When L.A. Was Empty: Wide-Open SoCal Landscapes
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/history/la-as-subject/when-la-was-empty-wide-open-socal-landscapes.html
By Nathan Masters, February 14, 2013
View of Hollywood in 1905, looking west by southwest from Laughlin Park.
Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust, and C.C. Pierce Photography
Collection, USC Libraries.
Early photographs of Los Angeles surprise for
many reasons, but often what's most striking is how empty the city
looks. Open countryside surrounds familiar landmarks. Busy intersections
appear as dusty crossroads.
Southern California entered the photographic
record at the cusp of a dramatic transformation in the region's
landscape. When an anonymous photographer stood atop Fort Moore Hill
circa 1862 and took the earliest-known photograph of Los Angeles, he
captured a small town -- population 4,385 in 1860 -- within an open
countryside. Vineyards, orchards, and other intensive agricultural
enterprises occupy the land immediately surrounding the city. Obscured
in the hazy distance, meanwhile, were sprawling cattle and sheep
ranches, legacies of the region's Spanish and Mexican eras. In 1862, Los
Angeles represented one of the few urbanized areas, as rustic as it
was, in the entire region.
Earliest
known photo of Los Angeles, circa 1862. The view looks east over the
Los Angeles Plaza from atop Fort Moore Hill. Courtesy of the Photo
Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.
Over time, the growing city spilled into the surrounding landscape.
Meanwhile, a devastating drought that began in 1862 and lasted through
1864 crippled the ranching economy, and more intensive agriculture
retreated into the former grazing lands. Pastures became bean fields and
orange groves -- a process that only accelerated with the arrival of
new technologies like groundwater pumping, concrete pipes, and
refrigerated train cars. Cooperative enterprises like the Anaheim Colony
in present-day Orange County provided a model for making irrigated
agriculture work. Providing a variety of microclimates and soil types,
the Los Angeles Basin and its adjacent valleys became home to a diverse
suite of agricultural uses. By the 1920s, Los Angeles County was ranked
first in the nation in the value of its agricultural output.
Los Angeles kept growing. It did so in part by expanding outward from
its historic core, rolling west toward the sea, but it also sprouted
offshoots. First along the steam railroads, then the interurban lines of
the Pacific Electric and finally the freeways, suburbs sprang up amid
the countryside. Many of the most dramatic photos of an emptier Los
Angeles show new settlements like Hollywood or Beverly Hills -- now
familiar to much of the world through popular culture -- as rustic
country towns. Eventually, the surrounding countryside disappeared as
the suburbs and city merged into one metropolitan agglomeration.
The process reached a fevered pitch in the years immediately
following World War II. From 1945 through 1957, subdividers carved
462,593 separate lots out of agricultural land in Los Angeles County. By
the end of those thirteen years, nearly all of the San Fernando Valley
had become urbanized, and the master-planned city of Lakewood had risen
from the bean fields north of Long Beach -- an event D. J. Waldie
chronicled in his classic memoir, "Holy Land."
Some communities resisted. Between 1955 and 1956, for example, three
along the zig-zagged border between Los Angeles and Orange counties
incorporated to fight encroaching urbanization: Dairy Valley (now
Cerritos), Dairy City (now Cypress), and Dairyland (now La Palma).
Within a decade, however, even those proud cow towns had adopted new
names as real estate developers made dairy owners irresistible offers.
Among some viewers, these photographs showing vast swaths of
emptiness where urbanization reigns today may inspire nostalgia for a
lost, Arcadian past. But they also provoke pertinent questions about
Southern California's urban development and city dwellers' relationship
with the natural environment. Does the open countryside pictured here,
for example, represent a lost opportunity to create a comprehensive
system of parks and open spaces? Have Southern Californians become less
informed about food production since agricultural enterprises moved to
far-off places? And how did the loss of open spaces change popular
conceptions of nature, wilderness, and conservation? The urgency of
these questions speaks to the enduring value of photographic archives.
Rural San Fernando Valley
The
San Fernando Valley and Mission San Fernando circa 1875. Courtesy of
the Title Insurance and Trust, and C.C. Pierce Photography Collection,
USC Libraries.
View of North Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley from the Santa Monica Mountains, 1909
Two
women look out over a rural San Fernando Valley from the Mulholland
Highway, circa 1930. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of
Commerce Collection, USC Libraries.
Hollywood as a Country Town
Highland and Franklin in Hollywood, 1903. Courtesy of the Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.
Highland Avenue north of Hollywood Boulevard, 1906. Courtesy of the Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.
Rural
East Hollywood, circa 1905. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust,
and C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.
Undeveloped Beverly Hills
Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Drive, 1911. Courtesy of the Beverly Hills Public Library Historical Collection.
Coldwater Cañon in 1910. Courtesy of the Beverly Hills Public Library Historical Collection.
Benedict Canyon in 1890. Courtesy of the Beverly Hills Public Library Historical Collection.
Western Avenue at the Turn of the 20th Century
Children
play on Western Avenue south of Sunset, circa 1906. Courtesy of the
Title Insurance and Trust, and C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC
Libraries.
Bicycle
race on Western just north of Santa Monica Boulevard, 1896. Courtesy of
the Title Insurance and Trust, and C.C. Pierce Photography Collection,
USC Libraries.
The
Los Angeles Times Bicycle Club on Western north of Pico, 1895. Courtesy
of the Title Insurance and Trust, and C.C. Pierce Photography
Collection, USC Libraries.
Orchard
at Western and Washington, circa 1899. Courtesy of the Title Insurance
and Trust, and C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.
Around Town
A
troop of Boy Scouts demonstrate their skills in the open fields across
from Caltech in Pasadena, at the southwest corner of East California
Blvd. and South Wilson Ave. Property of Polytechnic School, Pasadena,
CA.
West
Adams Boulevard at Caldwell Avenue (now Ridgley Drive), 1923. Courtesy
of the Automobile Club of Southern California Archives.
Geranium Gardens in Gardena. Courtesy of the CSUDH Archives.
Aerial view of Disneyland surrounded by orange groves in 1955. Courtesy of the Orange County Archives.
Rural
view from the home of Arthur Brent in Bel Air, 1927. Courtesy of the
Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce Collection, USC Libraries.
A field of sweet peas in Gardena. Courtesy of the CSUDH Archives.
Lantern
slide of a poppy field below in present-day Altadena, 1900. Courtesy of
the Braun Research Library Collection, Autry National Center. Object ID
LS.12459.
The
Munk farm in Compton in the early 1900s. Courtesy of the Braun Research
Library Collection, Autry National Center. Object ID P.14969.
Barbecue
to celebrate the opening of Montrose, a new 300-acre subdivision in the
Crescenta Valley. The celebration (and land auction) took place at the
present-day intersection of Verdugo Blvd. and Clifton Place in the city
of Glendale. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust, and C.C. Pierce
Photography Collection, USC Libraries.
Rep. Adam Schiff, in announcing the funding, vowed to change the disaster assistance funding formula.
