keep the 'l' out of los angeles race, discourse, and urban modernity in 1920s southern california --...

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Journal of Urban History

DOI: 10.1177/00961442073066142007; 34; 3Journal of Urban History

Jeremiah B.C. AxelrodSouthern California

"Keep The 'L' Out Of Los Angeles": Race, Discourse, and Urban Modernity in 1920s

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KEEP THE L OUT OF LOS ANGELESRace, Discourse, and Urban Modernity

in 1920s Southern California

JEREMIAH B. C. AXELRODOccidental College

In the spring of 1926 the voters of Los Angeles were asked to decide whether to accept a modern rapidtransit system for their metropolis. The referendum campaign, a watershed moment in American urban

history, forced citizens to choose whether their rapidly growing city should develop into a centralized

conurbation of skyscrapers linked by an extensive transit infrastructure, like New York and Chicago, or

become a metropolis dominated by low-density development. Crucially, the campaigncharged with

vivid rhetoric and metaphor, mobilized primarily by local newspapersultimately turned on Angelenos

conceptions of race and class and on their notions of what cosmopolitan urbanism entailed. By election

day, urbanity no longer connoted for Angelenos towering skyscrapers and unlimited progress, but the

specter of slums, ghettoes, and darkness, both metaphorical and literal, as Southern Californians chose to

abandon Jazz Age modernity for a mythology of whiteness and suburban sunshine.

Keywords: elevated; mass transit; urban modernity; sprawl; race

The two images are striking, if by now reassuringly familiar (see Figures 1

and 2). One, a high-contrast photograph, features a lone woman casually sur-

veying a modern urban landscape of tall buildings, which seemingly stretches

to the limits of vision. Her high perch (protruding, improbably, from outside

the frame into the vertiginous image) affords her a royal perspective over all

3

AUTHORS NOTE: I thank Professors John Ganim, Jon Wiener, and Alice Fahs for their encourage-

ment and helpful advice on earlier versions of this article. In addition, this article depends entirely on

assistance rendered by the librarians at the University of California (UC)Irvine, UCBerkeleys

Bancroft Library, the Young Research Library at UCLos Angeles, the USC Regional History Library, the

Los Angeles Public Library, and the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell University. Material support for

research and writing was provided by the Department of History and School of Humanities at UCIrvine

and by the UC Humanities Research Institute. Finally, I thank my parents, Steven and Rise Axelrod, for

their unerring editorial advice and for inculcating in me a fascination with the Los Angeles of the past.

My warmest thanks are due to my grandfather, Dr. Bernard Axelrod, who unpacked produce alongside his

father at the Grand Central Market at Broadway and Third during the time period discussed in this arti-

cle and who much later established his first medical office in the downtown district. It has been an honor

to return, if only virtually, to those days with him.

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 34 No. 1, November 2007 3-37DOI: 10.1177/0096144207306614

2007 Sage Publications

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she observes and implies a viewing position elevated even above this cluster

of towers. Her demeanor and stance convey the impression that she approves

of the spectacle before her gaze. Is she evaluating this urban progress, or is

she herself an allegorical figure, representing in attractive form and contem-

porary attire the very spirit of the modern metropolis around her?1

The second image is far more futuristic and not ambiguous at all. In fact,

this sketch is so finely delineated as to appear the work of a draftsman. Asidefrom the futuristic, stylized glaring sun in the top right corner (and, more

4 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2007

Figure 1: Surveying the Modern MetropolisSOURCE: Los Angeles Record, January 1, 1926, 1:1.



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vaguelyand improbablya similar design in the bottom left), which could

have come directly from the science fiction pulps of the era, this image con-veys the full aspect of a serious technical schematic. In the center of the frame

Axelrod / KEEP THE L OUT OF LOS ANGELES 5

Figure 2: Lloyd Wrights Plan for a 1,000-Foot Tower in Los AngelesSOURCE: Los Angeles Examiner, November 26, 1926, 2:1.



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rises a single massive, roughly cruciform skyscraper, surmounted at its

rooftop by a series of mooring masts for dirigibles as well as airplane landing

strips. Descriptive text boxes sketched into the drawing beside this towering

structure direct by arrows the viewers attention to notable features of the

building. This graphic narration makes immediately clear that, at forty acres,

this is no ordinary skyscraper. Instead, it purports to stretch about 1,000 feet

high with 15 times the floor area of the Woolworth Building. As the tallest

building of its age, this mammoth tower would house about 150,000 people,

the captions proclaim. Within this single megastructure would be situated an

entire industrial complex as well as thousands of elevated residential apart-

ments honeycombed into the crenellated central vertical shafts. Despite the

density of habitation, each of these myriad interior rooms offers an unob-

structed view of [the] surrounding country, allowing panoramic perspective

over large portions of the many-branched tower itself as well. Far below, cap-tions note with an engineers precision, the foundations of the exemplary

futuristic skyscraper rest on caissons in a reservoir of liquid mud as protec-

tion from tornadoes, quakes, etc. This careful attention to architectural detail

within the utopian vision betokens the work of an expert delineatoran

impression verified by the authors name drawn at the bottom of the frame:

He is none other than Lloyd Wright, son of the already legendary builder, and

a man who was by this time himself a notable (and usually quite serious) pro-

fessional architect.2

These two representative imagesone confidently celebrating contempo-

rary metropolitan progress appropriately symbolized by a field of skys-

crapers, and the other packed with the imaginative detail of frenetic and

enthusiastic urban utopianismlook like so many others emerging from the

modern ebullience of New York or Chicago in the Jazz Age. Both pictures,

though, were published in newspapers in Los Angeles, a metropolis already

by 1926 making a name for itself as a city of bungalows and private automo-

biles, and not as a modern skyscraper city.3

This reputation for bucolic suburbia was alluring, and it made Los Angeles

the fastest growing large city in America during the 1920s, but local boosters

wanted their city to overtake San Francisco as the great Pacific metropolis.For many Angelenos, and particularly the business elites situated in the citys

downtown core, the existing suburban sprawl in Southern California looked

nothing at all like a great metropolis. Since the 1870s, with the first of the

famous Chicago towers erected after the destruction of the Great Fire and the

iconic Manhattan skyscrapers that followed them, American cities had been

reaching skyward. By the 1920s, urban modernity seemed to be defined by

the frenetic energy of a cosmopolitan culture of jazz, technology, big busi-

ness, and the iconic skyscrapers that situated and symbolized all this activity.

Los Angeles did have a thriving downtown, distinguished by modest rows of

rather solid twelve- and thirteen-story buildings, but this district was no match

for the Loop or lower Manhattan in grandeur. Many Angelenos felt that it was




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high time for their city to grow up and to leave its low-density past behind it.

How could Los Angeles claim consideration as a great metropolis while pre-

senting to the world such an unimposing, small-town skyline?

Yet it was no coincidence that Los Angeles had no true skyscrapers by the

mid-1920s. Buildings in the city were limited to 150 feet by law, and the

architects of that regulation did not share the skyscraper enthusiasts dreams

for the metropolis. In fact, an outspoken and visionary contingent of profes-

sional planners, in alliance with a powerful faction of boosters and business

leaders who were deeply invested in Southern Californias existing image and

lifestyle, rebelled against the dreams of vertical urbanism for Los Angeles.

Indeed, they rejected the dominant model of modern city form altogether,

arguing that urban densities such as those common in New York and Chicago

were fundamentally unsustainable. They felt that these dense, centralized,

towering metropolises imposed a terrible burden on the land that inevitablyled to inhumane overconcentration and congestion. They wished instead to

preserve urban Southern Californias low-density character and its quasi-rural

amenities, while allowing continued rapid growth. New ideas in planning and

technology would enable the booming region to eschew concentration and

density. Los Angeles might, in the process, demonstrate the potential for an

entirely new kind of modern city.

These sharply opposed visions of modern urbanism came into direct con-

flict in 1926, when, in an extraordinary referendum, local voters were asked to

choose what sort of metropolis they wanted. During the course of a campaign

that was waged over several months, abstract notions of urban form were trans-

formed into vivid, clearly opposed visions of modern life. In the process, long-

standing coalitions of business leaders, boosters, and professional planners

unraveled, leading to one of the bitterest campaigns in the history of the City

of the Angels.4 Fought in the pages of the citys six fiercely competitive news-

papers, the battle over the future of Los Angeles mobilized political discourse,

striking rhetorical images, and shameless yellow journalism to present voters

with a stark choice of urban futures. By the time the votes were counted, not

only was the fate of the rapidly growing metropolis decided for the remainder

of the century, but so too was the shape of twentieth-century urbanism in thecountry as a whole.

It all began with traffic. Since the late 1910s, automotive traffic had been

getting worse and worse in Southern California, particularly around the cen-

tral business district. The flood of cars was playing havoc with the extensive

local mass transit system. Both the yellow streetcars of the Los Angeles

Railway (LARY) and the longer-haul Pacific Electric (PE) red cars were

obliged to share precious street space with these automobiles in the downtown

district.5 The crush of motorists was causing the transit companies enormous

trouble, both through excessive delays that rippled through the entire trans-

portation system and through catastrophic collisions, which were becoming

quite common under the onslaught of an army of novice automobilists. In




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April of 1920, downtown business leaders, led by the owners of the major

department stores, induced the city to implement a business-hours parking

ban in the central business district. Yet amid great public outrage, including

notable parades and demonstrations, the interdiction was lifted within a

matter of weeks.6

Not lost on the elites of Southern Californias business community, envi-

ously eyeing eastern counterparts in their glassy towers, was the promise of

the vertical city to resolve many of these irksome problems once and for all.

Chaotic and frustrating automotive traffic, swirling without discernable pat-

tern or logic, seemed to this newly assertive contingent of would-be modern-

izers as a particular plague visited upon the city as punishment for its failure

to keep pace with the prevailing trends in American urban development. By

failing to properly build up its city core, these critics implied, Los Angeles

was not simply being inefficient or backward, but self-destructive as well. Aspread-out pattern of settlement might suit a provincial community, but it

would bring disaster to a major metropolis of a million citizens or more. To

support such populations, cities required intensive and elaborate infrastruc-

ture systems, making full use of multiple spatial planes. The modern large city

required an array of stacked support systems, from subways to elevated roads

to airplanes and skyscrapers. Only with this multilayered and dense sort

of infrastructure might cities expect to harmonize the potentially conflicting

and virtually incalculable movements of so many individuals. This was the

promise of the skyscraper cityto dissolve intractable, essential urban fric-

tions by partitioning them into a third dimension. As eastern theorists such as

architect Harvey Wiley Corbett and architectural renderer Hugh Ferriss

argued, modern cities could solve their problems only by thinking vertically.

As Corbett argued in an influential essay in theArchitectural Forum, the mod-

ern city, like any other living creature, had to continually grow or else it would

certainly die: Growth,why is it both necessary and desirable? It is neces-

sary because it is an essential element in the continued vitality of a city. The

dead portions of any city are those which are not growingi.e., not increas-

ing in number and bulk of buildings.7 By making use of the practically

unlimited frontiers of sky and earth, previously inevitable friction betweenstreams of traffic, each vying for limited and precious surface area, could be

made to vanish literally into thin air (see Figure 3).8

The modern metropolis offered the alluring possibility of delivering urban-

ites from vexing and contentious strife over finite real estate, while at the

same time offering an urban form that struck even the jaded observer with

awe at the vertical sublime.9 Thus, the eras skyward trend of thought

combined a powerful sense of aesthetics and style with undeniable efficiency

and modern technocratic rationality. Furthermore, in the eyes of many of the

citys business leaders, Los Angeles was going to become more vertical

whether it wished to or not. It was merely a matter of time before the regions

rapid growth forced the city to rescind its restrictive height limits and allow

the metropolis to follow a normal pattern of evolution.




8/36


Figure 3: Hugh Ferrisss Rendering of the Metropolis of TomorrowSOURCE: Hugh Ferris, The Metropolis of Tomorrow(New York, 1929), 65.



9/36

This was certainly a dream held by those Angelenos eager to develop

Wilshire Boulevard. This major eastwest thoroughfare, which was connectedthrough Westlake Park to downtown in the mid-1920s, had been zoned as a

residential district. Nevertheless, the new Wilshire Boulevard Development

Association, composed almost exclusively of ambitious businessmen, launched

a vocal campaign to develop Wilshire Boulevard as the Fifth Avenue of the

West.10 Running a series of advertisements in local newspapers (see Figure 4),

the Wilshire developers circulated a number of images depicting the road as a

high-class commercial corridor, a stately thoroughfare, lined on either side

with majestic skyscrapers, as the Examinerenthused.11 If Los Angeles pre-

vented Wilshire from developing into the sort of high-class corridor of hotels

and department stores, these ads implied, the city could never command the

respect of the nation as a great urban center. The reputation of the city was held

to hinge on Los Angeless willingness to transform itself into a modern, verti-

cal metropolis.

Perhaps the most articulate local skyscraper enthusiast was Irving Hellman,

one of the citys prominent financiers and real estate investors.12 In the

mid-1920s, he edited and published in Los Angeles a journal aptly titled

The Skyscraper. In the first issue, under the bold heading The Skyscrapers

Influence on Municipal Progress, Hellman declared that skyscrapers stand

impressively as monuments of principal progress and as strongly reflecting ourfaith in the citys future.13 The city, he implied, would be judged by Americans

in terms of its vertical aspirations. If Los Angeles failed to meet the challenge


Figure 4: Booster Dreams of a Skyscraper CorridorSOURCE: Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1926, 5:1.NOTE: At the time of this illustration, Wilshire Boulevard was almost entirely undeveloped.



10/36

by committing to this preeminent symbol of modern urbanity, it would not

only shirk its destiny as a great metropolis, but also undermine its present

health. If urban observers secretly suspected that the old western cow town had

simply outgrown itself, engorged by transitory migration, Angelenosirrational

refusal to modernize would surely confirm that damning assessment. Once

again, the reputation and future growth of the city depended on keeping up

with the times, and resplendent verticality was the obvious way to do this. This

was the sort of rhetoric commonplace in New York and other American cities

at this time, but it was certainly a challenge to the status quo prevalent in low-

density Los Angeles. Yet Hellmans enthusiasm for the skyscraper and for the

vertical city form it implies, so typical in the larger national urban context, rep-

resented a growing strand of visionary sentiment within respectable circles of

Southern California of the 1920s.

Although many of the citys boosters were content to ponder the futurenecessity of change, one of the citys most powerful interests was willing to

act immediately to transform the metropolis. For the stalwart local interur-

ban companies, the problem was not one of long-term inevitability but of

urgent and immediate necessity. For the LARY and the PE, street traffic was

no mere inconvenience. It was indeed a threat to the companies very sur-

vival. Despite the remarkable prevalence of automobile ownership and auto-

motive commuting that was so obviously fouling up the citys traffic grid, the

majority of Angelenos were still totally reliant on the streetcars to get around

town. Yet the railways had suffered terribly throughout the decade from

surface street congestion, and they were getting a bad reputation from the

frequent grade-crossing collisions as well. By the mid-1920s, the traction

companies engineers began to express a note of desperation; major reorien-

tations of the citys traffic infrastructure were becoming absolutely essential

if the transit system hoped to avoid total breakdown. After waiting fruitlessly

for the citys leaders to act on the problem, the PE decided in 1924 that it had

to act on its own, and immediately. Thus, the railway began excavations for

what would become the citys first working subway, stretching in its first link

about four-fifths of a mile from Hill Street between Fourth and Fifth Streets

to a point near First Street and Glendale Boulevard, on the route toward theWestside and Hollywood.14 Thus, unlike the city's official traffic planners,

the notoriously stingy street railway system was clearly concerned enough

about the severity and seriousness of the traffic problem that it was willing

to takeand pay forthe first step in rebuilding the metropoliss transport

infrastructure. Once again, the project of partitioning rail traffic into its own

vertical plane was seen by engineers, and not just urban visionaries, as the

inevitable, exclusive, and necessary solution to a large citys transit prob-

lems. Consequently, the so-called Hollywood Subway was presented quite

explicitly as a step in the urban modernization of Los Angeles and was

planned from the start as the first stage of a much larger system of elevated

and submerged rail lines to come.




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The Hollywood Subway was also seen by downtown interests as another

step in the inevitable vertical development of their city. As important as the

subway in this respect was the downtown station. The PEs downtown ter-

minal was situated at the foundations of a brand-new height-limit commer-

cial building, where elevators could whisk the commuter fortunate enough

to be employed at an office in the structure directly to his or her proper floor

within seconds of alighting from the subway train.15 This was exactly what

skyscraper urban visionaries in Los Angeles were demanding.

The speed with which these plans were put into practice lent further encour-

agement to those enraptured by the promise of verticality. Begun in 1924,

excavations on the new subway were finished on November 30, 1925, and the

tube opened to great fanfare in 1926. Everything seemed to work; the Subway

Terminal Building itself was profitable from the start, and each train saved

up to fifteen minutes, thanks to the direct route and lack of interference fromautomobiles. And this tunnel was not going to be the end. City officials pro-

claimed that the Hollywood subway would be the seed of a vast subterranean

system that would solve Los Angeless travel problems for all times.16

Yet as soon as the ceremonial bottle of ginger ale was smashed against the

side of the first subway train, all construction was abruptly halted. It seemed

that urban planners had invoked an obscure clause of the city charter stipulat-

ing that any major transit improvements be submitted as part of a compre-

hensive rapid transit plan. The PE had been building its subway on its own

initiative, outside of any city plan. But the urban railway had made changes

to its extensive system regularly for years without official objection. Why did

planners pull the plug on the PE this time?

If the vertical sublime metropolis encapsulated the aspirations of many

business leaders and boosters, it was anathema to others. The opening of the

PE heralded the sort of urban modernization that so captivated the imagina-

tion of the age, but the citys professional planners envisioned a very different

future for Southern California. Indeed, these men declared their mission was

to Dream Dreams and see Visions for their metropolis.17 They had estab-

lished themselves as one of the nations first official city planning commis-

sions in 1920 with a wide purview to regulate future development of thefast-growing metropolis. They followed up this success by setting up the

countrys first regional planning agency in 1924 and, by 1926, they had forged

strong ties with a range of political and business leaders throughout the

region. They saw themselves as experts and professionals, leading the way to

Progressive reform and rational, scientific management of the urban environ-

ment. Moreover, these men were not just experts and visionaries, but radicals

as well. Led by chief planner Gordon Whitnall, who had come to Southern

California from Milwaukee in 1913 to work for the local Socialist Party, Los

Angeless planners believed firmly that the modern metropolis, with its sky-

scrapers and elaborate transportation infrastructures, was totally unsustain-

able. Congestion, they believed, was the primary affliction of modern cities.




12/36

Population density had led to traffic, blight, disease, crime, and poverty.

American cities were growing larger and larger in the first decades of the

twentieth century, and that growth was being artificially concentrated into

more and more crowded spaces by intensive transportation systems. All trends

in urban development seemed to point to this congestion worsening over time

as cities evolved ever more complex infrastructures to concentrate their pop-

ulations. Consequently, when these experts looked up at skyscrapers, they saw

not the peak of human progress but instead the depths of human misery.

Helpless urbanites were afflicted with tremendous congestion and traffic as

thousands of workers concentrated into a single dense downtown block. For

Gordon Whitnall and his peers, the modern Jazz Age city was a place of blight

and stagnation, not dynamism and excitement; darkness, not light. The cos-

mopolitanism in which urban boosters reveled instead struck the planning

professionals as the sort of dangerous racial mixing that threatened the break-down of all rational boundaries of legible and proper municipal segregation.

The supposedly inevitable growth path of the American city in this era

seemed to these Progressives to be both foolish and utterly inhumane.

Whitnall and his men intended to break this seemingly natural evolution-

ary cycle in their own metropolis. They saw the existing far-flung and low-

density urban form of Los Angeles not just as an alluring image for booster

propaganda, but also as a potential model for a new sort of city. Indeed,

throughout the later 1910s and into the 1920s, planners gradually nurtured a

vision of a decentralized, deconcentrated urbanism for Southern California

that might endure even in the face of continued rapid growth. Los Angeles

would become a new American metropolis, free of the congestion, density,

blight, and class hierarchy that afflicted most other modern cities of the era.

For inspiration, Whitnall and his colleagues rejected the hegemonic vision

of the vertical city and turned instead to another Socialist visionary, albeit one

of an earlier generation and another nation. This was Ebenezer Howard, a

modest but earnest and energetic British social thinker who had published an

extremely influential tract in 1898 advocating what he termed the garden

city. This garden city would be a permanently low-density community, sur-

rounded by a greenbelt, and providing work, recreation, and living space allwithin walking distance. The community was bounded by its greenbelt, so it

could never grow too large to lose its autonomy and its close-knit character or

force people to commute into some other city. Indeed, when the garden city

filled up, a neighboring one might then appear nearby, also buffered from the

original city by a greenbelt that was both pleasant and absolutely off-limits to

development. Eventually, a cluster of garden cities would develop, and this

configuration would functionally replace the crowded, dense, and impersonal

metropolis of the era. Indeed, in Howards view, this garden city cluster might

offer many of the amenities of, say, London, without forcing each commu-

nitys inhabitants to lose their connection with each other and with their own

autonomous neighborhoods.18




13/36

Although clearly utopian, this harmonious Socialist vision had led to the

development of several model communities in England, and the idea exerted

a powerful influence on these planners of the 1920s far off in Southern

California. Los Angeless planners did not accept Howards model entirely.

Rather, they saw the concept as a perfect accompaniment to the low-density

suburban lifestyle that Los Angeles had long been promoting to the world in

its residential districts. In fact, they believed that the solution to the coming

crisis in American urbanism lay right before them. As local planner George

Damon put it in 1924, The real answer to the problem . . . is not to build big

cities, but to plan and create great living districts, made up of comparatively

smaller centers of population and industry. Instead of producing tremendous

land values at congested centers, our efforts should be directed toward spread-

ing out these values over a large contiguous district.19 Planners asked, why

couldnt these existing residential streets of bungalows and single-familyhomes comprise the bulk of a modern city? More radically, why couldnt

business centersor satellite sub-centers, as Damon called thembe dis-

persed to serve individual, autonomous neighborhoods within a much larger

metropolitan region, instead of being concentrated downtown as they almost

universally were in this era (and still were in Los Angeles, in fact)?

Writing in the early summer of 1926, planner C. A. Dykstra explained the

thoughts of his local peers to their colleagues in other American cities through

a notable article called Congestion DeLuxeDo We Want It? published in

theNational Municipal Review: There can be developed in the Los Angeles

area a great city population which for the most part lives near its work, has its

individual lawns and gardens, finds its market and commercialized recre-

ational facilities right around the corner and which because of these things can

develop a neighborhood with all that it means. 20 The dense, confused, con-

gested central business districtthe epicenter of excessive land values, crime,

poverty, disease, promiscuous racial mixing, and all the other perceived

blights of the modern skyscraper metropolismight eventually become obso-

lete as anything other than a modest civic center. In its place would come

clearly demarcated and relatively self-contained districtsanalogous to

Howards garden citieseach hosting its own shops and places of employ-ment to serve neighborhood residents. As Dykstra elaborated in a speech to

the Los Angeles City Club that year, the great city of the future will be a har-

moniously developed community of local centers and garden cities, a district

in which the need for transportation over long distances at a rapid rate will be

reduced to a minimum.21

It is perhaps difficult to recognize today, in our postsuburban nation,22just

how radical the planners vision was in the 1920s, but it seemed to them to

be a logical and rational means both to preserve the existing low-density,

bucolic lifestyle touted by boostersa way of living that seemed so well

adapted to the Mediterranean climate and the existing culture of bungalows

and beachesand to avoid the pitfalls that were until this point considered




14/36

the inevitable consequences of urban growth. Los Angeles would pioneer a

new sort of American urbanism far superior to the dominant vertical model,

as Dykstra rhapsodized: Under such conditions city life will not only be tol-

erable but delightfulinfinitely more desirable and wholesome than the sort

induced and superinduced by the artificially stimulated population center

which constantly must reach higher and higher into the air for light, air and

a chance to see the sun.23 In essence, planners hoped to allow Los Angeles

to grow into the sort of major metropolis that it seemed to be very rapidly

becoming by 1926 while preserving the clarity, legibility, and social order of

the small city it had until recently been.24

Looking deeper, we can interpret many of the planners actions during the

preceding decade as fitting with this grand vision. In implementing the

nations first modern zoning system, during the 1910s, Whitnall and his staff

had worked hard to stabilize and police Los Angeless existing social divi-sions and hierarchies.25 The City Planning Commission had for a decade

relied on the latest scientific techniques and Progressive methods to preserve

what planners more generally termed segregation of population.26 Planners

used the term widely, as it encapsulated all they aimed to achieve in their

battle against urban congestion. Proper segregation of use meant that eco-

nomic activities were restricted to their most appropriate urban districts.

There would be no factories in residential neighborhoods, particularly after a

major revision of the citys zoning ordinances in 1925. Innovations in zoning

had helped enforce this discipline upon the urban fabric, as the nations first

explicit zoning designation requiring single-family residential dwellings

had been created in the city. This zoning category helped ensure that outlying

suburban neighborhoods would not be transformed into districts of transient

apartment dwellers as the city expanded, as had happened in many cities in

the East.27 By encouraging far-flung development of bungalows and tracts

through the subdivision planning approval processes, planners had hoped

to maintain the low-density middle-class character of the region. The major-

ity of Angelenos would be spared from having to live in crowded and unsan-

itary conditionsunlike their brethren in other modern metropolisesby the

active enforcement of regulations that restricted building types and occupants.Instead, they would be guided to settle in the newer outlying suburbs, which,

of course, fit perfectly with the efforts of local realtors, boosters, and devel-

opers. Meanwhile, older neighborhoods, closer in, would be protected against

excessive harm to their value as the city expanded by a bulwark of existing

private mechanisms intended to enforce neighborhood homogeneity and sta-

bility, such as the ubiquitous residential deed restrictions that bound more

than 90 percent of the citys housing stock during the 1920s.28 Thus, zoning

control, building codes, and official encouragement of widespread private

covenants combined to prevent the flood of newcomersin Los Angeles,

largely white migrants from the Midwestfrom being forced into the sort of

tenement districts common in other American cities of the era. Through such




15/36

simple measures, combined with natural population growth and the urban

restructuring that would inevitably entail, it will be possible, Dykstra pro-

claimed to the Los Angeles City Club in late 1925, for garden cities to take

the place of slums and industrial congestion.29

A side effect of these efforts was that ethnic immigrants and racial minori-

ties were effectively restricted in Los Angeles to a set of increasingly crowded

older neighborhoods near the downtown core. These inner-city apartment

house districts became more and more inhospitable as the city grew, but,

by discouraging the development of apartments outside the core, this inner

circle, planners felt, could reasonably be sacrificed for the welfare of the

ever largerand ever more far-flungregion as a whole. This was, of course,

entirely normal practice for the Progressive Era, where concern for social wel-

fare always bound itself up with obsessive attention to proper and clear racial

legibility. Indeed, the partitioning of the metropolitan topography by race andby class had been absolutely critical to the development of American cities in

the half-century after the Civil War, and in Southern California great efforts

had always been expended to police the boundaries of the separate communi-

ties. Thus, under the watchful attention of city planners, rapid urban growth

in greater Los Angeles had for years been channeled in ways that intention-

ally reiterated the existing social order and enforced patterns of population

segregation, while freeing most white middle-class Angelenos from the blight

of urban congestion even as the city continued to expand.30

Yet now this carefully orchestrated urban order was under threat from two

primary sources, as the planners saw it. First, they had inherited a densely

packed downtown district, which still hosted the regions business, consumer,

and entertainment facilities, and it was being deluged by traffic. In fact, the

unprecedented crush of automobile traffic flowing daily from the suburban

residential settlements into the central corea dangerous side effect of the

planners subdivision strategyheld the potential to severely damage the

entire regions economy and pleasant lifestyle. Tracts were growing faster

than planners could regulate them, and the planning staff was extremely hard

pressed merely to keep pace with the rapid topographical transformations of

the decade, let alone promote their own ambitious dreams and visions.31

Worse, the congestion of commuters was forcing downtown business leaders

into what planners considered to be a hasty and dangerous action. As these

elites sought to protect their interests by promulgating a misguided urban

vision for the region, they threatened to force Los Angeles to abandon its low-

density form in favor of the sort of dense vertical urbanism that so blighted

traditional eastern cities. Here, one form of reckless business development

tied into aggressive boosterismpromoting Southern California as a place of

limitless suburban subdivisionswas encouraging the rise of another even

more dangerous one.

Hence, the PEs plans posed imminent danger: It is clear from the outset

that the PE subway simply did not accord with the local planners visionary




16/36

agenda. The interurban engineers were designing a system that would

improve access to the already dense downtown district, further drawing res-

idents to the citys principal congested area and potentially starting the whole

metropolis down the familiar path of ever-increasing concentration and

crowding. Already, this congested district was clogged by traffic, it jumbled

people together willy-nilly, and it seemed to erode all sensible lines of clear

segregation. What would happen if new rapid transit systems were built that

would further promote the continued development of this chaotic and clut-

tered central district?

Of course, this development was precisely what most downtown business-

men had in mind. Clearly, these two groups of urban leaders were at logger-

heads. The radically incompatible visions of modern urbanism held by the city

planners and the downtown businessmen were converging into open conflict over

the future of the western metropolis. The local business community fractured, andlong-standing coalitions of planners and elites were strained, as incompatible

engines of metropolitan boosterism ground toward collision. Although the ten-

sions built up silently for years, the big break would finally come in the first

months of 1926 over this question of rapid transit modernization.

The commercial boosters struck back with alacrity. Enraged that planners

had stifled progress on the PE subway, downtown business leaders immedi-

ately engaged the services of the engineering firm of R. F. Kelker and Charles

De Leuw to provide the city with a comprehensive rapid transit plan.

KelkerDe Leuw was a wise choice. The firm was based in Chicago, and it

proposed a plan for Los Angeles that sought to transpose rather directly the

Loops famous system of elevated railroads onto the landscape of Southern

California. KelkerDe Leuw had three years earlier constructed a transporta-

tion plan for that city that had, in no uncertain terms, called for the continued

vertical development of the Chicago transit system, endorsing an expansion

of the citys extensive use of elevated railroads knit into the dense fabric of

the Loop. If Los Angeless modernizers hoped their city would follow the

developmental model of that protean American metropolis, and if they wished

to begin by emulating Chicagos modern transit infrastructure, KelkerDe

Leuw was the company to call on. And these commercial elites got exactlywhat they wanted. Declaring early on the similarities of the two metropo-

lisesIn comparing Los Angeles with other large cities we find the closest

analogy in the city of Chicago32the Rapid Transit Plan for the City and

County of Los Angeles transposed the earlier Chicago report rather directly

onto the topography of spread-out Southern California. Moreover, Kelker, De

Leuw, and Company also explicitly endorsed the narrative of urban evolu-

tionary development espoused by downtown boosters. Although the private

automobile had been appropriate to Los Angeles when it was a low-density

town of purely regional ambitions, the city would now have to take responsi-

bility for its newfound stature and properly grow up: Los Angeles, having

passed through various stages of development, has become a metropolitan




17/36

center and now requires rapid transit facilities in its urban area not only to

meet present needs but to prepare the city for the growth of future years.33 A

proper city required proper infrastructure, and that meant heavy, fixed rapid

transit to support a new wave of intensive downtown development.

No sooner was this comprehensive plan released than serendipity struck for

Los Angeless modernizers. For years the city had anchored its three major

steam railroads in three separate terminals, all scattered around the downtown

district. And for years the city, backed by the influentialLos Angeles Times,

had been trying through the courts to coerce these railroads into consolidating

their stations in a single location near the old Spanish Plaza to provide easier

access for newcomers and, it was hoped, to open the city to further competi-

tion from other long-distance rail companies. So now, in 1926, the Southern

Pacific, the Santa Fe, and the Union Pacific made a proposal to the city: Drop

the lawsuits, and the railroads would connect their existing stations by anelaborate elevated rail system, removing all steam locomotives from the citys

streets, all at no cost to the taxpayer. This new infrastructure would totally

remove the steam trains from street level, eliminating dozens of dangerous

grade crossings. It would efficiently link the stations together and thus

improve conditions in the congested downtown district. And to sweeten the

deal, the three railroads offered to open this new infrastructure to the PE rail-

way for free, immediately providing Los Angeles with the heart of a modern

elevated interurban mass transit system at no public expense.34 Confidently,

the president of the Southern Pacific published a two-page spread in the five

largest local papers detailing the many traffic improvements that the three rail-

roads could put into place within a mere eighteen months if their plan received

official endorsement.35 Thus, simply by dropping the fight for the Plaza

terminal, the city could guarantee itself a multilevel rapid transit system

making use of overhead structures of modern design.36 To circumvent

inevitable planning opposition, the railroads sought to take their plan directly

to the voters through a public referendum to be held at a special election that

spring.37 Thus, voters were quite plainly asked to decide which vision of

urbanism Los Angeles should embrace as it crossed the one million resident

mark and thus shot into the league of Americas largest cities.As you might expect, planners did not appreciate this gift or this choice at

all, nor did theLos Angeles Times, a newspaper and civic institution of great

influence beyond its modest circulation. The Times had for years been push-

ing for the proposed Union Station located near the Plaza. Now, the booster

newspaper, long in close alliance with local planners in its complete and total

investment in the vision of a Mediterranean low-density Southern California,

picked up the fight against the railroads plan with enthusiasm and would

carry it forward in the months to come as Angelenos prepared to cast their

votes on these issues in the April 30th referendum.38

As the election campaign unfolded, the railroads appeared totally unpre-

pared for the ferocity of the onslaught launched almost immediately by the




18/36

Times toward the Plaza terminal question. The papers attack, which seemed

continually to possess the initiative during the long campaign, was carried

prominently under a single, incessantly repeated banner: the punning, but

more than a little menacing, slogan Keep the L Out of Los Angeles.39


Figure 5: Miss L.A. Educates Herself (with the TimessHelp) about the "L"SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1926, 1:1.



19/36

The Times began its assault with a series of front-page, right-below-the-

masthead cartoons ridiculing the railroads and their rapid transit proposals

(see Figures 5, 6, and 7). The cartoons focused primarily on the image of the

elevated railroad, suggesting that these transit structures would destroy the

appearance and lifestyle of Los Angeles. Emphasizing the darkening effect


Figure 6: Times Cartoonist Gale Effectively Recasts the Railroads Gift of TransitInfrastructure as the Selfish Scheme of Railroad Barons to Darken the City underImposing Elevated TrestlesSOURCE: Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1926, 1:1.



20/36

of these trestles, the Times continually raised the specter of a city cast into

darkness. It argued that this was a nefarious and self-serving scheme con-

cocted by railroad oligopoliststhe opening wedge of some larger, darker

conspiracy to cast gloomy shadows over the bucolic bungalows of sunny

Southern California.

About the same time, dramatic shots of twisted and shattered steel cars

hanging off bent structures in the aftermath of deadly collisions began to


Figure 7: The TimesEvokes Frank Norriss OctopusLooming over the Urban FabricSOURCE: Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1926, 1:1.



21/36


Figure 8: Breaking News:The TimesReported Vividly on Every Elevated Accident in theCountry

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, March 29, 1926, 1:1.NOTE: Timesreports included those, such as this one from New York in 1923, that had takenplace years earlier.



22/36

appear throughout the newspaper as well (see Figure 8). These items appeared

on the front page, in the pictorial sections, and elsewhere in the paper.40 It

seemed no eastern citys train could have a mishap without it being pro-

claimed breaking news in the Times.

Combining this series of inflammatory political cartoons and graphic

pictorials with hard-hitting, illustrated investigative articles on the pro-

spective rapid transit plan, the broadsheet hammered home its message that

elevated railroads were dark, noisy, unhealthy, and dangerously accident-

prone. Throughout the two weeks leading up to the election itself, the

Times featured a daily running series of lengthy illustrated reports from

cities that were cursed by their own elevated systems (see Figure 9).

Poetic headlines such as Foul Dirt, Darkness and Bedlam Curse of L

and New York Pays Piper for Dance that Opened L hit home the mes-

sage, while the reportage underneath testified that an elevated is a many-legged and roaring steel serpent and should be shunned by all cities for the

machination of the devil that it is.41 Chiaroscuro sketches suggesting how

an elevated might blight Los Angeles reinforced high-contrast photographs

of darkened streets in eastern cities. The paper even resorted to verse to

illustrate the horrors of the elevated railroad, such as the Song Of The L,

by Harry Bowling, which began:

I am the scourge of citiesI am Satans cynical plan,

To crush with his own invention the impotent insect, man

My grip is the grip of duress, my voice is the voice of doom,I triumph in grime and clatter, in ugliness, dirt and gloom.

Round and about my pillars the thug and the bandit steal,

I stifle the cry of the victim with the roar of the clanging wheel;

I gather humanitys refuse in a hideous nest of slums,

And Dives eats at my table while Lazarus gets the crumbs.42

These allusive and blunt images, heralding a Biblical plague of poverty and

inequity brought on by the mass transit system, reinforced the bundle of

associations that the Times was attaching not only to the elevated railway,

but also to eastern urbanism more broadly. Los Angeless reputation asa middle-class paradise was explicitly threatened by evocations of the

inequality of the traditional American metropolis. Thus, discourse about

rapid transit consistently raised a powerful underlying Progressive critique

of the capitalist metropolis of slums and tenements. Similarly, captions such

as Even California Sun Would Balk At This warned readers that the dank

scenes before their eyes could be repeated around Los Angeles as well.43 In

this way, the Mediterranean mythos of Southern California was mobilized

in opposition to the railroads plan, suggesting that Los Angeles had rela-

tively more to lose by the blighting effects of the overhead tracks than othercities did.




23/36

Through this skillful evocation of a tradition of booster imagery, combinedwith graphic rhetoric of urban decay and poverty, the Times inveighed against

all that had previously been glorified in the Jazz Age metropolis. Instead of

sublime skyscrapers piercing the clouds, readers were presented with constant

reminders of the misery of the depths. Local elevateds, in their headlong

swaying flight, were described as dirty, noisy, inartistic, bringing din, gloom,

and property loss and foul dirt, darkness, and bedlam to these cursed cities.

A Stygian gloom, correspondents testified, permeated the unhealthful atmos-

phere under an elevated structure, [where] even on the brightest day, it is as

twilight. It is a cloud before the sun that never passes.44 In hyperbolic prose,

the paper hammered home evocative images of the dispiriting world clusteredaround the towers foundations.45


Figure 9: Photo Surveys of Cities Cursed by the L Portrayed Transit Not as Modernand Efficient, but as Blighting and OminousSOURCE: Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1926, 1:3.



24/36

Feebly, the protransit forces tried to recover. A group calling itself the

Business Mens Association of Los Angeles began placing large advertise-

ments in local newspapers protesting the railroadscase, pleading that Angelenos

be fair to industry.46 Their advertisements, though, could not match the

Times (itself never known to be unfair to industry) in clear, graphic visuality.47

Haplessly, the pro-elevated lobby protested the Timess slick propaganda, espe-

cially the use of arresting, iconic images. Despite their complaints, the elevated

was itself now becoming an icona symbol not of Jazz Age urban moderniza-

tion but of darkness and blight, social inequality, crime, and misery.

Before long, rapid transit proponents were reduced to trying to deflect the

Timess assaults instead of defending the railroads proposal, insisting, for

instance, that

The railroads plan does not contemplate elevated structures length-wise of streets, but along a private right-of-way and through an indus-trial district, where it would not be objectionable and where it wouldnot result in property damage. It would not be street darkening since itwould not run on the streets.48

Evidently, the Times had established its discursive hegemony; advocates of

rapid transit were forced to resort to claims that their objectionable and

darkening structures would only cast blighting shadows over private prop-

erty. Faced with the Timess incessant images of blight (places beloved of

germs and microbes that defy cleanliness in their dark corners) and din(a nerve-wracking roar, a hollow rumble, insomnia taking auditory

form), advocates of the elevateds began to repudiate what had so shortly

before been their most cherished marks of urban modernity.49

Clearly, the Times seemed to have struck a nerve in its juxtaposed opposi-

tion of Californian sun and air against eastern darkness, steel, grime, and

smoke. The newspaper was mobilizing Los Angeless carefully constructed

booster imagean image that organ had played no small part in creatingto

wage an internal war over the future of the metropolis. Defending the low-

density pastoralism of Southern California, the Times persistently returned to

the specter of the darkening L in its public relations campaign. Clearly,rapid transit plans were being subsumed into the discourse on elevateds, and

the overhead railroads were themselves being devoured in a hopeless contest

between images of East and West. Dreams of vertical modernity were being

crushed by a powerful local rhetoric of pastoral Mediterraneanism.

In the end, the gambit that proved, at least temporarily, most effective for

the increasingly desperate backers of the railroad plan was a particularly cyn-

ical one. Instead of attempting to put forward the advantages of their own

ambitious modernization project, rapid transit supporters began instead, by

the late stages of the campaign, to attack the Timess cherished Union Stationplans. These rail proponents began repeatedly to allude in criticism of the

Union Station site to the adjacent Chinese American and Mexican American

ghettoes. Asking if the Plaza location offered an attractive and inviting first




25/36

impression for visitors to the city, advertisements by the Business Mens

Association played on local prejudices and hatreds. As one spread put it, the

truth is that the so-called Plaza union station would face Chinatown, which

lies between the Civic Center and the site proposed for the station.50 Here, the

depot opponents were mobilizing the anxiety white Angelenos felt during this

time about urban illegibility in order to suggest that previously (properly) hid-

den ethnic districts were now threatening to become prominent and that the

all-important boundaries defining racial order in this highly restrictive and

segregated metropolis would be overturned by the Union Station plans.

Before long, theExaminer, which was always the most aggressive opponent

of the Union Station proposal (no doubt because of the Timess support of it),

began referring to the envisioned depot simply as the Chinatown Terminal.

If there is ever to be a union station, the Hearst paper insisted, let it at least

not be located between Chinatown and Little Mexico.51

Continually calling attention to this undesirable location next to Chinatown

and Mexican settlements, theExamineralso (rather shamelessly) railed indig-

nantly against the potential destruction of the romantic atmosphere of [the]

Plaza.52 In the midst of this apparent contradiction, clearly a potent distinction

was being made between the desirable Mission mythology of the old zocalo

and the less picturesque actual inhabitants of the area.53 While an actual urban

neighborhood was assumed to be a sign of blight and decay, a cheerfully san-

itized version of the Spanish-era pueblo was granted to be an urban asset, a

sign of historical character and romance, a tourist attraction.

Ultimately, though, the discontinuity in racialist discourse on the part of rapid

transit backers proved a rhetorical and political error. Backers of the Plaza site

soon began to exploit these internal contradictions in a Machiavellian program

to neutralize theExaminers charges of racial blurring. One advertisement by

the Citizens Union Station Committee, for instance, claimed that the Plaza

Terminal will be a monumental gateway to Los Angeles, harmonizing with the

Civic Center and historic old Plazacreating in the minds of the newcomer

[sic] an everlasting impression of beauty and civic achievement. Not only

would the historic Plaza not be destroyed in the building of a Union Depot,

the ad reassured readers, to the contrary, this landmark of old Los Angeles willbe beautified and perpetuated.54 Yet this co-option of the Mission myth was

only the first, most benign, aspect of the neutralization project.

If opponents of the Union Station measures had hoped to race-bait the

Times, they would soon find that the paper could turn this trick at least as well

itself. Thus, after starting with a flood of Mission nostalgia, seamlessly fitting

the Plaza site into a long tradition of booster rhetoric,55 the paper launched

into a more serious strategy. Starting in mid-April of 1926, the Times began

actively to reposition its Plaza Union Station plans as a first step in a larger

and, in retrospect, much more sinisterprogram of urban redevelopment.

What the paper had in mind was clearly revealed under the heading End of

Chinatown. Here, the newspaper recast the terminal as a first step in an ambi-

tious program of ethnic cleansing:




26/36

The Civic Center Plaza depot plans spell the passing of Chinatown and itsrookeries into the dim history of early Los Angeles. The steam shovels are nowat work in the opening of the new Spring street north of First street. . . .Chinatown is doomed by the march of the greater Los Angeles Civic Center

and the Plaza union depot.56

Instantly, the Times figured out how to neutralize the racial associations that

Plaza opponents hoped to attach to the new Union Station location. There

would be no taint from the Chinatown site because Chinatown would be lev-

eled, wiped entirely from the map. Where theExaminermerely used words,

the Times was eager to put bulldozers to work:

Those opposed to a union station at the Plaza have stated that such an edi-fice should not be built in the midst of Los Angeles Chinatown. . . . With the

completion of the Civic Center and the union depot there will be no moreChinatown.57

Here was the blunt edge of Progressive Era reform. Not only would undesirable

minorities be cordoned into restricted districts to contain their contagion of mal-

adapted customs and worldviews, but the more visible objectionable zones

would be utterly eliminated, permanently sanitizing the new urban core. Where

these preterite peoples would be allowed to go in a city that enforced so many

restrictions on choice of habitation was left unaddressed in this campaign. In the

view of the Times and its supporters, these citizens were simple artifacts of an

old Los Angeles that would be left behind. This was an entirely different visionof urban modernization than that proposed by the skyscraper enthusiasts. Here,

the citys population itself would be modernized, with no place left for those

historic but retrograde peoples who had no place in the new metropolis.

Looking back on the entire 1926 election campaign, it is easy to see that in

the space of a couple of months opponents of the rapid transit plan had man-

aged to engineer two dramatic discursive shifts. First, they had effectively

transformed the transit program of their opponents from an optimistic Jazz

Age modernization proposal into a scheme to darken Southern Californias

streets with the hideous L. Then they had turned the negative racial associ-ations attributed to their own plans into a justification for wholesale ethnic

realignment of entire districts of the city. Instead of being tainted by the racial

connotations of its preferred Plaza site, the Times emerged as champion in the

cause of racial purity and proper segregation. In this pivotal campaign, which

a number of historians have pointed to as a turning point within local thought

on matters of rapid transit and downtown development,58 the battle between

the planners and modernizers rival visions of the urban future was fought

almost exclusively on the field of contemporary understandings of, and anxi-

eties about, the existing city. And these understandings and anxieties were

inextricably bound up with ideasand fearsabout race.Within the ideological contexts of 1920s Los Angeles, the vivid evocations

of blight and darkness attending the prospective el were obviously,




27/36

from the start, themselves racially coded. The prospect of transforming the

sunny and bright city into a much more shadowy, dim onea particularly

literal version of what Mike Davis famously referred to as sunshine and

noirplayed on white Angelenos contemporary anxieties about the social

disruptions of rapid migration.59 In referencing the potential darkening of

prominent visible parts of the metropolis, the Times editors certainly knew

they would thereby inflame widespread fears about imminent spatial (and

racial) miscegenation in the city.

Although African Americans constituted only a tiny fraction of the Jazz

Age Los Angeles population, blacks have always punched above their demo-

graphic weight in the metaphorics of dominant white racial imaginings. Dark

streets would certainly suggest dark skins to most Angelenos in this racially

hypersensitive era. The explicitly linked evocation of Mexican and Chinese

communities within the city further served to collapse all this racist imageryinto a ludicrously simple dynamic of paired oppositions: West versus East,

white versus black, light versus dark, sun versus shadow, health versus dis-

ease, life versus death.

The parallel specter of slumlike blight clearly also connoted, even more

explicitly, a potential collapse of the citys precious booster image as middle-

class metropolis, where every inhabitant might live a carefree existence in his

or her own detached home, with a private automobile parked nearby. Despite

the mythology, many Angelenos, even in this period of relative prosperity,

were extraordinarily insecure in their class positions (a fact reflected in the rel-

ative success of the citys Socialist politicians during the previous decade).

Contrary to the mythology, most locals did not at this time own their own cars,

and many did indeed live in crowded apartment buildings. The alluring

prospect of upward social mobility seemed to be potentially endangered by the

rapid transit modernization represented in the Timess scare pieces. The eth-

nically mixed slums and tenements of eastern citiesblighted and darkened

by looming overhead tracksquite simply frightened middle-class Angelenos.

Whether these people feared that the availability of single-family homes would

disappear and that they would themselves be forced into claustrophobic

accommodations, or whether they merely felt threatened by the prospectivepresence of a visible urban underclass, such images indelibly and subversively

linked rapid transit in the local imagination not with gleaming skyscrapers, but

with violence, miscegenation, and misery.

When the polls closed, the final vote was decisive. In fact, it was a water-

shed for Los Angeles and, as time would tell, for American urban history: A

citys populace, by popular decision, turned away from the dominant vertical

model of modern urbanism. The decision assured that the future that most

Americans expected would not in fact come to pass in Southern California.

Instead, something else would have to take its place. What form that future

urbanism would take remained far more vague in the years to come, both in

Southern California and elsewhere, but the tide was turning nationally against




28/36

the vertical metropolis. The image of dense cities being centers of poverty,

blight, and crime began to emerge more strongly in writing about cities. More

and more, the futuristic skyscraper city seemed a utopian dream, not an immi-

nent reality.

Los Angeles planners must certainly have been pleased by so clear a public

ratification of their vision for the metropolis. Equally reassuring must have

been the Timess strong defense of the sort of low-density urbanism they were

working so hard to preserve. Even more gratifying was the fact that what local

planners were preaching at national planning gatherings all decade had

finally, by the mid-1920s, begun to resonate within eastern planning circles as

well. Perhaps the most dramatic evidence that urban experts within the con-

centric cities of the East were having doubts about the direction of their con-

tinued development was a lively and contentious running battle waged

between New Yorkers Henry Curran and that champion of verticality, HarveyWiley Corbett. In an extended series of exchanges appearing, one after

another, in many of the nations most important planning journals, Curran and

Corbett debated the future of the concentrated metropolis throughout the sec-

ond half of 1926 and into 1927. In so doing, they replayed, in very different

form, the referendum that had transfixed Southern California in the early

spring of 1926.

The conflict began in reaction to one of Corbett and Ferrisss ambitious

vertical sublime visions of future New York, published in The American City

in June of 1926. As a response to that piece, Henry Curran, a lawyer for New

Yorks City Club, launched a direct attack on the very cathedrals of the verti-

cal sublime. As The American City, sensing a fight, enthusiastically informed

its professional readers, The skyscraper, so generally considered as the hall-

mark of a real city, is meeting serious opposition in the very metropolis in

which it has attained its greatest development and fame.60 Curran, whom the

journal described as leading the fight against the skyscraper in New York,

declared in an accompanying article that the worst enemy of the American

city today is the skyscraper. He then offered a warning to unsuspecting offi-

cials in the nations less developed cities:

It is true that in some cities this modern form of monster has not yetincreased and multiplied to the point of peril. It is true that in some others, theblow has not yet fallen, though the danger is in sight. But it is also true that instill some other cities, the skyscraper has already become a plague that we maywell range alongside our ancient city scourges of cholera, yellow fever, tuber-culosis and slums.61

In this age where enthusiasm for tall buildings still saturated the culture, such

invective could not go unchallenged. Within a few weeks, Corbett responded

with a reply of his own, carried in theNational Municipal Review. Corbett

admitted in the enthusiastically titled Up with the Skyscraper that New York

was congested, but he insisted that it was not the fault of the skyscrapers:




29/36

Traffic is bad in New York, but it is worse in other cities where the average

building height is far less. Detroit and Los Angeles, for instance. Despite

these pragmatic arguments, though, Corbett really wished to make a larger

point about urbanity in general. He did this by turning on Henry Currans bio-

logical arguments. The city, Corbett hypothesized, is really itself a living

thing, and in this stage of its life cycle the tall building must be seen as a nec-

essary feature of its natural anatomy:

You cant kill off the skyscraper, for it would be against nature andprogress. . . . Growth is progress. The only way to stop a tree from growingis to kill it. A city is not just a mass of bricks, stones, streets, subways. It isan organic-growing thing, with its inhabitants flowing through its veins likethe corpuscles in the blood.62

The development of a city must be allowed to follow its own course, Corbettimplied, and in Jazz Age America, that course was toward the vertical.

Still undaunted, Curran fired back a final volley. Focusing on Harvey

Corbetts own metaphor, the skyscraper critic claimed that there was actually

something deeply unnatural about the modern city: We are still a nation of

prairies and plains and far mountainsand yet Harvey would have us forego

our freedom of motion, and tie ourselves up into a pulsing pretzel of interwo-

ven moles, squirming under the overshadowing masses of his skyscraper

brood.Arguing that great concentration would guarantee only blighted living

conditions, Curran rebelled against the notion that an entire city could be con-tained within sheaths of glass and steel. Is, he asked, Harvey really on the

level with us when he spins this fairy tale about people being born, living, and

dying all within the skyscrapers, each in his own predestined skyscraper?

Curran concluded his assault on Corbett, and on the reigning discourses of

verticality within the modern metropolis, with a mournful apostrophe for the

citys unhappy souls to be saved from what he called the depths of Harveys

Inferno, lying far below the heavenly cloud-piercing towers.63

Gradually, even in the height of the Jazz Age, professional planning dis-

course, backed by Progressive Era concern about the modern citys social

ills, began to turn against the vertical model of American urbanism. Althoughmany of the tallest buildings were yet to come, no American city would

fulfill Harvey Wiley Corbett and Hugh Ferrisss rapturous vision in the

twentieth century. Indeed, with the exception of a few iconic urban dis-

trictsManhattan and the Chicago Loop primary among themAmerican

skylines would tend to spread outward instead of upward. By the 1950s, with

active federal policies in place underwriting suburban sprawl everywhere, it

was becoming clear that for all the evocative power still residing in the sky-

scraper districts of the large cities, postwar American growth would be

horizontal, not vertical. In the second half of the century, it would not bethe Jazz Age urban model that would dominate, but what could be termed




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a Los Angeles model of metropolitan form, where segregated deconcentra-

tion would triumph over cosmopolitan density.

Prophetic perhaps was an editorial section of theLos Angeles Express dur-

ing the height of that pivotal referendum campaign. TheExpress was generally

a much more soft-spoken local newspaper than the triumphantly boosterish

Times, Hearsts populist Examiner, or the working-classRecord. Yet on the

fifth of April, 1926, in the middle of the special election frenzy, that journal

shouted at the top of its editorial page: Los Angeles, City of Homes.64

Proceeding to declare that Los Angeles maintains its reputation as a city of

homes, the paper championed the dominant single-family, low-density

nature of local residential development. More important, just below this self-

congratulatory paean to the status quo, came juxtaposed another descriptive

editorial piece. This one, titled The Future City, presented a radically diver-

gent picture of urban settlement:

Combination office and apartment buildings of 80 stories and more, linkedtogether by aerial causeways, with airplane landings on the roofs. . . . To visita neighbor the inhabitants of one building would step out onto a walk or cause-way maybe several hundred feet up in the air, or, going to the roof of their ownbuilding, take an airplane and fly to the building they wished to visit.65

Here was the skyscraper urbanism of the Jazz Age metropolis (the site of this

vertical sublime vision was, not surprisingly, identified as New York) intrud-

ing into the tumult and conflict of a Los Angelesand a nationstill poised

at a crossroads between models of urban development. All along, though,

the conclusions were preordained. Whether Angelenos fully understood the

garden city ideal or not, they were full participants within the discourses

engendered by it. Despite the concerted efforts of the citys business elite, the

hegemony of low-density, single-family development within the imaginations

of Angelenos remained essentially unshaken, and it spread to other Americans

as well in the years to come. As the editors of theExpress concluded thought-

fully in their account of this city of the future (as well, perhaps, of the future

of their own city, as envisioned by downtown modernizers), This is no mere

fanciful picture, but actually what men of affairs see for the future, and planto create with their money. But it isnt inviting. It seems better to have lived

in an age of earth dwellers.

NOTES

1. The photograph is impressive, but also a bit deceptive. It catches the buildings on an angle, instead

of along the street grid, thus portraying each building on two sides instead of one, making it appear as if

there are more structures in the picture than there actually are and making those shown seem larger. This

perspectival trick also enhances the apparent size of the buildings by showing their rooflines receding into

the background at a rakish downward angle from the particularly eye-catching and sharp leading edges of




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the rectangular buildings. The lighting in the shot further accentuates the sharpness of these edges by

starkly casting one of the two visible sides of each structure in shadow and the other in light. Furthermore,

the cameras position reinforces the impression that the buildings are much taller than they in fact are. The

skyscrapers in the foreground are actually only six or seven stories high, whichcombined with the

foreshortening effects of the perspectivemakes the second tier of structures seem much taller than their

actual twelve- or thirteen-story height. Perhaps most deceptive is that we are actually seeing buildings riseup the side of a hill, making the array of buildings in the background of the shot seem taller and rein-

forcing the impression given by the entire tableau that the structures rise into the distance. In actuality,

the buildings are fairly uniformly of modest (150 feet) heightnot small structures, but certainly not sky-

scrapers in the sense that the 1,000-foot towers rising in New York or Chicago were at that time.

2. Most well known for his Southern Californian residential architectural projects of later years,

F. L. Wright, Jr., had extensive professional experience by 1926, not only through his own commissions,

but also from working for his fathers firm and, interestingly, that of the Olmsteds. See Charles Moore,

Peter Becker, and Regula Campbell, The City Observed: Los Angeles. A Guide to Its Architecture and

Landscapes (New York, 1984), 250.

3. The first image was splashed across the cover of the working-class Los Angeles Records

Anniversary Edition, and the second appeared, at about the same time, in the solidly conservativeLos

Angeles Examiner.4. Spencer Crump, Ride the Big Red Cars: How Trolleys Helped Build Southern California (Los

Angeles, 1962), 165.

5. Of the two, which were only tangentially interconnected during this period, the Los Angeles

Railway (LARY) was harder hit. The yellow cars shared the streets with automobiles throughout their

entire network. The Pacific Electric (PE), on the other hand, relied on its own rights-of-way in the outly-

ing suburban areas where it dominated. Near its busy downtown hub, however, the PE shared the plight

of the LARY, relying on the overburdened local street grid to accommodate its crowded interurban trains.

6. For more on the importance of the automobile in Los Angeless urban transformation during the

1920s, see Martin Wachs, Autos, Transit, and the Sprawl of Los Angeles, Journal of the Americ

keep the 'l' out of los angeles race, discourse, and urban modernity in 1920s southern california --...

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