Like, I’ll totally agree that California NIMBYs are ridiculous and have committed the state to a poorly chosen path, but I don’t think you guys appreciate how very explicitly central “a civilization where everyone lives in a small-town environment with direct exposure to undeveloped nature” has been to the California Dream

Like before even the postwar Golden Age buildout under Gov. Brown the Elder that really instantiated this suburban paradise, the prewar boom of LA was very commonly framed – embraced by boosters to draw more residents – in terms of a job-rich city that uniquely didn’t have “slum” housing.

(You don’t even hear about “slum clearance” – the postwar practice of demolishing blocks at a time and giving the former residents intentions of something better that much anymore, but large areas of downtown-adjacent land in American cities was hyper-dense and low quality tenements or often formerly comfortable-class housing that had been subdivided all to hell)

California had an idiom for “life at high residential density” – the crowded, warrenlike Chinatowns of LA and especially SF since the Gold Rush, chaotically full of improvised enterprise, drug addiction, and murderous gang violence!

In the early 1980s, Long Beach – the industrialized working class shore to the south of LA, kind of its Queens, was like “ha-HA, we have filled this wonderful location at low bungalow density, time to upzone so as to keep this a functional area for working-class life!”

Of course the thing is the 1980s in Southern California went on to feature a massive illegal immigration wave (Cheech Marin’s 1987 Born in East L.A. is called that because it’s about an American-born bilingual Mexican Angelino experiencing this) which often landed in Long Beach AND the crack- and gang- heavy nadir of South LA-area Black communities.

Which is to say, in actual historical precedent that informs cultural sentiment, dense housing in California (let’s talk *Oakland*) consistently means “the white average-Joe neighborhood becomes overrun with inscrutable, addiction-riven, gang-murderous Others”

And the whole environmental stuff – there’s a clear line from John Muir and the Sierra Club through Paul Erlich and The Population Bomb to the Bay Area types who want to cap tech jobs or the people who worry about water (or road!) use coming from new development that the way to keep properly stewarding the land without exhausting finite resources was to limit population.

You can work racial or wevs angles too, a lot of the West Coast issues with natives and Chinese workers came from the way that the coast’s founding culture really came from a “Free Soil” philosophy, common among smallholders and “mechanics” in the (then-“West”), one of the two strains that went into the Republican anti-slavery stance along Boston moralism (New York, as the major port city of an international economy powered by cotton, was fairly pro-Confederate), that this was supposed to be a country to enable white men’s ability to establish self-sufficient petty dynasties of their own, and that indulging all this nonwhite work – creating a national economy oriented around slave-produced agricultural exports rather than white artisan industrial development, Pacific landowners recruiting natives or Chinese in a labor shortage rather than letting white wages rise so the workers could establish their pioneer fortunes – were, fundamentally, taking their jerbs.

And the pastoralism! This was the pleasant climate where the ranch house really blew up, integrating the outdoors and living area. Backyards – and home gardens – were key.

(In a LOT of ways Portland as I came to it at the dawn of the 2010s suddenly reminded me of things I had read about midcentury LA far closer than the one I saw in the 2000s)

Pete Seeger in 1963, “little boxes made of ticky tacky”, Joni Mitchell in 1970, “paved paradise and put up a parking lot”, these were laments for greenfield development coming before the activist-driven 1970s downzonings that saw that greenfield development was the ONLY way for California to add housing.

collapsedsquid:

In the case of the Valley, you know, you can maybe start that with Hewlett and Packard and the famous HP Way — what they called management by walking around. No corner offices, shirt sleeves. They still had ties, but we took off the jacket. And this was in the 1950s. You know, Hewlett Packard was founded in a garage, an iconic garage startup in 1939. By the fifties, it’s a publicly traded company. It’s extremely successful.

And Hewlett and Packard, are very kind of self-consciously working against the Organization Man paradigm. That was corporate capitalism in the 1950s. So creating a culture where management and the rank and file engineers are all kind of on the same side is taking the culture of the engineering lab and transferring that into a corporation.

And it also was I think philosophically too, this was the high water mark of private sector unionization. People like Dave Packard were very much against unions. Just saw them as a sign that something’s wrong with a company if you can’t find a way to get along. And that instead that employees of all rank should be rewarded with stock options, they should have a stake in the ownership of the company. So it was a different model. And that kind of percolates through. There are a lot of HP veterans that go on to start venture firms, start other companies, and they bring that laid back California more sort of ostensibly egalitarian corporate culture with them.

kontextmaschine:

The Old Internet I Loved

What I Thought It Was:

A World Where Established Orders Were Rendered Superfluous, and In the Absence Of Coordinating Forces, A Congenial Culture Arose From The Free Interplay Of All the World’s Diverse Peoples

What It Was, Apparently:

A World So Hegemonically Dominated by People In a Similar Class and Cultural Position That Our Interests Were Simply Uncritically Adopted as Local Cultural Norms, Which Could Then Be Misread as the Sensibility of the World Entire

So uh I guess it was that second one I was fond of the whole time and saw as our salvation from a broken world?

kontextmaschine:

Oh one thing to think about: Los Angeles - the last place we had a religious revival from - has traditionally been significantly, substantially, literally one of the more pro-Nazi parts of America.

Has to do mostly with migration patterns, boomed with a lot of Scando-German midwesterners (and after WWI a lot of German-friendly ex-Ottoman immigrants).

Like, all this was masked by the way its WWII effort was locally understood as mainly against Japan (which helped align California’s substantial non-Japanese Asian population, identifying with lands colonized by the Japanese Empire)

Like there were actual Nazi cults in the hills, the whole surfer hippie thing was a recapitulation of German wandervogel with actual Nazi mystic elements, the Falling Down surplus store with the secret Nazi room (and kinda the Gimp in Pulp Fiction) and American History X reflected real LA things.

Police forces usually lag their local populations (an interesting exception is how the Boston Irish used it to push out the older WASPs) and like, “the LAPD is a bunch of Nazis”, no that was real (so is “they since retired and helped settle Northern Idaho as an armed white ethnostate”)

That means The Rocketeer, where the hero fights the Nazis from 1938 LA, is kind of a nyah-nyah from the 80s (punk, anti-Reagan) antifascist tendencies

Oh also it should be noted that with an oil-boom and buildout-boom economy and plenty of open space to expand into pre-WWII LA was known as a particularly middle-class city, a precursor to the postwar “mass middle class” California and American Dreams. And that it was also particularly nonunion, with the newspaper Chandler dynasty rallying a coalition of businessmen to keep them out.

Like, beyond the favorable ethnic mix it was a petit bourgeois society of union suppression, no surprise there’d be resonance there.

There were countertendencies. A West Coast port, there were Asian and maritime communities - Filipino sailors, Malay dockworkers, a Chinatown since way back. There’ve been Mexicans in LA since LA was in Mexico, and the wartime buildout of airplane and other materiel factories boomed its black population. Ideologically, the Chandlers were fighting someone on the labor side, and they sometimes fought back with dynamite.

The wave of Mexican immigration that seriously browned the city is popularly dated as late as the 1980 Olympics. Before that, the Southern California that gave us Reagan and received Nixon was key to why until the party’s collapse in the mid-90s, California was once a bulwark of Republican conservatism.

best-blurst-of-times:

“It is no surprise that the dominant perception of space, marked by discourses of property and nationality, continue to hold sway even among those who seek to transform it. But, as Benjamin put it, when the old temporality is interrupted in a fundamental way, this perception will also be interrupted, by a ‘historical time-lapse camera’ – a new image of time that will reorient our perception of space. This is especially important, since for individuals time is marked by a succession of affective attachments that overgird one another in ever deepening layers over the course of a lifespan. Those who mobilized or were swept up by the movements of the late 1960s, for instance, necessarily experience subsequent events differently from those who came of age in the late 1990s.”

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/occupy-time

Model Metropolis

The original SimCity was an implementation of a Nixon-era libertarian theory of urban decay cycles

me: the Getty Villa is closing for the Malibu fire

also me: not for fear of burning, the Villa and the Getty Center in the Sepulveda Pass (of the Santa Monica mountains cutting through LA) have elaborate systems to protect their priceless classical collections from smoke, fire, and earthquake

me: but isn’t it just a great summary of California’s — and America’s — land baron, extractive, unsubtle history that we build these boomtowns and put these (hey Hearst Castle) absurd collections of ancient classical art right in the path of every natural disaster you can imagine?

also me: you realize that the Roman practice of collecting fancy prestige objects and putting them in pretty rich-guy villas on Mediterranean-climate coastlines to be overrun by landslides, earthquakes, and volcanos is half the reason we still even have this stuff

In retrospect a big part of the wonder of the ‘90s was that even trivial vidya entertainments would be, like, part of a competition between Peter Molyneux and Will Wright and Richard Garriott and Sid Meier to create the most accurate simulation of the entire world according to their own personal theories of the underlying metaphysics

xhxhxhx:

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.

Los Angeles birthed Pentecostalism and America barely even notices that it has a new religion running free taking over continents

LA was a hot scene in the 20th Century that gave us the Foursquare Church, Objectivism, Scientology and EST, also The Source Family, The Manson Family, Tensegrity, Esalen, New Age cults, UFO cults, Nazi cults, Nazi UFO cults

That’s how these things go, in waves like any other industry, Mormonism was only the most famous thing to come out of the Burnt-Over District in the Third Great Awakening

Christianity was only the most famous thing to come out of Jerusalem of the period, that’s the deepest joke of Life of Brian, that it’s not a joke