This story is told from its end to a beginning. It’s about a remarkable tree now gone, but even more, it’s about a place also lost. Places that are lost are the most precisely located. They’re found in memory.

Alta Journal | Issue 24 - July 2023

Illustrations by Chris Sickels | Red Nose Studio

Everything's mine but just on loan, nothing for the memory to hold, though mine as long as I look.

- Wislawa Szymborska

REMEMBER? You were young and holding a paper rectangle as crisp as a playing card, its surface like glass, and behind the surface, someone posing for a picture. Then a woman's hand, far older than yours, passed you another snapshot. "This is my aunt and here is her husband," she said. "You never met them because they lived back east." (Everyone you never met lived there; you thought "back east" must have been a place filled with abandoned, disoriented people.)

"Let me tell you their story," she continued, and she does, but it's only a fragment. Because here is a snapshot of your father in his Army uniform when he went to into the war, but that's only a fragment and another story. Because here you are when you were three, not so long ago and in another place, but your own story is only a fragment to you, too. Because here is another snapshot and another story. (Montage didn't begin at the movies; it began with the family album.)

Then one day, years later, the only member of your family dies who knew how to piece these fragments together. Why did she hold these stories, just as the shoeboxes held these snapshots? Why didn't anyone else hold them? Then your father dies; his wartime buddies, lean and young in their snapshots, die a second death from forgetfulness. Then your mother dies; her wedding pictures are crowded with lovely bridesmaids and a grim minister unremembered long before. But the snapshots, which had once been poised between hands like a magician's levitating card trick, remain.

You put the shoeboxes of snapshots in the garage, thinking, you do I know any of these people? But dimly, here's a face that seems familiar. Is that your mother's cousin, looking serious, the one who loved her like a sister, didn't someone once say? Is that your father's boss, smiling broadly for no reason, whose son died in Vietnam? Still later, you took the shoeboxes to a self-storage place at the edge of town because you've got so much stuff at the house and the garage is full already, but you couldn't throw these snapshots away. You want to turn them over to the kids, but you discover you don't have kids or they won't have you, and then you have other things to think about, now that you're dead.

A few months after, because you've passed beyond caring and paying the rent, a man you never met (from back east, perhaps) buys everything in the storage unit where the shackle of the padlock has just been cut, and he puts everything, including the boxes of snapshots, in the back of a shabby pickup or a van with patches of gray primer paint and he goes to the Saturday swap meet at a rundown drive-in movie theater to sell what he can, and some of the shoeboxes of snapshots split and spill the pictures out, and the guy who brought the boxes leaves them there all day without looking at them.

The snapshots that don’t sell by the end of the day, he'll throw in the dumpster next to the swap meet snack bar when he packs up and leaves.

But before then, someone standing in front of the seller’s stall reaches down and picks up a glossy rectangle of black and white and stares into it like a peeping tom gazing into an empty room. Your lost snapshots have been found.

Is this the fate you would have chosen for them (if you could choose anything from your place of eternal repose)? Would you have your snapshots gathered at the entrance to the incinerator of history, stripped of associations, and selected, this one to be kept for now by a knowing stranger for reasons you'd find puzzling and possibly sad, and those others—perhaps the very ones that once evoked the purest memories—to be lost forever?

Long ago, when they were in the air between old hands and your hands, your snapshots weren't ironic. They weren’t art. They didn't want more than what was told about them. They didn't congratulate the photographer who took them or the one who gazed at them. Your snapshots had only one aspiration: to be handed around. They had only one purpose: to incite stories. They had the power to appropriate and alienate—and they did—but they only intended to cherish.

Photography, as the first modern art (that is, the first to give science greater weight than aesthetics), had promised more. Photography had promised to bring back hard evidence from a world of facts, but it only delivered more conjecture. “This is the way things are,” a photograph insists, but we know by now that it's only the way something was, and only for an instant and only in one preferred direction, without reference to what was off to the side, or to the moment before, or any of the many moments that followed.

Photography had promised to romanticize everyday life, too, but the democratically simple Kodak camera of 1888, and the cheaper and simpler cameras that followed, rained hundreds of millions of casual snapshots over the nineteenth-century's uplifting assumptions about science and art. Then the Kodak System ("You press the button, we do the rest") collapsed picture taker, subject, and consumer into one—a twitchy, indiscriminate shutterbug who, from childhood on, knew how to take a snapshot and be seen in one.

Photography's document and romance became the snapshot’s incident and sentiment. The sparse vocabulary of gesture in a snapshot, recalled at the moment when everyone in the viewfinder shifts into a pose at the command of the picture taker, means that almost every picture has the same surface. Vacationers pose with their back to the sight they are supposed to be seeing. Major celebrations are always recorded as tableaus of family relationships; very few friends or colleagues make the cut. Moody children and exuberant adults are always moody or exuberant; they never break character before the camera. Self-conscious jokes re-create the compositional pratfalls of naïve snapshots, except no one is naïve anymore. More women and children are pictured; men are behind the camera, calling the shots. The first child is photographed more than the next and, according to studies of family albums, is the only one who will be shown being fed. Snapshot shooters never take pictures of family arguments, abuse by spouses or parents, the deteriorations of sickness and disability, or the facts of solitude or death.

(Today's picture takers are so squeamish. During the nineteenth century, studio photographers often photo- graphed dead children, lying as if asleep in a cradle but more often being held in their mother's arms, sometimes posed with other children in the family. In Austria, so many parents went to photo studios with dead children that the authorities declared a public health threat and prohibited the practice.)

Snapshot shooters sidestep more than just troubling content. In older photographs, the subjects look glum, partly, of course, because of long exposure times, but also, perhaps, because they were closer to an era when facts didn't come with so much cheerful spin. The faces mostly smile in snapshots—like archaic Greek kouroi or the figures of husbands and wives from Egypt's Old Kingdom tombs—because the subjects are aware that their photograph is the projection of an image as much as it's the preservation of a fact.

Today, photographer and subject, becoming each other as they hand the cell phone camera back and forth, have thoroughly internalized snapshot clichés. They've already seen the picture they've just taken. It's been parodied in magazine advertisements, accompanied a TV newscaster's announcement of a killing, appeared inside a supermarket tabloid, illustrated a dictator's biography, hung in a museum gallery, been found wedged between the pages of a library book, and been pasted into an album lying in a funeral home next to the coffin of a distant relative.

The next snapshot they're about to take is everywhere, too. Everyone makes them. Everyone's in them. Everyone wants to be remembered. Almost everyone wants to remember, but there are so many pasts: the past in private reverie, in family fable, and in public history. Pick up one of your snapshots, even one that you only half remember, and many pasts push forward.

It's the work of a moment to chuck out or incinerate a single snapshot or a lifetime of them when one of these pasts is no longer wanted. The standard black-and-white print of 1950, with its filigreed edge, rips after a slight resistance; self-inflicted amnesia couldn't be more satisfying. It's a wonder that so many snapshots have survived. But it's problematic that they'll survive as the vernacular of memory much longer. "Kodak culture" has gone digital, and the uses of the digital snapshot serve our purposes less than they do "the acceleration of history," Henry Adams's baleful insight in 1908 that, in the name of quickening modernity, we're bound to be barbarians to ourselves. Few digital snapshots will have anything like the durability of the drugstore print of sixty years ago.

By leaving fewer tangible traces to provoke a story, our past is becoming the past ever faster. To gain even more speed, we lighten ourselves of the snapshots by which we remember, especially when the traces of memory are so commonplace, so unflattering, and so much in need of us. What's thrown overboard in the regime of speed is mostly sucked under and lost. But some of it washes up on a distant, asphalt shore.

You survived because you were the first. You survived because you were the last.

Because alone. Because the others.

Because on the left. Because on the right.

Because it was raining. Because it was sunny. Because a shadow fell.

- Wislawa Szymborska

Randy Burger is a friend who, on weekends, combs a swap meet in a community-college parking lot. It's the sort of swap meet where you find working-class vendors selling to the working poor. Professional dealers in the things auctioned from storage units come, too. They lay out stuff sifting downward in an informal economy that processes the lost bits of everyday life after the obviously valuable and usefully secondhand and minimally collectible are mostly, but not entirely, gleaned for a profit before the swap meet opens. At the bottom of the swap meet economy, my friend says, are the family snapshots.

He isn't looking for lost photographs—he calls them "orphaned"—but he sees a lot of them anyway. "I once saw an album," he tells me, "that was filled with old photographs and it was carefully annotated, including genealogies." (A whole tribe obliterated.) He says that photographs still in frames are sold for the value of the frame. Loose snapshots sell for next to nothing; vendors will give them away. "I can only hope that the moment when one of these photos was taken was a moment filled with genuine feeling," he says, "and that the photo and what it represented were cherished and understood by someone," even if it was only for a little while.

He sees his own future. "I don't know all the people in my own photographs—relatives or friends of my parents who stand around smiling in front of houses, in front of cars, and in front of tractors," he says. "What I do know probably won't last another generation. Not only can I see the faces of my relatives one day looking up at someone at that swap meet, but I can see my own face frozen in time on the asphalt of that parking lot." My friend grieves over what he expects to be. "You and I saw a tombstone years ago in Quebec City," he reminds me. "Ne m'oubliez pas,” it said. “Don't forget me.”

The commandment to remember leads some to collect and publish their found snapshots as acts of resistance against official amnesia. At Susan Meiselas's website, stateless Kurds are asked to identify a growing collection of anonymous snapshots to "build a collective memory," she says, for "a people who have no national archive."

Ann Weiss found the photographs of an even more monstrous forgetting. She walked into a neglected storeroom at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1986 and found nearly three thousand snapshots collected in 1943 by Nazi guards from a trainload of Jewish prisoners. Lest the fact of their life outlive their death, the prisoners’ snapshots were routinely destroyed, except for these that escaped and were later confiscated by the camp's Red Army liberators, kept by them for no apparent purpose, and then returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau only to be forgotten again. Weiss spent years restoring names to her found snapshots, giving stories to mundane pictures of weddings, birthdays, summer outings, sober people holding babies, businessmen in suits, and smiling women in hats.

By what they had chosen to remember, these men and women had restored to them a life uncontaminated by the terrible abstraction of their death. This is the heroism of snapshots: in the right hands, they stand against the evil of enforced forgetting.

And if they aren't dumped by the end of the day, and if they fall into avid hands of a collector by chance, then lost snapshots found at the swap meet become objects of fascination. "My personal reaction is different each time I find some," Ann Colvin, a collector, tells me. "They catch my eye, the time period mostly, then I just get lost in the 'looking.' The photographs always have stories. Some are obvious, like old wedding photographs or events in a family's life, and some are hidden in the photography itself. Those I find most interesting, and they draw me into them. Again, I find myself lost in the image. I believe they can become almost magic."

Colvin hangs her snapshots where her friends and family members see them and ask about them. Other collectors assemble their found snapshots in online galleries where the viewer's speculation is invited. This is mostly comedy with ironic captions, but sometimes a found snapshot fulfills its purpose as the pretext to a story, even if the story isn't the snapshot's own.

Gail Pine and Jacqueline Woods—California artists who are custodians of thousands of photographs rescued from swap meets—tap into this mystery. "Memory, an intangible, seems almost a tangible thing," they assure me, "when gazing into a snapshot. Suddenly smells, sounds, and sometimes even tastes bump us right in the memory bone. The 'Then' becomes 'Now,' just for a second."

Found photographs are elusive, vulnerable, ominous, and ordinary, part historical diorama and part freak show. Mutely, they've passed through hazards to be selected, each with its own practical, moral, and aesthetic questions: Why was that subject photographed and that snapshot printed and that one saved? Why was this snapshot picked up before others were thrown away, that one chosen later to be kept when others weren't? And-for a very few, why were these snapshots delivered to the museum curator, and why did some of those make the cut and get on the gallery wall?

I don't know. All I know is how to look. All I see is how one photographer once saw. The longer I look, the more the snapshot in my hand becomes anything I want to make of it.

Maybe this particular photograph is folk art. The nicely dressed man and women displaying a birthday cake, the boy padded with rats, the woman dressed as a die, and the man in the "Groucho" glasses and mustache insist on the validity of their representation of themselves. "I made this of me," they might be saying. "For my own purposes."

Maybe found snapshots are just uncanny: an American-brand surreality of domesticated weirdness plucked by the disembodied wit of modernity from the chaos of the images we've made of ourselves. The very tall man and the very short woman dance on the lawn. The two women grimace while another looks on. The car enters the car wash. The nearly empty refrigerator gapes to reveal a can of V-8. The woman in undergarments and stockings hoists a double highball glass. The woman in a bikini holds a dead rabbit and a rifle. The woman in the sunsuit does a stock pinup pose under a sign that reads "PRIVATE." The baby holds a picture of a soldier.

Or maybe this found photograph is something else entirely. The simple drugstore print buckles under the weight of interpretation even as I begin to understand that the interpretive impulse is all that I have in the face of the snapshot's obdurate presence. Found snapshots may look like fragments of a narrative to be decoded, but the formal grids I lay over them never stick.

All I do is look. I'm a voyeur, a stranger who should never have been left alone to thumb through the family album and become fascinated with intimacies that were not meant for me.

The couple in the embrace of the light that hovers over them is smiling so calmly that I want to be their son. His right hand on the back of her upholstered chair is the promise of a touch. If the radio begins playing something sentimental, he might complete his half-turn around the lamp, lean on the wide arm of her chair, and give the matronly woman—her smile is more knowing, now that I think about it—a young man's kiss.

The voyeur's pleasure is your exposure to his daydream and his concealment from you. Putting snapshots in the museum validates and regulates my voyeuristic looking-from-a-distance at a photograph's nakedness. Although the intimate moments are curiously dispassionate and everything in the image is on the surface, the found snapshot on display in "the context of no context" on the white gallery wall gains for me unintended erotic attraction.

In traveling from closet to museum, snapshots shed their role as instigators of domestic history—always partial and subject to revision—and became, for their viewers, objects of wonder or harmless prurience. For photographers, they became a source catalogue for an accidental "snapshot aesthetic" of the irrelevant and unintelligible details that dominate a photograph when the narrative of everyday life is stopped with a click. In the "authored" snapshot photography in the 1970s and 1980s, the snapshot's mixture of contrivance and vulnerability lent a fleeting authenticity to the photographs in museum shows and magazine spreads. "Look at this moment," invented snapshots said, "but you miss the point if you regard us too long or too seriously. And remember to look ironically."

Museum curators, the official custodians of what we look at, have hung both found and made-up snapshots next to crime scene photos, stills from industrial films, pornography, mug shots, accident investigation records, and institutional photography. They used snapshots, among other ambiguous objects, to make a new kind of museum out of the deconsecrated space that was left after the passing of modernism.

The swarm of ambivalent meanings in found snapshots (and in other anonymous or almost anonymous photography) has conveniently answered everyone's needs, from commodity to fetish to consolation.

Memory at last has what it sought.

- Wislawa Szymborska

Found snapshots serve the memory of modernism with their artless gestures toward the themes of the old avant-garde. That makes them chilling fun when they're at the safe distance of a gallery wall or in the pages of a coffee-table book. But what demand is made by the hunger of memory in them?

It might be compassion. Snapshots litter the contested ground between candor and concealment, between what's public and what's private. Imagine everyone gathered around the family photo album. The snapshot in view, depending on who's doing the looking, is horrifying, hilarious, pointless, or suffused with yearning. What a snapshot wants to have leak out of its neat rectangle is the messy network of human relationships from which the snapshot was made.

Or the hunger might be fear. All of us are arsonists, and the ordinary is on fire every day. These snapshots—those you've just found at the swap meet and your own that you're about to lose—insist that we're destined to be among the disappeared. The flimsy snapshot is the last artifact that will remember your likeness and your unavailing self-regard. What a snapshot fears isn't its destruction but your anonymity.

"We are poor passing facts," wrote Robert Lowell, "warned by that to give / each figure in the photograph / his living name." It's tenderness, then, for which your snapshots yearn. It's not just the faces in a snapshot that appeal for a caress that cannot be reciprocated. Everything in the snapshot wants it, and all the much-handled things you grew up with want it, too. "Fall in love again," your snapshots say, "with what you already have."

Or these snapshots might need your forgiveness. Grievances crowd them, even the snapshots that aren't yours. Either they fail to satisfy your present desires and leave you with fury and contempt, or they record desires you no longer want. That does not make them less in need of you. In fact, the more worn and undecipherable the image, the more it resists our easy dismissal, and the more it insists that its references be puzzled out, its story be imagined into existence. The purpose in a found snapshot is, I suppose, to teach you pity and give you a human heart.

Or it's just to persist. The commonplace, the place where we find love and hope, necessarily disappears without a murmur or complaint; it's only remembered. The snapshots I hold resist my preference for forgetfulness.

We're like snapshots. What we hunger for is remembrance. Found snapshots are trivial, but they're bodies, too, just like you and me, and they have nowhere else to go but into someone's hands or into the furnace. You are seeing. They are seen. That's all the faith they need. Just look. You were lost, but now your snapshots have found you.

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“Facing the Facts” was the essay accompanying the exhibition catalog for Close to Home, presented by the J. Paul Getty Museum October 12, 2004 to January 16, 2005 at the Getty Center. Snapshot photography has changed dramatically in the nearly 20 years since the exhibition, but the cloud of meanings and apprehensions in snapshots—digital and analog—still clings to them.

The photographs in this essay are snapshots by photographer Tom Johnson and are used by permission.

Pierre Koenig's Stahl House (Case Study House #22) epitomized the ideal of modern living in postwar Los Angeles.

 Prologue

I met Alessandra Moctezuma the other day at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art. Moctezuma is Gallery Director and Professor of Art at San Diego Mesa College, where she leads the Museum Studies program and teaches courses on Chicano/a art. She is also the widow of historian and social critic Mike Davis who died in October 2022. We chatted briefly after I offered what condolences I could for her loss and ours.

Shortly after his death was announced, I reflected on Davis’ achievements as an interpreter of Los Angeles in a brief essay for the Los Angeles Times. That essay—somewhat revised—is offered here.

With Anger and Love

We’ve lost Joan Didion and now Mike Davis. Kevin Starr preceded them in 2017, but these three interpreters of our coast of dreams should be read together. They told us who we were as Angelenos and, more broadly, as Californians. Davis was a thorough Marxist. Didion was the flinty realist. And Starr was Catholic. Each had a theory of history—an explanatory model of the forces that had made Los Angeles and brought us, sometimes heedlessly, to it.

Davis and Starr were friends (an irony that delighted Starr), perhaps because both believed that history inevitably aims toward a redemptive conclusion. Both Karl Marx and Thomas Aquinas thought that history would have a happy ending, however delayed it might be.

In service to that conviction, Davis examined the distempers of Los Angeles and diagnosed their causes. His analysis was often harrowing. I criticized him for his conclusion (in Ecology of Fear) that my working-class neighbors should never have been allowed to live where they still do, that their hopes for an ordinary life had cruelly deceived them.

In an interview Davis gave to the Los Angeles Times in July 2022, he disparaged the idea of hope. “I don’t think hope is a scientific category. And I don’t think that people fight or stay the course because of hope; I think people do it out of love and anger.”

“Love and anger” are the fires that burn through his books, though I cannot judge the proportion of anger to love. Despite Davis’ reputation for bleakness, I prefer to believe that eventually love was dominant. He told the Guardian newspaper in August 2022, after he had ended treatment for esophageal cancer, “What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems.” “Fight” was a word Davis often used.

This is a “romantic” imagination—the imaginative faculty that that makes alternative histories plausible and even achievable. Davis begins his most celebrated book—City of Quartz—in the ruins of Llano del Rio, a utopian community founded in 1914 by Job Harriman, who could have become the first Socialist mayor of Los Angeles. His campaign was wrecked by the bombing of the Los Angeles Times in 1910 and by his defense of the bombers, both of them union organizers. The ruin of Llano del Rio and Job Harriman’s Socialist campaign are historical facts, but so is the engaged activism that brought both into being. Looking to the past in Los Angeles is not only instructive; it’s fortifying. Unfortunately, history has never meant much to Angelenos.

He thought his own past had value. He told author Mark Dery in 1996, “One of the things I've increasingly ended up fighting for, where I teach and in the kind of politics I do, is a nostalgized vision of what Southern California was like 30 years ago—the freedom of its beaches and its cruising streets and the kind of careless, libidinal adolescence that used to be possible.” But those “relative freedoms,” Davis knew, were exclusive. They were “the intoxications” that white kids had, which for Davis included a mild amount of hooliganism. Davis insisted that there should be other possessors of those freedoms and ultimately of what it means to be an Angeleno.

Davis wrote what he said were “impassioned polemics on the necessity of the urban left.” He was less convinced of the necessity of the sacred ordinariness my neighbors had exchanged for class consciousness.

Davis wanted action, not murals or marches. He said he didn’t want to die quietly but on the revolutionary barricades somewhere “with the red flags flying.” Instead of a revolution, Davis gave us a different way to see Los Angeles by demolishing not only the city’s endemic boosterism but also the clichés of sunshine and noir that the city’s critics still deploy. His scholarship cleared a wide space in what can be said about Los Angeles, a place where divergent stories—from the streets and in neighborhoods—could be told by a multitude of other voices. I was fortunate to be one of them because of Davis.

“People’s stories are key,” Mike Davis said. “Listen carefully to the quiet, profound people who have lost everything but their dignity.” He passionately believed that shared and remembered stories create communities and sustain lives. Joan Didion and Kevin Starr had a similar faith in narrative. As interpreters, these three showed Angelenos who they were. But now they’re gone.

If Los Angeles—so beautiful and tragic—means anything to Angelenos today, they’ll have to find and fiercely embrace (and just as fiercely question) new interpreters who will help them see who they are now.

I don't drive, though I grew up and still live in suburban Los Angeles. I don't drive because of the effects of glaucoma and keratoconus on my eyesight and the loss of effective vision in my right eye. If I could, of course I would drive. The swoop of a freeway onramp and the intoxication of momentum are this city’s birthright.

I’m not part of the Los Angeles that drives. I’m the part that’s driven.

When I tell people in Los Angeles that I don't drive, they express mild surprise. Some assume that my non-driving is an environmental statement. When I tell them I don't drive because I don't see well, they become skeptical. Few Angelenos can imagine that an otherwise fit-looking, middle-class male would not drive, however marginal his vision.

Drivers are uneasy with my claim of disability. Maybe they think it's something they’d prefer not to hear that keeps me from driving.

Instead, I talk briefly about taking the bus. They’re uninterested. I'm describing habits drivers have no intention of ever acquiring. They imagine a future in which they will always be drivers. They think they will always be in control, if only of a car.

I'm lucky those drivers have been so willing to tax themselves for the past 40 years to expand a transit system few of them will use. I'm luckier still that I can be in the company of bus riders far from my home with no certain way back, trusting their knowledge of the route they'll willingly share.

Instead of driving a car, I get lifts from friends. I'm a good passenger. I don't reflexively apply a phantom brake if the driver doesn't respond fast enough to slowing traffic. I don't presume to know the directions to where we're going. I don't question the driver's choice of lane, speed or off ramp. I don't ask to have the radio or air conditioning on or off.

■ ■ ■

Like Ray Bradbury—who was a Los Angeles non-driver—I've been stopped by a patrol car on a completely empty stretch of suburban sidewalk, at midday, dressed in a coat and tie, and ordered to identify myself and explain my destination. As a pedestrian, I’m a suspect.

I’m a good pedestrian however, staying within the marked crosswalks and never jaywalking, even when the next crosswalk is a long walk away. Free-range pedestrianism is dangerous, Anti-war activist Jerry Rubin was struck and killed in 1994 while attempting to cut across Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. The head of the Los Angeles teachers’ union, crossing the seven lanes of Olympic Boulevard, was killed.

Fewer streets are marked by crosswalks today. The city has sandblasted away hundreds since the mid-1970s when traffic engineers showed, not surprisingly, that more pedestrians are killed in crosswalks than out of them. The engineers said the painted lines gave pedestrians a false sense of security, making them less attentive to danger. Risk managers had another reason to eliminate crosswalks. Their presence makes cities vulnerable if the city is sued by injured pedestrians or their survivors.

Using a crosswalk has other risks. In 2010, a Swedish hip-hop artist punched, kicked and drove over the body of a pedestrian, killing him, because the pedestrian had asserted his right-of-way in a crosswalk.

■ ■ ■

Seen from curbside, driving looks like a pathology—a syndrome of sudden tics, cognitive agnosias and kinetic preservations.

A driver preparing to turn right on red swivels his head to the left when he's a hundred feet from the intersection. He fixes his gaze on the flow of oncoming traffic. He barely slows until his bumper reaches the leading edge of the crosswalk, his head still rotated 75 degrees to the left. If there’s a break in traffic, he continues his turn before he, for the first time, sees preparing to cross as the traffic light turns green.

I've been watching him, because traffic safety trainers tell pedestrians to stare at drivers who've turned away during a right turn maneuver. The theory is that human beings are quick to sense when someone is staring at them—a common primate threat behavior—and a driver who's stared at will react unconsciously as if the pedestrian is real. My belief that staring actually works is my only protection.

Though I've not yet stepped off the curb, some drivers slam on their brakes when our eyes finally meet. The rear of the car humps slightly while some of the slack goes out of the driver's shoulder belt. Other drivers will swerve as they complete their turn through the intersection, their eyes averted from mine.

My gaze got under the driver's second skin. I've brought the sidewalk inside his car, and he, in momentary discomfort, recognizes what I am. I rarely make out the driver's expression but sometimes I see a face that shows irritation and occasional anger.

The driver making the turn is alone. His windows are rolled up; the air conditioning and radio are on. He's cocooned inside, but he's also extended a phantom skin to the surface of his car. A neurologist would say that the driver has enlarged his proprioception—the background sense we have of how we're oriented in space and where self leaves off and not-self begins.

If a driver should ding his car in the parking lot or thump the roof going under a low branch, his expanded proprioception will make him wince as if his real skin, not the amplified surface of his car, were at risk.

■ ■ ■

Even going nowhere, your car is the room you may not have had as a child. It's one of the few places in which you can be entirely alone by choice. Driving is performed in public, but it's a private act, removed from the spectacle of the street.

When I watch from the curb, drivers seem oblivious, wrapped in a second skin of high impact plastic and sheet metal edged in shining chrome. We who do not drive are equally remote from you who does. We’ll never know the concert of speed and solitude in which drivers commune.

We're the ones at the periphery of your gaze, standing in a cluster at the intersection where you've just turned right without even slowing. As you turn, the most anxious one among us, who had been peering into the oncoming traffic for a bus that's 20 minutes late, abruptly steps back from the curb, a bulging plastic bag digging a red band into the flesh across the back of the hand she had thrust through the bag’s handle. (That red line across a numbed hand is the pedestrian stigmata).

The most resigned one of us has been hanging back, leaning his left shoulder against anything (the light standard, the stucco wall of the strip mall, a struggling tree), his head down and hands jammed into the pockets of a drooping hoodie. As walkers in Los Angeles, we are in silent attendance on the traffic bunching and flowing in its minute-long pulse as the traffic lights change.

The preoccupied drivers automatically surrender to the momentum of driving. Trust passes from driver to driver in a wheel of cars. Not one of us at the curb observes with anything like the exaltation it deserves the arc of turning cars, as lovely and orderly as the advancing line of dancers in a corps de ballet.

Prologue

Patt Morrison, writing in the Los Angeles Times recently, surveyed an old argument: What exactly are we to call ourselves? There are several options and a few common usages. It’s not an important argument, but like many concerns that seem of interest only to historians, what we’ve called ourselves says something about what we’ve made of ourselves.

Angeleño, Angeleno, Angelino

According to the Immortales of the Real Academia Española, we’re angelinos.

The emblem of Spain’s royal academy is a refining crucible, wreathed in fire, with the motto Limpia, fija y da esplendor. The RAE has been purging, pinning down and burnishing Spanish since 1713. Its language fixes became royal decrees in 1844. Today, the academy continues more democratically to wrangle into order the grammar, spelling and vocabulary of Spain and its former colonies.

We became angelinos because of basketball. When the Los Angeles Lakers signed the Catalán forward Pau Gasol in 2008, Spain’s sportswriters needed a ruling on what to call Los Angeles basketball fans. It was unclear if they should be angelinos, angeleños, angelopolitanos, or some other gentilicio (which in Spanish denotes a people).

The rapid response unit of the royal academy—the Fundación del Español Urgente (Foundation for Emerging Spanish)—picked angelino, a gentilicio in Spanish dictionaries and already used by Spanish-speaking residents of Los Angeles to name themselves.1

America doesn’t have an academy for fixing its language like the RAE, but it did have H. L. Mencken—journalist, curmudgeon and scholar of how Americans speak. Mencken was committed to American English in all its ways and varieties (called descriptivism by linguists, in contrast to the prescriptivism of the royal academy).

In 1936, he mused in The New Yorker on the words commonly used to name a city’s residents:

The citizen of New York calls himself a New Yorker, the citizen of Chicago calls himself a Chicagoan, the citizen of Buffalo calls himself a Buffalonian, the citizen of Seattle calls himself a Seattleite, and the citizen of Los Angeles calls himself an Angeleño. … In Los Angeles, of course, Angeleño is seldom used by the great masses of Bible students and hopeful Utopians, most of whom think and speak of themselves not as citizens of the place at all but as Iowans, Nebraskans, North and South Dakotans, and so on. But the local newspapers like to show off Angeleño, though they always forget the tilde.2

Mencken hated Los Angeles for its provincialism, which may explain in part why he favored Angeleño, the least common, least Iowan and most musical word to bind a heedless people to their place. Mencken presumed that the tilde (the mark above the n in Angeleño) was an accent mark that careless typesetters forgot. It isn’t. The unfamiliar ñ/eñe (pronounced enyé)—has been a separate letter in the Spanish alphabet since the eighteenth century. (Think of the “nyon” sound in canyon/cañon, although that’s not exactly it either.)

Angeleño to Mencken may have sounded something like ăn′-hǝ-lǝnyō or perhaps ăn′-hǝ-lānyō, with stress on the first syllable which sounded more like awn and less like ann.

Angeleño wasn’t a word residents of Los Angeles would have seen in the Los Angeles Times in 1936. Mencken was right that the most common Los Angeles demonym (the technical term for a place-based name) was Angeleno, without the eñe. The Times spelled it that way in more than 700 articles in 1936 alone (and at least 10,000 times between 1930 and 1950). Angeleno—usually pronounced ăn′-jǝ-lē′-nō—stresses the first and third syllables and sounds like nothing in Spanish.

In picking Angeleño, Mencken, perhaps unthinking, had fallen into the prescriptivist trap. When an expert makes a definitive choice—and Mencken was an expert—it’s understood to be the right way to say something.3

The people of Los Angeles didn’t have the perfect word for themselves even before the diaspora of flat-voweled Midwesterners arrived after 1900. We still don’t have one word that accepts us all.

Disappearing Ñ

A 2015 report to the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission, in a filing to give historical status to an Edwardian-era house, named its location as Angelino Heights, Angeleno Heights and Angeleño Heights almost interchangeably throughout the report. The uncertainty in naming the heights—the city’s first suburb in 1886—layers a sequence of demonyms over the landscape of Los Angeles.

Maps in the late 1880s that parceled out lots on a ridge overlooking downtown were headed with the title Angeleño Heights. The tract’s name became Angeleno Heights in the advertising copy of the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald, probably because the decorative typefaces used for splashy real estate ads lacked the eñe character. The Herald did use Angeleño Heights in other contexts after 1886, but not exclusively. The Times used Angeleno Heights in classified ads and news stories, but only a few listings and location references used Angeleño Heights instead.

The Birdseye View Publishing Co. rendered virtually every building in Los Angeles on a 1909 map. A block of houses on Kensington Road, even then among empty fields, is labeled Angeleño Heights. By 1918, Angeleño Heights had disappeared. Angelino Heights rarely appeared, except in a few house-for-sale ads, probably typeset that way when the seller telephoned in the ad. It’s an easy error to make when spelling by ear. For English-only speakers, both Angelino and Angeleno will sound the same.

Anecdotal accounts suggest that spelling by ear led city planners in the 1950s to permanently anglicize the neighborhood’s name as Angelino Heights as if they were modern-day Noah Websters reforming an alien word to conform to the speech of the city’s Anglo ascendency.

Highway directional signs continued to point to Angelino Heights until 2008, when Los Angeles City Councilman Ed Reyes had them replaced, correcting the signs, but only to the first, eñe-less error.

Eventually, a truce was called. At Bellevue Avenue and Edgeware Road are two signs that spell out the neighborhood differently: Angeleno Heights is on the highway directional sign; the city’s historic marker uses Angelino Heights.

Stories in a Name

The drift from Angeleño to Angeleno to Angelino back to Angeleno was carried by currents that linger in the story of Los Angeles. In 1850, when the Mexican ciudad de los Ángeles abruptly became the American city of Los Angeles, its tiny Anglophone population was necessarily bilingual in borderlands Spanish. Court proceedings, ordinances and city council meetings were in English and Spanish (and sometimes only in Spanish).

What the city’s Americans called themselves isn’t clear. It may even have been Angeleño. The eñe was still in the type fonts of printers. The Star/La Estrella—the city’s bilingual newspaper—accurately characterized travelers from Sonora as Sonoreños in 1853. But the paper apparently had no collective name for Los Angeles residents, identifying them as Americans, Californians and Mexicans in the English language columns and as americanos, californios and mejicanos/mexicanos on its Spanish pages. El Clamor Publico—the city’s Spanish language newspaper in the 1850s—did the same. (For a differing account, see the epilog below.)

It wasn’t until January 1878 that the Los Angeles Herald described residents as Los Angeleños. By 1880, the Herald had clipped this to Angeleños, a spelling the paper continued to use intermittently with Angelenos (without an eñe) through early 1895. The Herald then carried on without an eñe until the paper merged with the Los Angeles Evening Express in 1921.

The Los Angeles Times was equally inconsistent. In 1882, less than a year after its first edition, the paper was regularly referring to Angeleños collectively. Angeleños (sometimes with “Los”) appeared in news and society columns through mid-1910, a linguistic puzzle for the growing number of residents who had never heard their demonym spoken. But some writers had heard and recorded an echo of the Spanish gentilicio.

In 1888, Walter Lindley and J. P. Widney referenced Angeleños in their popular guidebook, as did Charles Lummis in Out West magazine in the late 1890s. T. Corry Conner’s city guide in 1902 and J. M. Guinn’s history of California in 1907 both used Angeleño to name Los Angeles residents. Harris Newmark—who had arrived in 1853 from Germany and who spoke Spanish as often as he did English in those days—used Angeleño throughout his 1916 memoir of American Los Angeles.

Even as the twentieth century began, the eñe in Angeleño lingered at the margins of the city’s self-image, a fading music. But had it ever actually played?

Orthographic Salsa

In 1948, the Los Angeles Times style guide directed the paper’s copyeditors to reference Angeleno/Angelenos exclusively. Angelino/Angelinos made it into other papers, spelled in imitation of the sound that transplants gave to the last syllable of loss an´-je-leeze (when they didn’t pronounce Los Angeles as loss-sang’-liss).

Angeleno/Angelenos made it into dictionaries—in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (which gave Angeleño as an alternative), in the third unabridged Merriam-Webster Dictionary (which offered Angelino as an alternative), and in the current American Heritage Dictionary (with no alternate spelling).

Dictionaries that provide word origins point to angeleño and the Spanish eño morpheme as the source from which Angeleno was derived. It makes a neat evolutionary tree. Angeleño (hard for English-only speakers pronounce correctly) begets Angeleno (easier but unclear about the value of the second e), which becomes Angelino (finally pinning down that value).

Except the Angeleño source may be only conjectural. The OED dates Angeleño’s first appearance to 1888 in the Lindley and Widney guidebook. The appearance of Angeleño in the Los Angeles Herald in 1878 pushes back the word’s first use in print, but 1878 is almost a decade after the city ceased to be casually bilingual.

For Robert D. Angus, writing in California Linguistic Notes in 2005, the Angeleño origin story is unlikely, and the word is probably an Anglo invention. Angeleño “appears to be a self-conscious and intentional (but erroneous) emulation of a Spanish looking and sounding form, a kind of fashionable hypercorrection, garnishing an article in a trendy publication like a dab of orthographic salsa.”4

Despite the appearance of Angeleño/Angeleños in contemporary publications in Latin America (and even in the English language newspaper published in the Filipino city of Angeles), each fresh occurrence of the ñ might be another instance of spreading more orthographic salsa. The pull of American English, Angus thought, would naturally end the confusion, and we would properly be Los Angeleans one day.

Who Are We?

Comb through books in English published since 1950 for the names that the people of Los Angeles have been given, and Angelenos tops the other alternatives: angelinos, angeleños and Angeleans. That doesn’t make Angeleno the right (prescriptivist) way to identify us but only the typical (descriptivist) way.

No more right is angelino (with an aspirated g that breathes into the following e: ăn′-hǝl-ēnō), despite the royal academy’s decision to fix our gentilicio. Nor is Angeleño more correct, despite my own attempts (and of some in the Latino community) to foster that name back into use.

Angeleño might be a linguistic myth and a reminder of Anglo nostalgia for the fantasy romance of Spanish Los Angeles, but that the name may be a myth is inconsequential. Angeleño is already in the reality of Los Angeles.

Although we’re no longer Mencken’s tribes of “Iowans, Nebraskans, North and South Dakotans, and so on,” a worse alternative would be two permanently divergent language streams, their Spanish and English histories separated although they share the same place. A Latino resident of Boyle Heights could choose to be an angelino/ăn′-hǝl-ēnō, the Anglo Westsider would always be an Angeleno/ăn′-jǝ-lē′-nō, and neither angelinos nor Angelenos would know the full music of the other, depriving both speakers of some of the hybridizing of Los Angeles.

They would never experience the strangeness that Jesuit philosopher Michel de Certeau thought was necessary to make the everyday more difficult in order to make it more truly felt. They wouldn’t know the many stories of their place and end by not knowing their place at all. “Through stories about places,” de Certeau wrote, “they become habitable. … One must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name.”5

Los Angeles existed first in the mouth. It was spoken before it was. It was inhabited with words before it was lived in by us. In the process, Los Angeles has gathered many names. All of them have entered into language and the imagination and thus into history. Angelino, Angeleno and Angeleño (even Angelean) are part of who we are, part of our sense of self and of place.

We’re all those names.

Epilogue

Angelenos responded to Morrison’s column in the Los Angeles Times. One commentator (with the screen name dckimbrobills) found further instances in post-1850s Los Angeles of Angeleño, Angeleno, Angelino and compared these with usages in Spanish speaking countries.

[P]eople living in Madrid are indeed called “Madrileños,” just as residents of Quito are called “Quiteños,” and residents of Lima are called “Limeños (both Lima Peru and Lima El Salvador), so the resident of Los Angeles could quite naturally be called Angeleños. … In Los Ángeles, Chile, the terms angelino and angelina are used.

Dckimbrobills also searched the databases of the city’s bilingual and Spanish language newspapers.

In 1875 there was an announcement about a concert for the benefit of "el pueblo angelino." Likewise, in 1875 someone wrote of "F. P. Ramirez" as one of the luminaries of "el foro angelino." In 1921, Aurielio Castro of Santa Barbara wrote about a newspaper in Los Angeles as "el diario angelino." There is even one instance in 1876 where the phrase "el angelino" was used seemingly in the modern sense.

But the English-only newspapers of the period reflect a different demonym.

Most interesting is that if you search English language newspapers in Los Angeles between 1855 and 1922, the tern Angeleño shows many times, mainly in the Los Angeles Times. … [The] Los Angeles Daily Evening Express (1875 - 1877) had dozens of articles where the term not just Angeleño is used, but Los Angeleño and even East Los Angeleño (that is, residents of what is now Lincoln Heights).

This divergence gives support to Robert D. Angus’ contention that Angeleño may be an invention of the Anglo mythologizers of Los Angeles.

-------------------------------------------------

Notes

1. “El gentilicio correcto de Los Angeles es angelino,” https://www.diariolibre.com/revista/el-gentilicio-correcto-de-los-angeles-es-angelino-GKDL4976, accessed 01 February 2019.

2. H. L. Mencken, “The Advance of Municipal Onomastics,” The New Yorker, 08 February 1936, 54-57.

3. Mencken’s The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States went through multiple editions after its publication in 1919.

4. Robert D. Angus, “Place name morphology and the people of Los Angeles,” California Linguistic Notes, vol XXX, no. 2, fall 2005.

5. De Certeau, Giard, Mayol; Timothy Tomasik, trans., The Practice of Everyday Life: Volume 2: Living and Cooking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 142-143.

Publication note. This essay is adapted from “Who Are We” (LMU magazine, Spring 2019) and “Who Do You Say I Am?” in Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory and a Sense of Place (Angel City Press, 2020).

 The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in 2004 decided to erase the Latin cross that former Supervisor Kenneth Hahn had put on a redesigned county seal in 1957. A divided board voted to edit out the disturbing imagery and made other changes in Hahn's seal. The mythical goddess Pomona was replaced by a Native American girl. Oil derricks were swapped for the mission church of San Gabriel Arcángel.

As Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky pointed out in a 2015 Los Angeles Times editorial, the mission was depicted without a cross. The board majority, he said, wanted it that way in 2004. Other supervisors remembered differently. The cross had fallen during the 1997 Northridge earthquake. It’s lack on the county seal had been for accuracy.

In 2014, another divided board decided to put the Latin cross back on the seal as an addition to the façade of the mission for, it was now said, historical accuracy. Soon after, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which had urged removing the original cross, sued the board to turn back the seal to the cross-less 2004 version.

In her ruling upholding the ACLU suit, U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder wrote that the “change and the associated expenditure of public funds places the county’s power, prestige, and purse behind a single religion, Christianity, without making any such benefit available on an equal basis to those with secular objectives or alternative sectarian views.”

The judge’s ruling, which the board declined to appeal, ended Yaroslavsky's naïve hope that "Our county seal should be a unifying emblem that all Los Angeles residents can call their own ..."

In Los Angeles, a place notable for edited lives, a symbol that tried to unify who we are would have to picture the unimaginable. We're so impatient with other people's memories and so careless with our own. How do you draw forgetfulness?

Corporate America learned long ago that your misinterpretation of their symbols isn't good for business, as Proctor and Gamble discovered when some Christian zealots in the 1970s imagined satanic references in that company's corporate symbol. Proctor and Gamble adopted a new, innocuous logo.

For the makers of advertising nonsense, a product name should be meaningless sounds, and the company emblem should be a conundrum. Did the name Enron identify a power company or an erectile dysfunction preparation? The company's cockeyed E logo refused to own up.

For the people in marketing, the name Enron had whatever meaning the company said it did, and if the company's product ultimately failed, it could be branded with a different string of optimistic consonants and vowels and another bit of askew typography.

The Board of Supervisors should have learned Proctor and Gamble's lesson. The iconography of the county seal contains appeals to a past we don't want – to Pearlette the award winning heifer, an unnamed tuna fish, and drafting tools. These obsolete markers of our former prosperity mock what we used to think of ourselves.

The cross should stay off the county seal because, among other things, the cross stands for the risks of believing in something. Putting one there would be a lie about Los Angeles. An officially sanctioned reminder of any sort of faithfulness is the last thing we want.

Scrap the galleon San Salvador, which Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into San Pedro Bay in 1542, for its imperial presumption. And take down the cross-less mission church, symbol of Native American genocide to many.

Better to scrape off the name "Los Angeles" for its religious and colonialist overtones.

The county's corporate name should be Elā – two meaningless syllables, pronounceable in most of the 185 languages spoken in the county, short, and sort of uplifting without promising anything the Federal Trade Commission would question. The imagery on the county seal ought to be pointlessly assertive, celebrating action without purpose. Too bad the Nike swoosh is already taken.

But if our place can't be boiled down to a trademark and a made-up word, perhaps it could be represented by all of us instead.

Draw something like on odometer on the seal, the numbers in the total rolling up from 10,000,000 as the county's population increases. New numbers could be stenciled on county buildings every year, memorializing nothing except the bare fact of our existence.

Or the seal could be replaced by a mirror so that you'd see only your own image, the one thing that apparently matters. Nothing else endures the withering fury of our grievances against the past. The county seal should reflect only our own self-regard.

Or everything should come off, because collectively we have neither the courage nor the humility to deal with the history that the seal represents. Public symbols should be neutral surfaces, untroubled by what we've been and uncomprehending of what we might become, because we resist the idea of becoming anything together.

 Walk north on Balboa Boulevard from the commercial hurly-burly of Ventura and within 200 feet you’re deep in the suburban grid that consumed square miles of San Fernando Valley chicken ranches and orchards in the 1950s. Today’s landscape looks domesticated, but the light is for a desert, simplifying everything into glare or shadow.

By 10 a.m. on this Sunday morning in August 2003, the milky sky is incandescent and the valley heat is already a material presence. What you need is shelter. What’s available is mostly nostalgic, given that virtually everyone here is or was an immigrant and full of longing.

The campus of the First Presbyterian Church of Encino, a block up from Ventura Boulevard, replicates an immigrant’s longing and some of longing’s provisional remedies. The original church from 1945 is a vaguely English, half-timbered shed constructed, one parishioner told me, with the help of the actor Edward Everett Horton. Attached to it is a more substantial block of classrooms and offices that implies an abbey cloister.

(By 2022, the original church had become the Kehillah Chen v'Chesed Jewish Universalist congregation.)

The second church, put up in 1954, still suggests British roots with a shorthand of historical detail applied to the exterior of a simple, A-frame structure. There are hundreds of churches like this in mid-century neighborhoods, evoking traditions on a framework of everyday modernism.

But it’s too bright to stand outside considering how Los Angeles makes the modern look traditional. You want shade.

Step inside the nave and what you get is more light. It’s light with a remarkable emotional range and almost always presented – even when artificial – with great subtlety and sophistication. It’s never unmediated light. It’s light that’s passed through something, been cut by asymmetrical openings, allowed to screen on a tilted and curving panel, been half blocked by the overlapping edge of another panel, let in to gather in irregular polygons from 14 mostly unseen skylights, been reflected onto white oak pews and absorbed by the gray of the carpeting and the black concrete of the chancel platform.

It’s as if you had taken a platinum photographic print and enlarged it to wall size blocks of tones graduating from not exactly white to not quite black.

(This luminous interior earned the AIACC Honor Award for Design in 2003. Apart from the astonishing beauty realized by principal architects Trevor Abramson and Douglas Teiger and Michael Cranfill, architect in charge of design of the remodeled interior, the work took just seven months to complete and cost less than $900,000.)

The pervasive, ambivalent light all around you isn’t static. The succession of tones modulates minute by minute as the morning sun climbs and follows the ridge of the roof, turning the recesses of the east facing chancel wall into a gallery of monochrome abstractions. A comparable experience – interior light as theology – is in the church paintings of the 17th century Dutch artist Pieter Jansz Saenredam. He caught the pale northern light pouring over Gothic pillars and arches from the clear windowpanes that had replaced the stained glass in the stripped and whitewashed naves of Catholic cathedrals made Calvinist. Saenredam painted the undeceiving light of reformation.

When an usher, working the controls before the service, extinguishes the spotlights that define the oval plinth and its incised cross in front of the chancel and the 16-foot-high cross that projects into it, the remaining daylight is less dramatic. It’s more nuanced in shades of gray, more capable of affirming the physical surface of the plaster-over-sheetrock of the large side panels, in that way more architectural, and even more mysterious (and less liturgical) as the light passes over the planes of the chancel wall.

Whatever it might be in the abstract as space for manipulating light, this sanctuary is a machine for praying in a particular way. With the spotlights back on and the service begun, the worship space reorganizes around the hulk of the grand piano accompanying the hymn tunes and the officiant at the ambo reading aloud the words of the Gospel. There is a parallel text in the light animating the panels that bend and clasp over his head.

The optimistic lesson of the First Presbyterian Church of Encino is that a lyrical, humane postmodernism is a fit alternative to nostalgia in making sacred spaces in Los Angeles. Hundreds of suburban churches from the 1950s, crowded with immigrant shadows, await a new enlightenment.

 Hody’s Family Restaurant in 1952 was toffee and caramel stucco on the outside and wood veneer and red vinyl in the half-dark interior. Somewhere inside even darker, there was a cocktail lounge. Hody’s tower gestured toward the boulevard that pointed north across the dead-level landscape between Lakewood and Pico Rivera. Cruising teenagers might swing over to Wallach’s Music City, play 45s in a listening booth, and then pull into Hody’s in Lakewood Center for burger and a coke.

Hody’s was, the local newspaper said, designed inside and out by Wayne McAllister. He would become famous for Southern California’s Googie-style coffee shops. The Lakewood Hody’s was more restrained, because restauranteur Sidney Hoedemaker wanted it that way.

Hody’s made the transition for my neighbors from diner to a sit-down restaurant with cloth napkins, but the restaurant also had counter service and car hops. It was still not middle class.

I remember best the dried seahorses and starfish entombed in the plastic dividers between the booths and the horrific, clown face menu for kids.

I have no memory of the food, except the intense tomato redness of the viscous French dressing they served on salads. It was both astringent and too sweet, rather like our lives then.

 In September 1945, under a pall of ocher smog, Los Angeles entered the postwar world. The city was bigger than it had been when the war began, wealthier, and more diverse. Its established people—past middle age and conservative; few who were really rich—kept the narrowness of the Midwest towns from most of them had come. The city’s new people—Okies and Arkies, Black Southerners, and white ethnics—had arrived with the buildup to war. Few of them had much interest in art.

There was art in Los Angeles they could have seen. Broad-shouldered men and women in WPA murals reaped and forged and lifted up symbols of a better America to come. Sabato Rodia’s unfinished Watts Towers/Nuestro Pueblo glittered over the Pacific Electric tracks south of downtown. In office waiting rooms, in the bank lobby, and on sale at Barker Brothers were desert landscapes with chaparral and scenes with eucalyptus trees and poppies. The paintings were loosely impressionist in a taste that had grown stale.

At the county’s Museum of History, Science, and Art—its name a hierarchy of values—curators mounted loan exhibitions among the mastodon skeletons. The Huntington Library displayed a superb collection of eighteenth century portraits and landscapes.

Serious collectors of modern art could find Matisse and Picasso, Klee and Kandinsky at Earl Stendahl’s gallery on Wilshire Boulevard and Frank Perls’ gallery nearby, but Stendahl and Perls were practically alone.

The Chouinard Art Institute, the Art Center School, and the Otis Art Institute offered day and evening art classes for veterans studying on the GI Bill. (Some would get jobs cartooning for Disney or Warner Bros.)

Art—as a way of life and a livelihood—was something found in New York that September. Los Angeles didn’t even have an art museum and it had no interest in opening one. Downtown and Hollywood were separate Protestant and Jewish worlds; their moneyed people never mixed.

With a few exceptions—Man Ray was the subject of two retrospectives in the 1940s—little public notice was taken of contemporary art. Officially, Los Angeles distrusted art that delivered the shock of the new.

On Olvera Street in 1932, city workers had whitewashed America Tropical, David Alfaro Siqueiros’ allegory of American oppression. In 1939, conservatives on the county museum board had turned down a gift of avant-garde works from the collection of Walter and Louise Arensberg. Vincent Price, Edward G. Robinson, Fanny Brice, and Sam Jaffe founded the Modern Institute of Art in 1947 to keep the Arensberg collection in Los Angeles, but the institute closed when funding ran out. The art went to Philadelphia in 1950.

Indifference had turned into hostility. When James Byrnes, the first curator of modern and contemporary art at the county museum, sought a Jackson Pollock painting in 1947, he was told by one of the museum’s trustees to keep the painting out of sight in his office.

Culture war

Anne Bartlett Ayres in the catalog for the exhibition Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties described the city in 1950 as “(v)ulgar, extroverted, spontaneous, energetic, proudly unsophisticated—Los Angeles discouraged a civilized sense of art historical continuities.” It also seethed with resentments.

Kenneth Ross, the director of the city-funded Municipal Art Department, had a pragmatic approach to art in Los Angeles, drawn from New Deal models of communal action. Art, film, dance, and music—without much discrimination except that it should be lively and interesting—could be brought to every Los Angeles neighborhood, even to communities of color. In his way stood the politics of mid-century Los Angeles, a mixture of anti-immigrant, anti-modern, anti-Communist, and anti-New Deal sentiments that flowed through the influential California Art Club to city council members equally unsettled by manifestations of the new.

The club and its city council allies tried to block Ross’ appointment as department director, only to be overruled by the Municipal Art Commission in 1949.

Ross hoped his eclectic approach would accommodate every taste (and quiet some of the criticism). The All-City Outdoor Arts Festival he planned for 1951 was two weeks of community engagement held at parks and at the Greek Theater. Dance and music performances were included, but the focus was on the jury’s selection of 180 paintings and sculptures in a wide range of styles, including art that was influenced by surrealism, cubism, and abstract expressionism.

That was too many “isms” for traditionalists. As Sarah Schrank notes in Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles, Ross’ critics used the Los Angeles Times to complain of the art and Ross’ politics and patriotism. The San Fernando Valley Professional Artists’ Guild and the Coordinating Committee for Traditional Art went directly to the city council. Ross, they wrote, championed “Communist art” and besides, there weren’t enough of their own members’ works in the festival.

When City Councilman Harold Harby convened the first of two days of a noisy public hearing intended to condemn the festival’s “offensive and nauseating” modern art, a member of the Society for Sanity in Art smeared non-representational works in the festival as “meaningless lines and daubs with nothing that is uplifting or spiritual, only an affront to the sensibilities of normal people.”

Other speakers informed the city council that modern art was unhealthy, dangerous, and perverse. Harby thought the works were “Communistic” in spirit (if not actual Soviet propaganda). He singled out an abstract seascape by Rex Brandt, one of the festival award winners, pointing to a hammer-and-sickle he saw in one boat’s sail.

Harsh questioning of one of the festival’s artists drove him to tears. He had spent, he said, “two years in the Army fighting for freedom of expression.”

The conflict was partly generational. Art club members were older, genteel, and conservative. The contemporary painters were mostly former servicemen, brash, young, and uninterested in uplift. The dispute was also about the city’s other concerns: the passing of cultural authority to new Angelenos and the unmet aspirations of Latinos and African Americans. A plein-air painting wasn’t about a pretty landscape. It was about how you imagined Los Angeles should be.

The second day of hearings, coming a week later, only deepened the confusion between aesthetics and politics. In the report submitted by Councilman Harby (along with Charles Navarro and John Gibson), the festival’s non-representational art was branded as anti-American.

Although the city council ultimately resisted this interpretation, along with Harby’s demand for a separate show for “sane” art, city council members did compel Ross to submit his budget to additional oversight. In the future, Ross would have less freedom to present an inclusive festival.

The politics of modernism had split the city council along the same lines that was dividing it over the issue of public housing. When Harby helped Norris Poulson become mayor in 1953, running on a platform that opposed public housing, Ross’ position as department director became even more difficult. His business sponsors drifted away, fearful of being red-baited.

Sheen and surface

The local culture war was serious enough, but the conflict was fought in a tiny arena around the merits of the European avant-garde and New York abstract expressionism. The real preoccupation of post-war Los Angeles was the popular culture being made and consumed in the city’s new suburbs.

In the tract house valleys and flatlands, young guys with a knack for tinkering were turning twenty-year-old jalopies into chromed and lacquered hot rods. Surfers were taking jet-age materials and giving their boards sleek contours in polymer and fiberglass. Aerospace workers were learning the skills of vacuum forming, acrylic casting, and vapor coating. The sheen of finishes applied to sheet metal and plastic turned industrial objects into objects of desire.

The things the men made were loud, fast, and colorful. They jostled competitively with the stuff of suburban life—billboards shouting come-ons, men’s magazines lingering over every airbrushed inch of skin, local TV recycling vintage Hollywood—and all of it pouring into suburban Los Angeles in an unfiltered torrent of immediate and mostly disposable content.

In a media-saturated city, Spade Cooley, Bill Haley, and the Metropolitan Opera all played on the kitchen radio. The latest issue of William Randolph Hearst’s House Beautiful on the Danish Modern coffee table assailed the abstract expressionists but also warned middle-class housewives that their tastes needed to be modern. Their kids furtively passed around copies of Mad Magazine and Tales from the Crypt, lingering over four-color graphics that rendered the suburban everyday as satire or horror.

From this bricolage, the popular culture of postwar Los Angeles rose, part corporate product and part do-it-yourself assembly in which all the arts—high and low—were mashed up and extruded. Los Angeles had impulsively disposed of its own past and long ago made self-invention its defining tradition. The new popular culture and Los Angeles were made for each other. It was an egalitarian, ahistorical, and optimistic fabrication of what the future should be, with all the excess and aspiration that implied.

The rest of the country wondered if art from Los Angeles had anything to say other than well-advertised dreams. Seen from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles looked like a mess of clichés: happy, sun-besotted, trivial, and too immersed in spectacle to make serious contemporary art. In Los Angeles, no one seemed to care, even though the shallowness was at least partly true.

In New York in the 1950s, you looked to history and theory to explain how the fears and longings of the age were to be expressed. In Los Angeles, you only had to look to wanton desire. Los Angeles—a bipolar city of bright surfaces sharply bounded by shadows—tended to eroticize everything, to give even the banal a Dionysian spin into play, physical perfection, violence, altered states of consciousness, and a thirst for the infinite.

The infinite had been a part of the sales pitch for Los Angeles for a long time: in its light, its deserts, its emptiness, and its location at the end of the continent. Ecstatic religion, New Age thought, and UFO cults had once satisfied the ordinary folk who wanted transcendence. In a rapidly changing Los Angeles, dabbling in LSD and Zen satisfied some of those who looked for a personal cosmic doorway.

Los Angeles itself was a doorway for guys who liked to draw, who liked to gamble, who dropped in and out of art school, and who didn’t fit in well. Guys like Ed Kienholz, one of the founders with Walter Hopps of the Ferus Gallery in 1957, where Kienholz later showed Roxy’s, the first of his life-size environments assembled from the city’s junk. And guys like Billy Al Bengston, who experimented with industrial pigments and spray lacquer to render luminous hearts, irises, and sergeant’s stripes. And Kenneth Price, who put the same gloss on ceramic pieces, joining traditional craft work to functionless abstraction. And Craig Kauffman, who began painting in a West Cost expressionist style but who is best known for perfectly finished panels of Plexiglas. And John McCracken, who brought the same perfection to resin-coated planks, casually propped against a gallery wall. And Robert Irwin, an intensely focused minimalist in painting and later a fabricator of sight altering installations made solely of light.

If Los Angeles was fundamentally insubstantial, then its art could be limitless light and space and sheen—what the critic Rosalind Krauss would later call “the California Sublime.” And if the city was a less-than-innocent joyride, then Los Angeles artists would cram all of this emerging culture in the back seat.

In Los Angeles, no critical arrow pointed the way. In Los Angeles, there was no art history exam to be passed. You were on your own. Successful New York artists fitted their work into a system of reputation merchandizing that involved certain galleries, art critics, and publications. None of that was true of Los Angeles.

To drum up patronage for their struggling galleries, some artist-entrepreneurs set up courses on contemporary art in Westside living rooms—Tupperware parties for the aesthetically curious. New art was risky, and it didn’t pay in Los Angeles. But the surfing was good, almost everything was cheap, and anything was possible.

An unruly hybridization of the ordinary and the visionary gave a specifically Los Angeles context to the abundance of Andy Warhol’s soup cans (first shown at the Ferus Gallery in 1962), the moral outrage of the Peace Tower (a Vietnam War protest coordinated by Mark di Suvero in 1966), and the ethnic manifestos in Chicano art (itself an extension of labor organizing). Art in Los Angeles could be vulgar or political or intensely private, just like Los Angeles.

Los Angeles artists assembled from light, space, color, adolescence, joy and the debris of the city a body of work that investigated and delineated what Los Angeles meant when it was on the verge. Some observers saw the birth of a new capitol of art in that. Some saw only the shine on too perfect surfaces. Hardly anyone saw the fire that would burn the heart out of these daydreams. Hardly anyone saw that Watts and the rest of Los Angeles was on the verge of 1965.

 An adaptation of the afterword to Common Place. The American Motel by Bruce Bégout. Colin Keaveney, trans., Otis Books | Seismicity Editions, 2010.

The parenthetical references are to the pages in Lieu commun: Le motel américain (Editions Allia, 2003).

Bruce Bégout is a French philosopher, writer, and translator who teaches at the Université Bordeaux-Montaigne. A phenomenologist of the everyday, Bégout has examined Las Vegas, American motels, and suburbs as part of an “archeological inquiry into the meanings of our daily urban world.”

Haunted

I have an intense recollection of a particular summer day. I’m very young and I’m playing hide-and-seek in our house with my older brother. It’s near dusk, and the rooms in our house have filled with shadows.

The house we live in is small – less than 1,000 square feet – but because I’m small too, even this diminished space seems large. I’m standing in the doorway to the bedroom I would share with my brother for another fifteen years.

The last of the light is almost gone, as if condensed from the air, and my knees actually begin to knock out of fear. I’m afraid of what isn’t in that room. I fear my own absence.

That summer evening, my dreaming house was revealed. I knew it was haunting itself. I knew that all houses are haunted. The chair in the vacant room improvises a sitter, the doorway a passing figure, the bed a couple trysting.

Years later, after my father’s funeral, I came back to that house. My father and I had shared it since my mother’s death three years before. My brother brought me back in his car, dropped me off at the curb, and drove away. That day and over the next few days, I sat and waited as the light drained out of each of the rooms in turn.

Blindness

Afflicted with a boring collection of vision problems, I’ve been trying on the blindness that probably awaits me. In the rooms of my house, where I rarely turn on the light, the contents are marked out by the illumination thrown by street lights, cars passing, and the diffuse aerial brightness that every city compounds nightly from its hundred million lamps. We’re never truly in the dark on the Los Angeles plain. I make my way by the light others have discarded.

The faith of the blind man is familiarity. It’s the reciprocal touch of the things he touches, confirming that they are in their place and he is in his. But the presence of the everyday does more than orient. I touch the much-handled things I grew up with and they touch me back.

In some of us, however, the touch returned by the everyday inspires horror. The imagination dwells on what Joan Didion memorably called “the unspeakable peril of the everyday” – the coyote standing by the swimming pool at dawn, the snakes in the baby’s playpen at noon, and the wildfire whipping over a canyon lip at sunset. The glass tumblers in the motel room are swaddled in cellophane for that reason. (LC, p. 31). The paper banner on the toilet seat reads “Sanitized for your protection.” The sheen of a human touch is wiped from every surface daily.

The forces of internal security against the impurity of the everyday are, in the motels of the American West, modest Latinas wearing poorly fitting uniforms and pushing gondolas of cleaning supplies. The Latinas and their labors are half-invisible, appearing only when the distracted traveler lingers too long. And even when the transient finally departs, and the room is restored to the specifications of its corporate owners, the labor of the Latina restorers is left half-done. But it’s not their purpose to purge the everyday from the anonymity of the motel room, only to camouflage it (LC, p. 43). An ultra-violet light wand – the kind public health inspectors carry – will make the residue of the room’s memories fluoresce: the months old stain of sex on the carpet, the wine spilled before that or the urine of an elderly incontinent or the blood of the solitary traveler who tentatively exposed his wrist to a razor blade.

As I do at home, I rarely turn on the room lights where I lodge. There is loose illumination enough, and the shadows in rooms made for transience are all the same anyway.

Motel Man

The motel room is a space of forgetfulness (LC, pg. 37). Its manufactured consistency invites misremembering. “Is this the bed I slept in the night before or the night before that? Do I turn right down the breezeway to the rank of soda and snack machines or do I go down the steps on the left? And by what route did I get here? What GPS-enabled device can lead me back to the Interstate?”

As a “non-place,” the motel room enforces forgetting: of habits and rhythms imbedded in the everyday, of burdens never understood as such because they are those that ordinary circumstance commands. Misremembered are the promptings of a moral imagination, which is necessarily in sympathy with daily life. The ability to persist through a succession hired “non-places” – each vacated affectively as well as imaginatively – depends on the amnesia that comes with every motel room. Even the worst of them offers forgetfulness as its principal amenity.

Forgetting and misremembering – along with wrapped glass tumblers, in-room pornography, and tiny containers of shampoo and body wash – are consolations exchanged for the motel man’s complicity with the room’s purpose. Its purpose isn’t his shelter. The room’s purpose is its availability.

Ford, Le Corbusier, Taylor, and Fuller taught the lodging industry the iron laws of availability, the rules of a régime of speed made palatable under the guise of process rationalization and streamlined design (as if a dirigible had anything to offer beyond its fragile surface tension). Around-the-clock availability is what motel operators sell (except for the strictly regulated minutes when the Latina housekeeper Taylorizes the bed sheets.) Always available but never accommodating, the motel room awaits the next phantom to check in as you check out (LC. p. 60).

A motel man is waiting in the office cubicle next to you and available to take your place. On BBC radio, three British corporation heads are discussing the intersection of business travel and globalization. The actual subject is availability. “It’s immaterial where you are,” the European head of an American stock trading network offers as conventional wisdom. The discussion moves to “time zone shifting” – the requirement that office staffs in London work (and therefore live) on South Asian time. Which leads to a comment about the timelessness of work within the régime of speed. A project begun in London is uploaded, half completed, at 10:00 p.m. to workers in Los Angeles arriving at 7:00 a.m. the next day who then FTP their contribution to colleagues in Hong Kong at 8:00 a.m. (now the following calendar day) before the proposal is presented, via the Internet from London, to senior members of a government ministry in Moscow. Work occurs in a “non-place” that is in no sense an actual locality, nor do the workers there have any genealogical connection to it. The space of this work is always available and always the same. Work now requires the logic of the motel room to be applied everywhere.

The dematerialization of place into a space of frictionless momentum (equivalent for the unmoored knowledge worker as well as the footloose traveler) confounds the vernacular geographies that arise naturally from the human capacity for wayfinding. Aggression, lethargy, and other conversion reactions follow (LC, p. 55) when this innate human ability for wayfinding is confounded. These dissociative responses, which characterize the un-housing of a moral imagination, are natural to the “non-places” in which global workers are made to labor – available spaces without ambiguity, that require no negotiation between setting and character or any absorption of meaning from locality.

And eliminated from the workforce with the same ruthlessness are the un-globalized who have lingered too long, who have begun to daydream, who have paused to note the shift of dusk to dark over the city’s skyline, who are now actually somewhere (or who have discovered how to be imaginatively elsewhere). Unhappily, they’ve become inconvenient. They’ve made a place for themselves. They’re no longer fully available (LC, p. 84).

Montage

On the other side of the 20th century, an annotator of the future worried that the tyranny of being somewhere would challenge any attempt to evoke a superbly emancipated self (LC, p. 80). In 1897, Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard deconstructed language, author, character, text, reader – and finally the book itself – to forestall the tragedy of (n’aura eu lieu … que le lieu) “nothing having taken place … except the place.”

Materially, Un coup de dés is some printed sheets. Movement is pantomimed by turning the pages, each sheet burying the text beneath in white. Resisted everywhere is the reader’s submission to this lulling momentum. Reading is not the response Mallarmé wanted; the concrete text continually distracts the reader’s attention or stalls it in grammatical ambiguities. The reader is re-rendered an observer of what has been subsumed in the whiteness of the page. Constrained by the destiny inherent in books, which Mallarmé cannot delay for long, the observer-reader finally arrives at the book’s dark, impenetrable cover. The closed book becomes the featureless “non-place” that precludes there ever having been a transcendent text whose paradoxical subject is absence.

Mallarmé hoped that something might rise above this disaster. A kind of guiding constellation, as a universal coordinate, might reanimate the catatonic observer. In fact, only Mallarmé’s romantic aspiration distinguishes the “non-place” of Mallarmé’s closed book from the “non-place” cubicles of global enterprise, where aspiration has been replaced by an algorithm. In between Mallarmé’s poem and the cubicle are Einstein’s dismissal of universal frames of reference, the first Battle of the Somme, the Shoah, the Internet, and the demands of social media. Coordinates might still be inscribed, but they would be figures on a map most of us no longer use (LC, p. 100-101).

Their replacement was already being revealed in the play of shadows. In the improvised theaters of 1897, the light of a movie projector springs on and a disorderly crowd of images – their juxtapositions unrelated in time and place – overlaps in the middle distance: an evanescent succession of impressions from no human perspective. As substitute for embodied geography, Mallarmé dreamed montage, the new century’s image of continual, rapid displacement. Montage will now serve as idol and guide (LC, p. 95).

Through the tiny lens that reveals to the bored wayfarer the slim possibilities of the motel corridor, through this illuminated breach in his double-locked door, the watcher attends. Never completely sure of his position, but always anticipating – this is the movie-goer’s purest imagination – the motel man waits for something unspeakably wonderful, unspeakably monstrous, to occur as if by chance. Waiting and ever failing to be entirely enchanted. As dusk turns to night outside the theater, the motel room, the office (with its glowing broadband connection), the motel man resists the invitation of the contaminating street to enter into the body of the city where, by immemorial processes, place becomes an attribute of the body of the dweller.

Optional Participation

We’re not at home in America. And how could we be? How could we make a home here when what is called home is always framed – by convictions of agency and autonomy – in terms of “non-places”?

We’re not at home in America, and not because of historical necessity or libidinal adolescence. (A full account of any American place is yet to be made.) We’re not at home, and being footloose is just the symptom of American unease with the idea of home, precisely as Bégout diagnoses it from his vantage point by the side of the Interstate, from the balcony of an indeterminate motel, from the far end of a corridor of identical doors (“none of them numbered” in Lilianna Lungina’s recollection of the many interrogation rooms of the Lubyanka headquarters of the KGB). We’re housed, surely. We’re in our cubicles. We’ve taken cover in the bomb shelter. We’re interned. But we’re not at home (LC, p. 73). The gift America has given the world is homelessness.

Motels atomize, but they also are places in common, a condition that troubles the picky American imagination, which is tuned by myths and media always to be sensitive to the threat of other people. Relieved to be carrying nothing but what a laptop will hold, America’s modular motel men travel untethered from situations that enforce (or embrace) the sense of communitarian solidarity (LC, p. 163) which arises, in part, from enduring the ordinary together and in some place. In essayist and critic Anneli Rufus’ libertarian reformulation of John Donne, every “hobohemian” can be an island, even at the level of generational continuity. “We no longer need to be social animals in order to survive as a species,” Rufus writes in Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto. “Mandatory social interaction is an evolutionary remnant which whose who wish to may discard. Civilization will go on whether you attend the block party or not . . . or have kids or not. Its momentum is strong. It will go on.” Your participation, it seems, is now optional. This terminal neutrality –the situation of the motel man waiting in his room without inheritance or legacy – stands in opposition to the “pale” vista of the commonplace (the place where we necessarily find love and hope). The strong will have no need of places. The weak will be at home because of its wounds, because it has wounded them.

Manifest

By accidental epiphanies or with rituals of “gray magic” (LC, p. 167) can some form of place be scratched provisionally into surfaces of plastic and chrome, into the whiteness of the page, into the moral “non-place” through which the motel man drifts. There’s a feeling for dirt, for example. “On coming to a new place, my father would take a pinch of dirt, sprinkle it in his palm, sniff it, stir it with a blunt finger, squeeze it, then take it on his tongue, tasting,” notes Scott Russell Sanders in Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. “When I first saw him do this, I was puzzled. Why eat dirt? ‘Just trying to figure out where I am,’ he explained.”

Not into geophagia to be grounded in a place? There’s mere attention. In my southern California ordinariness, I feel – as an electric current – the change from season to season in subtle shifts in the quality of light, the ebb of on-shore and off-shore winds, the cyclical replacement of birdsongs, and the scents (still there) of the chaparral fading or blooming.

Between the motel room and the waiting car – the air conditioners in each loudly humming in the summer heat – comes a moment when a bead of sweat forms, the rank pungency of a skunk crosses the parking lot, a breath of roasted air startles, and a place is made manifest.

Confession

I’m a memoirist – a problematic vocation, given the elastic way some authors have treated their autobiography. Admissions of fictionalizing[1] rightly cause suspicion of the kind of writing for which I’m known best. Worse, I’m a suburban memoirist and I half wish I could substitute a grittier account in place of my nondescript life. I write about the way winter light falls through the trees that edge my street and the apprehension of something coming into being that I feel.

My street is in Lakewood, on the flood plain between the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers. My house is 957 square feet of wood frame and stucco put up hastily during World War II and close to a Douglas Aircraft plant camouflaged then to look like a suburban neighborhood. My parents were lucky to buy that house in 1946 when the idea of mass-produced housing for blue-collar workers was new, and no one could tell what would happen when tens of thousands of husbands and wives – young and so inexperienced – were thrown together without instruction and expected to make a fit place to live. What happened after was the usual mix of joy and tragedy.

Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute, insisted that Americans have not yet become native to their place. His subject was rural; mine is suburban, but the essential problem of America is true in both places: How do we make a home here? We live on land we’ve wounded, yet we must be here or be nowhere and have nothing with which to make our lives together. How should one act knowing that every American place was once a paradise stolen from its Indigenous possessors – now a ruined paradise yet still our home? How should I regard my neighbors, complicit with me? It’s possible to answer with fury or neglect. It’s possible to be so assured of privilege that contempt for a place like Lakewood is the only answer. It’s possible to be so rootless that these questions are merely ironic. We can no longer whitewash our connivance with forgetfulness – or worse, out of willful amnesia – and instead imagine, as many want to, that they sojourn in a historyless place devoid of sacred ordinariness. As Martin Dines notes in The Literature of Suburban Change, “Habitation entails a life of habit.”[2]

The story I tell myself about my home begins with ruin. There are heroes and gods in Homer’s Iliad, and I had thought the story was about them. But the story is really about an imperfect place and how living there mingles heartbreak and the everyday. It’s good to recall that every city claims someone’s allegiance, answers someone’s longing, and persists in someone’s memory. It’s good to be reminded of this when, as it inevitably will, disenchantment conspires to leave you comfortably housed but emotionally homeless.

My father’s kindness was as pure and indifferent as a certain kind of saint’s.

My father did not have a passion for his giving; it came from him, perhaps after much spiritual calculation, as a product might come from a conveyer belt.

The houses in this suburb were built the same way. As many as a hundred a day were begun between 1950 and 1952, more than five hundred a week. No two floor plans were built next to each other; no neighbor had to stare into his reflection across the street. Teams of men built the houses.

Some men poured concrete into the ranks of foundations from mixing trucks waiting in a mile-long line. Other men threw down floors nailed with pneumatic hammers, tilted up the framing, and scaled the rafters with cedar shingles lifted by conveyer belts from the beds of specially built trucks.

You are mistaken if you consider this a criticism, either of my father or the houses.

From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir [3]

Haunted by Incarnation

I actually imagine that Lakewood is, in philosopher Josiah Royce’s terms, a “beloved community” – that is, a place of faithful shelter.[4] Mark Doty, in Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, considered what it meant to be sheltered and thought, “what we want is to be brought into relation, to be inside, within. Perhaps it’s true that nothing matters more to us than that.” [5] What kind of imagination is at work to prompt that belief? It’s not exclusively mine. The imagination at work is particular and peculiar in ways that I’ll call Catholic.

“Catholics live in an enchanted world,” Fr. Andrew Greeley asserts in the opening pages of his extended essay on the Catholic imagination:

A world, of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are merely hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility that inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. The world of the Catholic is haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of Grace. [6]

Some revelations of Grace, as novelist Flannery O’Connor might have said, may be encounters that render you so wounded that divinity infects you. Fr. Stephen Schloesser noted in locating the roots of the twentieth century Catholic novel that Catholic writers sought to “out-grotesque the grotesque” in order to show that behind even the ugliest phenomena – even suburban sprawl, in my case – the supernatural is at work.[7] “God lurks everywhere,” Fr. Greeley told an interviewer from Religion & Ethics Newsweekly in 2002. “That’s the fundamental Catholic instinct: That on the imaginative and poetic level, God is lurking everywhere. Right down the street, right around the corner, there’s God.” It’s a reflection of the “enchantment that permeates the Catholic community, a haunting that hints powerfully at a salvation guaranteed by pervasive grace.”[8]

Fr. Greeley has said that ordinary Catholics remain Catholic because they like to be Catholic, which he ties to the sensual life that even humdrum Catholicism can make habitual. But some revelations of Grace are things themselves, and that, I suppose, is my faith. We touch the much-handled things we grew up with and they touch us back, a relationship that implies a sacramental extension, a corresponding touch that you might rightly mistake for God’s. Novelist and critic Jun’ichiro Tanizaki noted that the “sheen of antiquity” valued by Japanese collectors of antiques is the correspondence that results from years of handling, leaving behind the stain that we give and receive.9] For historian Neil Campbell,”[f]rom the immediate and local material of the ordinary … worlds unfold. They touch and, in turn, touch us.”[10]

“No later painter,” Henry James wrote in Italian Hours, “learned to render with deeper force than Fra Angelico the one state of the spirit he could conceive – a passionate pious tenderness… .”[11] All of my writing is, in part, a meditation on what we touch with tenderness or with rough inattention and the lingering effects of touch on us. Manipulation is precisely what happens, but that works both ways. In some of us, however, the implicating touch returned by the everyday inspires horror. The imagination dwells on what Joan Didion memorably called “the unspeakable peril of the everyday” – the coyote standing by the swimming pool, the snakes in the baby’s playpen, and the autumn wildfire whipping over the canyon lip. The immanent is at hand, but it will arrive at times as a monstrous epiphany. “All my stories,” complained Flannery O’Connor, “are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”[12] In the Catholic imagination, catastrophe and revelation touch.

Intimacy

Apprehension of the numinous in the everyday has a “political” dimension (a sympathetic bond between neighbors) and a “cultural” one (an active intimacy continually mapping a geography of recollection on the contours of the familiar). Ordinary practices, so embodied, aim to arouse a moral imagination – an imagination capable of dwelling in someone else’s experience – that is in “constant contact and interchange between the local scene and the wide world that lies beyond it.”[13]

As much as it may be a source of wonder and delight, the Catholic imagination, as Greeley sees it, is a tool that helps men and women trust one another and to be faithful. That faithfulness supports our efforts to form “beloved communities” and breed in them “habits of being” that do not make us ashamed and which may even be redemptive. One habit is “a sense of place,” based (for me) on the belief that each of us has an imaginative, inner landscape compounded of memory and longing that seeks to be connected to an outer landscape of people, circumstances, practices, and things. I believe that a “sense of place” is, like a sense of self, part of the equipment of a conscious mind. When I walk out of my house, I see the familiar, human-scale, porous, and specific landscape into which was poured the ordinariness that has shaped my work, my convictions, and my aspirations. “I experience myself in the city,” wrote architect and urban theorist Juhani Pallasmaa, “and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city, and the city dwells in me.”[14]

The author and environmentalist Barry Lopez once asked a question some about the San Fernando Valley, his childhood home and another place of terrific ordinariness. For Lopez, a “sense of place” doesn’t begin with any of the conventional markers of community: institutions, political processes, ethnic solidarity, or tradition. He sought it through an insightful question: “How can we become vulnerable to a place?” For Lopez, a “sense of place” comes with the deepening and widening of the imagination by which we become more and more trusting and intimate. With that sensibility, we become implicated in a specific history and in the common stories that bear both individual and shared memories. And for Lopez, fitting those together filled a deep longing. “Out of such intimacy may come a sense of belonging, a sense of not being isolated in the universe. … [T]he implication that follows is this: the place knows you’re there. It feels you.” [15] This reciprocity – in being touched and returning your touch – is for Lopez the assurance that you will not be “forgotten, cut off, abandoned.”

In becoming thus vulnerable, a kind of intelligence is born, emergent in interleavings, and poetic in expression. In its reluctance to give the obvious interpretation to events and in its readiness to remain mystified, it seeks to drag things into view that actually “feel like something” in a relay of correspondences that spark bewilderment, charm, or consolation until everything at hand becomes “charged, overwhelming, and alive.”[16] And everything becomes definite.

“We waste our time if we try to go around or above the definite,” argues Fr. William F. Lynch, “we must literally go through it.”[17] The definite has tightly wound within it a capacity to affect and be affected, to be embodied as the beloved, and to enmesh the personal, the local, and the global. “In an enchanted world,” Greeley writes, “the beloved is both enchanted and frustrating.” We cannot, or will not, understand the reason why attraction to a place and its circumstances asks so much of us, but we act on that desire, which lets us yearn for what we already have. It’s really a question of falling in love and the obligations that falling in love brings. The strength of that regard, Josiah Royce thought, might be enough to form a community even if the place is as synthetic as a mass-produced suburb like mine or the sudden Gold Rush towns of California that Royce had known. At a minimum, loyalty to the idea of loyalty is necessary, even if the object of our commitment is frustrating. There are no perfect places, only places where memories and longings may persist. (Paul Wilkes, in his review of Greeley’s The Catholic Imagination, referred to this sensibility as “sympathetic pragmatism.” [18] As Carissa Turner Smith has pointed out, “the habits of faith are a burden that yet provides shelter.”[19]

And then for some of us, that feeling evaporates into disregard. After all, we’re well-trained consumers, TV remote in hand, and ready to switch channels or affections or homes whenever we’re distracted. We run the risk, of course, of becoming so distracted out of narcissism that the imaginative connections between inner and outer landscapes break down entirely.

I once thought my suburban life was an extended lesson in how to get along with other people. Now, I think the lesson isn’t tolerance; it’s humility. When I stand at the head of my block, I see a pattern of sidewalk, driveway, and lawn, set between parallel low walls of house fronts that aspires to be no more than harmless. Every place framed by stories and conflicted loyalties ultimately is like Homer’s Troy, and therefore to be cherished while you can. We are living in a time of great harm to the ordinary parts of our lives, and I often wish that I had acquired all the resistance my neighborhood shows.

I don’t really know how to make myself more vulnerable to the place in which I find myself (or perhaps I do, but only dimly). But faithfulness to what can be found in its history – to what can be found in its shared stories – impels me forward, drawn by the sentiments of a Catholic imagination. I don’t have to love all the possibilities for conviviality handed to me by the contingencies of Lakewood, but I have to love enough of them.

When I was a boy and served on Good Friday, the lines of congregants stretched to the back of the church.

There was no distinction about who could participate in the veneration of the cross. Mothers and fathers stood with their small children, waiting in line.

They came forward, genuflected briefly on the first step in front of the altar, leaned forward, and kissed the feet of the figure of Jesus on the cross.

If I was holding the cross, I tried to keep it as steady as possible. If I was holding the square of starched, white cloth, I was supposed to wipe the feet of the figure.

I wasn’t sure if this was reverence or something to do with hygiene. As the members of the congregation venerated the cross, the cloth I carried grew bright red from the lipstick I wiped from the feet of Jesus.

§ § §

While the congregation knelt and venerated the cross, the choir sang. The hymn they sang was Pange Lingua, a hymn traditional for Good Friday.

Among its many verses are some addressed to the cross itself.

Dulce lignum,
Dulcis clavos,
Dulce pondus sustinet.

Sweet the wood.
Sweet the nails.
Sweet the weight you bear

From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir [20]

Disappointment

The imagination is a power of appropriation that, like the Word being made flesh, entangles the ghostly and the definite. That entanglement is experienced, for writers like me (I suppose) as a dialog, a continuous narrative within and without that I understand to be prayer. Because my imagination inclines to being analogical, habitual, and commonplace, I assume that it’s Catholic. The complication for that imagination, as Fr. Mark Ravizza has noted,[21] is the appeal of the too domesticated, a weakness he notes in Greeley’s conception of an analogical imagination framed by statues, stained glass windows, gilded altarpieces, tapestries, votive candles, rosary beads, and holy cards. There’s more, of course, than all this lovely comfort. My faith uses ordinary things from the marketplace: oil, bread, salt, wine, and wax. It values the unappealing debris that life leaves behind: dismembered remains, the marks of decomposition, and (as analogs) spilt blood, and torn flesh. After all, the Catholic imagination must consider daily the consequences of a state-sanctioned murder by public torture. Greeley’s enchanted world pivots on abjection, on “this defilement, this shit … at the border of my condition as a living being.”[22] There, film critic Elena Lazic writes, “brushing up against the limits of human nature,” our attention is drawn “to its shape and to its fragility.”[23]

For pilgrims journeying through the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angeles in Los Angeles, a contemporary manifestation of the Catholic imagination as a pilgrimage, the end of the journey is Simon Toparovsky’s life-size bronze figure of a man, black skin flayed, nailed up on a post, at the moment of death. Nothing is sentimental in that image, no appeal to a consoling folk piety, only the “trauma of remembrance.”[24] It isn’t possible to be nostalgic about a crucifixion.

In his defense of the analogical (or sacramental) imagination as an accomplice of faith, Greeley offers a beloved aesthetics. “I am still a Catholic,” he writes, “because of the beauty of Catholicism, beauty being truth in its most attractive form. It is the beauty of the images and stories of Catholicism which keep me in the Church… .” [25] But sometimes the analogies are weak; beautiful effects fail to materialize. During the sermon at one Sunday mass at the Los Angeles cathedral, the altar servers brought out a large brazier to help illustrate a point the celebrant was making about the nature of prayer. He poured a handful of incense onto the coals until flames drove up a thick column of grey smoke. I anticipated that the cloying odor of liturgical incense – a powerful instigator of Catholic memories – would fill the air. It didn’t. By an accident of geometry in the design of the nave or its superior ventilation, the cloud ascended, spread into a veil, and joined the indifferent light overhead. But the burning incense left no smell.

In the Catholic imagination, the Holy haunts the everyday, but so does disappointment. As Greeley notes, because the Catholic imagination believes that everything is a sign, it is prone, in its disappointments, to pious superstition, personality cults, and the substitution of religion for faith and authority in place of loyalty. The brokenhearted can make a redemptive turning to the Incarnate or they can turn away to the idols of institutions or their own comforts.

My imagination dwells (on and in a community of superabundant grace), but I’m anxious that having a Catholic imagination will unsettle me, too. That imagination should flinch when blows are laid on another’s back, lift in sympathy with the prayers of another’s worship, and savor another’s wisdom even when expressed in cadences that are foreign. It’s a sacramental imagination, surely, but also a cultural and political one, and the means by which I have written myself into the story of my community and attempted to negotiate my way from the personal to the public.

The Catholic imagination exults in what a redeemed world signifies, and it trembles because Catholics make so little of the world’s redemption. This is the challenge for an imagination that emphasizes less the transcendence of God and more the presence of God: How can such an imagination accommodate the reality of a world in which the good news of its redemption appears to be mislaid? How might it acquire the ability to sympathize with the condition of others and act on those conditions by communal means? How can anyone hope that a narrative with long stretches of dread ultimately will be a comedy? As Fr. Ravizza notes, “The truth of a sacramental imagination – that all reality is imbued with the hidden presence of God – needs to be complemented with what William Lynch has called a Christic imagination, an imagination that sees the life of Christ, especially the Cross, as a model of the fullest human life we can lead – a life poured out in love for one another.”[26]

The everyday isn’t perfect. It confines some and leads some astray into contempt or nostalgia, but imbued with the Incarnation, it frees the imagination of others. The weight of this everyday life is a burden I want to carry.

These [Lakewood] houses were built so lightly that they might even shelter us in a major earthquake.

The burden of our habits may do the same.

I avoided most of my father’s Catholicism, but I still live here.

From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir [27]

Notes 

1. This essay expands on a presentation at Loyola Marymount University in February 2006, a few days after James Frey acknowledged the fictionalizing in his best-selling memoir A Million Little Pieces, which included fabricated details about his criminal record, drug use, and drug rehabilitation experiences.

2. Martin Dines. The Literature of Suburban Change: Twentieth-Century Developments. Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 156

3. D. J. Waldie. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. Norton, 2005, 7

4. American philosopher Josiah Royce coined the phrase. “Since the office of religion is to aim towards the creation on earth of the Beloved Community, the future task of religion is the task of inventing and applying arts which shall win all over to unity, and which shall overcome their original hatefulness by the gracious love, not of mere individuality but of communities.” The Problem of Christianity. Macmillan, 1913, 430

5. Mark Doty. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy. Beacon Press, 2001, 6

6. Andrew Greeley. The Catholic Imagination. University of California Press, 2000, 1

7. Stephen Schloesser, S.J. “‘Really, Really Dark: Inventing the Catholic Novel, “ Explore magazine, vol. 5, no. 2, 16

8. Greely, 170

9. “In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow (i.e., “sheen of antiquity”) describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling – which is to say, grime.” Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. In Praise of Shadows. Leete’s Island Books, 1977, 11

10. Neil Campbell. “Ordinary Geographies. Trajectories of Affect in the Work of Kathleen Stewart and D. J. Waldie” in Martin Dines and Timotheus Vermeulen editors, New Suburban Stories, Bloomsbury Studies in the City, 2013, 151-16

11. Henry James. Italian Hours. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909, 408

12. Habits of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor. Sally Fitzgerald editor. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979, 275.

13. Lewis Mumford, “The South in Architecture” in Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition. Vincent Canizaro editor. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007, 101

14. Juhani Pallasmaa. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Wiley, 2012, 43

15. Barry Lopez. “We are shaped by the sound of wind, the slant of sunlight.” High Country News, 14 September 1998, https://www.hcn.org/issues/138/barry-lopez-we-are-shaped-by-the-sound-of-wind-the-slant-of-sunlight

16. “(W)orlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something.” Kathleen Stewart. Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press, 2007, 2

17. William F. Lynch, S.J. Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination. Sheed and Ward, 1960, 7

18. Paul Wilkes. “A Sense of Sacred,” America magazine, 8 April 2000, https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/culture/sense-sacred

19. Carissa Turner Smith. “D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land: Redeeming the Spiritual Geography of Suburbia,” Renascence, vol. 63, no. 4, 2011, 315

20. Holy Land, 178

21. Mark Ravizza, S.J. “Polluted Protagonists and the Enduring Appeal of the Catholic Imagination,” Santa Clara University, Explore magazine, vol. 5, no. 2 (Spring 2002), 20-23

22. Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Leon S. Roudiez translator. Columbia University Press, 1982, 3

23. Elena Lazic. “The House That Jack Built: in defence of the serial killer movie.” The Guardian, 13 December 201

24. “Shapes that are easy to ignore stand in for the trauma of remembrance.” Iain Sinclair. Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London. Granta Books, 1997, 9

25. Greeley. “I Like Being Catholic” in Why I Am a Catholic, Kevin and Marilyn Ryan editors. Riverhead Books, 1998, 186-197

26. Ravizza, 22

27. Holy Land, 138

Woozy with the words pouring out of a text intoxicated English culture – which had already produced Shakespeare, the King James Bible, the popular ballad sheet, and the scurrilous broadside – Americans in the eighteenth century knew that language embodied enlightenment. How else except by the Word were unruly human hearts to be fixed and fractious citizens reformed to populate the New Jerusalem? The Bible and the land lay open before Americans: God’s word held in a grid of his book’s orderly columns, a savage wilderness howling all around.

Thomas Jefferson thought that making a nation on the blank spread of the continent was a common act of composition, but only for the literate. For Jefferson, to read was to be free, and the notion of a literate slave an impossibility. Jefferson presumed those who toiled for him would be illiterate – the ultimate definition of a non-participant in the national story. Archeology at Monticello now hints that some of Jefferson’s slaves subverted his racist ideal. They had schooled their children in the citizen’s skill of reading.

Jefferson understood (and feared) that literacy wasn’t a neutral tool but a protean capacity for transformation. He knew, after all, the erotic attractions of text. He imagined an American narrative penetrating forests, fording rivers, and passing across prairies in the company of pioneers, leaving behind a rational grid of sections and townships that extended uniformly from the Alleghenies to the Pacific Ocean. But Jefferson was anxious, in a peculiarly American way, about the passage of that narrative into the hands of any huckster, charlatan, or snake oil salesman with a signboard.

In bibliolatrous America, where encounters with the printed word still set men and women trembling in Jefferson’s day to build or buy other utopias, it was too late to constrain the promiscuous play of language in the landscape, that public spectacle of the democratic word.

▪▪▪

When I was a boy, when to drive was limited by the edges of Jefferson’s scripted continent, the transfixing boredom of a family trip was abated at some point on the first day by one of us reading aloud the passing billboards to no one in particular. In the West, long stretches of summer brown landscape were subdivided by billboards counting down to an attraction that was 25 … 15 … 10 … 5 … 2 miles away until THIS IS IT! in letters thirty feet high hung over the reptile farm/date orchard/coldest beer/giant ball of twine by the side of the road. The billboards advertising these attractions were ugly, intrusive, shrill, and comforting as signs from a realm where loneliness need not abide.

My brother or I, reading billboards aloud, proclaimed that forward progress was being made, that something settled would eventually punctuate the West’s emptiness, and that to stop was an option even when the arrow-straight highway, clinging to a Jeffersonian section line, said to go on.

Reading billboards aloud overcame the silence that collected in our family car. Their sales pitch was as much a yearning for a connection as an appeal to buy. The language of billboards pleaded for a relationship (if only over a lunch counter) and pleaded more nakedly than anywhere else I knew. Every sign along the highway was hung on a scaffold of hope.

▪▪▪

Some painted signs (often those facing north, because they are less faded by the sun) offer products and services hardly imagined anymore: MILLINERY, FIREPROOF HOTEL, CLOTHES IN THE NEW YORK MANNER, SYRUP OF FIGS, Trusses, ARTIFICIAL Legs, WINE OF CARDUI, Taxidermist Supplies.

These signs, some still asserting brand loyalty after a hundred years and some a palimpsest of sales pitches bleeding through successive decades, are more than a museum of past desires or a record of fashions in advertising (and least of all merely nostalgic). Old signs are part of a dialog that is continually shaping American places, in the same way every neighborhood that unexpectedly survives its own era critiques the national passion for amnesia. America bristles with public conversations that aren’t about you and me or our contemporary desires, conversations that were begun without our presence and will continue after.

Preserved public speech traces and retraces history in the air above our heads. There is a connection between a sign’s tenuous survival and our own. The disposability that troubles our era leaks into our lives, erasing connections and recollections. Our past dwindles incoherently, rushing away from us like a landscape glimpsed in the rear view mirror of a fleeing car. We’re only along for the ride.

Neglected things, like old signs on the sides of buildings, stand against this regime of speed and our passivity in its grip. Every memory casually preserved is an instance of sabotage against the forces in our lives that insistently separate us from the much-handled things we grew up with. These signs are neither noble nor pure; in America, our memories are mostly the debris of consumption, either the failed promise of satisfaction or the container in which promise was packaged.

That these painted memories are unremarkable does not make them less affirming. In fact, the more worn and undecipherable the sign the more it resists our easy dismissal, the more it insists that its references be puzzled out, and the more personal it makes of what was once only public. We are as cryptic as they are and as hard to interpret.

What Whitman understood that the American story did not begin with one word but with many words. He thought that a distinctly American language was being concocted in the streets and on the signboards of cities. He believed that language abroad – in public, in the form of appeals and declarations – was our common speech. Read a worn sign and you still hear America singing.

More stories, profiles of Angelenos famous and unknown, and new episodes in finding a “sense of place” in twenty-first century Los Angeles are in Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory and a Sense of Place, published by Angel City Press.

 A pale, phosphorescent glow – like a full moon through high, thin clouds – once illuminated Los Angeles with the promise of beauty and health. The glow came from a discovery by Pierre and Marie Curie – from up-to-the-minute Paris – with the isolation in 1898 of radium from uranium ore.

The Curies’ radium was fabulous and strange and very expensive. It also was very radioactive, showering alpha and beta particles and shimmering with gamma rays. A tiny amount of radium sulfate, combined with zinc sulfide, made paint that glowed (patented by George Kunz in 1903). On watch faces, signs, clothing, buttons, roulette wheels, house numbers, and toys, radioluminous paint mysteriously dispelled the dark.

Small amounts of radium salts soon turned up in medical devices in hospitals and doctor’s offices to treat everything from eczema to hemorrhages. In thin glass tubes inserted into tumors, radium even had some curative effects.

Radium’s promise was irresistible. Radium was modern, dynamic, and scientific. Los Angeles had to have more of it – to bathe in, rub on, drink, and wear. With the virality of a meme, radium and radioactive blended into the brand identities of soaps, metal polish, cosmetics, toothpaste, bath salts, wrinkle removers, and mineral water. Dealers sold radium condoms, radium suppositories, and radium belts. Degnen's Radio-Active Eye Applicator, manufactured by the Radium Appliance Sales Company of Los Angeles, promised to make eyeglasses obsolete. The company’s radioactive “solar pads” answered the question “Will Radium at Last Open the Door of the Great Unknown?”

None of these products contained radium. They were compounds of hope and the conviction that science was about to throw its light on all the “great unknowns.” In an era when conventional medicine had little to offer for chronic suffering and almost nothing beyond the scalpel for cancer, the magical glow of radium promised healing for sick bodies and sick hearts.

Liquid Sunshine

Radium Sulphur Springs in Colegrove (Hollywood before it was Hollywood) enthused about the fizzy warmth of its sulfur, iron, and soda laden water:

“Oh! How it Sparkles.

Oh! How it Foams!

It Chases a Microbe Wherever it Roams.”

But the management also promised that the water was “radio-active” from radon gas dissolving into the spring.

Between 1908 and 1927 Dr. G. P. Gehring, the spa’s medical director, placed 245 advertisements in the Los Angeles Times offering his “liquid sunshine” for the cure of a long list of conditions ranging from locomotor ataxia to “female troubles” with the assurance that the spa’s water “is radio-active, germicidal and purifies your blood by destroying disease germs, thereby revivifying, rejuvenating and increasing your Vital Force and circulation.”

Radium Sulphur Springs may have sparkled and foamed like champagne, but it didn’t offer the health seeker much beyond a slight increase in the background level of radiation. To be effective, other radium hucksters said, therapeutic radioactivity needed to be potent. “It seemed that the more radioactive something was,” writes Robert Maxwell, “the better it must be for you, so claims of efficacy were often built upon further claims of high radioactive content.” [1]

If you couldn’t come to the irradiated water (at five cents for the streetcar ride to Radium Sulphur Springs), the water could come to you in the form of an “earthenware or stoneware cistern with radioactive material inclusions in the fabric of the vessel, into which may also be placed a radioactive core, most often called an ‘emanator’ … made from a mixture of concrete and a radioactive material such as uranium ore. A vessel was filled with water, the contents allowed to stand for 24 hours, then consumed. By the addition of an activator such as zinc sulphide, the water could also be made to glow.” [2]

The glow proved that radium’s Vital Force was present to do its curative work.

The Revigator, “The Perpetual Health Spring at Home,” was manufactured in Los Angeles beginning in 1912. “Fill the jar every night,” went the urgent advertising copy. In theory, the uranium ore in the Revigator’s “emanator” would have released a healthful dose of radon gas into the water by morning. “Drink freely … when thirsty and upon arising and retiring, average six or more glasses daily.”

The American Medical Association was concerned that the public was being misled by radium appliances like the Revigator, not because the irradiated water was a fake cure but because the “radioactive water crocks” weren’t radioactive enough. The AMA established guidelines (from 1916 to 1929) that certified the potency of irradiated water. Few of the crocks could meet the AMA standard for radioactivity, and most of them tainted the water with significant amounts of lead, vanadium, and uranium.

Other companies in Los Angeles assembled crocks similar to the Revigator from pre-cast emanators stocked by the Radium Products Laboratories. The company had its own brand of “radio-active water” and something ominously called radiumilk. Dr. H. Russell Burner blended milk, radium, and rest as a general cure at his chain of five Los Angeles sanitariums. In frock coat and with upraised hand, he admonished sufferers at the turn of the twentieth century to find comfort in milk and radium in almost daily advertisements in the Times.

Radium Age Ends

Enthusiasm for radioactive products dimmed with the deaths, beginning in the mid-1920s, of young women who had been hired to paint luminous numerals on watches and the lettering on dials sold to the War Department during World War I. Told to “point” their brush with a moistened lip or tongue for more accurate lettering, the workers rapidly poisoned themselves. Cancers and disfiguring bone loss followed.

The story of the “radium girls” was troubling, but it took the horrible death of wealthy sportsman and industrialist Eben Byers to curtail enthusiasm for all things radium. Byers was a daily drinker of Radithor, a health elixir concocted in 1925 that actually contained radium. By 1932, Byers was dying, his jaw and skull dissolving as the radium isotopes in Radithor replaced the calcium in his bones. The decision by the New York medical examiner to report the cause of Byers’ death as radium poisoning led the Federal Trade Commission to ban radioactive tonics. [3]

It took the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, decades of atom bomb testing, concerns about the strontium-90 in children’s milk, and finally the Chernobyl disaster to turn the rage for radiation into a kind of radiophobia. It’s just as potent as the mistaken beliefs that put the label radioactive on hand cream and packaged butter at the turn of the twentieth century. If we’re unmoved by scientific claims today … if we’ve become apostates from the science faith our grandparents showed … we might see one cause in the fading glow of the Radium Age.

Notes

1. Clarke A., Frederick U. & Brown S. That Was Then, This Is Now: Contemporary Archaeology in Australia. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, p. 84.

2. Ibid.

3. There was at least one other death linked to drinking Radithor. An unknown number of cancers were probably caused by similar elixirs.

Traffic on summer weekends was heavy on the Venice Short Line, the fastest, most direct Pacific Electric rail line from downtown Los Angeles to the beach.

On summer Sundays at the turn of the twentieth century, trolleys on the short line might carry 15,000 passengers. “Locals” made scheduled stops. “Flyers” made limited stops. Added “specials” carried the extra load, up to five cars coupled together. As many as 125 “locals,” “specials,” and “flyers” might pass Pacific Electric’s Venice station between 9 a.m. and 9:30 p.m.

“Flyers” could make the trip to downtown in 45 minutes. “Locals” and “specials” usually took five or ten minutes longer.

On Sunday night July 13, 1913, returning trains were so crowded that motormen sped past stops, leaving passengers where they waited. John Wynkoop and his wife saw four trains pass their Ocean Park stop before a fifth train – a three-car “special” – paused. It was so solidly packed that the Wynkoops barely found standing room in the open vestibule at the front of the last car.

Every seat inside was taken, and the aisle was shoulder-to-shoulder. The Wynkoops tried to get off at Venice, willing to wait for seats, but the vestibule was filled and more passengers perched on the steps clinging to handrails. The Wynkoops stayed and stood.

A three-car “special” – possibly one that failed to stop at Ocean Park – had left Santa Monica at 8:53 p.m. A second “special” had left Venice at 8:55. Both were stalled at 9 p.m., one behind the other, at Vineyard Junction (today, near where Pico and Rampau meet). They idled beyond a curve where the two trains would be nearly out of sight if another “local” or “flyer” or “special” from Santa Monica, Ocean Park, or Venice appeared.

The moon was almost full, but moonlight hadn’t yet reached the two rows of tracks at the junction, sunk in a trench where the line that took passengers from beach towns joined one that branched toward Beverly Hills.

The trains waited because an overhead line had fallen about fifty feet ahead, cutting power to the next section of track. The sharp crack and bright electric spark of the trolley wire when it dropped on the rails had jolted Dr. Harrington Marxmiller from sleep in his home on 16th Place. He dressed and walked the few hundred feet to the embankment overlooking the tracks.

Some effort was being made to secure the fallen wire and get the two trains moving again. A few of the riders took this as an opportunity to get off, stretch, and get a breath of air. The conductor of the end car was given the signal to walk back along the tracks with red and white signal lanterns to stop the next train coming up the short line.

Trains were running tight that night, but no more than usual for a Sunday evening in July. Management depended on PE’s motormen and conductors to cope with traffic safety. The short line, run on the “street car system,” lacked a network of automatic train-control signals to warn a following train that the gap of time and distance was narrowing between it and a train stopped ahead in the dark.

At about 9:40 p.m. while Dr. Marxmiller watched from the embankment, the Wynkoops’ “special” entered the curve at Vineyard Junction. The train may have been running at nearly fifty miles an hour at this point, the end of a long straightaway. A SLOW sign directed motormen to reduce speed through the curve. In some accounts, the “special” began to slow to about 35 miles an hour. John Wynkoop and other eyewitnesses later told the Los Angeles Times that it didn’t.

The conductor who had gone down the tracks heard, then saw, the arriving “special” and sprinted toward it, swinging his red lantern. He shouted a warning too before he was forced back as the “special” passed him.

Later, news accounts speculated that pranksters, with the conductor gone, had been clanging the bell and triggering the air horn of the end car on the stalled train. Perhaps it sounded like the train was pulling away from the Vineyard Junction stop, confusing the motorman of the arriving “special” who might have thought the way ahead was clear. But he also may have begun to brake, having recognized the conductor’s warning lantern. Eyewitness accounts again are unclear.

It would take, it was later determined, 400 feet to bring a loaded, three-car “special” to an emergency stop.

The gap between lead car of the “special” and last car of the train stalled at Vineyard Junction was narrowing by at least fifty feet a second. In six seconds, the gap was gone.

The Wreck

The “special” impacted the stalled train, telescoping through most of the end car, killing and maiming as it split steel frames and peeled back wooden sidewalls. The impact pushed the end car into the car ahead, causing more damage, more injuries. Momentum rammed the car behind into the back of the lead car of the “special.”

When the sound of steel being torn and wood pulling away from bolts had ended and the screaming began, four cars of the nine at Vineyard Junction were smashed, pushed from the rails, and ridden one atop the other.

The Los Angeles Times reported “gaping flesh wounds, cut arteries, twisted limbs, scalps laid bare, and in one case an eye gouged out. … Men, women and children were penned in, their limbs and bodies held imprisoned by the wreckage. [T]he car seats snapped from their fastenings and piled back … the passengers being caught as though in a vise.” For John Wynkoop, “The sights we saw … were sickening and horrible.”

As survivors – many with wounds or broken bones – struggled out of ruined cars, emergency flares, lit by train crews to forestall another collision, terrified passengers still trapped in the wreckage. They pleaded for help, afraid of being burned alive. Although there were many willing hands, rescuers had no tools to cut through splintered planks or to wrench twisted seats away from the men and women pinned underneath. The rescue work was done by the surviving passengers digging through the debris with their hands.

“It took a good while to get at those who were jammed into the middle of the cars,” one passenger recalled. “We had to work our way through layers of men and women who were injured.”

Edna Alter, a well-known Pasadena social worker, was killed instantly, as were Canadian Carl Murray, jeweler Jacob Barman, and young sweethearts Veronica Miller and Merle Evans. The body of an unidentified woman was taken from the wreckage, her dead baby in her arms. Joseph Rosenfeldt was trapped for more than an hour before he was lifted out only to die later. E. E. Arey had hoped to return to Mexico to bring his wife and daughter out of the chaos of the Mexican Revolution. He died the next day, following the amputation of his legs. George Norman, honeymooning with his wife, survived uninjured. She died on the operating table at the Los Angeles Receiving Hospital.

The three trains at Vineyard Junction carried more than a 1,000 passengers, and they streamed away from the wreckage just as rescuers began to arrive from nearby homes. They had no portable lighting. Candles provided some illumination. The trains were at the bottom of a deep cut. Getting the injured out was difficult. Plush seats from the ruined trolleys became makeshift litters.

Dr. Marxmiller triaged the wounded and bandaged them with strips of cloth torn from bed sheets volunteered by nearby residents. He splinted broken legs (the most common injury) with lengths of siding from the wooden trolleys. Three nurses among the uninjured passengers, all from the Clara Barton Hospital, helped. It would be another ninety minutes before ambulances arrived. When they finally did, medical attendants had to make their way through crowds of onlookers who came to stare at the devastation.

“One man,” said the Times, “pinned between two of the front windows [of the trolley], his body mangled and his face bearing evidence of horrible torture … remained in the prominent position through two hours of rescue work. His body finally was liberated when the roof of the car was jacked up. He was the last of the dead to be removed.”

At least 125 passengers required medical aid; 15 died (accounts vary on the number injured and killed). John Sutherland Sinclair, 17th Earl of Caithness, Scotland, died a year later weakened by his injuries and unnerved by witnessing the dismemberment of a woman who had been sitting in the seat ahead of him.

After Vineyard Junction

A haze of eyewitness accounts, contradictory testimony, speculation, and justification settled over Vineyard Junction almost immediately.

Some witnesses, like Wynkoop, thought the “special” had been run recklessly. Some said it wasn’t. Dr. Marxmiller complained that neighborhood residents had “protested to the City Council and to the railway company against the great speed of trains past the station. They seldom pay attention to the SLOW board, and we have often remarked in the community that it is a wonder such an accident didn't happen before.”

The Times editorialized that no one was to blame. A downed wire had stopped traffic. Night and the blind curve had obscured the stalled trains. Lights were out on the car that had been hit first. Warnings had been given but were misunderstood or were too late. Rowdy passengers had caused confusion. The wreck was a series of unhappy accidents. The railway company was already doing everything necessary to protect commuters.

A quickly assembled panel of PE officials almost automatically faulted Joseph Forster (the motorman of the “special”) and Emil Bartholomai (the conductor who had been sent down the tracks to warn arriving trains). Safety rules had been ignored, the company men said, the motorman of the “special” took the curve too fast, he hadn’t applied the brakes or applied them too late, he ignored the conductor’s red lantern; the conductor had warned the “special” but didn’t go far enough down the tracks, or he hadn’t warned the motorman at all. Not all of these conflicting explanations could be true.

The Times, in the spirit of its pro-business ideology, offered an additional excuse. The wreck was actually the public’s fault for demanding cheap, frequent rail service. Transit riders in booming Los Angeles (for which the Times was a cheerleader) shouldn’t be too particular about safety or complain too much about corporate policies.

“The public demands rapid and frequent service, and what it demands it will have. It is not so exigent for safety as it should be. The railroad company has always been quick to respond to all reasonable demands, but it should be taken into account that the growth of Los Angeles has been so rapid, and its increase in population so enormous and continuous – especially at the beaches – that it has taxed the resources of the company and the untiring efforts of its officials to keep pace with the demand. It may be well not to forget that, while much has been expected by the public as individuals, yet the public as a mass has sometimes, under the leadership of political demagogues, evinced a disposition to harass all corporations, and especially railroad corporations, with unfriendly legislation and unreasonable demands.”

The coroner’s jury that met on July 16 excused Forster (the motorman), and blamed the railway company for running its trolleys with too little spacing between trains, too many passengers on them, and with insufficiently trained operators. The majority of jurors recommended the installation of automatic train-control signals on the Venice line. A minority report agreed with these conclusions, but fixed primary blame on Bartholomai (the conductor).

The California State Railroad Commission focused instead on setting a standard for automatic signals throughout the PE system and California’s other interurban railways. Preemptively, PE’s management announced a million-dollar train-control upgrade for several lines, including the Venice Short Line. The Times editorialized that the company ought to be commended for ordering signals rather than criticized for its operating practices.

In August, the federal Interstate Commerce Commission issued its report, repeating the concerns of the coroner’s inquest and the state commission’s report, but emphasizing that the company men on the three trains were poorly trained and almost entirely inexperienced. Only one of the PE employees on the three trains had been with the company more than four months. Bartolomai (the conductor) had been employed for less than a month and had only a vague notion of the company’s rules for signaling that a train was stopped ahead.

Everyone connected with Vineyard Junction had a theory why so many died on that warm Sunday night. They all offered a solution: automatic signals, something other interurban systems had already installed. There were no train-control signals on the Venice Short Line because the company’s practice of leaving safety to train crews was cheaper, and its habit of randomly inserting “specials” into the schedule was marginally profitable.

The company’s business model was made explicit in the last hour of testimony before the State Railroad Commission on August 2. All the company men at Vineyard Junction on July 13 were newly hired (except for one) and nearly untrained because, a PE superintendent said, “the interurban man is a migratory bird.” They migrated away from work with the PE because its trainmen were the 1913 equivalent of gig workers. Called to work only when traffic required it, trainmen had no assurance of a whole month’s pay or even a whole day’s. Running trains with novice workers who drifted in and out of the workforce meant they weren’t rigorously trained in safety procedures or even particularly competent.

Death at Vineyard Junction wasn’t the result of a downed wire or missed warnings, or reckless speed but of the company’s financial decisions: delay the installation of train-control signals and employ a casual workforce. Pacific Electric was a business, and its business was paying its bondholders and returning dividends to its stockholders. Most of the company’s profits came from hauling freight and selling house lots along the PE tracks, not from carrying passengers.

In 1914, the company quietly equipped all cars with tools “to meet emergencies in case of wrecks; thus facilitating extricating any persons who might be buried under the wreckage,” Glass fronted boxes and their axes, sledge hammers, and saws were installed over doors in train partitions. In another wreck, the surviving passengers would be equipped to rescue themselves. The company began ordering steel cars, but wooden cars continued to run on the system through the rest of the decade.

The company considered upgrading the Venice Short Line in 1948 at a cost of almost three million dollars. Instead, the company replaced trains with buses at a cost of slightly more than a million.

Vineyard Junction, no part of Metro’s Expo/E Line to Santa Monica, appears as one of those inexplicable place names on Google Maps a survival from USGS topographical maps of the 1920s. The crash site is the parking lot of a big box retailer.

This account of the Vineyard Junction tragedy is based on news reports, eyewitness accounts, and the published findings of the coroner’s inquest, the California State Railroad Commission, and the federal Interstate Commerce Commission. All are from July and August 1913. Much of this material can be read at the Wynkoop genealogy pages.

 I don’t drive. I used to.

I took California’s required course in driver education in 1965 as a summer class at the end of my junior year of high school. The class included all the movies in the Signal 30 series of educational films.

As the camera lingered on a mid-50s car torn in two by a light pole, the narrator remarked that both the driver and passenger were killed on the way home from their high school prom. Other drivers in other scenes were impaled on a steering wheel or immolated in a car fire or crushed in a sedan that had become catastrophically fragile.

Sunday afternoons in the October of my senior year, my father took me in our pea-soup-green Ford Falcon station wagon to the empty streets around the neighborhood elementary school to practice driving. I got my license just before Christmas.

I got a perfect score on the written test and only one demerit on the driving part. According to the DMV examiner, I had failed to signal far enough in advance for a right turn.

I drove through the summer between high school and college. In the fall, I was driving my mother’s rust-colored Ford Galaxie sedan. I misjudged a driver turning left from Bellflower Boulevard onto Spring Street as it passes under the 405.

The other guy’s 56 Bel Air right rear quarter panel was no match for the bumper of the 62 Galaxie.

I became “transit dependent” the next day.

▪ ▪ ▪

When we were boys in the 1950s, my brother and I would visit every new car showroom we could ride our bikes to. The showrooms smelled of vinyl and rubber and wax polish. We’d inspect the new models on display. The knowing salesmen watched us, smiling.

My brother was passionate about cars. My father took him to the Autorama car show in Los Angeles, and I went along. The car show fixed in my mind what the future should look like. It would be sleek, low, protectively enclosing like the cockpit of a jet fighter, edged in shining chrome, and powerful. In the future, I would go faster and faster.

▪ ▪ ▪

I stopped driving in 1966 because of the effects of glaucoma and keratoconus and the eventual loss of useful vision in one eye. I don’t carry a cane or wear special glasses. When I tell people I don’t drive, some express surprise that an otherwise fit-looking, middle-class male isn’t a driver.

Some people congratulate me, however, as if being a non-driver is a moral victory. It’s not. I’ve seen your car. Your car welcomes you – from lumbar support to drink holder to AC to audiophile sound system. Your car shelters, swaddles, shuts out, soothes. Your car embraces you.

I wouldn’t give it up, if your car could be mine.

▪ ▪ ▪

I’m detached from the skin of steel and high-impact plastic that surrounds you as you move in beautiful crowds, completely alone in your car. I watch from the curb, a pedestrian exile from the city in motion. And when the urge to move overcomes me, when the longing that is Los Angeles takes me, I ride a bus, call an Uber, or get a lift from a friend. Just being flesh in Los Angeles is humiliating.

Because of that, I’m not – to myself – an Angeleno. But my status as a tourist in the country of wheels allows me to examine some of the assumptions that sustain the forward motion of Angelenos in cars.

A driver preparing to turn right on red swivels his head to the left when he’s fifty feet or more from the intersection. He fixes his gaze on the flow of oncoming traffic. He barely slows even at the leading edge of the crosswalk, his head still rotated 90 degrees to the left.

If a break in traffic is approaching, he begins to turn, taking his car through 30 or 40 degrees of arc, until he sees me on his right after the light has turned green, and the “walk” symbol of a striding figure shines ghostly white. Some drivers jerk to a stop when they see me stepping into the crosswalk.

Most don’t and continue through their turn in front of me. I’ll sometimes see a driver’s hand raised as if in benediction. Or is it warding off a phantom?

▪ ▪ ▪

Los Angeles loves the steel wheels on trains, chrome wheels on custom cars, and the urethane wheels on skateboards. Wheels over the asphalt, the concrete, the adobe soil; wheels on any freeway or sidewalk or backcountry trail, if only it leads away.

Wheels are the fix. The need – the rush – is momentum. Los Angeles moves or it isn’t Los Angeles anymore.

Nothing is too good for wheels. There are 21,198 miles of roads, highways, and freeways in Los Angeles County; two-thirds of our public space is space just for wheels. There aren’t enough acres of parks for all of us, but there are acres and acres for cars.

This is a city of joyrides, often disappointed.

▪ ▪ ▪

Nothing is permitted to stop the city’s wheels, unless it’s the presence of even more wheels. Angelinos, even if they’ve been here only a year or two, claim to remember a better time, a time when the traffic wasn’t as bad, and when driving was exhilarating, a release, and a promise that you could be in control of something, even if it’s only a car.

Angelenos will do almost anything to stay in motion – a rolling stop or a lane change to get one car length ahead. Angelenos are not who they want to be unless they’re in control of some vehicle – skateboard or Maserati – and that vehicle is moving. If their wheels cease turning, Angelenos suffer an intimation of mortality.

It’s not about the reason for all that motion – bike or sports car or relentless treadmilling; it’s about the momentum that seems to stand for something else. Or maybe it doesn’t stand for anything. In Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion’s freeway addicted Maria drives the way a dancer moves or a jazz player riffs on a melody: it’s not in the destination; it’s in being carried away.

▪ ▪ ▪

Los Angeles isn’t one place; it’s many places, their disconnections relieved only a little by wheels that turn because there’s no still point where our place in the city is revealed. That would be the ultimate gridlock, if we could find it, if the wheels of Los Angeles would stop, and we stepped out of the stalled car, got off the quiet treadmill, dismounted from the bike, and finally saw each other at rest.

Listen to the author read Rush (from which this essay is adapted). Rush is an episode of California Stories: Driving Passions from KCET.

 David Hockney came to Los Angeles in 1964 for many reasons: light, libidinous freedom, unrestrained mobility. Naturally, he bought a car almost as soon as he arrived. He taught himself to drive, got a license within a week (they were giving them away, he said), and began to see Los Angeles as Angelenos do – through a windshield. From that perspective came the panorama Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio (1980) and the photomontage Pearblossom Hwy (1986), which Hockney called a picture about driving without the car being in it. Oher landscapes followed with the same sinuous line of empty asphalt through them. “Your eye,” he once said, “moves around the painting at about the same speed as a car drives along the road.”[1] In the 1990s, Hockney orchestrated the road to Sousa marches and excerpts from Wagner blasting from the sound system of his red Mercedes sports car.

Lawrence Weschler, chronicler of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, was invited to All Saints Church in Pasadena in 2006 to talk about the evils that he had found in the ruins of the Bosnian war, which he included in Vermeer in Bosnia (2004). Weschler knew Hockney, whose theories on optics Weschler was then investigating. Weschler knew me because we both knew something about the light in Los Angeles. He invited Hockney and me to hear his talk.

Weschler also knew that I’m not able to drive, but I told him that I could get to Pasadena and back again by bus and train and on foot. Getting there took two hours and 30 minutes.

When the talk ended that night and as the audience filed out, Weschler stopped me before I started for the Gold Line station several blocks away. He told me that he’d arranged a ride at least as far as the station. And so I was introduced to David Hockey and his assistant.

I understood that Hockney had given up driving in Los Angeles by then. I had given up driving in 1966 after a two unhappy months behind the wheel and a minor traffic accident. Hockney’s assistant drove the unremarkable car (not the red Mercedes), Hockney beside his assistant in front. I sat in back.

We talked about not driving, the condition of public transit, and place of cars in Los Angeles in the ten minutes it took to get to the station. We were strangers together; two mild, polite, older men in conversation about an essential aspect of Los Angeles that both us now knew at one remove, only as passengers.

If the driver said anything, I can’t remember it.

Our conversation was the talk those who live here and who are dependent on other people to negotiate a way home. But there was something more, in retrospect, to the windshield view of deserted Pasadena we shared – a gap between us and the street that was enforced by the surrounding glass, an optical illusion that always makes me doubt where I am and my place here.

Hockney and his assistant dropped me off at Lake Avenue, at the top of the stairs that lead down to the tracks. I rode the Gold Line back to Union Station, the Red Line back to downtown, the Blue Line to Long Beach, and a cab from Long Beach back home.

It took three hours. 

Notes

1. David Hockney. That’s the way I see it. Nikos Stangos, ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 67.

[Beginning in the mid-1880s, the coastline of Los Angeles sprouted wooden piers that poked out of beach resorts made accessible by rail.[1] Most of these included an amusement zone – a miniature Coney Island – where ballyhoo, fakery, and slightly naughty entertainment brightened working-class lives. This is the story of one of the largest of those playgrounds-by-the-sea. It was called the Pike. A shorter version of this story was posted in 2017 to KCET’s Lost L.A.]

In 1925, Sarah Bixby Smith, who had grown up on the nearby ranchos of Los Cerritos and Los Alamitos, remembered picnicking on the deserted shore of Alamitos Bay.

[T]he beach was our own private, wonderful beach [...]. Nobody knows what a wide, smooth, long beach it was. It was covered with shells and piles of kelp and a broad band of tiny clams; there were gulls and many little shore birds, and never a footprint except the few we made, only to be washed away by the next tide. Two or three times a summer we would go over from the ranch for a day. […] [T]he thing that was … best was the meat broiled over the little driftwood fire. Father always was cook of the mutton chops that were strung on a sharpened willow stick, and I shall never forget the … smoky chops, gritty with the sand blown over them by the constant sea breeze … of the beautiful, empty beach.[2]

By 1900, Sarah’s empty beach had become a selling point for struggling Willmore City and later for the renamed Long Beach (which had incorporated after the failure of Willmore City, disincorporated, and reincorporated). The little town – hardly more than 2,500 residents – already had a few seaside attractions: wood-frame hotels with wide verandas and “bath houses” on the beach where hardy swimmers could, for a small fee, rent a bathing suit for the day.

The breakers at Long Beach were notoriously rough and the rip tide was treacherous. Most tourists – and there were more arriving every year – waded into the surf or strolled the four miles of level sand along Alamitos Bay. Accommodations on the beach in a tent city, rented by the week, made do for visitors willing to rough it. Better off tourists stayed at a hotel.

The Methodist Resort Association had built a large “tabernacle” in 1884 on the bluff that overlooked the tent city. Thousands of church members assembled each summer for weeklong camp meetings. The Chautauqua of Southern California opened up a branch of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Society for even larger crowds. They came to hear lectures and concerts, stroll the beachfront, and enjoy the sea breezes. There was little else to do. Long Beach intended to be a community of moral uplift “giving the Christian people of Southern California a genial, wholesome summer resort.”

A correspondent from the Los Angeles Herald wrote that Long Beach was a city where

The invalid and the pleasure seeker can regale themselves in the balmy breezes and not be molested or crowded by the drunken night brawler or the beastly element that are so conspicuous at some of our eastern seaside resorts, where the drunken rabble make night hideous and where the cultured and refined are compelled to jostle with the monkeying snob or the coarse, untutored braggadocio with more money than brains. The sale of liquor is not tolerated at this place, and as a consequence, there is a better class of people than otherwise would be.[3]

Sedate, church-going Long Beach was officially “dry,” not even allowing wine to be blended into the sauces served at hotels that catered to more sophisticated tourists.[4] (Drinkers made their way to saloons beyond the city limit in prosperously “wet’ Zaferia.) The Long Beach City Council legislated against Sunday dancing too, as well as other profane entertainments on the Sabbath. Some residents even resisted the new trolley cars, fearing the assault of day-tripping Angelenos on the “cultured and refined” tourists who defined the image of Long Beach.

But Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric cars could not be stopped. On July 4, 1902, Los Angeles day-trippers crowded on a line that quickly became the PE’s most profitable. Many of them headed for Charles Drake’s newly built Long Beach Bath House. It was vast, with men’s and women’s dressing rooms, a bowling alley, a ladies’ and children’s plunge, a men’s stream bath, and a 60-by-120-foot concrete pool (open until 10 p.m.). A visitor’s gallery allowed for discreet ogling of swimmers in their bulky, flannel “bathing costumes” (as they were called then). The company provided a welcome novelty: paid lifeguards.

The Long Beach Bath House held band concerts every afternoon and evening but, as the proprietors pointed out, no liquor was served in the Casino Café.

By 1906, Drake’s Long Beach Bath House and Amusement Company had acquired much of the beachfront below the Pine Avenue business district. The company leased a short strip of the land to lunch counters, a fortuneteller, and candy and popcorn stands. These were connected by a 12-foot-wide wooden boardwalk that extended from the colonnaded bathhouse building to the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium and a twin-deck pier with a “sun parlor” where invalids could enjoy the ocean air away from the wind.

“All along this particular portion of the beach,” wrote a reporter for the Los Angeles Evening Tribune, “stands the row of stands, some of quaint design, and an interesting sight to the tourist. It is here that the hot tamale vender, the peanut crisp man and the pretty girls who sell sweets of all kinds, find a living for themselves.”[5]

The pious Methodist campers and the earnest Chautauqua audiences were gone by then. The Pike had other attractions whose innocence and vulgarity would continue until the Pike finally closed in 1979. (The Pike would have different owners and names – Silver Spray Pier in 1915, Nu-Pike in the 1950s, and Queen’s Park in the late 1960s – but no one in Long Beach called it anything but the Pike.)

A Thousand Lights

By 1908, Drake’s bathhouse and been joined by the Majestic Ballroom, a roller rink, a shooting gallery, and a movie theater. The wood planks of the boardwalk had been replaced by a 35-foot-wide concrete esplanade illuminated nightly by a double row of electroliers with strings of more lights overhead. It was called The Walk of a Thousand Lights. At the far end of the walk – and a sign of things to come – were two proto-thrill rides: Bisby's Spiral Airship and the first of several roller coasters.[6]

A storefront on the end of the walk had business designation “slot machines.” It was a sign of things to come. And beyond this end of the Pike were boarding houses and tenements for workers in the concessions that had gone up on Sarah Bixby’s once lonely beach.

In 1910, Charles Looff look control of part of the walk to house a “hippodrome” (carousel) of carved and painted horses. Looff moved his family into the apartment he built over it. Outside, he posted a sign: “Colored people and their friends are welcome after 9 o’clock Saturday nights.” When Black visitors protested, Looff told the Los Angeles Times that his “amusement is run for ladies and children, and he will not agree to any modification of his rules.”[7]

By 1915, “Reckless” Ross Millman had begun frightening audiences at one of the first Wall of Death “silodromes.” Racing his Indian motorcycle up and around the inside wall of a vertical drum, Millman seemed to defy gravity. Overhead, the cars on the twin tracks of the new Jackrabbit Racer roller coaster rumbled and riders screamed. There was still no Sunday dancing.

Sailors and Shriners

 The Walk of a Thousand Lights expanded in the following years with even more carnival rides, as well as beauty parades, hot dog sellers, vaudeville performers, movie theaters, and the pitch and skill games carnival operators call “flat shops” designed to separate rubes from as many of their nickels and dimes as possible. In the shadows beyond the thousand lights were peep shows, bootleggers, and prostitutes. Elks, Moose, Shriners, and other Long Beach conventioneers enjoyed it all.

When the US Navy split into Atlantic and Pacific fleets in 1919, Long Beach became the home port of the Pacific Fleet and a shore leave destination for thousands of sailors each year. Through the 1920s and 1930s, throngs of young men in uniform crowded the sidewalks along Ocean Boulevard, slowly moving past its movie theaters, credit jewelers, and dance halls. Most of the sailors eventually drifted down the bluff at Pine Avenue to enter the bright and noisy nighttime world of the Pike. The Long Beach PD Vice Bureau kept six patrolmen on the midway, which also had its own force of civilian “special officers” sworn by the Long Beach PD.

Poolrooms arrived in 1927, at the request of the Amusement League, an association of the Pike’s concession operators and the pier owners. The Pike that year employed 1,229 area residents and had an average weekly payroll of $42,287. The Pike had become a political force as well as downtown’s major tourist business.

The Cyclone Racer (“The World’s Greatest Ride”) replaced the Jackrabbit Racer in 1930. The new roller coaster was taller (94 feet), had more hills and drops (17), and could pack in 2,400 riders per hour. It had high-velocity banked turns where riders experienced more than 3gs of centrifugal force. Regularly, a daredevil teenager or drunk sailor would stand or try some other stunt in one of the coaster cars and be killed.

An 8,000-seat municipal auditorium, surrounded on three sides by a lagoon and the semi-circular Rainbow Pier, opened in 1932. Shriners and Elks on a spree still went looking for fun on the “$3,000,000 Pleasure Pike.”

Bars and open-front liquor stores of a grittier Pike replaced popcorn and salt-water taffy stands after 1934. Tattoo parlors and palm readers replaced the curio and souvenir dealers. Spooky “dark house” rides – a staple of the Pike – drew sailors and their dates, who found the sights inside less thrilling than stolen kisses. Sideshows with their real and fake human “oddities” drew in the curious and gullible. Dodg'em cars gave riders the troubling thrill of reckless driving. The Lido dance hall replaced the Majestic ballroom, but jitterbugging was frowned on. Couples were forbidden by city ordinance from dancing cheek-to-cheek.[8]

But Looff’s carousel still turned. Pearl Rogers’ Pillow Shop, Mr. Shiply’s Goat Carts, the Studio of Fortune, Puzzletown, the Weight Guesser, Wing’s Chinese Arcade, and the Crazie Maize ride joined shooting galleries, pinball arcades, and “flat shops” that still separated the out-of-towners from their dimes and quarters. At the Rainbow Pier’s “spit and argue club,” Midwest retirees whittled on white pine sticks provided for their use and listened while religious prophets, tax reformers, and Socialists – including Upton Sinclair – argued that Utopia or Armageddon was on its way.

For Latino teenagers, the Pike was an escape from the barrio and the constraints of traditional family members. It was a place of (mostly) harmless fun.

From the end of the pier or the top of the Cyclone Racer, couples on dates could see the lights of gambling barges in the bay, anchored beyond the reach of law enforcement. Motor launches plied back and forth carrying Hollywood starlets, Chicago mobsters, and East Coast conventioneers. Long Beach welcomed 50,000 of them in 1939 and almost 70,000 in 1940.

The Nu-Pike

The war years after 1942 suspended convention business, but restrictions on travel and the buildup of defense industries meant the Pike was more crowded than ever. The midway, its theaters and dance halls entertaining war workers and furloughed troops, caroused, brawled, and skirted the law.

The Pike’s dart and peg games turned out to be dodges for gambling. The payoff typically was in packs of cigarettes, which sailors used as currency. Winning players at Lite-A-Line – a game combining bingo and pinball – were given coupons that could be exchanged covertly at nearby gas stations for cash.

The Los Angeles District Attorney, ordering a raid in early 1943, called the Pike a menace to the community and to soldiers and sailors on leave. Despite arrests, the gambling games continued. Juries decided that Lite-A-Line actually was a game of skill. When the Looff carousel burned down in the summer of 1943, its place was taken by another Lite-A-Line arcade.[9] Gambling and the payoffs the Pike distributed to councilmen and mayors were woven into Long Beach politics.

The war left Long Beach bigger, with a booming suburban fringe flush with jobs, and more than a little run down. A city famous for its many retirees in the 1920s had aged. The theaters on the midway no longer showed first-run films. The greasy spoons were greasier. The number of bars and liquor stores in the amusement zone had grown. Teenagers cutting class roamed the midway during the day. Petty theft was a problem after dark. The Pike had a reputation.

In 1946, Cobra Woman, a sideshow headliner for years, was killed by Emperor, her biggest rattlesnake, during the “kiss of death” routine. Bitten at least twice on the face in as many seconds, Cobra Woman died at Seaside hospital a few hours later. Autopsied, Cobra Woman turned out to be a man.[10]

In an effort to rebrand itself, the Pike turned into the Nu-Pike in 1950. It had more than 100 concessions and thrill rides on land reclaimed from the original fun zone. The Silver Spray Pier was demolished, leaving ownership of the Cyclone Racer briefly in doubt. As inducements for the city to turn over even more shoreline, the operators of the Nu-Pike brought in a zoo and kiddieland rides.

The Nu-Pike was larger now but in reality not much newer. The Navy’s Shore Patrol still walked the midway in pairs, with their SP armbands and white puttees, swinging billy clubs on their leather strap. The Pike could not be gentrified into something tame, as Long Beach writer Matt Cohn noted in 2013.

Imagine, then, the sensory bombardment of the original Long Beach Pike, with its freak shows, carnival barkers, pickpockets and con artists; its aromas of salt-water taffy, fried shrimp baskets, popcorn and diesel fumes; the constant shots from the real .22 rifles used in the shooting galleries, and the chaos caused by the occasional drunken sailor plunging from the top of the legendary Cyclone Racer roller coaster ....[11]

The rides included a double Ferris wheel, Tilt-a-Whirl, Caterpillar, Octopus, Roll-o-Plane, and the Pretzel, along with two sets of bumper cars, the Sharks Alive diving bell, a boat ride, a train ride, a kiddie roller coaster, and a Mother Goose Land featuring animated nursery rhyme characters.[12] The Stone Man human “oddity,” Painless Parker (who did his dentistry in public), and the bullet-riddled Al Capone car (sometimes the equally fake and bullet-riddled Dillinger car) were on display. Other concessions were “skill” games like the fish bowl toss, Skee Ball, and horse race. The games still had aspects of gambling. Payoffs in merchandise were convertible, under the counter, for cash.

Richard Dowdy remembered what hanging out at the Nu-Pike was like in his online memoir “Summertime at Long Beach and the Pike.”

My favorite rides were the Deep Sea Diving Bell, the Dodg'em cars, the Laff In The Dark funhouse, the Crazy House, the Crazie Maize (house of mirrors), pony rides and the merry-go-round... The Let's Shoot shooting gallery was another favorite, where you could shoot moving targets with a .22 rifle. When I was on my own at the Pike, I'd go over to the shooting gallery and collect the spent cartridges to play with at home. The place by the big gift shop where you could shoot marbles at whiskey bottles with a slingshot was another favorite. So much broken glass by the end of the night! I wasn't much good at that one.[13]

Beyond the pony ride and the cotton candy stands of Virginia Park were sketchier businesses that merged with a neighborhood of shabby apartments on short, narrow streets leading down to the Navy Landing. The Shore Patrol and the Long Beach PD called the neighborhood “the jungle.” “It was a real shithole to go into, and you never went in there alone,” remembered one Long Beach patrolman.

The Lights Go Out

The Miss Universe pageant had come to Long Beach in 1952, bringing temporary glamour and TV cameras. But the young women in swimsuits left amid controversy in 1959.[14] It’s not recorded if many of the contestants wandered down to the Nu-Pike. Catholic orphans from Los Angeles came, annual guests of the Los Angeles Press Club and always the subject of a newspaper photograph of nuns in their traditional habits riding on the Looff carousel.

By 1954, the Nu-Pike was the fifth largest beachside amusement zone in the nation, but its appeal was fading. The aspects of the Nu-Pike that give it, in memory, a noir-adjacent vibe kept young families away.[14] Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm had the same kinds of rides but none of the old midway’s louche sideshows and dim arcades with questionable “games of skill.” Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm didn’t have drunken sailors, tattooists, palm readers, a headless chicken (periodically replaced), or Lite-A-Line (“The World's Most Thrilling and Fascinating Skill Game!”).

The Nu-Pike looked cheap and felt cheap, despite periodic efforts to Disneyize the midway. The old-time carnival operators and their culture weren’t made for Walt Disney’s militant niceness.

By 1960, there were more than 200 concessions, lunch counters, tattoo parlors, fortune tellers, thrill rides, and shows like Sid Hirsch’s “mental act” and Joe Glacy’s side show on a midway that stretched from Pine Avenue and Hollywood-On-The-Pike (a burlesque club) to Magnolia Avenue and a second fun zone called the Virginia Park Gayway (“Contains all the Elements of a Circus and Carnival”).[15]

Redevelopment claimed the tenements and boarding houses of “the jungle” as Long Beach tried to redefine its downtown. The city began filling in the Rainbow Pier lagoon for a proposed new convention center. The city bought the Queen Mary ocean liner in 1967, hoping to rebrand the shoreline for tourists, but the effect was unimpressive. The pools of the original Long Beach Bath House had closed by then.

Venice was gone too, and Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica was in decline, but the Pike’s rides, concessions, and sideshows were still there when I walked the midway in the mid-1960s, a college kid spending an evening in what passed for me as a big city.

I could wander into one of the midway’s tattoo parlors, its walls covered with the “flash art” of thirty years before – big pink nudes in pinup poses and anchors with Navy mottos – but now crowded out by biker symbols, flaming skulls, peace signs, and different poses of a bleeding Jesus. To introduce the idea of an electric needle repeatedly puncturing your skin, you could get four small, black dots inconspicuously tattooed for a few dollars. I never did.

The decline of the midway – of the Pike in all its manifestations – was propelled by the city’s plans for redeveloping its downtown and by the Nu-Pike’s owners, who realized that no amount of repainting and dressing up could ever restore the allure of The Walk of a Thousand Lights. The Cyclone Racer fell silent in September 1968, and that seemed to take much of the life out of the midway.

Darker Idea of Fun

In 1976, a macabre discovery in the Laff In The Dark funhouse summed up the arc of the Pike’s story. Ken McGrath, a Nu-Pike policeman until 1978, remembered what was found.

Elmer McCurdy … was a mummified bank robber that was killed by a posse at the turn of the century. His body was sold to a carnival and made its way around the U.S. for many years, ending up at the Pike. Two fellows named Crysdale and Learsh opened a wax museum type place and Mr. McCurdy was one of the displays. The wax museum folded and the contents were kept by the Pike. Elmer ended up hanging in the Laff In The Dark ride until they were shooting the TV series, "The Six Million Dollar Man" in the park.[16] A doctor on the TV set picked up an arm that someone had pulled off Elmer, and we were all shocked to learn that he was a real human. We all thought he was made of fiberglass and leather. I called Thomas Noguchi, the L.A. coroner, and his office sent someone down to take the body. An autopsy was performed, and they found the bullet that killed Elmer. They also found in his mouth a 1922 penny that was like brand new and a ticket stub.[17]

McCurdy’s leathery remains were returned to Guthrie, Oklahoma in 1977, where his hapless career as a train and bank robber had begun. A corpse from 1911, embalmed in arsenic, was a fitting icon for a seaside fun zone stuck in a time with a different, darker idea of fun.

The Nu-Pike, now called Queen’s Park in honor of the Queen Mary, closed in 1979, but some outlier attractions continued. The Lite-A-Line players, as enduring as Elmer McCurdy, continued to trust their skill at getting the pinballs into the right rows.

Today the Ocean Center Building on Ocean Boulevard at Pine Avenue is the Pike’s only remaining structure. The wide archway on side of the building had been once been the entrance to the Pike’s midway. It was the patio of a cocktail lounge until that closed. The Walk of a Thousand Lights is the name of an access road within the cluster of condominiums that replaced the eastern end of the Pike, part of a residential, entertainment, and retail complex that fronts the Long Beach Convention Center.

Outer Limits Tattoo and Museum at Chestnut Place meets Ocean Boulevard is in a corner of the Sovereign building, built in 1922 when the beach was closer. Redevelopment moved the shore away, leaving the Sovereign and the last of the Pike’s tattoo parlors behind. Nothing else remains except the Looff’s Lite-A-Line. It’s still played for modest cash prizes but miles from the vanished midway. It’s only a vagrant souvenir – a distant memory – of the gaudy, tawdry, bawdy Pike.

Notes

1. Piers seem to have an essential appeal. “Piers symbolize escape from the everyday, from the shore, from work, from life itself.” “The End of the Pier.” The Economist, December 2007.

2. Sarah Bixby Smith. Adobe Days: Being the Truthful Narrative of the Events in the Life of a California Girl. (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, The Torch Press, 1925), 125-126.

3. “The Most Charming Beach on the Pacific Coast,” Los Angeles Herald, 6 September 1884, 6.

4. “Wine Sauce Ordered Out at Long Beach,” Los Angeles Daily Times, 22 August 1901, 15.

5. “A Short Trip Along the Pike.” Evening Tribune, 18 March 18 1905, 2.

6. Bisby's Spiral Airship, built in 1902, had open cars suspended under a track. The cars traveled up a lift to the top of a conical tower where they were allowed to descend by gravity. As the “airships” began their descent, centrifugal force caused the cars to swing outward. Not surprisingly, Bisby's Spiral Airship was the only one of its kind.

7. “Welcome Rather Late,” Los Angeles Daily Times, 4 April 1911, 14.

8. “Jitterbugs Trial to Dance Police,” Long Beach Independent, 1 September 1938, 1 “Dime a dance” halls were forbidden, as was the sale of liquor in dance halls.

9. It’s still being played in Long Beach by third- and fourth-generation players.

10. “Cobra Woman, a Man, Came to U.S. as ‘Dog Faced Boy’,” Long Beach Independent, 16 April 1946, 1.

11. “Welcome to the Jungle: The Forgotten Tale of Long Beach's Oceanfront Slum,” Long Beach Post, 23 October 2013. https://lbpost.com/hi-lo/welcome-to-the-jungle-the-forgotten-tale-of-long-beach-s-oceanfront-slum

12. “Long Beach Fun Spot Called Miracle,” The Billboard, 26 November 1949, 112.

13. Richard Dowdy, “Summertime at Long Beach and the Pike.” http://www.millikanalumni.com/Pike/Stories2.html

14. In 1959, two semi-nude photographs of Miss Universe contestants appeared in a men’s magazine. Concerned about vulgarity, Long Beach officials demanded that the contestants be demurely dressed at all times, but the swimsuit company that owned the Miss Universe and Miss America trademarks wouldn’t agree to a “no swimsuit” contest.

15. “Long Beach Firm Outlines 50G Plans for Virginia Park,” The Billboard, 10 January 1953, 47. The owners of the Nu-Pike acquired Virginia Park and its concessions in 1952.

16. The many films shot at the Pike – going back to silent comedies in the 1920s – include several films noir. A near complete list of movies is included in the Wikipedia entry on the Pike.

17. Ken McGrath’s recollection is at The Pike history pages. The “corpse in the funhouse” is almost all that’s remembered of the Pike today. There are many accounts, many of them contradictory or embellished.

My friend Randy – a dedicated collector – paid a dollar for a seventy-year-old letter in 2012. He had picked the letter from the asphalt of the community college parking lot that each week became a swap meet.

The letter he found had been sent Air Mail and Special Delivery on June 21, 1942 to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Pearl. The letter’s writer – Henry Peal Jr. – had marked it IMPORTANT. He was about nineteen or twenty and traveling on his own. It was at a time in his life when many things seemed IMPORTANT.

Henry was a member of the Medical Cadet Corps of the Seventh Day Adventist church and had been hitchhiking home in his M.C.C. uniform. He was glad he did, since drivers in California were officially urged to pick up hitchhiking service men in that first year of World War II. Henry in his M.C.C. uniform certainly looked military.

“With that on I do not have to wait more than 10 minutes at the most,” he wrote his parents. “Usually about the third car picks me up.”

Henry’s parents were part of the Seventh Day Adventist medical system, and Henry had been writing letters detailing what he called adventures to his parents at the New England Sanitarium and Hospital in Melrose, Massachusetts, where Mr. Pearl was stationed. It was one of several Adventist medical centers on the East Coast.

Henry’s letter is eight closely written pages that cover his arrival in Pasadena (“a very nice, rich man’s city”), an overnight stay in the new dormitories at the Adventist Loma Linda hospital (large leather davenports and brightly tiled wash stands in each room, “very fine and elegant”) and a weekend trip to Mount Wilson, one of the peaks in the San Gabriel range and famous for its observatories.

Henry went up the mountain because he had a passion for astronomy. He even carried a letter of introduction from a mutual friend to John A. Anderson, one of the leading astronomers on Mount Wilson who also headed the Caltech Observatory Council that oversaw the design and construction of the 200-inch Hale telescope destined for the Palomar Observatory.

Henry took the bus from Pasadena up the old toll road to Mount Wilson and the cabins of the Mount Wilson Hotel that clustered at the foot of the observatory domes. From a veranda at the hotel, in weather that he regarded as particularly hot, Henry wrote about his ride up the mountain.

I sat in the back [of the bus] and right at the start begin talking with a cheery little hunch-backed, elderly man who said he was an astronomer on the Mount Wilson staff. I then introduced myself and found that he was Dr. Gustaf Strömberg. I then knew that he was the world-famous astronomer and philosophical physicist that has written so many books. His latest is a highly philosophical volume entitled (I think) “The Soul of the Universe.

Strömberg was famous, more for his musings on the place of man in the universe than for his astronomical research. Strömberg’s The Soul of the Universe had even been endorsed by Albert Einstein. “Very few men.” Einstein wrote in an introduction to the book, “could of their own knowledge present the material as clearly and concisely as he has succeeded in doing. The attempt to unify our knowledge is commendable, at a time when almost everyone forgets the whole in the investigation of the parts.” [1]

Einstein praised the science, but Strömberg was more interested in the metaphysical. Aligning himself with other writers who speculated on the evolving order of creation, Strömberg argued that the world of measured and counted reality was underlain by another realm that cannot be described in those terms. It was in this non-physical reality that the observable universe was born and from it life and consciousness inevitably arose.

Strömberg imagined a universe that reflected the purposeful working out of a design for humanity, an idea that would have appealed to Henry, given his Adventist faith.

Henry’s chance meeting with Strömberg led to a guided tour of the Mount Wilson telescopes, which were closed to visitors because of the war emergency. “He lingered long,” Henry wrote, “at each instrument, explaining and answering all my many questions.” Henry told Strömberg that he might want to be an astronomer too, but he feared that he couldn’t learn all the things he needed to know. Strömberg was amused at Henry’s doubts. “He laughed,” Henry added, “and said that was a lot of bosch [sic]. He said he didn’t know anything (!) – all he did was bluff.”

Strömberg introduced Henry to Dr. Adriaan van Maanen, the Dutch-born discoverer in 1917 of Van Maanen's Star, among the first, immensely dense, white dwarf stars to be discovered. Henry described van Maanen as “a little, ruddy-faced man with a broad smile and a very hearty laugh.” Henry found both men similarly humble about his work. “Pointing to Dr. S, he said, ‘Look at us! We don’t know anything!’”

Henry met other astronomers working at Mount Wilson, including Alfred Joy (a spectroscopist known for his work on stellar distances). Henry spent some time that night sitting with Joy as he guided the 100-inch telescope through a two-hour exposure. Strömberg let Henry guide the 60-inch telescope while Strömberg completed a spectrographic plate. When it was developed, Strömberg declared it “a very fine plate.”

Henry got the complete tour, including the observatory’s solar telescopes, the great interferometer, and the observatory’s highly sensitive seismometer (which registered his footsteps on the observatory floor).

(Henry’s letter of introduction to John A. Anderson, although he never met him, had let Henry see the unfinished, 200-inch mirror of the Palomar telescope, kept guarded in the Caltech optical shop.)[2]

Mount Wilson in 1942 was more than a research center. It was a strategic point in the defense of Los Angeles, and Henry noted the heavy military presence around the hotel, the observatory equipment, and the nearby radio relay towers. That didn’t preclude Henry from taking some snapshots. Tramping around the observatory was tiring. Henry blamed the 6,000-foot elevation.

Strömberg let Henry stay the night in the cottage where visiting astronomers bunked. Henry wrote his parents that he was a bit ashamed that he had begun his trek up the mountain on Saturday (the Adventist day of rest). He was happy to be given free room and board because meals at the Mount Wilson hotel, he thought, were too expensive.

Henry was eager to push on to Phoenix, noting the smog that lapped at the San Gabriel foothills (thinking it was dust from the Mojave). “I will be glad to get away from L.A., as it is a sprawling hodge-podge of a city,” he wrote, echoing a half-century of tourist complaint. “You travel for scores of miles and are still in the city.”

Henry had concerns about being drafted, since he planned that fall to enroll in an Adventist college in Tennessee. He heard from a corporal guarding the observatories that the Army Reserve was “no good – the army puts you on reserve for two weeks and then calls you up for immediate service.” Henry thought the odds would be better if he signed up with the Naval Reserve. He ended his letter with some directions to his parents – labeled IMPORTANT – concerning his college enrollment.

According to my friend, Henry’s other letters weren’t likely to be sold, and so his further adventures are lost. Only this glimpse remains. I don’t know what became of Henry, although I like to think that he survived the war, went to college, and perhaps he became an astronomer.

Postscript

Gustaf Strömberg, whose studies of stellar motion helped confirm the place of our solar system at the edge of the Milky Way, continued to speculate about a purposeful universe into which consciousness was born and lives on. Strömberg idied in 1962. Adriaan van Maanen had supported an alternative image of our galaxy until his findings were shown to result from the limitations in his observations. He error is still taught to science students as a warning about observing only what you expect to see. Van Maanen died in 1946.

Some days after the original version of this essay was posted to the KCET website, I received emails from Dr. Edward Allen of Union College and Mr. Thor Dockweiler, an amateur astronomer then living in Santa Monica. I learned that Henry Pearl, Jr. had gone to college, returned to Los Angeles, and had lived in Glendale. Beginning in the 1960s, he taught physics at East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park. He remained a committed Adventist who worked to reconcile science with the doctrines of his faith.

His death in 2012 likely caused the dispersal of the contents of his storage unit. That brought his letters and memorabilia to a swap meet in Orange County.

Notes

1. Quoted by Peter de Lima in the transcript of a KFWB radio broadcast about The Soul of the Universe on 28 January 1946 in the Swedish language newspaper Vestkusten (West Cost), no 7, 14 February 1946.

2. That work – delayed by the war – was finished in 1948

Karla Klarin: Homeward Bound

Places seem to matter. It’s probably too much to say that they have an overwhelming power to shape their inhabitants, but Americans think places probably do. Valley girls, as just one example, wouldn’t be the same without the San Fernando Valley.

Home is another place, and Americans are certain about the qualities of the houses other people live in and their effect on the lives inside. I live in a 957-square-foot, wood-frame-and-stucco “minimal traditional house” put up quickly during the worst months of World War II for the families of workers at the Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach, and I think that my life in that house has been given a kind of grace. Critical observers, seeing my home from the street or my neighborhood from an altitude of a thousand feet, would think suburbia or worse (if that were possible). They might think my neighbors and I have lived a “minimal” life too.

I continue to live there, accompanied by what fills the rooms: the French Provencal furniture, the china clock with gilt trim that was my grandmother’s, the seascapes my grandfather painted, a cut-glass dish in the closet over the stove. (It has never, in my memory, been anywhere else.) My uncle Arthur bought the living room furniture for my parents in 1953 in an act of such generosity that each time my hand brushes the back of one of the chairs, my uncle’s gift comes again as a shock.

There is nothing remarkable about the clock, the paintings, the dish, or the furniture. But they figure an embodied presence, which is not just the stories I could tell about them. These things now seem to be manifestations.

Most of my suburban days begin and end in half-stillness and half-light. I listen to the muttering, not quite silence of my neighborhood, pregnant with dreams like the time between sleeping and waking. The everyday here is not emptied of possibility by this familiarity. It appears with its burden of history, like my uncle’s gift. The everyday sometimes reveals tableaux of joy or dread. Manners of knowing are lived into being there.

I touch much-handled things, and they touch me back. Manipulation is precisely what happens. The novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki noted that the “sheen of antiquity” valued by Japanese collectors only appears after long years of handling, of leaving behind the human stain that we give and receive from touching and being touched by the things that have known hands. They “bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather (and) the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.”[1]

By accidental epiphanies, in repeated encounters, or with habits of tenderness, a sense of place can be layered onto a tabletop, into a tract house neighborhood, and through the welter of desires to merge into a single longing. The longing can, in the context of Los Angeles, be framed as a question: Do I have a home here?

That question was answered for millions of working people in mid-twentieth century America in places like the tract house suburb where the artist Karla Klarin spent much of her youth. Today, she paints those places as grids of intersecting lines and planes, worn by remembrance into images of houses and neighborhoods that aren’t purely abstract or conventionally representational. Klarin “examines some of our city’s more quotidian landscapes in … works that take sprawl and the suburban as points of inspiration. But don’t expect the cookie cutter: Klarin’s works have a way of capturing grit.” wrote art critic Carolina Miranda in the Los Angeles Times in 2016.[2] Tanizaki’s sheen and Klarin’s grit materialize felt histories.

It’s true, regrettably, that the suburban everyday is thought to be empty of what someone might long to hold and to be held by, to remember and be recalled by. Fetishize nostalgically– yes. Observe voyeuristically – yes. Disclose as uncanny – yes. But not fall in love with. And yet, the swarm of feelings that hovers over Klarin’s sun-struck homes is enough even now to answer someone’s longing and persist in someone’s memory. Out of the ambivalent heroism of the ordinary, a moral imagination can be bred.

It was an imagination roughly made, despite the slick Ozzie and Harriett-Leave it to Beaver-Brady Bunch mythology. The houses of the mass-produced suburbs of Los Angeles are mostly sheds. Their orthogonal streets mimic Roman military encampments or the arrangement of blockhouses in an internment facility. The bedroom windows of one house are exactly fifteen feet from the kitchen windows of the next. Even in winter, with doors and windows shut, some of the public talk of neighbors – and even some of the private talk– leaks into the adjoining living rooms. The imperfections and limitations of “minimal” houses in Van Nuys, as realized in Klarin’s paintings, make them just like us.

The writer and environmentalist Barry Lopez spoke of his need to be touched and to touch when explaining his attachment to his childhood home, also in the Valley. “If you're intimate with a place, a place with whose history you're familiar,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Weekly, “the implication that follows is this: the place knows you're there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.” A place’s (or a home’s) reciprocity – touching and being touched – Lopez added, is “a fundamental human defense against loneliness.”[3]

The house in which our lives begin is “our corner of the world” and “a real cosmos in every sense of the word,” the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard believed.[4] Our house may be all that we ever know of the temporality of space and the embodiment of knowledge. Places of lived experience, embedded in habits as much as in memory, will accompany us, who are fated to be solitary wayfarers. Your house could tell you how to live in a world with no shelter.

I don’t know why my house remains adequate to my desire. I can’t imagine it satisfying more sophisticated consumers. It’s only the skin I won’t slough off, the familiar story I want to hear again, and the body into which I welcome myself every day.

Adapted from a catalog essay accompanying the exhibition “Karla Klarin: Subdividing the LAndscape,” curator Damon Willick, 29 August – 8 October 2016, CSU Northridge Art Galleries.

Notes

1. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. In Praise of Shadows (Lette’s Books, Inc., 1977), 10-11.

2. Carolina Miranda. “Datebook,” Los Angeles Times, 29 September 2016.

3. Barry Lopez. “A Scary Abundance of Water.” Los Angeles Weekly, 9 January 2002.

4. Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space (The Beacon Press, 1964), 4. 

John Humble: Seeing Everything

John Humble lay on his back and pulled himself through a gap under a chainlink fence marked No Entry on the bank of the Los Angeles River. He was near the river’s official headwaters (a confluence of the Arroyo Calabasas and Bell Creek). Once under the fence, he retrieved the camera, tripod, and bag he had just lowered over it.

There are only a few access points to the river. None of them is meant for public use. The river can be a dangerous place. It was made for the transmission of millions of gallons of water an hour when winter storms pile up against the nearby San Gabriel Mountains. The river channel fills quickly. In minutes, the water can be chest high and flowing faster than you can run. (After a light rain in late 1997, just before the school day began, seven teenagers loitering in the channel further downstream were pulled under the suddenly rising water; three drowned.)

Only a sheen of water covered the concrete at the confluence point when Humble walked west up the riverbed with his camera. No one saw him approach. No official ordered him to leave. The river always seems deserted (but some of the city’s homeless camp beneath bridges east and south of the confluence point).

Humble positioned his tripod and camera where the curving walls of the river’s tributaries meet in a demonstration of Euclidean geometry. Two arcs of engineered concrete– one white in the sun, the other fallen into shadow – merged in a terrible beauty.

Los Angeles ceased to be merely picturesque long ago when, composed in a movie camera viewfinder, its landscapes stood in for many places – the Old West, Shangri-La, the Kansas plains, the Serengeti, or for any place where you most longed to be. 1920s Hollywood tutored the world to see Los Angeles as infinitely mutable and therefore not quite real, not quite a place at all.

The Los Angeles of the moviegoer’s imagination is now a concealing screen. When the screen is pulled back, as in Humble’s photographs, Los Angeles appears, in geographer Jérôrme Monnet’s words, “alien, troubling, menacing and cut off.”[1] And when the city exposes itself to those who never accepted the city’s emergent qualities, who accept only the city’s dystopian mythology, Los Angeles always collapses into metaphors of ironic distance and the mechanical replication of enigmas. Our failure to see Los Angeles renders it a city of regret for the formerly enthralled.

The disenchanted city looks like a collection of absences: the absence of hierarchies and boundaries, of formal architecture, of urban intensity, of a center, and for some sojourners merely the absence of New York. And finally, all of us are absent too, wrapped in our reveries of a cinematic Los Angeles where a perfect paradise or a perfect hell substitutes for the city we’re busy forgetting.

“John Humble's super-saturated photographs give gorgeous visual form to the unnatural beauty of Los Angeles,” wrote a reviewer in 2010. “He depicts the sprawling city as a vast spider web of power lines, railway and streets. In this network of electricity, steel and concrete, people are trapped like helpless insects.”[2] Humble is more ambivalent abut the Los Angeles, more attentive to the unsuspected qualities of its disregarded places.

“I show the places that the Chamber of Commerce tries to sweep under the rug – which is most of L.A.,” Humble said in a Los Angeles Times interview in 1989. “And it’s not just the Chamber of Commerce – none of us want to look at this stuff because it doesn’t feed our illusions about where we live. I’ve been taking these pictures for 10 years, but my work has been largely ignored because the landscape I show is pretty horrifying. But for me, it’s quite beautiful as well.”[3]

Other photographers have crossed Los Angeles – notably Ed Ruscha. He turned over the work of photography to an automatic camera that repeated back desolate and melancholy images of the city’s useless banality. Ruscha has said of Some Los Angeles Apartments, Every Building on the Sunset Strip that his photobooks were actually exercises in filling up pages, calling into question the making of images and the act of looking at them, and I suppose, the idea of giving attention to anything at all.

Humble fitted a van with a reinforced roof to make an elevated platform and waded through streams of treated wastewater to complete his series on the Los Angeles River. His 4x5 cameras are awkward to use, conspicuous, and slow. They’re the machines of a craftsman. His images are full of color, as if absorbed by gazing.

Humble’s photographic practice is in the tradition of nineteenth-century landscape photography. Because of it, what is indistinguishable on the freeway at 70 miles an hour gains an identity and discloses habits that can be considered and connected across the whole flawed, tragic, and humanizing body of the city. But unlike the photographers of the American sublime, Humble asserts that his pictures – nondescript shopfronts, tract houses, and trailer parks – come from him.

As one gallery curator noted, Humble’s “methodology reminds his audience of Eugene Atget’s views of Paris, wherein both artists assembled a vision of their city with a sense of awe and with the knowledge of its changing subject matter.”[4] Humble delights in this imperfect city where, he says, everything of its garbled inauthenticity is visible in the uniquely still air and particularizing light.

Fixed in Humble’s photographs – particularly those of the river – is the paradox of nature in Los Angeles. An imaginative investigation of nature in Los Angeles might seem merely ironic: all the city’s hills are scaled with houses; all its rivers are concrete; the air overhead is a petrochemical byproduct; the city’s water flows from a criminal conspiracy; and asphalt pavement marches to the horizon in every direction.

Beneath sarcasm are the complex natural systems in which Angelenos have always been embedded. It might better be said of the relationship between nature and the city that Angelenos since the 1880s have bound themselves more – not less – to rainfall, fire, earthquake, and drought. The elements of its nature penetrate the city at every off-ramp of its freeways and on every block on its gridded streets, just as Humble shows.

We who live here are in nature. It’s not an ideal of unspoiled wildness, but a compromised nature in which we have our anxious home beneath the electrical towers. Our home is not beautiful. It is not sentimental. It does not appear to be consoling. But it could not be our home unless we fell in love with it.

Adapted from D. J. Waldie. “À propos du photographe John Humble - Tout visible,” Urbanisme, no 361, Juillet – Août 2008, 73-74.

Notes

1. Jérôrme Monnet. “The Everyday Imagery of Space in Los Angeles.” Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the Urban Landscape. eds. Salas and Roth (Getty Publications), 2001.

2. “John Humble: .. Landscape,” exhibition Stieglitz19 (Antwerp), 10 September – 10 October 2010. http://photography-now.com/exhibition/72111

3. Kristine McKenna. “A humble view of L.A.: Portfolio by John Humble,” Los Angeles Times, 19 November 1980.

4. “John Humble: Los Angeles Cibachromes,” exhibition Joseph Bellows Gallery, 16 September – 31 October 2019. https://www.josephbellows.com/exhibitions/john-humble-los-angeles-cibachromes.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, presiding silently over an inflating economic bubble. Al Smith, a Catholic, was running for president while Klan crosses burned a warning that Catholics are more loyal to the Pope. In New York, Mayor Jimmy Walker drank stylishly in speakeasies with chorus girls and bootleggers. In Los Angeles, Mayor George Cryer took orders from a City Hall gang of gangsters and grifters.

It was 1928. It was an age of frivolity and cynicism. In Long Beach, the age was about to end. It came on the last afternoon of the Pacific Southwest Exposition.

Picturesque Orient.

The exposition had been put up in just ten weeks, hurried into existence in the spirit of Hollywood: cheerful vulgarity, spectacle for its own sake, and commercial hard sell. On nearly sixty-five acres of sand dunes, at the western end of 7th Street as it nosed into the Port of Long Beach, rose a canvas and plaster imitation of a Tunisian kasbah designed by Long Beach architect Hugh R. Davies.[1]

The newspapers called it the Dream City.

“Giving the entre scene a touch of natural color,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, “dancers, musicians, market beggars, fakirs, snake charmers, magicians and other types which make the Orient picturesque will mingle with the crowds of visitors day and night ….” [2] Exoticism and romance were the exhibition’s goals, as realized in the film sets of “The Sheik” (1921), “The Thief of Bagdad” (1924), and “Beau Geste” (1926). The exposition’s native girls, behind their silk veils, were members of Long Beach women’s clubs.

The Pacific Southwest Exhibition was assertively local, despite its North African setting and European and Latin American exhibitors.[3] Long Beach was booming in 1928. The city’s port was busy. The Navy’s Pacific Fleet was in. Tourism was up. Farms and pastures were being turned into the subdivisions of Alamitos Beach, Bixby Knolls, and North Long Beach. The Signal Hill oil fields were making some residents rich.

City council members, the Chamber of Commerce, and port officials wanted to celebrate their city’s ascendency. They said intended to commemorate the founding of Spanish California in 1769. How minarets and camel rides symbolized the arrival of the Spanish was left unexplored. The only thing Southwestern about it was the Hopi and Navajo families displayed in front of a stucco and chicken-wire pueblo.

Fakery always domesticates the exotic in Southern California. But Southern Californians in the 1920s were unusually wary of foreign influences. As an editorial in the Pomona Progress Bulletin noted, the alien aspects of the exhibition “show by origin, nature and characteristics that they belong to another part of the world….” Manners and customs there “greatly differ from ours.” Their oddity was interesting, even enjoyable in an afternoon’s outing, but “a sort of weirdness” gathered around the tourists meandering through the streets of the Dream City.

Weirdness like that needed to be thrust away by newly restrictive immigration laws, the resurgent Klan, and the politics of “America First.”[4]

Republican candidate Herbert Hoover had a local headquarters at the exhibition. Al Smith’s campaign apparently declined.

Strolling the Fair.

To the resonant booming of cannon, the bursting of aerial bombs and the screeching of sirens, the Pacific Southwest Exposition opened its great gates to a waiting crowd promptly at the stroke of 12 o’clock today. Los Angeles Times, 28 July 1928

Opening day visitors entered the Dream City after crossing a sandy waste, meant to represent the desert but actually the parking lot. They streamed through a Moresque portal that opened into a landscaped courtyard enclosed on three sides by exposition buildings. The fourth side was a long, shaded arcade. It formed the wall of an inner courtyard, surrounded on three sides by more buildings facing the Pool of Reflections.

West of the pool and its central bandstand was the largest exposition building. From its tower, 135 feet above the crowds, a hired muezzin (said to be named Kamal Ahmedd) chanted the call to prayer at noon and six p.m.

Beyond this was a Fun Strip of carnival rides, freak shows, hot dog stands, somersaulting autos, and the callous display of Hopi and Navajo reservation life.[5] There was a temporary stadium for sports contests and in the harbor, power boat races, a sailing regatta, and a schooner that served as a floating restaurant. A huge cafeteria on shore expected to serve twenty-four thousand meals a day.

The organizers promised that each day of the exposition would have some spectacular form of pageantry or entertainment. At night, colored lights played on the white walls of the exposition buildings. Searchlights swung overhead as if illuminating a continuous movie première. (Movie star Gloria Swanson pressed the switch on opening day that turned on the exposition’s lights.)

From July 27 to September 3, more than a million residents and tourists (along with actress Clara Bow, filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, author Upton Sinclair, aviator Charles Lindbergh, and Republican presidential candidate Herbert Hoover) came to see what the Dream City offered for amusement and wonder. Visitors walked through exhibits “devoted to the control of the prairie dog, a miniature German cathedral, methods for growing hair and methods to keep it from growing, motor cars, machinery, and Krishnamurti's method of happiness.”[6] They strolled the Avenue of Nations to visit the international pavilions and attended one of the daily performances of “Friendship of Nations,” the pageant that was the exposition’s signature attraction.

From a very pictorial introduction, in which the natural allure of the Southland is portrayed by dancers, garbed symbolically as poppies, the Sagebrush, the palms, the cacti, with the premiere danseuse, Rene Tumanova, impersonating in very dazzling garb, the Sun, there are gradually unfolded the impressions of the early California days.[7]

“Friendship of Nations” had Spanish conquistadores, Mexicans, Russian fur trappers, Chinese laborers, and American 49ers along with the dancing cacti. It included trick lasso twirling, a Ukrainian octet singing folk tunes, The Bounding Bagdads acrobats, a “fire dance” by Mille. Glorine, a Spanish dance by Señorita Cordova, and Native American opera singer Daniel Simmons (known professionally as Chief Yowlachie).

The headline act was the “disappearing ballet.” The ballet, thought the Los Angeles Times “was one of the most mystifying ever presented. It presents an assemblage of singers and dancers who at the conclusion of their act pass in groups of eight and ten into a tank of water and then disappear before the eyes of the audience.”[8] (The Times said that the show included sixty-two girls.) The forty-foot-long tank was used by other water acts, including a demonstration by Olive Hatch, champion springboard diver.

The “Friendship of Nations” turned history into vaudeville, pitched to the tastes of the “folks” who were making Los Angeles the biggest Midwest city in the nation.[9] The organizers invited the twenty thousand former Nebraskans in Los Angeles to attend.

Flaming Flappers.

If the shows and special events were of county fair quality, no one seemed unhappy. Alma Whitaker, a Times columnist, was giddy with anticipation.

The right way to visit a flaming young flapper exposition is by airplane obviously. So it was entirely comme il faut when the handsome young ambassadorial Mr. Kirby escorted me in a Ryan plane to Long Beach and saw that I was properly enthralled by the sight from the air. You see, the Pacific Southwest Exposition is the most precocious of flapper expositions. … They talk about Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, San Diego, but this exposition isn't anything like them. It's smaller, more compact, utterly youthful, dazzlingly flapperish throughout, even if twenty-two nations are participating. … They have gotten scores of real Tunisian Arabs, too, picked up on the waterfront from visiting ships. … But all the same, the Moorish idea pervades it all – a Moorish carnival deluxe, with the Pacific playing the role of the Mediterranean.[10]

Completely flapperish for Whitaker was the tiny, but imaginative Guatemala building, a pyramid brightly painted in stylized patterns and edged with symbolic figures. It was the work of Rafael Yela Günther, sculptor and authority on indigenous art.

More conventional were other national buildings. Ecuador’s was a miniature version of the presidential palace at Quito. The Belgian and Czechoslovakian buildings copied traditional designs. The Bolivian building appeared to be a mission church with a belfry. The Persian building, with its tall archway and flanking minarets, was mosque-like.

The Japanese building was described in news accounts as “typically oriental.” It had been designed by R. K. Tsakamoto, said to be America’s only Japanese architect, in the style of Japan’s Nara era.[11] Interior decorations were by the Japanese American artist and art teacher Chiura Obata.

The French building housed a coach once owned by Napoleon. The California building had a pool stocked with trout. Mexico displayed contemporary paintings and sculpture by Francisco Cornejo (best known in Los Angeles for his Mayan Theater decorations, completed in 1927). Denmark showed tapestries, embroidery, china, furniture, and linens. Holland and its colonies exhibited bulbs and seeds, traditional wooden shoes, spices, tea, sugar, tobacco, and tin. Fijians demonstrated weaving.

There were several theme buildings: the Palace of Education, the Palace of Transportation, and a Palace of Textiles and Modes.[12] The Palace of Fine Arts was under the direction of artist and teacher Theodore Modra, who selected paintings and watercolors by California artists. Modra’s preference was the scene painting that artists in Laguna Beach and Carmel had made popular at the turn of the century. Sentimental and frankly nostalgic, the paintings and watercolors were another kind of fantasy.

The Palace of Industry, below where the muezzin chanted, was the exposition’s largest venue. Its ten acres included sections labeled Varied Industries, Pure Foods and Household Equipment, Land and Community Development, Oil and Mining, and Manufactures, Machinery and Automotives.

 “There is everything here to see and to admire, from baby food to immense aircraft guns from Fort MacArthur, from free travel movies to gas engines,” wrote one Los Angeles critic.[13] Among the marvels was a booth devoted to the Tri-Clast machine for curing tuberculosis. The company’s motto was “Vibration – Magnetism – Radio-Activity: The Trinity of Life.”

An End.

The guiding theme of the Pacific Southwest Exhibition – and its motto – was “friendliness.” It was a modest goal, its earnest folksiness keyed to the booster values of the men’s and women’s clubs that supplied the exhibition’s organizers and volunteer staff. Middle-class Californians were exceptional joiners in the 1920s, seeking the company of their own kind in dozens of organizations that made uplift their goal.

Uplift had limits. The men’s and women’s clubs were racially segregated. Jews were not welcome in most of them. Prejudice went deeper for some, who hid their racism and ethnic prejudices under Klan hoods. (The Klan had held a cross burning rally in Long Beach’s Recreation Park in 1924 with nearly twenty-thousand in attendance.)

The organizers of the Pacific Southwest Exposition had said that “Long Beach Invites the World” to attend, but the world wasn’t on display in Long Beach or even wanted there. Keeping the exposition’s Arabs, Iranians, Native Americans, Japanese, Fijians, Guatemalans, and other “exotics” behind walls of plasterboard and stucco reassured the folks who came to gawk.

If the Dream City seemed to promise America’s prosperity would go on forever, the exposition itself had to end. There was a beauty contest (open only to the fair’s volunteers), a special day for members of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, another day for sailors from the Pacific battle fleet, and a visit by three thousand Boy Scouts and several hundred postal workers. Spanish American War veterans paraded. Norwegians from Los Angeles arrived in a Viking longboat to attend a Lutheran church service.

Monday, September 3 was the exposition’s final afternoon. Just before Navy Secretary Curtis Wilbur was to speak, as crowds streamed through the palaces of commerce and industry

Amid a crash of noise, the Pacific Southwest Exposition closed its doors here … after a thirty nine day run, but the noise was not the blare of horns and shouting of a joyous people such as often is associated with similar events, The noise was the collapse of the dome of the Fine Arts building almost within the final closing hour of the exposition, and as the wreckage was cleared away four persons were found prostrate beneath thousands of pounds of timber and plaster, all severely injured. … After a preliminary investigation …, the exposition officials agreed the collapse was due to a settling of earth beneath the building and it was indicated no effort would be made to fix blame, the accident being viewed as an “unfortunate circumstance” and “unavoidable.” [14]

In falling, the tower of the Palace of Fine Arts carried away part of the canvas roof and its supports. Wood beams and stucco shards had fallen among those below, knocking down three women and a four-year-old girl. The two most seriously injured were taken to Seaside Hospital, one with a possible skull fracture.

The Palace of Fine Arts closed with some of the artworks damaged. Secretary Wilbur eventually spoke, but only briefly. Signor Ardizoni, a Long Beach vocal coach, directed a few operatic numbers. The band played popular Italian airs. The crowd enjoyed a moonlight Mardi Gras under the exhibition’s shimmering lights. Gaiety was undimmed until midnight.

A year later in another dream city, the illusions of the Jazz Age crashed along with the New York Stock Exchange. The Great Depression that began in 1929 was another “unfortunate circumstance” that some claimed was “unavoidable.” Alma Whitaker’s flapperdom did not survive it. Neither did Herbert Hoover’s presidency.

The Pacific Southwest Exposition, called an “Epochal Event in the History of California” by its optimistic promoters, was soon forgotten. The site was occupied by a Procter & Gamble factory that made Ivory soap. It’s now a container yard where cargoes for Hawai’i and Guam are transferred to freighters.

Notes

1. Davies is best known for the design of the Long Beach Main Post Office, which opened in 1934.

2. Arthur Pangborn. “Walled Moorish City Arising at Long Beach,” Los Angeles Times, 1 July 1928, 24

3. Exposition organizers listed Argentina, Belgium, Bolivia, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Hawai’i, Holland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Persia (Iran), Philippine Islands and Spain as participants.

4. Both Woodrow Wilson (in 1916) and Warren Harding (in 1920) had campaigned with the slogan “America First.”

5. The wife of Edgar Miller, the Bureau of Indian Affairs agent on the Hopi reservation, was given management of the Native Americans at the exhibition.

6. Suzanne Cooper, et al. Art Deco Long Beach. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2006, 65.

7. “Pageant Show Is Colorful,” Los Angeles Times, 10 August 1928, 29.

8. “Too Bad! Girls to Disappear,” Los Angeles Times, 7 July 1928, 15.

9. Historian Kevin Starr’s term for middle- and lower-middle-class Anglos from the Midwest who defined Southern California through much of the 20th century.

10. Alma Whitaker. “Flaming Flapper Arrives,” Los Angeles Times, 26 July 261928, 17.

11. “Only Japanese Architect,” The Architect and Engineer, February 1929, 122.

12. The website Ken Blog (http://expoguy2.blogspot.com/2009/01/ ) provides a useful summary of the exposition’s design scheme and its special events.

13. Quoted by Tim Grobaty in Long Beach Chronicles: From Pioneers to the 1933 Earthquake. Charleston: The History Press, 2012, unpaged.

14. “Building Crash Ends Beach Fair at Proper Time,” Oakland Tribune, 4 September 1928, 17.

Disease and injury inevitably accompanied the First People who settled the foothills and valleys of what is now Los Angeles. In response, they evolved cures for spirit and body, making use of the indigenous flora, the wisdom of healers, and the power of belief. Colonists from Mexico in the eighteenth century brought their own medical traditions, some not far removed from the healing practices of the First People. When American physicians and pharmacists settled in Los Angeles, they brought with them other philosophies about illness and the treatments to cure it.

At the border of three worldviews – Native American, Mexican colonial, and Anglo-European – medical care in mid-nineteenth century Los Angeles blended empirical science, folk traditions, and a large dose of Yankee hucksterism.

Remaining healthy in Los Angeles was hard. Medical treatments were often worthless and sometimes toxic. In a search for wellness, doctors and their patients adopted beliefs about the health effects of climate and environment that sold modern Los Angeles into existence.

Indigenous Los Angeles.

Teas of leaves and bark, poultices of powered roots, and therapies that included aspects of bloodletting and cupping, along with sessions in sweat lodges, supported the health of indigenous Los Angeles. Specialized shamans – using tobacco smoke, cupping, or bloodletting, even red ants – dealt with disorders with the aid of guided dreaming and drug-induced visions.[1] With efficient dispatch, native healers also reset broken bones and relieved sprains with binding and immobilization of the injured arm or leg.[2]

Village healers, familiar with the properties of roots and leaves, culled the hillsides and arroyos of Los Angeles for their remedies. Yerba mansa (Anemopsis californica) was prominent among them, the processed root used as a body rub to treat wounds and skin conditions and as a tea for pulmonary and gastro-intestinal complaints. Chuchupate (Lomatium californicum), an aromatic root, carried both medicinal and magical properties. Wearing a bit of the root warded off rattlesnakes. Chewed, the root relieved headaches. Decocted as a tea, it soothed upset stomachs. The leaves of California laurel (Umbellularia californica) were thought to cure headaches. Made into a poultice, the leaves healed wounds.

Gum Weed (Grindelia robusta), which in the 1890s was still “tolerably common on the moist slopes in Elysian Park and the districts around Los Angeles,”[3] produced a milky substance used as an expectorant for coughs and as an asthma remedy. Poison Oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum), dried, powdered, and made into a moist plaster, was spread on wounds and cuts. Amazingly, poison oak leaves were steeped as a tea to treat diarrhea.

These treatments seemed to work. When the Portola expedition of 1769-1770 crossed the edge of the Los Angeles plain, Fr. Juan Crespi noted the region’s good health. The native population, Crespi wrote, “is vast; indeed the villages we have been meeting are becoming larger with every day…most of (the natives) are very fair, well-formed and robust, and very cheerful.”[4]

Crespi was the first booster of Southern California’s healthy climate and lifestyle. But behind the sunshine and cheerful native demeanor of lay a history of endemic disease, including tuberculosis and bacterial infections that long ago had reached indigenous communities on trade routes from Mexico and mid-America. Intermittent contact with Spanish sailors and English pirates transmitted other diseases – measles, smallpox, and cholera among them – that led to the collapse of some island and coastal villages in the 17th century. Worse effects would follow in the footsteps of Portola and Crespi.

Colonial Los Angeles.

The indigenous response to illness was imperfectly understood by the mission friars who recorded the first encounters between Europeans and Native Americans in the late 1700s. The goal of the Franciscan missions was to Christianize native peoples and make them a settled peasantry. The friars assumed that the healing practices of village shamans, blending physical and spiritual elements, were diabolical. These were forbidden to the newly converted.

The California mission system, begun by Fr. Junípero Serra in 1769, was (apart from its other evils) a demographic catastrophe. Denied access to the consolations of traditional therapies, confined to gender-segregated dormitories at night, made to do hard labor, and fed an unfamiliar diet, hundreds of the indigenous Tongva[5] died from measles, smallpox, dysentery, influenza, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, and pneumonia.

The Franciscan fathers attempted to treat these outbreaks without the aid of trained physicians. At the San Gabriel mission, the missionaries gathered remedies from gardens that contained Spanish transplants, medicinal herbs from Mexico, and California native plants used by the Tongva. European medicines came from army surgeons who served at the presidios in San Diego and Monterey.

Each mission also had an infirmary for the sick and some had an infirmarian, a caretaker whose medical knowledge was generally limited to teas and poultices.[6] Not all colonial-era treatment was so homespun. Smallpox inoculation began as early as 1786 in Monterey.

By 1820, demographic collapse caused by European diseases, alcohol, and forced labor had unraveled indigenous society. Syphilis, gonorrhea, and despair caused birth rates among the mission neophytes to plummet. By 1826, the fertility of young women living at the Santa Barbara mission fell to less than half of what it had been in the 1780s. Deaths among infants and young children rose in parallel with the declining number of births. Young Tongva women, shut up nightly in crowded dormitories that bred disease, died in disproportionate numbers.[7]

The health crisis was not confined to the mission grounds. Neophytes frequently escaped back to their home villages, taking European diseases with them. Increased contact with colonists and soldiers from Mexico kept epidemic diseases in circulation. A newly fluid population, traveling through settlements like Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, spread sickness.[8]

As witnesses to so much illness, the missionaries concluded, in a rebuff to Crespi’s observation of cheerful and robust natives, that the California climate bred the weak and the malingering. Fr. Mariano Payeras wrote to his superiors in Mexico City in 1820 that California produced “a people miserable and sick” who “as soon as they commit themselves to a sociable and Christian life … become extremely feeble, lose weight, get sick, and die.”[9]

The harmful qualities of the environment even afflicted non-natives. In reports to their superiors in Mexico City, mission fathers routinely complained of serious health problems among the missionaries and government officials. Assignment to California was sure to result in chronic illness and emotional disorders. The authorities in Mexico blamed homesickness and hypochondria.

Or it may have been an effect of California itself leading to a persistent melancholy that wore down mission priests and secular officials alike. Even physicians, posted to what one of them called “this sad destination,” deteriorated.[10]

Disease and efforts to control it troubled the mission system as long as it persisted. There were so few doctors. From the 1770s through 1823, by one estimate, only fourteen physicians were sent to California to assess the health of mission neophytes. [11] There were fewer army surgeons, and they rarely treated non-military cases. There was no trained doctor in Los Angeles; the nearest was in Santa Barbara.

A doctor had practiced briefly in Los Angeles in 1836. John Marsh, a native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard, presented himself to the excelentísimo ayuntamiento (city council) of Los Angeles along with his diploma. It was in Latin and needed the services of a priest at Mission San Gabriel to assert that it was correct. The council accepted Marsh’s problematic credentials and licensed him to practice, but Marsh stayed only a year. [12] When the city council required medical advice in 1837, it turned to Santiago McKinley, a Scots merchant, who was said to have some knowledge of medicine.

Without a doctor to deal with a smallpox epidemic in 1844, the council issued instead a list of public health rules. Among them: refrain from eating peppers and spices, wash salted meats, bathe at least once every eight days, and burn sulfur on a hot iron to fumigate sickrooms. The council also ordered travelers to stay outside the pueblo and in quarantine for three days, during which time their clothes must be washed. Only the quarantine would have had any effect on the spread of the disease.

In the epidemic’s aftermath, leading Angelenos sought a credentialed physician who would remain in residence.[13] They found one in Dr. Richard Den, a Santa Barbara surgeon who had been educated in Ireland. Den was the first physician to make Los Angeles (more or less) his home.[14]

Den provided care for Angelenos who could afford his fees. Most couldn’t and depended on traditional cures and remedies. These included preparations of Mexican medicinal herbs, the application of European imports (honey, olive oil, wine, and brandy), and the use of healing herbs that the Tongva had used for generations. The indigenous/colonial exchange went both ways. Native American and colonial healing practices became increasingly alike during the early nineteenth century and equally dependent on imported ingredients and medicinal plants introduced from Mexico.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Laura Evertsen King recalled some of these concoctions

Seventy years or more ago … in every small village or pueblo there was the vieja, whom everyone respected and consulted, and who dispensed with a lavish hand her various herbs, which she had gathered, dried and put into safe-keeping for future use. A call from a fever patient hastened her with a package of saúco [Mexican elder, Sambucus mexicana], which she made into tea and administered at stated intervals, until relief came in the shape of a profuse perspiration. … For cancer she made a poultice of the pounded leaves of totoache [sic] [Jimson Weed, Datura wrightii] which removed cancerous growths if applied in time. … If in the annual rodeo a vaquero was thrown from his horse or otherwise bruised, he was removed to his home and yerba del golpe [Evening primrose, Oenothera rosea] applied to his contusions. [15]

King ended her ethnobotany with a racist sentiment that repurposed the environmental determinism of the melancholic mission fathers. “This has been written,” she concluded, “to show that the laziness of the Californian is in a measure excusable. For what use had he for work when everything grew at his hand – his food, his medicine, his shelter.” What had been a called a physically unhealthy environment for both Christian neophytes and missionaries in 1800 had been redefined as culturally debilitating.

American Los Angeles.

Tongva shamans believed that disease was both physical and spiritual and offered remedies for both realms. Spanish and Mexican colonists thought disease was an upset in the humors that ruled temperament and physical state. American doctors relied on a body of medical science (as they understood it) that still included much that came from classical and medieval tradition. To be healthy in Los Angeles – and stay that way – required Angelenos to align several theories of disease and have faith in the claims of newly professionalizing American medicine.

Dr. Den was joined in 1854 by Dr. John Griffin. He had first come to California in 1846 as a military surgeon accompanying the Army of the West under General Kearny. He was stationed in Los Angeles during the last phase of the Mexican War and at the start of the city’s Americanization in 1847. After other army postings, Griffin returned to Los Angeles and began a long career that included treating patients at the city’s first hospital, established by the Daughters of Charity religious order in 1858. An ardent supporter of the Confederacy during the Civil War, Dr. Griffin combined with other secessionists Angelenos to make wartime Los Angeles “the nursery, resort, and hot-bed of disloyalty.”[16]

H. D. Barrows, in a paper read before the Historical Society of Southern California in 1901, named other early Los Angeles physicians

(T)here were doctors A. P. Hodges, the first mayor of the city (July 3, 1850, to May 15, 1851) and A. W. Hope, who was the first state senator, (1850-51) of the First Senatorial District (San Diego and Los Angeles), and doctors McFarlane, Downey (afterwards governor of the state), Thomas Foster, T. J. White, R. T. Hayes, Winston, Cullen, etc. …. My friend, Mr. Elijah Moulton, who came to Los Angeles in 1845, informs me that he knew two other doctors, who practiced here for a short time between '45 and '49: one of them a Frenchman … and an American named Keefe. The Frenchman's name has been forgotten. [17]

Barrows also recalled the careers of two physicians who jointly published a circular in English and Spanish announcing their fees. For an office prescription, they charged $5; for a day visit in the city, $5; for a night visit in the city, $10; and for a visit in the country, for each league, $5.[18] Treatments included bleeding ($5) and cupping ($10). Dr. Den claimed never to accept less than $20 for his professional services.[19]

Angeleno laborers and ranch hands couldn’t afford these fees. Instead of a doctor’s care, families treated illness with traditional preparations. Harris Newmark, recalling the period, remarked that “Every mother did more or less doctoring on her own account, and had her well-stocked medicine-chest. Castor oil, ipecac, black draught and calomel were generally among the domestic supply.”[20]

Native American healing had sought to bring order to a disorderly internal state. Anglo-European medicine sought to expel offending “plethoras” (excess fluids and excrement). Castor oil (Ricinus communis) and black draught (a mixture of Senna and other ingredients) were powerful laxatives. Calomel (mercurous chloride) was another laxative and highly toxic. Ipecac (prepared from the roots of the Carapichea ipecacuanha plant) induced vomiting. Bloodletting remained a favored treatment even as the practice declined in Europe.

Aggressive treatments like these were termed “heroic medicine.” Doctors and druggists (often the same person in mid-nineteenth-century Los Angeles) dispensed calomel to treat cholera, fevers, and abdominal pain. Sugar of lead (lead acetate) was another toxic treatment for intestinal complaints. Blue Mass pills, containing about thirty-three percent mercury, were prescribed for tuberculosis, constipation, toothache, parasitic infestations, venereal diseases, labor pains, and depression.

Less toxic preparations included asafetida, a pungent herb used for bronchitis, whooping cough, and the flu; peppermint oil for intestinal upsets; oil of cloves to relieve toothache; camphor for pain and itching; and capsicum (red pepper) in the form of a lotion to reduce the pain of arthritis and shingles. When widely advertised patent medicines made their way West in the 1860s, sick Angelenos dosed themselves with “bitters” made of herbs and roots and “tonics” with opium or morphine. Both were mixed with liberal quantities of alcohol.

All of these medicinal options were relatively expensive. For poor Angelenos with a chronic illness there was only one option. Persons seriously sick and “not having the means of paying therefor… in all such cases the victims shall be removed to the city hospital ….” The city hospital was the notorious “pest house” located near the municipal cemetery.[21] When smallpox swept through Los Angeles in 1861-1862, 1869, and 1876-1877, the city council turned to the Catholic Daughters of Charity, the only nurses in the city who would care for those quarantined there.

Those who could afford treatment could choose a physician from three general philosophies of medical practice: Allopaths, Homeopaths, and Eclectics. Allopathic physicians (also known as Regulars) were in the majority. They used bloodletting, purgatives, emetics, and poultices as the foundation of their therapies. Homeopaths followed a less aggressive regimen. They were content to diagnose the illness and oversee its progress without much interference. Unlike toxic Allopathic treatments, Homeopathic drugs were nearly inert and at least did no harm. The Eclectics blended therapies from both Allopathic and Homeopathic medicine with an emphasis on herbal remedies.

Health Seekers.

Preparations with toxic mercury and decoctions of herbs produced the visible effects that sufferers in the nineteenth century wanted and expected – immediate and sometimes painful effects – ameliorated only by the use of opiates and alcohol to control pain. In reaction to the risks of nineteenth century medicine, some observers began to see Southern California itself as the remedy for chronic illness – an environmental medicine free of the side effects of purgatives, tinctures, and tonics. The climate, the land, the place itself had the power to heal, they claimed. For sufferers of tuberculosis, whose inexorable progress to death might take decades, and those with something like PTSD, the warmth, sunlight, outdoor life, and vaguely exotic setting of Los Angeles appeared to be therapeutic. These environmental qualities also were profitable for developers parceling out former rancho land into house lots and doctors who operated sanitariums.

Doctors Joseph Widney and Henry Orme, on behalf of the county medical society (and at the request of the 1874 equivalent of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce), laid out a table of diseases for which the ecologies of Southern California would be the cure. For the worried well with a “delicate constitution,” Los Angeles provided an easeful lifestyle. Consumptives in the early stage of tuberculosis might be made whole there (or at least their children would be free of the disease). Other chronic lung diseases also responded, but treatment would require the advice of a physician (since the microclimates of Southern California were each effective but for different conditions).

Malaria sufferers were advised to live at the beach. Asthmatics would find the air of the local tar pits or the mountain pines beneficial. And “cases of nervous prostration, and all the innumerable train of tormenting ills that come to an overtaxed or deranged nervous system”[22] would be healed by the air and sun of an outdoor life (which also would remedy bladder and kidney complaints and the effects of arthritis and rheumatism). Historian John Bauer, reflecting on the belief that environment and climate could replace medical care, suggested a nickname for what the Los Angeles region had become “Dr. Southern California.”[23]

The redemption of Los Angeles as a place of good health required tolerance for a paradox of environmental determinism. To homesick missionaries and Spanish colonial officials in the eightieth century, Southern California had been a uniquely unhealthy place. The malign climate also explained the “degraded” state, as defined by the colonizers, of the region’s indigenous inhabitants. Anglo occupiers of Los Angeles after 1850 generally agreed with this negative assessment of the climate and the environment, but included their Californio neighbors in the class of those that life in Southern California had “degraded.” Yet the climate that brought out the physical and cultural inferiority of these Angelenos made newly arriving Anglos more robust. How was that possible?

Anglo physicians racialized a way out of the paradox that Southern California was toxic for Native Americans and mixed-race Latinos but would be a tonic for Americans suffering from chronic illness or nervous exhaustion. Doctors and land speculators successfully sold the idea that debilitated office workers and traumatized Civil War veterans became newly well and thrived in the reviving atmosphere of Los Angeles while other races grew lazy and declined into physical illness and moral decay.

In the rush to sell Los Angeles into existence, the unstable contradictions in these assumptions were resolved by boosterism and white ethno-nationalism. Health, the doctors’ committee resolved in 1874, “is not across the ocean or upon some foreign shore, where the invalid is an alien or a stranger, but within our own land, under our own flag, and among our own people.”[24]

What finally made Southern California healthful was its white possessors. The healing virtues of its climate and environment could be realized only now, under an American sun.

Notes

1. Toloache is a hallucinogenic plant that had medicinal properties in both the spiritual and physical worlds. As a medicine, its leaves or roots were steeped as a tea or applied as a poultice to wounds.

2. In A Voyage Round the World (the record of the La Perouse scientific expedition of 1785-1788), Dr. Claude-Nicolas Rollin reported that native healers “place the ends of the broken bones in contact; keep them in that position by a bandage; and placing the limb in a case of bark, tied fast around it by leather thongs, the patient is made to lay perfectly quiet until the parts are completely united.”

3. “Medicinal Plants of Southern California,” Los Angeles Herald, April 25, 1897, 38.

4. Alan K. Brown. A Description of Distant Roads: Original Journals of the First Expedition into California, 1769-1770 (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 2001), 423.

5. In recent years, the indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin have called themselves the Tongva, Gabrieleños, and Kizh (pronounced Keech). Gabrieleños references Mission San Gabriel.

6. The mission fathers turned to medical guidebooks that summarized symptoms and suggested treatments that drew on classical and medieval medical theories.

7. This summary of mission life is drawn from Anne Marie Reid, Medics of the Soul and the Body: Sickness and Death in Alta California, 1769-1850 (2013) [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, 2013) USC.

8. California experienced smallpox epidemics in 1828, 1838, 1840, and 1844.

9. Quoted by Anne Marie Reid in “Medics of the Soul and the Body: Sickness and Death in Alta California, 1769-1850,” (USC dissertation, 2013), 98.

10. Pablo Soler and Diego de Borica to the Viceroy, dated August 15 and August 27, 1799, Archivo General de la Nación de México, Instituciones Coloniales, Real Hacienda, Archivo Historio de Hacienda (008), Volumen 1400, Expediente 20.

11. Reid. “Medics,” 95

12. Despite the impressive Latin, Marsh was not a graduate of any medical college.

13. In 1844, the Mexican Congress ordered that physicians must present documentary proof of their qualifications to the city council or the municipal tribunal. The regulations also set fees for service and the price of medicines.

14. The dates of Dr. Den’s arrival in Los Angeles and his intermittent residence vary in different sources.

15. Laura Evertsen King. “Some of the Medicinal and Edible Plants of Southern California,” Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California and of the Pioneers of Los Angeles County (Los Angeles: George Rice & Sons, 1903), 237-238.

16. Ezra Drown, Jonathan Warner, and James Mohan. “Address to the Loyal and Patriotic Voters of Los Angeles County,” clipping in Scrapbook of Benjamin Hayes (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, vol 48, publication and date not identified).

17. H. D. Barrows. “Pioneer Physicians of Los Angeles,” Annual Publications of the Historical Society of Southern California (Los Angeles: George Rice & Sons, 1901), 105.

18. A distance of about three miles, as noted by H. D. Barrows. “Two Pioneer Doctors of Los Angeles,” Annual Publications of the Historical Society of Southern California (Los Angeles: George Rice & Sons, 1905), 233.

19. Walter Lindley. A History of the Medical Profession of Southern California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Press, 1901), 1.

20. Harris Newmark. Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-1913. Containing the Reminiscences of Harris Newmark (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 110.

21. Marco Newmark. “Medical Profession in the Early Days of Los Angeles (Part I)” in Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly, March 1953, vol 24, no 1, 74.

22. George H. Kress. History of the Medical Profession of Southern California (Los Angeles: Times Mirror Printing and Binding House, 1910), 7.

23. John E. Baur. The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870–1900 (San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 2010), 12.

24. Kress. History, 7.

The shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor started before dawn on Friday, April 12, 1861, the day the Civil War began. Two weeks later, the news arrived in Los Angeles. An Army captain – sole representative of the United States military in Southern California – waited in an adobe warehouse at the edge of the city. He had hidden muskets, ammunition, and sabers under sacks of grain and flour, provisions for troopers who weren’t there. He had shown his wife where his pistols were kept. They would make some defense of the Army’s stores when the secessionist Monte boys came to take them.

Captain Winfield Scott Hancock and his wife expected that a raid on the Army warehouse would signal the start of the annexation of Southern California to the secessionist cause. He knew that many Angelenos would welcome it. Prominent among them were immigrants from the slave states, but native-born Californios were secessionists too.

The decomposition of the United States into unionist and secessionist factions had been driven partly by California statehood in 1850. Admission of California as a “free soil” state (whose constitution outlawed slavery)[1] destabilized the balance of power in Congress. The effects rippled through the decade of the 1850s, hastening the collapse of the Wig Party, putting secessionist and unionist Democrats at odds, and allowing new parties – the Know Nothings and the Republicans – to contend for federal office.

Californians were similarly at odds. Sectional differences and tensions within the Democratic Party encouraged division of the state, with the southern portion to be part of the new Territory of Colorado. If it was open to slavery, the Territory of Colorado might restore the political balance of free and slave states and suspend secession, if only temporarily.

The California legislature (described as “intensely pro-slavery”)[2] passed the Pico Act in 1859 calling on Congress to divide the state and create the new Colorado territory. The Pico Act was signed by Governor John B. Weller, overwhelmingly approved by voters in Southern California,[3] and sent to Congress.

Asylum of peace and safety.

Governor Weller did not expect that the division of California would relieve the political crisis. National disunion was too far advanced by 1859. If the next step wasn’t civil war, it would be the creation of two weaker nations at constant odds. Distant California, Weller thought, would mean little to either a northern union or a southern confederacy except to be taxed by one or the other.

Weller offered the alluring alternative of independence. “If the wild spirit of fanaticism which now pervades the land,” he said, “should destroy [our] magnificent confederacy – which God forbid – [California] will not go with the south or north, but here upon the shores of the Pacific found a mighty republic, which may in the end prove the greatest of all.”[4]

Other Californians agreed. “We are for a Pacific Republic,” the editor of the Sonora Democrat declared. “[California] has all the elements of greatness within her borders. Situated thousands of miles from the distracted States, she would be an asylum of peace and safety ….”[5] The San Francisco Herald supported this view. Henry Hamilton, publisher of the Los Angeles Star, also endorsed the plan. And in Stockton, a homemade flag with the legend “Pacific Republic” briefly flew.

When John Downey – an Angeleno, Democrat, and secession sympathizer – unexpectedly became governor in early 1860,[6] he was less certain about independence, but he needed to be cautious in opposing it. California’s representatives in Congress – Senators Milton Latham and William Gwin and Representatives John Burch and Charles Scott – argued privately that the complaints of the slave states were valid. Publically, they called for California’s neutrality in the event of civil war and the state’s eventual independence.

The fantasy of a Pacific republic, extending from western Canada into northern Mexico and from the Pacific to the Rocky Mountains, seemed more likely when news of Fort Sumter reached Los Angeles on the afternoon of April 24, 1861. Henry Hamilton, in a Star editorial, asked, “Shall we, too, strike for independence – or, like whipped spaniels, crawl at the feet of either a Southern or a Northern Confederacy?”[7]

A fractured California, a Confederate California, or a neutral, independent California – these anti-Union alternatives seemed real enough in Washington. The War Department, knowing his loyalty to Texas, recalled Brigadier-General Albert Sidney Johnston, commander of the US Army in California,[8] from his post at the San Francisco presidio. Johnston had resigned his commission when Texas seceded but loyally continued to serve until Brigadier-General Edwin Sumner arrived from the East to replace him.

General Sumner was told that Johnston knew of secessionist conspirators in San Francisco (which was true). He suspected that Johnston might also be one of the architects of the Pacific Republic scheme (he wasn’t). But Sumner and those who advised him saw disunion everywhere in California.[9]

Writing to the Army Adjutant General on April 28, just four days after his arrival in San Francisco, Sumner lamented

The secessionists are much the most active and zealous party, which gives them more influence than they ought to have from their numbers. I have no doubt that there is some deep scheming to draw California into the secessionist movement, in the first place as the Republic of the Pacific, expecting afterwards to induce her to join the Southern Confederacy.[10]

Ominously, Sumner warned the War Department that “the troops now here will hold their positions, but if there should be a general uprising of the people, they could not … put it down.”

Hotbed of disloyalty.

The spirit of disunion grew worse while Captain Hancock waited through the first three weeks of April 1861. He surrounded the Army storehouse in Los Angeles with the high-walled wagons that usually hauled military freight. He collected pistols to arm “a few loyal friends.”[11] Among the few likely to stand with him were Los Angeles District Attorney Ezra Drown, rancher and pro-Union polemicist Jonathan Warner, newspaper publisher Charles Conway, and port operator Phineas Banning.

General Sumner in San Francisco was pessimistic about popular support for the Union cause. “I believe there is a large majority of Union men in the State,” he reported, “but they are supine with confidence, while there is an active and zealous party of secessionists who will make all the mischief they can.”[12]

Jonathan Warner, writing to the Sacramento Daily Union, named the leading Angelenos he thought particularly zealous in support of secessionist mischief.[13]

All our judges are secessionist [Benjamin Hayes and William Dryden] are at least strongly tinctured with it. Our Sheriff [Tomás Sánchez] is a secessionist; our Deputy Sheriff [Andrew King] ditto; our County Clerk [John Shore] ditto – in one word, all our own public officials, with the exception of the District Attorney [Ezra Drown] and County Surveyor [William Moore] are secessionists, root and branch.[14]

Warner could have included Mayor Damien Marchesseault among secessionist sympathizers in Los Angeles, along with prominent attorneys Edward Kewen and Volney Howard, wealthy landowners Benjamin Wilson and William Wolfskill, physicians John Griffin (brother-in-law of former General Johnston) and James B. Winston, former State Assemblymen Daniel Showalter and Joseph Lancaster Brent, and former State Senator Cameron Thom.

Judge Benjamin Hayes assured his sister in February that “the tone of the people here (Los Angeles) is Southern to a greater extent than might be supposed ….”[15] Under the pretense of enrolling a volunteer militia for the defense of Los Angeles, secessionist leaders in February 1861 had begun recruiting among ex-southerners and native-born Californios with southern leanings. Joseph Lancaster Brent urged Judge William Dryden to swear them in as the Los Angeles Mounted Rifles. In March, former Los Angeles Mayor George W. Gift mustered the eighty riders of the Mounted Rifles at the county courthouse. The membership roll was as diverse as Los Angeles. It included, along with Brent and Gift, Sheriff Tomás Sanchez, Undersheriff Alonzo Ridley, at least four other city and county law enforcement officials, and members of the Californio, German, Irish, and Jewish communities.

Alonzo Ridley, as the unit’s captain, petitioned Adjutant General William Kibbe of the California State Militia to supply 80 rifles, Colt pistols, and sabers. Ridley was confident that the arms could be requisitioned from Los Angeles, even though it was generally known that secessionists led the Mounted Rifles.[16]

They weren’t the only show of secessionist force in early 1861. The newly organized Monte Mounted Rifles, led by Undersheriff Andrew King, made a similar request for arms.[17] Union supporters also complained of para-military organizations openly drilling in San Bernardino and in the Holcomb Valley mining camps. A shadowy organization called the Knights of the Golden Circle was said to be training secessionist recruits who would soon “leave for Dixie” and service in the Confederate States army.

Secessionist city and county officials, Hamilton’s racist editorials in the Star, armed conspirators, Confederate recruiters in the mines, and Southern sympathizers in the state Legislature – so “many active and influential citizens who are hostile to the Government whose efforts for its disintegration are strenuous and undisguised” – made Southern California, for Union men like Hancock, “the nursery, resort, and hot-bed of disloyalty.”[18]

A county not to be relied upon.

Henry Hamilton actively fostered the spirit of disloyalty in Los Angeles. Hamilton had abetted the pro-secession faction of Democrats in the national election of 1860 and had urged secessionists in Los Angeles to resist the new administration in advance of Lincoln’s inauguration.

In February 1861, Hamilton wrote that disunion might still be mended if concessions were made. “Even if secession should run its full course, and there be presented a consolidated South against the aggressions of a united North, there may, even in that attitude … arise negotiations for a union … in which the rights of the South shall be fully and fairly stipulated and guaranteed.”[19]

For Hamilton, those rights necessarily included the right to own human property, which Hamilton defended as fundamental to the principles of the Constitution. As historian John W. Robinson has argued, “Historians of the pre-Civil War period would be hard put to find anywhere a more vociferous advocate of slavery” than Henry Hamilton.[20] Robinson viewed Hamilton as an “inflexible Confederate sympathizer” who denounced Republicans, unionist Democrats, and anyone who sought to abolish slavery.

Hamilton would, the following year, use the pages of the Star to describe the Civil War explicitly as a race war.

Hamilton was not alone. Edward Kewen,[21] a nativist and white supremacist, had given rousing speeches before cheering Los Angeles audiences in the weeks leading up to the 1860 election. So had newly elected US Senator Milton Latham. Democrats in the pro-secession Breckenridge Club had met in front of the Montgomery Saloon every Tuesday evening before the election, often to hear Kewen speak, followed by a torchlight procession up Main Street to the old Plaza. Having told listeners “I must confess … I am not enamored with this word loyalty,”[22] Kewen continued to stir up secessionist support during the first months of 1861.

There was a great deal of loose talk at the Bella Union Hotel, where ex-southerners and pro-secessionists gathered, drank, and spilled out on the street with shouts of “Hurrah for Jeff Davis” and boozy choruses of “We’ll Drive the Bloody Tyrant Lincoln From Our Dear Native Soil.” When Lincoln called for volunteers to join the Union army, a huge portrait of Confederate General Beauregard went up in the hotel bar. Armed riders from San Bernardino and El Monte sometimes appeared at the Plaza with an air of urgent expectation only to ride off again. Union men in Los Angeles increasingly felt intimidated.

“Hardly a day goes by,” wrote a worried Jonathan Warner, “without leading to the discovery that individuals unsuspected of disloyalty are deeply tainted with disloyalty.”[23] Charles Conway, publisher of the Semi-Weekly Southern News, understood Warner’s anxiety. His paper opposed Southern California’s secessionist drift at the beginning of 1861.[24] He attacked Hamilton, calling him a traitor, and deplored the extent of secessionist enthusiasm the Star encouraged.

 “We shall be set down as a county not to be relied upon, and as a county containing naught but traitors and conspirators,” Conway later warned.[25]  He eventually called for the suppression of Hamilton’s paper. “No other government in the world suffers itself to be misrepresented and maligned by its citizens,” he complained, “and it is time our Government should prove no exception.”[26]

More danger of disaffection.

Both secessionists and Union men in Los Angeles expected California to be dramatically changed by the onrush of events brought on by the Civil War. What form change would take remained unclear.

Legislation to divide the state into northern and southern territories had gone to Congress two years before, but action was unlikely. The state’s pro-secession Congressional delegation had advocated the Pacific Republic scheme, but it was too fantastic to generate support now that war had begun.[27] Neutrality had support from secessionists and many anti-secession Democrats, but no mechanism other than secession could enforce it. Joining the entire state to the Confederacy was doubtful, but secessionist Southern California might be annexed.

Albert Sidney Johnston, aging and weary, left San Francisco on April 25 after resigning his commission. Before turning over his command of the Army’s Department of the Pacific to General Sumner, Johnson doubtlessly reminded Sumner of Captain Hancock’s vulnerability in Los Angeles. Sumner also knew the psychological effect that a successful move against Army supplies would have on secessionist Angelenos. It might even signal the “general uprising” Sumner feared.[28]

In Los Angeles, Hancock had literally circled the wagons in anticipation of a raid on his store of arms. There was little he could do now but observe, report to Sumner, and wait.

On April 29, Sumner responded to Hancock’s fears and wrote the War Department

I have found it necessary to withdraw the troops from Fort Mojave and place them at Los Angeles. There is more danger of disaffection at this place than any other in the state. There are a number of influential men there who are decided Secessionists, and if we have difficulty it will commence there.”[29]

On Sumner’s order, troops from Fort Mojave and later from Fort Tejon began preparations to relieve Hancock and block secessionist ambitions in Southern California. In Los Angeles, Hancock set two wagon trains in motion to collect military stores from both forts. Troopers from Fort Mojave were expected to arrive on May 14. Los Angeles remained on edge.

On May 4, Hancock wrote to Sumner that if there “should be a difficulty in California it is likely that it will first show its head [in Los Angeles], but I do not think the matter is ripe yet for any serious movement.” Nevertheless, Hancock warned Sumner that

There are people here anxious for a difficulty and there may be (I believe there are, although not yet formidable) organizations to that end. The people generally are scarcely prepared for strife, and there is a strong loyal element among them. On the other hand, there is quite a number of reckless people who have nothing to lose, who are ready for any change, and who are active in encouraging acts tending to hostilities .… [They have] a new, bronze field-piece and carriage (I think a 6-pounder gun) ….[30]

Hancock thought the city’s Union men were capable of giving him aid (encouraged perhaps by the troop movements underway) but “those persons who have heretofore been influential and active leaders in politics, and have exercised great control over the people, are encouraging difficulties here by open avowals of their opinions.” He asked that Fort Tejon or Fort Mojave bring two 12-pound howitzers. With dry understatement, Hancock wrote that “the moral effect would not be trifling in case of a difficulty.”

Hancock’s contradictory report to Sumner – Los Angeles was quiet and Union men confident but the city was restless and the Army’s response to “a difficulty” would require heavy artillery – illustrates the uncertainty that both Sumner and Hancock felt about the city in the first months of the Civil War. Adding to Hancock’s concerns was the discontent he felt among Californios and their Latino dependents. “When once a revolution commences, the masses of the native population will act, and they are worthy of a good deal of consideration. If they act it will be most likely against the Government.”[31]

Both men had to consider the implications of Albert Sidney Johnston’s arrival on May 2, trailing a cloud of rumors about his connection to conspiracies and the Pacific Republic scheme. If Johnston had been active in plotting with secessionists to bring Southern California into the Confederacy, then Los Angeles would naturally have been Johnston’s destination. (Johnson and his family were now living with Dr. Griffin and his wife.)

Hancock’s more immediate concern was who would arrive first – Army dragoons or the Monte boys and other like-minded secessionists. Rowdies in El Monte and San Bernardino had already begun to parade the bear flag of the California Republic, now taken to be a symbol of secession. Hancock expected that the next attempt to “raise aloft the flag of the ‘bear’” would come in Los Angeles on May 12. Hancock had learned that a group of fifty or more riders planned to meet at the Plaza and raise the bear flag over the county courthouse. And would that end, after drinks and rebel songs at the Bella Union bar, with stripping the Army depot of its guns and ammunition?

It might have. Except the leaders of the Los Angeles Mounted Rifles feared that a disorganized assault on Hancock and his supplies would put their own plans at risk. Now that Southern California was to be garrisoned by the Army, making annexation impossible, the mounted riflemen intended to slip out of the county, cross the Colorado River at Yuma, disappear into the disputed Arizona territory, and make their way to Texas.

Sheriff Sanchez (who was a 2nd lieutenant in the Mounted Rifles) hastily persuaded the members to hold off any demonstration in Los Angeles, and Undersheriff Alonzo Ridley, as captain of the Mounted Rifles, met quietly with Johnston to share his plans for assembling a party of ex-military officers and ardent secessionists that would slip out Los Angeles and join the Confederacy.

Gone to Dixie

On May 14, Major James Carleton and fifty mounted troopers from Fort Tejon rode into Los Angeles. They set up a temporary encampment about half-a-mile from the Army depot, placed strategically to oversee Hancock’s position and close enough to the center of town to respond the provocations of secessionists. Carleton named the site Camp Fitzgerald.

Hancock, his wife, and the Army supplies were safe. The moment had passed when secessionists might have raised a force of several dozen from El Monte, San Bernardino, and among the Californios in Los Angeles who favored the Confederacy. A successful raid on Army supplies might have been enough to persuade Confederate units operating in the Arizona Territory to cross the Colorado River into Southern California.[32]

Albert Sidney Johnson, along with the most ardent secessionists in Los Angeles, quietly left Los Angeles on June 16, crossed into Arizona, and with the help of secessionists there, joined the Confederate States army. The Johnson party wasn’t the first to make the desert crossing and not the last. An estimated 250 Southern Californians joined the Confederacy by that route. By September, Captain Hancock was serving in the East, eventually to become a Union hero at Gettysburg.

The secessionist threat had ended, but Los Angeles would continue to be troubled by secessionist agitators who were abetted, Colonel Carleton told General Sumner, by a sheriff who wouldn’t arrest secessionists, judges who wouldn’t try them, and juries that wouldn’t convict them. In April 1862, Undersheriff Andrew King was arrested at his office by Union troopers for the use of “treasonable expressions,” cheering for Jefferson Davis, and displaying a large portrait of General Beauregard. After taking the usual oath of loyalty that he regarded as meaningless, King was released.

The War Department’s response to the spirit of disunion in Los Angeles was a new military garrison called Camp Drum. Significantly, the encampment was sited close to Banning’s Wilmington port and far from the Bella Union hotel and its secessionist patrons. Other military posts in the Los Angeles area were kept busy patrolling the city and arresting Southern sympathizers who would be promptly released after taking the required loyalty oath.

The boys from El Monte continued to swagger through doors of the Bella Union with the implication that they could still deliver vigilante “justice” to upstart Unionists. Pro-secessionist agitation was so disturbing that Independence Day celebrations were cancelled in 1863 and 1864. Tomás Sánchez would remain sheriff of Los Angeles County, despite his connection to leading secessionists.[33] Dr. Griffin, Judge Hayes, Benjamin Wilson, and other Angelenos still sympathized with the Confederacy, to the point of contributing substantially to organizations that aided wounded and disabled Confederate soldiers. And Henry Hamilton continued to publish anti-Lincoln editorials in the Star, although the paper was briefly suppressed for sedition. Hamilton was even elected to the state Legislature.

According to some sources, Los Angeles supplied only two volunteers to the Union army: Horace Bell and the city’s zanjero Charles Myers Jenkins.

Yet secessionist.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis made Albert Sidney Johnson the second-ranking general of the Confederate Army. Johnson died early in the war at the battle of Shiloh, Alonzo Ridley by his side. George W. Gift, who had presided over the original mustering of the Mounted Rifles, became a Confederate naval officer. Joseph Lancaster Brent found his own way to the Confederate States, ultimately becoming an army brigade commander. So did attorney Cameron Thom, who became a captain. Thom returned to Los Angeles and served at the city’s mayor from 1882 to 1884. When the war ended, former Undersheriff Alonzo Ridley joined another dubious cause and died fighting for Emperor Maximilian in Mexico.

That leading men in Los Angeles remained openly secessionist for so long and that so many Confederate volunteers passed through the city at the start of the war troubled Unionists then and those who wrote about the Civil War in its immediate aftermath.

Had Los Angeles remained attached to the Union only by the presence of Army troops, as Charles Conway of the Semi-Weekly News believed? Or had a policy of toleration on the part of Army commanders, obliged to work with disloyal city and county officials, preserved Southern California for the Union, whose militant secessionists had “gone to Dixie” rather than lead insurrection at home?

Challenged in late 1865 to define where he and other secessionist Angelenos stood, now that the Confederacy had been defeated, King wrote a defiant reply. “We have been and are yet secessionist,” he insisted.[34]

Many Angelenos agreed. And when they went to the polls in election years after 1865, they voted secessionists and former Confederates into city, county, and state offices, which is why the Civil War remains a powerful lens through which to examine how Angelenos saw themselves then and how we see ourselves today.

 Notes

1. “Free soil” did not mean anti-slavery. California limited more than any other “free” state the civil rights of African Americans before the Civil War. Between 1849 and 1865, from 500 to 1,500 African American bondspeople were taken to California.

2. Imogene Spaulding, “The Attitude of California to the Civil War,” Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California, vol. 9, nos. 1-2, 107.

3. Voters in the state’s six southern counties supported division of the state by 2477 for and 828 against.

4. “Governor’s Message,” Journal of the Senate of the State of California at the 11th Session of the Legislature (Sacramento: T. C. Potts, 186.), 60.

5. Quoted by Spaulding, “The Attitude of California to the Civil War,” Annual Publication, 108.

6. Downey was sworn in as Lieutenant Governor in January 1860. Five days later, Governor Milton Latham resigned after being elected (by the state legislature) to fill the vacancy left by the death of US Senator David C. Broderick. Broderick had been killed in a duel over the division of California into “free soil” and “slave” territories in September 1859. Downey assumed the governorship on January 14, 1860.

7. “Hostilities Commenced,” Los Angeles Star, April 27, 1861.

8. Johnston took command of the Department of the Pacific on December 21, 1860. He resigned on April 9, 1861, when his adopted home state of Texas seceded.

9. President Lincoln received only 25 percent of Southern California’s vote in November 1860.

10. Sumner to Townsend, April 28, 1861. Operations in: The Pacific Coast, January 1, 1861-June 30, 1865 (Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, ser. 1, vol. 50, part 1), 471.

11. According to his wife, writing many years later.

12. Sumner to Thomas, June 10, 1861, Operations, 506.

13. The constitution of the Confederate States of America was adopted by seven southern states in March 1861.

14. “Letter from Los Angeles,” Sacramento Daily Union, April 30, 1862.

15. As quoted by John W. Robinson in Los Angeles in Civil War Days, 1860-1865 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), e-book.

16. Throughout the 1850s, the state militia had supplied muskets and other military paraphernalia to quasi-official volunteer units organized in Los Angeles by many of the same men who, in 1861, formed the Los Angeles Mounted Rifles. Some of these arms were collected by Sheriff Tomás Sánchez. After the Johnston/Mounted Rifles party left for Texas in June 1861, none of the rifles and sabers sent to Los Angeles could be found, presumably because they had been taken to the Confederacy by Undersheriff Alonzo Ridley.

17. In some accounts, Andrew King is identified as a deputy sheriff; in others, an undersheriff.

18. Ezra Drown, Jonathan Warner, and James Mohan, “Address to the Loyal and Patriotic Voters of Los Angeles County,” clipping in Scrapbook of Benjamin Hayes, vol. 48 (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley), publication and date not identified.

19. “The Crisis,” Los Angeles Star, February 2, 1861.

20. John W. Robinson, “A California Copperhead: Henry Hamilton and the Los Angeles Star,” Journal of the Southwest (Autumn 1981), pp 113-120.

21. Edward John Kewen had been California’s first Attorney General in 1850.

22. Quoted in California and Californians, vol. 2. Rockwell D. Hunt, ed. (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1926), p 339.

23. “Letter from Los Angeles,” Daily Alta California, September 29, 1861.

24. The creation of the Confederate States was announced on February 8, 1861.

25. Semi-Weekly News, September 6, 1861.

26. Semi-Weekly News, July 30, 1862.

27. Congressman John Burch, in a letter published in the San Francisco Herald on January 3, 1861, strongly endorsed the Pacific Republic scheme. Congressman Charles Scott echoed Burch a few days later in the same newspaper.

28. This also was the view of Adjutant-General William Kibbe of the state militia.

29. Sumner to Townsend, April 29, 1861, Operations, 474.

30. Hancock to Army Headquarters, May 4, 1861, Operations, 477. Hancock was referring to the field gun that County Sheriff Sanchez had been keeping (unaccountably) at the county jail along with other arms. If a 6-pounder, it was a formidable piece of military hardware.

31. Hancock to Army Headquarters, May 4, 1861, Operations, 480.

32. In July 1861, Texan Volunteers, led by Confederate Colonel John Baylor, captured the southern half of the Arizona Territory and named it the Confederate Territory of Arizona. By February 1862, Confederate units had nearly reached the Colorado River.

33. Sanchez was re-elected sheriff in 1863 and 1865.

34. Los Angeles News, November 24, 1865.

She gave her real name to a reporter who came to watch one of her burials. He wrote down Corrinne Neustedt, [1] but that wasn’t her name. The reporter had misheard. A name that was easier to remember – the name on the black-and-white banners and the one in the newspapers – was Gloria Graves. She was, for a season, the “Beautiful Girl Buried Alive,” initially at the end of the Ocean Park pier in Santa Monica. Reporters, playing up the sex angle, described Gloria as “curvesome.”

Her handlers included The Mysterious Mr. Q, the name Robert Godwin used as a vaudeville performer. Godwin presented himself as one of those mind-over-matter, higher-consciousness grifters who regularly turned up in LA to grab a few bucks from the gullible or the bored. Godwin had a wife – Florence – who posed as Gloria’s nurse. Maybe she was a nurse. Godwin stuck the title Dr. on his name and called himself a hypnotist. Maybe he was. He had a look that could etch glass. He had a strange way with women. You’ve probably guessed that The Mysterious Mr. Q will be dead before this story is done.

Godwin exhibited Gloria as the “Beautiful Girl Buried Alive” in the summer of 1935 for a-dime-a-look down a long shaft that opened over Gloria’s almost pretty face and conventionally blond hair, shining in the glare of an electric light. You could have seen the same face and hair repeated on any street corner in Hollywood for free. That didn’t stop the customers from paying ten cents and peering at the girl lying below, entombed in her coffin.

The curious could call questions down to her, and she would answer. She had a nice voice.

Buried alive.

Gloria Graves wasn’t the first girl to be buried alive. Lois Shirk, a recent high school graduate, lay beneath the Lincoln Lawn Miniature Golf Course in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1933. She was happy to be interred. “My family needs the money badly,” she told the Gettysburg Times. 1933 was the Depression’s worst year.

Irwin Westheimer, a vaudeville comic who went by the stage name Billy West, had himself buried at Ocean View on the New Jersey shore in 1933. He drank Orange Crush “exclusively for his liquid diet,” the banner over his grave site said. The local Orange Crush bottler and an appliance store paid for his stunt.

Some burial artists said they were contending for a record-breaking stay. Jack Loreen, an out-of-work miner who had done weekend stints underground at carnivals on the East Coast, took long-form burial to Chicago in 1933. [2] Loreen intended to be interred for 60 days, longer than anyone, he claimed. He brought a “four-tube, midget radio” for company and claimed that the first tune he heard (using his toes to dial it in) was “Dancing on the Grave of Love.” [3]

Despite a night of flooding that put four inches of muddy water in the bottom of his casket, Loreen stuck it out. He was buried again in 1934, staying down 65 days. In December, Loreen, buried eight feet underground, was “attracting attention at Hollywood Stables,” an LA supper club. Top billing there went to a fan dancer and a rumba team. [4]

“Human groundhog” Harry Morrison spent 120 days under the Akron airport. He rose on resurrection day in 1934 heavier by 28 pounds and looking like “a potato just out of the cellar bin.” He had been looking for any kind of work before he chose voluntary burial. "I'd rather work than be buried alive," [5]

Endurance contests had entertained American gawkers through the 1920s – six-day bike races, flagpole sitting, and long-distance walking. But this was different. Between Jazz Age flagpole sitters and those who willingly buried themselves was a Depression-made abyss of wrecked businesses, mass unemployment, and broken dreams.

Coffined and nearly immobile, a simulation of death-in-life, burial artists looked up into the faces of men and women just as desperate and powerless as they were, and just as trapped, only the buried were getting paid. They were celebrities for having what millions of the anonymous unemployed had: no other job except to wait.

Beautiful girl.

Gloria Graves (whose misheard name was actually Corinne Nienstedt) took being buried alive with the breezy nonchalance of Joan Blondell or Ann Sothern as a B movie chorus girl. In one front-page account.

Workmen tapped down the last rivets on Gloria Graves’ stainless steel coffin …, ready to lower it – with Gloria inside – into a 15-foot grave at Ocean Park beach …, officially opening the 1935 swimming season. Not even Gloria could explain why her burial should usher in the swimming season. “I’m really interested in aviation – not swimming,” she pointed out, but the good folk of Ocean Park beach, who have laid out some $1,500 for Gloria’s burial, insist it opens the swimming season, and since it’s their money, that’s the way it stands. [6]

Gloria told the reporter that she had been buried before, but only briefly. Her new goal was a three-month entombment. At stake was the $1,500 the operators of the Ocean Park pier would pay, but Godwin insisted that the burial was intended to be a demonstration of a new form of self-hypnosis, the result of his years of research.

“Gloria is a scientific psychologist with tremendous will power. If she says she’ll stay under dirt for 90 days you can bet all the grapes in Mussolini’s boots she’ll be there when they pull up the casket.” [7]

The reporter described Godwin as Gloria’s “sponsor, mental advisor, and best friend.”

His self-hypnosis instruction seemed to work. Gloria was fearless about the burial. “I know I’ll like it,” she said. “I won’t have to worry about traffic lights, and I’ll take plenty of books to read. I’m just nuts on aviation and I’ve got several books on aviation to read while I’m down there.” Down there she would be fed through the airshaft and the condition of her heart checked daily by means of a custom-made, extended stethoscope.

Gloria – to whom the adjectives tall, willowy, and blond were now permanently attached – was lowered into her grave on Saturday afternoon June 15, 1935. Five tons of beach sand was laid over her coffin. Four days later Jack Loreen rested in his wooden casket waiting to be buried alive at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach.

Perhaps the twin burials were a coincidence, but it didn’t look like one.

Gloria brought aviation books to her grave. Jack, whose promoter called him the “world’s champion ‘self-inflicted burial’ artist,” brought a radio set and a telephone (Bayview 7272, no collect calls accepted). Jack’s promoter was dismissive of Gloria’s burial attempt. “There is only one Loreen, and the others just don’t count,” he announced. [8]

The curious or the morbid lined up that summer to pay their dimes to see Gloria and Jack. Some asked questions, shouting down the airshaft. Most just looked, not sure if what they saw was a trick or real.

Resurrections.

Gloria was lifted from her seaside grave in Santa Monica on September 15, 92 days, 5 hours and 28 minutes after her coffin lid had been screwed shut. She shook some dirt out of her “corn-yellow hair” and announced that she had broken the world’s record for being buried alive. (The record had no meaning, although it was clear that Jack Loreen was keeping score.) “I hope I have proved to skeptics that this was not a publicity stunt,” she told reporters, “I am a student of psychology, and what I have done proves conclusively that mind is stronger than matter.” [9]

Dr. Godwin announced with scientific precision that she had consumed 60 pounds of spinach, 45 quarts of milk, 30 quarts of buttermilk, 30 pounds of carrots, 42 heads of lettuce, 39 eggs, 28 malted milks (all vanilla), 20 loaves of whole wheat bread, 8 quarts of cream, 3 steaks, a single piece of candy, 19 packages of chewing gum, 35 pounds of prunes and 5 cans of cod liver oil. She also had received 27 proposals of marriage, 13,652 offers of a date, 27 offers of jobs from nurse to movie star, 7 books on exercise, and 5 offers to join churches and 14 to join the Communist Party. Gloria had been viewed by 72,693 customers at 10 cents a look. [10]

She would have remained underground longer, she said, except for a new law that restricted endurance contests like marathon dancing and flagpole sitting. Gloria was resurrected just as the law went into effect. “Miss Graves felt she made sufficient contribution to the science of psychology,” Godwin explained, slipping into gangster-ese, “without she had to be sent to the jug for it.”

Jack Loreen wasn’t worried about being jugged. He smiled up at reporters on his ninety-third day underground, declaring that he now held the record for self-inflicted burial, beating the “Ocean Park blond” by a whole day. He planned to be interred for another ten or twelve days, he said. Ultimately, he spent 119 days below ground.

The first 100 days were the easiest, he said. “After I broke the record, my nerves began to get jumpy. I couldn't sleep. I've never counted so many sheep in my life.” His coffin was raised on October 17 and Jack "de-casketized" at a wrestling match later that evening. [11]

He’d had enough. “Driven to stunt acts by the Depression and in order to extricate himself from a financial hole, Mr. Loreen submitted to his being buried alive,” wrote the Republican Press of Ukiah, where he was recovering from his long rest underground. He gave up the coffined life. “He has entered the used car business in San Francisco where he how intends to reside with his wife and two children.” [12]

Pinched.

Gloria Graves, however, was ready for another bout of immobility. Almost as soon as Jack Loreen had given up being buried, Godwin rented an empty lot in what is now Koreatown, opened another grave, lowered Gloria into it (this time with her own radio and telephone), and began collecting dimes. A good crowd came for the burial, but after a week the crowds were thinner and the dimes fewer.

Gloria had been buried just 192 hours when detectives from the LAPD vice squad showed up with uniformed patrolmen and a work detail of trustees from the county jail. They had come to enforce a city ordinance that outlawed endurance contests. “This show is pinched,” declared Detective Lieutenants L. O. Jennings, L. L. Miller, and Fred L. Coe.

A stringer from the United Press syndicate captured the rest of the graveside encounter as it was a scene in a Bowery Boys picture:

Robert Wood, described as a “ticket taker,” looked over the ordinance. “Looky,” he said, “This here’s against flagpole sitting and marathon dancing. I give you my word Miss Graves ain't sitting on no flagpole, and it’s a cinch she ain’t dancing down there.” He waved a hand to a mound of earth, eight feet beneath which was the narrow grave of Miss Graves, but the detectives paid him no heed. Gravely they surrounded the peep-hole through which customers might peer after buying a ticket. “Hey,” shouted Jennings, “you’re under arrest. Come up outta there.” “I can’t.” trilled Miss Graves. ''Come down and get me. The detectives did … and three hours later Miss Graves rose from the tomb. “But please,” wailed Wood, “what's it all for?” “That ordinance,” explained the law majestically, “ain't only for flagpole sitters and marathon dancers. It’s agin’ all indoor endurance contests.” “Ya dummy," retorted Miss Graves, “who ever heard of grave with a door? You can’t prove nothin.” “We don't hafta,” refuted the police. “That's up to the city prosecutors.” “Sure,” put in a bystander, “Lawyers are wonderful.” All nodded solemnly, and the patrol wagon came clanging. [13]

But Gloria had a point. The ordinance specifically outlawed flagpole sitting and marathon dancing by name and generally restricted other endurance contests that occurred indoors. Being buried alive in a vacant city lot wasn’t exactly indoors.

The logic of this objection didn’t keep Gloria, Florence Godwin, and Robert Wood from being booked on misdemeanor charges and then freed on $50 bail each pending a hearing before a municipal court judge the following morning. The judge remanded the three for trial in late December.

A smiling Gloria brought her coffin to court and provided a tutorial on the mechanics of being buried alive. Courtroom spectators were fascinated. Detective Lieutenant Jennings, who had stopped the show on November 15, told the court he was not convinced Gloria was demonstrating the power of mind over matter as advertised. Judge Arthur Crum agreed, and fined the defendants $50 each. They said they would appeal.

They did, and because of technicalities in the criminal complaint and the trial judge’s original decision, the appellate court agreed that Gloria’s burial hadn’t violated the city’s ordinance against indoor endurance contests. The Los Angeles Times headlined “Buried-Alive Girl Wins in Appeal from Penalty.”

Murder in Hollywood.

Aviation enthusiast Gloria Graves – willowy, tall, curvesome, blond – drops out of the buried alive racket at this point and disappears from the newspaper headlines. [14] (But there is more ahead for Gloria as Corinne Nienstedt.)

Robert and Florence Godwin also disappear from the headlines until they reappear in 1939. Things had worsened for Godwin and his wife. Perhaps as a result of war injuries, Godwin had become an addict. He also had a drinking problem and a bad heart. He had hospital bills and owed even more to Dr. Harold T. Edwards, an osteopath who treated him for his addictions.

Sometime in 1938, needing money, Godwin had gone looking for a new partner for a new act. He found one in a pretty, 20-year-old actress named Marianna Persall.

Persall wasn’t another “buried alive” girl or the subject of the strip-tease-via-hypnosis routine that had been Godwin’s vaudeville act. What Persall was expected to do on stage isn’t clear from news accounts. Edwards, the osteopath, was part of the deal, although mostly by finding backers for the new show. Persall now lived with the Godwins in their Hollywood bungalow.

During the first weeks of 1939, the mixture of drugs, liquor, Persall, and Godwin led to the inevitable. Godwin was something of a brute, but also someone that some women found fascinating. [15] Maybe Persall did.

She gave in to Godwin’s advances but threatened to tell his wife about the affair. Godwin reacted by kicking, beating, and choking Persall into unconsciousness. When Florence Godwin confronted him, he struck her as well. She fled the house. Godwin began drinking heavily, ending up in the hospital that evening.

Discharged into Edwards’ care on February 8 or 9, Godwin and Edwards met with potential backers in a Hollywood hotel room. The meeting didn’t go well. Afterwards, Godwin blamed Edwards and began accusing him of knowing where Florence Godwin was hiding. Edwards retaliated with a warning about harming Persall. The two men were on the street by this time. Godwin clipped Edwards on the jaw, knocking him to the sidewalk. Edwards drew a pistol from his coat pocket and fired one wild round and three better aimed shots. They struck Godwin.

If the news stories are right, Godwin’s dying words were another B picture cliché. “Dramatically clutching his chest, Godwin gasped, ‘He got me,’ and fell to the sidewalk dead.” [16]

Edwards was arrested and did not deny that he had shot Godwin, but only in self-defense. Persall disappeared for several hours after hearing of Godwin's death, probably to meet with Florence Godwin, who came out of hiding. A coroner’s jury heard their stories, along with the testimony of eyewitnesses, and delivered a verdict of justifiable homicide.

The District Attorney’s office was less understanding. Godwin hadn’t been armed at the time of his death. Edwards could have fled without taking further shots at Godwin. The District Attorney filed a charge of murder.

In anticipation of the preliminary hearing, Edwards, Florence Godwin, and Persall – with help from the newspapers – spun a convincing story about the days leading up to the shooting. They turned Mysterious Mr. Q/Dr. Godwin into a kind of monster: addict, abusive drunk, sinister hypnotist, and sexual predator.

Florence Godwin testified at the preliminary hearing in mid-February that her husband had been under the care of Edwards since 1937, treating him for a narcotics habit. “He was a dangerous man,” she told Judge Leo Freund. Persall testified that Godwin often became abusive and beat her, knocking her to the floor frequently.

Edwards repeated his account of being struck down by Godwin and fearing for his life. Eyewitnesses corroborated that Godwin had been the aggressor. On a motion from Edward’s attorney, Judge Freund reduced the charge from willful murder to manslaughter and released Edwards on $2,000 bail pending trial in Superior Court. Deputy District Attorney Kenneth Thomas objected, but Judge Freund gaveled the hearing closed. [17]

The Edwards trial was heard in April without a jury before Superior Court Judge Charles Fricke. Florence Godwin, again testifying for the defense, claimed that her husband had “an ungovernable temper, a ‘vicious disposition,’ and was a narcotics addict. She said her husband had threatened Dr. Edwards with death if he interfered with his attempts to place under his hypnotic spell Marianna Persall, partner in his vaudeville act.” [18] Eyewitnesses again testified that Godwin had attacked Edwards first.

In the Los Angeles Times account of the trial, Edwards insisted that he only meant to frighten Godwin, not kill him:

I was knocked into the doorway of a store and saw him corning toward me with his hands out as if to choke me,” Dr. Edwards testified. "His face was contorted with a maniacal look, so I drew my gun and fired in an attempt to scare him away. I shot four or five times. With the last shot, he grabbed at his heart and said, “You got me." Godwin's attack on him, Dr. Edwards said, followed unjustified criticism of Dr. Edwards, whom he accused of causing him to lose the financial backing of a man Godwin wanted to sponsor a play. Before the shooting, the osteopath said, the hypnotist had cursed him, roughed him up with his hands, and threatened to kill him. [19]

“Godwin may have been ruthless and evil, but he was unarmed and the man who shot him down should be found guilty of murder,” Deputy District Attorney W. O. Russell argued. Judge Fricke disagreed. He acquitted Edwards of the manslaughter charge.

On the steps of the courthouse, Persall, Florence Godwin, and a relieved Edwards celebrated his release, grateful perhaps that Robert Godwin was out of their lives.

He was buried at what is now the Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood. No one expected him to be resurrected soon.

Epilog for a Pilot.

The fad for buried alive stunts did not die with Godwin’s end. There are stage magicians today who perform versions of these stunts. Some still try for the mythical record, claiming to have broken it with stays of just a couple of months. Jack Loreen and Gloria Graves would be amused.

Jack, one hopes, was a good salesmen, husband, and father. His story beyond the grave could have ended happily. If you want to believe that Corinne Nienstedt was Gloria Graves, and that Corinne was as much an aviation enthusiast as she said she was, then her story also may have ended well.

The face of a less brassy Corinne Nienstedt smiles warmly from a black-and-white photograph, probably shot in 1943. She’s wearing a leather flight jacket with the cartoon mascot of the WASPs. Corrine was a member of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, an civilian, all-volunteer corps of women pilots who flew every kind of military aircraft from factory airfields to military bases.

There were more than a thousand WASPs in World War II who freed military pilots and aircrews to return to combat. The WASP pilots risked their lives; 39 of them died when engines failed, landing gears collapsed, or they went missing.

Toward the end of the war, Corrine Nienstedt was stationed at the Moore Field combat training base in Texas. Her unit’s assignment was towing aerial targets for trainee fighter pilots and ferrying military planes to all parts of the country.

Once she had been earthbound, but now she soared. [20]

Notes

1. The San Bernardino County Sun (San Bernardino, California). 16 September 1935, 1.

2. Southtown Economist (Chicago, Illinois), July 13, 1933, 1.

3. Radio Guide (Metropolitan Edition, Chicago), 3-9 September 1933, 11.

4. Los Angeles Times, December 14, 1934, 26.

5. Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio), August 20, 1934, 9. (Footage of Morrison’s unearthing can be found online.)

6. Klamath News (Klamath Falls, Oregon), Jun 14, 1935, 1.

7. Ibid.

8. San Bernardino County Sun, June 19, 1935, 3. Carl T. Nunan, who ballyhooed Loreen’s burial, was a publicist connected with the amusement park at Ocean Beach.

9. San Bernardino County Sun, September 16, 1935, 1.

10. Ibid.

11. Oakland Tribune (Oakland, California). 18 October 1935, 25.

12. Republican Press (Ukiah, California), October 30, 1935, 1.

13. Nevada State Journal (Reno, Nevada), November 17, 1935, 5

14. Gloria Graves turns up, but only as a passing reference, in a mystery story serialized in the Des Moines Register in November 1936. There are snapshots of another burial, dated July 1936, but no news stories or advertisements mention this show or where it was located.

15. Godwin told the police in Memphis in 1928 that he had been married eight times, and some of the women were already married. Florence told LA reporters she had married Godwin in 1928 and was his ninth wife.

16. Danville Bee (Danville, Virginia), 10 March 1939, 8.

17. Santa Cruz Sentinel (Santa Cruz, California), Wednesday, April 19, 1939, 2.

18. Los Angeles Times, 16 February 1939, 10.

19. The Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1939, 39.

20. Corinne Nienstedt died in 1996.

More stories, profiles of Angelenos famous and unknown, and new episodes in finding a “sense of place” in twenty-first century Los Angeles are in Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory and a Sense of Place, published by Angel City Press.

Los Angeles in 1855 was a flea-bitten little town with nothing much to recommend it but thousands of semi-wild cattle strewn on its hills.[1] Rancho beef was herded north to hungry miners in the gold fields, and gold came south, paid to Californio rancheros who gambled it on horse races or spent it on Chinese silk, Manila embroidery, and tooled leather saddles.

In the saloons that fronted on the city’s unlighted dirt streets, roughly distilled aguardiente (“fire water”) fueled so many brawls among cattle drovers and vaqueros that Los Angeles was possibly the most violent city in America.

It was barely a city. There were no hospitals for the sick or shelters for the orphaned. When epidemics of smallpox and cholera swept through, the infected were quarantined in a wretched “pesthouse” hard by the town cemetery or they were nursed by a boarding house proprietor who was paid so much a head by the county. A close relative might take in an orphaned child, but in a town of strangers, to be helpless and alone was a curse.[2]

Bishop Thaddeus Amat, whose Monterey diocese included Los Angeles, saw what the city’s poor and abandoned lacked and appealed for the help of civic-minded Catholic businessmen and landowners. They formed a committee. As the Los Angeles Star reported:

[I]t was organized by calling to the Chair Don Abel Stearns and John G. Downey, Secretary, when, on motion of Hon. Benjamin Hayes, a committee of nine, consisting of the following gentlemen, were appointed, viz: Hon. Benjamin Hayes, Don Abel Stearns, Hon. Thomas Foster, Don Luis Vignes, Hon. Ezra Drown, Don Antonio F. Coronel, Don Manuel Requena, Don Ignacio del Valle and John G. Downey, for the purpose of drafting resolutions expressive of the sense of the meeting. On motion, the committee retired, and after due deliberation returned and reported as follows: Resolved, that Don Agustin Olvera, Don Ignacio del Valle, Don Antonio F. Coronel, David W. Alexander, Esq., and Hon. Benjamin Hayes be appointed a committee to solicit subscriptions from the citizens of this county … and that Don Manuel Requena be appointed Treasurer to said Committee.[3]

The committeemen were a representative sample of the city’s Californio elite, Anglo landowners who had prospered under Mexican colonial rule, and striving Yankees who would, like Downey, become players in state and local politics. Bishop Amat promised to staff an orphanage and perhaps even a hospital, if these men could purchase a place for them. They told Bishop Amat that they could.

God’s Geese.

Many years later, Harris Newmark recalled how basic social services first came to Los Angeles in the form of blue-gowned sisters in outsized, stiffly starched wimples that some observers likened to kites and others to the white wings of geese:

About the beginning of 1856, Sisters of Charity[4] made their first appearance …. Sisters Maria Scholastica, Maria Corzina, Ana, Clara, Francisca and Angela…. It was to them that B. D. Wilson sold his Los Angeles home, including ten acres of fine orchard, at the corner of Alameda and Macy streets, for eight thousand dollars, and there for many years they conducted their school, the Institute and Orphan Asylum ….[5]

Newmark misrembered the names of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul who arrived in Los Angeles on January 6 1856. They were Sister Mary Scholastica Logsdon and Sister Ann Gillen, both from the Emmetsburg, Maryland motherhouse of their order. Sisters Angelita Mombrado, Clara Cisneros, and Francesca Fernández had been recruited by Bishop Amat in Spain.[6] Together, the bishop and the sisters had traveled by side-wheel steamer from New York to the Isthmus of Panama, taken the newly completed rail line to the Pacific side, and sailed from there to San Francisco where Sister Corsina McKay joined them for the trip south to Los Angeles.

The arrival of the six sisters wasn’t handled well. Debarking had been difficult at the mud flat that was the port of Los Angeles. The famously jolting ride from Phineas Banning’s Wilmington anchorage had been worse. No one greeted when they stepped down from the stagecoach, only a startled priest from the plaza church who hurried out from the rectory.

The sisters spent the next days at the home of Ignacio and Isobel del Valle while Sister Scholastica negotiated accommodations for a convent and the orphanage that Bishop Amat so desperately wanted. She chose a frame house northwest of the plaza belonging to Benjamin Wilson. The building had been fabricated on the East Coast, disassembled into numbered parts, shipped around South America to Los Angeles, and put back together.

“It’s something more than twelve acres,” wrote the Los Angeles Star on January 12, 1856, “within a few minutes’ walk of the public square – ‘in the city, yet out of the city’ – and in the very finest state of cultivation: a large two-story frame house on it, with which the Sisters are satisfied. There are seven and a half acres of vineyard, the grapes worth $1,500 annually. It has an orchard of choice fruit, imported by Mr. Wilson; splendid vegetable and flower gardens; pure well water, and two zanjas running through it for other household uses and irrigation.”

Bishop Amat’s committee wasn’t pleased with Sister Scholastica’s decision. The committeemen had intended to benefit their friends who had old adobes near the plaza to sell. They didn’t reckon on Sister Scholastica, a member of her order since 1839. She had established an orphanage in Natchez, Mississippi and had been the property manager for other Daughters of Charity institutions. She had already begun a career of deflecting the preferences of politicians, bishops, and businessmen

Sister Scholastica had a “winning personality” (as more than one biographer noted), but she had been chosen to come to the Los Angeles borderland because she had shown herself to be a capable administrator. (She would serve as the “Sister Servant” – i.e. superior – of her company of sisters until she retired in 1884.)

The committeemen grumbled but they agreed to purchase Wilson’s lot and adjoining house. Wilson reduced the $9,000 price by a $1,000 and contributed a further $250 to the help the sisters settle in. They soon needed more. The committee had raised only half the purchase price through their countywide appeal. Even with Bishop Amat’s help, the sisters needed an additional $2,000 before the end of 1858 to complete the purchase of the house and grounds.

Resources were painfully thin. The sisters sewed bags together and stuffed them with wood shavings scavenged from a carpentry shop to make mattresses for the orphans. A single room served as classroom, parlor, sewing room, and oratory. As soon as the sisters unpacked, the impoverished sick appeared at their door, Sister Angelita Mombrado remembered. “Only God knows what we went through.”[7]

With practical dispatch, Sister Scholastica expanded the orphanage into a school for girls, whose tuition helped meet the cost of caring for the twenty-two orphans resident by 1858. The first students were the sisters themselves, since the three Americans spoke virtually no Spanish and the three Spanish sisters spoke no English. Learning both languages was necessary to serve in bi-lingual Los Angeles. The sisters’ orphanage was called the Institución Caritativa – the Charitable Institution.

The sisters’ school opened with twenty girls and Francisco Coronel (father of Antonio Coronel) and his two daughters as teachers. By the end of 1857, the school had 170 students (about a quarter of them were orphans or half-orphans). As enrollment grew, the sisters added courses – including music, drawing, and French – for girls who came from the Californio gentry and the city’s aspirant middle class.

As historian Kristine Ashton Gunnell has noted, “The Californio-Mexican elite saw the advantages of teaching their children English – particularly in a safe Catholic environment – and sent their daughters to the school. Students included Susana Avila, Ysabel Ramírez, and José Sepulveda’s daughters Ascensión and Tranquilina. Some adult women, most notably Arcadia Bandini de Stearns [the wife of Able Stearns], also received English lessons at the school.”[8]

The Los Angeles Star talked of “ministering angels” but not all those under the sisters’ care were content. When two girls ran away from the orphanage in July 1860, the Star dryly reported, “We have learned that they left because of what they considered the severity of the discipline of the establishment.”

Social Relations.

The early success of the Daughters of Charity in bringing welfare services to Los Angeles reflected the mission of their order, whose roots go back to seventeenth-century France. The rule adopted then required that the sisters treat the poor with “compassion, gentleness, cordiality, respect, and devotion” and without class or race bias. For their part, the sisters accepted orphaned girls without regard to ethnicity, ability to pay, or religion.[9]

In arguing for a state subsidy in 1860, Sister Scholastica reminded the Assemblymen that “no orphan has ever applied for admittance … without having been received, and her wants provided for” (despite, she might have added, the sisters continual worry about finances). Persuaded, the Assembly voted an appropriation of $1,000.[10]

The diversity of the sisters’ supporters mirrored the sisters’ inclusiveness. It’s not hard to imagine why American Protestants, European Jews,[11] and Californio, Irish, French, Basque, and German Catholics contributed to the maintenance of institutions administered by women whose swooping wimple (called a cornette), blue habit, and communal life put them outside the usual categories of borderlands society. Overcoming the risks of the frontier required collective action, which (philosopher Josiah Royce believed) began with a sense of civic responsibility transcending religious and cultural antagonisms.

The city’s fragmentations – its essential incoherence – required multiple forms of self-definition within its Anglo, Californio, Jewish, and Mexicano communities. Just as Antonio Coronel could be the spokesman for Californio interests and California State Treasurer, and Harris Newmark could be a founding member of the Los Angeles Hebrew Benevolent Society and a financial partner with Mormon leader Brigham Young, Sister Scholastica could be a pious Catholic sister, a shrewd player in local politics, and a corporation head.

American Catholic institutions like the orphanage and school formed a bridge between Californios, uncertain of their place in the newly Anglo city, and the diverse assembly of non-Catholic Anglos who now called themselves Angelenos. And all Angelenos could benefit from the communitarian habits that grew up around the sisters’ orphanage, school, and hospital. “If we carefully notice all the elements of our peculiar population,” said the Los Angeles Star, and reflect on “the sense we have of the common interest,” then the growth of these institutions will “bring others here, and invite the settlement of innumerable families, whose presence would not only add to our prosperity, speaking as traders, but, what is of higher importance, soften and elevate the tone of all our social relations.”[12]

While significant for the development of Los Angeles, the multi-ethnic network of support for the Daughters of Charity that the Star saw could not reach into all classes of Angelenos. Worsening ethnic tensions between working-class Anglo newcomers – many from the slave-holding South – and Californio rancheros and their Latino and Native American dependents began two decades of lynching and vigilantism.

Expanded Mission.

The sisters’ original mission had been to care for the orphan girls of Los Angeles. A school for tuition students was a natural extension and an economic necessity. An even more entrepreneurial expansion of the sisters’ mission followed almost as soon as the orphanage and girls’ school were established. In January 1858, a second company of six sisters arrived from Maryland, and Sister Scholastica now had sufficient staff for a proposed county hospital serving the indigent.[13] The Board of Supervisors had recently allocated $2,600 a year for the operation of a hospital and would provide a dollar a day for the care of each patient (reduced in 1871 to 75 cents). Like the orphanage and the school that helped support it, private patients able to pay for the sisters’ care would cross subsidize care for the poor.

Awarded the county contract, Sister Scholastica rented a four-room adobe north of the plaza in May 1858 and put Sister Ann Gillen[14] in charge of its meager supplies: just cots and bedding for eight patients and two resident sisters. Conditions were so poor, however, that in October Sister Ann moved the hospital to a house next to the orphanage. (Sister Ann remained in charge of the hospital[15] until failing health forced her to resign in 1881.)

During its first seven months, the hospital took in 52 indigent patients and 11 private patients. The county reimbursed the sisters $706. By 1870, the hospital was earning $6,000 a year in county subsidies and patient fees against expenses of $5,500. Although the hospital was primarily a county-funded institution, everyone called it the “sisters hospital.”

Until 1878, when county funding ended, the Daughters of Charity were the major provider of public welfare and healthcare services in Los Angeles, sheltering orphans, educating girls, finding jobs for young women leaving the orphanage, and ministering to the sick.

When smallpox swept through Los Angeles in 1862-1863, 1868-1869, and 1876-1877, the city council turned to the sisters to care for those quarantined in the municipal “pesthouse.” Sister Scholastica sent two sisters to take charge. When flooding along the Santa Ana River in 1862 carried away the communities of Agua Mansa and San Salvador, sisters were sent to manage relief efforts.

Orphans’ Fair.

In 1869, the sisters’ hospital moved into a new, two-story brick building and incorporated as the Los Angeles Infirmary, making the Daughters of Charity the first women in Southern California to form and lead a state-chartered corporation. The sisters also operated income properties – including a vineyard with 6,000 vines and 300 fruit trees – much to the distress of Bishop Amat, who argued that the sisters’ properties ought to be under his direct control.

Sister Scholastica eventually prevailed[16] and proved her administrative and political skills in other ways, taking out loans to expand the hospital and orphanage, managing mortgage repayment schedules, dealing with elected officials to improve conditions in the hospital, and overseeing fundraising campaigns that were essential to the sisters’ often precarious finances.[17]

The sisters hosted St. Patrick’s Day dinners, a benefit circus performance, concerts, and in September 1858 the first Orphans’ Fair (a charity bazaar).

Fundraising in 1850s Los Angeles had its quirks. “There were important considerations to decide the date of a Fair,” William H. Workman recalled in 1902. “It could not be held except on ‘Steamer day,’ as there was no ice (to make ice cream) save that which came from San Francisco, and it could not be held except at the right time of moon as no one cared to grope about the streets in … darkness.”[18]

Women’s groups made craft items for sale and cakes, candy, and pastries. Donated gift items were auctioned off. Ice cream wasn’t the only treat sold. Brandy and other “after dinner stimulants” also were on offer. Dancing might last until the small hours of the morning. The fairs, with varying degrees of popularity, continued to be a significant source income for the orphanage until 1900. Receipts ranged from $1,534 in 1863 to $7,564 in 1888.

Supporters of the Orphans’ Fair reflected the diversity of the city’s tiny middle-class. Among the women who volunteered were the wives of prominent Jews: Caroline Hellman, Rosa Newmark, and Fanny Sichel. Fanny Sichel was the wife of Philip Sichel, a leading merchant and one of just eight self-identified Jews listed in the 1850 census. Caroline Hellman was the wife of Isaias M. Hellman, merchant, pioneer banker, and one of the founders of the University of Southern California. Rosa Newmark was the wife of Joseph Newmark, who had arrived in Los Angeles in 1854 and eventually became the city’s leading rabbi. Women from the French-speaking community also supported the fair, including Leonide Ducommun and Jeanne Sainsevain. Jeanne Sainsevain was the wife of Jean Louis Sainsevain, vintner and entrepreneur. Leonide Ducommun was the wife of Charles Louis Ducommun, merchant and founder (in 1849) of the oldest industrial company in California. From these and other women sponsors, the sisters built a network of benefactors who, along with their husbands, could be relied on to sustain the sisters’ orphanage and school.

New Home

A maturing Los Angeles required the sisters to take on ever larger responsibilities. The original hospital was entirely inadequate to handle the number of patients seeking care. The hospital moved to North Main Street and San Fernando Road and then in 1887 to 6.5 acres at Sunset Boulevard and Beaudry Avenue. In late 1927, a new, 250-bed, eight-story brick hospital building – and the hospital’s fifth site[19] – opened at Third and Alvarado streets.

The orphanage moved too. Sister Scholastica had secured property in Boyle Heights for a much larger facility. After years of fundraising, the cornerstone for the new building, designed by Curlett, Eisen and Cuthbertson,[20] was finally laid in February 9, 1890. On Thanksgiving Day 1891, the imposing (and somewhat ominous-looking) structure was dedicated by Bishop Francisco Mora. Its dormitories housed 250 girls, ranging in age from infants to young women of 16. There were now 25 small boys as well. By then, Sister Scholastica, “kindhearted, generous, true, devoted,”[21] had retired.

The Los Angeles Orphan Asylum served the city (and loomed over it) until the early 1950s, when time, the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, and the widening of Sixth Street undermined its foundations and made the building unstable. The sisters moved to Rosemead in 1953 and to a new facility they named Maryvale, today a residence for girls and young women and a center for early childhood education and family support services.

Not long after Sister Scholastica’s death in September 1902, William H. Workman offered his tribute to the Daughters of Charity who had given so much to the undomesticated Los Angeles of the 1850s and 1860s. Workman remembered that:

The people of Los Angeles welcomed the Sisters, and, regardless of religious differences, gave them cordial assistance. Gentle Sister Scholastica and genial Sister Ann were everybody’s friends and to this day are not forgotten, even by those who have not seen them for many years. To need their help was the only ticket of admission to their sympathy: color, race, or creed did not enter at all into the consideration.[22]

Workman knew Sister Scholastica when Los Angeles had first received her charity. But despite his belief that she was not forgotten, the awful acceleration of the twentieth century had nearly erased the collective memory of what she had accomplished. Forgetting is the original sin of Los Angeles. At Sister Scholastica’s passing, the Los Angeles Evening Express reported, “Strange as it may seem, with all this reverence, respect, and affection during her lifetime, only one of the many whom she had taught and advised from childhood to womanhood paid tribute at the last rites. Only one of the old friends (and there are many in the city) attended her funeral.”[23]

Intermediaries.

Sister Scholastica and the Daughters of Charity served Los Angeles as teachers, nurses, and caregivers. They were adaptable and entrepreneurial, negotiating a dual Catholic and American identity. They molded their charitable mission to the realities of an isolated borderland, becoming fundraisers, political lobbyists, family counselors, social workers, and advocates for the poor (often to the annoyance of the deeply conservative bishops who followed Amat). Essential to the sisters’ success was their “otherness” as women unlike any on the frontier: unmarried, mutually committed, living together but apart from the secular world, yet performing as educational, administrative, and medical professionals within it.

The Daughters of Charity, as unthreatening intermediaries between antagonistic cultural and ethnic groups, were uniquely generative of the “social relations” through which Californio rancheros, Jewish merchants, European Catholic immigrants, and Protestant politicians and their wives and daughters collaborated to meet the needs of orphaned and sick Angelenos.

In the civic space the Daughters of Charity created, a real city was being made.

Notes

1. A report in the 31 March 31 1851 issue of the Sacramento Daily Union noted: “It appears from the census returns, that the County of Los Angeles contains a population of about 4,000 persons—of which the city of the same name, has about 1,600. The county is well supplied with stock, there being in it about 100,000 head of horned cattle. And 12,000 horses.”

2. 2. During the Mexican colonial period, children left homeless might be farmed out to willing families where they were often treated as unpaid labor.

3. Los Angeles Star, vol 5, no 32, 22 December 1855.

4. The sisters were members of the Daughters of Charity of Saint Vincent De Paul, an order of American religious women that had merged with the much larger French branch of the order in 1850. Los Angeles, unused to the details of Catholic nomenclature, called them the Sisters of Charity (which is a different order).

5. Harris Newmark. Sixty Years in Southern California (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1916), pp 189-190.

6. Michael Engh, S. J. “Soldiers of Christ, Angels of Mercy: The Daughters of Charity in Los Angeles, 1856-1888,” Vincentian Heritage Journal, vol 15, no 1, p 30.

7. Her name is variously spelled Mombrado and Mumbrado.

8. Kristine Ashton Gunnell. “Women’s Work: The Daughters of Charity Orphans’ Fairs and the Formation of the Los Angeles Community, 1858-1880,” Southern California Quarterly, vol 93, no 4, p 398.

9. Gunnell, p 397. “The 1860 census demonstrates that the Daughters of Charity accepted children from a variety of ethnic and national backgrounds … Thirty-three of the children were born in California, five in Mexico, two from other places in the United States, two from Australia, and one each from France, Ireland, and Argentina.

10. "Report of the Trustees of the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum of Los Angeles, December 1860." Appendix to Journal of the House of Assembly of California, 12th session, 1861 (Sacramento: C. T. Botts, State Printer, 1861).

11. Isaias W. Hellman, Sister Scholastica’s banker, left a bequest of $5,000 to the orphanage in 1921.

12. Los Angeles Star, vol 5, no 35, 12 January 1856.

13. State legislation in 1855 gave counties responsibility for the care of the sick poor.

14. Ann Street in Los Angeles was named in her honor.

15. The orphanage became the Los Angeles Orphan Asylum when it incorporated in 1869.

16. Bishop Amat kept the deeds for the hospital and Los Angeles Orphan Asylum until Bishop Mora, Amat’s successor, agreed to transfer them to the Daughters of Charity in 1884. Significantly, that was the year that Sister Scholastica retired.

17. In 1861, the sisters’ properties were put on the Delinquent Tax List for non-payment of county property taxes.

18. William H. Workman. “Sister Scholastica,” Annual Publications of the Historical Society of Southern California, 1902 (Los Angeles: George Rice & Sons, 1903), p 258.

19. The Daughters of Charity incorporated the hospital as the Los Angeles Infirmary in 1869. The name was changed to St. Vincent’s Hospital in 1918.

20. The firm also designed a new Los Angeles City Hall in a similar style.

21. Los Angeles Herald, vol 37, no 38, 27 November 1891.

22. Workman. “Sister Scholastica,” p 257.

23. Los Angeles Evening Express, 20 September 1902, p 5.

More stories, profiles of Angelenos famous and unknown, and new episodes in finding a “sense of place” in twenty-first century Los Angeles are in Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory and a Sense of Place, published by Angel City Press.

 [A shorter version of this essay was published in mid-2016. Since then, its thesis – that Los Angeles was shaped by opposition – has been argued in other (and more sophisticated) analyses of the city’s peculiar urban form. Why Los Angeles looks the way it does, how it works politically, and what it means to be an Angeleno began in contraries.]

We’ve been here before, arguing fiercely about the future of Los Angeles, memorably in the mid-1970s when the growth machine that had boomed the city to greatness stalled. The machine had taken Angelenos on an epic bender, turning square miles of flood plain, valley, and foothill into house lots. And it seemed that Los Angeles was finally sobering up – and growing up – as its development matured around a low-rise, suburban-appearing uniformity.

The boomtime’s hangover lingered in City Hall’s failure to notice the changing character of development and in the Angeleno faith that an improved middle-class paradise – as another tract-house subdivision – could be found around the next bend in the freeway.

Angelenos still lined up to buy that snake oil in the pre-recession 1990s, even as the promise relocated beyond the San Fernando Valley and into the high desert, stretching commutes and families to the breaking point. The promise had been something hopeful about an ordinary life within the limits of suburban privacy, security, and comfort. The promise also had been something flawed about locating home at a distance from urban centers with their mixtures of races, ethnicities, and habits of living.

An Alternative City

Both the utopian hope and the nativist fear had been there in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a product of the accelerating Americanization of the former Mexican villa de los Ángeles (originally shorted by English speakers to Los; the breezier LA came later).

Possessors of an intact, thriving (although small) provincial Mexican city with a distinctly mestizo population, the new American immigrants, many of them from the South, set about building for themselves an alternative Los Angeles. The making of a contrary city reflected their anxieties about being Protestant in a Catholic country, about being occupiers of a city captured in an unjust war, and about their fears of Mexican irredentism. Los Angeles was a psychological, economic, and cultural borderland, invested with all the anxieties of living on the edge of something uncanny. Above all, the oppositional city would reflect segregationist assumptions about the means to sustain whiteness in a sea of brown bodies. The sectional tensions of ante-bellum America were recreated in Southern California, where white identity was more southern than Californian.

Los Angeles remained a hotbed of secessionist intrigue and outright sedition throughout the Civil War. When the war ended in 1865, stay-at-home secessionists welcomed back many of those who had “gone to Dixie” and elected former Confederates to civic office. Veterans from both sides joined in post-war comity in the 1880s to monetize square miles of former rancho land while systematically excluding the ranchos’ former laborers from civic life.

The regime of white opposition took advantage of the already dispersed character of colonial-era settlement and accelerated it. Among the first actions of the new American city government after 1850 had been to plat and then sell off (or give away) its municipal lands – some 17,000 acres that Spanish kings and Mexican legislators had reserved to finance and manage the city’s growth.

When rancho lands passed from their Californio grantees into the hands of Yankee merchants in the 1860s and from them to San Francisco capitalists in the 1870s, the oppositional pattern of development was set. A large tract of ex-rancho land (not always contiguous to other developed tracts) would be improved as a unit and sold, first as acreage for farms and orchards and later as individual house lots. Development on this basis made Los Angeles multi-polar but insular, with many nodes of community interest indifferent to metropolitan hegemony.

These ex-rancho tracts were connected by steam railways and then dotted with farm towns platted by the railways for their convenience and profit. Pacific Electric trolleys bound these towns together and proceeded to fill the unbuilt spaces between with the local version of streetcar suburbs. Freeway building after World War II replicated this pattern at ever greater distances from urban centers and their rings of suburbs.

Twentieth century Los Angeles established itself as a city in opposition: opposed to its Mexican identity, to its colonial history, to its mestizaje of cultures and races, and to urban centers generally. Opposition was extracted from the landscape – in the hills above the mestizo plaza and adjacent Sonoratown and in the flat terrain west and south where the Anglo city could rise uninhibited, secure in white privilege and unmoored from history.

Because the Los Angeles 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 too planned, 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 1910s and the automobile suburbs of 1920s as it was of the freeway-adjacent ranch houses of the 1960s.

Los Angeles might 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 fads for what the city of tomorrow ought to look like. Parts of Los Angeles still reflect a hundred years of formerly good ideas for being modern, from garden suburbs to exclusionary zoning to public housing to urban redevelopment.

Geographer Michael Dear memorably summed up the condition of Los Angeles at the start of the 2000s. Sprawl, he wrote, had hit the wall. And if “sprawl” was too easy and contemptuous to be accurate, it was true that something had reached an end, and it was mostly the idea of a limitless Los Angeles in opposition to a more compact urbanity. The growth machine had run out of cheap dirt to build on and had run into homeowners ready to fight.

Stalling the Growth Machine

Committed to single-family houses, homeowner equity, and neighborhood determinism, anti-development activists, beginning in the mid-1970s, enlisted the courts, city council members, and state legislators to stall the growth machine when the machine sought to build density into existing neighborhoods.

Urban planner William Fulton described what happened in The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. He chose an unexpected example to illustrate the entanglement of politicians, developers, and activists (not all stereotypically white and middle class) as they exploited weaknesses in the city’s land use policies and its politics.

When planners proposed greater housing density as part of the rebuilding of a stretch of Vermont Avenue that had been erased by civil unrest 1992, Black suburbanites in the adjoining Vermont Knolls neighborhood rebelled. They allied themselves with white anti-growth activists in the Valley and defeated state legislation that would have given the Los Angeles redevelopment agency more freedom to create redevelopment project areas in neighborhoods like theirs. That success threatened to stall rebuilding in other burned-out zones of the post-riot city.

Even with the lighter densities neighborhood activists had demanded, the Vermont Corridor project was unacceptable to the community and ultimately earned Mayor Richard Riordan’s veto. The City Council overrode him, mostly to preserve individual council member’s control over development in their district. Development means developers, and developers mean campaign money. From Fulton’s perspective, every project leading to a denser city, however benign in the abstract, was going to be a toxic mixture of the adversarial and the collusive.

In the former Los Angeles, raw land was turned into house lots through massive government subsidization of infrastructure – principally water systems and highways. In built-out Los Angeles, unprofitable commercial property would be turned into high-rise and high-rent housing through massive developer subsidization of city election campaigns. (Former Los Angeles City Planner Dick Platkin estimated that Los Angeles City Council members and mayors had accepted upwards of six million dollars in campaign money from developers and real estate companies between 2000 and 2016.)

Council members, abandoning any idea of land use coherency, approved development projects by “spot amendments” to the city’s planning guides. And community groups pushed back through protest, litigation, and legislative threats, stopping some developments and stalling others.

This is the failed process bringing the city of tomorrow into being.

The Status Quo

Measure S in 2017 proposed a remedy. Called the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative by its sponsors – the Coalition to Preserve LA – the NII would have suspend piecemeal amendments to the city’s General Plan, imposed new oversight responsibilities on planning officials, and placed a moratorium on non-complying projects until the General Plan and associated neighborhood plans were updated. Real estate developers, labor unions, and other opponents spent more than $8 million to stop Measure S, with more than $3 million coming from a single developer heavily invested in a Hollywood high-rise project.

Preservation was the goal of Measure S, said then Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, who opposed to the measure. But what was to be preserved?

“(T)wo historic qualities of LA are running into one another,” Hawthorne wrote in a series of tweets. “And we can't preserve both. The first is a city whose chief industry was growth, that was always in flux, that prized newness and change. The second is a horizontal city, a city that passed municipal height limits before WWI and doubled down on privatization after WWII. Remarkable thing about LA is that it was for a long time roomy enough to accommodate both sets of ideals, even tho they're clearly at odds. But now something has to give. And we need to have a more substantive conversation about what precisely we are trying or want to preserve.”

In a “conversation” marred by shrill accusations and misleading advertising, Los Angeles voters failed to bring these competing images of their city into balance, meaning a win for the status quo, including the practice of “spot zoning” to make way for development projects championed by individual council members in areas of their district where those projects would have been prohibited under the city’s General Plan.

The public face of failure is former Los Angeles City Councilmember José Huizar. In December 2020, Huizar pleaded not guilty in federal court to racketeering charges that alleged that he accepted cash and other benefits from developers who wanted favorable treatment for projects in his 14th City Council District. Huizar and his co-conspirators are accused of committing more than 400 “overt acts” including bribery and money laundering. Raymond Chan, who was the general manager of the Department of Building and Safety and later Deputy Mayor for economic development also was charged, along with a billionaire developer.

The investigation has already reaped five guilty pleas from Huizar employees and allies, including former District 12 Councilmember Mitch Englander.

Whatever future is ultimately legislated for Los Angeles, it won’t be ideals of community integrity or civic discourse that will be preserved. It will be a history of opposition, first as Anglo opposition to the disquieting mestizo city of Mexicanidad; later as urban reformers’ opposition to the diverse, crowded, and vertical cities of the industrial East and Midwest; and then as homeowner opposition to anything that would change the charmed pattern of suburban manners.

Imagining Los Angeles

Today, it’s opposition to anything – even reform of the corrupt status quo – that might result in challenging, new forms for the city’s frustrating, lovely, and always inadequate design. What eludes planners, politicians, and neighborhood activists is a consensus about placemaking that will be generous to the aspirations of ordinary Angelenos as opposed to the chimeras of a perfected Los Angeles where none of us will actually live. Recognizing where we are now – and how we got here – requires a certain humility.

Longing for tomorrow’s city should be tempered by our encounters with the city of today. Los Angeles is what it always will be: relatively dense and multi-polar, mostly urban but suburban-appearing, characterized by single family homes on small lots in neighborhoods with strong – but always provisional – dependence on “urban-appearing” nodes along axes of transportation, in immigrant enclaves, and around cultural institutions (like universities and arts centers).

Los Angeles, one booster early in the last century claimed, had “everything in the future.” That’s the problem – everything in the future and nothing of today.

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