A longtime and celebrated resident of Paris, Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland,
her childhood home, “There is no there there.”
There are many American cities – small and large – in which there is not now
and never has been any there, because Americans are much better at unmaking
places, than at making them.
As our forebears moved across this vast and various continent in the nineteenth
century, looking for money, they slapped towns together, most of which
looked more like camps than places, were more pauses than stops, and have,
ever after, been stations more than destinations.
As agrarian America became an industrial nation, Americans turned out to be
as talented at making things as they were untalented at making places.
When World War II began, America was still suffering the ravages of the
Great Depression, but when the war ended, it was “the richest and most
powerful nation” on earth, in part because its manufacturers had geared up,
worked around the clock and built the extraordinary arsenal that this
country and its allies used to defeat Germany and Japan.
America industry was the wonder of the world. Its hallmarks were quality,
innovation and efficiency. The planes, some of which were made at Douglas
Aircraft in Santa Monica, the hardy Jeeps, the tanks and aircraft carriers
and guns and bullets, the bombs were made fast and well, rolling off America’s
assembly lines in astonishing numbers.
Too fast and too well, as it turned out. The nation’s industrial behemoths
retooled at the war’s end, and began producing automobiles, refrigerators,
radios and all the other toys the newly prosperous Americans lusted for.
But the men who ruled American industry soon concluded that if peacetime
goods were as durable as wartime weapons, sales would soon decline,
because the shiny new cars and kitchen appliances and the like were so
well-made they would never wear out.
The new cry was “calculated obsolescence.” Appliances, cars, everything
was built not to last, but to dazzle for a moment and then fall apart. The
major changes from model to model were cosmetic, rather than innovative.
Apparently, it did not occur to industry leaders that foreign manufacturers
would enter the market with more innovative and durable goods, and soon
Sony, Volkswagen, Toyota and other foreign products challenged Bendix,
RCA, GM, Ford, and other American industrial giants, overtook and
Surpassed them.
Today, much of what’s left of America’s manufacturing has moved offshore,
American goods now bear foreign labels, and calculated obsolescence has
become a primary American principle.
Rather than preserving, retuning and refining great places, municipal leaders
now call in the mad marketeers and uber consultants to turn their towns
into “products,” and sell them as “brand names.” It’s the latest means of
unmaking places: reducing them to simulated places — malls, theme parks,
and Walmarts — that can be summed up in slogans. Thomas Bender, an NYU
professor, has labeled such cities “City Lite.”
Before the first lot was sold in 1875 and the first brick was laid, there was
plenty of there here. It was located on the western edge of America, on the
Pacific, in the heart of what Hamlin Garland called “the fortunate coast.”
That was the town’s primary fact, the shaping element. It was made
in, of and by the oceanic air and light. Its undulating topography imposed
a benign eccentricity on the grid. Its first residents were Japanese fishermen
who lived on the beach for several months every year.
Santa Monica has been made by six generations, and, as Lewis Mumford
pointed out, “In a city, time becomes visible.”
The first business and public buildings were substantial. The first houses
ranged from modest cottages to elaborate Victorian mansions.
Its first residents were a solemn lot. Venice and Ocean Park, then a separate
town, built elaborate pleasure piers But the primary purpose of Santa Monica’s
municipal pier, built in 1909, was to carry the town’s sewage out to sea.
As beach towns do, Santa Monica soon attracted rogues of every stripe:
Hollywood people, writers, artists and inventors, including Waldo Waterman,
inventor of the “flying car,” and architects. Craftsman cottages and John
Byers’ Spanish colonial revivals appeared among the Victorian houses.
Los Angeles swells built 11 beach clubs, Hollywood created “the Gold
Coast,” and blue collar workers gathered in beach cottages in Ocean Park,
which had long since been annexed by Santa Monica.
That natural evolution proceeded until the 1960s when some major excisions
and additions were made – at the behest of planners in the dubious name
of “urban renewal.”
“Urban renewal” by any name has turned out to be nothing so much as
calculated obsolescence, and worked not to preserve a place’s history and
cultural, ethnic and economic diversity, but to obliterate it.
A flourishing, attractive African American neighborhood in the southeastern
corner of the City was destroyed to make way for the last curve of the Santa
Monica Freeway, and the largely Jewish blue collar workers’ beach cottages
were demolished to make way for two apartment towers.
The City then proceeded to raze two busy blocks on the southern side of
downtown Santa Monica to make way for a new shopping center, Santa
Monica Place. And a series of Miami-like tall buildings rose on Ocean
Avenue.
These were all gaffes of the most serious sort, and were protested by residents,
but they were mere preface to what’s happened to the townscape in the last
three decades.
Over 9 million square feet of new commercial development have been built
in Santa Monica in the last three decades, and another two million square feet
are gathering at the gate. A major City policy goal is “the intensification of
the urban form,” though we have yet to hear a coherent explanation of why
the City wants to impose “urban form” on a beach town, beyond increasing
City revenues and developers’ profits.
In fact, the weight and clumsiness of the City’s additions to this small scale
townscape have diminished its power and multiplied its problems.
Traffic congestion is now a constant. Santa Monica leads the state in the number
of pedestrians who are injured or killed in traffic accidents annually, according
to the state’s Office of Traffic Safety. The daily transient population of Santa
Monica is now over 300,000.
And our history, and time, as expressed in our townscape, are being pulverized
by bulldozers and hauled away to become landfill for somebody else’s townscape.
St. John’s original hospital buildings were elegant structures — human in scale,
purpose and effect. Lives lost and saved, begun and ended. But the graceful old
buildings have been replaced by enormous machine-like edifices – cold, sleek
and meaningless.
Indeed, the entire “hospital district” seems composed now of outsized,
pretentious, aloof buildings that overshadow the small scale, unpretentious
townscape around them.
The original RAND buildings were among the most architecturally and
historically significant buildings in Santa Monica. History was literally written,
unwritten and rewritten in them. But rather than preserving the light, modest
structures, the City demolished them, and permitted RAND to replace them
with one enormous glistening white bunker.
In the same way, countless small graceful garden apartments have been
demolished and replaced by bulky, pretentious condos, the light, fleet
Boulangerie has disappeared under a long, tall solid block of apartments,
there is no time but the present, and there is more stuff, but less there here
every year.
The power of a place is not contained in the size of its parts but by their
authenticity, their fitness, their connection to and reflection of what has
been and will be. They contain the gathered past and gesture at the future,
which is, after all, one more version of the past.
And, as William Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead, ir isn’t even past.”