932. Huot will design the ornamental features for most of them.)[13] The only public that Huot finds demanding are the five appointed members of the city’s Municipal Art Commission. The commissioners’ goal is “to work for the gradual elimination of ugliness,”[14] and the humble wood trestles and girder trusses over the Los Angeles River are “about as ugly as they can be.”[15]

The commissioners feel that a better Los Angeles can be evoked through civic architecture in the classical style. City Engineer John A. Griffin agrees. The character of these bridges “will be such as to excite comment from visitors who enter and leave Los Angeles,” Griffin tells the city council in 1923. They will “raise the status of Los Angeles as an enterprising, properly developed city.”[16]

It is an extraordinary epoch, defined by bridges. The Los Angeles Times, the Automobile Club of Southern California, and the railroads persuaded voters (many of them new motorists) that replacing narrow trestles and truss bridges would relieve traffic congestion and give the city monuments to its ambitions. With new bonds approved, eleven improved river crossings are built: Ninth Street in 1925, Macy Street and Franklin Avenue in 1926, Fletcher Drive in 1927, Fourth Street over Lorena Street and North Spring Street in 1928, Glendale-Hyperion in 1929, and now the Fourth Street river crossing, begun in 1930 and finished two months ahead of schedule. (Still to come are bridges at Washington Boulevard in 1931, Sixth Street in 1932, Figueroa Street in 1937, and Riverside Drive in 1938.)

These improvements are made for an accelerating regime of speed. “These bridges, especially over a stream of this character, should seem as little like bridges… and as much as possible like improved bits of street,” landscape architect Charles Mulford Robinson had told the city council.[17] A bridge should be “conformable to the automobile which it carries across the chasm,” according to Huot.[18] They are horizontal monuments for a horizontal city.

The material of ambition—of monumentality and liberated movement—is the steel-reinforced concrete of the arches that supports the bridge decks and in the pylons, parapets, light standards, brackets, and balusters that decorate their roadways. Mixed on site, the concrete is poured into temporary wooden forms over supporting wood framing called falsework. Smoothed, the concrete will look like well-finished limestone. In less visible parts, after the concrete has set, the impression of the forms will be left as they are. Parallel ridges the length of individual boards and the knots and grain in the wood will still be visible, a permanent shadow.

Huot’s design vocabulary comes from imperial Rome, Renaissance Italy and Spain, and the Paris of Louis Napoleon. Nearly all the new bridges are variations on the classical tradition, except for the Fourth Street Viaduct, where the design is Gothic Revival.[19]

Wooden forms (in any shape a carpenter can fit together), poured concrete, and the conservative aesthetics of the Municipal Art Commission have made monuments of desire out of utilitarian bridges over the city’s problematic river.

What nature divided has been brought together, David Faries of the Los Angeles Traffic Association tells the women of the Hollenbeck Ebell Club, who are waiting on the new Fourth Street Viaduct for speeches about progress to end. A locomotive whistle interrupts. The Playgrounds Department band waits to play “Sidewalks of New York” with its refrain about “east side, west side, all around the town.” Officials from the three railroads that pass under the approaches to the bridge are next to speak, happy now that the last wood and girder viaduct over their tracks is gone. Celebratory banners hang from the catenary wires that carry the electrical grid powering the streetcars that share the viaduct with pedestrians and motorists. Dedication day—Thursday, July 30, 1931—is overcast and hot.[20]

Nature’s divide, for Faries, refers to the Los Angeles River, bracketed with earthen levees but not yet bound in concrete, hummocked with sand mounds, dusty most of every year but prone to sudden flooding, and no longer a city dump.

The river is the least of the bridge’s concerns. Most of the 2,700-foot length of elevated viaduct from Molino Street to Anderson Street at the foot of Boyle Heights crosses two industrial roadways and a braid of rail lines connected to repair shops, freight yards, and passenger terminals. The bridge itself, supported on graceful, open spandrel arches that leave the west bank of the river to touch down at what had been William Workman’s fifty-five acres, is only 254 feet long. Just as the city engineer in 1903 had warned, the new viaduct snakes through a tangled section of riverside street grid, splits in two at its western end (anticipating street alignments that will not happen), and bends as it reaches the foot of Boyle Heights to connect with Fourth Street.

Although every bridge inevitably goes somewhere, not every bridge is necessary. Mere connection is not sufficient reason to build a bridge. Sometimes separation is better.

Seen from the air, the viaduct appears uncertain about its start and uneasy about where it must end. Fourth Street on the west side of the river angles southeast, generally conforming to the 36 degrees of disorientation in the city’s colonial street grid. Fourth Street on the Boyle Heights side angles northeast. The two ends of Fourth Street, offset where they should face each other across the river, cannot be made to line up, as if the western and eastern parts of Los Angeles were never meant to be in one city.

The division was not natural, and the viaduct’s sinuous geometry could not overcome the forces keeping the halves of Los Angeles separate. A report sent to the board of the Federal Home Loan Bank in 1939 will explain why. Boyle Heights “is a ‘melting pot’ area and is literally honeycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements. It is hazardous residential territory….”[21] The Fourth Street Viaduct seems to have something to say, but none of the Los Angeles papers will ever ask residents of Boyle Heights what message to them the imposing new viaduct is intended to carry.

There is a long flight of steps that takes pedestrians up from Santa Fe Avenue to a streetcar stop where the western end of the viaduct splits to drop one leg down to Mateo Street while the other leg bends further west and north. After the dedication, streetcar passengers will stand there, in the middle of the roadway in a rectangle of white lines painted on the new asphalt. Motorcars will pass on either side while streetcar passengers wait within the white lines of the “safety zone.” The speed limit for motorcars is twenty-five miles an hour.[22]

The streetcar fare is seven cents.[23] 1931 is the second year of the Depression, and not many workmen have seven cents to spare. Some of them will continue to walk from homes in Boyle Heights to jobs in the rail yards, factories, and warehouses between First and Sixth streets along the river. When those men, lucky to still have a job, return in the evening over the Fourth Street Viaduct, one or two might pause to rest on one of the small benches that Louis Huot placed on either side of several of the light standards that spire from the parapet railing. The resting men probably no longer notice, in the fading golden light, the decorative elements that Huot had cast in concrete and made to be appreciated at twenty-five miles an hour.

The Fourth Street Viaduct, somberly Gothic, crosses the not-yet-concrete Los Angeles River in 1931, from the Ralph Morris Collection, Los Angeles Public Library, 1931.

Evergreen Cemetery is at the end of the streetcar line that the Fourth Street Viaduct in 1931 carries over the river—Main Street to Third Street, east to Traction Avenue, a south on Merrick Street, another turn at Fourth Street, across the river to Fresno Street in Boyle Heights, north to First Street, and then a stop at the cemetery gates.[24] The dead could take this way by streetcar; two had been available for charter, specially designed to carry a coffin in a separate vestibule, screened by a stained glass panel, while mourners sat beyond in silence.[25] More recently, automobile corteges cross the river with their burdens and turn off Fourth Street to Evergreen Avenue and the cemetery. A solitary driver arrives by the same route to walk among the headstones to find one and leave flowers.

The new bridges and viaducts Merrill Butler and his engineers have built north of Fourth Street allude to an antique imperial grandeur, confirming with reinforced concrete that the westward course of empire had arrived triumphantly at its destination. The style of the Fourth Street Viaduct is different and solemn in its Gothic Revival details. The pylons at each end of the bridge evoke a memorial cenotaph. Their lancet openings suggest the entrance to a nave. The columns of the light standards, which support the catenary lines of the streetcar power grid, rise above an acanthus leaf capital to taper like the finals atop a medieval cathedral. They intend to lead the eye heavenward. The frames of the streetlight lanterns are banded by a row of primroses, topped by flourishes in the form of leaves, and crowned with a final that could be mistaken for a cross. The parapets lining the viaduct are decorated with alternating equilateral triangles. A trefoil opening pierces each; its three-part shape represents stylized leaves of clover. Both triangles and trefoils are reminders of the 3-in-1 of the Christian Trinity.[26] The Fourth Street Viaduct crosses the Los Angeles River with a pastiche of ecclesiastical architecture and Christian iconography.

The mourner crossing to Evergreen Cemetery by streetcar and the businessman bound for Montebello or Whittier by automobile see one bridge. The train passenger below sees another. The mourner and the driver see a road that rises only slightly at the river crossing, framed by the four pylons. The passenger sees, as the train slows on arrival or picks up speed on departure, a regular pattern of arching ribs overhead, uprights connecting the bridge’s deck to the arches, and cross members connecting the arches to each other. Above is somber decoration, the simplified memories of somewhere else made tangible. Below is structure with no past, beautiful in its economical management of invisible forces.

There is something else to see, perhaps best understood by the occasional pedestrian who pauses to lean against the parapet or sit on one of the small benches. Nearly every outward facing surface, above and below, in the penetrating light of Los Angeles, is patterned with areas of sun-struck brightness and bands and panels of knife-edged shadow. In the moving light, while the pedestrian watches, the surface of the concrete moves too, projections dripping shadows, moldings shedding darkness over plane surfaces, incised grooves stacking alternating white and black bars, changes in profile edged by shadow declaring the three dimensions of pillar, pilaster, corbel, and column.

The Fourth Street Viaduct, gleaming in the sunlight in 1931, is a bright thing for a city that wishes to be only white. As the shadows pass over it, it finds its life in the absence of whiteness.

The tapering spires above the light standards on the Fourth Street Viaduct echo similar features found on Gothic cathedrals. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Historic American Engineering Record Fourth Street Viaduct, HAER No. CA-280.

Empty in 2018 except for a stream of processed wastewater[27] in the low-flow slot that perfectly centers its concrete floor, the Los Angeles River passes beneath the bridge that barely interrupts the almost level deck of the Fourth Street Viaduct. Belvederes, set into the arches of the sentinel pylons that mark the bridge’s place, overlook an engineered void. In the months with no rain, under a sky the color of dried urine, the river is a mirror that reflects the city’s disregard of it. Given two or three days of winter rain, however, the river will carry four times the flow of the Colorado, and dark water, passing with the speed of a freight train, will reach up the slopes of the channel.[28] The river is an artifact of desire as much as the bridges that span it.

What Los Angeles sought, after its river was crossed at Fourth Street by rail and highway viaducts, is hard to discern. For William Workman, the ambition might have been marketable real estate; for city planners, to untangle a transportation grid; for the railroads, to secure uninterrupted approaches to the city; and for downtown business associations, to ensure the daily flow of workers and shoppers. Each of them, in different ways, wanted a city of greatness to satisfy the demands of their desire. They constrained a river because of them and built bridges to make the fulfillment of their dreams seem inevitable. (In the name of other desires, this image has begun to change, as the river channel northward is restored and as parts of its floodplain are reclaimed by parks.)[29]

Evergreen Cemetery is the furthest Los Angeles extended across the Boyle Heights mesa. The future was not in the modest houses and two-story shops along Fourth Street as it rose to the crest of the bluff. The future was south of downtown and then west, away from the threat of the river and beyond the historical claims the old plaza made. East of the river is where the city housed its lepers and syphilitics, where its orphans were asylumed; where the city sent its aged and infirmed, and where its paupers are still cremated and buried in a mass grave as each year ends.[30] East is where the city has sent its dead, not just to Evergreen Cemetery, but to the Odd Fellows and Masonic cemeteries (where lodge brothers lay together companionably), and to the cemeteries (segregated by prejudice and theology), for Catholics, Serbians, Chinese, and Jews.

The viaduct’s Gothic Revival details were intended to inspire melancholy recollection in 1931, although they were not generally the memories of the multi-ethnic communities of Boyle Heights, dispersing even then into a second generation of diasporas. (Did sons and daughters of Jewish immigrants, returning at the yahrzeit, notice that the way to Mount Zion cemetery and Home of Peace was now marked by remembrances of English cathedrals?) In 1939, federal housing surveyors, as a warning to lenders, redlined all of racially mixed Boyle Heights. In the 1950s, the California Department of Transportation, taking advantage of redlining, began cutting rights-of-way along the bluff that the Mexican residents of Los Angeles in the 1830s had called, because of its whiteness, the Paradón Planco.[31] Freeways replaced rows of wood-frame houses where Russians, Italians, Japanese, Latinos, and Jews had lived together and left together for work across the Fourth Street Viaduct. In 2017, and mostly Latino now, the community of Boyle Heights remembers the freeways’ dislocation and the indifference behind it.[32] East has been what the city, in its haste toward the future, chooses not to remember.

The Fourth Street Viaduct bears desires across railroad tracks, across access roads, across the blank surface of the Los Angeles River channel, and across time. Some are desires you may not recognize today or want anymore. But the viaduct cannot do otherwise, or be other than what it is, so well made was it, with skill and an eye toward the effect of its repeating elements of arch and trefoil, pylon and spire, light and shadow. These elements, which framed the city’s aspirations in 1931, are still available today as a borrowed elegy for a city full of anxieties about its place.

The contained river below and the stylish viaduct above were intended to be monuments of Anglo triumph over nature and space, achievements that need thoughtful translation if we are to bridge the abyss made by the city’s subsequent erasures of memory. Recovery of the commonplace is sensuous: the sight, smell, sound, and touch of things that might be the prelude to an embrace or a blow, that might make us cringe at their maker’s motivations, that might require humility—even love—instead of fury or contempt when considering the history of these things. Crossing over a bridge is risky.

A traveler comes to this bridge, an articulate framework suspended between its past and our future, to cross over its consort river that divides Boyle Heights from the Arts District. The number of pedestrians is fewer now, and the passengers waiting for streetcars are gone. A Metrolink train rumbles under one of the viaduct’s arches. A tree, rooted within or under the roadway deck, tops the parapet where it crosses Santa Fe Avenue.

A homeless man is living on the belvedere that projects from the arch of the first pylon as the bridge prepares to leap east. A shopping cart and plastic sheeting make a barrier in front. The sidewalk here is only five feet wide, and the footing is uneasy because the metal grates that provide access to conduits under the sidewalk are uneven. Pearly grit, enough to support a few shoots of grass, has gathered along the parapet edge as if a slow-moving river had passed over the bridge, dropping silt. The belvedere beneath the arch of the opposite pylon stinks of urine. The streetlight lanterns here are missing glass panels, so only the skeletal arch remains in the metal frame. Time and the vandalism of indifference both work on the Fourth Street Viaduct every day, which is part of the pathos of things in our lives. Yet insulators for the streetcar wires on the light standard next to the pylon and a catenary holdfast over the arch remain as the viaduct’s memories of itself, not yet erased. The banister under the traveler’s hand has the feel of stucco. The thread of water in the low-flow slot below glints and murmurs. The advent of something terrible or beautiful seems to be near. Some birds wheel overhead.

In 1998, the Fourth Street Bridge was retrofitted to improve the lateral stability of its arches in an earthquake.[33] In 2014, the National Bridge Inventory of the Federal Highway Administration determined that the entire Fourth Street Viaduct met the “minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as is,” although the geometry of its roadway deck is “basically intolerable.” The report added that the viaduct is “functionally obsolete.”[34]

Notes

The drawings and paintings accompanying this essay are by Roderick Smith and Richard Willson, and are part of the exhibition, “Positively 4th Street: An Encounter with Los Angeles Viaduct,” on display at the Don B. Huntley Gallery, Cal Poly Pomona, through April 12, 2018.

[1] This description is based on Brooklyn Land and Building Company, “View of Los Angeles from the East,” 1877.

[2] Connection to the transcontinental rail network (through San Francisco) began in September 1876.

[3] The high school was completed in 1873, the cathedral in 1876.

[4] City of Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting, “History,”, http://bsl.lacity.org/history.html, accessed December 8, 2017.

[5] Water and Power Associates, “Historical Notes,” http://waterandpower.org/museum/Early_City_Views%20(1900%20-%201925)_5_of_8.html, accessed December 8, 2017.

[6] “The Storm: The Situation of Yesterday Fully Set Forth,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1887, 1.

[7] Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Gumprecht details episodes of flooding along the Los Angeles River through the 1990s.

[8] “Ten Years: The Story of a Decade,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1891, 1.

[9] City council’s bridge committee; 2000 foot length; “Big Bridge Accepted,” Los Angeles Times, January 13, 1905, 14. Bridge advocates; of necessity greatly inconvenienced; “More Interest in Los Angeles Real Estate,” Los Angeles Herald, November 24, 1901, 7. Not enough to repair; it winds around like a snake; “Calls It a Steal: Kern Fights for Fourth Street Bridge,” Los Angeles Herald, July 19, 1903, 8. Sale of land benefits Workman, “Bridge Street Tract Sold, Los Angeles Herald, September 20, 1903, 1. Construction details, “Plans for Fourth Street Bridge,” Los Angeles Herald, October 8, 1903, 14. City council politics; “To Submit Plans for New Bridges,” Los Angeles Herald, January 3, 1904, 6.

[10] Some references claim 5,000 automobiles were produced between 1902 and 1910. The lower total is cited by the Los Angeles Almanac, “First Production Motor Vehicles in California,” http://www.laalmanac.com/transport/tr10a.php, accessed December 8, 2017.

[11] “City’s Garbage Turned into the Pork We Eat,” Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1906, 13.

[12] Louis L. Huot, “Modern Lines Are Reflected in New Los Angeles Viaduct,” Architect and Engineer (October 1933): 27.

[13] Stephen D. Mikesell, “The Los Angeles River Bridges: A Study in the Bridge as a Civic Monument,” Southern California Quarterly 68 (1986): 365-86. Mikesell describes both the engineering and the aesthetics of Merrill Butler’s bridge program.

[14] “Art Commission to Beautify City,” Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1903, 2.

[15] Charles Mulford Robinson, “The City Beautiful: Suggestions,” in Los Angeles, California (Los Angeles Municipal Art Commission, 1909), 3.

[16] Engineering Department, Annual Report (City of Los Angeles, 1923), 30.

[17] Robinson, “Suggestions,” 3.

[18] Huot, “Modern Lines,” 26.

[19] Merrill Butler, “Architecture and Engineering Are Harmonized in Fourth St. Viaduct.” Southwest Builder and Contractor (August 7, 1931): 50.

[20] “Fourth Street Span Dedicated,” Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1931, 1.

[21] Home Owners Loan Corporation City Survey Files, “Area D-53, Los Angeles” (National Archives, Washington, D.C. 1939), 7, quoted in George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 137.

[22] Al Parmenter, “Change in Motor Law Goes in Effect Friday,” Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1931, 1.

[23] Laurence M. Benedict, “No Review on Fares,” Los Angeles Times, January 7, 1930, 1.

[24] “Route Map of the Los Angeles Railway,” 1934.

[25] The Descanso (Spanish for “rest”) was built by the Los Angeles Railway in 1911, followed by the Paraiso. Descanso and Paraiso would often make as many as seven trips a day. The service ended in 1921. See City Lab, “A Funeral Car Named ‘Descanso’ or When Death Rode the Rails in America,” https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/05/funeral-car-named-descanso-or-when-death-rode-rails-america/5478/, accessed December 9, 2017.

[26] William Durandus, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments, ed. John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb (Leeds: T. W. Green, 1843): lxli.

[27] About 20 million gallons of treated wastewater are discharged into the Los Angeles River each day from the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys.

[28] Joe Mozingo, “Watery Giant Roars to Life,” Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2016, 1.

[29] For the status of river restoration and associated riverside improvements, see “Los Angeles River Revitalization,” http://lariver.org/.

[30] Doug Smith and Ryan Menezes, “Evergreen Cemetery is Awash in History and Drowning in Blight, Los Angeles Times, November 28, 2014, 12.

[31] George J. Sánchez. “What’s Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews: Creating Multiracialism on the Eastside during the 1950s,” American Quarterly 56 (2004): 634.

[32] Eric Jaffe, “The Forgotten History of L.A.’s Failed Freeway Revolt,” CityLab https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2014/07/the-forgotten-history-of-las-failed-freeway-revolt/374843/, accessed December 9, 2017. The residents of Boyle Heights today are concerned about further loss of their community identity as the process of gentrification in the downtown core reaches crosses the river.

[33] National Park Service, Historic American Engineering Record, Fourth Street Viaduct, HAER No. CA-280 (National Archives, Washington D.C., n.d.), 7.

[34] Extracted from the National Bridge Inventory, July 2014 inspection data at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/bridge/nbi.cfm.

D. J. Waldie is the author of six books of non-fiction dealing with aspects of everyday life, including Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. His commentaries on California history and politics have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.

Copyright: © 2018 D. J. Waldie. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Articles

Lines and Fences

Boom California on December 14, 2017

Marcel Brousseau

Gloria Anzaldúa delivered a presentation called, “A Crosser of Borders,” on 10 April 1983 at a conference at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Just a week earlier, on Easter Sunday, Anzaldúa visited Border Field State Park in San Diego. “That place,” Anzaldúa related to conference attendees, “has a fence that runs from the top of the mountains all the way to the edge of the sea. And that fence divides the United States from Mexico. I started writing a poem beside that fence.”[1]

The chain-link and barbed wire fence that Anzaldúa saw, touched, and translated into verse in 1983 has been replaced by an array of forms and materials over the past three decades. In 1992 a perimeter of steel landing mats, running 14 miles from the base of the San Ysidro mountains due west to the Pacific Ocean, supplanted the barbed wire and chain link. In the intervening years steel mesh, and finally, twenty-foot-high steel bollards were installed on the south edge of Friendship Park, where Anzaldúa once stood. Meanwhile, multi-layered mesh and landing mats continue to shadow the rest of the line.

It is not hard to imagine that the border fence will change again in the coming months and years: Fall 2017, the U.S. government built eight prototypes of 30-foot border walls on Otay Mesa, adjacent to the extant landing mat fence. These historic and ongoing changes to the form and media of the California border fence/wall are not incidental. Each fence or wall rewrites the horizon line and the surface of the land itself, as it also revises the political and cultural narrative of the borderlands. By reading Anzaldúa’s poetic drafts about the fence in comparison with Friendship Park photographs from Joe Burkeholder, Peter Goin, and María Teresa Fernández, this essay critiques the inscriptions made by the very presence of the California fence. While the future of the California fence/wall is being written, in legislation, steel, concrete, and dirt, the representations of the fence provided by Anzaldúa, Burkeholder, Goin, and Fernández critically document the fence as a violent yet vulnerable discursive medium. Whether as a shifting poetic symbol, or as an evolving iconic sign, the fence appears as an assemblage of materials and semiotic associations—in other words, as a kind of written text—capable of being replicated, transformed, critiqued, and destroyed through countervailing acts of writing. These acts of writing, like the fence itself, encompass the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, but are centered on California, where the border fence has long been a palimpsest of U.S. line drawing and cross-cultural revision.

Poetic Revisions

In the years after her visit to Border Field State Park, Anzaldúa wrote a few more drafts of the poem that she “started…beside that fence.” Then, in 1987, she published the poem in “The Homeland, Aztlán/ El otro México,” the first chapter of her book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. As Anzaldúa drafted her poem, its content and form changed, and the semantics of the fence shifted. At first a metonym for the bureaucratic violence of boundary marking, the fence also became an analogy linking the brutality of land division with acts of sexual assault, and with agricultural techniques. One draft of “Del Otro Lado”—which we might assume is a typed version of the poem Anzaldúa began beside the fence due to its being labeled, “Begun 3 Abril 83/ Easter Sunday/ Border Field Park/ Beach, San Diego”—ends with the lines, “They build a fence across her body, Mexico,/ a wall called El tratado de Guadalupe-Hidalgo./ Thousands are sacrifieced [sic] to that Barbed wall.”[2]

An early draft of Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem “Del Otro Lado,” written in response to her experience at Border Field State Park, in San Diego. Image courtesy of Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

In this draft, bodies are rendered geographically, and the fence is conflated with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which resolved the U.S.-Mexico War and officially redrew the U.S.-Mexico borderline. By characterizing the peace treaty between the two nations as a barbed wall, Anzaldúa characterizes the border not as a legal concept, but as nomos, as an act of land appropriation that forecloses Mexico from its territory, or its body. In this frame, “law and peace” in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands “[rests] on an [enclosure] in the spatial sense” dividing the body of Mexico, and enforcing the sacrifice of Mexicans to the United States. The fence symbolically and technically perpetuates this sacrifice by maintaining the historic foreclosure of Mexico from itself.[3]

In another draft of “Del Otro Lado,” Anzaldúa further qualifies the nomos of the border fence in terms of gender and sexual violence, writing, “She looks at the Border Field fence/ feels them stick posts into her throat, her navel,/ shove barbwire up her cunt./ She and the land were one./ Her body torn in two, half a woman on the other side/ half a woman on this side, the right side.”[4] While the earlier draft qualifies Mexico as a female body dismembered by a treaty signifying a wall and by a wall signifying a treaty, Anzaldúa’s later draft enacts a more personalized and localized violence in which a female observer is violated and dismembered by the apparatus of fencing as she speculates upon the fence. While the specific components of the “Border Field Park fence”—“fence posts” and “barbwire”—are implicated in the dismemberment of the female body, the fence’s particular geography is generalized to a binary of “the other side” and “this side.”

Another draft of “Del Otro Lado” elaborates upon the themes of sexual violence, dismemberment, invisibility, and silencing, in relation to the “Border Field Park fence.” Image courtesy of Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

The fence’s repression of national and cultural markers is revealed by the poem to be one dispositif among a system of discipline, as half of the dismembered female protagonist gains subjectivity by educating herself in language and classification techniques. She only commemorates her historic wounding “At night when no one is looking.” Meanwhile, the other half of the dismembered protagonist is further dissected, viscerally “scattered over the deserts,/ the mountains and valleys,” until her “mute voice” is transmuted to a wind “whisper[ing] through grass stems” in echo of her other half. In its narrative of dismemberment, invisibility, and silencing, this poetic draft forces the reader to consider the poem as a document that communicates yet cannot resolve the multivalent ”struggle of flesh, [the] struggle of borders…[the] inner war” symbolized by the “Border Field Park fence.”

Yet another draft of Anzaldúa’s poetry states, “In—Park in South San Diego/ staring at that rust colored fence/ 2,100 miles long from the mouth/ of the Rio Grande in my valley to/ the Pacific/ Nature had gashed a hole in the wall/ Did not ask are you an American citizen/ Where were you born/ can we see your papers.”[5] This draft also extends the fence, from its localized site of witnessing, across the entirety of the borderline, symbolizing the historic foreclosure of Mexico. Where, in past drafts, the fence/wall enacted violence, in this draft the wall is made vulnerable. Rust eats away and “colors” the metal; “nature” breaches the wall, undermining its physical and discursive formations. However, despite the emerging precarity of the fence, this handwritten draft, taped together from three separate fragments, attributes another loss to fencing—the “ancient myths” of “sacred history.” In this revision, the fence encloses a system of mental concepts—“fence posts on which the mind/ is strung out”—away from the “land of creatures/ primal instinctive.” With this representation, Anzaldúa relates the California fence to “archaic cultural techniques,” such as “corrals, pens, and enclosures,” that “accentuate[d] the anthropological difference between humans and animals.”[6] In concert with the other drafts, the ancient delineation between humans and animals is implicated in the histories of colonization and sexual assault represented by the fence.

Another contemporaneous handwritten draft of Anzaldúa’s poetry introduces a vulnerability to the border fence and addresses dichotomies between natural and mental systems. Image courtesy of Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

The many meanings of the fence worked through by Anzaldúa in her drafts ultimately cohere in her published revision, with a twist: She reformatted the conventional typography of the drafts to express spatial and emotional conflicts in the physical arrangement of lines and words, as well as in their linguistic semiotics. The poem’s second, third, and fourth stanzas, which rewrite the image of waves attacking the fence, slant and arc back and forth, in successive enjambments that resemble the careening tides of the shoreline. The seventh stanza, which continues the trope of the fence stretching the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border, connotes a cartography of the Americas in its formatting, while also embodying a twisting form that resembles the barb of a barbed wire fence:

In refining her poetic visions of the California fence, Anzaldúa declares the fence to be an inscriptive object: a technology that is not only representative of, and represented by, writing, but that also functions as writing, in its marking of space and time. As she twists her poetic lines in shapes across the page, Anzaldúa replicates the fence “unrolling” in space, “dividing” and “split[ting]” the terrain until at the end of the poem the fence has indeed been blown down, and Indigenous land is restored.[7]

In reckoning with the border fence, Anzaldúa indirectly presented the fence as a counter symbol to the figure of the bridge, the guiding motif of her and Cherrie Moraga’s landmark collection, This Bridge Called My Back, which was published the same year Anzaldúa visited Border Field State Park. However, just as the bridge is a complicated symbol of burden and connection, so too is the fence a paradox. “That fence” in Border Field State Park in San Diego ultimately functioned for Anzaldúa as a deeply referential infrastructural text. While her poetry provides a rich document of the California fence, cataloguing its diversity of forms and materials in relation to its violences and its vulnerabilities, the fence also provided a motif for Anzaldúa’s self-reflection. The fence aided Anzaldúa’s understanding of the ways in which she felt displaced and split among different cultural locations and coalitions, and it connected her struggle to monumental histories of hominization and conquest. Although she prophesized the fence’s destruction, her readings of the fence would continue to inform her conceptualizations of artistry and “consciousness.” The fence eventually became central to her idea of nepantla, the transitional process through which one “question[s] old ideas and beliefs, acquire[s] new perspectives, change[s] worldview, and shift[s] from one world to another.”[8]

Photographic Revisions

“In the beginning was the fence,” writes Jost Trier, asserting the enclosure of space as the basis of law.[9] Anzaldúa, in her characterization of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as a fence, concurs that the accord between the U.S. and Mexico is fundamentally an inscription that divides, or forecloses, Mexico from itself. In this context, the actual fences and walls that have risen over the borderline during the last century are indexes of this original diplomatic, postwar enclosure. However, as Anzaldúa’s poetry shows, fences and walls on the U.S.-Mexico border are also representative of animal economies, of gender violence, and of artistic techniques and transformation.

A 1909 range fence installed by the U.S. Bureau of Animal Industry to eradicate the fever tick’s infestation of cattle herds between California and Baja California is among the first documented fences on the borderline.[10] Thus, in the beginning of the U.S.-Mexico border fence was the California fence, which Anzaldúa’s poetics inspire us to see as a work in revision, an object continually rewritten in reference to law and to commerce, to xenophobic rhetoric, and to discourses of fear. A 1974 photograph of border monument 258, taken by Joe Burkeholder and used by the National Register of Historic Places, shows that roughly a decade before Anzaldúa began her poem, a simple range fence with three to five strands of barbed wire also crossed Friendship Park, in what was then known as Border International Park. The labeling of Burkeholder’s photo with the toponyms of Mexico and the United States, on either side of the fence, gestures toward the ambiguity of the borderline, as it also indicates a bureaucratic investment in reinforcing the distinction between the two nations.

Friendship Park, in Border Field State Park, on the border of San Diego and Tijuana, as photographed by Joe Burkeholder on 21 March 1973. It is not clear when or by whom the photo was marked. Image courtesy of United States Department of the Interior.

In dedicating the park three years earlier, first lady Pat Nixon stated, “I hope someday there won’t be a fence here at all,”[11] but in monument 258’s registration as a National Historic Place, the stakes of the California fence are literally and figuratively made clear. The photograph of the site, and its accompanying paperwork, document a fragile borderline, at which the legal marker—the border monument—had, by the end of the nineteenth century, been subject to erasure, or “mutilat[ion] by visitors [until] its outlines were nearly destroyed, and its inscriptions partly obliterated,” at which point it was renovated and itself protected by a fence.[12] This brief history of the border as a site of textual revision corroborates Anzaldúa’s poetic exploration of the unresolved violence underwriting the borderline. Apparently, for bureaucratic readers, neither the border monument, nor the barbed wire fence are depicted in Burkeholder’s overwritten photograph, effectively demarcated the nomos, or the enclosure, of the United States from Mexico. In the hypertextual discourse referenced by Burkeholder’s photograph, the borderline inscribed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is rewritten by the monument, the fence, the photograph, and the markings on the photograph, each a separate mediation correlating to the others, while also implying the limitations of the others.

The overwriting of Burkeholder’s photograph demonstrates why Nixon’s hope for an unfenced border was never honored in any official manner: The fence, as Anzaldúa would later indicate in her poetry, functions as a form of writing used by the U.S. to both demarcate the borderlands and the bodies that inhabit it. The barbed wire fence that bisects Burkeholder’s photo also bisects two bodies, and forecloses them from the photographer’s point of view. The subsequent overwriting of the photo places these individuals on the Mexican side of the fence, as it places the photographer on the U.S. side. The importance of the fence in underlining the distinctions between “this side” and “the other side” is made official in the filing of Burkeholder’s overwritten photograph as evidence of a National Historic Place, namely the “southwestern corner of the Continental United States,” as it is described in the site’s nomination paperwork.

By 1987—the year Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera was published—the barbed wire fence at Friendship Park had itself been overwritten by chain link and wire mesh, as documented by photographer Peter Goin in Tracing the Line, his photographic survey of the U.S.-Mexico border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. At the time, Goin’s fieldwork revealed that “most of the [border] fence [remained] barbed wire, usually three to five strand.” However, he also learned that during the late 1970s, the Immigration and Naturalization Service had selectively “constructed an ‘impenetrable’ fence… twelve feet high… of metal webbing (much like chain link) topped with barbed concertina wire,” between Calexico and Mexicali and San Ysidro and Tijuana.[13] Goin’s photograph of a heavily-fenced Friendship Park, in comparison with Burkeholder’s earlier official image, indicates the escalation of the enclosure of the “southwestern corner of the Continental United States,” as it also provides context for Anzaldúa’s semiotic shift between symbols of barbed wire and chain link in documenting the different forms of the borderline. Goin writes in Tracing the Line, that “Each photograph must represent an area far greater than the parameter of its rectangle,” arguing for, not unlike Anzaldúa, a metaphorical yet material reading of the borderlands, in which “path, roads, bridges, and fences with barbed wire become line [which then] creates tension by dividing the space, both visually and culturally.”

Friendship Park, as photographed by Peter Goin for his 1987 book Tracing the Line: A Photographic Survey of the Mexican-American Border. Image courtesy of Peter Goin.

Lines—or fences—structure Goin’s photographs, revealing the 1980s borderlands to be a “web of boundaries.” In his image of Friendship Park, the rewriting of the fence as a chain link wall with locked gates becomes a multiplication of lines blotting the horizon and the ground, and casting the sunlight into shadows. The area labeled “Mexico” in Burkeholder’s photograph is not actually visible as land in Goin’s photograph, but rather only as tracings or shadows, as visual effects of the crosshatched lines of the California fence. The rewriting of the California fence in steel mesh and chain link was, in narratological terms, rising action in the now-long story of the U.S.-Mexico border fence. Contextualizing Goin’s image, Anzaldúa’s roughly coeval poetry indicates that the fortified fence remained symbolically plurivalent yet materially ambivalent: A culturally divisive, physically imposing, historically onerous enclosure, albeit vulnerable to the elements and to transborder economies and human migration. The slab of chain link seen in Goin’s photograph of Friendship Park is replaced by a broken and patched web of metal in his photos taken further East, in areas derogated as “lawless” by the Border Patrol.[14]

The slab of chain link in Friendship Park is also replaced by a twenty-foot bollard wall, clad in steel mesh, in a photo taken by María Teresa Fernández thirty years after Goin and Anzaldúa’s books were both published. Since the end of the twentieth century, Fernández has been photographing Friendship Park, and families “torn in two”—to use an Anzalduan phrase—who meet there to talk and bond through the California fence/wall. Her photography has regularly documented a correlation of events on the borderline: The capricious expansion of the border fence to a larger and more tortuous wall, and the constancy of families and friends—a binational community—in negotiating the nomos enforced and reinforced by the growing fence/wall. What would Anzaldúa write about the scene depicted by Fernández? What would she say about a fence so large that it obliterates the southern horizon, about the steel bollards dissecting the faces and bodies of people on the south side of the borderline, about the thick layers of metal and mesh that now commemorate “el tratado de Guadalupe-Hidalgo”? “I am tired of borders,” Anzaldúa said at that 1983 conference talk in Illinois, “I am tired of nationalist thinking.” She cast her vision forward: “I think we will grow to have respect for one another, that we will listen to each other… [and] tear down that iron fence.”[15] This growth of respect and compassion is, beside the shadow of the California wall, the other subtext of Fernández’s photography. Despite the fact that the fence has not been torn down—quite the opposite—patterns of filiation and amity have emerged at Friendship Park that implicate the fence into “act[s] of fellowship [and] strategic coalition” by families, friends, law enforcement, and local activist groups such as Friends of Friendship Park.[16] Although Fernández’s photo documents Friendship Park as a dystopian enclosure, it also depicts the results of dedicated binational activism to write a communal narrative around, through, over, and, indeed, beside the fence—a narrative that seeks to erode the enclosure and revise the nomos foreclosing Mexico from itself and the U.S. from its others.

Friendship Park, as photographed by María Teresa Fernández on 10 September 2017. Image courtesy of María Teresa Fernández.

Political Revisions

“This sagging wire fence is conclusive evidence of the present cordial relations between the two countries,” John A. Ryan writes, unironically, for Westways magazine in June 1958, captioning a photo of the “lonely” borderland above the Pacific Ocean, which would become Friendship Park. By Ryan’s logic, the California border fence is an index of international diplomacy, a barometer of the political consensus between the U.S. and Mexico. Where Anzaldúa later reads and writes the fence as a permanent trace of animalization, war, and sacrifice, Ryan sketches an idyll finally emerging “after bloodshed and hate… after a war of empire building through force of arms.” Strangely, to look backward at Ryan’s wild, windswept border site is to look forward to Anzaldúa’s proleptic flood, in which waves wash away the California fence. In this comparison, there is the intimation that the revision of the border fence is circular, not unilinear; that what has been written over and over will also someday be erased. However, Ryan’s article also documents another fence, the barbed-wire topped, chain-link fence discretely surrounding the border monument. Despite Ryan’s diagnosis of binational cordiality in a withered barbed-wire border fence, the sacrificial nomos of the border prevails: “U.S. Government Structure,” a sign reads on the east side of the monument’s chain-link fence, without specifying the fence, the monument, or the borderline it/they represent, “do not molest under penalty of law.”[17]

“Access to the monument is easy,” Ryan wrote, urging his auto-club-members-cum-readers to detour west down Monument Road and experience “the never-to-be-forgotten feeling of somehow being part of history.”[18] A quarter-century later, Anzaldúa, divided by history, urged us to go farther: “I propose we become a crosser of borders,” she declared in her 1983 conference talk, encouraging her audience “to start within yourself and reconcile [gender, racial, cultural, emotional, sexual, spiritual] borders,” and ultimately to “open ourselves up to what the other person is saying—to feel the other person’s presence.”[19] In this call to restore the self and to be marked by the other, the border fence has become, it seems, sublimated into a passionate political metaphor. This semantic shift, however, cannot be understood without acknowledging Anzaldúa’s insistence on the materiality of the symbolic, on the stages of revision that inform and deform ideas and visions to make personal and social change. Tired as she was of borders, Anzaldúa continued writing and rewriting her poetic fence, until it became a symbolic medium for self-reconciliation and communication with the other, a written object that she would live in and through, and not merely beside.

In her artistic destruction—or deconstruction—of the California fence/wall, Anzaldúa anticipated the ways in which the U.S.-Mexico border fence/wall writ large has become a medium of transborder culture, a palimpsest for binational expression. Photographers, poets, activists, academics, families, and friends: At Friendship Park in San Diego, on most any Saturday or Sunday, countless people are literally or figuratively beginning poems “beside that fence,” as Anzaldúa did, writing themselves and each other in and through the fence, over the line where lawmakers continue to write with the fence. Of course, in Tijuana, and elsewhere del otro lado, people are free to write on the fence. One weekend in Playas, having crossed to volunteer with Dan Watman, of Friends of Friendship Park, in the Binational Friendship Garden of Native Plants, my wife and I watched schoolchildren cover the fence in writing, in pithy post-its that would have made Anzaldúa proud. “Di no al amor con fronteras” read one. “¡No Separan a las Familias!,” said another. Given a few years of revision, one can only imagine what these fence-post post-it poems might become. Likewise, one can only imagine what the California fence/wall will look like by then. Maybe it will be gone.

Student post-it poems affixed to the south side of the fence at Friendship Park, in Playas, Tijuana, 15 November 2014. Photographs by the author.

Notes

The author would like to thank Dan Watman, María Teresa Fernández, John Fanestil, Jill Holslin, and the Friends of Friendship Park, Peter Goin, Carla Alvarez, the staff of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, Domino Perez, Rita Raley, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins, and the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Literary Trust. Quotes and images of Anzaldúa’s poetic drafts are copyright of the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Literary Trust and may not be reproduced without permission of the Trust.

[1] Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Pre-draft early notes, Box 32, Folder 4, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942-2004, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. The conference was called “Feminism: Cross-Cultural Perspectives.”

[2] Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Manuscript, discards, Box 32, Folder 3, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942-2004, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin. It should be noted that a poem specifically addressing queer identity and oppression by Anzaldúa, called “Del Otro Lado,” was eventually published in 1987’s Compañeras: Latina Lesbians (An Anthology), ed. Juanita Ramos. See Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 99.

[3] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, Ltd., 2003), 74-75.

[4] Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Manuscript, discards, Box 32, Folder 3, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942-2004, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Bernhard Siegert, “Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory,” trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Theory, Culture & Society 30 (2013): 56.

[7] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands-La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Co., 1987), 2.

[8] Ibid., The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 248.

[9] Schmitt, Nomos, 74.

[10] United States, Bureau of Animal Industry, Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Animal Industry for the year 1909 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1911), 290. This report by the U.S. BAI frankly conflates humans and cattle, stating, “with this fence installed, eradication [of fever tick infestation] will soon be accomplished…Such a fence will also assist customs officials in preventing illegal traffic between the two countries.”

[11] “Legacy of Parks,” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C., 20 Aug 1971: B4.

[12] United States, Department of the Interior, National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form for Federal Properties: Initial Point of Boundary Between U.S. and Mexico, 6 September 1974, https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/AssetDetail/3a5a9b80-bb6d-479e-a006-e2e18bb2ed4d?branding=NRHP

[13] Peter Goin, Tracing the Line: A Photographic Survey of the Mexican-American Border (Reno: Library of the University of Nevada-Reno, 1987), n.p. The “impenetrable fence” was also installed between El Paso and Juárez.

[14] See Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.- Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002), 63-65; and Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, 2d ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), xi

[15] Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Pre-draft early notes, Box 32, Folder 4, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942-2004, Benson Latin American Collection, The University of Texas at Austin.

[16] Jill Holslin, “Saving Friendship Park A History of the San Diego Coalition Friends of Friendship Park,” in Wounded Border/Frontera Herida (San Diego: San Diego City Works Press, 2011), 133.

[17] John A. Ryan, “Lonely Monument on the Border,” Westways, June 1958, 14-15. The photos do not reveal if the monument’s fence contained a similar sign under the aegis of the Mexican government, on the west side.

[18] Ibid. Ryan also quotes a sailor, employed at what was then the U.S. Navy’s Border Field, who assures him that the military installation does not deter visitors, stating, “We can’t keep the people from their monument.” Absurdly, the current fence installed by the U.S. at Friendship Park seals the monument on the south side, away from U.S. visitors.

[19] Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Pre-draft early notes, Box 32, Folder 4, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, 1942-2004, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

Marcel Brousseau is a lecturer in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. From 2015 to 2017 he served as a Carlos E. Castañeda Postdoctoral Fellow in UT’s Center for Mexican American Studies. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Copyright: © 2017 Marcel Brousseau. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Articles

Water, Space, and Placemaking

Boom California on October 10, 2017

Dorie Dakin Perez

Like many so-called “boomerang” millennials, I found myself returning to the Central Valley to set down roots after living away for a decade. Looking at my hometown with new eyes and a burgeoning career as an urban anthropologist, the subject of change in insular Fresno and its spatial politics can be hard to swallow. More so, crisis conditions from the statewide drought had been an alarming yet helpful framing mechanism in which to visualize the physical and communal stratification of Valley life.

Water, or more specifically its absence, has helped shape the built environment of urbanization in Fresno. Such deficit thinking has continued to be a driving force in setting policy and placemaking practices^[1] in the City of Fresno, even as the city currently pursues an effort to revitalize its aging infrastructure to meet twenty-first century economic demands. Most interestingly, the production of an imagined future by groups of non-state actors eager to stake their claim on the community is where memory and planning intersect, sometimes painfully.

As much as the Central Valley’s agricultural interests have long positioned themselves as the major economic base for the region, the drought has revealed the lingering dispossession caused by such uneven concentrations of wealth. Regional concerns echo those claims of dispossession, highlighted in the media coverage of dry, unincorporated areas feeling the worst effects of the drought. A 2015 example of this was in the especially hard hit region of rural East Tulare County, where a humanitarian crisis occurred due to major water shortages and a lack of stable infrastructure. Yet it is the City of Fresno and the process of urbanization where such discourses of cultural deficit meet an engaged social placemaking through practices of memory and a general rethinking of the politics of space.

My ethnographic scholarship uses the recent five year drought, and the inequality it has made visible across different cultural platforms of space and place, to understand the Central Valley as a culture of historic extraction, be it natural resources, labor or public space. This social memory of dispossession^[2] is exemplified in the ways that nonstate actors in the City of Fresno, and the greater Central Valley, seek to revise social-spatial projects. Specifically, the push to stake a grassroots claim in the revitalization of the inner urban core of downtown Fresno, as well as the reimagining of space in and around the city, is part of this new project of place that small-scale community organizations are using to highlight the sunshine and noir of urban change. My use of the term “urban,” in a region known for its rural life and agricultural economy, is deliberate; “The urban is not a unit, but a process of transformation unfolding in diverse sites, territories and landscapes.”^[3]

The subject of water is never far behind when discussing land use policy and the Central Valley’s built environment. Changes in the conceptualization of these two resources—water and space—are the mechanisms of new social projects happening in Fresno. Through the application of a theoretical framework borrowed from urban geography, Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the “right to the city,” the twin issues of water and space are helpful for their potential to assist in making these projects of social construction manifested.

The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire. It is, moreover, a collective rather than an individual right since changing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power over the processes of urbanization.^[4]

Urban development and water resource management by competing interests seek different ends to their work, and yet together shape the social and physical landscape of the Central Valley. Two key case studies are the focus of my analysis that convene the spatial politics of place with the histories of dispossession that have become part of the collective social landscape.

Urban development and water resource management by competing interests seek different ends to their work, and yet together shape the social and physical landscape of the Central Valley.

Water and its infrastructure needs in the Central Valley were made material in the dry fountains along the Fulton Mall in downtown Fresno. From initial private investment to haphazard public enjoyment, the fountains once stood as beacons of modernity, offering shoppers a spot to linger as they returned to the revamped “cool” of 1960s urbanism chic. The fountains, all twenty-two of them, were in Fall 2015 mostly dried up and filled with trash or repurposed as planters. Refilled and drained at random, their visible deterioration echoed the nearly empty space of the Mall’s decaying Mid-Century Modern infrastructure. “Emptiness” remains a relative term. In the perception of the mainstream shopping public of Fresno, a lack of middle class shoppers present reads as evidence of emptiness, as ‘empty’ despite the “hundreds of people, mostly of color and of lower socioeconomic status, who walked the Mall each day.”^[5] Illegibility, of both a new kind of patron, who is not the white middle-class consumer benefiting and partaking in gentrification processes, and the natural resources like fountains and trees through which water flows on the Mall is inscribed in its initial problematization.

The Fulton Mall’s fountains, part of the initiative to find local artists who could help curate the space for a 1960s consumer base, and their removal as not representing the natural conditions of the Valley environment exemplify the different conceptualizations of public goods and a changing vision for the future. This decline, tracked for decades by The Fresno Bee daily newspaper and local business community newsletters, is part of the contestation of space and place that is underscored by the recent drought conditions that made water a necessary but insufficient condition for change in the Central Valley imaginary.

Blackstone Avenue is another dispirited infrastructural legacy, once the “center of town” where commercial interests were centered below Shaw Avenue away from the civic institutions of the city’s downtown. Similar to how rural space in the Valley has been divided up and intensified throughout the twentieth century, the commercial space on Blackstone has transitioned from retail to a concentration of auto and auto-service related enterprises, owned by non-residents who are seen by many within the transitioning neighborhoods around the central artery as the cause of urban blight that bleeds southward towards the neglected downtown. Both the Mall and Blackstone Avenue are the foci of revitalization efforts by government functionaries led by former Mayor Ashley Swearengin’s “I Believe in Downtown”^[6] campaign and community nonprofits who seek to tie physical revitalization with social transformation through engaged electoral participation and economic investment. The phantom force of water—its accessibility, disappearance, ties to nature as key to physical improvement and regulation as part of the broader technologies of power overlapping in downtown—is always present as part of a larger discussion of resources that have helped reproduce histories of dispossession and extraction that leave “ordinary cities”^[7] like Fresno a contested social terrain.

California, as a product and site of cultural production, is an outward-facing entity that valorizes a mythic, encrypted self-narrative of opportunity envisioned by generations of booster elites^[8] eager to develop the American West. California’s “sunniness” is coupled with its inherent noir,^[9] a hidden power phenomena that keeps its less desirable yet essential parts in shadow. The Central Valley is where those dual forces of noir and sunshine intersect, where the issues of urbanization and historical patterns of rural settlement coexist uncomfortably within the California project. An area east of the Coastal Range that includes the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, from Bakersfield to Chico, the Valley has always been socially embattled when not ignored as a political backwater. “Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another. The separation, of north from south, and even more acutely of west from east, from urban coast from the agricultural valleys… was profound, fueled by the rancor of water wars and by less tangible but even more rancorous differences in attitude and culture.”^[10] As Gerry Haslam has argued, the Central Valley serves as a liminal cultural space, the “Other California,” left out of a Southern California-centered focus on economic opportunity and cultural production:

I began to look more closely at the physical environment and saw things I should have noticed before. Just north of where I had grown up, I realized, lay a maimed environment, the bed of the largest freshwater lake in the West, now dried, plowed and irrigated: What had happened?^[11]

This naturally-occurring ecological event has intensified to unheard-of costs to human development. The statewide drought was deemed a disaster in 2014 by Gov. Jerry Brown and subject to federal intervention by 2015. The drought’s slow burn into the collective consciousness of those not in the business of agriculture^[12] has helped unearth some of the more human disasters and longstanding internal contradictions that make explicit the social constructions of place that re-emphasize the Valley’s history as a land of physical and social dispossession and struggle for cultural significance. The research agenda that informs this work is part of a broader focus on the anthropology of Fresno’s downtown redevelopment that informs my preliminary dissertation research on the cultural construction of urban space. Over the course of the last two years, I attended public meetings at the state, city and regional levels (Fresno City Council Meeting, 4 and 27 February, 2014; State Workshop on Water, January 2015; Kings River Irrigation District Board Meeting, August 2015) on urban redevelopment and water policy, as well as conducted unstructured and semi-structured interviews with informants working on these two issues within the city. One key part of this preliminary ethnographic analysis has been the data collected through fieldnotes from participant-observation efforts. I worked on projects, went to meetings and attended special events with various community organizations working outside the confines of political campaigns or government office.

Central Valley farmers have long fought against the movement of water from Northern California to the southern part of the state, using “L.A.” as a euphemism for waste, entitlement and bad planning policies.

The theoretical framework of Lefebvre’s “right to the city” can be used to understand California’s historical spatialization and put the recent water crisis into socio-political context. Henri Lefebvre, the primary member of the Marxist revival in mid-twentieth century cultural geography scholarship,^[13] argued that the city’s inherent benefits—social, political, and economic—were made possible by the diversity of people, opportunity and intensification of space and development. These social and economic resources found in cities should not be hindered by privatization as a phenomenon in a city available for public benefit, including the surrounding areas. This call for keeping some things, like economic markets and open urban space, public and publicly-administered was positioned squarely against the creeping privatization and divestment of public resource management that cities sought to systemize in the latter half of the twentieth century.^[14] Public goods, Lefebvre argued, were the only things not made into commodities for exchange by the economically-privileged few who gained the most from capitalism’s structural inequities. This idea was part of his more general discussion of the social production of space^[15] as something categorized and made into physical and representation modes for the organization and stratification of human development. Thus the built environment, and policies of land use and production, are part of this codification and reinscription of capitalistic social organization, where space makes some welcome and bars others from its production.

City/farm, urban/rural—the dispossession of space and the extraction of resources for a global market is a process that the Central Valley has always taken part in despite competing concerns over growing urbanization and the political economy and industrial concerns of agriculture. A recent focus on water is one of many historical cycles of political attention and eventual obfuscation. Central Valley farmers have long fought against the movement of water from Northern California to the southern part of the state, using “L.A.” as a euphemism for waste, entitlement and bad planning policies. For the last decade, signs along Highway 99 shout slogans like “Food Grows Where Water Flows,” vilifying the names of those legislators who vote for more environmental protections that limit industrial water use. This geographic division of resources and power are part of the political project of the state’s dualism; a shiny attractive Coast and a shadowed hinterland in complete symbiosis, the city’s “contado” that Gary Brechin wrote, “feeds the people,”^[16] yet remains unknowable.

Decades of benign neglect of water in the form of a lack of regulatory processes across the Central Valley has led to the depletion of groundwater from local water tables. Water meters that measure and charge for home water use are recent additions to the utility bills of Central Valley residents, a factor that historically increased the illegibility of its importance in the daily lives of residents. This lack of attention, given that other urban areas have for decades worked on multiple levels of governance to limit and control water use, poses questions about water’s centrality and value in Valley life. Was there a simplistic feeling of material abundance in the landscape, or rather, did power elites controlling the development of the Valley landscape see little need to quantify the use of water even as urban areas like Fresno started to compete with industrial agricultural operations for finite material resources? These type of questions about the relationship between the material conditions of Valley life ask questions that efforts like urban revitalization and placemaking seem to want to answer, the social response to physical and natural droughts.

This water crisis, similar to the “urban crisis” of the 1960s in its self-creation mythology,^[17] has afforded the social space in which different alternative imaginings of place and the politics of belonging can be articulated. Several groups have taken up the charge of not letting a crisis go to waste, using different but significant points of entry to discuss dispossession in urban form. The role of activism around issues of equity and resource distribution, the special relationship between space and water, development and history, has been ripe for discussion. At a regional level, dry wells in East Tulare County, south of Fresno, have highlighted the lack of infrastructure and muted governmental response to the physical needs of a largely poor community of Latinos. This inattention has spurred efforts by local organizations and non-state actors like the Valley Water Center and California Rural Legal Assistance to organize a disadvantaged community and link their concerns for the continuation of life in a culturally cohesive yet politically unincorporated part of the county to larger variables about representation and engagement in the formal political process. “All local residents should participate for, although corporate boards elsewhere may control the deeds to much land here, they do not know the call of a dove or the chill of river water slicing from the Sierra Nevada or the dawn smell of a freshly mown alfalfa field.”^[18] Countering the power of a decentralized planning regime and decades of developmental policy that are exclusive by their very nature is used as the mechanism by which the historiography of the Central Valley organizes its major themes.

The contestation over the revitalization of the Fresno Fulton Mall is where urban space and its complicated place in the cultural imaginings of place are centered in this analysis. An aging twentieth century pedestrian center in the heart of downtown Fresno, the history and cultural narrative of the Fresno Fulton Mall is contentious. Recent efforts to revitalize the three-block area as part of a national post-recession movement to gentrify deindustrialized urban areas, as well as a nod to the market demands of cities’ endless search for tax revenue, have frayed the tempers of longtime denizens who seek to preserve the space according to its ethos of Mid-Century Modern aesthetics.

This project is personal to me, challenging the division between emic and etic approaches to anthropological study. As one born in Fresno and gone for over a decade, the place-memory of home still retains meaning for me, especially in the older areas like the Fulton Mall that are untouched by urban redevelopment. Marx Arax understands this as part of returning home: “The stakes always seemed higher [in Fresno] than when I was writing about L.A. The reasons were obvious in one respect—it was my home—and yet I sensed a deeper explanation that had to do with how we as a society related to place…. It has been a messy affair, but I am still here, trying to put my finger on this place.”^[19] As the world urbanizes and the process of urbanization takes varied forms that go beyond the simplistic dichotomies of rural vs. urban, suburban vs. urban,^[20] the Mall has become meaningful to me and a new generation of citizen artists, activists, and planners.

Built to much fanfare in the early 1960s, the Mall became one of the first open-air pedestrian malls at the beginning of the suburban mall era. Anchored by J.C. Penny and other major department stores, the mall was the first major site of concentrated consumerism in Fresno, and attracted shoppers with its park-like setting. The choice to redevelop an already urban space was deliberate—planners including the nationally-recognized planner Victor Gruen and landscape architect Garrett Eckbo^[21] wanted to bring the suburban shopping experience to downtown Fresno, already in decline as citizens moved northward. Its success at the time of its opening in 1964 was quickly overshadowed by the creation of newer enclosed malls like Manchester Center in 1969 and Fashion Fair Mall on Shaw Avenue in the 1970s.^[22] As fewer shoppers came downtown, the Fulton Mall became a place where community events were held in Mariposa Plaza, the largest of the open areas in the three block mall setting, and a free speech stage was created as a commemoration of the site of a labor protest in the 1920s.

The turn from the Mall’s original plan as a place middle-class residents shop into de facto parkland for the urban poor was due to unimpeded and steady decline, as the vast majority of the major department stores left in the 1980s. The Mall’s genesis speaks to a planning ideology of another era, and contemporary proposals that seek to either crystallize its history or revamp it altogether manifest the competing pressures of real estate and community memory that counter each other within the sphere of Fresno planning politics. As it stands today, the Mall is under construction to be transformed into Fulton Street, reopening late 2017. The approved proposal to open the pedestrian mall to vehicular traffic and add over a one hundred parking spaces was stymied by a lawsuit filed by supports of the Downtown Fresno Coalition (DFC), which sought to keep the Mall a pedestrian-friendly place and thus were behind the unsuccessful push to get the site registered as a California Historic Landmark. As such efforts indicate, the mall serves as a place of nostalgia and distinction for many Fresnans despite its diminished state. The DFC utilizes the ideas of walkability, the need for the preservation of democratic public space, as well as green space in an urbanizing world, as the emotional pleas of an underdog argument bent on mobilizing the affective nature of place attachment.[23] The death of several trees by lack of water oft-rumored to be a coordinated effort by the city to encourage blight and make its case for redevelopment stronger, echoing a similar fight over changes in a historic Central American urban space discussed by anthropologist Setha Low:

The sense of loss in these stories is not with the place itself, but with the decoration and social participants, yet the stories communicate a sense of place attachment that has been disrupted physically, but not in memory, by ongoing social change.^[24]

The emotionality and use of memory in the argument for preservation touch on issues of aesthetics, in the access to public art and environmentalism, representing the interests of the denizen-activists of the DFC. Decidedly white, upper-middle class and college-educated, very few members live near Downtown and the Mall and most don’t visit its businesses and services. The Mall, to them, is understood as parkland and a place where public art can be enjoyed. The cost and prestige of the public art, led by some of the artists themselves, are often highlighted in the materials produced by the group. The transition from mainstream consumer sites like J.C. Penny to smaller, local retailers as well as the administrative offices of county agencies that cater to a largely Latino audience has been an uncomfortable one. The racial politics of space are deliberately softened by the social memory of postwar prosperity that centers on white consumers. As part of a series of events to mark its fiftieth anniversary of operations in 2014, a local filmmaker created a film that made the Mall its main subject. “We certainly don’t need more botanicas,” one woman commented during a Q&A session after viewing the documentary. Screenings and a series of walking tours were hosted in 2015 and 2016. This was also a response to the walking tours that are offered by a competing business association centering the Mall in a discussion of urban blight, focusing on future development plans in 2017 for the space that include private real estate.

Another significant project of place where space and water play a central developmental role is the A Better Blackstone neighborhood redevelopment project, northward in Fresno’s central core area. Blackstone Avenue serves as Fresno’s High Street, its central North-South conduit that shuttles people into and out of downtown, paralleling the main Highway 41 that intersects with Highway 99, the Valley’s main site of passage. Its demise has been well-documented, echoing concerns for a better investment of place:

No place with even a modicum of self-worth would allow such a disgrace, much less right down its spine. I venture it’s more complicated than that—and more simple. I doubt that anyone in City Hall actually planned on disfiguring Fresno this way. The Boulevard more or less developed, downtown to river, a century of progress, without any countervailing force ever saying “no.” In the process, its belief only got replicated.^[25]

A programmatic arm of a local nonprofit giant, A Better Blackstone is a multiyear project that is both ideational and outcome-specific. “We have come together to imagine what it would look like for Blackstone to thrive once again.”^[26] In its first months of work, the program sought to collect data on every business on the avenue itself as well as initiate direct contact with residents of the surrounding neighborhoods, no small feat.

At a community event called “Imagine Blackstone,” Summer 2015, local residents were asked to participate in this reimagining, both the possibilities of place in the central district and the realism of its current state of neglect. A photovoice project led by staff was displayed, and viewers were asked to stop and get their event pass stamped along a curated path of projects related to city services, civic education and spatial imagery. A fully stamped event pass meant free tacos and drinks on the hot August tarmac of Susan B. Anthony Elementary School. Pop-up parklets, like those trumpeted by urban civic leaders as solutions to the limited public space of gentrifying cities, were created using rolled up Astrotrurf and DIY park benches. Asked to take the lead on this exhibit display twenty minutes before the gate opened, I gamely tried my hand at curation and was assigned a twelve year old assistant who worked the scotch tape. There was a clear agenda of engagement that was being asked of participants by A Better Blackstone staffers: we as volunteers were tasked to stimulate conversation by asking how Blackstone is popularly and individually conceptualized (“bad” and “ugly” were common answers), and what, if any, factors could improve the thoroughfare (“Trees!”).

Methodologically and logistically, these conversations were happening on several fronts: Participants at the event wanted to know what photovoice as a method was, and second, why did all these photos matter to the redevelopment of their neighborhood? An ethnographic research methodology^[27] used by visual anthropologists, photovoice is both empirically sophisticated and immediately accessible. A photovoice project is typically a carefully administered elicitation of visual data collection through initial discussions of themes about a certain phenomenon, then cameras given to those involved as subjects. The ensuing photos and captions are pulled together to gain understanding of one’s emic view of the world-made material by the photographs, and narratives captured that expand discussion on the community-developed central theme in the user’s own voice. Here, local students and their parents were asked to take photos of their neighborhood around Blackstone Avenue that they deemed were either positive or negative depictions of local life, and then asked to write down why they chose those photos, describing them in their own words. Central Valley water, as ever, was omnipresent as a thematic core of the project yet hidden behind an understanding of issues that made it seem only tangential to the goals of placemaking and revitalization. Dead trees, stagnant canals and broken curbs were the problems of infrastructure cited by many participants in their commentary. A lack of water, and lack of nature, or rather, its re-envisionment as pop-up spaces of temporary comfort on the hot summer tarmac of Susan B. Anthony Elementary were evidence of the creativity that such spatial deficits could engender.

Water’s role as the unacknowledged shaper of events, even in its absence, is correlated with the reproduction of a deficit-centric cultural discourse found here in the tactics of Fresno interest groups.

The activism and organizational engagement of A Better Blackstone on issues of space are central to what Michel De Certeau understands as tactics used to make sense of urban planning regimes by residents looking to exert spatial agency in a complex spatial arrangement,^[28] and to a larger extent, is “tactical urbanism” in action. The bottom up, self-directed work of A Better Blackstone functions in a liminal space—quasi-governmental due to its close relationship with regional arms of government and public orientation as part of a forty year-old nonprofit, yet privately-funded by larger state and national foundation grants for goals that center on social justice and the promotion of public health.

Imagined landscapes were the goal of “walking audits” of the corridor during the hot summer months. Strollers were pushed by volunteers up and down the street in an effort to collect data and physically embody the imagination of what could be. Infrastructure needs were documented in great detail; wheels stuck in concrete cracks were photographed as evidence of infrastructural neglect. The search for shade in 100 degree temperatures was a constant reminder that nature had been categorically eliminated on Blackstone Avenue. A 10 a.m. walk in August 2015 found two groups of mothers directed in both Spanish and English by A Better Blackstone staffers, upon whom seeing the ten feet of shade found near a bus stop north of Olive Avenue broke out into happy exaltations. Apparently shade is a historic vestige in vehicle-centered planning. Open irrigation canals that crossed the city were noted for being concentrated in older, now poorer parts of town, brimming with dark fast-moving water that seemed to tempt in the summer heat.

The role volunteer groups, political organizations and nonprofit service agencies play in the discussion of urbanization has proved the singular counterweight in the face of the capitalist political economy of city leadership forced to play an unending game of growth liberalism. Whether the aims of the ten year A Better Blackstone project will be fulfilled is an ongoing question, but the actions taken by its leadership and that of the Downtown Fresno Coalition to fight perceived threats of spatial inequality are indicators of deep place attachment^[29] by historically overlooked groups. The attachment reproduced by socially-ascribed memory implicitly ties place as the physical bearer of culture within the production of space.^[30] Water’s role as the unacknowledged shaper of events, even in its absence, is correlated with the reproduction of a deficit-centric cultural discourse found here in the tactics of Fresno interest groups.

Water is the phantom subject of interest that spurs political movement on space and place in Fresno and throughout the broader Central Valley. The planning regime that produced the Fulton Mall, and the modern effort to revitalize it amidst calls to preserve its significance as a site of history and social memory for many city residents are cyclical development projects that further the production of space, as all states must be productive in the highly privatized spatial project that is the Central Valley. Yet it is this same planning regime that has created the blighted Blackstone Avenue, where water’s disappearance in the form of trees and urban nature are also felt. Understanding the social response to urban physical intervention is my ongoing effort to capture ethnographically the process of change and renewal that stem from these issues of place attachment, and from within a historical framework of deficit that has subsumed conceptions of the Valley for so long. Through the distribution and rethinking of water as a central resource, a human right rather than a commodity, a naturally-occurring resource to be redistributed by humans, its role in reshaping Fresno as a political project and cultural production makes visible the fault lines across which denizens and their institutions must negotiate. For me, it is the price of coming home.

Notes

All photos taken by Sydney Santana.

^[1] James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

^[2] Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

^[3] Neil Brenner and C. Schmid, “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question,” International Journal Urban and Regional Research 38 (2014): 731–55.

^[4] David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso Press, 2012).

^[5] Henry Delcore, “Pedestrian Survey,” Institute of Public Anthropology, California State University, Fresno (2010).

^[6] Downtown Fresno Partnership, “Do You Believe in Downtown?” video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpX02x91OiE, 14 March 2013.

^[7] Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (New York: Routledge, 2007).

^[8] Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

^[9] Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso Books, 1990).

^[10] Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Knopf, 2012), 64.

^[11] Gerald Haslam, The Other California (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000), xv.

^[12] Mark Grossi and Marc Benjamin, “In San Joaquin Valley, Drought Fight Has Landed In the City,” The Fresno Bee, 22 August 2015, http://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article31823472.html.

^[13] Michael Dear, “The Los Angeles School of Urbanism: An Intellectual History,” Urban Geography, 24 (2013): 493-509.

^[14] Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012).

^[15] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

^[16] Gary Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

^[17] Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

^[18] Gerald Haslam, Haslam’s Valley (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2005), 206.

^[19] Marx Arax, West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders and Killers in the Golden State (New York: Public Affairs Books, 2009), 27.

^[20] Neil Brenner, “Globalization as Reterritorialization: The Rescaling of Urban Governance in the European Union,” Urban Studies, 36 (1999): 431.

^[21] Marc Treib and Dorothée Imbert, Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

^[22] Elliott Balch and Joe Moore, “The (Broken) Heart of Our City: A Downtown Timeline” (City of Fresno, 2012), https://www.fresno.gov/mayor/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/10/FultonMallTimeline.pdf.

[23] Irwin Altman and Setha Low, Place Attachment: A Conceptual Inquiry (New York: Plenum Press, 1992), 23.

^[24] Setha Low, On the Plaza (San Antonio: University of Texas Press, 2000).

^[25] Mark Arax, “Blackstone is the Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” The Fresno Bee, 13 December 2014, http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/article19528338.html.

^[26] A Better Blackstone Association brochure, 2015, http://www.betterblackstone.com/.

^[27] Aline Gubrium and Krista Harper, Participatory Visual and Digital Research in Action (New York: Routledge, 2015).

^[28] Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

^[29] Irwin Altman and Setha Low, Place Attachment: A Conceptual Inquiry (New York: Plenum Press, 1992), 23.

^[30] Yi Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974).

Dorie Dakin Perez is doctoral candidate in political anthropology and urban history at the University of California, Merced. Her research focuses on the cultural meaning-making of urban space and public policy as cultural change. Previously, she worked for the State Legislature and the Google X Self-Driving Car project. Her work can be found at www.dorieperez.org.

Copyright: © 2017 Dorie Dakin Perez. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Photography/Art

Sonoma’s Fading Images of Hwy 12

Boom California on August 16, 2017

Mike Acker

Running through the heart of Sonoma County’s unincorporated communities of Boyes Hot Springs, Fetters Hot Springs, and Agua Caliente, California Highway 12 is now a major thoroughfare between Oakland/San Francisco and Santa Rosa. Yet as recently as the 1950s, it was a narrow road for tourists enjoying the resorts. And it was a main street for locals. The resorts started to made these towns more populated and prosperous than the City of Sonoma next door. However, the prosperity reversed over the latter half of the twentieth century as wine tourism grew and Sonoma’s role in California history was revived.

The collage below incorporates photographs from 2009-2010 with those from the 1930s and the 1950s. On the left side we travel back to an era when Kramer’s Inn had wooden benches in front and a Greyhound sign overhead. The “TATTOO” sign peeks out from 2010. On the far right is the original Mary’s Pizza Shack, which became a decent-sized pizza chain of some nineteen restaurants by 2017.

A few miles further up the road in Agua Caliente the traces and memories of the uncelebrated history of “The Springs,” can be seen. The faces and buildings of the forbearers of a fourth-generation resident, gleaned from a series of Facebook posts, are combined with his words: “The Driveway of the Valley Of The Moon Saloon, 1930…. That building to the left is still there, but now an apt. The Thugs are still there too… My Great-Grandfather is in the middle ‘Cheif [sic] Bootlegger’ and a couple of Runners.” They are superimposed onto photographs from 2009. The sad state of historic preservation in the area is alluded to by the inclusion, fading in and out, of a page of a historic resource report from 2005, which states that no significant structures remain.

Michael Acker has lived in the Sonoma Valley for the past 20 years. A local artist and historian, Acker is past president of the Sonoma Valley Grange, and an activist in the Springs Community Alliance. He holds the MFA in sculpture from San Francisco State University, and is the author of the recent Images of America book, The Springs: Resort Towns of Sonoma Valley (Arcadia, 2017).

Copyright: © 2017 Michael Acker. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Articles

The Myth of a Desert Metropolis: Los Angeles was not built in a desert, but are we making it one?

Boom California on May 22, 2017

Glen M. MacDonald

The question is posed like this. You’ve probably heard it or asked it yourself. Perhaps at a cocktail party. Probably not in LA—but hey, maybe even here in the heart of the folly.

Why on Earth would you build a city for millions of souls in a desert?

Someday, and maybe sooner rather than later, the water is going to run out, and Los Angeles will dry up and blow away.

Alex Prud’homme, author of Ripple Effect: The Fate of Water in the Twenty-First Century, prophesied that Perth, Australia, “could become the world’s first ‘ghost city’—a modern metropolis abandoned for lack of water.” And, he warned, “similar fates may await America’s booming desert cities: Las Vegas, Phoenix, or Los Angeles.”[1] Prud’homme’s description of Los Angeles as a “desert city” has a distinguished lineage. Boyle Workman, a 1930s booster, recalled Los Angeles’ “desert” beginnings when he described the Los Angeles Aqueduct as a triumph of human ingenuity and engineering. Workman praised “the men who diverted streams into ditches and fed waving fields of grain, vineyards, glossy orange groves and rich gardens that blossomed where once desert brooded.”[2] A 1977 article by the famed aqueduct critic Remi Nadeau was headlined “Los Angeles is by Far the Largest City Ever Built in a Desert.”[3] And nine years later in Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water,[4] Marc Reisner referred to Los Angeles as being second only to Cairo as the most populous desert city on earth.

The myth of desert Los Angeles suggests that if not for the Los Angeles Aqueduct—and if the city were ever to lose the water that comes from Owens Valley—LA could be Ozymandias: that “colossal wreck, boundless and bare,” around which “the lone and level sands stretch far away,” in the immortal words of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. But is Los Angeles the once and future desert? And should the LA Aqueduct be seen as Mulholland’s greatest gift? Or a curse because it gave rise to an ultimately unsustainable metropolis?

That Los Angeles is a “desert city” is, in large part, a myth. Writers have chipped away at the myth of the desert metropolis before.[5] Here my objective is not simply to dispel the myth but to explore the history that underlies the mythology and to consider its potential for becoming true—because sometimes myths have a strange way of becoming true. Could we, through our own actions, be transforming the myth of desert LA into a self-fulfilling prophecy? It turns out, we have in fact gone a long way down that road.

Mojave Desert and creosote bush on the outskirts of Lancaster, California. Photograph by Glen MacDonald.

“A very pleasing spot in every respect”

The term “desert” has specific meanings. But how well does Los Angeles fit the bill? According to the venerable Köppen-Geiger Climate System, deserts typically receive less than 10 inches of precipitation a year.[6] Los Angeles gets around 15 inches.[7] However, it is not quite that simple. The real mark of a desert is the ratio of potential evaporation and transpiration (evapotranspiration) to precipitation. This ratio is dependent on temperature, and when the ratio is taken into account we find that a Southwest city such as Tucson, with its high temperatures, is classified as desert despite its average annual precipitation of around 11.6 inches. LA’s higher rainfall and milder temperatures place it in the Mediterranean climate zone. Climatologically, Los Angeles’ sister cities are not places like Cairo but Rome, Lisbon, Madrid, and Athens.

What else defines a desert? Ecologists and biogeographers delineate deserts as regions in which aridity produces sparse and treeless plant cover.[8] Typically, in deserts there is more bare ground than vegetation. Consider the creosote bush-dominated Mojave Desert that extends from Lancaster to beyond Las Vegas. Here we see a generally treeless landscape where creosote bushes often occur at densities of less than one plant for every 100 to 200 square feet of land. Did Los Angeles ever look like this?

It can be hard to imagine what Los Angeles, with its pervasive built and irrigated landscapes, was like prior to Mulholland’s aqueduct, let alone in a state of nature. But glimpses of LA long before the deluge can be found in the written accounts of Padre Juan Crespi who accompanied the Gaspar de Portolà expedition in 1769.[9] Crespi’s descriptions challenge the notion that Los Angeles was a desert. On 2 August 1769, Crespi described what is now the heart of Los Angeles: “The river flows on down nearly at ground level through a very green, lush and wide reaching valley of level soil some leagues in extent from north to south; upon one and the other side of the river, which runs continually onward with a great amount of trees[,] lie very large, very green bottom lands, looking from afar like nothing so much as large cornfields.” Crespi called it “a very pleasing spot in every respect.” He went on to express his views about the potential for European settlement: “And good, better than good, though the places behind us have been, to my mind this spot can be given the preference in everything, in soil, water and trees of which it has a good amount as I have related. A grand spot to become in time a good-sized mission of Our Lady of the Angels and La Porciúncula.” Instead of a mission, Governor Felipe de Neve established a civilian farming settlement on arable land that had once sustained the Tongva Indians. On 4 September 1781, a party of forty-four colonists and their military escort founded what was to become Los Angeles. The pueblo was established not in the middle of a desert but where colonists found water, lush vegetation, and good soils.

The Portolà expedition also crossed into the SanFernando Valley, a region generally hotter and drier than the site of future downtown LA. On 5 August 1769, near present day Encino, Crespi found another “grand spot for a good-size mission.” He wrote that “there is no bettering the vast amount of level soil in this valley, dark and friable.” Encino took its name from the Spanish word for live oaks, and Crespi commented on the many trees in the vicinity.[10] “There are a great many walnut trees and white oaks here on the slopes of the mountains belonging to this plain, with a great deal of trees visible to eastward.”

Was Crespi overselling the Los Angeles region? It is not all lushness in his accounts. He does note burned grasslands, coastal sage, and prickly pear cactus consistent with semi-arid vegetation, but he does not describe a desert.

We have other glimpses of early days in the so-called “desert city.” In the nineteenth century, precipitation supported rich range lands and early cattle ranches surrounding Los Angeles, and farmers in the San Fernando Valley produced wheat without irrigation. River water irrigated vineyards, orchards, and market gardens near the pueblo. Shallow groundwater and spring water that collected in the basin’s substrates provided additional water for pumping. A picture from 1863 of a water wheel taking irrigation water from the Los Angeles River against the background of verdant fields and green trees tells the story, as do maps of agriculture in the late nineteenth century. As Crespi had observed earlier, it was “a very pleasing spot in every respect.” The natural local water of the Los Angeles Basin’s streams, rivers, and groundwater allowed Los Angeles to become by 1910 the top agricultural producing county in the entire United States.[11]

Water wheel along the Los Angeles River in the 1860’s. Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection.

Water Wars, Real Estate and the Birth of the Desert City Myth

So, where did the “Los Angeles is a desert city” myth originate? Historian Ralph Shaffer has laid the blame on Harrison Gray Otis, the Chandler family, and their use of Los Angeles Times as a propaganda vehicle to secure water and ensure development.[12] However, I think it’s a little more complex than that. In the writings of city boosters during the first real estate boom in the 1880s, one finds no overt reference to Los Angeles as a desert. The following assessment in Los Angeles Times comes from 15 August 1886: “The water supply of Los Angeles is abundant, and while not everything that it should be or can be made, it is better than the water of Boston, Philadelphia, and other Eastern cities.”

There were, however, other forces at work that may have contributed to conceptions of Los Angeles as a desert at the time. The 1877 Desert Lands Act classified as desert those tracts of land that “will not, without irrigation, produce an agricultural crop.”[13] Private citizens could be granted title to such lands if they intended to “reclaim” them through the provision of irrigation waters. The area of Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County east of Los Angeles was a region of such activity, although it is arguably not a true desert either.[14]

Closer to Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley in the 1880s was explicitly referred to as desert that could be made to bloom with irrigation.[15] Here is one example from Los Angeles Times, on 4 June 1886: “It was said by somebody years ago, that the man who made a blade of grass grow where none grew before was a public benefactor. What can we say of the man who brings water from the bowels of the earth and causes a fresh, pure living stream to flow where there never was one since the world’s creation? Streams shall break out in the desert, and the thirsty lands become pools of water.” We begin to see the desert city myth taking hold in what would become the greater Los Angeles area, appropriately enough in the San Fernando Valley, where water from the LA Aqueduct would enable urban development in the twentieth century.[16]

The image of Los Angeles collapsing and returning to desert can be seen in a remarkable Los Angeles Times article, “When the Desert Came Back,” which was published29 May 1927, just twelve years after the aqueduct first brought water to the city. Nathaniel Davis’s ostensible subject was the Roman ruins at Timgad, Algeria, but he used the occasion to warn about the potential environmental collapse of Los Angeles and the need for the conservation of water and surrounding forest lands. Uncannily, his voice can seem to speak directly to us from over eighty years ago about topics starkly relevant today. As many would do after him, Davis employed the desert motif in his plea: “I stood on the heights of Hollywood’s hills and looked seaward and then toward the mountains. It is a stirring panorama, a drama in orchards, steel and stone, and brawn and brain and heart. And I was pessimistic enough to imagine that self-confident Los Angeles had forgotten Babylon, Palmyra, Palestine, China and Timgad. What I now saw was our own beloved land. And I saw sand dunes, sage brush, aridity, stately ruins, idle derricks, desolation.” Much of what has since been written about Los Angeles’ fated return to desert echoes this refrain.

Maps to accompany report on irrigation and water supply, by William Hammond Hall, California Department of Engineering, 1888. Courtesy of davidrumsey.com.

What About William Mulholland?

But what about William Mulholland, the father of the LA Aqueduct? Did he ever subscribe to this view of the desert city? Or use it to sell the aqueduct? In 1905, Mulholland claimed that he originally thought the city would never need water from anywhere else. “Thirteen years ago Fred Eaton first told me that Los Angeles would one day secure its water supply from Owens Valley,” Mulholland told Los Angeles Times. “At that time the Los Angeles River was running 40,000,000 gallons of water daily, and we had a population of less than 50,000. I laughed at him. ‘We have enough water here in the river to supply the city for the next fifty years,’ I told him. ‘You are wrong,’ he said, ‘You have not lived in this country as long as I have. I was born here and have seen dry years, years you know nothing about. Wait and see.”’ Mulholland concluded: “Four years ago I began to discover that Fred was right. Our population climbed to the top and the bottom appeared to drop out of the river.”

The cause was drought. Mulholland’s case for the aqueduct was not built on making a barren desert bloom, but accommodating population growth and providing protection against drought, arguments that have been used to justify importing more water to the city ever since.[17]

In 1907, Mulholland urged voters to support bonds that were critical to building the aqueduct, arguing: “Our population has doubled since 1904, while our water supply has diminished. At times we have faced a veritable water famine.”[18] Drought, of course, was no stranger to Angelenos even prior to Mulholland’s arrival. A devastating drought from 1862 to 1865 eviscerated the region’s cattle-based economy.[19] A prolonged dry spell from 1893 to 1904, coupled with dramatic population growth—the city tripled in size during that period—motivated Mulholland’s quest, not a vision of creating a city in the desert.

MODIS satellite image of the urban area of greater Los Angeles and the surrounding desert. Courtesy of Glen MacDonald.

Myth Made Real?

But are we turning the city into a desert? To see, let’s get a view from on high, above the city, from a satellite orbiting Earth, which gathered data to create an image while I was writing this piece. What has Los Angeles become since the pastoral eighteenth and nineteenth century views we encountered earlier?

Now we see the gray tones of our metropolitan area blanketing the entire Los Angeles basin, San Fernando Valley, Santa Clarita Valley to the north, and Inland Empire to the east. The San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains, which seem so imposing from the ground and separate us from the true desert to the east, appear like tiny green islands in a sea of city and desert. Indeed, because it now veritably merges with Palmdale, Lancaster, Victorville, and Palm Springs, it is the growth of the megacity that encroaches upon the Mojave Desert and not vice versa. The cities merge physically and in terms of the daily flows of people, energy, and commerce. Taken as a whole, Greater Los Angeles has grown from its Mediterranean core outward and has merged with the true deserts to the east. The “fertile vales” that once separated city from desert are no more. This image shows a huge city that blends in with vast deserts to the north and east.

That is not all. Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, to which Los Angeles has contributed directly, threaten to bring the true desert climate closer to the city’s core. A recent projection of the impacts of climate change shows the city of Los Angeles warming by some 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of this century, while foothill, mountain, and desert regions could warm even more.[20] At the same time, other models suggest that precipitation patterns are likely to change in ways that will reduce the snowpack in our mountains and diminish our water supply. The result is likely to be increasing general aridity in the Southwest, Southern California, and the Los Angeles region coupled with longer droughts that will tax an already stressed water system.[21] Neither the Sierra Nevada nor the Colorado River are likely to be able to provide the imported water to which we have become accustomed. Unfortunately, the phrase “desert city” could soon accurately describe Los Angeles. As we move further into the twenty-first century, not only are the outer boundaries of the Los Angeles megacity sprawling into the true desert, we are also bringing the desert climate inexorably closer to the heart of the founding plaza of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula.

And just so we come to the end of a chapter of our history that William Mulholland began, “There it is. Take It.” Now we must write a new chapter of our history, and in the process perhaps create a new myth for our metropolis.

Notes

[1] Alex Prud’homme, “Drought: A Creeping Disaster,” The New York Times, 16 July 2011.

[2] Boyle Workman, The City That Grew (Los Angeles: The Southland Publishing Company, 1935).

[3] Remi Nadeau, “Los Angeles: A City That Water Built,” Los Angeles Times, 26 June 1977.

[4] Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York: Viking Press, 1986).

[5] Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Ralph Shaffer, “That desert myth: will it ever dry up?” LA Observed, 10 November 2003, http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2003/11/la_is_not_a_des.php; Glen MacDonald, “Los Angeles Water––Myths, Miracles, Mayhem and William Mulholland,” AAG Newsletter, December 2012.

[6] M.C. Peel, B.L. Finlayson, and T.A. McMahion, “Updated World Map of the Köppen-Geiger Climate Classification,” Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 11 (2007): 1633–1644.

[7] http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/land-based-station-data/climate-normals/1981-2010-normals-data.

[8] Glen MacDonald, Biogeography: Space, Time and Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002).

[9] Juan Crespi, A Description of Distant Lands, Alan K. Brown, trans. (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 2001).

[10] In the San Fernando Valley, Crespi describes grandes enzinos y ròblez, meaning large evergreen live oaks (Quercus agrifolia) and deciduous valley oaks (Quercus lobata). The neighborhood of Encino in the San Fernando Valley takes its name from this. The modern Spanish spelling for live oak is encina.

[11] Quoted in: J. Cohen, “Agricultural Land Is Growing Scarce: Nursery Plants Are Now the Top Crop in Los Angeles County,” Los Angeles Times, 10 May 1987.

[12] Ralph Shaffer, “That desert myth: will it ever dry up?”

[13] “‘Instink’ and Desert Lands: The Act of Congress in Such Cases Made and Provided,” Los Angeles Times, 7 July 1883; J.T. Ganoe, “The Desert Land Act in Operation, 1877–1891,” Agricultural History 11: 142–157.

[14] “Improving the Waste Places: The Work of Settlers on the So Called Cucamonga Desert,” Los Angeles Times, 17 November 1883; “Cucamonga,” Los Angeles Times, 20 July 1883.

[15] “San Fernando Valley: A Fertile Region with a Prosperous Future,” Los Angeles Times, 25 November 1883.

[16] See for example: “The San Fernando Water Case,” Los Angeles Times, 22 August 1904; “Bright Days in the Valley,” Los Angeles Times, 10 August 1905.

[17] Robert W. Matson, William Mulholland: A Forgotten Forefather (Stockton: University of the Pacific, 1976); Margaret Leslie Davis, Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles (New York: Harper Collins, 1993).

[18] “Truth About Owens River: Mulholland Talks to Sixth Ward Property,” Los Angeles Times, 30 May 1907.

[19] Workman, The City That Grew; Lynn Bowman, Los Angeles: Epic of a City (Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1974); Gordon DeMarco, A Short History of Los Angeles (San Francisco: Lexikos, 1988).

[20] A. Hall, F. Sun, D. Walton, S. Capps, Q. Xin, and H-Y. Huang, “Mid-Century Warming in the Los Angeles Region”––Part I of the Climate Change in the Los Angeles Region (UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability Peer-Reviewed Report, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6v88k76b).

[21] IPCC, 2007: Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report: Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eds. R.K. Pachauri and A. Reisinger (Geneva, Switzerland, IPCC); Glen M. MacDonald, “Climate Change and Water in Southwestern North America Special Feature: Water, Climate Change, and Sustainability in the Southwest,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, 21256–21262; doi:10.1073/pnas.0909651107, 2010.

Glen M. MacDonald is Director of the White Mountain Research Center and a UCLA Distinguished Professor. He is a former Director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and holds the John Muir Memorial Chair in Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Biogeography: Space, Time and Life. His research focuses on climatic and environmental change.

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Los Angeles County Jail Sonnets #13

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The Myth of a Desert Metropolis: Los Angeles was not built in a desert, but are we making it one?