A City in Opposition: How History Shapes Tomorrow s Los Angeles

We've been here before, arguing fiercely about the look of Los Angeles, memorably in the mid-1970s, when the growth machine that had boomed the city to bigness - and greatness - first stalled. It had been an epic, hundred-year bender by then, turning square miles of flood plain, valley, and foothill into single-family house lots. And it seemed that the city was sobering up - and growing up - as its development pattern matured around its low-rise, suburban-appearing uniformity. Sure, the hangover from the boomtime lingered in City Hall's failure to notice the changing direction of the growth machine, and in Angele os' faith that an improved middle-class paradise - in the form of yet another subdivision - would be found around the next bend in the freeway.

Angele os still lined up to buy that snake oil 40 years ago, even as its promise relocated beyond the San Fernando Valley and into the High Desert, stretching commutes to the breaking point. The promise had been something hopeful about making an ordinary life within the limits of suburban privacy, security, and comfort. The promise had also been something flawed about locating home at a distance from urban centers with their mixtures of races, ethnicities, and habits of living.

Both the hope and the fear had been there in 1850, with the Americanization of the Mexican villa de los ngeles. (Shorted by English speakers to Los; the breezier LA came later.)

Anglo Los Angeles established itself as a city in opposition: in opposition to Mexican identity, to colonial history, to other cultures and languages, and to existing urban centers.

Suddenly possessors of an intact, thriving (although small) provincial Mexican city with a distinctly mestizo population, the first American immigrants here, many of them from the South, set about building an alternate Los Angeles just for themselves. Its construction would reflect their anxieties about being in a Catholic city, its capture in an unjust war, and Mexican irredentism. But the Anglo city would mostly reflect the segregationist assumptions of its builders.

Anglo Los Angeles established itself as a city in opposition: in opposition to Mexican identity, to colonial history, to other cultures and languages, and to existing urban centers. Opposition exploited the landscape - the hills above the mestizo plaza and the flat terrain west and south, where the Anglo city could rise uninhibited, white in a landscape of brown

Ranchos of Los Angeles County. The end of the Mexican period left Los Angeles with a pattern of large-scale land ownership that shaped how the city would develop. Map courtesy of the Map Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.

Los Angeles city lands, 1858. The city is the tiny dot in the center of the map surrounded by some 17,000 acres of municipal land originally granted by Spain in 1781. Map courtesy of the Map Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.

Temple Street, 1876. An unpaved Temple Street leads west below Bunker Hill among scattered houses and empty fields. Courtesy of the Security Pacific National Bank Collection - Los Angeles Public Library.

Angele o Heights, 1886. Angele o Heights (later known as Angelino Heights and Angeleno Heights) was one of the first suburbs of Los Angeles. Map courtesy of Loyola Marymount University, William H. Hannon Library.

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Opposition also took advantage of the already dispersed character of Mexican-era settlement and accelerated it. Among the first actions of the new American city government was to plat and sell off (or give away) its municipal land - some 17,000 acres that Spanish kings and Mexican legislators had reserved to the city to finance and manage its growth.

When the adjoining rancho lands passed from their Californio grantees into the hands of Yankee merchants in the 1860s and from them into the hands of San Francisco capitalists in the 1870s, a pattern of development was set. A large tract of land (not always contiguous to other developed tracts) would be improved as a unit and sold, first as acreage for farms and orchards, later as house lots. As they developed, these tracts were connected by steam railways and dotted with farm towns platted along the tracks by the railways for the company's convenience and profit. Later, Pacific Electric trolleys bound these towns together and proceeded to fill the space in between. Freeway building after World War II replicated this pattern at ever greater distances from urban centers and their pre-war suburbs.

Because the region was developed in large units by land companies with at least a rudimentary design scheme, it's unfair to say that Los Angeles was unplanned. It might have been planned too much in the 20th century, since every solution to the problem of making a home here seemed to be a square mile or two (or ten) of single-family homes on a grid of streets lined by strip commercial. That was as true of the bungalow heavens of the 1890s and the street car suburbs of 1910s as it was of the freeway-adjacent ranch houses of the 1960s.

Los Angeles might also be faulted for having once been too modern, since the period of its greatest growth coincided with the rise of the planning profession and its changing fashions for what the city of tomorrow ought to look like. By the end of the 1970s, Los Angeles reflected a hundred years of formerly good ideas for being modern, from garden suburbs in 1888 to exclusionary zoning by 1910 to public housing in the 1940s to urban redevelopment in the 1960s. There have been more good ideas since.

Pacific Electric and Los Angeles inter-urban railways. The map boasts that Los Angeles has the greatest electric railway system in the world. Map courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library, Security Pacific National Bank Collection.

Hollywood District land use survey by the WPA, 1933-1939. By the end of the 1930s, the b

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