In the summer of 1964, Christopher Rand visited Los Angeles on assignment from the New Yorker. His writing for the magazine, published in Los Angeles: The Ultimate City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), feels like an artifact from the last moment when ordinary Americans felt that science and engineering could remake the world for the benefit of humankind.
Rand visits a base in the Santa Monica Mountains that directs the fire control planning for the 330 square miles around it:
I was shown a large map-room there, with consoles full of communications gear, these tended by two or three men around the clock. The man in charge said that the post had seventy-six fire companies and seven ambulances available, and patrols on the move in all directions. If a brush fire was even suspected in the hills, he said, the post would get six fire companies and two chief officers onto the scene as soon as possible; they would be sent from various quarters because movement was so hard in that terrain. Then if the blaze got serious, more and more equipment would be sent from nearby points, and meanwhile still more would be moved up, as reserves, into the vacancies. “In a big fire we keep redeploying constantly,” he explained, and it all reminded me of our infantry operations in Korea – even to the possibility of air strikes, which the station could call in, if they were needed, much as a regimental command post might.
He heads to Irvine, where the architectural firm William Pereira is creating a whole community from ranch land. (“This is Irvine Ranch,” his guide tells him. “It was the only thing that could stop those suburbs from spreading.”) Pereira himself speaks: “Right now my kind is in command,” he says. “We have sold the idea that planning is necessary, and we have generations of development ahead of us. We have the palette here and we’ll see what we can do with it.”
Rand speaks to the Pereira partner running the Irvine field office, James Langenheim, who tells him about the firm’s plans for Catalina:
“Catalina,” said Lagenheim, “can’t be developed for a few years anyway, because its population can’t increase much till the water and transport problems are solved. We think desalinization will take care of the water; it is being studied now, you know, in Southern California. We hope it can be done economically in a few years, which would free us on that score in a decade. As for transport, the island is now served by airlines and, in the summer months, a boat from Wilmington, in the Los Angeles port area, but the boat is too slow and infrequent for the population we visualize. We are looking forward to cheaper, more efficient helicopter service or to improved hydrofoils that can operate in the channel there, which is often choppy. This, too, should take a few years. It all delays our plan, but at least it gives us a lead-time for more thorough research; we are, for instance, trying to find just where the Indians used to live on Catalina, so we will know more about the ground water. And we are getting a chance to indoctrinate the Catalina population about planning in general. Not to mention indoctrinating Los Angeles County, to which the island belongs, about its problems and its future.”
Rand saw in Century City, a high-rise community built with capital from Alcoa, Lazard Frères, Tishman, and the Pennsylvania Railroad, a new Los Angeles. “Capital is coming from many directions,” he wrote, “and this force, together with others – the influx, the technology, the dreams of the planners – is pushing the projected Los Angeles toward realization.”
Like Century City, Los Angeles would grow up:
It accords, also, with certain accepted ideas about the modern city. For one thing it should have much high-rise living in it. Heretofore L.A. has run to single-family houses. This has been partly due to a fear of earthquakes and partly to the small-town, or rural, Midwestern background of so many Angelenos. The idea of every-man-his-own-landlord-and-every-man-his-own-chauffeur has been thought a key to freedom of some sort. (And also to social standing. “There was a matter of image,” an L.A. write has said in discussing the aversion here to high-rise. “A homeowner had more status than an apartment dweller.”) But now that prejudice is passing. Real-estate economists and analysts, who abound in L.A., point out that the big U.S. crop of war-babies recently attained their early twenties, an age that favors apartment living; they say this has sped the change. They also say, more simply, that close-in land prices (not to mention taxes) preclude one-family homes for most people. There has recently been a slump in all real-estate activities in L.A., but prior to that slump – in the early ‘sixties – three-quarters of the dwelling units built were going up into the third dimension, and this is making it more like other cities.
Rand says this all without a hint of irony or doubt, even when he compares fire control in the Santa Monica Mountains to the land campaign in Korea. There is confidence and optimism in the people he speaks to, and Rand himself is not anxious or fearful.
It is hard to imagine anyone writing like this in the New Yorker today.
Los Angeles may be the ultimate city of our age. It is the last station, anyway, of the Protestant outburst that left northern Europe three centuries ago and moved across America: the last if only because with it the movement has reached the Pacific. There are other cities on our West Coast, but none so huge or dynamic as Los Angeles, or so imbued with the Northern wilfulness in battling nature. L.A., as its people often call it, is the product to a rare degree of technology. Though built on a near-desert, it is the most farflung of the world’s main cities now, and probably the most luxuriously materialistic. It is also – apart from the big “underdeveloped” cities, with their shantytown outskirts – the fastest growing in population. With its hinterland, of Southern California, it is gaining nearly a thousand inhabitants a day, and is expected to go on gaining indefinitely. The Angelenos, its people, are prone to live in the future and to project their statistics forward; the visitor hears them talk more about 1980 than about next year. “This is an optimistic city,” a friend here told me recently. “If something is built wrong it doesn’t matter much. Everyone expects it to be torn down and rebuilt in a decade or two.”
These are the opening words of a piece that end with the same sense of optimism about human potential: “the builders of L.A. keep building,” Rand writes. “L.A. is bound up with technology like no other city in history, and technology has a will of its own.”
But what is striking is how little has changed, and how little the city of today reflects the dreams of 1964. They stopped building, and everything we had hoped for – “the influx, the technology, the dreams of the planners” – never came to be. It is as though the country went into the darkness and never emerged.
Catalina never became much bigger than it was in 1964. Today, there are fewer than five thousand people on the island’s 48,000 acres. Philip Wrigley, chewing gum magnate and owner of the island, deeded 42,000 of those acres to a nature conservancy in 1975.
Catalina never became a haven for golf carts and pleasure craft. Los Angeles did not become Century City. Pereira’s firm designed the airports of Baghdad and Tehran, but they did not indoctrinate Los Angeles. Instead, the Californians came to fear growth and change. They stopped building.
Every day I pray that they will tear it down and build again.
