Never Built Los Angeles

Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell begin by treating LA as an architect’s paradise. For every decade, and innovative architect shows up, adds style to the city, and move on. Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, Frank Gehry, they all made their mark on the city. The problem is, the greatest works of architecture were funded for private buildings, not public ones. There’s also the issue of what happens when the architects move on.

    Some of the designs in this collection are practical, like Richard Neutra’s “Rush City” from the 1920’s. The glass-box style seems less like fantasy nowadays, because more people are opting to live in small apartments near the place where they work. Others, like A.C. Martin’s Egyptian Swim Club, are beautiful, but costly. By the 1950’s, you had practical ideas for building, but the massive scale would hit road blocks. Take the Bunker Hill project, for instance; it was a sound plan, with regard to transportation and pedestrian safety, similar to London’s Barbican. Bunker Hill would have residential buildings surrounding parkland, and the roads would be tunnels underneath. The problem was, it would require demolition of whole residential blocks. You’re unlikely to get approval for that. It may have worked in New York City, with Lincoln Center and Stuyvesant Town, but not in Los Angeles. The city had no Robert Moses to bully politicians into bulldozing the neighborhoods.

   One of the most ironic projects in the book is the Dobbins Cycleway, built in 1900 and named after the mayor of Pasadena. It was a massive elevated roadway, made of wood from Oregon, and designed to connect residential and leisure areas. There was even a bike-sharing program, much like today’s Citibike, where you could rent a bike at one end and drop it off at another. The Dobbins Cycleway died after the automobile became available, along with electric streetcars. There are calls for efforts to bring it back, but with only $4 million a year to spend on cycle roads, the city can’t meet the massive cost. Building expenses are higher in 2016 than they were in 1900.

    The sad thing about this book is that almost all of the ideas were good. So many of them, even the ones from the 1920’s, promote apartment blocks with nearby rail service. If LA had pushed for light rail and electric streetcars at the time, then it wouldn’t have needed the massive expressways that slash the city and pollute it. Based on maps of LA, I suspect that a lot of it had to do with availability of land. LA is a coastal city, and to the East is just more land, so you can build right out into the hills and deserts. Remember the scene from E.T. where the boys race their bikes through the hills? They’re full of half-finished houses (big, I might add), and in the 33 years since, more neighborhoods like that have been built.

    After reading The Metropolitan Revolution, Walkable City, and other similar theses, I think that this will change in the next few years. The foreclosure crisis has shadowed the home-buying ideal all over the USA, and bigger isn’t better anymore. Maybe Los Angeles will see abandoned neighborhoods will be torn down and replaced with apartments, connected by light rail?