William Deverell and Greg Hise’s A Companion to Los Angeles
After securing water and eventual rail access, early American growers in southern California planted citrus fruits, often with other standard and specialty crops. Farmland with its water and rail proximity would become the central core of a town, with the trees and vines replaced by hotels, office buildings (or “blocks” as they were referred to then). Radiating outward from the core, single-family houses on urban lots defined the perimeter of the community. For instance, William Wolfskill’s groves, the first commercial citrus acreage in the state when he planted it circa 1840, lay in what would become the heart of modern-day Los Angeles, encompassing 70 acres between modern-day San Pedro and Alameda, Third and Sixth streets. Jean Louis Vignes farmed his 100-acre vineyard in the area now bound by Aliso Street and Alameda, east of Little Tokyo.
Citrus cultivation introduced key ingredients to the stew of Yankee-style urban growth, namely, water and irrigation infrastructure, railroad access, investors and settlers with capital, and a set of marketable vistas. Railroads formed key links to development of the citrus belt where growing towns were connected to Los Angeles by the transcontinental lines and later the Pacific Electric. Water, especially in the form of mutual water companies created to nurture thirsty citrus fruits, was the true enabler of regional growth. The evolution of the basin’s built landscape owes much to the decentralized yet controlled patterns of land use the citrus industry created.
But from [California historian Carey] McWilliams forward the primary industry of Los Angeles has been considered speculative land development. “Place entrepreneurs,” land speculators, bankers, newspaper publishers, politicians, the mighty Chamber of Commerce, and public utilities with a stake in the economic growth of an area collectively formed a “cartel of power interests”. Los Angeles grew due to rampant speculation by the best collection of boosters the West had ever seen.
Desiring an endless and profitable cycle of urban development, consequences be damned, the cartel sought to provide infrastructure, promoted business, immigration of the right sorts (from the Midwest mostly), and the “subdivision, settlement and cultivation of our lands,” according to the Chamber By-Laws of 1892. After an initial failed attempt in 1873, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce reconstituted itself in 1888 with a mission: to bring back some of those who left following the boom of 1885-7 and to remind the nation that Los Angeles “occupies a most advantageous spot on the map”.
The Chamber supported interurban and regional trolley and train lines and sewer and water projects necessary for population growth. It also lobbied for federal assistance in dredging out the then-largest manmade harbor in San Pedro after arm-twisting to take over that existing city. William Mulholland, chief engineer for the Department of Water and Power, declared that “if we don’t get it,” that is water, “we won’t need it”. But his words resonate metaphorically for us, as the same could be said of both the infrastructure and material culture of Los Angeles.
The boosters succeeded. With increased Anglo immigration Los Angeles grew from the 187th largest city in the nation in 1880 to the largest city in the western United States in 1920; from a city of 11,000 in 1880 to 1,238,000 in 1930; from 29 square miles in 1895 to 442 square miles in 1930. The local growth machine was successful in attracting intranational migration: in the decade between 1910 and 1920, one-third of all Americans going west of the Rockies came to live in Los Angeles. [La Raina author Lawrence] Hill was right about that new blood: according to the 1910, 1920, and 1930 censuses, only one-quarter of all Los Angelenos had been born there.
Many of those newcomers hopped in cars to transverse the expansive basin. The conflation of popular culture with car culture in Los Angeles has been a topic of sustained study, but its early twentieth-century contours remain unexamined. This trope too is rooted in certain realities: at one car for every eight residents in 1915 and two cars for every three Angelenos in 1929, Los Angeles boasted one of the highest per capita rates of ownership of any metropolitan region. Importantly for ethnic minorities and women, roads allowed for greater mobility to work and recreate and were not segregated or run with restricted stops like interurban cars were. When the state began constructing limited-access roadways in the 1910s, it funded these projects with over $70 million in state bonds.
As citrus growers hopped in their mighty Packards for the drive from Riverside to downtown Los Angeles for a meeting of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange, known by their trademark Sunkist, in say 1925, they were participants in the great and emerging car culture. Upton Sinclair began his novel Oil! with “The road ran, smooth and flawless, precisely fourteen feet wide, the edges trimmed as if by shears, a ribbon of grey concrete, rolled out over the valley by a giant hand”. At the turn of the twentieth century, Los Angeles provided an ideal location for the engineers of an aggressive marketing coup by an extremely transformative agribusiness, the citrus industry, which consumed the vast valleys of the Southland. Side by side, the leaders of the CFGE worked with the railroads, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the Los Angeles Times, and booster Charles Fletcher Lummis’s Arroyo Set to transform the economic, social, racial, and cultural landscapes of greater Los Angeles. The solidification of the cooperative marketing movement and the marking of the spatial conquest of the region went hand in hand.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Wiley-Blackwell, from “‘A Most Advantageous Spot on the Map’: Promotion and Popular Culture” by Anthea Hartig from A Companion to Los Angeles, edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise. Copyright © 2010 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
*Photo courtesy danorth1.
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