Taking Back the Boulevard

Art, Activism, and Gentrification in Los Angeles

Jan Lin

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781479895700
• eBook ISBN: 9781479894192
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art
• Index: Social Sciences

The promises and conflicts faced by public figures, artists, and leaders of Northeast Los Angeles as they enliven and defend their neighborhoods

Los Angeles is well known as a sprawling metropolis with endless freeways that can make the city feel isolating and separate its communities. Yet in the past decade, as Jan Lin argues in Taking Back the Boulevard, there has been a noticeable renewal of public life on several of the city's iconic boulevards, including Atlantic, Crenshaw, Lankershim, Sunset, Western, and Wilshire. These arteries connect neighborhoods across the city, traverse socioeconomic divides and ethnic enclaves, and can be understood as the true locational heart of public life in the metropolis.

Focusing especially on the cultural scene of Northeast Los Angeles, Lin shows how these gentrifying communities help satisfy a white middle-class consumer demand for authentic experiences of "living on the edge" and a spirit of cultural rebellion. These neighborhoods have gone through several stages, from streetcar suburbs, to disinvested neighborhoods with the construction of freeways and white flight, to immigrant enclaves, to the home of Chicano/a artists in the 1970s. Those artists were then followed by non-Chicano/a, white artists, who were later threatened with displacement by gentrifiers attracted by the neighborhoods' culture, street life, and green amenities that earlier inhabitants had worked to create. Lin argues that gentrification is not a single transition, but a series of changes that disinvest and re-invest neighborhoods with financial and cultural capital.

Drawing on community survey research, interviews with community residents and leaders, and ethnographic observation, this book argues that the revitalization in Northeast LA by arts leaders and neighborhood activists marks a departure in the political culture from the older civic engagement to more socially progressive coalition work involving preservationists, environmentalists, citizen protestors, and arts organizers. Finally, Lin explores how accelerated gentrification and mass displacement of Latino/a and working-class households in the 2010s has sparked new rounds of activism as the community grapples with new class conflicts and racial divides in the struggle to self-determine its future.

1

Boulevards, Gentrification, and Urban Culture

Los Angles is well known as a decentralized, sprawling metropolis that diverges from the urban prototype of central business districts with grand pedestrian centers like Chicago or New York. The freeways celebrate personal mobility and the aesthetics of the automobile society, but foster social distancing more often than boosting civic engagement or urban public culture. The construction of the freeways helped relieve congestion at the center and abetted the rise of Los Angeles as the prototypical “suburban metropolis” of the mid-twentieth century (Fishman 1987). But freeways and the power of eminent domain also led to the destruction of some established neighborhoods often populated by minorities and contributed to class and racial separation as a result of white flight to the suburbs (Villa 2000; Avila 2004).

Before the advent of the automobile, boulevards serviced by electric railway lines were the main conduits of urban development in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Los Angeles. The electric streetcars were relatively affordable and contributed to social class mixing, and the boulevards were main avenues of commercial and public life. The interurban electric railway networks knit together residential real estate developments scattered throughout the Los Angeles region through vast agricultural estates from the coastal plain to the irrigated inland valleys. The neighborhoods of Northeast LA were some of the first streetcar suburbs to emerge. From the 1880s to the 1930s, Los Angeles was a metropolis of “town and country” (Fishman 1987). The Slovenian immigrant writer Louis Adamic (1932) described Los Angeles during the interwar era as an “enormous village” that was a teeming metropolitan frontier of immigrants and fortune seekers, who had a provincial outlook borne of their small-town and rural origins.

But the electric railways were demolished and their old rights of way were superimposed by a network of freeways servicing the booming suburbs in the postwar period. Many of the boulevards and inner-ring suburban neighborhoods such as in Northeast Los Angeles suffered through decades of postwar disinvestment and decline as the focus of commercial and residential life shifted to new outer-suburban subdivisions and shopping centers that serviced the automobile-centered mass society. Financial redlining by the government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation further contributed to the disinvestment of minority inner-ring neighborhoods. But with the passage of civil rights and immigration reform laws in the 1960s, racial minorities began to move into neighborhoods and boulevards being vacated by whites, who increasingly after the Watts Riots of 1965 viewed the inner city as a zone of social disorder.

While the freeways are the main arteries in the regional transportation network, the surface boulevards and avenues of Los Angeles are drawing new interest as the true locational heart of public life in the metropolis. The freeways allow visitors and suburbanites to bypass the inner city and are concrete walls that divide and fragment life at the neighborhood level. The boulevards, by contrast, stretch for miles across the coastal plain, connecting neighborhoods across the sprawling city, traversing socioeconomic divides and a diverse patchwork of ethnic enclaves. Western Avenue, for instance, one of the longest north-south boulevards in Los Angeles, starts in the tony Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Feliz and runs down through Koreatown and Latino/African American neighborhoods of South Los Angeles to the ocean. Sunset and Wilshire boulevards are two well-known east-west arteries that extend from Downtown LA through Hollywood and the Westside all the way to the ocean at Santa Monica.

Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote a series of stories (2012–2013) chronicling the renewal of public life on several of the city’s iconic boulevards, including Atlantic, Sunset, Crenshaw, Harbor, Lankershim, and Wilshire. He describes a cultural and economic renaissance resulting from the combined efforts of architects, urban planners, small business owners, and community activists. Higher density and mixed-use commercial and residential projects are part of the transformations he observes along with street-level cultural amenities like hip art walks, ethnic food scenes, pocket parks, and strategies to share automobile street space with bicyclists and pedestrians. He also credits new Metropolitan Transportation Authority efforts to fund light-rail, subway, and bus networks armed with new funding from Measure R, a sales tax increase approved in 2008 by Los Angeles County voters, and city efforts to create more miles of bike lanes. He describes the emergence of a “post-suburban” civic identity in contemporary Los Angeles.

Hawthorne draws new attention to a book previously neglected but now in a twenty-fifth-anniversary reprint, Doug Suisman’s Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-rays of the Body Public (2014). Suisman describes boulevards as “the spine or umbilical cord of the city” and argues that they “constitute the irreducible armature of the city’s public space and are therefore charged with social and political significance.” Suisman has put his theory to action through twenty-five years of work in infrastructure and landscape planning for transit, streetscapes, parks, campuses, and neighborhoods, for local and international clients. His Suisman Urban Design studio advertises a “profound respect for social and cultural fabric” in working to integrate socially diverse and broad public collaboration into its design and planning charrettes.

Figure 1.1. CicLAvia in Boyle Heights. (Credit: Jan Lin.)

Widespread public engagement on the boulevards of Los Angeles has also been enlivened since 2010 by the semiannual open-street event known as CicLAvia, inspired by the Ciclovías that have taken place in Bogotá, Colombia, since 1976. Bicyclists predominate, along with pedestrians and skaters, in the streets that are closed to automobile traffic for several hours. Musical performances and walking tours provide a mixed atmosphere of recreational celebration and public education about the local cultures of city neighborhoods. Predating CicLAvia was the ArroyoFest, during which the Arroyo Seco Parkway running through Northeast Los Angeles was closed to automobile traffic for several hours in 2003 to allow for bicycle and pedestrian recreation and a community festival in Sycamore Grove Park (Gottlieb 2007).

Figure 1.2. CicLAvia over the Hollywood Freeway. (Credit: Jan Lin.)

CicLAvia has received kudos for promoting carbon-free “green” modes of urban transportation and social mixing among the citizenry. But in working-class immigrant neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, CicLAvia is also perceived by some residents and business owners as a phenomenon that brings in white middle-class tourists who subsequently become home buyers and commercial entrepreneurs and accelerate the gentrification process while promoting displacement in the transitional neighborhood (Bermudez 2014). There was local outcry against a May 2014 flier distributed by Adaptive Realty, an LA-based company, for a bike tour of the neighborhood that asked, “Why rent downtown when you could own in Boyle Heights?” The flier also cited Boyle Heights as a “charming, historic, walkable and bikable neighborhood,” “2 seconds from the Arts District,” where buyers can “put down as little as $40K with decent credit.” Company president Moses Kagan canceled the event in response to the public controversy.1

Boulevard Transition in Northeast Los Angeles

The neighborhoods of Northeast Los Angeles, particularly Highland Park and Eagle Rock, have historically been known for architectural preservation, artistic and bohemian cultural life, independent small businesses, and racial/ethnic diversity. The neighborhoods are framed by four boulevards, including Figueroa, Colorado, Eagle Rock, and York. Among the first suburbs to be built in Los Angeles, the northeast neighborhoods have experienced historical cycles of disinvestment and white flight, followed by settlement of Latin American and Asian immigrants and their families, and now a trend of gentrification and white return. New coffee shops and restaurants, art galleries, and boutique retailers selling handcrafted home décor and vintage products are sprouting amid the existing retail landscape of Latino/a sidewalk food vendors, taco trucks, bakeries and eateries, and Filipino mini-markets. The boulevards are in a state of active gentrification and racial/ethnic transition that reflects broader dynamics in the neighborhoods of Northeast Los Angeles.

In the last few decades we have seen new interest in downtown and inner-ring suburban neighborhoods such as Northeast Los Angeles, as a countertrend to urban sprawl and the long commutes experienced by residents of exurban locations. The appeal of older neighborhoods with historically significant architecture close to central city cultural amenities has drawn young professionals and business investors to communities like Eagle Rock and Highland Park. The economic revitalization of the boulevards is palpable, but so are concerns about the displacement effects of commercial and residential gentrification. Turnover in commercial storefronts from ethnic-owned enterprises catering to working-class consumers to white-owned enterprises catering to middle-class consumers has increased during the recent economic recovery from the Great Recession of 2007–2010 Speculative investors are purchasing foreclosed properties and flipping them for windfall profits in the current post-recessionary period and stoking a red-hot residential real estate market that augurs the displacement of Latinos and working-class residents.

Along with the revitalization of the boulevards we have seen the rise of community-based efforts to enhance public space on the boulevards, including the Take Back the Boulevard campaign of the Eagle Rock Association, which seeks to slow traffic on Colorado Boulevard and add bike lanes, enhance pedestrian access, and improve street landscaping. Traffic slowing and bike lanes have been enhanced on York Boulevard for several years, while Councilman José Huizar’s office has helped procure public monies for a park and sidewalk “parklet,” street beautification, and traffic management. On Figueroa Street, the North Figueroa Association has worked for years with the assistance of Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative funding to improve the boulevard through streetscape enhancements. These public space campaigns mark an evolution of the historical preservation and slow growth movements that emerged in Northeast Los Angeles in the 1980s. These community interests have increasingly converged with a growing regional coalition of cyclist interests, planners, and public officials working to make the boulevards more bike- and pedestrian-friendly. These interests have been boosted with a broader metropolitan movement for “transit-oriented development” arising around the growth of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) light-rail system and the sales tax revenues since the 2008 passing of Measure R. Transit-oriented development has been under way in Northeast Los Angeles since the opening of the Gold Line light-rail system through the Arroyo Seco corridor in 2003.

Figure 1.3. Take Back the Boulevard campaign logo. (Credit: Jan Lin.)

In October 2013, Mayor Garcetti made further commitments to public-sector support of boulevard revitalization with the announcement of his “Great Streets” program to fund design, permitting, and infrastructure changes to make streets more pedestrian-friendly, attract businesses, and improve quality of life. In June 2014, he announced the targeting of fifteen streets in each Los Angeles City Council district, with North Figueroa Street between Avenue 50 and Avenue 60 pegged in Northeast LA. An associated “People Streets” program was created to facilitate the creation of bike corrals, parklets, and plazas to foster public interaction.

Artists and the Hipster Scene

The transitions in the public space of the boulevards of the Northeast Los Angeles have been accompanied by evolutions in the public identity of the region. The cultural identity of Northeast Los Angeles has its historical precedents in the Arroyo Culture that flowered at the turn of the twentieth century in the Arroyo Seco tributary of the Los Angeles River that flows down through the region from the San Gabriel Mountains. The Arroyo Culture was associated with the West Coast Arts and Crafts architecture and design movement and organized artist collectives, small-scale handcraft production methods, and retreat into nature in a social and aesthetic critique against industrial capitalism and the white supremacist spirit of frontier conquest (Winter 1999). One of the Arroyo’s most famous public figures was Los Angeles Times city editor Charles Lummis, who founded the Southwest Museum of the American Indian and the Landmarks Club, and prefigured the modern historical and environmental preservation movement on the West Coast. But Lummis also contributed to the cultural invention of a romanticized mythology of California’s pastoral Spanish mission past that served the interests of the boosters and real estate interests during these early decades of urban development in Los Angeles (McWilliams [1946] 1973).

The Northeast Los Angeles region fell into economic and cultural decline with mass suburbanization and white flight in the mid-twentieth century. Latino immigrants began to populate the neighborhoods and stabilize boulevard commerce, although there emerged pockets of poverty, and the Avenues street gang rose in power, especially in the southern part of Northeast LA in Cypress Park and Glassell Park. The Arro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Introduction: Scenes from Northeast Los Angeles
• 1. Boulevards, Gentrification, and Urban Culture
• 2. The Stages of Neighborhood Transition
• 3. From Arroyo Culture to NELA Arts
• 4. Neighborhood Activism and Slow Growth
• 5. Gentrification, Displacement, and the Right to the City
• Conclusion: Going Back to the Future
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author