Reinventing Los Angeles

Describes how water politics, cars and freeways, and immigration and globalization have shaped Los Angeles, and how innovative social movements are working to make a more livable and sustainable city. Los Angeles—the place without a sense of place, famous for sprawl and overdevelopment and defined by its car-clogged freeways—might seem inhospitable to ideas about connecting with nature and community. But in Reinventing Los Angeles, educator and activist Robert Gottlieb describes how imaginative and innovative social movements have coalesced around the issues of water development, cars and freeways, and land use, to create a more livable and sustainable city. Gottlieb traces the emergence of Los Angeles as a global city in the twentieth century and describes its continuing evolution today. He examines the powerful influences of immigration and economic globalization as they intersect with changes in the politics of water, transportation, and land use, and illustrates each of these core concerns with an account of grass roots and activist responses: efforts to reenvision the concrete-bound, fenced-off Los Angeles River as a natural resource; “Arroyofest,” the closing of the Pasadena Freeway for a Sunday of walking and bike riding; and immigrants' initiatives to create urban gardens and connect with their countries of origin. Reinventing Los Angeles is a unique blend of personal narrative (Gottlieb himself participated in several of the grass roots actions described in the book) and historical and theoretical discussion. It provides a road map for a new environmentalism of everyday life, demonstrating the opportunities for renewal in a global city.

This edition is a celebratory pictorial compilation recounting the evolution and transformation of one of downtown Los Angeles’ primary arteries. Over 200 photographs showcase architectural structures and details that line the blocks of North and South Broadway Street in the center of downtown Los Angeles. The book traces colorful legends, anecdotes and landmarks that preceded current standing constructions. Broadway Street was originally identified as Fort Street in the initial 1849 city tract created by U.S. Army map surveyor Lieutenant Edward Ord. The Fort referenced Fort Moore Hill, a prominent and strategic incline that overlooked the early settlement. The Fort Moore district served as one of the city’s first burial grounds and was later leveled to construct the Hollywood Freeway. In 1890, Broadway Street was permanently renamed. The Los Angeles El Pueblo settlement was established in the mid-18th century along the then fertile banks of the Los Angeles River. The colony’s terrain was agriculturally cultivated for vineyards, cattle ranching and later citrus groves before an encroaching urban environment altered the complexion of city towards the close of the 19th century. Drawing from varied archival documentation and narratives, Vickers traces the evolutionary stages of Broadway Street into the city’s commercial and entertainment center. Broadway’s reputation extended throughout the first half of the twentieth century but was followed by a prolonged period of four-decade stagnation. The most current reinvention has introduced retail, office and residential mixed-use developments. Existing retail lease commitments contracted during the street’s lean years of decline, however, has slowed this synergy of change. Reinventing Broadway Street documents numerous colorful and influential contributors to the local history. Among the profiled personalities include Oliver Morosco, John Temple, William Wolfskill, Jean-Luis Vignes, Abel and Arcadia Sterns, Isaias Hellman, Joaquin Murrieta, John C. Fremont, John Parkinson, Prudent Beaudry, Sarah Bernhardt, Harris Newmark, and many others. Structures photographed include the Times Mirror Square, Bradbury, Irvine-Byrne, Hosfield, Zobel, Trustee, O. T. Johnson #1 and #2, Junipero Serra, Metropolitan, Judson Rives, Bumiller, Chester Williams, Remick and Grayson, Schulte United, J. W. Gold, Story, Desmond, Jewelry Trade, Mercantile Arcade, Norton, Hass, Merritt, Clifton’s Brookside and Schaber’s Cafeterias, Yorkshire Hotel, Garland, Charles C. Chapman, Eastern Columbia, Wurlitzer, Brown-Israel, Broadway Leasehold, Platt, Western Pacific, Howard Huntington, Case Hotel and Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Theatres include The Million Dollar, Roxie, Cameo, Los Angeles, Palace, Globe, Tower, Rialto, Orpheum, Arcade and United Artists. Former department store buildings includes The May Company, Bullock’s, Swelldom’s, F. W. Woolworth’s, National Dollar Store, S. H. Kress, Broadway, Silverwood’s, Hartfield’s, and Barker Brothers. Notable government constructions include the LA County Hall of Record, Justice Building, Foltz Criminal Justice Center and the nearly completed Federal Courthouse Building. Reinventing Broadway Street takes the reader on a stroll through the history, present and progressive future envisioned and being created simultaneously.

This Companion contains 25 original essays by writers and scholars who present an expert assessment of the best and most important work to date on the complex history of Los Angeles. The first Companion providing a historical survey of Los Angeles, incorporating critical, multi-disciplinary themes and innovative scholarship Features essays from a range of disciplines, including history, political science, cultural studies, and geography Photo essays and ‘contemporary voice’ sections combine with traditional historiographic essays to provide a multi-dimensional view of this vibrant and diverse city Essays cover the key topics in the field within a thematic structure, including demography, social unrest, politics, popular culture, architecture, and urban studies

Once the third-largest lake in California and among the world's greatest sources of dust, for decades the dried Owens Lake was merely a footnote to the most notorious water grab in modern history. Now, the desert lake has been reassembled--not refilled--to redeem its lost value without returning Los Angeles's main water supply. In The Spoils of Dust, this bargain redemption and its surprise conjuring of an extraordinary landscape, is the backdrop for investigating contemporary relationships between landscape architecture, engineering, and perception. The Promethean terrain makes legible the frameworks we use to reinvent nature in the Anthropocene, revealing itself as a monument to the prismatic modes by which we know landscapes today. Almost by accident, this has made select landscape values the linchpin for major water resource decisions, thrusting landscape architecture into a consequential position. Answering the challenge, the book concludes with a speculative atlas and robotic tool for an imaginative and advanced approach to dry lake design.

Los Angeles has a tantalizing hold on the American imagination. Its self-magnifying myths encompass Hollywood glamour, Arcadian landscapes, and endless summer, but also the apocalyptic undertow of riots, environmental depredation, and natural disaster. This Companion traces the evolution of Los Angeles as the most public staging of the American Dream - and American nightmares. The expert contributors make exciting, innovative connections among the authors and texts inspired by the city, covering the early Spanish settlers, African American writers, the British and German expatriates of the 1930s and 1940s, Latino, and Asian LA literature. The genres discussed include crime novels, science fiction, Hollywood novels, literary responses to urban rebellion, the poetry scene, nature writing, and the most influential non-fiction accounts of the region. Diverse, vibrant, and challenging as the city itself, this Companion is the definitive guide to LA in literature.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Japan went through massive welfare expansions that sparked debates about citizenship. At the heart of these disputes stood African Americans and Koreans. Reinventing Citizenship offers a comparative study of African American welfare activism in Los Angeles and Koreans’ campaigns for welfare rights in Kawasaki. In working-class and poor neighborhoods in both locations, African Americans and Koreans sought not only to be recognized as citizens but also to become legitimate constituting members of communities. Local activists in Los Angeles and Kawasaki ardently challenged the welfare institutions. By creating opposition movements and voicing alternative visions of citizenship, African American leaders, Tsuchiya argues, turned Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty into a battle for equality. Koreans countered the city’s and the nation’s exclusionary policies and asserted their welfare rights. Tsuchiya’s work exemplifies transnational antiracist networking, showing how black religious leaders traveled to Japan to meet Christian Korean activists and to provide counsel for their own struggles. Reinventing Citizenship reveals how race and citizenship transform as they cross countries and continents. By documenting the interconnected histories of African Americans and Koreans in Japan, Tsuchiya enables us to rethink present ideas of community and belonging.

In the latter part of the C20th, a series of seminal books were written which examined Los Angeles by the likes of Reyner Banham, Mike Davis, Edward Soja, Allen Scott, Michael Dear, Frederick Jameson, Umberto Eco, Bernard-Henri Levy, and Jean Baudrillard which have been hugely influential in thinking about cities more broadly. The debates which were generated by these works have tended to be very heated and either defensive or offensive in approach. A sufficient amount of time has since passed that a more measured approach to evaluating this work can now be taken. The first section of this book, 'Contra This and Contra That', provides such a critique of the various theories applied to Los Angeles during the last century, balancing the positive with the negative. The second part of the book is an investigation of L.A. as it exists on the ground today. While political, the theoretical stance taken in this investigation is not mounted as a platform from which to advocate a particular ideology. Instead, it encompasses cultural as well as economic issues to put forth a view of L.A. which is coherent and cogent while at the same time considering its multi-layed, complex and ever-changing qualities. It concludes by arguing that sectored off and 'totalizing' visions of the city will not do as instruments of urban analysis and that only a theory as mobile as its target will do: one that replicates the polymer nature of this place. It proposes that, extending that theory to the world beyond this particular city, only a theory that models itself on the mobile and polymer nature of the world, while still retaining a sense of the actual and the real, will do as an instrument with which to comprehend the world. In doing so, this book is not only a model by which to think through Los Angeles, but as a model by which to think through other world cities.