Los Angeles and the anti-tradition of the suburban city

Journal of Historical

Geography,

18, 1 (1992) 121-138

Los Angeles and the anti-traditkm sulmban city

of the

Arthur Krim

An anti-urban image of Los Angeles that projected the city as a sprawling suburban expanse of automobile freeways and smog without a downtown skyline was broadcast in the national press after the First World War, climaxing in 1960. The national emotional response to the lack of urban order in Los Angeles was triggered by the night view from the Hollywood Hills and realized in the imagery of Los Angeles as “Six suburbs in search of a city”. In fact, the night view of the Los Angeles 3asin defined the emergent urban axis of Wilshire Boulevard, expanding west from the downtown district along the elite corridor to Beverly Hills and the Pacific shore. The result of the continued development of both Wilshire Boulevard and the downtown district was a revision of the anti-urban imagery, signaled by high-rise construction and increasing urban density after 1960. Recent critical imagery of Los Angeles appears to be based on deep-rooted notions of traditional urban density and Old World pre-industrial city structure. The result is a continuing evaluation of Los Angeles in the national press as a terrae incvgnitae when compared with New York City as the traditional city prototype of the vikvumene.

Los Angeles has long been regarded as a city without traditional urban form or structure. This conception of anti-traditional urban space has developed in responseto the extraordinary growth of Los Angeles as a primary metropolitan center challenging the establishedurban hierarchy of New York and Chicago for dominance of the 20th century American city system.[*]The anti-urban response by those who see Los Angeles as a city beyond the bounds of expected urban order can be likened to unconscious revelations of geographical lore asdescribed by John K&land Wright: The errors of an age are as characteristic as the accurate knowledge which it possesses and often more so. Moreover, in addition to formulated beliefs, whether true or false, out definition of geographical lore covers man’s spiritual and esthetic attitude toward various geographical facts, as revealed-often unconsciously-in descriptions of regions and landscapes.‘2l

No other American city has receivedsuch anti-urban responsefrom professional observers and the basic geographic form of no other American city is as misunderstood as that of Los Angeles. The purpose of this paper will be to explain the anti-urban geographic image of Los Angeles as an invention of tradition

(or anti-tradition)

distinct

from that of the “normal”

American

tit-y.

Night view suburbs The essential response by critics to Los Angeles is that it is a city without obvious urban order. That is, the city lacks the traditional central urban core 0305-7488/92/010121+ 18 $03.00/O

121

$2 1992 Academic Press Limited

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common to older cities. Observers cite the famous night view as seen from the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles (Figure 1) as an experience which disoriented observers in that its night mask revealed no traditional urban skyline characteristic of American cities. The night views were first photographed from the Mt. Wilson Observatory in Pasadena in 1906t31 and the essential distorting view of Los Angeles was based on the display of electric lights as seen on the valley floor below the mountain observatory. The imagery was first described by visiting New York actors of the early Hollywood film community in 1913, one of whom likened the cityscape view as reminiscent “of a diamond bar pin.“t41 Such reactions by eastern observers to the disoriented form of the city presaged the general critical response to Los Angeles after the First World War. In this sense, the night view became the signet image of Los Angeles: the disorientation of seeing the city from the mountain heights above created a singular impression of non-urban or anti-urban form. It was the experience of the night view that directly triggered the alliterative imagery of

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LOS ANGELES

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“sprawl” and of Los Angeles as “Six suburbs in searchof a city.” The emotional core of observers’reactions to the night view was the oblique distortion of seeing electric lights extending a seemingly infinite distance along the Los Angeles Basin from the vantage of the mountain view above Hollywood or Pasadena (Figure 2). Here the traditional core of the city was masked by the mountain flanks hiding the expectedskyline of downtown Los Angeles. Instead, observers saw the expansive spreadof electric night lights that merged with stars overhead. creating an endless array of suburban form that appeared to lack an obvious civic center. Articles in national magazines promoted the distorting effect of the Los Angeles night view, as in this 1928example from Harper’s: “Go to the top of Mount Wilson at night, and you will be told you are looking at Los Angeles and her satellites of sixty towns. They might as well tell you six hundred. Nothing like it is anywhere to be seen upon the earth’s surface.“”

Figure 2. Night

view: observation

points of the Los Angeles

basin.

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The night view elicited an entire array of related responses that described Los Angeles as a suburban city, an urban structure without traditional central focus. The distortion of the night lights of the Los Angeles Basin created the impression for outside observers that the city lacked an obvious focus, and was instead an infinite spread of suburban towns extending without order. This critical, anti-urban view of Los Angeles was symbolized in the image of Los Angeles as “Six suburbs in search of a city.” This characterization was based upon the 192 1 avante-garde Italian play, Sei personaggi in cera d’autore by Luigi Pirandello, opening in New York as Six Characters in Search of’ an Author in October 1922.t61 Comparisons of the Pirandello play with the night view of Los Angeles were reported by “sardonic visitors” of the early 1920s and the image of the city as “six suburbs in search of a city” was born.L7] The first published account of the Pirandello image was offered in 1937 by the English writer J.B. Priestly, based on his reactions to the Hollywood night view: “Indeed the truest as well as the wittiest description of Los Angeles is ‘Six suburbs in search of a city ’ ” .~1 The comparative imagery of the Pirandello play to Los Angeles implied directly that the city was literally “in search of” its structure and was an array of numerous suburbs without an “author,” that is, without a traditional center. Such anti-urban imagery was broadcast by the national press and defined Los Angeles as existing outside the context of traditional urban form and without standard urban structure as it was understood to exist elsewhere in America. The effective power of the Pirandello imagery of Los Angeles as “Six suburbs in search of a city,” was probably based on alliterative sequence of the liquid “s’s” that focused on the “city” sound. The key phrase, “six suburbs,” described the new anti-urban form, based on expansive private residential development in Los Angeles. Such suburban development appeared to lack a cohesive center or form; it was, in fact, viewed as sub-urban in structure. The active image of this suburban structure was portrayed by the use of “sprawl” to depict the disordered growth of Los Angeles. Early use of “sprawl” is found in the 1928 Harper’s article that reacted negatively to the night view as the “sprawling hugeness” of Los Angeles. t9] National attention on the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games further expanded the “sprawling” imagery of the city and the “adjective went sizzling over the cables.“[“] By the early 1930s a full set of powerful anti-urban images had been developed by national observers to describe the sprawling suburban city that appeared to be Los Angeles, especially when seen from the distorted darkness of the night view from Mount Wilson. The primary assessment was that such a sprawl of suburbs was not an authentic city in the traditional sense, as compared with Chicago and New York, or London and Paris. In this sense-as a sprawling suburban expanse-Los Angeles lacked urban order and therefore was without cohesive central structure. In this formless imagery of Los Angeles, “sprawl” came to define the anti-urban density of the suburban city, or the city of sub-urban expanse. If there was no “author” to Los Angeles, then the city was only a random array of low density suburbs or, as described by one critic, “this huge collection of villages.“t’ ‘I Auto freeways

If Los Angeles lacked a cohesive traditional suburban sprawl both was and was understood

form, the root agent of active to be the private automobile.

LOS ANGELES AND ANTI-TRADITION

125

Early association of the automobile with Los Angeles was evidenced, after the First World War, by traffic reports that showed high automobile ownership ratios for the city. As stated in the 1922Los Angeles Plan, the city had “more automobiles per capita than any other large city in America.“[i2] By the time of the Second World War, such auto data was combined with the sense of suburban structure to establish a perceptual cause-and-effectrelationship with suburban sprawl: “The enormous expanse of these sparsely populated areas is typical of American cities like Los Angeles and Detroit where the effects of the automobile transportation are especially noticeable.“[“] The active highway system, a high rate of automobile ownership and travel, and the suburban sprawl of Los Angeles were now formally linked by planners and the image of a formless city would grow with highway expansion and increased automobile traffic. The initial planning of high speed“motorways” in the Los Angeles area was completed in 1939,and the first section of the Arroyo SecoParkway to Pasadena opening in 1941.[I41These first “freeways” were described in national magazines after the Second World War as “a spaghetti-like tangle of superhighways” and as “The World’s Worst Traffic Tangle.“~~1A senseof disorientation characterized the outsiders’ view of the Los Angeles freeway system and this was epitomized by the national reaction to the four-level “Stack” interchange built on the downtown fringe for the Hollywood and Harbor freeways in 1944.[‘“l When opened to full traffic, the “Stack” symbolized the dominance of the freeway and automobile mobility in the suburban growth of Los Angeles. As portrayed in national magazines, the Stack and its freewaysbecame the singular symbol of the city, appearing in cover aerial views in Newsweek,Business Week and Holiday during 1956 and 1957.1’1 Linked with the automobile, suburbs and freeways was the imagery of the inversion pollution defined as “smog.” First noted during the Second World War as a “Fume Nuisance,” the English term “smog” was applied to the Los Angeles air pollution in 1944.[I81National news coverageof air pollution in Los Angeles increased after the war with photo articles in the New York Times and Newsweek[“l and recognition of automobile exhaust as a causeof smog pollution was made by the Stanford Research Institute in 1950.1201 Thereafter, the increasingly traditional view of the city’s suburban structure with automobile pollution was symbolized by the smog that masked the already disoriented and disorganized structure of Los Angeles: The sprawling city in many places is dammed and parceled into islands, isolated from each other by torrents of cars that can neither be slowed nor penetrated. There is no focus, no place where the body and eye can come to rest, no point where people might converge and enjoy the amenities of life, if there is any. The same blight yearly creepsinto outer areas, through once magnificent canyons and mountains. The worst consequence is that the air itself has now become polluted by exhaust gases to such extent that respiration and the act of vision become painful processes.[*‘l

Midwest

town

While the national critics defined Los Angeles as an anti-urban city of sprawling and smog bound freeways, their critique of the city was most pointed at the lack of an obvious central core for civic identity. Early observations on the absence of a civic focus are found derided the emerging metropolitan

after the First World War when observers scale of Los Angeles, noting that “Down-

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town based small found

Los Angeles was never intended for a big city. “[**I In part, this critique was on the strong Midwestern origin of the Los Angeles population and the town, rural character of its metropolitan area. Such observations were in publications that openly dismissed the urban structure of the city:

If one were to take a hundred and place them end to end in not. He would have a huge sociological phenomenon; and “city quality.“lZ”

Middle Western towns of ten thousand population each the prairie. would he have a great metropolis? He would country village of a million population, a remarkable that is precisely what Los Angeles is. It does not have the

The visual sense of Midwestern scale was prefigured not only by the automobile and “sprawl” but by the legal limitations on the urban skyline for central Los Angeles. The thirteen story height restrictions implemented in 1905, prior to the San Francisco earthquake, had limited tall building profiles in the central area t241The height limits were excepted only for the City Hall, constructed with thirty-two stories in 1928. 1251Thus observers found the Los Angeles skyline without urban quality, “a series of iong, low lines instead of the rearing, jagged contours of most large American cities.“t26l The contrast between the suburban scale of metropolitan population and the absence of a traditional urban skyline confused observers about the internal structure of Los Angeles: An American city of two million with no skyscrapers is a novelty in itself. The city has a height limit of one hundred and fifty feet, or thirteen stories. The given reason was a desire to make the city spread, and the planners of outlying subdivisions have made the most of it. The confidential reason was a fear of earthquakes.‘z7’

Wilshire

future city

The inability of observers of the urban scene to understand the urban form of Los Angeles was compounded by the rapid growth of the city and its central structural expansion. Attempts to define a Los Angeles downtown business district, without a traditional skyline for identity, created a search for a singular shopping street that could be seen as a primary anchor of urban growth.t*‘] This search eventually focused on the development of Wilshire Boulevard west of the downtown area to Westwood and Beverly Hills (Figure 3). Originally intended as a residential avenue in 1886, Wilshire Boulevard assumed priority as a commercial axis after the First World War when downtown development turned west to the affluent suburbs of Westlake and Hancock Park’*“] Such expansion of the central business district following the elite residential locations as primary lines of urban development had long been noted in American cities with such examples as Fifth Avenue in New York. t301Rapid growth of these primary commercial corridors “leap-frogging” from the central business cores had been understood by real estate promoters since Elizabethan London and its West End growth to royal estates at Westminster. t3i1In Los Angeles, westward growth of the business district had been noted after the First World War along West Seventh Street, “towards new high grade residential districts developing between the main business district and the ocean.“t”l By the Second World War, development of Wilshire Boulevard directly from downtown Los Angeles had allowed the city to attain a notable urban structure: With the progressive decentralization of the city’s business district, which began in the 1920’s, Wilshire Boulevard has become the most important of the newer metropolitan arteries. Many of the larger shops and department stores have moved to the five mile

LOS ANGELES

Figure 3. Development

of Wilshire

AND

ANTI-TRADITION

Boulevard

as the Los Angeles urban axis

section between Westlake Park and Fairfax Avenue; others opened branches there. often finer than the parent store.n31

In the decadesthat followed the SecondWorld War, the continued development of Wilshire Boulevard focused primary urban growth on the axial corridor from downtown Los Angeles to Beverly Hills and Santa Monica. Establishment of such major civic institutions as the Los Angeles Country Art Museum and expansion of the University of California’s Los Angeles campus at Westwood centered national attention on Wilshire Boulevard as a “linear downtown.“[‘4j National guide books helped clarify the Wilshire axis as comparative with similar structures in other large American and European cities: To Los Angeles, Wilshire Boulevard is what Park Avenue is to New York, what the Champs Elysees is to Paris. Commencing its run in Downtown Los Angeles, near Grand Street. it stretches to the heart of Beverly Hills. It is an impressive string of hotels.

A. KRIM

128 contemporary ants.u5’

apartment

houses, department

stores, office buildings

and plush restaur-

While the functional clarity of the Wilshire axis emerges as the prime core of Los Angeles activity, its architectural expression was limited to individual clusters of notable buildings, still without the traditional vertical skyline. It was not until the lifting of height restrictions in 1956 that verticality became a of the realized feature of central Los Angeles. t361After this date a redevelopment Bunker Hill district within downtown Los Angeles promoted a rising skyline for the central city. Within a decade national magazines noted the new vertical development of the city core with Time portraying “Los Angeles’ New Skyline” in 1968 and Business Week in 1969 declaring that “Sprawling Los Angeles gets a New Skyline. “t371 In this national reaction, the new vertical definition of the central district fit traditional conceptions of American urban form and countered the anti-urban image or invented tradition of a sprawling suburban Los Angeles.

Revisionists The linear development of Wilshire Boulevard and the vertical construction of the central district redefined Los Angeles for the observers responsible for the invention of the tradition of Los Angeles as an “abnormal” urban form. Combined with the expanded freeways system and continued population growth, Los Angeles was now promoted as a prototype of the future American city, with an advanced display of urban structure: As far as the eye can see there is no break in the solid pattern of urban development. It is a sight to see, even to dismay but not to ignore. Los Angeles is unique, a city of cities, a new order of metropolis. It is today’s city today and, some are beginning to say, tomorrow’s city as well.[3*l

Although critical observers were willing to accept the anti-urban structure of Los Angeles as a model of future metropolitan form, the architectural definition of an urban core helped promote a new appreciation of the city on its own terms as an American automobile metropolis. Regional critiques had already noted the bias of eastern observers in dismissing the structural integrity of Los Angeles.t39] Yet, in 197 1, it was the British historian Reyner Banham who openly defined the city as a positive urban experience in Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies: A city seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep apart from a small downtown not yet two centuries old and a few other pockets of ancientry, Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape. Most of its buildings are the first and only structures on their particular parcels of land; they are couched in a dozen different styles, most of them imported, exploited, and ruined within living memory. Yet the cty has a comprehensible, even consistent, quality to its built form, unified enough to rank as a fit subject for an historical monograph.[4”’

It was the view of architectural revisionism that recast Los Angeles within the traditional realm of American urban form, although largely as an exceptional future city of unique suburban structure without a traditional central core. The essential anti-urban critique of Los Angeles was still imbedded within the revisionist image of the suburban city as the freeway metropolis. Critics questioned the rationale of the revisionist view:

LOS ANGELES AND ANTI-TRADITION

13

Why have triumphs like these gone unnoticed for so long? The remoteness of Southern California is partly the answer. The other, of course, is the city’s sprawling anticlassical form: until Banham few critics could see beyond it. Banham, indeed, seestoo far; he hymns freeway driving beyond the limits acceptable even to satire.‘4’l

Image categories As developed over the half century from 1920to 1970the anti-urban imagery of Los Angeles focused upon the lack of traditional urban form. In a simplified schema, the image of Los Angeles as portrayed in the national press can be viewed as a contrast between local observations and distant critics. In this schema, Los Angeles can be placed in Wright’s world of the unknown, terrne incognitae, and New York can be set as the traditional homeplace, or oikoumene.14*] Viewed from this schematic perspective,the imagery of Los Angeles can be seen as a series of generative cycles that defined the basic image categories (Figure 4). From the distant vantagepoint of observersin the oikoumeneof New York or other “traditional” cities, the unknown world of Los Angeles, as depicted by literary journalists, popular magazines and urban scholars. appeared to be a sprawling suburbanfuture city. The local accounts of Los Angeles traffic engineers,urban planners and architectural critics, on the other hand, depicted the city with its automobiles, freeways and new skyline as expected elements of contemporary culture, but broadcasts as terrae incognitas to the national press in New York. The result was a cumulative imagery of Los Angeles that defined the city beyond the bounds of traditional form, as antiurban or sub-urban in structure and appearance. Thus, the imagery of Los Angeles was developed from two opposite perspectives, one national and the other local. Both fused into a single non-traditional view that portrayed the city as one outside the expectedurban experienceas defined by New York observers in the national press. The generative imagery or invented tradition of Los Angeles is best understood as a developmental sequencethat usedelements of the anti-urban image to construct a national image of the city. This sequential imagery can be illustrated as a parallel of interrelated elements that linked with each other over the course of time from 1920to 1970(Figure 5). While certain elements of this image were already established after the First World War, the linkages between image elements were only evident in the national press after 1930,as the full spectrum of the Los Angeles imagery climaxed in the period from the Second World War to 1960.Certain elements can be seenas essential to the image sequence.Most obvious is the night view that triggered such later constituents as the Pirandello image of “Six suburbs in search of a city” and “sprawl”. The night view proved to be the oldest operative element in the Los Angeles imagery, dating to before the First World War, although only active when combined with related suburban elements after 1930.Other key imagery can be found in the definition of Los Angeles as a Midwestern town, the high ratio of automobile ownership. and the early expansion of Wilshire Boulevard from the downtown district. Al1 were in place by 1928, when the night view and Wilshire Boulevard first appeared as elements in the national press. Indeed, much of the Midwest and auto imagery was already operating as part of the national view of Los Angeles by 1922when the Pirandello imagery was first reported. Thus, sometime during the mid- 192Os,the basic structure of Los Angeles imagery was set in the nationa I

A. KRIM

130

Los Angeles Imagery

TERRAE

INCOGNITAE

01 KOUMENE cuc/cv

Figure 4. Generative

cycles of Los Angeles imagery.

press to project the anti-urban tradition of the city. Later elements-the freeways, smog and the Stack interchange-elaborated the auto and suburban categories already in place before the Second World War. The climax of Los Angeles image elements appeared in the national press by 1960. At this time, the imagery was focused on the Stack interchange as the epitome of the suburban freeway city, as evidenced by national magazine covers during 19561957. On these covers, Los Angeles was depicted as a sprawling, smog-filled auto suburbia without a downtown skyline or central focus. After this crucial moment, various internal changes within Los Angeles promoted a revisionist image of the city within the bounds of traditional American urban form. The lifting of height restrictions in 1956 and the later publication of Banham’s Los Ang&s in 1971 bracketed a shift in national projections of the city within urban norms. Nevertheless, such persistent anti-urban elements as the suburban night view and the freeway remained in the national imagery of Los Angeles as a city outside the expected bounds of urban traditions.

LOS ANGELES AND ANTI-TRADITION

Los Angeles

Image Clusters categories II 1920

cl

1IWl VW

1930

1930 [

_ -., ^ -.

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J

I “,.-‘I

-^I

1970

1973

Figure

5. Los Angeles image clusters.

Historic imagery In retrospect, the initial reactions to the night view that triggered the original suburban imagery after the First World War, and the subsequentrevision of the Los Angeles image with the development of Wilshire Boulevard and the rising profile of a new skyline, were both related to the same geographic reality of the Los Angeles Basin. In the case of the night view, the reaction to the expanseof electric lights was a visual misconception of disordered development on the flat plain of the Basin. Moreover, the principal observatory for the night view was set from the Holywood Hills, with later vantage points from the crests of Mulholland Drive (seeFigure 2). When seenfrom this Hollywood perspective. the night view encompassed the district between downtown Los Angeles and Beverly Hills along the axis of Wilshire Boulevard. In reality, the flank of the mountain range at Griffith Park Observatory blocked an effective view of central

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A. KRIM

Los Angeles and the landmark City Hall. Even night views above Pasadena on Mt. Wilson masked the obvious focus of downtown Los Angeles. Thus, the night view from the Hollywood Hills was a defacto observation of the Wilshire corridor alone, and the reaction to the expanse of electric lights in the Los Angeles Basin was, in reality, a response only to the oblique aerial view of the affluent residential district from Westlake to Beverly Hills (see Figure 3). In part, some of the confusion over the form of the city experienced by observers during the 1920s and 1930s was based on the novelty of such oblique night aerial views in an era before night air travel became common, The reaction to the night view which fostered the image of the city as a disordered expanse of suburban development was a response to the lack of a discernible architectural profile of the emergent Wilshire corridor from downtown Los Angeles. While isolated buildings along Wilshire Boulevard might have provided a reference of night location, the surrounding residential district masked the architectural landmarks of commercial growth. Such visual camouflage of Wilshire Boulevard as the development axis of Los Angeles, combined with the obscuring of the central district by mountain flanks, helped perpetuate the image of Los Angeles as a disordered suburban city without obvious focus or traditional urban skyline. From this night perspective, Los Angeles was, in fact, “Six suburbs in search of a city,” as defined in the Pirandello imagery of the prewar period. It can now be understood that the Pirandello imagery was a night portrait of the Wilshire axis in its formative period before obvious architectural definition had profiled high-rise development from downtown Los Angeles. The “six suburbs” might well have approximated the reality of the surrounding residential districts along Wilshire: Westlake, Hancock Park, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Westwood, and Santa Monica. The night view thus triggered an emotional reaction to a developmental urban structure emerging in Los Angeles during the period between the first and second World Wars. By the time full architectural expression of the city had been realized in the 1960s the emotive imagery of the night view was counteracted by the obvious architectural reality of urban form as seen in the vertical skyline of the Wilshire axis and central Los Angeles. Recent imagery In the two decades since the revision of the Los Angeles anti-urban imagery began, persistent elements of critical reaction to the formlessness of Los Angeles are still evident in the national press, both scholarly and popular. These critical elements follow the well-established image categories defined after the First World War and reveal the remarkable persistence of the invented tradition, a deep rooted reaction to Los Angeles as a non-traditional city without ordered urban structure. Most obvious is the continuing linkage between the automobile and disordered suburban development and the imagery of “sprawl.” Such reactions can be found in a number of urban scholarly statements-from Baldassare’s “a southwestern metropolis as Los Angeles is characterized by relatively low density and sprawl r’t431to Bottles’ “Los Angeles’ close association with the automobile and its sprawling urban form”t441-yet the subjectivity of “sprawl” has been openly questioned as an image of urban or sub-urban form: The popularity of the term “sprawl” is a compelling figure of speech, but one without precise definition. At times it may imply extensive or dispersed development that

LOS ANGELES AND ANTI-TRADITION

I33

produces a monotonous and undifferentiated residential landscape. At other times it may imply the disorder of helter-skelter growth.[451

The essential critique of “sprawl” as the fundamental element in the antiurban imagery of Los Angeles has resulted in recent redefinition of the city’s structure. If “sprawl” projected the image of dispersed or disordered development in a city without urban focus, then recent population pressurein the Los Angeles metropolitan area has revised the conception, from a suburban city into a primate national center. Current population statistics for the Los Angeles metropolitan region indicate a combined figure exceeding 12 million pe0ple.1~~1 Thus, the growth of the Los Angeles metropolitan region from one million in 1920 has resulted in a fundamental size-shift within the ranking of the national urban hierarchy. Whereas Los Angeles was originally a regional city of approximately one million after the First World War when the first critical imagery was broadcast in the national press, its current primate size of 12 million plus has placed the city within competitive advantage of New York for the primary American urban focus. In a certain sense,the anti-urban imagery of Los Angeles can be understood as a critical view by New York observersbased on the rivalry posed by Los Angeles for national urban primacy. This view is acknowledged in a recent observation in Atlantic Monthly: Once a prosperous but provincial regional metropolis, greater Los Angeles has become American’s true “second city”-second only to New York in economic power and cultural influence. Los Angeles rivals New York in attracting ambitious people who want to make it, in almost every professional endeavor and field of business.1471

The understanding that Los Angeles now ranks as a primary national city with New York, has produced parallels of image comparison as the population figures approach equity. In fact, the addition of nearly 12 million people to the Los Angeles metropolitan region since the First World War has resulted in fundamental structural changes within the internal development of the city. Certain elements of thesetransformations were revealed in the development of the Wilshire corridor as the primary axis of central activity between downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica (see Figure 3). Other expressions include the definition of a new skyline and the negative effects of freeway congestion and smog after the Second World War. The result has been an increasing density of development that has equated Los Angeles with traditional American city growth similar to that of New York. As the swell of more than twelve million people have been added to the Los Angeles metropolitan region since 1920,the concept of unlimited suburban development has revised the basic imagery of “sprawl”. Now the recent pressureof population growth has forced changesin the concept of suburban space, from that of sprawl to that of intense urban density, especially along the primary Wilshire corridor from downtown to the shoreline at Santa Monica: “In the Westside, the generally affluent Los Angeles communities within seven miles of the Pacific, the pressure of the real-estate market is reshaping many neighborhoods and introducing bulkier development. As land prices swell, so does the volume of living space jammed onto each lot 171481 Recent developments within Los Angeles have confirmed the increasing urban density of the city and the transformation of the established suburban imagery to that of a disordered-but-major metropolis. Two ongoing developments have clarified the role and image of Los Angeles as a traditional American city

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comparable with New York. The first is the continuing definition of the central skyline with the construction of high-rise buildings.149l The second is the opening of the rapid transit link to Long Beach as the first electric rail line in the Los Angeles metropolitan region since the Second World War. National coverage of the opening of this mass-transit system by the New York Times, however, still contained elements of the older Los Angeles suburban imagery: “Skepticism is fueled by doubts that people here will give up their cars that are a symbol of Los Angeles culture. “15”] An even more obvious anti-urban expression is seen in a 1990 description of Los Angeles, also from the New York Times, which contained the classic elements of suburban or anti-urban imagery: “An urban landscape of freeways, palm trees and jumbled communities, Los Angeles confounds many because it lacks a geographical focus.“15’l Such anti-urban expression by New York observers reveals that the original invention of the Pirandello imagery of Los Angeles as “Six suburbs in search of a city” without order or focus still exists. The fact that this anti-urban imagery is still active in national descriptive literature on matters of geography shows the continuing ability of the oikoumene of New York to accept and perpetuate a distorted view of the terrae incognitae of Los Angeles. Urban prototypes The question as to why the anti-urban imagery of Los Angeles has remained so persistent in the national press is best answered by searching for the ultimate root of the negative reaction to the city by outside observers. Certainly, the prototype city within the American urban tradition has been New York, with its architectural skyline defining the concept of “American City”.t5*l The insular boundaries of Manhattan Island that encircles the downtown business districts and the vertical profile of the skyline have created an urban image of great the civic infrastructure of subways, bridges clarity and power. 1531Additionally, and parks has helped define the density of New York on insular Manhatten as the epitome of the American urban form. Yet the development of key signets in the Los Angeles urban image have been fairly recent in historic terms. The first named “skyscraper,” the World Building, was not completed until 1890 and the first underground electric subway was not opened until 1904.1541 Even the monumental span of the Brooklyn Bridge was not fully finished until 1883 and the landmark tower of the Statue of Liberty until 1886.[“1 Thus, the key architectural and civic signets of the New York skyline did not form a completed urban image until the late nineteenth century. The internal structural changes within the urban morphology of New York can be found at an earlier period of mid-nineteenth century city growth, including the first franchised street railroads in 1851, the opening of Central Park in 1857 and the completion of the Croton Aqueduct in 1842, all key elements in the increasing urbanity of Manhattan Island.l561 The essential structural image in this initial phase of urban definition was the conception of “downtown” New York as the central business district. The first records of the use of “downtown” New York to describe the city’s core appear in diaries as early as 1835, with the earliest published reference by Herman Melville in Moby Dick in 185 1.15’] The elements of urban density defining a downtown district in lower Manhattan appear to have been in place after 1850 with street railroads, water supply, and an uptown recreational space at Central Park. The result is

LOS ANGELES AND ANTI-TRADITION

iJ5

that the urban image of New York as the prototype American city had only been in place for seventy-five years when the first anti-urban imagery of Los Angeles appearedin the national press and, in fact, only a brief decadeseparatesthe first New York subways from the first Los Angeles night view reactions from 1904to 1913. Even the classic elements of the Los Angeles suburban imagery are distanced from the New York high-rise skyline only by some thirty-five years. The resulting conclusion is that New York had only been recently establishedas the prototype American city before Los Angeles challenged that national urban image in the 1930s. If New York is only a recent prototype of American urban imagery, then the root reaction to Los Angeles as a sub-urban city needsto be found at a deeper level of imagic conception. Prior to the emergence of New York as the quintessial urban place, the urban imagery of European cities, such as London or Paris, might be offered as models for urban form. Obviously, London can be used as the English prototype of the mercantile city with its residential and commercial space distinctly defined by Elizabethan times in the late sixteenth century.[581Tracing the origins of urban images back even further, urban prototypes in Classical history might be found in Rome or Athens.[59] It may well be that the crucial concept of traditional urban imagery is the civic identity of the “pre-industrial” city with a clear central focus and with obvious architectural monuments in the core area, defined by the physical bounds of a protective wall around the urban complex. t601This bounded clarity of city identity is found in all the urban imagery from Classic times to the industrial era, with a physical line separating the city inside from the suburbs outside the encasedcivic core. With Rome, the fortified walls of the city servedas bounded identity; with New York, the shores of Manhattan Island formed the bounded line around the downtown district. t6’] The first such city walls appear in the temple centersof Mesopotamia (Iraq) sometime before 3000 B.C. at such sitesof the ‘Ubiad period as Eridu that date back to 4900 B.C.[‘j*l Such ancient urban walled settlements have thus been part of Western tradition for at least five thousand years and possibly earlier. Prewalled urban settlements of great antiquity have been located in Anatolia (Turkey) dating to the Neolithic period (6000 B.C.) at Catal Huyuk, whose discoverer described its urban form: “Catal Huyuk deservesthe name city: it was a community with extensive economic development, specialized crafts, a rich religious life, a surprising attainment in art and an impressive social organization.“16’] The senseof urban density, the collective memory of compact city living, can thus be traced back in Western imagery some eight millennnia to the Neolithic Near East. The roots of Western city culture are based in these proto-urban settlements of the Near East, with at least eight thousand years of continual tradition of compact habitation clusters. It is this ancient period that servesas the literal groundmark for images of urban density for later preindustrial and industrial city forms. Conclusion

If the understanding of a proto-urban density can be traced to Neolithic Near East settlements, then the urban image can be seen as basic to the very beginnings of early agricultural civilization in Western tradition. Perhaps it was this ancient and fundamental image of cities as compact settlements that

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prefigured the American emotive response to the sub-urban structure of Los Angeles as a sprawling city without a central focus. That is, the triggered reaction to the night view and the Pirandello imagery of “Six suburbs in search of a city” was based on the search for a compact urban density of preindustrial, Neolithic settlement form. The loosely defined density of Los Angeles, the lack of obvious city boundaries in the Los Angeles Basin, and the rapid development of the city center along Wilshire Boulevard, distorted and disoriented outside observers to the open structure of the city. And the recent sense of squeezing development and the loss of suburban sprawl now indicates that the urban density of over twelve million people is finally approaching the traditional concepts of the city compactness. In retrospect, the invented tradition of the suburban imagery of Los Angeles, developed on the basis of a city of one million after the First World War, is now a nostalgic notion of the relatively recent past. But even with the increasing urban density of a high-rise city, Los Angeles will probably continue to elicit the image of a city of new world order in conflict with old world traditions, reserving the suburban imagery as its own tradition of city form. Now the night view observer will look out on a dense plain of compact towers that have crowded at the base of Hollywood Hills to reveal a skyline of a scale with New York, bounded by the shores of the Pacific Ocean rather than the Hudson and East rivers. But Los Angeles will still be recognized as different from the continuing tradition of urban form that was but barely comprehended when the night view lights of the city looked like a diamond pin to the silent stars of the early movies. From such a perspective, the suburban imagery of Los Angeles enters the realm of geographic lore as a durable invented tradition, an unconscious belief that found its definition in its contrast with the most ancient concepts of urban density and form. But even as invented tradition, contemporary and future images of Los Angeles will cease being terrae incognitae and become part of our oikoumene. Department of Geography, Salve Regina College, Newport, Rhode Island, USA Acknowledgements My appreciation to Martyn J. Bowden for his original inspiration on the subject of image perception and Denis Wood for his insights and encouragement. Notes [1] A. J. Krim, Imagery in search of a city: the geosophy of Los Angeles, 1931-1971, in A. D. Hill (Ed), AAG program abstracts, Salt Lake City (Washington 1977) 4; Krim, Imagery in search of a city, the geosophy of Los Angeles, 1921-1971 (unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Clark University, 1980). Based on analysis of 280 paired quotations on Los Angeles published in the American national press during 192 l-l 97 1. See also D. C. Nunis, Los Angeles, a bibliography of a metropolis (Los Angeles 1973) [2] J. K. Wright, The geographical lore at the time of the crusades (New York 1925) 2 [3] R. A. Jahns, Investigations and the problems of Southern California geology, in Jahns (Ed) Geology qf Southern California (San Francisco 1954) 6 [4] Mrs. D. W. Griffith (Linda Arvidson). When the movies Lvere young (New York 1925) 238 [5] S. Comstock, The great American mirror, reflections from Los Angeles, Harper’s Magazine, 158 (May 1928) 721

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[6] S. Young, Brains: Six characters in search of an author, The New Republic 32 (November 22, 1922) 335-336; E. Bentley (Ed), Nakedmasks,jveplays by Luigi Pirandello (New York 1952) 378 [7] W. W. Robinson, Los Angeles: A profile (Norman, OK: 1968) 27 [8] J. B. Priestiey, Midnight on the desert (New York 1937) 173 [9] Comstock, op cit., 713 [IO] H. Carr, Los Angeles, city ofdreams (New York 1935) 251 [I l] M. Mayo, Los Angeles (New York, 1933) 327 1121Los Angeles Traffic Commission, The Los Angeles plan (Los Angeles 1922) 6 [13] J. L. Sert, Can our cities survive? (Cambridge 1942) 199 [ 141 E. B. Lefferts, Correcting Los Angeles traffic snarls, American City 54 (May 1939) 100; H. M. Goodwin, The Arroyo Seco: from dry gulch to freeway, Southern California Quarter1.v 47 (1965)73-102 [15] G. Hill, Los Angeles super highways, New York Times (March 9, 1952) X, 16; F. Taylor, The world’s worst traffic tangle, Saturday Evening Post 226 (March 13, 1954) 42

[16] S. V. Cortleyou, Four-level grade separation for Los Angeles parkway intersections, Caltfornia Highways and Public Works 22 (May 1944) 17; G. W. Long, New rush to golden California, National Geographic 105 (1954) 787; Taylor, op cit. [ 171 How Los Angeles deals with its traffic, Newsweek (May 14, 1956) cover; Los Angeles lives the future today, Business Week (May 18, 1957) cover; The astounding world of Los Angeles Holiday 22 (October, 1957) cover [ 181 Smog, Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago 1990) v. IO 900-9 1; Fume nuisance persists, Business Week (November 4, 1944) 46 [ 191 L. E. Davis, ‘Smog’ perils the sunshine, glory of Los Angeles, New York Times (November 3, 1946) s. IV 12; Los Angeles: Forgotten sun, Newsweek 28 (December 23, 1946) 27 [20] J. W. Reith, Los Angeles smog, Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 13 (1951)24-31

[21] C. W. Conduit, American building art, the twentieth century (New York 1961) 291 1221F. C. Wright, Observations on a Pacific Coast trip, Engineering News- Record 86 (January 13. 1921) 57 [23] Mayo, op cit., 328 [24] P. Gleye, Architecture of Los Angeles (Los Angeles 1981) 97-98. The original building limit was first adopted in December 1904 and passed in February 1905. Popular historians misdated the Los Angeles height limit to the San Francisco earthquake of 1906; see Work Projects Administration, Los Angeles, A guide to the city and its environs (New York 1941) 7 [25] Work Projects Administration. op. cit., 145-46; D. G. and R. Winter, A guide to architecture in Los Angeles and Southern California (Santa Barbara 1977) 223 [26] Work Projects Administration, op. cit., 7 [27] M. Yavno and L. Shippey, The Los Angeles book (Boston 1950) 58 [28] A. Krim, The central urban structure of Los Angeles, in R. F. Roberts (Ed), A,4G ‘86 abstracts (Washington 1986) 316 [29] R. Hancock, Fabulous boulevard (New York 1949); W. W. Robinson, History of the miracle mile (Los Angeles 1965); D. R. Suisman, Los Angeles boulevard (Los Angeles 1989) [30] R. M. Hurd, Principals of city land values (New York 1903) 81; R. M. Haig, Toward an understanding of the metropolis: the assignment of activities, Quarterly Journal ofEconomics 40(1926)428 [31] M. J. Bowden, Downtown through time, expansion and internal growth Econonic Geography

[32] [33] [34] [35]

47 (1971) 131-33; Bowden, Growth of central districts in large cities, in L. F. Schnore (Ed), The new urban history (Princeton 1975) 78-83 S. F. McMichael and R. F. Bingham, City growth and values (Cleveland 1923) 152 Work Projects Administration, op. cit., 181 R. A. Smith, Los Angeles, prototype of a supercity, Fortune 71 (March 1965) 101 S. Haggert and D. Porter, TWA getaway guide to Los Angeles (New York 1971) 99

[36] Gleye, op. cit., 98

[37] Los Angeles, new skyline, Time 92 (October 11, 1968) 101; Sprawling Los Angeles gets a new skyline (December 13, 1969) 68 [38] E. K. Thompson, Los Angeles, Architectural Record 143 (April 1968) 182 [39] R. B. Reily, Urban myths and the new cities of the Southwest, Landscape 17 (Autumn 1967) 21 [40] R. Banham, Los Angeles, the architecture of four ecologies (New York [41] D. Davis, Pop-up city, Newsweek 77 (August 23, 1971) 82

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[42] J. K. Wright, Geographical lore ofthe time of the crusades, 306; Wright, Terrae incognitae: the place of imagination in geography Annals of the Association of American Geographers 37 (1947) 115; J. L. Allen, Lands of myth, waters of wonder: the place of the imagination in geographical exploration, in D. Lowenthal and M. J. Bowden (Eds), Geographies of the mind. essays in honor of John Kirtland Wright (New York 1976) 4146 [43] M. Baldassare, Residential crowding in urban America (Los Angeles 1977) 48 [44] S. L. Bottles, Los Angeles and the automobile (Berkeley 1987) 4 [45] C. Abbott, New urban America (Chapel Hill, NC: 1987) 63 [46] C. Jones and F. Clifford, Census puts state near 30 million Los Angeles Times (August 28, 1990) s.A. 18 [47] C. Lockwood and C. Leinberger, Los Angeles comes of age Atlantic Monthly 261 (January 1988)48 [48]

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P. Langdon, Where sprawl comes to squeeze Atlantic Monthly 261 (January 1988) 87 Downtown office tower tops out at 52 stories Los Angeles Times (August 10, 1990) s.B, 4 S. Mydans, Rail line makes debut where car is supreme New York Times (July 16, 1990) s.A, 8 M. Lev, At age 30, Los Angeles is thriving NeM: York Times (January 5, 1990) s.D, 14 C. Tunnard and H. H. Reed, American skyline. the growth and,form of our cities and towns (Boston 1955) 206208; K. Kuh, American artists paint the city (Chicago 1956) 7-9; S. B. Warner, Slums and skyscrapers, in L. Rodwin (Ed), Cities qf the mind (New York 1984) 19194

[53]

J. A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia historical portrait of New York, an essay in graphic history (Garden City, NY: 1953) 39499; W. Weisman, A new view of skyscraper history, in E. Kaufman (Ed), The rise qf American architecture (New York 1970) 115-58; M. Domash, Imagining New York’s first skyscrapers, 187551910, Journal of Historical Geography, 13

[54]

J. A. Miller, Fares please! a popular history qf trolleys, elevateds and subways (New York 1941) 92293; H. Rinke, New York subways, Electric Railroads (October 1954) I-8; M. Domosh, A method for interpreting landscape, a case study of the New York building Area 21 (1989)

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R. Whitehouse, New York, sunshine and shadow: a photographic recotdfrom 1850 to 191.5 (New York 1974) 214-18, 232-33 [56] E. K. Spann. The new metropolis, New York Cit?, 1840~1857 (New York 1981) 117-19, 161[55]

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W. A. Craige and J. R. H. Hulbert (Eds), A dictionary of American English (Chicago 1940) v. 2, 80607; M. M. Mathers (Ed), A dictionary of Americanisms (Chicago 1951) 515 Bowden, Growth of central districts, 8&83 L. Mumford. The city in history (New York 1961) 160-65, 221-227; J. B. Ward-Perkins, Cities of ancient Greece and Italy: planning in classical antiquity (New York 1974) l&36 G. Sjoberg, The preindustrial city, past and present (New York 1960) 8&l 07 R. E. Wycherly, The stones ofAthens (Princeton 1987) 625; R. Krautheimer, Rome: proji’le o/ a tit!, (Princeton 1980) 2-31; D. H. Davenport, et. al., The retail shopping and financial districts in Nerr York (New York 1927) 23325; R. M. Haig and R. C. McCrea. Regional stove> qf New York and its environs (New York 1928) v. 1, 103 Sjoberg, op. cit., 3 I-37; S. Lloyd, The archaeology ofMesopotamia from the Old Stone Age to the Persian conquest (London 1984) 3942 J. Mellaart, A Neolithic city in Turkey Scientific American 210 (April 1964) 94