s Ecology Ill: The Plains of ld

The world's image of Los Angeles (as opposed to its images of

component parts like Hollywood or Malibu) is of an endless plain
endlessly gridded with endless streets, peppered endlessly with ticky-
tacky houses clustered in indistinguishable neighbourhoods, slashed
across by endless freeways that have destroyed any community
spirit that may once have existed, and so on ... endlessly. Statistically
and superficially this might be a fair picture if Los Angeles consisted
only of the problem areas of the City proper, the small percentage of
the total metropolis that urban alarmists delight to dwell upon. But
even though it is an untrue picture on any fair assessment of the built
structure and the topography of the Greater Los Angeles area, there
is a certain underlying psychological truth about it - in terms of some of
the most basic and unlovely but vital drives of the urban psychology
of Los Angeles, the flat plains are indeed the heartlands of the city's
ld [79].
These central flatlands are where the crudest urban lusts and most
fundamental aspirations are created, manipulated and, with luck,
satisfied. In so far as the history of Los Angeles is a story of the
unscrupulous and profitable subdivision of land, for instance, from the
initial breaking up of the Spanish land grants to their final platting-
out into their present occupied lots, the plains are where it most
spectacularly happened and where the craftiest techniques of sale were
Worked out, and where the most psychotic forms of territorial posses-
sion (armed Rightists in Orange County preparing to shoot down
\>ictims of atomic attack) dirty-up the pretty dream of urban home-
lteading out of which most of Los Angeles has been built.
These characteristic patterns of land manipulation did not really
originate, however, in the central areas most often illustrated to show
tbe horrors of Los Angeles. It was to the east, in the San Gabriel

143
 rt Son F.fnonclo Rood

SAN FERNANDO VALLEY

79· Map of the Los Angeles plains areas

Valley, the area traversed by the rail and road links to San Bernardino,
that much of its style and history can still be seen by the traveller on
the Berdoo or - better - Foothill Boulevard, which keeps mostly just
below the foothills, on the plain proper. Here, the land, traversed by
erratic streams from the hills, was cultivable without importing water

144
 n"'•l4•

0--
2 ~---
• & ~
8 10

San Bernardino

t SAN GABRIEL VALLEY

"'
S1n Bernard1no Fwy
ONTARIO-

Eudod Avenue I I
Roverstde

-1mpen1t Hwy
-'"'-<- - -Rosecraus Avenue
So. Mission San Gabriel, etching by 11. C. Ford, I883

from far away, hence the establishment of the Mission San Gabriel (So]
in the broad valley-bottom, out of which it conjured prodigies of
fertility - measured against the agronomy of the time, if not against
present standards.
Further east, in I 8 p, the first commercial breaking up of rancho
lands was begun by Henry Dalton, successful claimant to lands in San
Francisquito and Azusa, almost as soon as his patents were confirmed;
9,ooo acres in small farming plots, plus the promise of a townsite when
trade warranted it (thought to correspond to the present Duarte). This
was a real pioneer proposal, since the really big operators did not swing
into operation until almost fifteen years later, when two of the inheri-
tors of the San Antonio ranch disposed of their shares for subdivision,
and Governor Downey began the subdivision of the Santa Gertrudes
ranch, creating the present city of Downey in I 86 5.
The real rush to subdivide did not begin until another two decades
later, when competition between the Southern Pacific and the Santa
f~ Railroads brought the settlers flooding in, and provided the
transportation base without which most subdivision would not have
been viable. For the full pattern of subdivision required three things:
land that could economically be improved, water to make it support
rnen and agriculture, and transportation to take men in and bring
agricultural produce out. The soil of the San Gabriel was ideal for
jrnprovement because it could hardly get worse - a soft sand which
supports a light desert scrub when left to its own devices, and turns
into a kind of dry quicksand when broken for cultivation. But, watered,
it grew corn for the Mission padres, beans, vines, olives and citrus
fruits for the later intensive commercial farmers [81 ].
For much of its length, Foothill Boulevard traverses land still
devoted to this pattern of agriculture: solid orchards of orange trees,
though these are migrating to the slopes to get above the frost, and the

81. Garrett Winery, Ontario

147
baroque, contorted stumps of close-cropped vines in endless rows.
Lines of eucalyptus (introduced in 1875) along the highways, as frost
stops as much as windbreaks, and close groves of mingled palms, olives,
eucalyptus, oaks and what have you around the farmhouses - which
have often disappeared but left these miniature arboreta behind.
Even in its early stages, this was an agriculture that needed trans-
portation as much as it needed water - Edwin Thomas Earl of the
California Fruit Express had his first refrigerated rail-car away east
in 1890 but, well before that, the first carload of California oranges had
left for St Louis from a loading dock right inside the old Wolfskill
orange groves at the western extremity of the San Gabriel Valley.
The great German vineyards down at Anaheim, also, needed the
railroads badly enough for an Anaheim spur to be part of the original
package deal that brought the S P to Los Angeles. The rails still lace
the plain as far east as San Bernardino and Riverside, where the motorist
seems to bump over half-buried metal at every other intersection.

82. Ontario: Euclid Avenue in 1883

83 (opposite). Mission San Fernando as it is now

 It was also in these eastern plains that commuting over long
distances began, if we can trust Juan Jose Warner's testimony. In
anY case there is circumstantial evidence in support of this claim to
primacy in the incredible statistic that at the peak of the land and
railway boom of the mid eighties, there were no fewer than twenty-
five real or figmentary townsites laid out along the thirty-six mile run
of the Santa Fe between the pueblo and the San Bernardino countv
line. Precious few of them survive, and the most interesting of the
survivors lies, in fact, the Berdoo side of the county line - Ontario.
Carved out of the Rancho Cucamonga in the early 1 88os, Ontario
(81] is as instructive as it is interesting. It is, even now, the city of
fruit with streets named' Sultana' and even 'Sunkist' in honour of the
local products, and it still preserves the almost ludicrous grandeur
of its original layout, with the impossibly broad double street- Euclid
Avenue - bisecting. it from north to south and crossing the railroad at
a point still hopefully referred to as 'downtown'. Near the railroad, a

149
few early downtown-type buildings can be distantly perceived through
the luxuriant tree-planting down the central reservation of Euclid, and
also one or two vacant lots that look like they might have been there
since the foundation of the city - the general impression is that the
citizens of Ontario built a 'garden city' and left out the 'city' part,
urban homesteaders imposing their ideal of suburbs without urb.r on
the pattern. of Greater Los Angeles almost before it had begun to
take shape, a portent of the way the whole metropolis would grow.
Within degrees, the opening up and subdivision of the San Fernando
Valley, and of Orange County have been similar, though more stream-
lined operations - especially the San Fernando [8 3), which has been
a kind of big-speculator paradise ever since William Mulholland
brought the water to the valley in I 9 I 3. As the water surged down
the aqueduct, Mulholland made his most famous speech: 'There it
is, take it!' He could equally well have been referring to the land of the
valley itself, except that the big operators had already moved in
without waiting for the water. The Los Angeles Suburban Homes
Company (Harry Chandler and Harrison Gray Otis, of the Los
Angeles Titne.r, Moses 'General' Sherman, and others) had acquired
'Tract xooo'- 47,500 acres of dry wheatland in the southern part of the
valley- as early as I9o9, precipitating a pattern of development that
has left most of the valley an intricate patchwork of agricultural and
residential uses.
Broad, rather vague roads traverse these patterns, not vague as to
their direction, which normally relates directly to the four compass
points on an extremely regular grid, but vague as to their status and
destination. A substantial four-lane highway will apparently stop at a
white fence and a grove of trees, but will be found to have merely
narrowed at an unwidened two-lane bridge over a dry wash, the trees
marking the line of the stream; or the trees rna y stand on the property
line of a farm-holding that has not yet been bought back for widening·
In either case, the road may, or may not, return to full width after the

150
interruption. Or again a road may suddenly come to a dead stop against
a couple of mighty black irrigation tanks, indicating a still-undisturbed
agricultural holding, on the far side of which, maybe a mile away, the
road may or may not resume its straight course. Ultimately, such
anomalies in the development pattern will be regularized, but at
present they are more characteristic than any building type of the San
Fernando Valley, and distinguish its ecology sharply from that of the
plains south of the Santa Monica Mountains, the real heartland of the
plains of Id.
These 'real' flatlands occupy the valley-bottoms of the rivers and
creeks that drained the pre-historic Gulf of Los Angeles - valleys so
broad-bottomed, rivers and creeks so indeterminate that they could
change course cataclysmically after earthquakes, and have done so
in historical times, draining swamps and emptying the few surviving
lakes. These are the plains that are seen in the classic view south from
the Griffith Park Observatory, and this view [84] does indeed show an
endless flat city- the interminable parallels of Vermont, Normandie and
Western Avenues stretching south as far as the eye can penetrate
the urban haze, intersecting at absolutely precise right angles the east-
west parallels of Hollywood, Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards,
Melrose Avenue, Beverly Boulevard, Third Street, Wilshire Boulevard,
under the San Mo freeway, past Exposition Park and the campus of the
University of Southern California and ever south, across Slauson,
Florence, Manchester, Century, Imperial ... on a clear day - a very
clear day - the visible geometry extends twenty-odd miles to San
Pedro.
It is, without doubt, one of the world's great urban vistas - and
also one of the most daunting. Its sheer size, and sheer lack of quality
in most of the human environments it traverses, mark it down

84 (overleaf). The view south from Griffith Park

8~. Townscape in Watts

almost inevitably, as the area of problems like Watts [8 s], which lies
only a couple of miles east of the very midpoint of the Normandie
A venue axis. In addition the great size and lack of distinction of the
area covered by this prospect make it the area where Los Angeles is
least distinctively itself. One of the reasons why the great plains of Id
are so daunting· is that this is where Los Angeles is most like other
cities : AnywheresvillefNowheresville. Here, on Slauson Avenue, or
Rosecrans or the endless mHeage of Imperial Highway, little beyond
the occasional palm-tree distinguishes the townscape from that of
 J(ansas City or Denver or Indianapolis. Here, indeed, are the only com-
mercial streets in the US that can compare with the immense length of
East Colfax in Denver; the only parts of Los Angeles flat enough and
boring enough to compare with the cities of the :Middle West.
Yet this undistinguished townscape and its underlying flat topo-
graphy were quite essential in producing the distinctively Angeleno
ecologies that surround it on every side. In a sense it is a great service
area feeding and supplying the foothills and beaches- across its flatness
of instant track-laying ballast, the first five arms of the railroad system
were spread with as little difficulty as toy trains on the living-room
carpet, and later the Pacific Electric inter-urban lines, and later still the
freeways. The very first railroad of all in the area, the Wilmington line,
ran down across the plains to the harbour, but it was the Long Beach
line of the Pacific Electric with its spurs to Redondo and San Pedro and
its entanglements with the Los Angeles Pacific (which it bought out in
1906) which really began the great internal network that used the plains
to link downtown, the foothills, and the beaches into a single compre-
hensible whole.
Watts was the very centre of all this action, a kev junction and mter-
change between the long distance trunk routes, the inter-urbans and the
street railways. It is doubtful if any part of Greater Los Angeles, even
downtown, was so well connected to so many places - whatever local
ecological disadvantages Watts may have suffered from its flatness and
dryness, it was still a strategically well-placed community to live in. And
with the beginning of the sixties, and the passing away of the last P E
connexions, no place was more strategically ill-placed for anything, as
the freeways with their different priorities threaded across the plains
and left Watts always on one side. Whatever else has ailed Watts- and
it is black on practically every map of disadvantages- its isolation from
transportation contributes to every one of its misfortunes.
T he difference in priorities of the original freeways is worth noting
here, because those priorities have changed drastically since. The
Pasadena before the war, and the Hollywood immediately after, pur.
sued affluence over the hills into the valleys beyond. They were strictly
foothill affairs. But within a decade after the war's end, the flatlands
were beginning to draw the network south, and by the mid sixties, the
greatest mileage of freeways was in the plains, and beginning to bear an
ever stronger resemblance to the original railroad network of the 1 87os.
And in those decades the plains began to impose their style on the free.
ways- instead of having to follow the landscape; they began to create
the landscape. For miles across the flatlands the freeways are conspicu.
ously the biggest human artefact, the only major disturbance of the
land-surface, involving vastly more earth-moving than the railways did.
In areas like Palms, or Bell Gardens, or over between Willowbrook
and Hawthorne, the banks and cuttings of the freeways are often the
only topographical features of note in the townscape [86], and the

86. Townscape offreeway-land

q6
planting on their slopes can make a contribution to the local environ-
ment that outweighs the disturbances caused by their constructio n - a
vtew of a bank of artfully varied tree-planting can easily be a lot mo re
rewarding than a prospect of endless flat backyards.
But the freeways are also beginning to have distinctive if oblique
effects on the nature of the built environment too. Wherever a freeway
crosses one of the more desirable residential areas of the plains - say,
the San Diego south to a point just beyond International airport - it
seems to produce a shift in land values that almost always leads to the
construction of dingbats. This useful term - 'the basic Los Angeles
Dingbat' - was probably invented by Francis Ventre during the year he
taught at UCLA and lived in a prime example of the type within handy
traffic-roaring distance of the San Diego, and denotes the current mini-
mal form of multi-family residential unit.
It is normally a two storey walk-up apartment-block developed back
over the full depth of the site (87a, b, c,], built of wood and stuccoed
over. These are the materials that Rudolph Schindler and others
used to build the first modern architecture in Los Angeles, and the ding-
bat, left to its own devices, often exhibits the basic characteristics of a
primitive modern architecture. Round the back, away from the public
gaze, they display simple rectangular forms and flush smooth surfaces,
skinny steel columns and simple boxed balconies, and extensive over-
hangs to shelter four or five cars.
But out the front, dingbats cannot be left to their own devices; the
front is a commercial pitch and a statement about the culture of indi-
vidualism. A row of dingbats with standardized neat backs and sides
will have every street fayade competitively individual, to the extent
that it is hard to believe that similar buildings lie behind. Everything
that Nathanael West said, in The Dqy of the Loc11I1, about the fanciful
houses in Pinyon Canyon is true of the styles of the dingbats, except
that they are harder to trace back to historical precedents, every style
having been through the Los Angeles mincer. Everything is there from
'facoburger Aztec to w·avy-line Moderne, from Cod Cape Cod to un-
supported Jaoul vaults, from Gourmet Mansardic to Polynesian
Gabled and even - in extremity - Modern Architecture.
The dingbat, even more than the occasional tower blocks below
J-lollywood or along Wilshire, is the true symptom of Los Angeles'
urban Jd trying to cope with the unprecedented appearance of resi-
denual densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of home-
stead living. But these symptoms are still quite localized; across most of
the basic plain, the Angeleno, his car and his house can still sprawl
with the ease to which almvst unlimited land has accustomed them. The
dream, the illusion holds still, even if somewhere like Watts shows
how slender is the hold of the illusion. But even there, just south of the
cindered vacant lots and emergency installations on devastated 103rd
Street, the visitor will come upon blocks of neat little houses in tidy
gardens, proof that even there the plainsman's dream of urban home-
steading can still be made real.

87a, b, c. Dingbat architecture of freeway-land