When It First Came Together in Los Angeles (1965–1992)

My geohistory of Los Angeles begins in 1965, in the bewildering aftermath of one of the most violent and costly riots in U.S. history. The Watts Riots burned down the core of African American LA and had an even larger, worldwide impact. As one of the leading edges of global urban unrest in the 1960s, the Watts uprising announced to the world that the postwar economic boom in the United States and elsewhere was not going to continue with business as usual, for too many benefited too little from the boom. There were riots and uprisings around the world before and after Watts, but none were as violent, as destructive, and perhaps as symbolic of the end of an era and the beginning of a new one as the events of 1965 in Los Angeles. My Los Angeles is in large part an effort to make sense of what happened to LA in the decades following the Watts uprising.

Virtually everything contained in My Los Angeles depends on and extends from this first chapter and its central argument that the Watts Riots marked the end of the long postwar economic boom in the United States and signaled the onset of a period of crisis-generated economic restructuring that would affect to some degree every major metropolis in the industrialized world. The argument goes one step further to claim and demonstrate that very few if any other metropolitan areas in the world were as deeply restructured and radically changed as Los Angeles, giving to those who study it a remarkable panorama of experiences and expressions from which to draw insight.

There is some historical sequencing to this look at the urban restructuring of Los Angeles, but what emerges is certainly not a comprehensive history of LA before or after 1965. Nor is the geography of Los Angeles presented in full and permanent detail. To keep the historical and the geographical developing together, I call what I do "geohistory." This and all the chapters that follow are attempts to capture the fluidity of geohistorical development in this constantly changing urban landscape through multiple layers of interpretation and reinterpretation.

CREATING A NEW LOS ANGELES

At least three pronounced "inversions" took place in the four decades following the Watts Riots, each contributing to the city's remarkable metamorphosis. By inversion I mean a major historical reversal in which the LA that existed in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century was turned upside down and inside out. A new Los Angeles was created that in many ways was opposite to the image of Los Angeles that had developed in the academic literature and popular media up to the 1970s and which, despite its outdatedness, continues to dominate many present-day views of Los Angeles as well. One of the first tasks in looking at Los Angeles is to challenge this persistent inheritance of increasingly anachronistic imagery.

The first of these dramatic inversions had to do with the local labor movement. Once the realm of "sunshine and the open shop," to use Mike Davis's felicitous phrase, the old Los Angeles was renowned for its probusiness, antilabor environment. It stood out as a retrogressive counterfoil to New York City and its ultraliberal western outlier, San Francisco. LA had its moments—a significant flirtation with socialism if not anarchism in the 1910s, a breeding ground for revolutionary movements in Mexico and China, the groundbreaking center for the first wave of federally sponsored public housing in the early 1950s—but the dominance of institutions such as the chamber of commerce, the local manufacturers' association, and the then ultraconservative LA Times was clearly established and quite capable of breaking the back of any left-of-center trend or militant labor union activity.

The red-baiting war against public housing and the Hollywood blacklisting that arose from the inquisitions of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s confirmed and consolidated this dominance. Twenty years later, however, Los Angeles began its unexpected emergence as a leading generative and innovative center of the national labor movement, especially with regard to gender equality, gay rights, and above all, the organization of immigrants. Nowhere in metropolitan America have labor unions grown in membership and local power as they have in LA, and nowhere else have immigrants played as central a role in the labor movement. I will return to these remarkable developments in labor-community coalition building from the Watts Riots to the present in chapter 8.

A similar role reversal and image inversion took place with regard to neighborhood identities, place-based politics, and the activities of community-based organizations. For most of the past century, Los Angeles has been seen as the epitome of automobile-based urbanism, with residents creating far-flung "autopian" networks of contacts and attractions rather than forming "proximate communities"—well-defined neighborhoods where pedestrian life flourished and everyone knew and relied upon their neighbors. Berkeley urban planning professor Melvin Webber famously described LA in the 1970s as a "non-place urban realm," where distances were elastic and the local meant little, where many households had unlisted phone numbers and nestled behind high walls and a sign or two reading "Trespassers Will Be Shot." Since 1985, for many different reasons, just the opposite has been happening to community identity and activism. Perhaps nowhere else in the country today are neighborhood, community, and other place-based organizations as numerous, active, and successful, a topic that will also be explored further in chapter 8.

A third material and reputational inversion has transformed Los Angeles from the least dense and most destructively sprawling major metropolis in America—literally and figuratively seventy-two suburbs in search of a city—into the country's densest urbanized area, surpassing the twenty-three-county New York City urbanized area in 1990 and widening its lead ever since. Several factors contributed to this stunning reversal. One of the largest city-focused migrations in world history (at least BC, before China) added almost five million people (almost all from developing countries) to the population of the inner urban core alone. In all, since 1975, nearly eight million were added to the five-county LA urban region, by far the largest growth spurt among cities in the developed world outside Japan and comparable to the expansion of the great Third World megacities, such as Lagos, Dhaka, and Mexico City.

Also contributing to its overall density has been...