Imagining Los Angeles

A City In Fiction

David Fine

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780874174601
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The literary image of Los Angeles has evolved since the 1880s from promotional literature that hyped the region as a New Eden to contemporary visions of the city as a perplexing, sometimes corrupt, even apocalyptic place that reflects all that is wrong with America. In Imagining Los Angeles, the first literary history of the city in more than fifty years, critic David Fine traces the history and mood of the place through the work of writers as diverse as Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, Norman Mailer, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Carolyn See, and many others. His lively and engaging text focuses on the way these writers saw Los Angeles and used the image of the city as an element in their work, and on how that image has changed as the city itself became ever larger, more complex, and more socially and ethnically diverse. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the literature and changing image of Southern California.

1

STARTING POINTS

The Place and the Writers

Hell, we threw the land in and sold ’em the climate.

ATTRIBUTED TO LAND DEVELOPER LUCKY BALDWIN

I should have stayed home.

HORACE MCCOY, BOOK TITLE

Next day, we took a taxi to Hollywood. I was amazed at the sin of the city, and at the lack of shape. There seemed no reason why it should ever stop. Miles and miles of little houses, wooden or stucco, under a technicolor sky. Miles of little gardens crowded into blossoms and flowering bushes; the architecture is dominated by the vegetation. A city without privacy . . . the only permanent buildings were schools and the churches. On the hill giant letters spell “Hollywoodland,” but this is only another advertisement. It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city is “unreal.” But what the arriving traveler first sees are merely advertisements for a city which doesn’t exist.

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD, DIARIES, 1939–1960

I

Writing about San Francisco as a literary city more than a century ago (1897), Frank Norris had this to say:

There is no great city to the north of us, to the south none nearer than Mexico, to the west the waste of the Pacific, to the east the wastes of the desert. Here we are set down as a pin point in a vast circle of solitude. Isolation produces individuality, originality. . . . We have time to develop unhampered types and characters unbiased by outside influences, types that are admirably adapted to fictitious treatment.¹

Norris’s essay, “An Opening for Novelists: Great Opportunities for Fiction Writers in San Francisco,” pitched that city, not only as the West Coast metropolis, but also as the ideal setting for western local color fiction, a city that offered “types” one could not find elsewhere. San Francisco’s isolation provided the opening, the opportunity, for a vigorous new literature uncontaminated by genteel East Coast conventions. It was an endlessly fascinating place for the Chicago-born Norris, a wayward, polyglot city at the end of the frontier that offered itself to storytellers in search of the exotic and the colorful. It possessed “a strange mixed life . . . an undefinable air suggestive of stories all at once.” Its hybrid quality, its odd blend of racial and ethnic types, made for a splendid sideshow. Norris talks about a red-haired child “half Jew half Chinese” and of a dishwasher in a Portuguese wine shop with a Negro father and a mother who was a Chinese “slave girl.”

These were the exotic “types” spawned by the city that came into being in the gold rush. Its migrants and drifters, outcasts and opportunists would be incorporated by Norris two years later in his novel McTeague. In constructing his wayward San Francisco of the nineties, Norris had earlier literary explorers of the city to draw on, a whole generation of journalists and storytellers who since the 1850s had been drifting in from somewhere else—Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others—writers who had bestowed on early San Francisco its dual image of crowded, polyglot city and exotic frontier arena of oddballs whose stories cried out to be told. In the stories and sketches of Norris and his fellow visiting journalists in the second half of the nineteenth century, the city was an amalgam of the urban and the backwoods, the instant metropolis and “wild west” town, replete with the kind of frontier eccentricity and peculiarity demanded by local color writing.

What Norris did not know in 1897—perhaps could not have known then—was that at that very time a new instant city was being manufactured, packaged, and promoted four hundred miles to the south, one that by the 1920s would reach and then surpass San Francisco in population. Los Angeles emerged as the consequence not of gold rush migration but of a land boom made possible by the convergence of two rail lines into Southern California—the Southern Pacific in 1876 and the Santa Fe in 1886—and the aggressive promotion of land speculators, subdividers, city boosters, and railroad tycoons (who were given large land subsidies for bringing in the roads). The land south of the Tehachapi Mountains, the “cow counties” of Southern California, began filling up not with the kind of hardy adventurers who came to Northern California a generation earlier by ship or Conestoga wagon but with a more timid, gentler breed of migrants—largely white, middle class, and Protestant—lured by a national advertising campaign hawking consistently warm weather, open land, healthful dry air, and agricultural opportunity.

Boosted into existence, Los Angeles grew steadily, if unevenly, and sometimes spectacularly in the next several decades. In the 1880s the population went from 11,000 to 50,000. It doubled to 100,000 in the nineties, tripled in the first decade of the new century to 300,000, and by the early 1920s matched San Francisco’s population of 575,000. After that it never had to look back—or north—to see who was gaining. Unlike San Francisco, hemmed in on the tip of a peninsula, Los Angeles had room to spread out across a vast land basin stretching from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. With a man-made harbor, imported water, oil reserves, a movie industry, aviation plants, wartime defense manufacturing, and a postwar aerospace industry, it has grown into a Pacific Rim metropolis of more than 3.5 million people.

Not only America’s second most populous city, Los Angeles rivals, and may even surpass, New York City as its most culturally diverse. From a white Protestant city it has become in a hundred years a multiethnic enclave and immigrant destination where at least eighty languages are spoken and where today nonwhites constitute a decided majority. This is true not only of the city but of Los Angeles County and parts of surrounding counties in the basin. City limits have never really defined Los Angeles, a regional city-state stretching from Ventura County on the northwest to Orange County to the southeast, with a landmass comprising one-sixth of the state and a population of about fifteen million people, almost half the residents of the country’s most populous state.

Back in the pre-railroad 1850s and 1860s, though, while San Francisco was shaping itself as the West Coast city (and today San Franciscans still refer to it as the city), Los Angeles was a small encampment of Mexicans, Indians (living in a kind of limbo after the abandonment of the Spanish missions), Anglos (both ex-miners and opportunistic “Yankee Dons” who married into prominent rancho families), and Chinese (some of whom drifted down from the mines). El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles (the Town of the Queen of the Angels) was, despite its then-sparse population, like the San Francisco of Twain and Harte, a wayward frontier town, a maze of bordellos, gambling dens, and saloons radiating out a few blocks from a central plaza. It was a place of wooden huts and adobe haciendas, of dirt streets laced with zanjas, or irrigation ditches, and of gun-toting, knife-wielding toughs who roamed its muddy paths.

It was a zone of racial conflict too, conflict that intensified after California became part of the Union at midcentury. As the Anglos took control of the land, they saw the darker-skinned population—including those whose arrival predated theirs—as dangerous aliens, foreigners who stood as a threat to community and progress, to the Yankee imperative of Manifest Destiny. That many of the Anglo-Americans who arrived after the Civil War came from the Confederacy and brought their secessionist, pro-slavery sentiments didn’t help in racial matters. Horace Bell, one of the early chroniclers of the period and a member of the Los Angeles Rangers, a self-appointed vigilante group that hunted down banditos like Joaquín Murieta, Juan Flores, and Tiburcio Vásquez and prepared them for the frontier justice of lynching, described the pueblo’s notorious “Nigger Alley”—“niggers” being anyone not Anglo—in his book Reminiscences of a Ranger:

Every few minutes a rush would be made, and maybe a pistol shot would be heard and when the confusion subsided . . . you would learn it was only a knife fight between two Mexicans, or a gambler had been caught by a bullet. Such things were a matter of course and no complaints or arrests were ever made.²

Violence in “Nigger Alley,” a block that bordered the plaza, peaked in 1871 when an Anglo man was killed trying to stop a Chinese gang battle. In the ensuing retaliatory mob attack, nineteen Chinese were killed. Seven men were tried and convicted—of one hundred fifty who were arrested—but their convictions were subsequently overturned and they went free. Bell, an observer, noted that the massacre was not a spontaneous act but was incited by the new police department, whose chief had given orders “to shoot to death any Chinese who might stick a head out of or attempt to escape from [a] besieged building.”³

The massacre, occurring shortly before the rail lines were built and the city boosters began their campaign to lure tourists and settlers to the region, stands as violent preamble to white hegemony. The process of Americanizing the city began in earnest in the 1880s and continued through the next several decades. A white middle-class population was thickly layered over an ethnically mixed frontier town. The competing rail lines were offering lower and lower fares for transit from the Midwest (dropping at one point to $1 a head in the competition), and a national advertising campaign hawking the magical curative properties of the climate brought hundreds of thousands of tourists and migrants who took up the railroads on their bargain fares. Those who stayed settled not just near the founding zone of the old downtown plaza but, abetted by a new interurban trolley network, were drawn into aggressively marketed new towns stretching across the basin. Greater Los Angeles, the basin, that is, emerged as an aggregation of distantly spaced settlements carved out of a coastal plain bordered by mountains, beyond which lay the desert. Rail magnates, city boosters, and land speculators (often the same people) were busy slicing up the old Spanish and Mexican land grants. The old Californios, the “first families” who held the land grants, were unable to defend their claims in Anglo courts—unable to pay the legal fees much less to understand the laws that were disenfranchising them—and so lost their lands, piece by piece, to Yankee speculators.

In the promotional literature Southern California was hailed as the New Italy, the New Spain, the New Athens—whatever Mediterranean identity helped to sell the land to sun-starved midwesterners. In more grandiose, biblical terms it was lauded as the latest version of the New World Garden, the New Eden (its latitudinal proximity to the Holy Land not lost on the city fathers) ready for occupation by a regenerate Anglo-Saxon population. Thus the booster construction of Southern California as an Anglo-Protestant paradise was superimposed on a place that had been for the past hundred years a Spanish and Mexican Catholic enclave. The Catholic/Mediterranean garden could be marketed as the appointed destination of the Anglo Protestant in search of a fresh start after the East had been spoiled by overcrowding and immigration. The conventional Anglo-Saxon racial linkage of the cooler north with Anglo vigor and productivity and the warmer south with enervation and laziness could be reconfigured. The Spanish and Indian past could be appropriated, idealized, and celebrated as epic and romantic history—ignoring the enslavement and decimation of the Indians in the mission system—while an Anglo-Protestant future could be conjured into existence on the land.

Above all, though, the land was hawked for its sunshine. Salutary properties were attributed to the Mediterranean climate. The railroads put on their payrolls journalists who lauded the miracle of year-round sunshine in promotional tracts. The Southern Pacific hired Charles Nordhoff, former managing editor of William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post, and Ben Truman, a former New York Times correspondent, as publicists. Nordhoff’s influential California for Health, Pleasure and Residence was published in 1872 and Truman’s Semi-Tropical California (confusing tropical with Mediterranean) came out two years later, both books significantly appearing just before the railroads entered Southern California.

The railroad publicists, working in tandem with city boosters like Los Angeles Times owner and open shop extremist Harrison Gray Otis, his son-in-law Harry Chandler, and his indefatigable city editor, Charles Fletcher Lummis—editor of his own journal, Land of Sunshine—together with the new chamber of commerce aggressively and relentlessly promoted the region. It was one of the biggest land promotions in history. Rail cars were sent across the country filled with local exhibits—agricultural products, photos, graphs, and statistics. In the decade of the nineties the Santa Fe alone was carrying three to four trainloads of visitors and potential settlers into Southern California every day. Those who did settle made the region the destination of what the historian Carey McWilliams called “the largest internal migration in United States history.” It was also, he added, citing Lummis as the source, “the least heroic.”⁴

New towns appeared everywhere across the basin. Speculators subdivided land into parcels, laid out a few streets, and built a few hotels. They hounded potential buyers as they got off the trains, luring them to new town sites with brochures, banners, and free lunches. Lumber was placed on unsold lots along with “sold” signs. The whole basin was mustered, coaxed into existence as a vast commodity. By the turn of the century more than a hundred town sites were on the market. Some survived while others went bust, standing like ghost towns among their flourishing neighbors.

With its forest of oil wells, a new deep-water harbor in San Pedro (a site chosen over Santa Monica after a protracted battle between General Otis and the chamber of commerce forces and Collis Huntington, whose Southern Pacific Railroad controlled access to Santa Monica Bay), an aqueduct bringing water two hundred forty miles across the mountain from Owens Valley, and a vast interurban rail network with a thousand miles of track, Los Angeles, shortly after the turn of the century, was poised for even more growth. The old city limits were extended in every direction. The harbor site brought the annexation of a long, narrow strip of land leading south to San Pedro and Wilmington, and the aqueduct (completed in 1913) led to the annexation of much of the San Fernando Valley, where the pipeline terminated and where Otis and his cohorts had formed a syndicate to take options on land in advance of the project. Eager to get a share of the new water supply, dozens of towns throughout the basin joined Los Angeles. In a period of less than half a century a small enclave surrounding the plaza became a vast city of four hundred forty square miles.

General Otis died in 1917, but in the hands of his son-in-law, the Times, backed by an aggressive chamber of commerce and the All Year Club, continued to hawk the bright future of Los Angeles as the West Coast metropolis. And in the 1920s it became that. The population of the city more than doubled to 1.2 million by the end of the decade, becoming the nation’s fifth-largest city and covering an area larger than any other American city. Los Angeles County, too, more than doubled in population, growing from 900,000 in 1920 to 2.2 million in 1930. Big industry was booming. The movies had found a home in the then-suburban town of Hollywood in the 1910s and by the 1920s constituted the major industry of the city. Rich oil deposits, meanwhile, were discovered in Signal Hill, Huntington Beach, and Santa Fe Springs. Future-oriented Southern California also fostered the new aviation industry. The region hosted the first International Air Meet at Dominguez Field in 1910. In the 1920s and 1930s Glen Martin, the Laughead (Lockheed) brothers, Donald Douglas, and Howard Hughes began building and testing planes across the vast expanse from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara.

All of this meant more spread, more sprawl. The population, having gleefully appropriated the automobile, migrated west all the way to the ocean, north to the San Fernando Valley, and south all the way to the harbor, settling dozens of towns along the routes. The coming of the automobile was not in itself responsible for the sprawl within and beyond the expanding city limits. Horizontality was already in place, the product of the checkerboard pattern of town building established by real estate subdividers even before the turn of the century. Los Angeles emerged as a vast semiurban region (McWilliams called it “rurban”), growing less in the conventional urban way of expansion outward from a dense core than by the more or less simultaneous development of widely separated towns linked by the Pacific Electric rail lines. When the automobile came the city was clearly positioned for its arrival. A vast network of roads and highways, promoted by the new Auto Club and built alongside the trolley rights-of-way, crisscrossed the basin. People could move increasingly faster and farther, live at a greater distance from work and shopping. In 1925 there was an estimated one car per 1.6 residents. Interstate highways, too, were being built, and while the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads made mass migration to Southern California possible in the early years, the new interstates offered an alternative route into the promised land. Automobility, in high gear in the 1920s, both responded to and created the demands of a mobile, fluid, post–World War I population. In contributing to the decentralization of the city, the automobile diminished the central city’s hegemony.

In such a landscape where does downtown figure? Visiting British architectural critic Reyner Banham, who lamented that he had to learn how to drive in order to “read” Los Angeles, wrote in his 1971 Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies that the city’s downtown is irrelevant. It was never that. Despite the city’s decentralization, downtown, with its beaux arts and art deco municipal buildings, its department stores on Broadway and Spring streets, functioned as a crowded, vital urban center. But as the “white flight” move into the suburbs and the emergence of self-contained edge cities intensified after World War II, downtown came to be associated more and more with urban blight. When Banham was writing at the end of the sixties, the massive Bunker Hill redevelopment project, an attempt to revive a dying downtown and attract Pacific Rim trade and finance, was underway. Among other things, this entailed the razing of the stately old houses on the hill and the forced relocation of its inhabitants, a matter that engendered considerable controversy and resentment. Over the last twenty-five years more than thirty skyscrapers (most foreign financed and owned), several apartment buildings, and a contemporary art museum have been set in place on the hill.

Whatever its future, downtown is not, and never has been, irrelevant. It exists today, as it did in the boom years, as a dramatic study in contrast—a microcosm of the city’s multiethnic mix, a reflection of its extremes of wealth and poverty, its class and rac...