Creating cities and citizens: municipal boundaries, place entrepreneurs, and the production of race in Los Angeles county, 1926-1978

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Content CREATING CITIES AND CITIZENS: MUNICIPAL BOUNDARIES, PLACE
ENTREPRENEURS, AND THE PRODUCTION OF RACE IN LOS ANGELES
COUNTY, 1926-1978

by

Michan Andrew Connor

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

December 2008

Copyright 2008 Michan Andrew Connor
ii

Acknowledgements
I moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 2001 from Chicago, having only a dim
sense that my own move was replicating an ongoing paradigm shift in American urban
studies in which Los Angeles, many argued, was superseding Chicago as the archetypal
metropolitan region of a postmodern, postindustrial, and even post-nationalist age. I did
not, a first, hold this prospect in great esteem. Having read one of the canonical texts of
the Los Angeles’ school, Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, I was prepared to truly hate Los
Angeles, believing it to be an unpleasant mixture of celebrity-culture silliness and brutal
neoliberal police state.
In the coming years, however, that attitude changed as I “got to know” Los
Angeles. Though I did not reflect consciously on it at the time, this project grew out of an
effort to systematically understand how other people, both in positions of influence,
prestige, and power and at the grass roots, “knew” Los Angeles, and how that knowledge
affected the practices of daily life in the metropolitan area.
One of the first things that impressed itself upon me was the significance of places
in Los Angeles. From a number of interpersonal, academic, and media sources I drew
out a sense that the region was composed of seemingly innumerable places, all of which
conveyed social meaning to their inhabitants and to outsiders, and generally in no
innocent fashion, about race and class statuses, presumed behavior, and the place of
people in regional social hierarchies.
iii
In contrast to my experiences in Chicago (or, more appropriately, perhaps, my
theoretically-informed navigation of Chicago), the distinctions between central city and
suburbs were considerably more complicated in Los Angeles; instead of a clear contrast
between city and suburb, one might speak of “L.A.” in a sweeping sense, and only on
further interrogation disaggregate the vast metropolitan region into its constituent parts.
For instance, it took me some time to remember that the “inner city” area of East Los
Angeles was in fact an island of unincorporated territory governed by the County, though
one might also refer to “East LA” to include adjacent parts of the city of Los Angeles.
Likewise, part of my informal geographical education involved learning that the famous
or infamous Watts area was, despite its reputation as a place apart, actually part of the
City of Los Angeles, in fact quite distant from downtown Los Angeles, and, while
commonly conflated with it, distinct from “South Central.” While the region had many
independent suburban cities, it also had suburban-type areas like the San Fernando Valley
which were part of the city, while other suburban cities like Compton registered in the
popular imagination as inner city. The legal, political, and institutional borders of places
in “LA” bore no consistent relationship that I could see to the cultural understandings of
place which seemed to be so constantly, if unthinkingly, referenced by Angelenos.
This presented a sufficiently interesting bunch of contradictions to suggest itself
as a research topic. Following certain scholarly habits, my own investigations tended in
two directions; I sought to understand how the social meanings attached to places today
had evolved, and how the cultural logic of place affected the political distribution of
resources, power, and social legitimacy in Los Angeles, in particular the meaning and
iv
form of racial identity and difference. In this study, I hope to contribute an
understanding not only to the Los Angeles School, but to the practice of urbanism
generally, that these two stories are quite intimately linked (though my successful
clarification of those contradictions is a matter of debate).
It should not follow from the foregoing discussion that I undertook this mission of
discovery alone. The fact is that as a migrant to both the region and to certain academic
practices, I benefited enormously from a variety of guides. My chair, Phil Ethington, has
been my advisor since my first year of graduate coursework, and has been a steady source
of advice and the kind of critical reader that I have needed to complete this project, and
has always come through with suggestions for further reading! Laura Pulido and George
Sanchez have also served as my committee members and have organized innovative and
topical graduate seminars in which I developed many of the ideas and approaches I have
tried to implement in my dissertation. While Bill Deverell joined my committee late in
the writing process, I have benefited immensely from his insight. Steven Ross, Leland
Saito, and Peter Mancall also served generously as members of my qualifying exams
committee.
Professor Adam Green was a undergraduate mentor who first informed me about
USC’s new Program in American Studies and Ethnicity in 2000. He recognized that a
disciplinary program in history might not suit my needs and pointed me in the direction
of George Sanchez, the first director of ASE, who convinced me that his new program
would. The fact that I’ve never regretted my choice of program has much to do with the
community assembled at ASE. Once I arrived on campus, I encountered a generous and
v
vibrant community of graduate students in the first cohort of the PhD program. I thank
Laura Barraclough, Maya Hernandez, Hillary Jenks, Reina Prado, Cam Vu, and Karen
Yonemoto for their courage to join a brand new program and for their spirit of
collegiality and intellectual energy which made that program into one of the most vibrant,
open, and innovative graduate programs in the world. That spirit has been shared by all
of ASE’s faculty, and especially by its administrative staff. In my years at ASE, Kitty
Lai, Sonia Rodriguez, Sandra Hopwood, and Neda Lamarr have combined bureaucratic
expertise and personal attention to resolve funding problems, unlock the machinery of
cash reimbursement and clear up registration nightmares, many of which were caused by
my own inattention to detail, all with kindness and good humor.
Special thanks are due to Jaime Avila of the USC Chemistry Department, who
recovered all of my files from a 2006 computer crash that threatened to wipe out all of
my work to date on this dissertation.
As I began writing this dissertation, it was my good fortune to join with a writing
group of fellow PhD candidates who were all carrying out research on race and ethnicity
in Los Angeles. In this group, we were collectively able to work out our complicated
ideas free of the oversight of our committees, separate those ideas that were worthy but
half-baked from those that weren’t useful, and air out our anxieties about our research,
the job market, our committees, and our lives. We were able to squeeze this in between
debating the merits of sports teams, exchanging some industry gossip, and enjoying the
occasional pint at Lucky Baldwin’s Pub. Jerry Gonzalez, Daniel HoSang, Hillary Jenks,
Phuong Nguyen, and Sean Greene have been terrific editors, critics, and friends, always
vi
recognizing the best and worst tendencies in my writing and pushing me to improve. I
wish them success in their promising careers to come.
I have also benefited from the support of many friends outside of the academic
world in Los Angeles and elsewhere who provided moments of sanity (and, when
appropriate, insanity) over the last seven years.
My in-laws have been extraordinarily supportive of my work, though they may
have occasionally wondered whether their daughter would be married to a perpetual
graduate student. Thanks to Pete and Carolyn Briney and Ed and Carol Meunier, as well
as Bryson and Juliette Meunier, Patrick Briney, Jenny Paul, Tim Cannon, Kathy Chou,
and the Schiltz, Meunier, and Briney families. I have to thank my first teachers, my
parents Jack and Mary K. Connor, my sisters Nora and Eileen Connor, and my brother
Tom Connor, my grandmother Nancy Connor, and the Connor and Nolan families for
their love, support, and guidance. Most of all, I have to thank Heather Meunier Connor,
who had the courage to join me in Los Angeles, for her love, support, humor, and
patience over the years.
vii
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Tables

List of Figures

Abstract

Introduction
The Specificity of Place: Boundary Events and Historicity
Place Entrepreneurs, Boundary Events, and Socio-Spatial
Transformation
Political Geographies and Race-Ethnicity in Los Angeles
County
Place-Entrepreneurial Politics and Boundary Events in Los
Angeles County

Chapter 1: Black Place Entrepreneurs and the Consolidation of
Watts to the City of Los Angeles
The History of Place-Making in Watts: The Independent
Period
Crises of Black Place Making: The Ku Klux Klan or
Muddy Streets?
The Black Progressive Vision for “South Los Angeles”
Building Prosperity or Manufacturing Prejudice?: The
Frustrations of Race Men and Women in Watts

Chapter 2: Negotiated Boundaries of Race in Midcentury Los
Angeles
Production of the East Side—Presencing and Segregation
in Industrializing Los Angeles
Containing and Managing Diversity: Racial Borders in
Pre-World War II Los Angeles

ii

x

xi

xii

1
6
11

15

21

38

44

68

96
107

119

123

134

viii

Chapter 3: The Public Racial Crisis of the City
Inventing Urban Crisis: Local Implementation of
Federal Lending Risk Policies
The Public Implications of Racial Crisis
“And Ten Thousand More”: Public Housing and Urban
Crisis
The Public Production of Monoracial Places
Policing and the Naturalization of Racial Boundaries

Chapter 4: The City on the Air: Broadcast Culture and
Metropolitanism in Los Angeles
Television and Historical Analysis
Jack Webb’s Los Angeles
Urban Travelogues and Centripetal Metropolitanism on
Local Television
The Emergence of Suburbanity on Local Television

Chapter 5: “The Lakewood Story” and the Rule of Homes
Building the Suburban Frontier in Lakewood
“New Frontiers of Security”: Selling Community In
Lakewood
Investing in Community in Lakewood
Conflict and Crisis: Deciding the Political Future of
Lakewood
Mobilizing Community in Lakewood

Chapter 6: Home Towns and Home Rule: Empowering
Suburban Los Angeles County
Consumption, White Flight, and Public Choice: Putting
Suburbanization in its Place
The Political Construction of Suburban Privilege
Legislating Suburban Hegemony
Cultural Normalization of Contract City Suburbia
161
165

176
185

195
204

213

218
223
252

268

282
288
300

307
323

333

349

356

374
385
393
ix

Chapter 7: Identity, Place, and Politics: “Freedom City” in
Watts
Place, Representation, and Identity in the Suburban
Metropolis
“Freedom City”: Black Place and Black Power
Political Economy and the Meaning of Race in
Freedom City

Chapter 8: Identity, Place, and Politics: East Los Angeles
Cityhood
Industrialization, Power, and Political Geography in
East Los Angeles, 1931-1959
Home Rule and the Politics of Place in the 1961
Incorporation Drive
Place, Political Economy, and Embryonic Nationalism
on the East Side
The Contradictions of Ethnic Nationalism in the 1974
Cityhood Campaign

Conclusion

Epilogue: The Tax Revolt and Jurisdictional Conflict

Selected Bibliography
421

428

448
460

474

479

488

498

513

529

535

541

x

List of Tables

Table 1.1: Recall Election, August 25, 1924
Table 1.2: Recall Election, May 15, 1925
Table 1.3: Consolidation Election, April 2, 1926

65
67
93
xi
List of Figures
Figure 1.1: Recall Election, August 25, 1924
Figure 1.2: Recall Election, May 15, 1925
Figure 1.3: Consolidation Election, April 2, 1926
Figure 1.4: Political Factions and Leadership in Watts, 1922-1926
Figure 2.1: Latino Settlement, 1940
Figure 2.2: African-American Settlement, 1940
Figure 4.1: Jack Webb’s Bunker Hill
Figure 5.1: New Horizons
Figure 5.2: The Geography of Unincorporated Lakewood
Figure 5.3: Resisting Annexation
64
67
92
94
133
138
228
311
321
338

xii
Abstract
American urban and suburban places have been the sites of significant formations
of race, ethnicity, and class, but the way in which places shape these formations has been
incompletely understood. Racial identities are formed and altered through the production
of metropolitan places. Historical instances of altering or maintaining political
boundaries have affected relationships between metropolitan places and social identities.
“Boundary events” reformulate racial identity insofar as they structure the political,
economic, and cultural contexts of racially inflected local citizenship.
I integrate analyses from three fields. Political scientists and economists have
assessed the institutional relationships between local places, but generally presumed
ready-formed identities and interests. Critical race and ethnic studies scholars have shown
that racial identities are mediated by discourses and institutions, but inconsistently based
this analysis in historical place-time. Historians and geographers have chronicled the
development of local places as cultural, political, and social entities. I assess places in
relation to each other to demonstrate how local boundary events have affected the
metropolitan context of identity formation, created favorable conditions for the
production of racially differentiated political empowerment, and supported forms of
racial identification rooted in this placed relationship to metropolitan power.
This inquiry assesses three boundary events: the consolidation of Watts to Los
Angeles in 1926, the incorporation of Lakewood in 1954, and efforts to incorporate East
Los Angeles between 1931 and 1974. These places singly are metonyms for particular
racial formations, but collectively mark a metropolitan process that connects locations in
xiii
space and time and by the 1970s produced a particular form of metropolitan racial
hegemony. White middle-class residents of Lakewood used local government to protect a
limited form of social democracy and to generate institutional and discursive politics that
placed that same social democracy outside the reach of political activists of color in
Watts and East Los Angeles. The effectiveness of white home rule in Lakewood was not
simply a contrast to the critiques of disempowerment advanced in Watts and East Los
Angeles; its seeming naturalness provided a visible model for the convergence of
identity, territory, and power associated with urban identity politics.
1
Introduction

Local and Metropolitan Scales in Los Angeles County
This study takes as its object Los Angeles County, currently a collection of
eighty-eight incorporated cities and many unincorporated territories that is the most
populous county in the United States. More specifically, I study three places in the
county. The Watts section of the city of Los Angeles, the unincorporated area East Los
Angeles (governed by the County Board of Supervisors rather than a local municipal
entity), and the suburban city of Lakewood are all individually well-studied as locations
where many of the dynamics of Los Angeles County’s growth in the twentieth century
and the particular form of that growth are readily grasped. These places are more than
simply sites of historical events and processes, they are signifiers of them. The place
name of Watts signifies to scholars and casual observers near and distant to Los Angeles,
racial segregation, African American unemployment and impoverishment, and the urban
unrest of the 1960s, among other phenomena. East Los Angeles is widely recognized as
the geographic and cultural center of ethnic Mexican and Mexican immigrant community
in Southern California, the diverse citizenship statuses of its residents and the area’s
complex ethnic history notwithstanding. And Lakewood is often regarded as the
Levittown of the west coast, the prototype of the postwar, middle-class, white suburb.
Lakewood’s form of governmental organization, in which a minimal city government
purchases public services through contracts with the County of Los Angeles, is also
widely studied and heralded by both champions and detractors as an influential model of
2
governance for an era of municipal fiscal retrenchment. These places are appear very
different from one another, and their perceptible differences as places offers an example
of what Josh Sides has called “the freighted nature of geographic descriptors” and the
tendency in public discourse to “use [place names] to refer to or imply a larger set of
events, ideas, and developments.”
1
Watts, East Los Angeles, and Lakewood are symbols
of the place types of ghetto, barrio, and suburb. Their perceptible differences may be
taken as evidence of the political, cultural, and economic fragmentation of the Los
Angeles metropolitan area along lines of race, class, and residential location.
However, I seek in this study to argue a very different position, and assess these
places as interrelated, produced within a metropolitan system of policy, development, and
discourse. The concept of fragmentation obscures these connections, and obscures the
way that Watts, East Los Angeles, and Lakewood were produced as interdependent,
rather than singular, parts of this system. In his study of metropolitan Oakland, Robert
Self has argued that the seeming fragmentation of greater Oakland into prosperous
suburbs and a depressed and ghettoized inner city reflected political and economic
dynamics operating on a metropolitan scale. The uneven development of the suburbs and
the city of Oakland reflected purposeful decisions by industry, lenders, and political
officials to privilege plans that delivered capital investment and employment to suburban
areas, where their benefits were enjoyed by working-class whites, at the expense of
alternate plans for development within the city limits of Oakland. By the 1970s,
metropolitan Oakland saw the formation of suburban homeowner populism and urban

1
Josh Sides, "Straight into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black
Suburb," American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004): 602.
3
Black Power as ascendant modes of local politics. Self’s signal contribution to a project
of metropolitan history is his demonstration that both of these political forms were
responses to a metropolitan political and symbolic economy that created material
distinctions between the city and its suburbs and cultural justifications of those
distinctions.
2
Self’s study contributes to a trend toward metropolitanism as an alternative
to studying urban and suburban places separately, joining Jon Teaford’s synthetic history
of American metropolitan development, “New Regionalist” social science investigations
conducted by Manuel Pastor and others of metropolitan demography and the prospects of
implementing metropolitan development policies to promote equity between places, and
Matthew Lassiter’s political history which literally places the genesis of the New Right in
the suburbs of southern cities.
3
These works constitute a challenge to urbanists in
general, to scholars both in history and in other fields concerned with the relationship of
race and place, and to scholars studying Southern California, to work at the metropolitan
scale.
In some respects, metropolitan Los Angeles is a more complicated social and
political terrain than the Oakland area. Accordingly, the question of how geographically

2
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2003).
3
In a synthetic historical survey of American metropolitan regions, Jon Teaford has demonstrated the general need for
attention to the metropolitan scale of analysis. Jon C. Teaford, The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban
America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Manuel Pastor, Regions That Work: How Cities and Suburbs
Can Grow Together (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Manuel Pastor, Jr., "Looking for Regionalism
in All the Wrong Places: Demography, Geography, and Community in Los Angeles County," Urban Affairs Review 36,
no. 6 (2001).Matthew Lassiter’s insightful analysis of the post-World War II development of metropolitan Atlanta and
Charlotte demonstrates both that the national political trend toward conservatism and racial reaction attributed to
Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was successful not because it appealed to the overt prejudices of rural whites but
because it provided a post-racial discourse that appealed to suburban whites and that that appeal hinged on policy and
judicial decisions that prevented central cities from rectifying urban segregation or poverty affecting African
Americans through metropolitan revenue sharing or school integration policies. Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent
Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2006).
4
and culturally distant places are related is complex. Social science research has shown
that simple distinctions between “city” and “suburb” break down on closer analysis.
4

Within the city limits of Los Angeles, many community areas are “suburban” in type, like
the wealthy and verdant Pacific Palisades area near the ocean or the more modest tract-
home developments of the San Fernando Valley, while others both close to downtown
and far from it are considered “inner city” areas because of their impoverishment, crime
rates, or racial composition. Considerable variation is also found among the incorporated
suburban cities of the region. Some suburban cities exhibit the demographic profile
associated with the inner city, struggle to balance their budgets and provide services, and
compete fiercely to attract business investment, while others contain affluent populations
who enjoy outstanding public services, educational opportunities, and the fiscal benefits
of strong local economic bases. Manuel Pastor has argued that the city of Los Angeles
and many of its older, inner-ring suburbs can be aggregated as a collective entity and
compared to an aggregation of the newer, more distant suburbs in the county. When
regional geography is framed in this fashion, the profile of Los Angeles County, like
many eastern metropolitan areas, exhibits a binary polarization between privileged and
disadvantaged places. As a leader in the “New Regionalist” strain of social science
research and policy advocacy, Pastor expresses optimism that this information can
potentially be used to promote solutions to common metropolitan problems and promote
growth that is geographically equitable despite the proliferation of municipal boundaries,

4
Pastor, "Looking for Regionalism in All the Wrong Places: Demography, Geography, and Community in Los Angeles
County," 768.
5
local governments, and parochial interests in the region that complicate the city/suburb
binary.
5

I would like to take another approach to this problem, however, and suggest that
the proliferation of cities in Los Angeles County has in fact been integral to the historical
development of material inequity among places and among racial groups and to the
ideological distinctions between metropolitan and local interests and obligations that
continue to impede the implementation of strategies for realizing metropolitan equity. In
this study my concerns are larger than simply the regional history of Los Angeles County
or the framing of that history on a purposefully metropolitan scale. I seek to interrogate
the way that politically defined places (as a subset of socially significant places) have
been formed and the way that the work of producing places has affected social identities,
particularly race. This project interrogates the way that place and race are understood as
temporal phenomena in history and as spatial phenomena in geography. A productive
engagement of these two perspectives is needed to generate an ethnic studies approach
that neither reifies racism as a transhistorical phenomenon or analyzes the changing
content of racial identities and “racial formations” outside of the necessarily social and
spatial conditions in which those identities have been constructed, experienced, and
mobilized. This investigation requires the development of a more precise understanding
of the concepts of place and social space.

5
Ibid.: 771-72. See also Pastor, Regions That Work: How Cities and Suburbs Can Grow Together. Peter Dreier, John
H. Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century, Studies in
Government and Public Policy (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2001).
6
The Specificity of Place: Boundary Events and Historicity
Geographers David Harvey and Edward Soja have been instrumental in bringing
Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of the production of space to bear on social science
investigations of urban phenomena.
6
In his major work, The Production of Space,
Lefebvre contends that history is constituted in the process of transition between
historical forms of space, from the absolute space of nature, to historical space (the space
of primitive accumulation and the division of labor), to abstract space, the spatial
practice characteristic of modernist technocratic states and capital.
7
Historical space
became abstract as technological, political, and commercial development made it
possible for any ordered and politically controlled piece of land to be rendered fungible
and exchanged in relation to other units of space.
8
Lefebvre’s interpretation of the
transition between forms of space is not an instance of spatial form following historical or
ideological function.
9
Rather, as “every society… produces a space, its own space,” the
emergence of new social forms (capitalism, the modern state, racial segregation) occurs
through the social production of new forms of space.
10

The concept of abstract space exerts tremendous influence over scholars
following an evident “spatial turn” in the human sciences. As Soja writes:

6
David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1989). David Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990). Edward W.
Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1994), Edward W.
Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996).
7
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Blackwell, 1991) 48-49.
8
Ibid. 51-53.
9
Edward Dimendberg, "Henri Lefebvre on Abstract Space," in Philosophy and Geography 2: The Production of Public
Space, ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 35.
10
Lefebvre, Production 31.
7
at every scale of life, from the global to the local, the spatial organization of
society was being restructured to meet the urgent demands of capitalism in
crisis—to open up new opportunities for super-profits, to find new ways to
maintain social control, to stimulate increased production and consumption.
11

Harvey and Soja in particular tend to take the conception of abstract space, used by
Lefebvre to denote a particular temporal moment in the dominant spatial practices of
capitalist societies, for a sign of the utter domination of particular spaces, social
collectivities, and local identities by mobile capital. In part, this reflects Lefebvre’s own
insistence that abstract space was the necessary foundation of the era of modern
capitalism and statecraft.
12
For Lefebvre, abstract space is the spatial practice that both
attended and, critically, enabled, the rise of capitalist modernity. Succeeding the spatial
practice of the Renaissance in which representation and practice were realized in the
specific form of local places, abstract space requires the commodification of space as a
potential ground for the extension of capital investment, the measurement of the value as
exchange commodities rather than as sites of use, and the practical effacement of fine-
grained differences between places to make, for exchange purposes, one unit of land
comparable to another.
Yet, the fetishization of abstract space obscures the fact that it is not a totalized
condition but the negotiated product of social relations. Within any dominant spatial

11
Soja, Postmodern Geographies 34. Soja shares with Harvey a preoccupation with the “spatial fix” of capital as the
central problematic of spatiality in the human sciences. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity 186.
12
On the conflation of historical modernism with abstract space, see Philip J. Ethington, "Placing the Past:
'Groundwork' for a Spatial Theory of History," Rethinking History 11, no. 4 (2007): 478. Notably, anthropologist
James Scott has catalogued the abuses enabled by the practice of abstract space and the tendency for modern statecraft
to ignore local forms of knowledge in the creation of centrally-planned dystopias. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State:
How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). This
observation in the American case may be equally well applied to many forms of private, though large-scale,
development.
8
practice, Lefebvre suggests that a “differential space” may emerge, in which the
contradictions of a society’s spatial practices suggest and create opportunities for altering
those practices, though one critic argues that this presumed “differential space” is not
supported by any demonstrated historical necessity for transitions between forms of space
and thus presents more of “an ontology of forms and relations of spatiality” than a spatial
explanation of historical change.
13
The concept of “differential space” does little to
reconcile Lefebvrian spatiality with the evident fact that particular local places—legible,
relatively bounded locations of social activity--still matter tremendously in social life. As
Neil Smith argues, this “unresolved contradiction between ontology and ‘history’ drives
much of Lefebvre’s vision.”
14

A question thus emerges as to how places should be conceptualized and
understood. In earlier writings, Lefebvre championed a “right to the city” rooted in the
recognition of the social needs of urban inhabitants as an alternative to a political
economy of land that ruthlessly sorted, segregated, and commodified the urban
environment.
15
Within the overall framework of abstract space, Soja and Harvey, among
others, have argued that identities rooted in places may provide a standpoint for the
organization of politics to resist the transformation of space (for example, protests against
highway construction, demands for park space, or the expression of dissatisfaction with
the colonization of working-class neighborhoods by a franchise of an international

13
Dimendberg, "Henri Lefebvre on Abstract Space," 33.
14
Neil Smith, "Antinomies of Space and Nature in Henri Lefebvre's the Production of Space," in Philosophy and
Geography 2: The Production of Public Space, ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 51.
15
Henri Lefebvre, "The Right to the City," in Writings on Cities, ed. Henri Lefebvre, Eleonore Kofman, and Elizabeth
Lebas (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 157-58.
9
coffeeshop chain as a herald of gentrification).
16
Yet, as Doreen Massey argues, in
these understandings, “place” remains a derivative aspect of the regime of abstract space,
in which the particularity of places comes from the work of capital to locate particular
uses, structures, and institutions in particular sites.
17
Massey’s own efforts to rehabilitate
the meaning of “place” emphasize the social construction of place through networks of
social relations that may stretch beyond the geometric limits of place-as-site but
profoundly impact the character of place as a location of experience.
18
In Massey’s
conception, the concept of place as an experiential phenomenon is placed in dialogue
with the contemporary political economy in which flows if capital, people, and goods
destabilize older forms of traditional solidarity.
This is necessary for our consideration of places, but not sufficient, as change in
the structures affecting social relations may still be said to originate outside of places
and independently of them. It remains to be understood how even this subjective and
phenomenological ontology of places and the temporality of history can be reconciled.
Urbanists and geographers particularly may catalogue the manifest ways in which capital
and the state have subordinated the particularity of metropolitan places, identifying the

16
From the point of view of historic preservation, “place” is the medium in which the claims of racial minorities to
civic belonging can be defended against the efforts of capital to remake “space.” Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place:
Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). “Place” has been construed as a “lived
strategic location” for liberatory politics by Soja, Thirdspace 68. Though Doreen Massey offers an important caution
that neither places nor social identities realized in and through place are either primordial or necessarily beneficial, and
that places can structure reactionary politics and oppressive social relations (think of a woman in the traditional
patriarchal home or a differently-raced outsider in the parochial small town), she retains the construction of place as
experienced, immediate, and dense with meaning. Doreen Massey, "The Conceptualization of Place," in A Place in the
World? Places, Cultures and Globalization, ed. Doreen Massey and P. M. Jess (Oxford: Oxford University Press in
association with the Open University, 1995).In this framing, “while simplistic, it is not misleading to say that in the
current discourse, ‘place’ is good and ‘space’ is bad.” Ethington: 481.
17
Addressing the works of Harvey in particular, Massey argues that this conception of place as an artifact of the
process of capital accumulation “assign[ed] virtually all causality to a somehow unlocatable level of ‘the global’.”
Doreen B. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) 118.
18
Ibid. 154-55.
10
perceptible aspects of a spatial regime: functional and identity-based segregation
(particularly racial segregation in the American case, but also residential segregation by
class, age, and occupation and the spatial separation of the sites of work, residential, and
leisure), the use of space by capital, and the role of capital and the state in fostering
uneven development between locations in metropolitan and increasingly global
networks of places. Accordingly, historians are left with working out the ontology of
forms and relations of spatiality, but struggle to make narrative or causal connections
between places or constellations of places at different temporal moments.
As historians seek to write temporal change, the specificity of place as the object
of knowledge is subordinated to placeless discourses about development, ideology, or
politics. Philip Ethington has argued just this, but with the caution that historiographical
confusion seemingly precipitated by a “spatial turn” in the social sciences in fact reflects
the privileging of abstract space within the spatial turn and historians’ collective failure to
recognize that the temporal dimension of human experience is constituted spatially.
Ethington argues that the Lefebvrian literature generated in service of interrogating
abstract space as the specific spatial form of capitalism obscures a much simpler way of
conceiving the relationship of space and time: social activity both requires and produces
concrete and distinct places, anterior to and independent of Marxian or other
conceptualizations of historical epochs or systems of production, exchange, or ideology.
19

19
“All human action takes and makes place. The past is the set of places made by human action. History is a map of
these places.” Ethington: 465. Ethington relies on the work of Georg Simmel and Edward Casey to argue that the
concept of place is so embedded in the phenomenology of human social life as to obviate the need for recourse to the
concept of abstract space. Ethington: 481-83.I do not share fully in Ethington’s reservations about the validity of
Lefebvrian spatiality as an analytical concept. In particular, I utilize many other aspects of Lefebvre’s theorization of
the spatiality of social life. But this critique is important in that it clearly establishes places as the focus of inquiry.
11
To speak of events “taking place” is an uninterrogated spatial metaphor for temporal
change that demands to be unpacked. In a colloquy with Ethington, Edward Casey
establishes that this far simpler understanding of the placedness of temporal phenomena
can be interpreted in terms of the concept of the boundary: as the division between one
place and other places, “boundaries are where places happen.”
20
It follows from this
discussion that the work of creating or altering boundaries is an inherent part of the
process of place-making.
Historically, geographical boundaries represent the synchronous effort to
differentiate one place from another and the chronological flow from a given set of places
to a set that is qualitatively different. In this work, I describe successful and unsuccessful
projects of boundary alteration as boundary events.
21
Boundary events are both artifacts
of consciousness and structures that shape consciousness of difference, political interest,
and identity.
22

Place Entrepreneurs, Boundary Events, and Socio-Spatial Transformation
The concept of boundary events as spatio-temporal political projects implies the
existence of historical agency and thus of historical agents distinct from the abstract

20
Edward Casey, "Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History," Rethinking History 11, no. 4 (2007).
21
I have developed this term in the course of researching this project beginning in 2004 and have since been pleased to
encounter the term, used to quite similar effect, by Casey. Ibid.: 508. Ethington verifies the author’s independent
formulation of the term. Philip J. Ethington, "Reply," Rethinking History 11, no. 4 (2007): 529. Regardless of the
genesis of the term, I concur in substance with Casey’s usage of it, and hope to demonstrate empirically its utility in the
work at hand. Richard Feiock and Jered Carr employ a similar term, “boundary entrepreneurs,” though I will discuss
below my disagreement with their framing of this category of political agency. Richard C. Feiock and Jered B. Carr,
"Incentives, Entrepreneurs, and Boundary Change: A Collective Action Framework," Urban Affairs Review 36, no. 3
(2001).
22
Casey: 510.
12
phenomena of urbanization, industrialization, segregation, or suburbanization.
Happily, since boundary events necessitate historical agency, the effort to describe not
only the events themselves but also the way in which a given set of places differs
materially after an event from its characteristics before facilitates the narration of
historical transformation in and through place-making.
23
Boundary events require that
individuals or groups engage the local state apparatus, petition to create or change
specific boundaries, and construct public electoral support from residents or property-
owning stakeholders in the affected area (whose interests in place may or may not be
compatible). This is a form of entrepreneurial politics, and I borrow and adapt the term
“place entrepreneur” from political economists John Logan and Harvey Molotch as a
means of describing and locating agency.
24
However, I depart from Logan and Molotch
in that they construe the concept of place entrepreneurialism rather narrowly, as projects
that enhance the ability of individual property owners or collectivities of owners to
maximize the exchange value of property in specific places through increased rent or
capital investment, “regardless of the effects this may have on urban residents.”
25

Though the authors do not state as much, their concept of the place entrepreneur is firmly
in line with the social scientific engagement with abstract space; while financial place
entrepreneurs recognize that places are “not goods on a rack” and that particular locations
hold different potentials for profit, the use values of place maintained by residents are

23
See Thomas Bender, "Theory, Experience, and the Motion of History," Ibid.: 497.
24
“We offer the basic hypothesis that all capitalist places are the creations of activists who push hard to alter how
markets function, how prices are set, and how lives are affected.” John R. Logan and Harvey Luskin Molotch, Urban
Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987) 3.
25
Ibid. 13.
13
typically set in defensive relation to the agenda of place entrepreneurs to maximize
financial return.
26
Much as I recognize that the spatiality of social life cannot be reduced
to the concept of abstract space, I argue that the work of place entrepreneurs has
historically engaged with the use value and the representational significance of place as
well as with its financial value. Entrepreneurial politics in regard to boundary events
engage with a host of motivations that may not be directly financial. Further, the roles of
“entrepreneur” and “resident” are seldom neatly separable.
27

Indeed, in Los Angeles, the politics of boundary events have related less to the
manipulation of abstract space than to the inherited character of local places as part of
lived experience. In the cases I study, the activities of place entrepreneurs did not
typically exhibit an oppositional relationship between use and exchange values, and the
entrepreneurs themselves were not members of a rentier class possessing interests
diametrically opposed to the interests of residents. To understand why this definition
must be broadened, it is useful to return to the Lefebvrian interpretation of spatiality in
order to harness it to a more disciplined conception of the placedness of history (as
opposed to its spatiality), a conception that recognizes history as happening through
places formed by boundary events.
Jeff Malpas presents a cogent critique of simplistic invocations of spatial
abstraction as the form of state or capital practice. Malpas argues that

26
Ibid. 2, 9.
27
See Feiock and Carr: 393. These authors expand the range of what they term “boundary entrepreneurs” to include
homeowners, politicians, and minority groups, but largely construct the alteration of boundaries as an instrument to
achieve mostly economic ends, though racial minorities are cast as potentially seeking political representation by
altering political boundaries. As I will discuss further below, these authors operate within a “public choice” or
“rational choice” framework that assumes transparent and stable interests which are contested through spatial politics,
an inadequate conception of the spatiality of politics.
14
to attempt to understand human being using only the resources given through
an objective and ‘leveled-out’ understanding of space as extension is to fail to
understand the nature of the being at issue. No purely objective space can ever be
sufficient to enable the development of the concept of the sort of place that is part
of the structure of human being since such an objective space contains no
topography of the sort required.
28

Though here we need not follow Malpas into the interrogation of being, we may
profitably follow his line of inquiry to ask: where in Los Angeles (or anywhere) has the
work attributed to abstract space (accumulation, repurposing, clearance, exchange) ever
been detached from knowledge and social relations constituted in particular places?
A careful reading of Lefebvre does not demand that we interpret such changes in
spatial practice as wholesale rejections or effacement of prior places.
29
Rather, Lefebvre
identifies a triad of interrelated spatial “terms” that can help frame our understanding of
how the specificity of place is integral to and implicated in the ongoing spatial practice of
a society. Lefebvre identifies the “terms” of socially produced space as “spatial
practices,” “representations of space,” and “spaces of representation.” These terms
constitute the way in which space in general, and I would argue places in particular are
apprehended as sets of signs, rules, and proscribed and facilitated movements (spatial
practice), the way in which plans, ideas, and power are projected over space to preserve
or alter it (representations of space), and the way in which individuals and groups
negotiate their relationship to physical and ideological forms of space and act themselves

28
Jeff Malpas, "Finding Place: Spatiality, Locality, and Subjectivity," in Philosophy and Geography 3: Philosophies of
Place, ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 35.
29
On this particular point I depart from Ethington’s more negative assessment of the utility of Lefebvrian spatiality.
15
as social subjects (spaces of representation).
30
The triad of spatial “terms” and the
spatial practice of a society are linked by a tension between the ability of capital or the
state to work through abstraction to efface the residues of past practices and the social
tenacity or “stickiness” of places as sites where power can be exercised, where
differences may be potentially exploited for the accumulation of capital or the
aggrandizement of power, and where people may resist. Place entrepreneurial politics
work through all three of these terms. Place entrepreneurs work at the intersection of
place as ontology and place as history. Their work is present at the intersection of
temporal and spatial change as they seek to transform inherited places into new and
desired places. Entrepreneurs recognize the spatial practice of the society as inadequate to
their needs, propose or “represent” an alternative practice, and work through the
representational space that they and their co-residents or fellow stakeholders in place
inhabit to try to build sufficient public support for the changes they propose by arguing
that a collective social interest in place will be best served by boundary change. A
boundary event is an intervention in political space that is simultaneously economic,
institutional, and discursive.
31

Political Geographies and Race-Ethnicity in Los Angeles County
My investigation of entrepreneurial boundary politics in twentieth-century Los
Angeles presents an excellent opportunity to address a second disciplinary concern, this

30
Lefebvre, Production 38-39.
31
In his study of metropolitan Oakland, Robert Self colloquializes Lefebvre’s triad of spatial terms to discuss “space as
property, space as social imagination, and space as political scale.” Self, American Babylon.
16
one related to the assumptions made by political scientists about the spatiality of
political loyalty, interest, and identity. Political scientists have been unwilling in many
cases to interrogate the concepts of territory and boundary that underlie their work. Even
construed narrowly as a defined and bordered geometry of space, territory is socially
constructed, through institutions, symbolic representations, the communication and
establishment of boundaries, and the positioning of bounded political territories within
larger systems of territory.
32
Any territory is unstable, contingent, and intertwined with
functional and symbolic political projects.
33
It should be no surprise that the actions,
meanings, and identities given privilege within any territory are intimately related to the
negotiation of boundaries between one territory and another. Both political scientists and
political geographers have been most comfortable in conceiving the boundary in terms of
the territorial limits of nation states, since these are limits of absolute sovereignty and are
associated with the strongest categorical prohibitions and restrictions on mobility and
access.
34
Recent work in the borderlands tendency in American Studies have called into
question the distinction posed between borders and boundaries.
35
Further, attention to the

32
Anssi Paasi, "Territory," in A Companion to Political Geography, ed. John A. Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and
Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 113.
33
Ibid., 109-10.
34
David Newman, "Boundaries," Ibid. (Blackwell Publishers), 124.
35
This tendency is most profoundly influenced by Gloria Anzaldúa’s discussion of the complex layering of social
identities attendant on the position of ethnic Mexicans in the places near the U.S.-Mexico border. Gloria Anzaldúa,
Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera, 1st ed. (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987).This perspective
informs historical work on ethnic Mexicans in Los Angeles, as in George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American:
Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Other
works have adopted the significance of the international border to discussions of municipal, administrative, and
informal boundaries as conditions of social identity, as in Greg Hise, "Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los
Angeles," American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004). More generally, the borderlands approach heralds a questioning of the
fixity of the nation-state as a unit of analysis in favor of interrogating the relationship of people drawn by various
migrations and urban place. In a review essay on this literature, one historian contends that “Chicanos are and have
been both American and Mexican, native and foreign, an ethnic group and a race, native and immigrant, and traditional
and modern. Their lived experience demonstrates the impossibility or improbability of such categories and, more so
17
impact of boundaries at scales below the nation state reveals that they “affect the daily
lives of most citizens much more than international boundaries.”
36
Accordingly, in this
study I do not seek, as Casey suggests, to establish boundary events as a global category
of place-time events, but am content to investigate more narrowly the effect of particular
boundary events—the events of municipal incorporation and consolidation that remake
the political geography of metropolitan regions—as a distinct subset of boundary events.
These political boundary events potentially affect the material conditions of life for
people in the places defined by boundaries by structuring access to political
representation, public services and education as well as exposure to environmental
hazards or negative intrusion by the police or other local state agencies.
37

Boundary events also structure the consciousness that people have of their own
place and the place of others in society.
38
Much as an individual’s access to social goods
is tied to their position in place, so is their perception of political interest, meaning that
both place and identity are mutually constitutive and unstable. Two predominant strains
of political science have failed to address this relationship. As Ethington and Jason
McDaniel argue, the behavioralist tendency, which takes the political (that is, by and

than perhaps any immigrant group before them, forces a reinterpretation of all such categories in American cultural
history.” Philip J. Ethington, "Toward a "Borderlands School" for American Urban Ethnic Studies? Review Essay, on
George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)," American Quarterly 48 (1996): 346.
36
David Newman, "Boundaries," in A Companion to Political Geography, ed. John A. Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell,
and Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 128.
37
Hise, "Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles," 555. Richard Thompson Ford, "The Boundaries of
Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis," in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement,
ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw and et. al. (New York: New Press, 1995). Laura Pulido, "Rethinking Environmental Racism:
White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California," Annals of the Association of American Geographers
90, no. 1 (2000). Philip J. Ethington, "Mapping the Local State," Journal of Urban History 27, no. 5 (2001).
38
Massey, "Place in the World," 68-69.
18
large, electoral) actions of voters as its explanatory object, “theoretically separate[es]
context from place” in a way that makes geographic location a mere analytic variable for
the evaluation of the effects of social interactions that operate outside of specific places.
39

Political scientists operating in the “public choice” (alternately “rational choice”)
tendency are nominally more rigorous in critiquing the dynamism of place, arguing that
the proliferation of political jurisdictions affords individuals the opportunity to settle in
places that maximize their individual utility, generally defined in economic terms as the
outcome of a calculus of maximum public services at the minimum tax rate.
40
The most
glaring fault of this theory is the presumption that political interests are not only
economistic but exist a priori of the individual’s location in place. As Catherine Zuckert
argues, local social life and the experience of place exert a profound impact on the
formation of political rationality and goals.
41
In Chapter 6, I will expand on this critique
of public choice to argue that its theorists make a crucial historical error in proceeding
from the assumption that a market of local places and jurisdictions is an historical given;
my work explicitly addresses the political production of this metropolitan political
geography.
Boundary events in Los Angeles are negotiations not simply of political
geography but of the social boundaries of race. Historian Josh Sides has written that “the

39
Philip Ethington and Jason A. McDaniel, "Political Places and Institutional Spaces: The Intersection of Political
Science and Political Geography," Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 130-31.
40
The foundational expression of this argument is Vincent Ostrom, Charles M. Tiebout, and Robert Warren, "The
Organization of Government in Metropolitan Areas: A Theoretical Inquiry," The American Political Science Review
55, no. 4 (1961). This follows from Charles M. Tiebout, "A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures," The Journal of
Political Economy 64, no. 5 (1956).
41
Catherine H. Zuckert, "On the 'Rationality' of Rational Choice," Political Psychology 16, no. 1 (1995). See also
Ethington and McDaniel, "Political Places and Institutional Spaces: The Intersection of Political Science and Political
Geography," 134.
19
history of urban America is inseparable from the history of race in America.”
42
While I
consider this observation incontestably true, it invites and indeed demands consideration
of the way in which both terms (“urban America” and “race in America”) are
geographically specific and fundamentally based in places. In general, the concept of race
is a meaningless abstraction outside of the social conditions in which difference is
experienced, certain forms of difference attain social legibility, and those differences
affect life chances for individuals and groups. The sociologists Michael Omi and Howard
Winant have influentially argued that race is a social construction whose significance is
realized through successive “racial projects”-- political, economic, and cultural or
ideological efforts to redistribute social goods, alter the rules of their distribution, or
argue for or against the propriety of that distribution or the categories that organize it.
43
In
a global sense, the most fundamental racial project is the boundary, the recognition of a
meaningful difference between the self that inhabits one racial identity and an other
inhabiting a different identity.
In this sense, the concept of the racial project implies a spatiality and indeed both
takes and makes a place in its unfolding. But this implication can be made historically
and geographically much more concrete. By this, I do not simply mean that the
establishment of political boundaries follows imperatives determined by a priori racial or
ethnic identities.
44
Rather, changes to political boundaries are moments where existing

42
Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003) 8.
43
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed.
(New York: Routledge, 1994) 55-56.
44
As Massey argues, “the drawing of boundaries is an exercise of power” at the scale of the nation-state and of the
local jurisdiction. Massey, "Place in the World," 69. Though Massey is sensitive to the possible use of the boundary as
20
racial identities and the social imperatives attendant upon them are made operational
and given political substance. Crucially, I argue that this action changes the political and
material stakes attached to racial identity in the metropolitan area. As the sites of
complex interactions and social diversity, urban spaces have always been sites where
claims by racial minorities to inhabit place frustrate the means of the state to enforce
segregation and prod the development of different means. In discussing the colonial cities
of the British Empire, Carl Nightingale writes perceptively that “cities—and the complex
politics of their increasingly multifarious spaces—[played] key, if always still contingent
and never preordained, roles in the ongoing reconfiguration of the global color line.”
45

That insight serves equally well an analysis of Los Angeles, a city whose history reflects
the immediacy of boundaries of race, nation, and community, and the constant
challenging of those boundaries by individuals and groups seeking to occupy places as
the basis of social existence. Boundary events in twentieth-century Los Angeles County
have changed the material stakes and ideological meaning of racial identities, often
unsettling and remaking the identities at work in their enactment.

a defensive or protective structure or as a tool for the defense of privilege, this expression does not go far enough to
recognize the transformative potential of boundary change, which generates new modes of being in the world and new
understandings of political interest and identity.
45
Carl H. Nightingale, "Before Race Mattered: Geographies of the Color Line in Early Colonial Madras and New
York," The American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 70-71. This observation is similar to that made by Self, who
argues that the spatial (or, perhaps more accurately, the place-based) dimensions of racial identity “hinges on the
material and discursive power of geographic relationships, proximity, and borders.” Robert Self, "Writing Landscapes
of Class, Power, and Racial Division: The Problem of (Sub)Urban Space and Place in Postwar America," Journal of
Urban History 27, no. 2 (2001): 238. The facility with which different metropolitan configurations may be compared
should not obscure the particularity of the social production of place in different contexts under rubrics of modernity or
development. Gyan Prakash, "Introduction," in The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics, and Everyday
Life, ed. Gyan Prakash and Kevin Michael Kruse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 15.
21
Place-Entrepreneurial Politics and Boundary Events in Los Angeles County
I now turn to a discussion of the specific empirical findings of this study. I
address three important boundary events: the consolidation of the independent city of
Watts with Los Angeles in 1926, the incorporaton of the suburban city of Lakewood in
1954, and a series of unsuccessful attempts to incorporate a city in East Los Angeles in
1931, 1961, and 1974. Studies have interpreted these places singly as metonyms for
particular racial formations, but I emphasize their connectedness in a metropolitan
history. In all three cases, local place entrepreneurs worked to alter political geography
for the achievement through place of greater political representation, economic
advantage, and the improved symbolic standing of the places they inhabited in the
metropolitan region. Each successful or unsuccessful boundary event created material
and cultural conditions that affected the way that inhabitants experienced life in those
places in the years to follow. But these boundary events were not events of strictly local
significance. They also created material and cultural conditions that affected future
relationships between places, and thus the social meaning and consequences of racial
identity at the metropolitan scale.
In Watts, African-American activists worked for consolidation to advance racial
group interests, but did not argue that black rule over a local government was a necessary
instrument to achieve those ends. Rather, by bringing Watts into Los Angeles,
consolidation activists intended to make the greater fiscal and administrative power of
that city available to improve the physical environment of Watts and facilitate the
accumulation of black wealth through property ownership. An unforeseen consequence
22
of consolidation was that it later made the black community in Watts vulnerable to
devaluation and disempowerment by Los Angeles’ municipal government. In East Los
Angeles, cityhood campaigns hinged on the potential costs and benefits of local political
control for ethnic Mexicans amid changing patterns of industrialization and racial
segregation. Successive attempts at incorporation mobilized increasingly race-based
appeals to community solidarity as a place-entrepreneurial strategy. In the years
immediately before the Second World War, both Watts and East Los Angeles were
multiracial areas, though public discourse increasingly identified them with African
American and ethnic Mexican residents respectively. Beginning in the 1930s and
accelerating after the Second World War, a coalition of public and private interests in the
city of Los Angeles promoted a discourse of crisis rooted in the equation of local places
with minority settlement. This coalition used the discourse of urban racial crisis to
initiate public policies of property appraisal, slum clearance, and public housing that
materially recreated Watts and East Los Angeles as very homogeneous places and sites of
economic and political disadvantage.
This urban crisis of place and race was one spur to suburbanization. But, I argue,
received notions of white flight driven by mass-mediated representations of urban
problems and racial corruption are inadequate to account for suburbanization in Los
Angeles. In the first case, local television programming and popular national programs
set in Los Angeles, including Jack Webb’s popular police procedural Dragnet,
represented places in Los Angeles through the 1950s as valuable parts of a functioning
civic whole. I argue that suburbanization as a largely white social movement was driven
23
not by placeless and negative encounters with urban space on the screen that
influenced whites’ placed interpretations of danger or decline in their urban
neighborhoods, but by the realization by suburban whites of material and cultural
privilege in the suburban places they came to inhabit. In Lakewood, moderate-income
whites constructed and mobilized an evolving suburban identity and orientation rooted in
homeownership and whiteness, and incorporated the city in 1954 to defend their
immediate and positive interest in place as homeowners (rather than simply as fugitives
from the city). Lakewood’s incorporation was an influential model for a wave of
suburban incorporations in the 1950s and 1960s. Local sovereignty and the financial
implications of Lakewood’s municipal service contracts with Los Angeles County
created conditions in which localism superseded metropolitanism as a scale of political
and cultural loyalty. Between 1954 and the 1970s, Lakewood residents worked to make
the sensibility of local suburban “home rule” dominant in metropolitan politics and
culture. The result was a metropolitan spatial practice of white privilege that was rooted
not simply in residence in racially homogenous suburban neighborhoods but in the
political construction of suburban cities and their residents as the political antagonists of
communities of color in competition for metropolitan resources.
In 1966 in Watts and 1974 in East Los Angeles, place entrepreneurs sought to
establish local home rule specifically in service of empowering racial minorities in the
places they inhabited. Though unsuccessful, both the Watts “Freedom City” campaign
and the campaign for cityhood in East Los Angeles both reflected a metropolitan critique
of local political power as a basis of white privilege and served as testing grounds for
24
politics that used the increasingly monoracial places established by public policy and
private discrimination as a basis for group solidarity. Lakewood, Watts, and East Los
Angeles were all key sites in the evolution of a particular form of metropolitan racial
hegemony—residents of Lakewood used local citizenship to win a limited form of social
democracy, and, through place, helped to generate institutional and discursive politics
that placed that same social democracy outside the reach of political activists of color in
Watts and East Los Angeles.
The chapters of this dissertation are organized in terms of this overarching
narrative. In Chapter 1, “Black Place Entrepreneurs and the Consolidation of Watts to
Los Angeles,” I begin with a critical revision of a common narrative of Los Angeles’
history: that whites in the city of Watts engineered consolidation with Los Angeles in
order to prevent the achievement of black political rule in the city. I argue that this was a
near-perfect inversion of the political dynamics of the consolidation. While racial
tensions and conflicts permeated the small city’s political culture, those tensions in fact
made upwardly mobile African Americans a principal constituency in favor of
consolidation. I identify some of the more important members of this group, describe
their efforts in the public sphere and the “race” press to connect Watts symbolically,
politically, and culturally to the growing African-American community in the Central
Avenue district inside Los Angeles’ city limits, and explain how they conceived
consolidation as an instrument for the achievement of a strategy for civil rights through
place and property.
25
In chapter 2, “Negotiated Boundaries of Race in Midcentury Los Angeles,” I
discuss the period following the consolidation of Watts to Los Angeles, an event which
also roughly coincided with the cessation of Los Angeles’ territorial growth through
annexation and consolidation.
46
In this period, the city limits of Los Angeles were
implicated in and helped to structure debates about the ongoing presence of people of
color in a city where a self-consciously white, Anglo, and Protestant civic culture was
ascendant. Leaders of this civic movement were preoccupied with the boundaries of race
in the city, reflected in police enforcement of vice laws and the private establishment of
racially restrictive covenants in most of Los Angeles’ residential neighborhoods.
However, those boundaries were not static and were not passively accepted by those who
they were intended to restrict. African-American settlement patterns, in particular a push
south and west from the Central Avenue district, reflected the challenges by black
Angelenos to the practices of segregation in the city.
Ethnic Mexicans largely organized their place-making efforts differently, and
fatefully, with regard to the city limits of Los Angeles. In the 1910s and 1920s, a “great
migration” of Mexican workers created conditions for conflict between the efforts of
ethnic Mexicans to claim place in central Los Angeles and the desires of many Anglo
civic leaders to physically and symbolically erase the evidence of Los Angeles’ Mexican
past from the city’s center by marginalizing the region’s largest ethnic group. The
demolition of buildings and the actions of the police and other agencies of the local state
accomplished a partial though significant ethnic cleansing of the Plaza area. While some

46
Philip J. Ethington, "The Spatial and Demographic Growth of Los Angeles," in The Development of Los Angeles City
Government: An Institutional History, 1850-2000, ed. Hynda Rudd, et al. (Los Angeles, Calif.: City of Los Angeles
Historical Society, 2007), 662-63.
26
of the displaced moved across the river to Boyle Heights (within the city limits), many
others relocated to the unincorporated area of East Los Angeles. This was not simply a
forced migration, particularly for those who settled in Belvedere, by the 1930s the largest
ethnic Mexican community in the United States. Here, ethnic institutions developed, low
land prices and relaxed building codes enabled a proletarianized group to own and
occupy their own homes, and the community’s many manual workers had close access to
work in the industrial landscape that was growing around East Los Angeles. Place-
making efforts by ethnic Mexicans and their Anglo antagonists, though they never
accomplished ethnic purity in either territory, established the eastern city limits of Los
Angeles as a political border between territories identified as Anglo and as Mexican, and
as a symbolic border between inclusion in and exclusion from the city of Los Angeles,
the most powerful and dynamic local polity in the region.
None of these facts should, however, obscure the fact that Watts and Central
Avenue, like the central neighborhoods around the Plaza and Bunker Hill and like Boyle
Heights and East Los Angeles, remained strongly multiethnic places (that is, housing
multiple non-Anglo ethnicities) through the end of the Second World War despite the
growth of particular racialized populations or the association of the neighborhoods with
those groups. This paradoxical condition of ethnic concentration within diverse places
complicated the ways in which Angelenos of all races “knew” their city, and made the
fluid boundaries of race a key discursive and material component of debates about the
future of the city.
27
These debates prefigured a far more comprehensive, broad-based, and public
campaign centered on the boundaries of race in the post-World War II period, which I
describe in the third chapter, “The Public Racial Crisis of the City.” In this campaign, a
broad coalition of local officials, bankers, and realtors applied Federal housing policies
and reinterpreted national discourses on housing and urban planning, first in the late
1930s to declare a crisis of urban property and then in the 1940s and 1950s to resolve that
crisis through massive projects of slum clearance and public housing. These policies had
the ultimate effect of replacing many of the multiethnic communities in places like Watts
and East Los Angeles with much more monoracial settlements, bringing the material
reality of local places into line with growing perceptions of those areas as associated with
particular, single, racial minority groups.
These effects have been described as artifacts of changes in Federal housing and
lending policy. However, I depart from that view in two crucial ways in this chapter.
First, I argue that, while many cities nationwide experienced a crisis of land values and
used Federal authority to remake urban space, in Los Angeles this project was guided,
organized, and justified through very particular local knowledge about the places that
ethnic minorities had made in Los Angeles. In this sense, “place,” in the fullness of its
affective, particular, and local meaning, was the means through which the intrusive
power of the state was exercised against communities of color. Second, many urban
historians have chronicled the development of the new Federal housing apparatus in the
1930s and justly identified Federal promotion of a fundamentally racialized private (or
more properly quasi-private) market for private home credit. I argue, however, that this
28
assessment regime had equally profound effects through public policies that
reorganized the racial boundaries of the city. Slum clearance was simultaneously a
discursive and a political-economic project, organized by a logic of risk and potential
“subversion” that publicly equated racial minority presence with the encroachment of
slums on other “healthy” places in the city. Property assessments both guided and
enabled public decisions to clear slum areas, acquire land for redevelopment, and locate
public housing. The peopling of public housing through the establishment of projects
with nearly all-black or all-Mexican inhabitants ultimately contributed to the material
realization of perceptions of Watts and the east side as monoracial places. This policy
outcome was an artifact of the lag between public housing’s conception in the war years
and their immediate aftermath and its construction in the 1950s, during which time the
program was condemned by conservative politicians who scuttled the aspirations of many
early housing advocates for interracial projects. Still, it must be noted that the regime of
property assessment which arose during the 1930s made it extremely unlikely that public
housing would have had any impact in desegregating those areas which had been
defended by whites.
This urban crisis of the 1930s and 1940s was resolved by public policy in the
1950s in ways that led to a second crisis of place in he 1960s and 1970s. This crisis was
a metropolitan one,though it was commonly referred to as “urban,” and its conditions
were created by the economic, racial, cultural, and political divergence of the postwar
suburban areas and older urban areas of Los Angeles County. The movement of whites to
these new suburbs was a place-making project that shifted the boundaries of race to the
29
metropolitan scale. As I demonstrate in chapters 4, 5, and 6, however, the concepts
commonly used to describe this movement, most notably “white flight,” fail to account
for it, in part because they overstate the force of the negative motivation for migration
and in part because they ignore the way that suburban cultural, political, and racial
sensibilities were developed through the historical process of constructing community in
suburban places.
In Chapter 4, “The City on the Air: Broadcast Culture and Metropolitanism in Los
Angeles,” I critique a central premise of the theory of white flight, that postwar mass
culture (and television in particular) fueled suspicion and loathing of the city and racial
minorities that motivated whites to pack off to the new suburbs. There is little doubt that
television was a key discursive terrain through which Angelenos were able to “know”
their city. But, I argue in this chapter, even in light of the very public crisis of the city
developed in prior decades, local television programming in Los Angeles in the 1950s (as
well as network public affairs and entertainment programs set in Los Angeles) promoted
a much more complex understanding of the city and of middle-class and working-class
whites’ potential relationship to it than other scholars have generally acknowledged.
Many programs supported the view that the white middle class belonged in the city, and
even provided a limited mediation of many of the anxieties created by the social (and to a
lesser degree racial and ethnic) diversity of the city.
Jack Webb’s Dragnet, which aired on the radio beginning in 1949 and on
television between 1952 and 1959, was the most popular entertainment show of the era
that used Los Angeles as its setting. The 1950s run of the program reflects to an
30
underappreciated degree Webb’s personal history in the city. Webb grew up in poverty
on Bunker Hill in the 1920s and 1930s, but represented Bunker Hill and other
neighborhoods of central Los Angeles in terms far different from those expressed in the
1930s by property appraisers or in the 1950s by LAPD Chief William Parker, whose
racial and policing philosophies have unfortunately overshadowed critical discussion of
the show. Webb’s Bunker Hill was a neighborhood of poor and working-class whites,
and Webb cast, plotted, and staged his shows to create a fictive urban world in which
those kind of people worked with police to catch criminals and rebutted the public
discourse of the area as irredeemable.
The limitations of Dragnet’s challenge to the image of the city as corrupted and
irredeemable were most apparent in the program’s treatment of race, or more precisely its
selective evasion of race as a subject (this evasion was impossible in the show’s 1960s
reincarnation which began barely a year after the 1965 civil unrest in Watts and south
Los Angeles). In this respect, Webb departed most dramatically from Chief Parker,
whose public statements blatantly portrayed racial diversity as a threat to public order.
With some exceptions, the inhabitants of Webb’s fictive Los Angeles were white. This
departure from the lived reality of the show’s local audience sustained Webb’s more
positive assessment of the fate of the city, but may have also limited Dragnet’s relevance
to increasingly racialized metropolitan knowledges of place.
Local pubic affairs programs produced by Los Angeles stations in the late 1950s
also often expressed a sense of the civic coherence of the city and the value of different
places to the civic whole, representing urban social life as part of a legible civic practice.
31
National network public interest programs set in Los Angeles at this time also
emphasized the vitality of the city and the social value of its different communities.
However, by the middle of the 1960s, the content of local public affairs programming
exhibited a marked shift toward representing particular places in the wider region as
separate, possessing individual characters, and marked by their difference from one
another. Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, a prototype of the “magazine” format of soft news
and human interest program typified this shift. Story established a regional perspective in
which the suburbs represented a populist and inclusive pattern of social mobility through
spatial mobility out of Los Angeles. By looking to television’s production and viewing
in place as well as temporal contexts, this chapter supports a conclusion that television
adopted a suburban sensibility only after an audience receptive to that sensibility
developed.
Making a place both on the air and on the ground for suburban populism was an
episode of Southern California’s political history in which the notion of community
masked shrewd and purposeful political organization to bring working-class white
populism to the center of the region’s and the state’s political economy. In chapter 5,
“’The Lakewood Story’ and the Rule of Homes,” I analyze the 1954 incorporation of the
suburban city of Lakewood in southeastern Los Angeles County. Lakewood was one of
the largest residential developments ever executed in the United States, and its creation
and growth into not only a cluster of tract houses but a self-conscious community was, I
argue, driven by the interaction between the builders and the buyers of Lakewood. The
Lakewood Park Corporation built housing for more than 70,000 people. Nearly all of
32
these residents were white, and nearly all financed their purchases with Federally
subsidized VA or FHA loans, whose terms guaranteed a homogeneity of modes means
that provided the basis for a political culture in which small homeowners found common
cause with giant corporations for incorporation of the city.
Like most other fast-growing suburban areas of Los Angeles County after World
War II, Lakewood was initially an unincorporated territory which received public
services and minimal local government from the County Board of Supervisors, paid for
by the County’s general fund. In this chapter, I describe the bitter conflict this situation
provoked between Lakewood residents and the adjacent city of Long Beach, which
attempted to annex Lakewood in 1953. This move prompted the deployment of both the
financial resources of the Lakewood Park Corporation and an army of citizen activists
around the issue of Lakewood’s political boundaries. This coalition, organized as the
Lakewood Civic Council, quickly moved from resisting annexation to championing the
incorporation of Lakewood as a city, which they achieved in a local election on March 9.
1954. This mobilization was organized through the discourse of “home rule,” in this
context simultaneously a political principle of localism, participatory democracy, and
anti-metropolitanism, and a cultural construct in which homeownership, citizenship, and
a populist sense of rough social equality constituted the basis of civic legitimacy.
It is impossible to understand the impact of Lakewood’s incorporation on the
metropolitan area without also understanding that both the political and cultural axes of
the doctrine of home rule were essential parts of the appeal of the Lakewood Plan, the
new city’s arrangement to purchase its municipal services from the county government
33
through contracts. In chapter 6, “Home Towns and Home Rule,” I analyze the effects
of the incorporation of thirty-two new Lakewood Plan cities in the County between 1954
and 1970, arguing that the creation of suburban municipal boundaries both enabled and
justified the development of suburban hegemony in county and state politics.
Both contemporary observers and retrospective analysts have presented
interpretations of the proliferation of new cities and the consequent development of
political, economic, and cultural fragmentation in the county in terms of the achievement
of home rule, public choice theories from economics and political science, or historical
narratives rooted in consumption or the desire of working-class whites to escape the city.
I address each of these perspectives in this chapter, and identify their individual failures
of explanation and their crucial collective shortcoming, that all read backward from the
outcomes of suburbanization and incorporation and abstract their central propositions
outside of the historical production of suburban places.
The understanding that I propose addresses the lived experience of suburban
whiteness in the context of its formation, establishment, and empowerment, a
simultaneously political and cultural process in which three elements of a suburban
consensus visible in hindsight (a white middle class, a market of separate local
jurisdictions, and the desire of that class to use those jurisdictions to escape from
metropolitan obligations) were created over time through political action. In Lakewood
and its successor cities, homeowning taxpayers and their political representatives worked
to develop, normalize, and protect the suburban, minimally governed, racially
homogenous city as a privileged municipal form. In the latter sections of this chapter I
34
assess the consequences of this trend in terms of the growing material and cultural
antagonism between the new Lakewood Plan cities and older, traditionally organized
cities, led by Los Angeles. This antagonism led to controversial statewide legislation that
reinforced the material privilege of the contract cities and judicial rulings that internalized
the cultural value of suburban home rule to legitimize this privilege.
These rulings were layered upon prior boundary-based political outcomes that had
created and preserved a manifestly unequal set of local places in Los Angeles County, not
through geographical accident but through the workings of metropolitan-scale systems of
labor, economics, and power. While the evident distinctions between new suburbs and
older cities have been extensively noted, far less recognized has been the extent to which
the new suburbs’ creation affected the political stakes of place and the relationship
between place and identity in the so-called “inner city.”
By any score, the civil unrest of August, 1965 in Watts and South Los Angeles
exposed the gulf between poor African American communities and the American social
and economic mainstream. However, in Chapter 7, “Identity, Place, and Politics:
‘Freedom City’ in Watts,” I argue that the visible and celebrated political sovereignty of
Los Angeles’ newer suburbs exerted a profound influence on the emergent nationalist
urban politics of the 1960s and 1970s, and on the oft-bemoaned “identity politics” that
followed. A year after the 1965 civil unrest, a coalition of SNCC and cultural nationalist
activists, with modest initial support from more moderate civil rights organizations,
proposed to establish Freedom City in South Los Angeles through the political secession
of Watts from Los Angeles and its incorporation with adjacent areas of black settlement
35
as a new municipality. Activists of color found it necessary in this case to counter the
inequities created by the localist consequences of suburban home rule by seeking to claim
through boundary politics a share of home rule in Watts. Freedom City’s advocates
recognized that having a place in the metropolitan region, unlike in the time of Watts’
consolidation to Los Angeles, had come to include governing it, recognized in the
suburbs an unacknowledged state of white rule, and insisted on a share of that home rule.
In the process of debating and imagining Freedom City as an expression of black rule, I
argue that the meaning of black identity in greater Los Angeles was recast in terms of this
relationship of race, place, and political power and the recognition that the boundaries of
cities were increasingly congruent with the boundaries not only of race or of opportunity,
but of racially unequal access to meaningful participation in politics.
Unfortunately, in Watts the increasing sense of the need to connect racial identity
to local political power as a remedy for racial inequality collided with the past production
of metropolitan space that had structured not only political representation but the location
of people and uneven economic development in the metropolitan area. This production
imposed material and discursive limits on the potential for realizing effective home rule
in Watts, limits which were reflected in the failure of Freedom City to attract support and
the demise of the initiative.
An emergent sense that ethnic Mexican (Mexican American or Chicano) identities
were related to the boundaries of political power were also reflected in the series of
efforts to incorporate a city from the unincorporated area of East Los Angeles between
1931 and 1974, as were the limits imposed by past boundary politics. As I argue in
36
chapter 8, “Identity, Place, and Politics: East Los Angeles Cityhood,” these successive
efforts were progressively more oriented toward ethic political interest, signaling not only
the demographic transformation of East Los Angeles but the sense that the conditions of
ethnic Mexicans in East Los Angeles were structured not simply by racial discrimination
and injustice but by the fact that the area lacked the kind of local government enjoyed by
whites in the new suburbs. By pointing out the political and economic success of newer
suburbs, postwar campaigns for cityhood did not just mobilize, but helped to construct, a
sense that disconnection and spatial exclusion from local power was a defining element
of Mexicanness in Los Angeles, a sense that transcended many of the ideological
divisions of East Los Angeles by the 1970s.
The campaigns for cityhood in East Los Angeles advanced further than did
Freedom City; elections to decide the issue were held in 1961 and in 1974, though
cityhood was defeated in each case. Past productions of space and past boundary events
imposed limits on the ability of cityhood advocates to deliver on the effective home rule
they promised. East Los Angeles in the post-World War II period was frequently and
ruthlessly targeted by the County Supervisors and private industry for freeway
construction, industrial development, landfills, and other noxious land uses, a pattern that
justly created intense suspicion of county and state government authorities in East Los
Angeles. However, cityhood advocates, particularly the East Los Angeles Community
Union (TELACU) which was a major force in the 1974 campaign, were also compelled
by the area’s poverty and low property values to propose extensive redevelopment as the
precondition of the proposed city’s economic viability. The specter of redevelopment,
37
even driven by ethnic compatriots, threatened further displacement of poor and
working-class residents of the area, and impeded the development of ethnic Mexican
political solidarity that advocates needed to construct around cityhood. Nonetheless, I
argue, the failure of cityhood campaigns to generate solid ethnic support is still consistent
with my claim that local political power, allotted on a racialized basis structured by
political geography, had emerged as a defining element of Mexican racial identity in
suburbanized Los Angeles County. Unlike whites in places like Lakewood, favored by
the racialized dynamics of the geographical, economic, and political development of the
metropolitan area, ethnic Mexicans in East Los Angeles in 1974 could choose only
between having no local government or creating and empowering one that could not be
trusted to deliver an ethnic variant of effective home rule.

38
Chapter 1: Black Place Entrepreneurs and the Consolidation of Watts to the City
of Los Angeles

Introduction
Watts is one of the most singularly evocative place names in Los Angeles--second
perhaps to Hollywood in the global imaginary but arguably more significant to the way
Angelenos understand their metropolitan area. Especially after the destructive civil
unrest of August 1965, Watts has functioned as a synecdoche for a host of narratives
about race, politics, and American urbanism that link places to perceptions, both about
those places and about the people who inhabit them. “Watts” evokes a supposed shift
between the “nonviolent” and “black power” moments of the movement for African-
American liberation.
1
Watts is likewise Exhibit A for debates over urban racial
liberalism and the welfare state.
2
Further, Watts has functioned in black communal
discourses as an object lesson in the need for constant vigilance in defense of the good
life for the individual and the community.

1
This distinction of course ignores the violence practiced by whites in opposition to civil rights and housing integration
in many regions of the United States both before and after the unrest.
2
Robert Beauregard writes of the emergence of discursive turn, accelerated by rioting in the mid-1960s, from
consideration of the problems of cities to problems of “the ghetto”, a construction that fuses place and race such that
“Negroes became the scapegoat for urban decline.” Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of Us
Cities (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass.: B. Blackwell, 1993) 165. Following Beauregard, one may see that this
construction has many political permutations, though the neoliberal and neoconservative have been most successful,
and have been deployed in incarnations from Edward Banfield’s Unheavenly City (New York, 1970) which raised the
specter of “rioting for fun and profit” to William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago, 1990) to argue
that urban liberalism either cannot alleviate social ills or will inevitably make them much, much worse. Space prohibits
a further exegesis of the literature of “the ghetto” or “the underclass”. However, I will note that my colleague
Christopher Jiminez y West is completing a study that suggests the unrest in Watts in 1965 is in fact a result of the
stillborn implementation of the War on Poverty in local areas, turning the discourse of liberal overreach on its head to
suggest that liberalism’s inherent weakness in Los Angeles was its fatal flaw. See also Robert Alan Bauman, "Race,
Class and Political Power: The Implementation of the War on Poverty in Los Angeles" (PhD Diss., University of
California, Santa Barbara, 1998).
39
For all the symbolic import of Watts in the mental atlas of Los Angeles County,
little scholarly attention has been paid to the area’s early history. Watts existed as an
independent suburban city between 1907 and 1926, when Watts citizens voted to
consolidate their city with Los Angeles.
3
Who these voters were and why they voted has
been the subject of much speculation. One enduring explanation has been that a white
racist faction in Watts desired consolidation to Los Angeles to thwart the imminent
possibility of black rule over the city. This view’s scholarly lineage dates to an interview
conducted in 1933 with a black Watts resident by J. Max Bond in his frequently-cited,
though unpublished, dissertation on the social ecology of black Los Angeles.
Referencing white resentment over black population growth, this resident claimed that
“Negroes moved to Watts in such large numbers that it became almost over night
a black town. It was only a question of time before it would have a Negro mayor.
It is said that because of this fear, the whites remaining in the community
successfully engineered a move to have it annexed to the city of Los Angeles.”
4

On the other hand, Charlotta Bass, the influential publisher of the California Eagle, the
most prominent black newspaper in the Los Angeles area, threw her support
wholeheartedly behind the consolidation in 1926, advising the black community of Watts
that “the last election to be held in Watts is on next Monday and every voter must keep
up the good work of annexation.”
5

3
A consolidation is the merger of an incorporated municipality into another, larger city. The term “annexation,” which
refers to the acquisition of unincorporated areas by incorporated cities is often—though incorrectly—used in reference
to Watts and is referred to only in direct quotations that reflect its vernacular usage
4
J. Max Bond, "The Negro in Los Angeles" (Dissertation, University of Southern California, 1936).
5
"Watts Voters' Alert to Be Sure of Victory," California Eagle, April 9, 1926, 1.
40
Strangely, given her political and cultural prominence in black Los Angeles,
and her militant opposition to racial oppression, Bass’ advocacy for consolidation has not
attracted much academic attention, while the theory that consolidation was an act of
white racism has become part of the core of vernacular historical knowledge about Los
Angeles.
6
In this chapter, I endeavor to bring greater clarity to this debate. While the
narrative of consolidation-as-racism is apocryphal, its appeal lies in its resonance with the
later history of African Americans in Watts. Scholars have pointed to the absence of
meaningful self-determination in the post-WWII period as a root cause of the unrest of
1965.
7
The seductive unspoken logic of the white conspiracy narrative is that the
consolidation of Watts was the moment when incipient black political self-determination
there was denied.
I argue precisely the opposite. In 1926, the consolidation of Watts to Los Angeles
was in large part the work of a group of African-American Watts residents who felt that
merging their community with the larger city of Los Angeles was essential to their

6
For example, the theory of a white conspiracy has been reprinted in the brief entry for Watts in Leonard Pitt and Dale
Pitt, Los Angeles a to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California
Press, 1997) 537. Repeating the theory advanced by Bond, see Lawrence B. de Graaf, "City of Black Angels:
Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930," Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 3 (1970): 342. Lonnie G. III
Bunch, "A Past Not Necessarily Prologue: The Afro-American in Los Angeles," in 20th Century Los Angeles: Power,
Promotion, and Social Conflict, ed. Norman M. Klein and Martin J. Schiesl (Claremont, Calif.: Regina, 1990). More
recently, California State Librarian Kevin Starr has cited Bond’s account in his popular series of books on California
history, and Josh Sides and David Leonard have also repeated it. See David Jason Leonard, ""No Jews and No
Coloreds Are Welcome in This Town": Constructing Coalitions in Post/War Los Angeles" (Dissertation, University of
California, Berkeley, 2002) 96, Sides, L.A. City Limits 19, Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California
through the 1920's (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1996) 149. On Bass, see her own unpublished memoir,
and Regina Freer’s recent biographical work. Charlotta A. Bass, "Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a
Newspaper," in Charlotta A. Bass Papers, MSS 002, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research (Los
Angeles: 1960). Regina Freer, "L.A. Race Woman: Charlotta Bass and the Complexities of Black Political
Development in Los Angeles," American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004).
7
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s, Carter G. Woodson Institute Series in Black
Studies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995).
41
interests and those of the race at large.
8
I shall call this part of Watts’ black community
“Race Men” and “Race Women,” in keeping with one common self-identification of the
group and their allies both around Los Angeles and nationally. They were part of a social
grouping that Douglas Flamming has called “strivers and joiners.”
9
While they have often
been maligned for supposed political passivity and economic elitism, recent scholars have
credited this group for civic-mindedness and for pushing the local state to enforce
fairness and stop discrimination.
10
Race Men and Women tended to be property owners,
professionals, or business owners. Many were involved in real estate, linking the
protection of black property wealth with the interests of the race and touting Los Angeles
as a “paradise” for the race where black people were typically able to buy homes in
greater numbers than elsewhere.
11
This relationship of personal interest and race-
mindedness presented certain temptations to self-serving political and social ideologies,
but Race Men and Women were to some extent correct in their contention that the
property owned by blacks could shape perceptions of the race, and potentially support
claims by wealthier and poorer blacks alike to full social and political equality.
12
Race
Men and Women believed that just as their investments might influence perceptions of

8
Adler recognizes the growth of black political activism and the discontent of black Watts residents with the state of
city government, but is ambivalent about the relationship of black activism to consolidation.
9
Freer has provided the best summary of the political, cultural, and economic qualities of the Race Men and especially
Race Women like newspaper publisher Charlotta Bass. See also Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los
Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press, 2005) 8.
10
Ibid. 126-28.
11
Bunch, "Past Not Necessarily Prologue," 103, Freer, "L.A. Race Woman," 615. Both authors emphasize the fragile
nature of this “paradise,” noting that the opportunity for home ownership enjoyed by many black Angelenos was
tempered by growing racial restrictions, especially as the black population grew in the 1920s.
12
Freer, "L.A. Race Woman," 615. quotes one realtor, Sidney Dones, who declared that a black homeowner could be
“considered a steady, stable, settled CITIZEN of Los Angeles.” On the tension between self-interest and group
interest in the cultural politics of racial uplift, see, among others, Kevin Kelly Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black
Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
42
the race, those perceptions affected the value and security of their investments. Thus,
individual and group became intertwined through place.
While recent historians have emphasized the significance of Race Men and
Women in building black political institutions in the City Los Angeles, there has been
little attention paid to their Watts compatriots.
13
By and large, the black community of
1920s Watts has been portrayed as a place of poverty and political indifference, in the
words of novelist and onetime resident Arna Bontemps “a tiny section of the deep South
literally transplanted.”
14
Yet a significant group of Watts Race Men and Women were
active in envisioning what kind of place Watts could be, and working--both on their own
and in concert with black activists in Los Angeles--to make it so. Their place-making
agenda led them to conclude that the risk taken on consolidation would provide a payoff--
the achievement and defense of the economic, political, and social benefits of American
citizenship--what Flamming has described as a struggle for freedom.
15
Their influence in
bringing about the merger of Watts and Los Angeles has been profoundly understated.
16

Race men and women worked to broker a consensus about racial identity,
political interest, and place through the press, pulpit, property, and politics. As I have

13
For example, Bond mentions Watts only in the context of its growing black population and its consolidation to Los
Angeles. Bond, "Negro in Los Angeles". Flamming’s recent work, which comprehensively reconstructs the networks of
black businessmen, church leaders, and activists in the Central Avenue and West Adams communities that organized
pre-World War II civil rights activities in Los Angeles nonetheless largely ignores Watts, and Regina Freer’s insightful
biographical study of Charlotta Bass largely takes the Central Avenue District as its geographic focus. Flamming,
Bound for Freedom, Freer, "L.A. Race Woman."
14
Arna Bontemps, God Sends Sunday (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931) 118. This description is contained in a work
of fiction, and it is worth noting that Bontemps’ journalistic writing about Watts is more nuanced. Nonetheless, the
impression has been enduring, cited by Leonard, ""No Jews and No Coloreds"" 94.
15
Flamming, Bound for Freedom 12.
16
Adler’s narrative is virtually unique in the relevant literature in that it acknowledges black dissatisfaction with the
state of affairs in the city of Watts, but is ambivalent about whether black citizens were moving the consolidation or
merely going along with a political eventuality.
43
suggested, our view of place-entrepreneurs as the historical agents of urban change can
and should be expanded beyond the limits of the market to the politics of culture and
representation. Race activists in Watts sought to convince their fellows to overlook a host
of social divisions and invest both money and personal energy in Watts and in
consolidation as a community act. They also tried to represent Watts to the metropolitan
area at large as a place of progress, prosperity, and opportunity, and, as a corollary, to
represent Watts’ inhabitants as valuable citizens. As I have noted in the introduction to
this dissertation, place entrepreneurship may be defined by the assumption of risk to
one’s financial investment in place. This narrow definition is inapt for minority place
entrepreneurs, and particularly the Race Men and Women of 1920s Watts, who also put
up as collateral the hold they had on property, community, social prestige, and the
freedom they and their fellows had achieved.
17

In this chapter, I strive to reframe the consolidation of Watts with Los Angeles as
a work of place-entrepreneurial action driven in significant part by black activists. This
requires some acceptance of the radical contingency inherent in urban places and the
social relations that are constructed in and through those places. The social production of
place can make the outcomes of even carefully planned activism unpredictable, as
evidenced by the shifting perception of the consolidation, seen in 1926 as an essential
support for collective black progress in Watts and forty years later as a crushing blow to
it. The novelist Arna Bontemps, who grew up in Watts, wrote retrospectively of it as a

17
Where Logan and Molotch point to a conflict of interest “between residents, who use place to satisfy essential needs
of life, and entrepreneurs, who strive for financial return,” black place entrepreneurs have straddled that divide, both in
their own self-interest and in their efforts to advance a group agenda through the production of space in cities. Logan
and Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place 2.
44
slum from which upwardly mobile black residents fled. Yet, his writings also suggest
that the 1920s were a moment of distinct potential for something more. Families there
had raised teachers, preachers, doctors, and lawyers, “all in a community without a
sidewalk, a community served by a single street lamp.”
18
Watts “was on the verge of
proving itself a wholesome and fertile community.”
19
The task of this chapter will be to
investigate that moment of potential, to identify activists, examine their visions of place,
and trace the public dissemination of those visions. I will leave for later chapters the
question of why these visions were ultimately unfulfilled. I will also lay the groundwork
for understanding how alterations in the political boundaries of Watts and Los Angeles
affected the cultural geography of race in the wider region.

The History of Place-Making in Watts: The Independent Period
Certain historical facts about the production of Watts as a particular kind of social
space—an embodiment of people’s plans for an ideal community-- need to be understood
before turning toward a closer investigation of how Race activists in Watts pursued their
goals. Two principal monographs address the early history of Watts as their principal
object. One is an anecdotal history by Mary Ellen Bell Ray of the settlement of the area,
the incorporation of Watts as a sixth-class city in 1907, and events leading to the political
consolidation of Watts to Los Angeles in 1926.
20
A doctoral dissertation by Patricia Rae

18
Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, They Seek a City (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1945) xv.
19
Ibid.
20
A Sixth-Class City, determined by population, is legally incorporated under the General Laws of the State of
California, and is legally empowered to operate under those laws, where larger cities are entitled to operate under
Home Rule charters once those are properly ratified by property owners. Charter cities enjoy greater autonomy in
legislation and may implement stronger executive and regulatory functions, while Sixth-class cities are to be governed
45
Adler focuses on the transition of Watts from a multiracial suburban city to a
predominantly black ghetto. Both are useful, in that they provide a documentary record
of political factions, demographic transition, and the changing physical character of the
area.
21
I rely extensively on these authors’ chronologies of what “took place” in Watts.
However, I argue that discussing the past of Watts also demands attention to a different
meaning of the term “taking place.” Accordingly, my account will stress the ways in
which people, particularly African Americans, developed a sense of their political
interests through their inhabiting of place in Watts.
After the conquest of California by the United States, Anglo settlement of the
Watts area began, but the area retained much of its rural character until the late 19
th

century, when the subdivision of lands began in earnest, coincident with the speculative
boom of Southern California real estate in the 1880s. One of these speculative
subdivisions was the Watts tract--named for Charles H. Watts of Pasadena, whose
substantial holdings were split between subdivided plots and a donation of land for the
Pacific Electric railway right of way. Watts’ name remained attached to the settlement
and the city that grew from it.
22
The volume of settlement and the character of settlers in
Watts were influenced by two major factors, rail transit and the class composition of the

by elected Boards of Trustees with more limited authority to legislate. In this work, references to a “Mayor” in Watts
in fact refer to the President of the Board of Trustees, an office chosen as first-among-equals by the members of the
Board, and not to an independent city executive.
21
Another work, a masters’ thesis by Clara Gertrude Smith documents the Mexican community of Watts in 1933 but is
mostly useful as a document of racist and paternalistic attitudes on the part of sociologists toward the ethnic Mexican
population of Southern California. Clara Gertrude Smith, "The Development of the Mexican People in the Community
of Watts, California" (University of Southern California, 1933). See also Phoebe S. Kropp, "Citizens of the Past?
Olvera Street and the Construction of Race and Memory in 1930s Los Angeles," Radical History Review, no. 81
(2001). for a description of the discursive construction of Mexicans as a people outside of the bounds of modernity (and
thus of citizenship in the modern city).
22
MaryEllen Bell Ray, The City of Watts, California, 1907 to 1926 (Los Angeles: Rising Publishing, 1985).
46
surrounding suburban area. The land lay along a major junction of the Pacific
Electric’s streetcar system, where lines serving Downtown Los Angeles, the growing
harbor at San Pedro, and the beach cities of the South Bay converged at Watts Junction.
The extension of rail lines by 1925 prompted boosters to proclaim Watts “The Hub of the
Universe.”
23
Accordingly, the area was conceived by many of its boosters as a bedroom
community; lying at a key juncture of the nation’s best regional light rail network, many
residents of Watts were apparently content to keep their community residential, with
minimal development of commercial facilities, or even the kind of services needed to
maintain commercial activity, like street paving and sidewalks.
24

The residential development of Watts was also influenced by the development of
distinctly working-class suburbs in the southern and eastern parts of the county as
manufacturing grew in the early 20
th
century. As Becky Nicolaides has most influentially
demonstrated, these suburbs were residential in character and shaped by the desire of
residents to keep taxes low by skimping on non-essential services. Residents also took
advantage of the lax regulations outside of the Los Angeles city limits by building their
own dwellings and mixing residential and agricultural uses on their land. In a time when
industrial employment offered uneven wages and no union representation, residential
property became an important source of financial security.
25
These imperatives were
reflected in political division around the incorporation of Watts in the 1900s. Most

23
Ibid. 26-27.
24
Ibid. 11.
25
Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
47
working-class suburbanites were apprehensive at the prospect of incorporation.
26
In
Watts, Ray claims, fears that incorporation would burden the buyers of “$1 down and $1
a week” lots motivated the rejection of three separate petitions for incorporation in 1906,
a year before the successful incorporation of the city.
27

The successful incorporation of the city in 1907 reveals that aspirations of
working-class settlers in Watts did not always sit easily with the plans of other settlers,
who envisioned Watts, by virtue of its transit-rich location, to be prime for development
as a well-ordered, progressive city defined by infrastructural development, economic
boosterism, and development of the local government’s capacity to control internal
affairs through zoning and regulation. Though these early boosting leaders were white,
many of these concerns would continue to animate the agenda of Race Men and Women
in the 1920s. The proponents were a relatively small group, but successive efforts at
incorporation evidently wore down the opposition’s capacity to resist. Political
gerrymandering was also an act of place entrepreneurialism, as activists created a
political majority for incorporation by excising unfriendly sections out of the proposed
boundary.
28
While turnout was low, those who were moved to vote favored incorporation
by three-to-one. Out of a population of 1,400, the majority for incorporation was only
101 to 24.
29

26
In fact, opposition to taxation and increased assessments were principal factors in opposition to the initial
incorporation of the Watts, consistent with the finding that working-class suburbia thrived chiefly in unincorporated
territory. See Becky M. Nicolaides, "The Quest for Independence: Workers in the Suburbs," in Metropolis in the
Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, ed. Tom Sitton and William Francis Deverell (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001), 81, Ray, 13.
27
Ray, 12.
28
Patricia Rae Adler, "Watts: From Suburb to Black Ghetto" (PhD, University of Southern California, 1976) 97.
29
Ray, 14.
48
As a sixth-class, general law city, Watts was governed by a Board of Trustees,
which combined ordinance-writing and executive functions and was elected at-large by
the voters.
30
Incorporation proponents carried on as city politicians after the successful
incorporation in 1907 and set about creating progress through the physical form of the
city. A 1910 Los Angeles Times article captured this ethos through interviews with a
host of Watts’ leading citizens. City Trustee C.H. Dodd, named by the Times as Watts’
“Mayor,” promoted the city’s central and transit-rich location as the foundation of
progress, but others touted the area’s suitability for economic activity ranging from
alfalfa growing to manufacturing. Frederick J. Yorke emphasized that the ability of the
local government to take action for development was critical to advancement, and all
respondents touted the paving of increasing street mileage in Watts as the example par
excellence of progress.
31
Though boosters expected great benefit from improvements,
plans to develop the city streets to “lead to the erection of many more new dwellings, of
greater average cost than formerly” also introduced a basis for conflict over rising tax
assesments and the class character of the city.
Despite Trustee Frederick Yorke’s optimism that incorporation was making Watts
such a magnet for capital that “I do not think any of our citizens would today be willing
to disincorporate and be relegated to former conditions,”
32
incorporation in Watts in no
way resolved the issue of improvements. In 1915 a group of tax-resisters circulated a
recall petition for the city’s five trustees, objecting to the assumption of debt for street

30
The designation of “Mayor” is deceptive; the title is a misnomer for the office of President of the city’s Board of
Trustees, a position first-among-equals on the five-member board.
31
"What Publicity Did for Watts," Los Angeles Times, September 11, 1910, sec. V, p. 19.
32
Ibid.
49
improvements. As the Times explained, “all these things cost money and hence the
petitions.”
33
The minutes of the Watts Trustees show frequent protests against street
improvement projects, generally from adjoining property owners unwilling to take on the
special assessments levied to pay for them. In all, the Trustee records contain more than
ninety written protests against street improvements between 1915 and 1926,
34
protests
which the Trustees were legally obliged to hear, and more importantly, generally
politically bound to honor. These protests tell an important part of the story of Watts.
In Watts, as in nearly all small cities in the United States in the early twentieth
century, local assessments were the chief means of paying for improvements in Watts,
supplemented only rarely by bond issues approved by a public election (In Watts, these
required a supermajority of 60 percent to pass). Resistance to local assessment
dramatically constrained development. This constraint on municipal improvements was
problematic for boosters.
35
However, it was not without political utility. In fact, Robin
Einhorn has argued that strictly local assessment, in which “the abutters who would be
liable to pay for a paving also decided whether to pave,” was the dominant mode of
political economy in large American cities through the nineteenth century, and continued
through the twentieth in smaller cities.
36
In general, this helped local politicians, who

33
"Town Torn by Recall Fight," Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1915, sec. II, p. 9.
34
See folders “Streets: Protests 1915-1923” and “Streets: Protests 1924-1926”, Box B-144, City of Watts Records, Los
Angeles City Archives.
35
Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Weiss argues that the problem of improving already-sold lands plagued
residential subdividers throughout California and the U.S., coming to a head in the late 1920s. Administratively and
politically, cities could not effectively assess owners of already-divided property in order to tax it for improvements.
The chief accommodation to the segmented system was for commercial developers to seek large parcels where both
development and assessments could be planned in advance.
36
Robin L. Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001) 17. “A staple of American municipal finance for a century, from its widespread introduction in the 1830s to its
50
could comfortably defer responsibility for action or inaction to the parochial choices of
landowners.
37
However, Einhorn argues that this old “segmented” political economy had
fallen out of favor with planners, businessmen, and governmental elites as increasingly
complex economies and services provided competing bases for public interest beyond
property ownership.
38
In the City of Los Angeles, planners and industrialists were eager
to enact large-scale transformation of the city by the 1920s. Frustrations with the
political drag that special assessment districts placed on street-building, Los Angeles
boosters and developers urged both reforms of the City Charter and the 1924 Major Street
Plan as remedies.
39
Evidence suggests that desire for a broader regime of public
improvements had also taken root among many in Watts. Many of these, of course, were
local merchants and commercial property owners who thought improvements would
further their own interests, though they couched their plans in appeals to both civic pride
and a public interest. This was reflected in the language of an ordinance passed by the
Trustees to put a bond issue for the “paving and otherwise improving” of the commercial
strip of Main Street up for a vote. The Trustees claimed this improvement as “more than
local or ordinary public benefit,” but could not legally use general funds for the

wholesale abandonment in the 1930s, special assessment is still used today, especially to finance public works in small
cities and suburbs.”
37
Ibid. 8. In this political economy, “[c]ities made financial decisions according to the wishes of those who had what
Chicagoans called ‘direct personal and pecuniary interests’ in their outcomes,” meaning the owners of property.
38
Ibid. Such interests might include the development of real estate, commerce, transportation efficiency, or public
health and safety.
39
Matthew W. Roth, "Mulholland Highway and the Engineering Culture of Los Angeles in the 1920s," in Metropolis in
the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, ed. Tom Sitton and William Francis Deverell (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), 50-52. Of course, as Roth points out, the passage of a bond issue to begin implementation of
the Major Street Plan only brought ten percent of the plan into being; special assessments were required to complete the
plan, with dilatory effects that were all too familiar to boosters.
51
improvements, necessitating an election to pass a bond issue.
40
While the rhetoric of
the early Watts boosters was at odds with halting progress, this dissonance was not
uncommon in the general climate of boosterism in the region, where the image of
inevitable progress often counted for more than its tangible realization.
41
Later, the gap
between promotional images of progress in Watts and the city’s ability to achieve
progress on the ground contributed to political crisis, particularly as Los Angeles’
boosters streamlined the larger city’s improvement process.
There were other immediate results of incorporation that tended to ameliorate the
resentment over improvements, chiefly the power to pass ordinances for nuisance
abatement. Throughout Los Angeles County in the 1890s and 1900s, groups of citizen
property owners incorporated cities in order to protect themselves through zoning and
local police powers from social nuisances like saloons, gambling halls, and dancing.
42
In
Watts, political struggles over alcohol raged for more than a decade, with “Dry” factions
attempting to pass local-option prohibition laws and, when these failed, petitioning

40
January 9, 1923, Minutes of Watts Board of Trustees, Vol. 4. Folder "Volume 4: 3/8/1921-9/9/1924", Box B-0084,
City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
41
Carey McWilliams has written most influentially on the centrality of promotion and often outright hucksterism in
developing Southern California’s towns and cities. Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land
(Santa Barbara Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1973) 135-37.Norman Klein provides an excellent investigation of the way in
which images of place held a stronger connection to increasing real estate values than the actual physical form of those
places. Norman M. Klein, "The Sunshine Strategy: Buying and Selling the Fantasy of Los Angeles," in 20th Century
Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict, ed. Norman M. Klein and Martin J. Schiesl (Claremont, Ca:
Regina, 1990).
42
A Haynes Foundation study in 1952 concluded that Compton, Pomona, Santa Monica, Pasadena, South Pasadena,
Burbank, and Hollywood incorporated in part to take advantage of local-option prohibition powers available to cities
under California law. This conclusion is cited to indicated the importance of alcohol in the minds of 19
th
and early 20
th

century incorporators, though it clearly ignores the connections between race, class, and religious divisions and the
liquor issue, and the potential for liquor to crystallize larger anxieties about social difference. Richard Bigger and
James D. Kitchen, "Metropolitan Los Angeles: A Study in Integration: Volume Ii, How the Cities Grew," in
Metropolitan Los Angeles: A Study in Integration (Los Angeles: John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation,
1952), 81-85.
52
Trustees to revoke liquor licenses of individual establishments and tighten the granting
of new licenses.
If they split over liquor, most of the white Anglo leaders and residents of the
small cities of Los Angeles County were united in viewing racial diversity as a prime
social nuisance. In nearly all cities in south and southeast Los Angeles County, racial
policies initiated by local realty boards and prejudices instantiated in restrictive deed
covenants, both increasingly common by 1920, operated to preserve white exclusivity.
43

In working-class suburbia this held as true as for the wealthier precincts in the region,
with “racial restriction” serving as a selling point for newly subdivided residential
tracts.
44
One local paper serving (and promoting) the working-class development of
Home Gardens east of Watts proudly proclaimed that “the only restrictions here are
racial—the white race only may own property here.”
45
However, in Watts, a major
building and subdivision boom took place between 1900 and 1910, and with lots to sell
and a growing market of black home seekers, exclusivity broke down in favor of the
profit motive. Progressive attorney Marshall Stimson was one land dealer who, noticing
the difficulty black migrants to Los Angeles often experienced in finding homes, bought
land south of Watts Junction and enlisted black ministers to advertise the lots to their
congregations. Stimson’s memoir dates the deal to “around 1910.”
46
Along with the

43
Lonnie G. III Bunch, ""the Greatest State for the Negro"," in Seeking El Dorado, ed. Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin
Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage, 2001), 143, Flamming, Bound for
Freedom 69, 218-21, Freer, "L.A. Race Woman," 616.
44
Nicolaides, "The Quest for Independence: Workers in the Suburbs," 87.
45
Home Gardens Press, August 7, 1925. Quoted in Ibid.
46
Marshall Stimson, Fun, Fights, and Fiestas in Old Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Gordon Stimson, 1966). quoted in
Ray, City of Watts 15. I do not include pagination from the original as it is available only through the Los Angeles
53
settlement of Mexican railroad workers, Watts thus became a multiracial settlement,
and, aside from the city of Los Angeles, attracted the bulk of black migrants to Southern
California. By the 1920 census, Watts was home to 650 black residents, a number that
was larger than that for any city in the state below 10,000 population.
47
The sale of land
to black residents was concentrated strictly in the southern, and least desirable, part of
town, described by one of Bond’s interviewees as “low, sandy, and damp” and “the
water [drainage] basin for Los Angeles,” prone to flooding and swampiness.
48
Yet, even
this sale of unwanted land was such a substantial breach of the white social code that it
was remembered by a white Watts resident in 1933 as a “spite deal,”
49
though it seems
more likely that the deal created spite than that it was motivated by it.
Though Adler cites oral histories that indicate friendly interpersonal relations
between the races throughout the independent period, more evidence indicates that race
was becoming a major community division. Main Street (now 103rd St. in the city of
Los Angeles) ran east to west across Watts and became a racial dividing line, with
residents of color living in the “Mudtown” area south of Main Street.
50
In her research,
Adler found that of 37 tracts subdivided in Watts between 1903 and 1907, only 12

Public Library’s reference collection and pages have been removed from the book. The relevant material from Ray is
quoted here:
In his book, Fun, Fights, and Fiestas in Old Los Angeles, Marshall Stimson, a wealthy Los Angeles civic
leader wrote: “Around 1910 I noticed that Negroes were coming into the City and found it hard to get settled.
I bought a large tract of land south of Watts and deeded it to a bank, after putting in a water plant and
subdividing it into acre lots. I placed a Negro agent in charge and announced it was a tract restricted to
Negroes. I interested several of the finest Negro preachers to call attention to their members of this
opportunity to acquire a home…. I prize very highly the confidence these fine men—Dr. McCoy, Dr.
Gordon, and Rev. A.P. Shaw—gave to me.”
47
Bond, "Negro in Los Angeles" 87.
48
Ibid. 88.
49
Ray, City of Watts 15.
50
See Adler, "Watts" 49, 55, 78-81, Ray, City of Watts 15.
54
contained any lots purchased by black or Mexican buyers, with all of these south of
Main.
51
The residential closeness of black and ethnic Mexican residents in Watts,
enforced by segregation from whites, was one departure from Bontemps’ recollection of
the area as a reincarnation of the isolated black communities of the rural South. The
community’s active institution building also diverged from Bontemps’ recollection of
indifference to white society. Many African Americans in Watts entered enthusiastically
into the local political fray. Several churches, a chapter of Marcus Garvey’s nationalist
Universal Negro Improvement Association, and political organizations indicated a desire
to cooperatively advance the race in white-dominated society.
52

As black Watts residents became more active in building institutions of
community, they also faced a particular set of social and political conditions that affected
their outlook and created distinct risks and opportunities for citizenship in Watts. There
were three primary sources of political division in Watts in the 1910s and 1920s. “Wets”
and “Drys” clashed over local-option prohibition measures, resorting to frequent (and
occasionally successful) recall campaigns and accusations of corruption against the
city’s elected officials. They also fought over the prerogatives of law enforcement and
saloon operators in the aftermath of nationwide prohibition enacted in 1918. Merchants,
realtors, and other boosters clashed with anti-tax activists and poorer residents over street,

51
Adler, "Watts" 55.
52
Even the UNIA in Los Angeles was not necessarily driven by a doctrinaire separatism. Rather, the local chapters,
isolated geographically, embodied a pragmatic, experimental stance toward advancing the race, whether by economic
nationalism through race businesses, interest-group politics, or fights against residential segregation. It was not unusual
for prominent black citizens like Charlotta Bass, in pragmatic fashion, to belong to both the UNIA and the NAACP,
and the local UNIA chapter split from the larger national body partly in defiance of the latter’s insistence on stricter
separatism. Freer, "L.A. Race Woman," 612, Robert Gottlieb, The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 52. For a monograph on the local UNIA, see Emory J. Tolbert, The
UNIA and Black Los Angeles: Ideology and Community in the American Garvey Movement, Afro-American Culture
and Society; V. 3 (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies University of California, 1980).
55
sewer, and utility improvements, with attendant charges of graft balanced by
accusations of backwardness and ignorance. Finally, the growing black community
encountered resistance to its presence from the many Los Angeles County whites who
disapproved of the prospect of a multiracial society. Throughout the southeastern
suburbs, both in and around Watts, the Ku Klux Klan increased its activity as part of a
broad spectrum of racism.
As might be expected in a small city with a polarized political culture,
disagreements over city policies were easily contaminated with recrimination, charges of
corruption, and widespread belief in conspiracies. In this atmosphere, racial concerns
became enmeshed with the questions of improvements and liquor. The linkage of race
and liquor is perhaps most readily visible, although I will argue that the issue of
improvements had a profound connection with race as well. A series of battles between
1914 and 1918 over local-option prohibition made the city a public laughingstock in the
pages of the Los Angeles Times for its near-constant stream of recall elections, charges of
corruption, and factional division. By 1918 Times reporters expressed concern that local
vaudeville comedians would lose their acts if national prohibition made moot the local
liquor battle in Watts.
53
Among other highlights of the liquor wars, Wet trustees were
accused of taking bribes and employment from liquor sellers, brawls erupted at heated
town meetings where Dry advocates accused Wets of plotting with saloon operators to
destroy the virtue of the local women, the Dry First Christian Church was burned under
suspicious circumstances with each side blaming the other, and Trustee John Lange was

53
"Tough on Vaudevillians," Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1918, sec. II, p. 4.
56
accused by his Dry opponents of having set a different politically motivated arson
fire.
54
Frustrated in attempts to ban liquor, the city’s Drys even initiated an abortive plan
to disincorporate the city in order to nullify the ordinances that allowed liquor sales.
55

Before long, black residents were scapegoated. In the 1915 Prohibition fight,
Drys accused Wets of using the town’s short one month residency requirement to
“colonize” the city with pro-liquor voters, a strategy the Drys hoped to defeat by holding
liquor referenda in several local cities in 1917.
56
The charge was not entirely unfounded,
as Al Levy, the operator of an infamous nightclub on the city’s western edge boasted in
1915 that he would personally triple the standing 31-vote majority for an “open” town by
importing 60 workers who would vote to preserve the liquor trade (along with their jobs),
and the April 8, 1918 special election was marred by seventeen indictments for voting
irregularities, which appeared to bolster Dry claims of Wet cheating.
57
As the votes were
being counted for the 1917 prohibition referendum, the Times quoted one Dry as saying
that the defeat of prohibition, should the votes fall that way, “will be by the colored
vote.”
58
The concurrent immigration of black residents likely cemented the notion that

54
"Allege Allegiance," Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1917, sec. II, p. 7, "Awaiting Trial," Los Angeles Times, June 8,
1916, sec I, p. 7, "Fever of War Stirs Watts," Los Angeles Times, November 3, 1915, sec. II, p. 7, "Trustees Hope to
Learn Facts," Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1916, sec. I, p. 15, "Wets and Drys Chase Speaker," Los Angeles Times,
November 12, 1915, sec. II, p. 7.
55
"Ballot Battle to Be Renewed," Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1915, sec. II, p. 7.
56
"Councilmen Hissed," Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1917, sec. I, p. 10, "Drys Declare War at Watts," Los Angeles
Times, September 17, 1917, sec. II, p. 1, "News from Cities and Towns South of Tehachepi's Top--Los Angeles County
Items," Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1918, sec. I, p. 5, "Wets and Drys Agree Upon Watts Armistice," Los Angeles
Times, January 9, 1916, sec. IV, p. 12.
57
"Seventeen Indicted in Watts Election Inquiry," Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1918, sec. II, p. 1, "Watts "Wets" Put
One Over," Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1915, sec. II, p. 1.
58
"Venice Apparently Wet; Watts Still in Doubt," Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1918, sec. II, p. 1.
57
blacks were in league with Wets to corrupt the town. and the association of saloons,
taverns, and liquor with threats to racial purity ran deep in the town’s culture.
Race was intimately woven up with concerns about alcohol when whites thought
about what kind of place they wanted Watts to be, and the association of liquor with
threats to racial purity ran deep in the town’s culture. In 1917, as the prohibitionist battle
raged, Watts trustees were questioned by the county Grand Jury on suspicion of
corruption in their toleration of Negro social clubs, licensed to serve alcohol, within the
city limits. The Times accounts suggest that race-mixing on the premises of these clubs,
rather than liquor alone, was at issue, as the Trustees claimed “they would not have
permitted white and colored persons to so intermingle had they been informed.”
59
Sixty-
six residents had successfully petitioned the Trustees in the previous year to deny a
license to a black social club (though numerous white clubs were granted licenses).
60
The
Trustees alleged failure to control liquor was thus not neatly separable from many of the
Drys’ frustrations about the failure of their city to police racial boundaries. By 1923,
frustrations over race and liquor boiled over. Once the Volstead Act took effect on
January 16, 1920 providing local enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment, the
question of prohibition became a matter of law enforcement, adding to the pressures
faced by a black community attempting to protect and enjoy freedom. In this climate, the
black community’s political organizing took on new significance.
Understanding the biographical profile of just one of the Race Men of Watts may
be helpful in illustrating the stakes of citizenship and place. Walter R. Knox was born in

59
"Watts Chiefs Explain," Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1917, sec. I, p. 7.
60
Ray, City of Watts 42.
58
Columbus, Texas (about 75 miles due west of Houston) in 1891. After graduating
from Houston College (the predecessor institution to Texas Southern University, now the
largest historically black university in the United States) in 1912 and marrying his wife
Mary in the same year, he arrived in California in 1920, settling in a home on
Wilmington Avenue in Watts. Knox typified the “joiner” ethos of many middle-class
blacks, serving as a Sunday School superintendent at Macedonia Baptist Church in Watts
and as a Mason, Odd Fellow, and Shriner. With Mary as his partner, he also became a
businessman, organizing the realty firm of Knox-Knox in May, 1921.
61
The Knoxes’
story, that of educated and ambitious African-Americans leaving Texas for the promise
of securing a firmer hold on freedom was in many respects typical of black migrants to
the Los Angeles area.
62
Texas and other southern states provided a cautionary example of
the need for political empowerment and organization to protect one’s achievements,
especially against abusive authority.
63
Knox was an early example of the effort to secure
political representation, unsuccessfully seeking a seat on the Board of Trustees in 1922.
64

However, the most striking indication of this growing black political organization came
in 1924 when the African-American community rallied to oust City Marshal A.S.

61
Biographical information drawn from Los Angeles Negro Directory and Who's Who, 1930-1931 (Los Angeles: The
California Eagle Pub. Co., 1931) 80.
62
Texas was the most common state of origin for black migrants to Los Angeles. Flamming contends that fully a
quarter of black migrants in the 1920s hailed from Texas. This pattern remained through later decades; according to
Josh Sides, census data suggests that Texas supplied 24.2 percent of Los Angeles’ black migrants through 1950
(encompassing all current Los Angeles residents born elsewhere), with Louisiana the only close challenger, supplying
18.8 percent. Flamming, Bound for Freedom 197. Sides, L.A. City Limits 38.
63
See Flamming, Bound for Freedom 55-58.
64
Nomination Papers for Walter R. Knox for Office of Trustee. 1922, Folder "Election Documents 1922", Box B-0142,
City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
59
Thomson (the chief law enforcement officer of the city, also referred to as the Chief of
Police).
Thomson was installed in 1923 by a Dry faction unhappy with the enforcement of
Prohibition. Thomson set about increasing the city’s police force, naming deputies, and
requesting funds for various weaponry from the Trustees, music to the ears of Drys who
viewed liquor as a crisis of law and order. Unfortunately, Thomson’s methods also
reflected a belief that liquor was a racialized problem, as he set about a program of racial
profiling, unwarranted ransacking, and intimidation of the Black and Mexican residents
of the city.
65
The black community in particular responded with an organized campaign
to defend themselves against official abuse. More than sixty residents of the southern part
of the city signed a petiton that was presented to the Board of Trustees in late January,
1924, stating that “we do not approve of the present Chief of Police, Mr. A.S.
Thomson.”
66
The petition was supported by a letter-writing campaign. In letters received
by the Trustees within days of the receipt of the petition, individuals complained of being
stopped on the city’s streets for no cause.
67
On one occasion, officers tore linoleum from
the floor.
68
On another, officers ate a woman’s Christmas dinner while ransacking her
house in a vain effort to find “moonshine.”
69
Sympathetic white business owners like

65
Ray, City of Watts 58.
66
Petition for Removal of A.S. Thomson. 1924, Folder "Police: Complaints Against", Box B-0143, City of Watts
Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
67
J.K. Henry to Watts Trustees. January 21, 1924, Folder "Police: Complaints Against", Box B-0143, City of Watts
Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
68
Unsigned to Watts Trustees. January 21, 1924, Folder "Police: Complaints Against", Box B-0143, City of Watts
Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
69
Louise Lee to Watts Trustees. January 22, 1924, Folder "Police: Complaints Against", Box B-0143, City of Watts
Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
60
poolhall operator W.H. Hazlett found their businesses ransacked on suspicion
(perhaps, in this case with some cause) of harboring bootleg liquor.
70
The timing of the
letters suggested that citizens were working collectively to overcome the fear that came
from putting their names and addresses on the record against a police department already
demonstrated as prone to harassment. If Thomson stayed in office, retribution was likely,
and the Marshal had taken the liberty of sending a letter to residents of the city thanking
them for their support and offering recommendations for their vote in the upcoming
election.
71

Initially, this seemed the likely fate. On February 19, only two Trustees, Aaron
Cowell and Marcus Manus, voted for a board investigation of the charges of harassment
leveled against Thomson.
72
But the general election in April altered the politics of the
board substantially. Candidate Irvin Odell was elected, unseating Thomson’s endorsee
Marion Todd and swinging the board to a 3-2 anti-Thomson majority. On April 22, 1924,
the Trustees voted to remove Thomson from office and installed Lambourne Edwards in
his stead.
73
The new Board took other actions in subsequent months to rein in policing,
allowing Edwards power to lay off police officers and dismissing two officers outright.
74

Thomson supporters William Touchstone and Lawriston Berdrow were also unsuccessful

70
W.H. Hazlett to Watts Trustees. January 21, 1924, Folder "Police: Complaints Against", Box B-0143, City of Watts
Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
71
A.S. Thomson to Watts Voters. April 10, 1924, Folder "Police: Complaints Against", Box B-0143, City of Watts
Records, Los Angeles City Archives. Thomson endorsed incumbent Marion Todd and candidate James Tipping.
72
February 19, 1924, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 4.
73
April 22, 1924, Ibid.
74
On June 19, the Board voted unanimously to allow the Marshal to lay off officers temporarily. Possibly this reflected
fiscal as much as political concerns. However, the vote on July 8 dismissing two officers outright was contested and
was decided by the votes of Odell, Manus, and Cowell against Berdrow and Touchstone. Ibid.
61
in a bid to remove pool halls (suspected of filling the void left by saloons and subject
to police harassment) from Main Street.
75
Nomination papers for Trustee elections in that
year show that there was a concerted effort by black activists as part of a coalition to
shape the Board of Trustees along lines defined by the police controversy.
76
Odell’s
nomination papers for the April 14 general municipal election were signed by a black
service-station owner named Robert Buford, who also signed Manus’ papers to remain in
office that year. Walter Knox, along with Odell, signed papers to nominate Laurence
Pryor to succeed the recalled Touchstone The influence of black citizens did not pass
without notice, as the Watts chapter of the Ku Klux Klan identified Knox and Buford as
black leaders in Watts.
77
Despite (or perhaps spurred by) the Klan’s hostility, Knox in
particular would remain an active member of Watts’ black community and influential in
events to follow.
After the police crisis, surrounding municipalities continued to close ranks against
black settlement, and local newspapers hinted at vigilantism as a remedy for black
political assertiveness. In fact, many local papers tended to exaggerate the extent of
black political power to create a sense of urgency for racial retrenchment. The San Pedro
Daily Pilot on May 9, 1924 cautioned that

75
May 20, 1924, Ibid.
76
Determining the racial identity of many of the particulars is an exercise in close-reading of accounts of the city
government. Petitions and nomination papers do not list the race of signers. Mention of men like Walter Knox and
Robert Buford in reference to their business achievements as men of “our group” in the California Eagle establish them
as “Race Men” in both the literal and metaphoric senses. Determining which actors were not black is trickier.
Thankfully, it is possible, by virtue of the ProQuest database, to search the full-text of accounts of Watts politics in the
Los Angeles Times. The Times was given to identifying non-white persons by race in their news articles, for example
as “Negro” or “Mexican,” making it possible to combine searches for racial identifiers with surnames or with the term
“Watts” for a given period of the paper’s press run. As a final reference, albeit not exactly matched temporally, I have
cross-checked names taken from press accounts and Watts city government papers against California Eagle’s directory
of Black Los Angeles. Los Angeles Negro Directory and Who's Who, 1930-1931..
77
"Here Is Ku Klux Complaint against Eagle Editors," California Eagle, June 5, 1925, 1.
62
The recent race trouble in Watts should be an obvious lesson to other Southern
California cities. Some Negroes were elected to office and the whites found
themselves unable to control the situation by legal methods…. It must be
remembered that the Negro immigration which has come to California in the last
two years isn’t the good old Uncle Tom kind.
78

The claim that black officeholders precipitated a racist backlash is dubious--I have found
no evidence that any African-American held elected office in Watts--but it has become
part of the historical mythology of Watts, and thus merits some analysis.
79
For example,
Adler conducted interviews in the 1970s with surviving inhabitants of 1920s Watts.
These people recalled that Walter Knox had been elected as a Trustee, but while his 1922
nomination papers are on file, there is no record in the Watts city records of him having
been elected or serving in this capacity (confusion may arise from the service of Charlotte
Knox, the white leader of the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union as a Trustee
around the same time). It is nonetheless true that even without holding office, black
citizens had substantially influenced the course of events in the city by their concerted
efforts to oust one of the most powerful local officials.
This success, in combination with other local political conflicts, spurred
intensified political jockeying in the remainder of 1924 and in 1925, with competing
liberal and reactionary factions initiating successive recalls of Trustees from the other

78
Quoted in Adler, "Watts" 192. Emphasis added.
79
The Los Angeles Times made no report of any election of a Negro to office in Watts. By way of comparison, the
paper did note the election of a woman, Kate Prentice, to the Board of Trustees in 1920. ("Kinney Forces Lose
Election," Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1920, sec. II, p. 1, "Woman to Be Watts "Mayor."" Los Angeles Times, April
14, 1920, sec. II, p. 7.) Adler cites reaction to the election of black officeholders in Watts by a conservative paper in
San Pedro, but the offices are not specified and the reliability of the account is uncertain. It is possible that whites
exaggerated the extent of black political power out of fear or to rouse a racist backlash.
63
side.
80
The Trustees minutes for 1924 and 1925 show that the Board spent a great deal
of its time meeting either to certify recall petitions, to certify recall election results, or to
swear in new Trustees. A recall election became almost literally a quarterly civic ritual.
Two factors help to demonstrate the essentially factional nature of the recalls. First,
candidates seeking to take office in a recall election ran for specified seats, even when
multiple Trustees were recalled. Recalls thus had a strategic intent of unseating a rival
and claiming a seat. Second, election results followed predictable geographic patterns.
Race was reflected in factional alignments, as the results from the precincts of heavy
black settlement south of Main Street were often an inversion of results elsewhere.
81

For all the turmoil, the succession of recalls in Watts did little to alter the balance
of power on the board. Emboldened by success in ousting Thomson, liberals initiated an
effort to recall the two remaining reactionaries, Berdrow and Touchstone. This election
took place on July 25. Knox, Pryor, and Odell all nominated Victor Repetto (a resident
of Pearl Street in south Watts) to the board as a replacement candidate.
82
Though the
recall failed citywide, it won clear majorities in three southern precincts. Another recall
cycle began almost immediately. The Trustees announced on August 18 that Berdrow,
Touchstone, and Cowell (two reactionaries and a liberal) would be subject to a recall vote

80
The terms “liberal” and “reactionary” are inherently problematic as political signifiers, but they do a serviceable job
as descriptors of behavior. I use “reactionary” in the context of Watts politics to designate support for vigorous law
enforcement against both liquor and minorities, a term that is differentiated from “conservative” by the central role that
race and liquor as perceived threats evidently held in their worldview. “Liberals” on the other hand, embodied many of
the classical attributes of the term, opposing discriminatory policing and favoring action to expand commercial
opportunities.
8181
A dot-cluster map created by Adler marks the residence of families identified by the Eagle as “Negro” between
1916 and 1920. Though not a complete survey of the residential landscape, the dots are almost exclusively clustered in
the area south of main Street, west of the Pacific Electric’s main north-south line, and southwest of the PE’s line along
Santa Ana Boulevard. Adler, "Watts" 80.These were the areas included in Precincts E, F, G, and H in local elections.
82
Nomination Papers for Victor Repetto for Office of Trustee. 1924, Folder "Election Documents 1924", Box B-0142,
City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
64
on August 25. Voters, perhaps disgusted with the cycle of recalls ousted all three.
Again, precincts displayed considerable divergence in their vote totals, as reflected in
Figure 1.1 and Table 1.1.
Figure 1.1: Recall Election, August 25, 1924
83

83
Locations of polling places are used as proxies for the reconstruction of precinct boundaries, as defined in Affidavit
of Publication, Resolution 1226. 1924, Folder "Ordinances 1924", Box B-0143, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles
City Archives. Locations added by author to base map by Watts Chamber of Commerce, in Folder “City Engineer
1922-1925 T-1”, Box B-0141, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
65
Table 1.1: Recall Election, August 25, 1924
84

Recall Election of August 25, 1924. Precincts voting in Affirmative on recalls in bold. Results for
Replacement Elections show votes cast for candidate (parentheses show vote as percentage of votes cast in
precinct on relevant recall question). Shaded fields show results divergent from Precinct A.
Precinct North of Main Street Precinct South of Main Street
Question A B C D E F G
Recall Lawriston Berdrow:
730/700 (Y/N)
149/152 108/155 83/122 140/122 55/49 119/63 76/16
Recall William Touchstone:
729/680 (Y/N)
147/151 113/145 91/138 137/121 52/51 117/16 72/13
Recall Aaron Cowell:
664/623 (Y/N)
138/136 146/97 126/82 123/115 53/33 68/93 10/67
Elect Emmet Burkhardt to
succeed Touchstone:
665 total votes
133
(44.5%)
102
(39.5%)
85
(37.1%)
128
(49.6%)
43
(41.7%)
120
(90.2%)
75
(88.2%)

Since liberal Emmet Burkhart replaced Touchstone, and Joseph Oliver succeeded Cowell
by outballotting Victor Repetto while Charlotte Knox (previously President of the local
WCTU) took Berdrow’s seat, the balance of the board was not ultimately changed.
Oliver was unsuccessfully recalled in 1925, with Walter Knox, along with John Buford
(Robert’s father), Burkhardt, and Odell signing nomination papers for Harry Birrer to
succeed Oliver.
85
Despite high turnover, the factional balance of the board remained in

84
Results as certified on September 29, 1924, Minutes of Watts Board of Trustees, Vol. 5. Folder "Volume 5:
9/10/1924-6/1/1926", Box B-0084, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
85
Nomination Papers for Harry Birrer for Office of Trustee. 1925, Folder "Election Documents 1925", Box B-0142,
City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
66
favor of the Race Men and their liberal white allies, showing the electoral clout of the
city’s southern precincts who voted consistently against the conservatives to maintain an
embattled but persistent majority on the Board of Trustees. Figure 1.2 and Table 1.2
demonstrate the continuation of this geographical pattern.
Figure 1.2: Recall Election, May 15, 1925
86

86
Polling place locations as proxies for precinct boundaries are taken from Affidavit of Publication, Resolution 1320.
1925, Folder "Ordinances 1925", Box B-0143, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
67
Table 1.2: Recall Election, May 15, 1925
87

Precincts voting in Affirmative on recalls in bold. Results for Replacement Elections show votes cast
for candidate (parentheses show replacement candidate’s vote as percentage of votes cast in precinct on
relevant recall question). Shaded fields show results divergent from Precinct A.
Precinct North of Main Street Precinct South of Main Street
Question A B C D E F G
Recall Marcus Manus:
796/591 (Y/N)
214/119
(64.3%-
35.7%)
183/70
(72.3%-
27.7%)
179/78
(69.6%-
30.4%)
146/133
(52.3%-
47.7%)
51/40
(56.0%-
44.0%)
82/81
(50.3%-
49.7%)
41/70
(36.9%-
63.1%)
Recall Joseph Oliver:
548/901 (Y/N)
104/218
(32.3%-
67.7%)
70/188
(27.1%-
72.9%)
62/189
(24.7%-
75.3%)
121/153
(44.2%-
55.8%)
42/52
(44.7%-
53.3%)
81/75
(51.9%-
48.1%)
68/26
(72.3%-
27.7%)
Elect Hans Anderson to
succeed Manus: 856
total votes
213
(64.0%)
174
(68.8%)
168
(65.4%)
146
(52.3%)
47
(51.6%)
79
(48.5%)
29
(26.1%)

Tracing the evolution of factional blocs and their supporters bolsters the conclusion that
the faction that supported consolidation, including some of the most prominent Race Men
in Watts, was built from the earlier anti-Thomson coalition. Contrary to received
wisdom, then, consolidation was being driven in large part by the Race Men, not by those
who feared black empowerment.
This is not to deny that the political and cultural climate of 1920s Watts was
sharply polarized. In particular, the linking of racial supremacy with law enforcement

87
Results as certified on May 18, 1925, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 5.
68
indicates that many local whites were coming to believe that racial diversity in itself
constituted a criminal crisis, while many black citizens no doubt questioned the ability or
will of their white neighbors to respect their rights and the utility of the Watts city
government as a tool to protect their interests. However, as I will argue below, it is a
mistake to attribute the consolidation to white racism alone, for there was a simultaneous
crisis of municipal government and service provision that, for black citizens tightly
restricted in their residential choices, became an even more pressing crisis not only for
the civic process, but for civil rights.

Crises of Black Place Making: The Ku Klux Klan or Muddy Streets?
The middle 1920s were a time of right-wing reaction throughout the United States
and Southern California, and Watts was no exception. With the official organs of the law
unable to satisfactorily suppress either liquor or minorities, calls for vigilantism emerged
both in Watts and around Southern California.
88
As the Times reporting on bootlegging
suggests, the problem was strongly interpreted on racial lines; black social clubs were
viewed as primary sources of illicit alcohol, and thus the revitalized Ku Klux Klan was
viewed by many whites as the savior of the sober white society. Flamming has argued
that the Times often denounced the KKK and took an official position that the Klansmen
were un-American thugs unwelcome in California.

However, the paper’s coverage of
events elsewhere in the US tended, as Adler argues, toward “pointing up the usefulness of

88
Adler, "Watts" 161-62. See also Flamming, Bound for Freedom 194, 200-02, Matt García, A World of Its Own:
Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970, Studies in Rural Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C.
London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) 75-77. In particular, Garcia notes the overlap between anti-liquor
and anti-Mexican sentiments in the activities and rhetoric of the Klan in the San Gabriel valley, east of Los Angeles.
69
the Klan.”
89
The Times encouraged its readers to associate liquor, bootlegging, and
gambling with race-mixing. In one lurid account of a raid on a gambling house near
Watts, the paper implicated black Angelenos as the source of the threat to social purity
and public morality:
The gambling house raided near Watts is described as a “sporting” haunt: “Every
Tuesday night was Ladies Night at which time fashionably dressed women drove
to the place in their high-priced cars and until early in the morning rubbed
shoulders with Negroes, consorted with women who made the house their
headquarters and wooed the goddess of chance.”
90

The combination of the Times’ coverage of Klan attacks on bootleggers in other places
and their lurid tales of late-night carousing and race-mixing in and near Watts certainly
encouraged Times readers to imagine a social crisis entwining race, morality, and
bootlegging.

In the small cities near Watts, less circumspect newspaper editors took a
more direct pro-Klan line.
91
Klan rallies in nearby Lynwood, Maywood, and South Gate
attracted up to 3,500 spectators, local stores posted advertisements for the rallies,
newspapers stoked fears of race-mixing in public schools, and six blue-collar suburbs in
the area proposed an ill-fated plan to consolidate into one city that could sustain an all-
white school district.
92
The Klan grew visibly active in Watts, too, with the usual

89
Adler, "Watts" 178, Flamming, Bound for Freedom 52-54. For an example of anti-Klan editorializing see "No Ku
Klux Wanted," Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1921, sec. II, p. 4.
90
Minutes of Watts Board of Trustees. June 26, 1923, Folder "Volume 4: 3/8/1921-9/9/1924", Box B-0084, City of
Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
91
For example, the South Gate Tribune promoted Klan activities. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven 165.
92
Ibid. 165-67. Broad support for the Klan beyond its membership rolls and black fear of racial vigilantism were fed
by the increase in white migration from the southern states. See Flamming, Bound for Freedom 198-9. However,
Gerald Horne argues that the Southern California Klans of the 1920s targeted primarily Mexican and Japanese
communities. Gerald Horne, "Black Fire: "Riot" and "Revolt" in Los Angeles, 1965 and 1992," in Seeking El Dorado,
ed. Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage,
2001), 383. In any case, the climate of racial antagonism was growing, and drew support from a broad social base.
70
assortment of cross-burnings, parades, and intimidations, and black residents reported
carrying firearms for self-defense.
93
The spate of recalls and political maneuvering to
pack the Board of Trustees also fed fears that the Klan was partly responsible for the
political turmoil. “Watts, it seems,” lamented the Eagle, “is almost solidly Ku Klux.”
94

On first analysis, it is reasonable to assume that the Klan sought to infiltrate the
Watts city government, as it was active throughout Los Angeles County, showing much
of its strength in the smaller cities of the region, and making frightening inroads to
official power. In Inglewood, an independent city to the west of Watts, Klan activity in
April 1922 inadvertently gave Black Angelenos a glimpse into the extent of the
organization’s regional ambitions. A Klan member shot by Sheriff’s deputies after the
Klan raided an alleged bootlegging establishment turned out to be an Inglewood police
officer. When the District Attorney, Thomas Woolwine, seized the Klan’s membership
rolls he found that three members of his own staff, several local policemen, and 3,000
total county residents were members of the Klan. Later, both the LAPD chief and the
County Sheriff were exposed as members and forced by the bad publicity of membership
in a secret group, to resign.
95
While many of the civic elites in Los Angeles, like
Woolwine, disdained the Klan, this attitude was far from universal among white
Angelenos. In particular, the resolution of the criminal case against the Inglewood Klan
was distressing; all of the thirty-five defendants were acquitted, and jurors (after shaking
hands with the defendants) told reporters that the presence of off-duty police among the

93
Adler, "Watts" 180. Ray, City of Watts 62.
94
"Here Is Ku Klux Complaint against Eagle Editors," 1.
95
Flamming, Bound for Freedom 204.
71
Klansmen legitimated the raid.
96
Essentially, this jury expressed the white
community’s belief that no meaningful distinction should be drawn between legitimate
policing and vigilantism. Despite the resignations of the LAPD chief and the Sheriff,
black Angelenos looked with suspicion on the seeming alliance between the Klan and
local police departments, as well as the ease with which Klansmen had entered the ranks.
As Flamming has argued, by the middle of the decade, black Angelenos were compelled
to consider that “[w]hen they dealt with any white police officer, any judge, any council
member, it was always possible that they were facing a Klan member or sympathizer.”
97

It became necessary to cultivate reliable allies. Among other actions, Walter Knox led an
organization called the Watts Community League to back Woolwine for Governor in
1922, despite the fact that Woolwine was a Tennessee-born Democrat and Los Angeles’
black community was still solidly Republican in 1922.
98
Though he filed his papers
prior to the Inglewood raid, Knox’s bid for a seat on the board of Watts Trustees also
likely reflected an effort to gain political representation as a defense against such attacks.
Mindful of the Inglewood affair and encouraged by their success in ousting
Marshal Thomson, the black community of Watts was ready for the Klan’s emergence on
the local scene, and seemed to successfully stem the Klan’s growth in their city. This
confrontation went public in April 1925, when the California Eagle claimed that an
individual within the Watts police department had forwarded to the paper a letter from
the local Klan leader outlining plans to subvert the city’s government and install a slate of

96
"Jury Frees Klansmen," Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1922, 1.
97
Flamming, Bound for Freedom 211.
98
Ibid. 206.
72
pro-KKK Trustees. In particular, the Klan sought to undermine the influence of Race
Men in Watts. As printed, the letter read in part
The influence of Negro Knox is waning, and will be easily killed if we can bring
proper pressure to bear…. Watch out for Oscar, Knox, and Buford. They are
much alive as yet. Knox uses the churches, but we are starting a fight against him
in his own church and break [sic] his influence.”
99

Of their purported black collaborators, the Klan wrote that “neither of these Negroes have
any racial pride and very little brains.”
100
Perhaps the Klan’s confidence that the black
community could be so easily divided and manipulated was the greatest insult to the
Eagle and to black leaders in Watts. In retaliation, the paper published the letter in the
interests both of exposing the KKK and rousing the local black community to action.
Walter Knox arranged a mass meeting in Watts where Joseph and Charlotta Bass, the
Eagle’s publishers, denounced the Klan and its alleged accomplices. In describing the
meeting, the paper noted that “the consensus of opinion voiced at the meeting was that
there are some Benedict Arnolds in their midst,” and praised Knox’s organizing,
describing him as one “who has fought in and out of season for all things which mean a
continued progress for all people in the environs of this section.”
101
The 1920s were
arguably the high-water mark for the Klan’s public respectability in the United States,
and the organization, probably anticipating a favorable result in trial, responded to the
Eagle’s charges with a libel suit. Ultimately, however, the case was decided in favor of
the Basses and the Eagle, as Judge J.S. Chambers affirmed the authenticity of the letter

99
"Here Is Ku Klux Complaint against Eagle Editors," 1.
100
Ibid.
101
"Eagle Editor Receives Ovation at Hands of Citizens of Watts," California Eagle, May 15, 1925, 1.
73
and declared that, due to the Klan’s apparent interest in the upcoming Watts elections,
the Eagle’s publication of the letter constituted a protected exercise of the press.
102
Both
Knox and Buford offered testimony that helped establish the authenticity of the letter,
shielding the Basses from conviction on the libel charges.
103

After the Klan was exposed and the Basses declared victory in Watts, rumblings
for consolidation began. This temporal coincidence explains why the narrative of white
conspiracy seems compelling at first inspection. Watts was a racial battleground, not least
because the success of whites in using restrictive covenants and homeowner associations
in other areas of the county put pressure on Watts whites to stop the influx of black
residents. As Bond noted, the pattern of black residential “invasion” of all-white
neighborhoods had ceased elsewhere in the County except in Watts by mid-decade.
104
In
such circumstances, where local government failed to control black migration and the
principal white vigilante organization was on the defensive, abandoning Watts’
independence could have been last resort of white civic racism.
105
Yet, the Klan opposed
the consolidation, apparently on tax grounds.
106
If consolidation was a scheme to thwart
black rule, someone evidently forgot to inform the Klan.

102
"Judge J.S. Chambers in Notable Decision," California Eagle, June 26, 1925, 1.
103
"Eagle Editors on Trial," California Eagle, June 19, 1925, 1.
104
Bond, "Negro in Los Angeles" 87.
105
Though, this explanation fails to account for why whites opposed to black political rule would remain as residents,
thus keeping black neighbors, and by the logic of real estate, sabotaging their most important financial asset, especially
when they could have resettled in any number of economically similar, but lily-white, working-class suburbs nearby.
106
According to Adler, the Watts Klan feared that the consolidation would promote “big-city extravagance” in regard
to taxing and spending. Adler, "Watts" 200. The Times grouped the KKK with other Watts organizations, including the
Chamber of Commerce and the Taxpayers’ League, in opposition. "Watts Votes to Enter City," Los Angeles Times,
April 3, 1926, A1.
74
This paradox points to the conclusion that, despite the clear overtones of racial
retrenchment, attributing the consolidation to white racism is inadequate; to do so would
be to ignore the ways in which black political actors struggled to define their relationship
as a group to the political system and to turn the power of the city government to their
own ends. The threat of the Klan was very real, but by 1925 the black community in
Watts had demonstrated sufficient unity and marshaled sufficient political resources to
push back. In the meantime, some Race activists attempted to turn that unity toward their
own positive plans that related to the prospect of consolidation.
107
The California Eagle,
the self-consciously crusading newspaper of black Los Angeles seldom missed an
opportunity to weigh in on the interests of “the race.”
108
Yet, the few references made in
the paper to the consolidation vote in 1926 were emphatically and unambiguously in
favor of it, as the Eagle urged voters to “keep up the good work of annexation by going
to the polls and working for the present board which worked for the victory gained last
Friday.”
109

This raises important questions about the way Watts voters viewed the decision.
Black political rule in 1926 was not an end in itself. Rather, it was a part of a larger

107
Exposing the machinations of the far right is significant work, particularly in light of the extent to which local
governing elites have either embraced the far right or, in the case of nominally liberal regimes, failed to resist. An
excellent narrative of the far right’s actions in the years around World War II is provided in Leonard, ""No Jews and
No Coloreds"". As Leonard argues, right-wing and fascist activity in Los Angeles was an important spur to interracial
organizing among minority groups. However, in Leonard’s narrative, it is difficult to conceive of minority group
politics as having positive goals independent of fighting against fascists.
108
The paper’s history of activism is well summarized in Flamming, Bound for Freedom 104-09. and in Charlotta
Bass’ own account of assuming a trust of community responsibility in taking over the paper in 1912. Bass, "Forty
Years," 31.
109
"Watts Voters' Alert," 1. The paper made its endorsement of candidates for the election of a final Board of Trustees,
which would have the duty of signing off on the consolidation that had been approved by Watts voters in a direct
election. Though the term “annexation” was often used in place of consolidation, they denote different actions. In an
annexation, an incorporated city takes on adjoining territory that lies outside of any city by consent of a majority of
property owners in the area. Consolidation refers to the merger of two incorporated cities.
75
project of remaking social space. The intense segregation of Los Angeles County
prevented much spatial sorting of black Angelenos by social class, which in turn meant
that a significant faction of black Watts residents owned property and strongly favored
improvements to increase the monetary value of their land and the commercial
potentialities of the area, which was anathema to the low-cost, no frills ethos of working-
class suburbs. Advertisements for real estate in the Eagle tend to demonstrate the
economic split within Watts between those with middle-class aspirations and those
content with living in working-class suburbia. For example, in October 1926, after the
consolidation, ads for J. Marcolesco (a regular advertiser) covered both bases, touting
land where one could “start a chicken ranch, will pay for your property” and a “3-room
modern house, 3 blocks from car line on paved street.”
110
Since Watts was one of the few
places where black residents could even live, let alone purchase property, naturally the
form of development held potential for controversy.
Though geographically separate from the community developing on “The
Eastside” and along Central Avenue to the north, Race Men and Women in Watts
identified more with their contemporaries to the north, described by Flamming as
“strivers of the black middle class,” than with the culture of some of their neighbors in
Watts, which native son Arna Bontemps had described as “a tiny section of the deep
South literally transplanted.” If the Eagle, referencing the residents of the black
“Eastside” neighborhood near downtown (where the paper was headquartered) claimed in
May 1916 that “all of us are not content living in the Los Angeles river bed, but are

110
"J. Marcolesco, Realtor," California Eagle, October 8, 1926.
76
seeking to purchase real estate that is saleable and will have the advantage of civic
improvements,”
111
that imperative could be easily applied to black residents in Watts in
the years before and after the consolidation.
Unfortunately, in addition to the toxic climate of recalls and accusations spawned
by the liquor conflict, the City of Watts was plagued by a political culture that favored
inertia. Thus, although progress-minded Trustees certainly favored them in principle,
factional politics made it difficult to achieve desired improvements. During the liquor
wars of the 1910s, there were some episodes that suggested an overlap between the Drys
and the anti-improvements Taxpayers’ Party in municipal politics. In the 1915 recall
fight, Drys claimed that Wets on the Board of Trustees raised assessments in Dry-
controlled areas as political retribution.
112
and when a bond issue for a sewer system
shared space on the April 8, 1918 ballot with a set of liquor-relate referenda “it was freely
declared that the drys were going to vote against the sewer proposition because the wets
had proposed it.”
113
For their part, Wets later attempted to wedge apart the anti-tax and
prohibitionist wings of their opponents by proposing to license a sufficient number of
alcohol sellers at rates that would allow the city to eliminate all property assessments.
114

This is not to suggest that conflict over improvements was reducible to a tangent of the

111
In Flamming, Bound for Freedom 154.
112
"Town Torn by Recall Fight," sec. II, p. 9. In 1915, a recall petition had circulated against the Wet-dominated board
of Trustees, but the chief ground of the grievance was for unwise spending, including the installation of decorative
lights on Main Street. As the Times noted, “the heaviest tax is said to be assessed to that part of the town inhabited by
‘drys.’” The liquor connections should not be exaggerated, however. The trend toward decorative streetlighting was a
common source of conflict in the region. According to Nicolaides, this “City Beautiful” initiative to cosmeticize South
Gate’s commercial streets provoked a bitter recall effort in 1925. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven 140-41.
113
"Venice Apparently Wet; Watts Still in Doubt," sec. II, p. 1. In this account, Drys Zera Asher Towne, Hans
Anderson, and John Zimmerman are listed as candidates for the Board of Trustees under the Taxpayers’ Party banner.
114
Ibid.
77
liquor wars. It was far too systemic to be attributed only to spite, and in any case
continued after the legal imposition of Prohibition.
As the 1920s progressed, the city’s affairs were handled less and less efficiently,
and basic services were threatened. Two examples of recurrent efforts to improve major
streets in Watts illustrate the point. Compton Avenue ran north and south in the western
part of the city. In March of 1914, the City Engineer and City Attorney discussed a
project of regrading South Compton Avenue at Thaxter Street, reporting to the Trustees
that the intersection was at risk of flooding and thus of producing liability claims against
the city (in addition to damage to property).
115
Though the re-grading was accomplished,
the street remained the focus of improvement efforts in later years. In 1923 “sundry
persons” wrote in protest to the Trustees to request that the city use cheaper paving
materials for Compton Avenue.
116
Later in that same year, the Trustees received
complaints about the improvement of both North and South Compton Avenue, and
rejected one petition to stop the project on the grounds that the protest did not represent
an adequate number of affected landowners.
117
Protests were renewed in the following
spring.
118
The protests against the improvement aroused some ill will. In a petition to
the Trustees to move ahead on the improvement of South Compton Ave, resident/owner
Earl Sibrel wrote that “evidently the people who make complaints are not interested in

115
March 31, 1914, Minutes of Watts Board of Trustees, Vol. 3. Folder "Volume 3, Part I: 1913-1916", Box B-0084,
City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
116
April 10, 1923, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 4.
117
June 26 and July 24, 1923, Minutes of Watts Board of Trustees.
118
April 8, 1924 Trustee Minutes, Vol. 4.
78
the welfare of our city…. Such streets are what has kept our city from taking its place
among the progressive cities of the state.”
119

Protests against the improvement of Lynwood Road, the southern boundary of the
city, were even more troublesome, as the flooding on that right of way threatened to
provoke lawsuits against the city. Yet, three months after the City Engineer warned the
Trustees of possible lawsuits, property owners filed a formal protest against improving
the street.
120
One owner, Josefa Abila expressed through her attorney a threefold
argument against the paving of the street. The first objection was a classic invocation of
the political economy of segmentation. While conceding that “the paving of this street
will especially benefit these adjoining owners,” Abila nonetheless insisted that “there is
not a person owning property adjoining this street who desires this paving,” evidently
expecting this line of reasoning to carry weight with the Trustees. In the event that this
was insufficient, the protest offered two other rationales, that the paving would only
benefit travelers from outside Watts, and that the paving was being pushed to make
Lynwood Road a storm sewer for the northern part of the city, in which case the whole
city should be assessed to pay for it. The third rationale illustrated quite clearly the limits
of the old, segmented political economy, while the second, more disturbing to the city’s
boosters, reflected an indifference from some quarters about developing Watts as a center
to which outsiders might come to do business. By declaring the fact that Lynwood Road
was “a street seldom used, except by people outside of the city of Watts” as a rationale

119
Petition for Improvement of South Compton Avenue. June 26, 1923, Folder "Streets: Improvements, Petitions For,
1923-1926", Box B-0144, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
120
June 15 and September 7, 1915, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 3.
79
for refusing to pave it, opponents of improvement were in effect saying that allowing
outsiders to travel into the city was unimportant.
121
These protests were evidently
effective in blocking improvement. In March, 1920 the City Clerk received letters from
the Postmaster claiming that Watts’ streets were “impassable in wet weather and some
are dangerous to travel on in dry weather.” The Postmaster further claimed that “this
office has been informed that some of these streets are in such bad condition that, even in
dry weather, tradesmen refuse to serve people living thereon.” A follow-up letter in
October specifically named Lynwood Road between Central and Compton Avenues as a
stretch that would be denied mail service in the coming winter, a threat which was
renewed in 1922.
122
By 1923, the City Attorney, with the Trustees’ approval, had begun
to investigate the possibility of deeding the Lynwood Road right-of-way back to the
County in order to avoid responsibility for its upkeep.
123
By contrast, the City of Los
Angeles was haltingly transitioning away from the “segmented” political economy of the
earlier era. In part this was because private development interests, with the blessing of
municipal government, had already staked a central role in the physical growth of the
city, but also because the experience of constructing public works made the issue of
traffic circulation appear as a common good in which all citizens shared.
124

121
Protest against Improvement of Lynwood Road. August 23, 1915, Folder "Streets: Protests 1915-1923", Box B-
0144, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
122
March 30 and October 5, 1920, Los Angeles Postmaster to Watts Trustees. 1920, Folder "City Clerk: Postal
Service", Box B-0141, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives. February 14, 1923, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 4.
123
September 25, 1923, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 4.
124
Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993) 42, 94.
80
Perhaps worst was the city’s sewage disposal situation. As early as 1914, a
consensus emerged among the pro-development group in Watts that the city’s cesspools
were no longer adequate, and that a sewer system should be designed and built.

This was
not an uncommon predicament among smaller, suburban municipalities in the United
States. Richardson Dilworth has argued that sanitation infrastructure has been a major
determinant of the tension between suburban autonomy and the expansion of central
cities through annexation and consolidation.
125
Initially, large cities pursued the
construction of water or sewer systems, in part as a developmental policy that boosted
real estate values.
126
By the late nineteenth century in metropolitan New York (and
somewhat later in Los Angeles) experience of civil engineers in building large-city
systems and the professionalization of engineering created a pool of knowledge and a
lowering of costs that put such infrastructure within the financial reach of smaller
cities.
127
Thus, with the development of sewers in Los Angeles, it was almost inevitable
that surrounding cities came to view these improvements as not merely desirable, but
necessary for the continued competitiveness of their towns in the real estate market.
While Dilworth cites case studies of suburban towns that preserved their autonomy by
successfully matching the infrastructure of neighboring cities at less cost, boosterish

125
Richardson Dilworth, The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2005). Dilworth studies cities in the greater New York metropolitan area, but, allowing for Los Angeles’ later
development, his argument provides a useful framework for considering infrastructural development in greater Los
Angeles.
126
Ibid. 15-16.
127
Ibid. 27-9.
81
pressure to build infrastructure set other towns up for failure.
128
This pressure was
exacerbated by the salesmanship of engineers. Communications from civil engineering
firms baited the Trustees with pricing plans by which the engineers would recoup
(against future revenues) a five percent advance on initial construction costs.
129

According to one supplier of steel for municipal pipe systems,
PROSPERITY follows PUBLIC IMPROVEMENTS. Lack of
IMPROVEMENTS retards growth and development. Water Works are a
necessity; but the War required they be delayed. Why delay further? War
conditions no longer exist. Men need work. Material prices have been
reduced.”
130

Ultimately, the push to compete exposed the weakness of the City of Watts as
both the complexity and the cost of the proposed sewer system crept upward. The
Trustees authorized a straw poll at a city election in September to gauge public support
for a sewer bond, but results were less than definitive.
131
Initially, the proposed system
included no outfall, but merely a central septic tank to keep sewage away from
groundwater. As of January 1916, the initiative for a $160,000 bond seemed to lack the
two-thirds support needed for passage, causing the City Clerk to complain that while “the

128
By the late 1920s, as Weiss. argues, the improvement of new subdivisions with sewer service was much more
economical and efficient than retrofitting old, developed property, so a city like Watts was forced to equal the service
levels of newer communities while paying more to do so.
129
Henry Osborne and Walter Jessup to Watts City Engineer. April 13, 1925, Folder "City Engineer 1922-1925 T-1",
Box B-0141, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives, Victor Staheli to Watts City Engineer. June 26, 1925,
Folder "City Engineer 1922-1925 T-1", Box B-0141, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives. The letter
from construction contractors Osborne and Jessup of Los Angeles indicated that the contractors recognized how the
hard-sell tactic of advancing a percentage of costs to be recouped against later assessments presented a risk of default.
The letter noted that “in the event that any proceedings ordered by the Board are protested out or for any other reason
beyond the control of the engineers are not carried through to completion it will be understood that the cost of carrying
through the proceedings up to that point will be paid for, estimated at 2 ½% of the estimated cost of the construction
involved.”
130
Fred Hatch, Pittsburgh-Des Moines Steel Co. To Watts Trustees. n/d, Folder "Water: Sewer System, Reports,
Queries, Requests", Box B-0144, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
131
August 18, 1914, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 3.
82
city Trustees and the Chamber of Commerce are solidly behind the movement… there
are always those who resist every public improvement.”
132
The Trustees next dispatched
the municipal Board of Public Works to collaborate with the Watts Chamber of
Commerce “along the lines of instruction and education of the citizens in regard to the
sewer proposition,” with promotional materials to be paid for from the city’s advertising
fund.
133
By March, a ballot measure for a $125,000 bond issue was put forward, but
failed.
134
Subsequent attempts to reach the magic two-thirds threshold were thwarted in
1918 by a bloc vote of Drys who turned out against liquor but also opposed increasing the
city’s debt, and in 1920 by a recount (demanded by the Taxpayers’ Party) that showed the
measure a mere two votes shy of passage.
135

The year 1921 saw the approval of a bond for $120,000 for the construction of a
sewer system in a May special election, and the commencement of construction of a
partial system after the Trustees received petitions urging the system be installed, but
things did not go smoothly from there.
136
No longer content with a municipal septic tank
network, boosters had set their sights on a municipal sewage treatment plant, with
dramatically increased costs. By 1922, Trustees Walter Weiss and Charles Wagniere
were accused by a contractor of soliciting a $15,000 kickback on a $500,000 bid for a
treatment plant, prompting a countersuit by the Trustees charging libel, and their decisive

132
"Watts Sewer Plans," Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1916, sec. I, p. 7.
133
"Better Water Service," Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1916, sec. I, p. 7. January 11, 1916, Trustee Minutes, Vol.
3.
134
March 14, 1916, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 3.
135
"Venice Apparently Wet; Watts Still in Doubt," sec. II, p. 7.
136
Ray, City of Watts 48.
83
removal from office by recall in January 1923.
137
While the Times jested that the
charges of graft signaled Watts’ arrival as a real city, the episode put the sewer project
under a cloud of suspicion, resulting in canceled contracts as organized taxpayers
rebelled against costs.
138
After the failed 1922 effort, Trustee Hugh Gove sponsored a
slightly discounted bid of $445,000 to builder George Beckjord in 1923. Anti-taxers
tried two tactics to block the project, claiming that the Trustees did not get a proper
permit from the State Board of Health, and that there had been illegal collusion between
bidders. Evidently, the taxpayers’ concern was less with corruption than with cost,
because after a judge ruled that the sewer was improperly permitted and blocked further
construction, the taxpayers temporarily dropped the corruption case.
139
The case was
revived the following year when a group of taxpayers sued Gove for corruption.
140
The
need for a sewer system was underscored when the Trustees were informed that soil
conditions made a system of municipal septic tanks unfeasible.
141
This meant that either
a treatment plant or a sewer system connecting to a major outfall would be needed, but
cost, factionalism, and political inertia stopped progress. By the next year, the civil
engineers hired by the city to draw plans for the plant demanded the return of their plans;
the city had neither paid for the plans nor called a bond election to finance the
construction and, foreseeing further rounds of accusations and administrative chaos, the

137
"Jury May Sift Bribe Charge," Los Angeles Times, May 27, 1922, sec. II, p. 13, "Trustees of Watts File Suits," Los
Angeles Times, June 24, 1922, sec. II, p. 1.
138
July 5, 1922, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 4. "Civic Magnificence," Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1922, sec. II, p. 4.
139
"Trustees Lose in Sewer Case," Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1923, sec. II, p. 1.
140
"Fight over Sewer Job in Court," Los Angeles Times, February 5, 1924, A3.
141
April 24, 1923, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 4.
84
engineers evidently decided to cut their losses.
142
Watts’ progressive citizens were not
going to get the modern sewer system they desired.
It was in this context that active black support for consolidation developed and
focused. Race Men and Women in Watts began to seek particular ends from their
political participation in city government—better services, an opposition to
discrimination, and support for progress. Watts residents whom Adler interviewed in the
1970s recalled their participation in an organization called the Watts Community League,
which was a biracial progressive political group in the city. This group moved from its
origins in a 1922 protest against racial bias in granting bus transit franchises to lobbying
the District Attorney to prosecute the local Klan. Its members by 1926 were largely
preoccupied with the state of civic gridlock in Watts. Their retrospective complaints
indicate the disaffection of some black (and some white) residents with the political
culture in Watts, and the intimate connection they perceived between the city’s
backwardness and provincialism and their own plans for commercial success. One black
Community League activist reflected that by 1926 “’Watts was not advancing…. The
Main Street business section was virtually static for many years.’”
143
Others noted the
condition of the streets and water supply and connected them to the constant recalls:
“’There were too many recalls. The streets were terrible, there were no sidewalks,
and, in the rainy season, you could hardly get to the car line. We had the water
piped in and sometimes we didn’t get enough water through the mains to fill the
toilet tanks and the toilets wouldn’t flush properly.’”
144

142
Koebig and Koebig Engineers to Watts City Clerk. February 2, 1925, Folder "City Clerk: Payments Claims", Box B-
0141, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
143
Adler, "Watts" 198.
144
Ibid. 199.
85
In general, the consolidation promised, even if only by extracting residents from the
morass of recalls and factions, economic stability, better streets and services, and better
transit across city lines. It was not much of a choice. In the words of one black resident,
“’People just gave up and voted to consolidate with Los Angeles and be done with the
mess.’”
145

If some of Adler’s respondents viewed consolidation as ultimately the best
resolution to a bad situation, advertisements for real estate in the Eagle showed that some
viewed the consolidation as less a surrender and more an opportunity. The Earl Realty
Co. of 10520 Compton Ave. crowed “WE TOLD YOU SO! Watts is now in the city of
Los Angeles” while touting properties with civic improvements.
146
Realtors who
evaluated their markets in different ways, then, certainly had vested interests in the
potential of consolidation to change the civic climate.
Improvements, taxes, and social values, along with race, were all significant axes
of political fragmentation in Watts. The construction of a black group interest around the
intersection of racial identity and place-based interest was crucial to bridging these
divisions and constructing a pro-consolidation polity. In particular, events reveal the
pivotal leadership of individuals like Walter Knox, who had advocated for consolidation,
and who, through the channels of his real estate business, his church, and his alliance
with Charlotta and Joseph Bass, defined what for the late 1920s at least, was the
definitive place-entrepreneurial vision for the progressive black community of Watts

145
Ibid.
146
"Watts Irked by Dirty Streets," Los Angeles Times, November 1, 1926, A5.
86
within the city of Los Angeles. Their task was to convince others of the soundness of
their plans.
Ironically, the Ku Klux Klan may have served as a foil for Knox to assert his bona
fides as a Race Man. As the Eagle battled the Klan in 1925, Joseph and Charlotta Bass
used the pages of their paper to take to task the black Watts residents who allegedly
collaborated with the Klan’s plan to undercut strong black leaders. The response from
the accused was angry, and the intraracial conflict reflected the reality that Knox was a
leader not of a monolithic “black community,” but of a faction thereof. His affinity for
the upwardly-mobile and assertive bloc voiced by the Eagle was evident in 1925, when
Knox organized Bass’ triumphant anti-Klan speech in Watts after the publication of the
infamous letter. In a show of mutual support, the Eagle identified Knox as a man “who
has fought in and out of season for the things which mean a continued progress for all
people in the environs of this section” as opposed to the “Benedict Arnolds in their
midst,” whom the KKK had described as having “no race pride and very little brains.”
147

After the meeting, Knox returned the favor in a letter published by the Eagle in which he
thanked the Basses for their attendance (and staked out his own position as a Klan-
fighter), arguing that “we need such people as you to remind us as a people that we are a
part of this nation and have a glorious past, and our future all before us.”
148

Acting out of race pride was not limited to one’s position on the Klan. From the
progressive, boosterish perspective, those who were willing to forego costly
improvements to property in favor of immediate economy could be described as a drag

147
"Eagle Editor Receives Ovation," 1.
148
"Editorial," California Eagle, May 15, 1925, 6.
87
on the progress of the race. To be sure, there had been protests from property owners
and taxpayers in the south end of the City of Watts against the sort of street
improvements that middle-class Race activists championed. Many of the protesting
property owners were likely to have been black. For example, in April of 1923, the
Trustees received protests against improvements of Pearl, John and Eagle Streets, near
the Long Beach line of the Pacific Electric tracks, from “persons representing more than
51% of frontage.”
149
Cost was the principal objection, with petitioners either demanding
the use of cheaper, more temporary materials, or claiming that “the improvement will
cost more than the lots can be sold for, and will be the means of many of us losing our
homes.”
150
A comparison with the signers of the anti-Thomson petition a year later is
instructive. Of the citizens who signed that petition to remove the City Marshal from
office, ten who listed their address resided on these three streets.
151
Two signers of the
Eagle Street protest on April 11, 1923 later signed the anti-Thomson petition.
152
But, if
significant numbers of residents of this neighborhood opposed improvements, many of
their neighbors were as adamant in favoring them. One letter of protest to the Trustees
demanded that work on John, Pearl, Eagle, and Lark Streets proceed. Although it is not
directly mentioned that the signers or their neighbors were black, the writers accuse the

149
April 24, 1923, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 4.
150
Protest against Improvement of Pearl Street. April 20, 1923, Folder "Streets: Protests 1915-1923", Box B-0144, City
of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
151
Petition for Removal of A.S. Thomson. There were an additional three signers whose handwritten addresses appear
to read “Ely” street. Contemporary street maps do not list such a street in Watts, and the closest similar street name for
the southern half of Watts is Eagle Street. The general legibility of the archived document is poor, and the inference is
speculative, so I do not include these among the ten residents.
152
These were A.J. Pride and Ulysses Boswell. See Protest against Improvement of Pearl Street.
88
Trustees of “doing all in their power to discriminate against said property owners.”
153

Residents of these streets, along with property owners along South Compton and
Willowbrook Avenues, all wrote to the Trustees to demand improvements.
154
One
petition for the improvement of South Compton Ave was signed by the white realtor J.
Marcolesco (a regular advertiser in the California Eagle) as well as the corporate
property owners J. W. Buford and Son and Grant Chapel AME Church among sixty-six
signers.
155
The work of politically unifying a community with such starkly divergent
class interests would be an ongoing process. In this light, one might conclude that the
KKK episode in Watts ultimately aided the black progressive faction there more than
anything they could have done on their own; for those like Walter Knox who could not
necessarily convince their fellow citizens of a shared economic interest in civic
improvement and property investment, fighting the sworn enemy of the race created
credibility across class lines. What could have been better than to be defined as Public
Enemy #1 by the KKK?
After the Klan controversy, Knox continued to work in various capacities in the
advancement of the race. In addition to involvement in the Community League, Knox
served as a go-between for local black parents to the Los Angeles School Board,
successfully lobbying in January, 1926 to have Kipling’s Captains Courageous removed

153
Petition for Improvement of Lark, Pearl, Eagle, and John Streets. July 22, 1924, Folder "Streets: Improvements,
Petitions For, 1923-1926", Box B-0144, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
154
All of these are located in the Los Angeles City Archives, Watts Records, Box B-144, Folder “Streets:
Improvements, petitions for, 1923-1926”. John Street (n/d, 27 signatures), Pearl St. (n/d, 29 signatures), South
Compton Ave. (June 26, 1923, sole petitioner), Willowbrook Ave. (September 18, 1923, 10 signatures identified as
“citizens and property owners of South Watts”), Pearl St. (November 13, 1923, 23 signatures), South Compton Ave.
(n/d, 66 signatures), Lark, Eagle, Pearl, and John Streets (July 22, 1924, 6 signers)
155
Petition for Improvement of South Compton Avenue. n/d, Folder "Streets: Improvements, Petitions For, 1923-
1926", Box B-0144, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
89
from the English curriculum because of its gratuitous use of racial slurs which created
license for white students to taunt and embarrass black students. Knox’s efforts met with
rapid success. Significantly, the Watts schools had been merged with the Los Angeles
school district in 1925, in part because of the leadership of Los Angeles County school
superintendent Mark Keppel in pushing the merger as a way to alleviate the lack of
school space that affected Watts children (as well as children from adjacent
unincorporated areas that were attached to the Watts school district).
156
The
responsiveness of the school board and of Superintendent Keppel to the racialized
concerns of black Watts parents probably affirmed that institutions outside the provincial
borders of Watts were more receptive to black demands than the local government. The
Eagle editorialized on “the fact that after all we have in this country a broad gaged [sic]
and fair minded Superintendent of Schools and School Board,” perhaps yet another
reason for black residents of Watts to throw in for consolidation.
157

Ultimately, the specifically racial aspirations of some black residents of Watts for
a government that would actively and fairly protect and advance their interests demanded
consolidation. Even with the franchise, the independent city of Watts could not deliver on
their interests. Though I have disputed the veracity of claims that Walter Knox served as
a Trustee, the fact that many of Adler’s interviewees remembered him as a leader
frustrated with the political climate is telling. One woman interviewed by Adler lamented
that once a black trustee had taken office, “he said he couldn’t do anything but sit there.

156
Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven 24-25, Ray, City of Watts 23-5.
157
"Silver Lining," California Eagle, January 15, 1926, 6. Nicolaides affirms the progressive bona fides of Keppel and
the Los Angeles County school officials. When white parents in the Home Gardens development near South Gate
complained that their children shared school space with black students from Watts at Jordan High School, officials
responded by suggesting that they move to another district. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven 161-62.
90
The main business of the city was not debated, much of the time. His one vote did not
weigh much.”
158
If black progressives had to wait for the time when they would have
electoral might sufficient to elect a majority of the Trustees, what would they have
sacrificed in terms of opportunity? It is likely that black property owners in Watts felt
like modernization might literally pass them by unless their property could be placed
under the authority of a more powerful and progressive local government; such a fear was
a driving force in the real estate industry’s nationwide support for local regulation of land
use and infrastructure.
159
It is easy to understand, in this light, why many black voters in
Watts feared that their aspirations would sink in the city’s muddy streets or the equally
swampy terrain of Watts city politics. Despite the persistence of the white conspiracy
mythology, it appears that black residents of Watts were prominent among those who
chose to consolidate with Los Angeles to escape the political tumult of a faction-wracked
city paralyzed by recalls and official turnover, and to secure reliable water, electrical, and
sewer service.
160
That is not to say that race was absent from the process. To the
contrary, these concerns meant more to black residents constrained by segregation and
residency restriction. Many black residents of Watts likely felt an acute need to secure
improvements to their property, the one economic resource available when industrial
employment was generally closed to them. More than 55 percent of the signatures on the

158
Adler, "Watts", 199.
159
Weiss, 10.
160
Bigger and Kitchen, "How the Cities Grew," 103.
91
petitions for consolidation came from south of Main St., the heart of the growing black
community in Watts.
161

By almost any standard, the turnout for the consolidation referendum was
outstanding. The consolidation was the work of a majority of the city’s citizenry, with
1,933 of 2,513 registered voters casting ballots. In that moment, the progressive forces
lined up for consolidation carried the day by better than two-to-one, with 1,226 votes for
consolidation and 606 against.
162
While pluralities for consolidation were returned in all
but one precinct, the southern end of the city delivered particularly strong support , as
shown in Figure 1.3 and Table 1.3.

161
Adler, "Watts" 200.
162
Results as certified by the Watts City Clerk on April 5, 1926, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 5. The Times had earlier
estimated the vote at 1,338-595. "Watts Votes to Enter City," A1.
92
Figure 1.3: Consolidation Election, April 2, 1926
163

163
Polling place locations as proxies for precinct boundaries from Affidavit of Publication, Resolution 1453. 1926,
Folder "Ordinances 1926", Box B-0143, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives.
93
Table 1.3: Consolidation Election, April 2, 1926
164

Precinct North of Main Street Precinct South of Main Street
Question Pct. A B C D E F G H
Consolidate with
Los Angeles (Y-N):
1226-606
(66.9%-33.1%)
216/109
(66.5%-
33.5%)
166/95
(63.6%-
36.4%)
167/176
(48.7%-
51.3%)
192/124
(60.8%-
39.2%)
92/39
(70.2%-
29.8%)
160/25
(86.5%-
13.5%)
142/12
(92.2%-
7.8%)
91/26
(77.8%-
22.2%)

The final hurdle to consolidation was the election of a slate of Trustees to sign off on the
consolidation. Those trustees, William Booth, Robert Rhoads, and James West, were all
elected by large pluralities, along with Lambourne Edwards, likewise a consolidation
proponent.
165
This slate was built from the faction that opposed Thomson, with many of
the same principals signing nomination papers and the Eagle endorsing them (see Figure
1.4).
166

164
Results as certified on April 5, 1926, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 5.
165
"Watts Votes to Enter City."
166
I infer this alignment from the fact that Walter Knox nominated James West, as did Lambourne Edwards. West and
Irvin Odell nominated Edwards, with Odell also nominating William Booth and Robert Rhoads. Nomination Papers for
James H. West for Office of Trustee. 1926, Folder "Election Documents 1926", Box B-0142, City of Watts Records,
Los Angeles City Archives, Nomination Papers for Lambourne Edwards for Office of Trustee. 1926, Folder "Election
Documents 1926", Box B-0142, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives, Nomination Papers for Robert
Rhoads for Office of Trustee. 1926, Folder "Election Documents 1926", Box B-0142, City of Watts Records, Los
Angeles City Archives, Nomination Papers for William Booth for Office of Trustee. 1926, Folder "Election Documents
1926", Box B-0142, City of Watts Records, Los Angeles City Archives. See also "Watts Voters' Alert," 1.
94
Figure 1.4: Political Factions and Leadership in Watts, 1922-1926

95
Joining the KKK and the Taxpayers League in opposition to consolidation, the
Watts Chamber of Commerce in February sent a letter to the Los Angeles City Council in
hopes of convincing Los Angeles not to approve its end of the consolidation. The letter
claimed that “the citizens of Watts would prefer to work out their own destiny,” a
proposition with which a majority of the board disagreed.
167
The evident harmony
between the Chamber of Commerce and the Klan on the issue of consolidation is an
interesting puzzle, because the Chamber had previously been on record supporting larger-
scale municipal improvements to support commerce, which the Klan opposed. There is
some evidence suggesting that many Watts Chamber members were also affiliated with
the Watts Klan.
168
Group loyalties aside, many members of the Chamber of Commerce
had a direct economic stake in maintaining Watts’ independence as holders of municipal
bonds.
169
It was not until after the consolidation that the Los Angeles City Attorney ruled

167
February 22, 1926, Trustee Minutes, Vol. 5. Adler, "Watts" 200. "Watts Votes to Enter City," A1.
168
This charge was made in 1928, generally against the Watts Chamber of Commerce and specifically to the owner of
the Largo Theater in Watts, who “frankly states he does not care for the patronage of colored. It is further said that this
same man is one of the remnants of the ill-fated Ku Klux Klan.” "South Los Angeles Citizens in Mass Meeting
Assembled," California Eagle, February 17, 1928, 1. Though not named by the Eagle, the owner was one Paul Ferron.
Ferron’s biography is colorful. He evidently came to both Los Angeles and the theatrical business after being
discharged from his commission as an Army aviation instructor in Texas for involvement with another officer’s wife.
Ferron’s colorful career continued after he sold the Largo. In 1928, he and his wife were sued by the purchaser of the
theater for misrepresenting it as a commercial success. His past indiscretions behind him, Ferron worked to found an
American Legion post strictly for aviators in 1929. The Legion link and his stay in Texas suggest circumstantially that
Ferron may have been amenable to Klan membership. See "Flyer Denies Blame for Poor Theater Receipts," Los
Angeles Times, 1928, A17, "Flying Instructor Is Dismissed from Army," The Los Angeles Times, 1918, sec. I, p. 2,
"War Aviators Get Invitation to Form Post," Los Angeles Times, 1929, 14.
169
Trustee Records indicate that C.R. Church, who, according to Chamber letterhead on file in the Los Angeles City
Archives served as President in 1923, made 29 separate demands for a total of $11,253.10 in interest and principal
payments from the Trustees between July 1920 and July 1925, representing more than half the value of all bond and
interest demands over that period. See minutes for the following: July 6, 1920; August 10, 1920; January 10, 1921;
January 25, 1921; February 1, 1921; February 23, 1921; all in Trustee Minutes, Vol. 3. August 9, 1921; January 24,
1922; July 25, 1922; July 10, 1923; July 17, 1923; July 17, 1923; July 24, 1923; January 8, 1924; January 9, 1924;
February 1, 1924; July 8, 1924; July 22, 1924; August 12, 1924; August 28, 1924; all in Trustee Minutes, Vol. 4.
January 5, 1924; January 13, 1925; January 26, 1925; July 20, 1925; all in Trustee Minutes, Vol. 5.
96
that Watts’ bonded debts would be honored by Los Angeles.
170
This desultory
opposition was not sufficient to block consolidation. Race Men and Women in Watts had
committed themselves to a program of place-based politics that included consolidation
with Los Angeles, and now would concentrate on developing more fully a political
program based on the new reality.

The Black Progressive Vision for “South Los Angeles”
This political activity reveals that the issue of political control for black activists
in Watts was not abstract or merely theoretical. For place-entrepreneurial activists,
asserting control over place as a political, social, and economic resource encompassed a
wide range of political terrain, including ensuring that property would appreciate,
demanding that children not be insulted in schools, and that the liberty and security of the
citizenry would not be infringed by police harassment.
171
Under Watts’ backward
political culture, black place entrepreneurs had achieved a mixed record of success; they
changed school policies, and did remove oppressive police officials and Trustees from
office, but were hamstrung in their efforts to secure improvements that would make
Watts a place where their individual and collective goals could be realized. Rather than
pointing to achievements in the arena of political support for improvements, I have
attempted to demonstrate political and cultural affinities in the pre-consolidation period,
pointing out the recurrent presence of some names as evidence of a cadre of activists.

170
"Council Finds Debt Annexed with District," Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1926, A11.
171
As I shall discuss elsewhere in this work, relationships between black citizens and the Los Angeles Police
Department were fraught with tensions, though there were contemporary signs that black residents could expect some
greater measure of justice in dealings with the LAPD.
97
Significantly, there is ample evidence from the post-consolidation period that testifies
to those affinities. It is possible to infer pre-consolidation political goals from the post-
consolidation representations of Watts as a place made by Knox and his allies. The force
and intensity of their demands, plans, and vision would suggest that they did not spring
forth spontaneously, but rather represented the full flowering of plans suppressed by the
provincial politics of Watts. Leaving the city of Watts made more ambitious actions
seem possible.
After the consolidation, Knox’s first significant political actions involved the
formation of the Citizens Council and Industrial League (CCIL), which originated in a
transit controversy. As the Eagle explained the case, companies licensed by the former
Watts government were withholding jobs from black conductors. Many believed that the
companies had been pressured to exclude blacks by members of the Watts Chamber of
Commerce, who were generally suspected by the black community at large as holdovers
from the Watts KKK. The injustice was glaring, as black riders “compose 98 per cent of
the patronage of the bus lines running in this section.”

The group’s first meeting at the
Grant Chapel AME Church established that congregation’s pastor C.F. Jones as
President and Walter Knox as Vice President.
172
A subsequent meeting (at Knox’s
Macedonia Baptist Church) was principally dedicated to the issue of transportation, and
the Eagle assured its readers that the organization was “well on its way for a solution of
the transportation proposition in which all people will receive a fair and square deal.”
173

However, queries to the Public Utilities Board provided no relief, as law prevented the

172
"South Los Angeles Citizens in Mass Meeting Assembled," 1.
173
"South L.A. Citizens Going Forward in Work of Organization," California Eagle, March 2, 1928, 1.
98
issuing of competing franchises as a remedy to discrimination, unless the new
franchise charged a higher fare. The campaign thus reached an anticlimactic end, limited
to urging travelers to bypass bus service to reach the Pacific Electric Red Car Station by
foot.
174
But, despite the failure to compel the bus company to stop discriminating, the
CCIL became a permanent organization. In April, the organization touted its growth to
over two hundred fifty members through the Eagle. By May, the CCIL had opened
offices at 10719 So. Compton Ave, and began to run an Employment Bureau and
community service program which, they boasted through the Eagle, had quickly placed
five people in jobs.
175

The CCIL became a means of solidifying the alliance between Knox and
Charlotta Bass, who not only gave extensive space to the organization’s meetings in her
paper, but accepted an appointment to a standing committee on Constitution and
Bylaws.
176
By allying himself and the CCIL with Bass and the Eagle, Knox was able to
take up the project of organizing and disciplining black public opinion. By late April
1928, news of the CCIL had superseded the typical birth, illness, and death
announcements that characterized the old “Watts News” feature, which the group took
over on May 11 as an official organ of the CCIL and renamed “South Los Angeles
News.” The CCIL hired a staffer to coordinate content and advertising (the group was
given space in the paper in return for selling advertisements and promoting the paper’s
circulation) and declared that “with this medium for advertisement and publicity we feel

174
Ibid.
175
"South Los Angeles News [May 11, 1928]," California Eagle, May 11, 1928, 8, "Watts News," California Eagle,
April 27, 1928, 5.
176
"South L.A. Citizens," 1.
99
that South Los Angeles as far as our group is concerned will enter upon a new era of
progress and development.”
177
This was provided, of course, that others did their part:
“All progressive citizens should read the California Eagle and keep informed on all the
important things going on in our community.”
178

The CCIL’s formula for prosperity was similar in many ways to the booster
claims of the white-dominated metropolis in the 1920s. Industrial development for the
region, it was argued, was imminent and should be welcomed, as it would inevitably
increase the value of property:
As it is evident the city will continue to grow toward the ocean and some day will
reach the harbor in its expansion, it can readily be seen that this district will some
day be the great business and industrial center of the city. People of our group
who have sufficient foresight and vision and are purchasing property in this
district are making a wise investment.
179

In this scheme, industry was the linchpin of development, and the improvements required
to sustain industry were potentially alienating to homeowners. The CCIL program
insisted, however, that there was no real conflict, as “city improvements are expensive,
but they add materially to the value of the property assessed.”
180
Once they swallowed
the costs of civic improvements to roads, sewers, and water and power lines, homeowners
would be investing their taxes in a future of higher property values. It should be noted

177
"South Los Angeles News [May 11, 1928]," 8.
178
"South Los Angeles News [July 20, 1928]," California Eagle, July 20, 1928, 2.
179
"South Los Angeles News [June 8, 1928]," California Eagle, June 8, 1928.
180
Ibid. Public works in the city of Los Angeles, outside of major projects, were still generally financed by taxing
special assessment districts to pay for improvements. Residents of the Watts area would not have all of their
improvements paid for by Los Angeles taxpayers at large, but would enjoy the benefits of economy of scale provided
by Los Angeles’ Board of Public Works, established in the 1925 charter, and could be assured that the city would
undertake the projects. See Patricia Adler-Ingram, "Public Works," in The Development of Los Angeles City
Government: An Institutional History, 1850-2000, ed. Hynda Rudd, et al. (Los Angeles, Calif.: City of Los Angeles
Historical Society, 2007), 307-09.
100
that, while equating an appeal to property owners as an appeal to the race as a whole
suggests economic elitism, the historical context of pre-World War II Los Angeles
justified it to a degree. Black Angelenos were more likely to own their homes than their
counterparts elsewhere, and the CCIL reminded its audience of this fact, noting that
“approximately eighty-five percent of our people in this community own their own
homes.”
181
The development would be so rapid that if black residents of South Los
Angeles adjusted their thinking to pursue property, thrift, and racial solidarity, they too
would reap rewards of prosperity, elevating the general character of their community in
the public eye and thus leveling the remaining vestiges of prejudice and discrimination.
Both homes and businesses were thus material and discursive weapons against
discrimination. In the first case, the community represented an embodiment of the civic
worthiness of its black inhabitants, as “our people take a great deal of pride in the upkeep
of their homes and the upkeep of their property. This is an evidence of the character of
people and the high type of citizens who live there.”
182
In the second, businesses
commanded respect in a way that lofty ideals did not:
The so-called Race Problem is as old as the races of mankind and is likely to
continue so long as one race owns so much of the things of this world and another
owns so little. Loud platitudes about our right as citizens without some tangible
evidence of our citizenship in the form of businesses and industries will get us
very little in this day when dollars speak such a universal language.
183

181
"South Los Angeles News [July 27, 1928]," California Eagle, July 27, 1928, 2.
182
"South Los Angeles News [August 31, 1928]," California Eagle, August 31, 1928, 10.
183
"South Los Angeles News [June 22, 1928]," California Eagle, June 22, 1928, 2.
101
Truly this was what Norman Klein has called a “sunshine strategy,” but with an
added layer of complexity. In addition to manipulating images of place to sell land,
Knox and the CCIL were manipulating images of place to sell their race to the
metropolitan public.
One of the most striking things about this vision of progress for the area is the
degree to which it denied the memory of the provincial backwardness of the city of Watts
in the language of its advocacy. In fact, the CCIL rejected entirely the place-name Watts
in favor of “South Los Angeles,” a name which clearly linked the southern satellite of
black settlement to the fast-growing black community to the north along Central
Avenue.
184
This nomenclature appeared, probably not by coincidence, in the Eagle’s
coverage of the CCIL’s first meetings. The paper editorialized that “it is inspirational
indeed to attend the meetings of the lately organized Citizens Council and Industrial
League of South Los Angeles, formerly Watts.” Dissociation from Watts was put forward
implicitly as a condition of opportunity for the upwardly mobile.
185
One lengthy passage
is particularly comprehensive in its evocation of the way in which dissociation from
Watts was a prerequisite to progress:
There was a time, and that time was only a few years ago, when So. Los Angeles,
formerly Watts, was a small town of only a few scattered residences, unpaved
streets, and practically no sidewalks. At that time this community was looked
upon as one of the most undesirable of any town adjacent to the city of Los

184
Readers familiar with present-day Southern California may notice the similarity between this maneuver and a shift
that occurred in the first years of the twenty-first century in local media nomenclature. Local African-American leaders
urged local news media to refer to “South Los Angeles” instead of the commonly-used “South Central.” This request
was a response not only to the geographical imprecision of “South Central,” which commonly referred not to the
district around Central Avenue, but to any place of black residential concentration south of the Santa Monica Freeway,
but also to the tendency of the term to isolate black communities from consideration as integrated parts of the
metropolitan area which shared in some degree in its destiny.
185
"South L.A. Citizens," 1, "South Los Angeles Citizens in Mass Meeting Assembled," 1.
102
Angeles. Few people thought of making Watts their future home, but today
one has only to drive through the streets of So. Los Angeles and see the many
beautiful homes, well-kept lawns, paved streets, and sidewalks to fully appreciate
the progress made in this community in the past few years. Our people of South
Los Angeles take a great deal of pride in the upkeep fo their homes and the
upkeep of their property. This is an evidence of the character of people and the
high type of citizens who live there.
186

In other words, disafilliation with Watts had not only facilitated improvements to black-
owned property, it made black residents of South Los Angeles more fit to be treated as
full citizens of Los Angeles.
The primary assumption underlying the CCIL’s message about the potential of
South Los Angeles was the belief that the area would inevitably become the center of the
growing manufacturing economy of the city. The belief was not wholly unfounded, as
readers of the South L.A. News were reminded that their community was “midway
between the main business district of Los Angeles and the harbor” and as such would
inevitably be integrated to the economy.
187
Further, on top of the existing transit
infrastructure of streetcars that routed nearly all passenger traffic from the harbor and
south bay cities through Watts Junction, the Santa Fe Railway purchased a right-of-way
through the area to connect with the main harbor “belt line,” a move described as
“another step in bringing about the long-expected development of So. Los Angeles as the
greate Industrial center of this city.”
188
Though the CCIL did not claim that blacks would
become large-scale industrial capitalists on the scale of the nearby Firestone plant, they
did anticipate that such large scale industrial development would generate demand for

186
"South Los Angeles News [August 31, 1928]," 10.
187
"South Los Angeles News [June 8, 1928]."
188
"South Los Angeles News [June 22, 1928]," 2.
103
residence and services that would benefit a generation of small proprietors. Ideally,
Race Men and Women would lead the way forward: “People of our group who have
sufficient foresight and vision” to purchase property could expect success, exemplified by
the sale of a gas station at 108
th
St. and Compton Ave. by J.W. Buford to his son Robert
on his retirement. Buford had purchased his lot and built his station when the streets
were still unpaved.
189
In a piece boosterishly titled “South Los Angeles Has Great
Future,” the scope and diversity of the expected spillover was further elaborated, citing
the existence of “a large manufacturing plant, Real Estate Offices, Grocery Stores, Drug
Stores, Gas Stations, Garages, Life Insurance Offices, Cleaning and Pressing Shops,
Barber Shops, Builders and Contractors, two Physicians, and several churches.”
190
The
paving of Central Avenue through to Redondo Boulevard further meant that four
connecting roads to the harbor (Alameda, Central, Compton, and Wilmington) would
carry “a constant stream of automobiles and other traffic from Los Angeles to the Beach
cities.” Race Men had, according to the CCIL, already begun to capitalize: “Two of these
important strets at present are rather thickly lined with people of our group engaged in
business, who are really the pioneer business people in this district.”
191
In the late 1920s,
this prediction was in fact supported by mainstream opinion in Los Angeles. The Times
in 1924 had touted several peripheral areas, pre-consolidation Watts included, as ideally
situated to take advantage of transit-driven growth:

189
"South Los Angeles News [June 1, 1928]," California Eagle, June 1, 1928, 8, "South Los Angeles News [June 8,
1928].", "South Los Angeles News [June 22, 1928]," 2.
190
"South Los Angeles News [July 27, 1928]," 2.
191
"South Los Angeles News [June 8, 1928]."
104
Seldom does one find such adequate transportation facilities in a small city as
are at Watts, the “Midland City”, seven miles south of Los Angeles. In the
natural direct path of the industrial expansion of Los Angeles, it has a definite
future as a manufacturing center. Watts is an ideal homesite for the working man,
and more than 80 percent of the residents own their own homes. The railroad
facilities and the three adjacent boulevards bring the pleasures of city, mountain,
and beach within less than an hour’s ride, either by train or automobile.
192

For homeowners, the improvements required to develop South Los Angeles’
residential property were perpetually just around the corner, and the CCIL used its
columns to counsel patience. By 1928, streets had been widened and lighted, but
connections of the antiquated Watts sewers (source of so much grief in the days of
independent Watts) to a new city main along Compton Ave. remained to be completed,
though the CCIL was confident that this was but the last infrastructural obstacle to “the
phenomenal progress of our community.”
193
That notwithstanding, construction
continued, so that
“the possibilities of this community developing into one of the most wholesome
and progressive communities in all Los Angeles is evident to the most casual
observer. Those looking for a good place with wholesome environments under
which to rear children should look towards So. Los Angeles.”
194

The realities of segregation were too evident for the CCIL to ignore, which posed a
contradiction to the CCIL’s rhetoric. Los Angeles whites were growing more and more
determined to live apart from blacks, and their prejudices threatened the value of black-
owned property. Unable to stem this tide, the CCIL made a virtue of the area’s history as
a black settlement, arguing that rather than inhabiting structures abandoned by whites,

192
"At the City's Gates," Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1924, F3.
193
"South Los Angeles News [June 8, 1928]."
194
"South Los Angeles News [May 11, 1928]," 8.
105
South Los Angeles Negroes inhabited structures built by Negroes, maintained with
care, and occupied by the owners at a rate of 85 percent.
195

Many of these buildings had been built by Knox himself (and his wife and
partner, Mary). The “South Los Angeles News” in 1928 described him as “one of the
busiest Real Estate men in all the city of Los Angeles. There is scarcely a minute in the
day that his office is without someone there for some business transaction.”
196
This
activity was exemplified by the completion in 1930 of a large land deal brokered with the
Diller family, remnants of the old-line Anglo settlers of the area.
197
A year later, the
California Eagle noted in its Los Angeles Negro Directory and Who’s Who that “Mr.
Knox is known as the builder of the South Los Angeles district, having brought more
than $1,000,000 capital into this section.”
198
In an advertisement in the volume, Pacific
Coast Building-Loan Association, Knox’s principal affiliated mortgage lender, claimed
slightly more modest, but significant, investment in the area:
Pacific Coast Building-Loan Association, through its Watts representatives Knox
and Knox, has made two hundred and fifty loans to the colored people of this
district, representing a total of three quarters of a million dollars. Pacific Coast
greatly appreciates this business and makes every effort to cooperate with the
colored people.
199

The CCIL committed itself to advancing the representation of these homes as
evidence of a high character on the part of black citizens.
200
This augured well for the

195
"South Los Angeles News [July 27, 1928]," 2.
196
"South Los Angeles News [May 11, 1928]," 8.
197
"Knox-Knox Realty Brokers Put over Big Deal," California Eagle, November 4, 1930, 1.
198
Los Angeles Negro Directory and Who's Who, 1930-1931 80.
199
Ibid. 8.
200
"South Los Angeles News [August 31, 1928]," 10.
106
prospects of political equality, economic opportunity, and cultural acceptance, and if
it also delivered profits to local black realtors and developers, such profits were also to
the credit of the race.
However, the CCIL warned its readers that this progress would not follow
automatically, and while the Eagle vigilantly informed on white racists, there was danger
from within the black community. Those who did not get on board threatened to drag
the whole enterprise down. These warnings reflected a continuing class-divide, for while
black progressives had succeeded in forcing consolidation and had a privileged access to
the most influential black newspaper of the day, they could not will out of existence the
working-class and rural origins of the community. Patronage at black-owned businesses
was near-mandatory, though shopkeepers were warned that their black customers
couldn’t be blamed for trading at white-owned shops if they found better service or fairer
prices there. The practice of keeping “Colored People’s Time”—the lateness and
indifference to schedules which the black middle class associated with the lower
classes-- was chided as a danger to the reputation and good standing of businesspeople
and the race as a whole.
201
The CCIL went so far as to warn that South Los Angeles was
becoming “overchurched,” wasting time and resources.
202
This warning should be taken
with a grain of salt, given the predominance of Baptist and AME church members in the
organization’s leadership, but it also pointed toward a class divide; the suggestion given
by the CCIL to consolidate twelve local black churches into four congregations may have
reflected a bias in favor of the mainline churches.

201
"South Los Angeles News [July 27, 1928]," 2.
202
"South Los Angeles News [May 25, 1928]," California Eagle, May 25, 1928, 8.
107
One other odd publication in the Eagle suggests that the class division in
South Los Angeles was problematic for Knox, and that the program of development
suggested by the CCIL and the Eagle was meeting with skepticism. On August 17, 1928,
the Eagle reprinted on its editorial page, absent context, a letter to the editor penned by
Knox in May, 1925, at the height of the Klan controversy. The letter read in part,
“remember Watts is with you to the end, as we all feel very much your inconvenience for
us all in publishing the plans of the Ku Klux Klan, but your life has been the life of a
soldier for your people.”
203
Although the paper’s reasons for reprinting this letter may
remain a matter of speculation, one might construe the publication as an effort to remind
Knox’s South Los Angeles constituents of his alliance with one of the most prominent
and recognized Race Women in Los Angeles, and remind readers of the roster of activists
who had rallied the community against the Klan. As I will discuss below, the work of not
only promoting but altering the space of South Los Angeles faced significant obstacles
from outside the community, which made reinforcing the political capital of the Race
People of Watts all the more urgent.

Building Prosperity or Manufacturing Prejudice?: The Frustrations of Race Men
and Women in Watts

The vision of place put forth by Knox and his allies did not come to fruition for
the black population of South Los Angeles, as anyone even casually acquainted with the

203
"Editorial," California Eagle, August 17, 1928, 6.
108
history of Los Angeles will recognize. Yet, the reasons for this failure must be
assessed. Though they faced many obstacles, black place entrepreneurs in Watts also
encountered a moment of possibility and potential. The reasons for the long-term failure
of their plans fall into two major categories. First, black progressives were far from the
only ones to offer up place-images of “South Los Angeles” or Watts. The image of
Watts as a place of racialized danger preceded and survived the consolidation. Second,
the effort to implement this agenda occurred simultaneously with changes in the
dynamics of planning, development, and financing of land sale and use, all of which
harmed Watts’ ability, relative to the metropolitan area, to attract capital, and the ability
of local property owners to protect their investments. The material and cultural
production of place and place-image were mutually reinforcing.
At the same time as Knox and his allies attempted to define and present South Los
Angeles as a progressive, modern, and potentially prosperous space, actors throughout
the metropolitan area advanced competing and often contrary representations of space
which carried forward many of the images of the city of Watts. These images spoke to
the way that whites in Los Angeles, increasingly concerned with the racial purity of the
various areas of the city, imagined Watts. After all, while Watts did include potential
water and electric ratepayers, assessable property, and other assets to a city committed to
expansion as nearly an end in itself, its addition to the city was far from necessary in
terms of the major strategic annexation of the early twentieth century, the addition of the
“Shoestring Annex” which connected the southern reaches of Los Angeles to the edge of
109
San Pedro, allowing the harbor to be joined to Los Angeles.
204
Los Angeles was also
forced to assume Watts’ debts.
205
Finally, given that Watts was a suburb with a sizeable
black population in a time of increasing racial antagonism and anxiety, one must question
why the Los Angeles City council was at all interested. Mark Wild has convincingly
argued that the white civic elite of early 20
th
century Los Angeles was committed to a
program of regularizing and affirming racial boundaries; the presence of minorities in
neighborhoods where they mixed with whites constituted a social threat.
206
As we shall
see, the popular depiction of Watts in the white-majority metropolitan imagination was as
precisely such a place.
Perhaps the most prominent conduit for representations of space during the 1920s
was the metropolitan press, led by the Los Angeles Times. Where Watts was concerned,
the Times presented its readers with a steady stream of scandal, lurid crime, and tales of
racialized danger in which person and place were often presented as synonymous. In
January 1926, the Times reported a violent psychotic episode by one Lawrence Kingsley,
who had been interned at the Los Angeles County Hospital. Kingsley was reported to
have threatened passers-by with a large knife and pelted others with stones before being
shot by police. Though the episode took place in Fullerton, the Times’ headline
announced “Watts Negro Runs Amuck, Brandishing Butcher Knife.” Kingsley’s tragic
personal history, which included losing his family to a white race riot in New Orleans

204
"Green Meadows Now Annexed to City," Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1926, 9, "Watts Funds Enrich City," Los
Angeles Times, June 5, 1926, A1, "Wilmington May Come In," Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1906, sec. II, p. 1.
205
"Council Finds Debt Annexed with District," A11.
206
Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005).
110
(the memory of which he claimed set off the episode) was relegated to the small
print.
207
If violence by blacks against whites was reported with breathless prose, violence
within the black community was treated as commonplace, and scarcely deserving of
mention. The Times contributed to the perception that in Watts, blacks shot each other
over card games as a matter of routine.
208
The paper also featured exposes of a favorite
target, the black minister, particularly when criminal activities could serve to discredit a
pillar of the black community. When a black man was arraigned in Pasadena for
“issuing a check without sufficient funds,” readers were told, perhaps by way of
explanation, of the accused’s claim to be a minister in Watts.
209

Significantly, many of the Times’ stories merged the sensational with a civic-
minded approach to crime reporting. The 1921, the Times took a disturbingly
lighthearted stance toward an episode in which a black man accused of sexual assault on
a white woman was believed through miscommunication to be in danger of lynching.
The mayor and concerned citizens had called the Sheriff to beg for assistance to stop the
lynching of the suspect from the Watts jail, not realizing that he had already been taken to
the County Jail. Though it found humor in the seeming incompetence of the Watts
authorities, and in the fact that bumpkins got worked up for nothing, the paper did
include obligatory descriptions by the alleged victim of being followed from the streetcar
and attacked on her way home from work.
210
The incompetence of the Watts authorities

207
"Maniac on Rampage Shot," Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1926, A8.
208
"Negro Asserted Shot and Killed in Card Game," Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1926, A5.
209
"Negro Pastor Held," Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1924, 14.
210
"Watts Plays a Joke on Self," Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1921, sec. IV, p. 12.
111
could be played for a laugh, but the danger to white womanhood in racially-mixed
Watts nonetheless portrayed was deadly serious.
While the Times gladly ran tales of black crime and race-mixing, it pursued the
matter of local governments’ corruption and ineptitude in controlling black behavior
more systematically, though it frequently returned to exposing the amateurish antics of
Watts officialdom. In this sense, the Times’ political sympathies were not far removed
from those of black progressives, its racism notwithstanding. In 1917 one Martha
Windbigler had challenged the city Marshal and Trustees to crack down on a “negro
clubhouse” staying open past 2:00 AM, suggesting that the Trustees send a “chaperone”
with the Marshal so that he did not ignore the complaints against the clubhouse as he had
allegedly done in the past. Humorously, the woman was convicted of assaulting the
Marshal; she had slapped him when he suggested that she serve as his chaperone!
211

Accounts of a 1923 raid on a “notorious Negro gambling house between Watts
and Compton” reveal the linkages posited by the Times between good government and
racial control. In addition to raising the specter of protection being offered by Sheriff’s
deputies to connected gamblers, the Times describe the owner of the house as a “black
politician” in the gambling ring, advancing a stereotypical view of black politics as
corrupt and criminal. Most damning, however, was the local authorities’ toleration of
race-mixing at the house, as “fashionably dressed women drove to the place in their high-
priced cars and until early morning rubbed shoulders with negroes.”
212

211
"Lively: Watts Feud in Another Phase," Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1917, sec. II, p. 5.
212
Minutes of Watts Board of Trustees.
112
These episodes illustrate the view, constructed through the Times’ crime
reporting, of independent cities as dens of corruption and disorder; the lax administration
at Watts, rendered suspect by its toleration of race-mixing and the public assembly of
blacks, constituted a danger to the safety, morality, and purity of the body politic.
213
With
the city of Los Angeles’ greater police resources as counterpoint, white readers in Los
Angeles could have understood the prospect of annexing Watts as an opportunity, if a
risky one, in terms of public safety; take on a racially suspect and much-feared area in
order to place it under control of the law.
This approach continued after the consolidation, but now with the effect of
placing Watts as a place of danger outside the pale of civic normalcy. Watts was a place
where escaped convicts fired shots at police in effort to escape recapture,
214
where a
“hammer bandit” followed his victim from a Watts gambling hall to lethally rob them of
their winnings,
215
and where “Negro preachers” murdered their wives with heavy
wrenches.
216
In 1936, police “were combing the Watts area” to find “a huge Negro who
Wednesday night attacked one white women and attempted to attack two other white
women and a Negress.” Police expressed certainty that the suspect was hiding in
Watts.
217
And, in 1937, in a story which foretold later fear-based images of racialized
space in the city, the Times reported that a white motorist shopping at a Watts market was

213
The Times frequently used crime reporting to manipulate politics, ratcheting up the luridness and volume of crime
reporting to embarrass and weaken city officials crossed publisher Harry Chandler. See Robert Gottlieb and Irene
Wolt, Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers, and Their Influence on Southern California
(New York: Putnam, 1977) 227-8.
214
"Escaped Convict Seen," Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1931, A2.
215
"Hammer Murder Victim Found," Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1932, 9.
216
"Negro Preacher Held for Trial in Wife Death," Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1933, A3.
217
"Negro Hunted as Attacker," Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1936, A2.
113
“kidnapped and beaten by three Negroes who took $400, his car, and most of his
clothing.”
218
In summary, the Los Angeles Times was no friend of the progressive black
bloc seeking to model Watts as the exemplar of prosperity and attractiveness, let alone
freedom.
The Eagle and the progressive black bloc which it represented were well aware of
the need to contest representations of Watts and the larger black community as places of
danger; who would buy property, shop, or recruit labor in such a place, and who would
take seriously the political demands of people who lived there? Occasionally, this
contestation involved the massaging of stories reported by the white dailies, shifts of
emphasis, and reframing of racial themes. The Times reported on a racial brawl at Jordan
High School, in which a fight between two students “developed into a pocket edition race
riot” after which three black youths were jailed and a janitor who was stabbed required
surgery. The Times delicately acknowledged that after the intervention of the janitor, one
Mr. Flanders, “reference was made to races” that provoked the youths to attack the
janitor.
219
The Eagle’s report edged toward media criticism, castigating in particular the
Hearst-owned Express for inflating one fight with overblown racial significance and
potentially causing a personal dispute exacerbated by racial tension to spawn more
widespread racial conflict: “Big scare headlines RACE RIOT are only calculated to
manufacture prejudice and oftimes needlessly bring about serious results.”
220
If the paper
discretely chose in this case to avoid gloating over the physical retaliation by black youth

218
"Man Kidnapped and Robbed," Los Angeles Times, October 17, 1937, 3.
219
"Janitor Knifed in School Riot," Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1926, A8.
220
"Manufacturing Prejudice," California Eagle, June 11, 1926, 6.
114
against a prejudiced adult, it was not always above such conduct. The year before, a
white man had been gravely wounded in a knife fight with a black man on the Watts
streetcar. In the Times account, the white man asked his assailant, identified once by
name and five times as “the negro,” to give up his seat to a white woman, and for this act
of chivalry was followed from the car and stabbed near death.
221
The Eagle’s account
weeks later of the accused assailant’s trial took issue with the city’s white papers,
charging that “in every way did the dailies print the account to the disadvantage of
Miller.” Yet, evidence of the white man’s beliigerence came out in court, resulting in the
dismissal of charges and a fine of $25 against the white man. To top off the incident, the
Eagle reported that “Judge Richardson in disgust at the flagrant conduct of the Cracker
said to him in passing sentence, ‘Man, what part of Texas did you come from?’”
222
The
Eagle was perhaps overly optimistic in declaring this case as evidence of the “absolute
fairness of the judiciary in California and of Los Angeles in particular,” but the
disposition of the case illustrated an important point, that in Los Angeles, there remained
the possibility of equal justice, of black assertiveness that would be rewarded rather than
punished, and of the achievement of freedom. However, the differential reporting of the
incident in the black and white presses underscored the uphill nature of the struggle for
managing the image of Watts and other black communities. The management of
racialized perceptions of place was critical. Either black areas could be viewed as places
where whites faced arbitrary danger, or they could be viewed as places where people

221
"Man Cut by Negro Still in Danger," Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1925, A5.
222
"Judge Asks 'What Part of Texas Did You Come From?' Judge Fines Texas Cracker, Turns Miller Loose,"
California Eagle, May 22, 1925.
115
could peaceably coexist so long as whites recognized that racist actions would not be
tolerated.
However, the management of images of place did not only affect individual
prejudices. In the next two chapters, I will discuss how local place-images informed the
actions of local, state, and federal governmental agencies and influential private actors to
profoundly transform the ideal image and the physical form of the city between the Great
Depression and the 1950s, to the ultimate detriment of Watts. In the immediate
timeframe, the integration of Watts to desired city services did not materialize. The first
indication of problems came when the City of Los Angeles, on learning that it was
assuming a considerable debt from the City of Watts, failed to locate funds for street
sweeping. One resident prophetically exclaimed “So, this is Los Angeles.”
223
Problems
increased in magnitude from there, exacerbated by the consequences of the Great
Depression. Watts’ original sewers were to have been connected to an L.A. city main
along Compton Avenue, but the lines sloped eastward and could not be connected
without extensive labor; the city failed to fund the project in prosperous times, and it was
only completed in the 1930s when Federal public works funds were made available.
224

Interestingly, when the CCIL discussed the slowness of sewer improvements, they had no
readily available political remedy. In June, 1928, the “South Los Angeles News” noted
that “recently a main sewer was put in on So. Compton Ave., which in time will serve a
large area for residential purposes, but as yet no connections to residences have been
made as the city has not yet provided an outlet.” Despite accurately diagnosing the

223
"Watts Irked by Dirty Streets," A5.
224
Ray, City of Watts 48-49.s
116
problem, the same column offered only the tepid recommendation that “it might help
if a committee was appointed from this community to wait on the City officials and see
what could be done in this matter.”
225
No mention was made of Charles Colden, the City
Councilman whose fifteenth district encompassed Watts, the Harbor, and the “Shoestring
Addition” connecting the two.
226
This omission raises deep questions, none more
troubling than that of why a politically motivated community of Race Men and Women
in Watts did not appear to have a strategy for using the representative process as a means
of achieving their ends.
During the real-estate contraction of the Great Depression, what development
resources were available flowed even more decisively to areas of new development that
could be developed with economies of scale under emergent methods of planning. This
had two consequences for black citizens and for Watts. First, the pursuit of open tracts
suitable for mass-building led developers to the west side of Los Angeles during the
1920s and 1930s. Second, the market practices of developers, realtors, and the Federal
government converged to .
227
Andrew Weise notes that in post-depression decades,
residents of independent black suburbs used the power of the local state to resist

225
"South Los Angeles News [June 8, 1928]."
226
Los Angeles had only returned to district representation rather than at-large representation on the City Council in
1924. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 222. James W. III Ingram, "Charters," in The
Development of Los Angeles City Government: An Institutional History, 1850-2000, ed. Hynda Rudd, et al. (Los
Angeles, Calif.: City of Los Angeles Historical Society, 2007), 18. Fogelson describes this shift as a political
compromise on the part of the city’s progressive elite, who distrusted district representation as a likely source of graft,
but who recognized that they could not claim democratic legitimacy in a growing city under a system of at-large
representation that concentrated power in a remote central administration. Since the district boundaries lumped Watts
with the Harbor and not with Central Avenue, it is likely that Watts’ black voters constituted as much an isolated
minority group under the one system as they would have had the other prevailed.
227
Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass.: London:
MIT Press, 2000), Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land
Planning.
117
intrusive development that threatened quality of life.
228
After consolidation, Watts
residents were dependent upon their representation in the Los Angeles City Council, As I
will discuss in subsequent chapters, the Council was an unreliable defender of their
interests. Neither the funneling of resources away from Watts by developers or political
neglect by the City Council were coincidental; decisions of officials relied upon cultural
understandings that Watts was not a place worth protecting.
Furthermore, absent responsive representation, Watts residents were vulnerable to
changes in the scope of state intervention into the production of social space, along with
changes in the aesthetic assumptions about cities that affected the viability of Knox’s
vision of an industrial/commercial/residential paradise. This vision held industry and
residences as the two poles of prosperity; South Los Angeles would be “a community of
homes…. [D]eveloping into one of the most wholesome and progressive communities in
all Los Angeles” to the extent that “industries [were] the most valuable asset to the
growth of any community.”
229
However, as Klein argues, by the 1930s, this kind of close
arrangement of residences, factories, and commerce came to be viewed by planners and
realtors as evidence of sickness in the social space itself, as “stores and filling stations
came too close to residential housing…. The natural, or unplanned city was beginning to
look more like Chicago than a rustic arcadia.”
230
The City Planning Commission by
1945 identified in Watts “overcrowding, mixed land uses, and unimproved streets” as
“factors contributing to its slum character,” while mapping average rents for the city with

228
Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, Historical
Studies of Urban America (Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 126.
229
"South Los Angeles News [June 22, 1928]," 2, "South Los Angeles News [May 11, 1928]," 8.
230
Klein, "Sunshine Strategy," 12.
118
a graphic legend that showed the darkest (that is, lowest) rents to the west of the Los
Angeles River in Watts.
231
I will discuss in later chapters, the discourse of blight justified
the enactment of large-scale redevelopment projects. In other places, this could mean
industrial development. In Watts, it came to mean the construction of public housing,
which was viewed with suspicion by some as a conspiracy to stick Watts with
undesirable public housing.
Walter Knox passed away in 1934, leaving his wife and daughter, and leaving
“South Los Angeles” in a liminal state. He would not live to see if, let alone how, his
community pulled out of the Great Depression. The Depression meant that black
businesspeople and homeowners were unable to continue their own agenda for
development, but it also meant that the transformation of Watts by outside agents was
delayed. The spatial production of the area remained contingent upon changes over the
next three decades in the political economy and racial imaginary of the region. The
transformation of Watts into a black ghetto was not immediate, nor was it automatic.
Even in 1945 Arna Bontemps viewed the construction of public housing in Watts as a
factor arresting the descent of “Mudtown” into decrepitude and hopelessness.
232
To
understand fully why this observation proved illusory, we must consider events, plans,
and ideas about place beyond the borders of Watts itself.

231
Los Angeles (Calif.). City Planning Commission., Accomplishments, 1945, City Planning Commission (Los
Angeles: 1945) 12, 20-21.
232
Bontemps and Conroy, They Seek a City xvi. By 1966, Bontemps revisited these conclusions in a revised edition of
his earlier work, concluding that despite his initial optimism, public housing ultimately reinforced the stigma of Watts
as a slum. Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace but Here (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri, 1966) 9.
119
Chapter 2: Negotiated Boundaries of Race in Midcentury Los Angeles

Novelist Chester Himes was one of the most acute observers of the mixture of
promise and peril that faced African Americans and other people of color in Los Angeles
during the Second World War. Unprecedented employment opportunity sat side by side
with racial hostility that occasionally exploded into violence and that led to the
internment of the area’s Japanese Americans. In Himes’ If He Hollers, Let Him Go,
protagonist Bob Jones, the wartime shipyard worker whose consciousness is shaped by
this racial climate. Jones takes a grim pleasure in transgressing the city’s racial
boundaries as his course to work takes him south from the black community along
Central Avenue through white working-class districts, where his aggressive driving and
expensive car produce palpable and thrilling dis-ease in the whites who cross his path.
1

From the driver’s seat of his Buick, it appears that the entire white race is powerless to
bar his passage.
This literary example hints at the power of the racialized boundary, but does not
necessarily lead to an understanding of the boundary as a spatial practice that
institutionalizes, justifies, and publicizes the differential allotment of mobility, access,
and power to social groups. But it does reference a specific historical moment in Los
Angeles, in which African Americans, ethnic Mexicans, and white Anglos attempted to
renegotiate physical, social, and cultural emplacement of people in the space of the

1
Chester B. Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go: A Novel (New York/Berkeley, Calif.: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002) 10-
13. On Slauson Avenue (which crosses Central Avenue between 58
th
and 59
th
Streets) as a racial frontier, see R. J.
Smith, The Great Black Way: L.A. In the 1940s and the Lost African-American Renaissance (New York: PublicAffairs,
2006) 13-14.
120
metropolitan area. The individual actions of racial minorities to claim a presence in
the city and of whites to restrict or erase that presence, combined with the actions of the
local state, produced a large-scale redefinition of the meaning of the city as a bounded
space, of the relationship of politically defined space and imagined qualities of places
delimited by those boundaries.
In Chapter 1 I argued that South Los Angeles activists in the late 1920s saw the
Los Angeles city limits as a crossing into an emergent site of opportunity. By the 1950s,
however, those limits signified opportunity tempered by subjection to political control
and the power of the local state to potentially erase their communities. And for many
middle class whites, engagement with the city limits as a boundary signified anxiety over
the future. How Angelenos “knew” their city and its constituent places had been
transformed. The ideal of Progressive era boosters of a city free of slums and social
problems was replaced by a discourse in which the slums threatened the entire city of Los
Angeles. This was a public refiguring of the meaning of the city limits, and of how
redeemable or valuable the territory enclosed within them could be.
This chapter and the one that follows it are concerned with this shift, and with
explaining how and why it happened. In this effort, I depart from established disciplinary
literatures to address political action, the physical placement of racialized bodies in space,
the differentiation of the metropolitan landscape, and the mediated image of place as
fundamentally related for the reason that they are all negotiations of boundaries. I use the
concept of the boundary following its usage by Philip Ethington and Edward Casey,
discussed in the introduction. Particularly, I share these authors’ concern for grounding
121
the consciousness of difference and social relations in material forms of social space
and in the configurations of political power operating in and through particular spatio-
temporal locations.
2
The political boundaries of the City of Los Angeles had, after 1926,
reached their present expansion through the addition of territory.
3
Placing new territory
within the city limits facilitated the proliferation of other kinds of boundaries—
boundaries of spatial practice embodied in differentiated land use and development,
policing, and public policy that in turn sustained metaphorical boundaries of community
and exclusion.
The boundary concept sustains a critique of Henri Lefebvre’s influential
theorization of the social production of space,
4
which tends to steer thought to the
abstracting power of capital and away from consideration of particular places, and the
particular forms of social activity that unfold through and remake places.
5
The necessity
of recognizing the particularity of place is evidenced by the way in which cultural
influences drawn from the everyday and particular spaces of Los Angeles (what Lefebvre
terms “spaces of representation”) have factored materially in the representations that
informed political action. A number of critical geographers have worked to emphasize
the concept of place as characterized by particularity, the uses of a territory in everyday
life and social practice, and the relationship of social identity and communal bonds to

2
Casey, "Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History.", Ethington, "Placing the Past: 'Groundwork' for a
Spatial Theory of History.", Ethington, "Reply."
3
Philip J. Ethington, "The Spatial and Demographic Growth of Los Angeles," in The Development of Los Angeles City
Government: An Institutional History, 1850-2000, ed. Hynda Rudd, et al. (Los Angeles, Calif.: City of Los Angeles
Historical Society, 2007), 661.
4
Lefebvre, Production.
5
Dimendberg, "Henri Lefebvre on Abstract Space.", Ethington, "Placing the Past: 'Groundwork' for a Spatial Theory of
History." Malpas, "Finding Place: Spatiality, Locality, and Subjectivity."
122
local territory.
6
Particularly in urban areas, place is counterposed to the concept of
space, which is associated with concentrated capital or political power that seeks to
destroy or remake places in the pursuit of political power or capital accumulation.
7

Constituted by the particular, place connotes the possibility of resistance, of a spatial
politics of liberation.
8
At risk of oversimplifying a complex debate, place is the domain
of the people, and space is the domain of the powerful. In this chapter, I will discuss the
course of place-making in minority communities of Los Angeles as an effort to resist
oppression and erasure. In Chapter 3, I will return to the concept of place to argue that
place, rather than the abstract concept of space, is also at work in the processes of erasure
and redevelopment.
For racial minority communities, the work of claiming place in Los Angeles is
best summed up by Douglas Monroy’s concept of presencing.
9
In the introduction to this
work, I have noted the ways in which the “present” is a trope that reflects the mutual
constitution of space and time as central constructs of history.
10
In the first section of this
chapter, I synthesize secondary literatures to argue that ethnic Mexican presencing in
modern Los Angeles was constituted in settlement of the greater East Side. Being

6
Arguably the most influential of these has been Doreen Massey, "A Global Sense of Place," in Reading Human
Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Inquiry, ed. Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregory (London: Arnold, 1997).
7
Soja, Postmodern Geographies. Harvey, The Urban Experience.
8
Most ambitiously, this prospect is raised by Lefebvre in The Right to the City, which proposes the necessity of
grounding revolutionary struggle in the superiority of the right of appropriation and use in the urban environment to
the right of exchange and property. Lefebvre, "The Right to the City," 173-4. Following from both The Right to the
City and The Production of Space, Edward Soja identifies the particularity of place as “a lived strategic location” for
multiple forms of political resistance. Soja, Thirdspace.
9
Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999) 33-38. Monroy defines the concept rather obliquely in this section, but does
identify the stakes of place, building community, and attempting to use a community’s position in place and in time “to
think that their future could be different from their past.” This hints at a point I seek to raise more directly, that
historical change occurs in the production and contestation of places.
10
Ethington, "Placing the Past: 'Groundwork' for a Spatial Theory of History."
123
“present” in the racial landscape of Los Angeles placed people physically,
temporally, and ideologically at the point of an argument about the ideal future of Los
Angeles, and specifically whether racial minorities would be “present” in that future. In
the second section of this chapter, I place the work of presencing by communities of
color alongside white Anglo projects of erasure that denied the compatibility of minority
claims on place with more temporal Anglo visions of progress, order, and prosperity.
11
As
William Deverell argues, the discourse of modernity underlying Anglo efforts to erase
the Mexican presence from the landscape of Los Angeles (except as labor) was one
connecting race and time through particular symbolic sites.
12
Presencing and erasure
represent two poles of a central dialectic of this spatio-temporal moment.

Production of the East Side—Presencing and Segregation in Industrializing Los
Angeles
From roughly 1910 to 1930 (and particularly in the 1920s), a “Great Migration”
of ethnic Mexicans entered greater Los Angeles, tripling their population in the city of
Los Angeles to more than 97,000, with an additional 70,000 (or more) residing elsewhere
in the County, mostly in areas adjacent to the city limits.
13
This migration in many

11
William Francis Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), Kropp, "Citizens of the Past?"
12
Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past 4. Deverell could
indicate more forcefully that this narrative of modernity was realized spatially through exclusionary and developmental
practices.
13
Ricardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994) 114. Monroy,
Rebirth 158. Others dispute these official U.S. Census figures, noting that the Census systematically undercounts
immigrants, the poor, and non-English speakers. The population of ethnic Mexicans in Los Angeles County in 1930 is
estimated at as high as 190,000. David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and
the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 57.While the foreign-born outweighed the
U.S.-born in the Mexican population of the United States in 1920, after 1900 migrants to Los Angeles had mostly been
124
respects enabled the industrial growth of the region; Mexican labor was the
foundation of industry in Los Angeles. This labor migration was, however, unlike the
migrations of European ethnic workers to the city. Though the terms of the 1848 Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo defined ethnic Mexicans living within the territory annexed by
conquest to the United States as white for the purposes of citizenship, the legacy of
conquest and prejudice supported a pervasive common sense among Anglos that
Mexicans were a distinct and inferior racial group. Post-conquest politics in California
were a non-military, though often violent, extension of racial war.
14
In the new Anglo
California, ethnic Mexicans had to cross both national boundaries and a host of local
boundaries, both institutionalized and extralegal, to claim a presence in Los Angeles.
15

The negotiation of these boundaries led ethnic Mexicans to adopt particular patterns of
settlement, claiming and occupying particular metropolitan places as a means of
achieving basic economic security, coethnic solidarity, and protection from Anglo
oppression ranging from everyday racial insults to organized racial violence, what
Monroy has termed “presencing.”
16
In this section, I review published historical accounts

in the U.S. for work for longer than five years; while technically immigrants, many Mexicans who settled in Los
Angeles chose the city above other possible destinations. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American 64-64, 70.
14
As Albert Camarillo argues, “the history of the Chicano people as an ethnic minority in the United States was forged
primarily from a set of nineteenth-century experiences” originating with the conquest. While this argument de-
emphasizes the effects of immigration, industrialization, and urbanization, phenomena of the twentieth century,
Camarillo is correct in arguing that the racialized context of white supremacy in which later change unfolded originated
in 1848. Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa
Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996) 2. Lisbeth Haas,
Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936, 1st pbk. printing. ed. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996) 10. Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past 13-14.
15
The small ethnic Mexican Californio population that predated conquest encountered intensified conflict with Anglos
in which race was tied to claims to land and political power, ultimately resulting in the wholesale dispossession of the
Californio elite concurrent with their transformation into “Mexicans.” Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The
Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 7, 19. Haas,
Conquests and Historical Identities 63. Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society 111-14.
16
Monroy, Rebirth 33-38.
125
of this migration, settlement, and presencing in order to assess how ethnic
communities participated in the making of place in metropolitan Los Angeles.
From the important works of successive generations of historians of Chicano and
Mexican-American Los Angeles, I draw two central premises. First, since consolidating
power in the 1870s and 1880s, Anglo-dominated society in Los Angeles and elsewhere in
California has produced systems of domination over ethnic Mexicans.
17
At different
moments of industrialization, Depression, or war, these systems have been expressed in
different modalities, as exploitation, erasure, suppression, or expulsion, all dependent on
a spatial logic of racialization. Through epresentations of racially identified places Anglo
authority has justified and organized the denial of ethnic Mexican claims to belonging in
Los Angeles. Second, the formation of community in Los Angeles’ east side has been a
consistent counterpractice against these forms of oppression. As David Gutierrez
describes the process of barrio formation, Anglo oppression and defensive ethnic
cohesion have operated in dialogue, encouraging ethnic Mexicans to adopt the
construction of la raza as an oppositional ethnic identity and to reappraise its utility for
joining a people divided by class and nativity.
18

These concepts need to be evaluated in a way that makes explicit the inherent
spatiality of the communal and political processes at work. I seek to present both
presencing and oppression, what Gutierrez identifies as a historical dialectic between the
promise of Guadalupe Hidalgo for full citizenship for ethnic Mexicans and the practices
of exclusion and prejudice, as more properly a spatio-historical dialectic. Presencing and

17
Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society 76-78.
18
Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity 37.
126
erasure have been projects constantly in dialogue with each other, and the actions of
communities of color (or factions therein) to stake claims to place have historically
produced new political, discursive, and economic stakes for places in the metropolitan
area. Conquest, the fundamental pretext of Anglo-Mexican relations in Los Angeles, is
after all only in the first instance a politial repositioning of a boundary between nations; it
mandated in succession a confrontation over the meaning of difference and the
occupation of shared space, the drawing of subsidiary boundaries in a hierarchical labor
market, and racial segregation. The dialectical relationship of presencing and erasure has
not only produced, but been constituted in, the historical process of boundary-making, in
which the limits of ethnic settlement and the city limits of Los Angeles have demarcated
racialized forms of political power. The city limits of Los Angeles were in an only
slightly metaphorical sense a borderland between Anglo and Mexican Los Angeles, and
between inclusion and exclusion from political power.
19

Social hierarchy implies a host of spatial metaphors which informed institutional
practices designed to demarcate the “place” of racialized people in Los Angeles. At the
start of the 20
th
century, this presented a paradoxical situation, in which Mexicans were
“simultaneously manifest and concealed upon the landscape,” needed as labor but not
otherwise recognized as part of the city’s path to modernity.
20
Because the city’s Anglo
elites needed Mexican labor, it was impossible for them to be fully excluded from the

19
Extensive literature on the concept of “borderlands” crosses disciplinary boundaries, engaging with politicized
identities at the concatenated scales of the body and of the nation-state. The most important conclusion to be drawn
from this literature is that, despite the pretensions of the powerful, borders never mark clear and absolute distinctions
between people or places; the border itself is an ongoing negotiation of inclusion and exclusion. The permeability of
borders is geometric, social, and metaphorical. Casey, "Boundary, Place, and Event in the Spatiality of History."
20
Monroy, Rebirth 10.
127
compact, pre-industrial city of 1900. More metaphorical exclusions substituted, and
in some cases rehearsed the later spatial separation of the metropolis. Anglo leaders
promoted the myth that Mexican neighborhoods near the Plaza were impermanent, using
the epithet of colonia, a term that had previously designated rural farm labor camps. This
fantasy of transience persisted even as the population of Mexican Los Angeles continued
to increase, and Mexicans became a permanent industrial proletariat, concentrated in
menial labor, with so little occupational or intergenerational mobility that certain tasks
(the dirtiest, hardest, and cheapest paid) became identified as “Mexican work.”
21
Ethnic
Mexicans’ rejection of the thesis that they were transients was reflected in their
determination to educate their children. While the city was required to educate the
children of its Mexican workers, bringing children of all races into its schools, it set up
separate schools and thorough tracking, backed with emergent “scientific” intelligence
testing, defined the educational place of Mexicans as learning the time discipline
expected of future laborers, not future leaders. One ethnic Mexican social worker of the
1920s bemoaned the belief among the Anglos that education would ruin Mexicans for
labor by encouraging higher aspirations.
22

The status of Mexicans as both integral and overlooked in Los Angeles was
disrupted by a “Brown Scare” in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and the First
World War, when ethnic Mexican labor radicals challenged both the political order of the
open shop and the cultural discourse of Mexicans as a compliant, transient, and therefore

21
On “Mexican work” see Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican
Past 130, Monroy, Rebirth 102-03. On proletarianization and mobility, Romo, East Los Angeles 116-22. Camarillo,
Chicanos in a Changing Society 219.
22
Romo, East Los Angeles 138-9. Monroy, Rebirth 135-37.
128
exploitable, workforce.
23
With this happy myth shattered, Anglo authorities began to
grapple with the possibility that the Mexican presence in Los Angeles would be
permanent, introducing a “Mexican problem” to Los Angeles’ public sphere.
24
Attention
was drawn to the house courts near the Plaza, which now appeared all-too-permanent as a
blight on the landscape. The use of housing as a social hygiene discourse was significant.
The crusade against “cholo courts” that resulted in passage of a House Court Ordinance
in 1907 had marked the beginnings of a set of political ideas about race, place, and civic
health, and it specifically targeted Mexicans and their homes as a danger to public health
and morality and as subjects of public and private intervention by the Anglo authorities.
25

One form of this intrusion prominent in the 1920s was Americanization, a program of
micromanagement of Mexican family, dietary, and labor habits.
26
Americanization
diverged from the strict politics of segregation or exclusion, but its logic nonetheless was
rooted in the concept of racial difference. This was a process of boundary-making in
which the national border marked the point where Mexican cultural practices were not
welcome, even if Mexican labor was. At the same time as Americanization was
underway, however, other Anglos were questioning whether Mexicans belonged, a
questioning that gained urgency in the Great Depression, when industrial contraction

23
Romo, East Los Angeles 92, 110-11.
24
Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society 225.
25
Gloria E. Miranda, "The Mexican Immigrant Family: Economic and Cultural Survival in Los Angeles, 1900-1945,"
in 20th Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict, ed. Norman M. Klein and Martin J. Schiesl
(Claremont, Ca: Regina, 1990), 43. Harold Brackman, "Making Room for Millions: Housing in Los Angeles," in The
Development of Los Angeles City Government: An Institutional History, 1850-2000, ed. Hynda Rudd, et al. (Los
Angeles, Calif.: City of Los Angeles Historical Society, 2007), 379-81. Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society
203.
26
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American 102-3. The goals and ideology of Americanization are illustrated by the
social work literature of the period. Smith, "The Development of the Mexican People in the Community of Watts,
California".
129
reduced the need for Mexican labor, the one collective racial virtue which most
Anglos were willing to acknowledge among Mexicans.
27
For their part, Mexicans who
underwent Americanization in the 1920s found that it still yielded only a second class
citizenship.
28
USC sociologist Emory Bogardus, the champion of contemporary social
research in Los Angeles and supervisor of numerous community studies by his graduate
students, had come to suspect that Anglos would not accept Mexicans as neighbors, even
if the most optimistic predictions of their economic and social assimilation were borne
out (a proposition about which Bogardus and his students were, to be charitable,
agnostic).
29
In this climate, Anglo calls for Americanization gave way to calls to expel
Mexicans from the civic body, and in turn increased the need for Mexicans to develop
communal strategies for survival and advancement, strategies rooted in great part in
place.
The Eastside barrio, an artifact of racial prejudice, the political economy of urban
land, and the impulse of communal solidarity among ethnic Mexicans, began to cohere in
the 1930s as a group of settlements east of the Los Angeles River, both inside the city
limits (in barrios in Lincoln Heights, Boyle Heights, the industrial flatland along the
river, and elsewhere) and outside (in Belvedere and Maravilla and more far-flung
agricultural settlements). One key spatial event in the formation of the Mexican Eastside
was the residential departure of ethnic Mexicans from the Plaza district, the residential

27
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American 211. As of April, 1930, one seventh of Mexican workers were unemployed.
This rate was nearly twice that for any other group in the city, and reflected the increased pressure on employers by
Anglos to employ an “American” work force and on elected officials to ban “aliens” from both welfare and work relief
rolls.
28
Ibid. 105.
29
Miranda, "Mexican Immigrant Family," 49. Hise, "Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles," 551-52.
130
and social center of Mexican life in Los Angeles into the 1920s. Whether this was an
exodus or an expulsion is debated. Authors have noted the arrogance of Anglo leaders, as
well as their greed in claiming land for their own purposes of industrial expansion,
justified by the convenient belief in the impermanence of small adobe houses.
30
It would
be a mistake, however, to interpret the exodus as purely involuntary, as the exclusion of
Mexicans from the development of the city. Consider Monroy’s reflection on the
destruction of the Plaza barrio: “This would not be the first time that Mexicans would be
pushed to live ‘across’ something, a river or the tracks usually.”
31
Ricardo Romo argues
forcefully that boundaries are contested from both sides; the negotiation of boundaries
and solidarities defined against them was the essence not only of barrioization, but also of
the formation of the entire urban area.
32
In a style familiar to students of suburban
history, streetcar lines enabled Mexicans to commute to work from Boyle Heights and
Belvedere, though their settlements there were, by virtue of race, never considered
suburban.
33
Outside of the crowded Plaza, even working-class Mexicans could afford to
buy or rent single-family homes (particularly east of the city limits in Belvedere and
Maravilla), allowing them, by relocating, to reestablish familiar domestic roles and

30
Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past 17. Sanchez,
Becoming Mexican American 81-82. Hise, "Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles," 549.
31
Monroy, Rebirth 17. See also Carlos Navarro and Rodolfo Acuña, "In Search of Community: A Comparative Essay
on Mexicans in Los Angeles and San Antonio," in 20th Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict,
ed. Norman M. Klein and Martin J. Schiesl (Claremont, Ca: Regina, 1990), 195.
32
Romo, East Los Angeles 8. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American 64-65.
33
Romo, East Los Angeles 68-69.
131
patterns and coethnic communities in a society that was increasingly hostile to their
presence.
34

By 1930 the greater eastside was home to 90,000. The coherence of this
community represented the start of ethnic politics—meaning the deployment of ethnic
identity and solidarity for economic and social security.
35
Place was integral to this
political development, and to the development of a culture based in neighborhoods that
strained and ultimately broke many of the quotidian ties of Mexicans in Los Angeles to
Mexico.
36
The Mexican Consulate of Los Angeles pursued the interests of its government
in seeking to retain the loyalties of Mexican nationals and foster increased Mexican
patriotism by serving as an all-purpose social service agency, taking responsibility by the
1920s for the welfare of a quarter of a million people in Southern California.
37

Ultimately, however, ethnic Mexicans in Los Angeles rejected the ability of the
Consulate to represent their interests. Most dramatically, the Consulate endorsed the
repatriation of poor Mexican nationals at the same time as local and Federal authorities
engaged in a smaller, but very public, campaign of deportation against destitute Mexicans
in 1931. Up to a third of the Mexican population of Los Angeles, an estimated 50,000 to

34
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American 143-45. Monroy, Rebirth 39-40. On the subject of coethnic community,
Monroy postulates that barrio formation represented the establishment of Mexico de afuera, or “Mexico outside,” a
recreation of lifeways familiar from Mexico. Sanchez is critical of this conception, and notes that notions of continuing
tradition mask the inevitable adaptation of family patterns and cultural forms to the American context.
35
Romo, East Los Angeles 129. Romo challenges the longstanding view that political organizing in Mexican
communities did not occur until the 1940s when the Sleepy Lagoon trial and the Zoot Suit Riots spurred a wave of
institution-building. The communal solidarities, business relationships, and ethnic organizations of the barrio were
political in that they supported group survival.
36
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American.
37
Romo, East Los Angeles 157.
132
100,000 people, repatriated.
38
The significance of forced repatriation is disputed, but
the exodus in its entirety confirmed for those who stayed their precarious social
position.
39
As Sanchez notes, the repatriation period also constituted a break between
those ethnic Mexicans who went to Mexico and those who stayed in Los Angeles.
Ethnic Mexicans thus lived in the metaphorical place between assimilation to a
hostile society and repatriation to a Mexican society whose government they distrusted,
But this metaphorical position was materialized in the growth of barrios as real social
and physical places where they could sustain an ethnic culture that included both
oppositional and alternative practices.
40
This is not to say that the barrios were purely
Mexican spaces; they were home to many ethnic groups, in particular more than twenty
thousand Jewish residents of Boyle Heights in the 1920s.
41
However, it is fair to place
emphasis, as Romo does, on the fact that by the 1930s the Eastside had grown
increasingly separate, both spatially and culturally, from white Anglo society, a means
“for Mexicanos to live out their lives with only minimal association with American
institutions.”
42
Part of this was due to the fact that the barrio crossed the city limits; by
1930 nearly as many Mexicans lived in unincorporated East Los Angeles as lived in the
barrios within the city limits (See Figure 2.1, where scored areas indicate the territory of
the City of Los Angeles).

38
Monroy, Rebirth 150. Navarro and Acuña, "In Search of Community," 200.
39
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American 214-15. Sanchez argues that the forcible repatriations carried out by local
authorities had the principal effect of intimidation. While fewer than 300 people were forcibly deported, raids on the
Plaza by immigration officers encouraged many others to take advantage of subsidized train fares back to Mexico.
40
Ibid. 124.
41
Ibid. 73-75. Romo, East Los Angeles 65.
42
Romo, East Los Angeles 162.
133
Figure 2.1: Latino Settlement, 1940
43

43
Map courtesy of Philip J. Ethington. The use of “Latino” encompasses persons of Latin American ancestry in
addition to ethnic Mexicans, though in 1940 most people who would today be identified under the wider category of
Latino were of Mexican ancestry.
134
The Belvedere area of unincorporated East Los Angeles, the most
predominantly Mexican community in the greater eastside, became a demographic
microcosm of the ethnic Mexican community at large and a place that reinforced a
growing sense of distinction between Mexicans and whites.
44
The ability to own property
or to live in a coethnic community initially mattered more than the ability to participate in
municipal affairs. For an ethnic group who correctly discerned that municipal politics
were a dead end in a racist climate, the division of the barrio was not a significant
distinction. Or so it seemed at the time. As this chapter and later chapters will show, the
strategy of presencing was not impervious to the institutions of the local state; the
division of the barrio between the City of Los Angeles and the County affected how the
community could respond.

Containing and Managing Diversity: Racial Borders in Pre-World War II Los
Angeles
Boundaries both political and symbolic figured in the conflict between presencing
and erasure, both on the increasingly Mexican East Side and in growing African
American communities in Los Angeles. Despite increasing segregation of the
metropolitan area, boundaries in Los Angeles were never, in practice, as impermeable as
their advocates and enforcers would have liked. Yet, while some boundaries existed only
as idealized representations of the city (most prominently as a “White Spot”), these
representations did figure in to the reformation of public space through public policy,

44
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American 75. Romo, East Los Angeles 81-82.
135
private capital, and numerous institutions that linked both. And, while ethnic
communities crossed many formal and informal boundaries, the presence of political
boundaries did structure institutional responses to racial diversity by making people
subjects of or objects of political power according to both their racial identity and their
locations in the space of Los Angeles.
Contemporary representations, perhaps more than demographic facts, sustain the
interpretation of local places in Los Angeles as domains of particular ethnic groups. In
the early part of the twentieth century, however, social practice confounded monoracial
categorization. As Mark Wild has argued, prior to the Second World War, Black,
Mexican, Asian, and working-class white ethnic Angelenos mixed promiscuously in
residence, work, and leisure association throughout much of central Los Angeles. Much
of the racial politics of the era, conceived as the politics of the boundaries of residence,
work, and leisure, was rooted in the slippage between representation and practice. People
of color defied representations of their proper place in the region, and many whites took
umbrage at minority practices that violated these represented rules. To start, this section
will examine the facts on the ground of multiracial settlement and their relationship to
various idealized visions of place in Los Angeles.
Watts, the East Side, and areas of Los Angeles adjoining Downtown all exhibited
tremendous racial diversity in the years before the Second World War. In 1936, surveyors
working for the Federal Writers’ project abandoned their effort to catalogue the racial
distribution of the Boyle Heights Flats, just east of the Los Angeles River from
136
Downtown, due to the presence of so many immigrant and ethnic groups.
45

Beginning in the early 1900s, African-Americans recognized that, while they were
nominally free to live anywhere they pleased in Los Angeles, this freedom was tempered
by the recognition that in practice, their homes were often located in undesirable areas.
46

Taking the promise of open housing at its word, African Americans elected to challenge
the unwritten law of segregation by moving, and black settlement moved south from the
“Eastside” district near Central Avenue and Ninth Street (later Olympic Boulevard). J.
Max Bond interpreted this migration as the outcome of waves of “ “blockbusting,” as
black real estate entrepreneurs directed concentrated campaigns to place black renters and
homeowners in new neighborhoods at the fringes of existing settlement in areas inhabited
by Asians, white ethnics, and Mexicans.
47
Douglas Flamming has argued that the
imposition of restrictive covenants by white residents in many areas both limited the
efficacy of blockbusting and imposed limits on where eastside African Americans could
relocate. Further, the rapid racial transition from all-white to all-black that the term
“blockbusting” implies rarely materialized.
48
Prior to the Second World War,
neighborhoods where black Angelenos settled rarely took on a monoracial character.
Rather, the process of black expansion was marked by the development of black
concentration, anchored by the successful funding of institutions like the Somerville
Hotel at Forty-First Street and Central Avenue, that symbolized and attracted a strong

45
Wild, Street Meeting 31.
46
Flamming, Bound for Freedom 66-7.
47
Bond, "Negro in Los Angeles" 76-78.
48
Flamming, Bound for Freedom 92-93, 97-98.
137
black presence among other racial groups.
49
Figure 2.2 illustrates the extension of
African American settlement and facilitates, through comparison to Figure 2.1, an
understanding of the way that black presence coexisted with the presence of other ethnic
groups. The dark-shaded areas on the map do not indicate the monoracial character of
the community but only that the density of African-American settlement prohibits the use
of the dot-array technique. Black settlement was more concentrated than ethnic Mexican
settlement in Los Angeles, but not spatially exclusive of it.

49
Ibid. 292.
138
Figure 2.2: African-American Settlement, 1940
50

50
Map courtesy of Philip J. Ethington.
139
As African American jazz developed popularity alongside the growth of black
residential community in the Central Avenue district south of Downtown, Central
Avenue’s musicians became observers of the growth of a community that was marked
both by the density of black settlement and the presence of other ethnic groups. The
character of Central Avenue could be interpreted quite differently depending on whether
one was inclined to identify it as a center of black social life or merely to observe the
diversity of people living, working, and playing there. Piano player Fletcher Smith
moved to “The Avenue” in 1933 and recalled his first impression of seeing only Black
faces “from Fifty-second Street to Eighteenth,” but this recollection seems both to stem
from Smith’s comparison of Central Avenue to his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska and
to exaggerate the ethnic dominance of African Americans in the district.
51
In fact, South
Central Los Angeles housed some Anglos, European ethnics, Asians, Mexicans, and
African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s.
52
As Douglas Flamming and Josh Sides have
noted, a substantial increase in the statistical dominance of African Americans in the
district occurred in the 1930s, though this was largely attributable to racial restrictions on
black settlement elsewhere in the region; before World War II the district’s increasing
“blackness” was more attributable to increased density than to other ethnic groups
leaving.
53
This multiracial community was bounded to the south by Slauson Avenue, a
street that marked the symbolic limit of black settlement and a jealously, if imperfectly,

51
Clora Bryant et al., eds., Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of
California Press, 1999), 77.
52
Stephen L. Isoardi, "Conclusion," in Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, ed. Clora Bryant, et al. (Berkeley,
Calif.; London: University of California Press, 1999), 403-04.
53
Flamming, Bound for Freedom 308, Josh A. Sides, "Rethinking Black Migration: A Perspective from the West," in
Moving Stories: Migration and the American West, 1850-2000, ed. Scott E. Casper and Lucinda M. Long (Reno:
Nevada Humanities Committee: Distributed by the University of Nevada Press, 2001), 200-01.
140
enforced boundary of white residential exclusivity.
54
Anecdotal accounts confirm that
Slauson was the absolute southern frontier for black settlement along Central Avenue.
55

As late as the 1940 Census, the tracts north of Slauson near Central Avenue reflect great
racial diversity, in stark contrast to the tracts to the south, which were nearly entirely
white.
56
Yet, as Figure 2.2 illustrates, neither the symbolic boundary of the street itself
nor the practice of restrictive covenants were sufficient to entirely bar black settlement
south of Slauson; in many respects whites placed symbolic importance on the boundary
because African Americans appeared determined to violate it in practice.
Further south, past working-class white districts and industrial areas, Watts hosted
another growing black population. Though, as I argued in Chapter 1, the consolidation of
Watts to Los Angeles had been driven by black activists who sought to connect Watts to
the larger community along Central Avenue, rigidly enforced racial boundaries kept the
multiracial spaces of Watts and the Avenue separated by miles of nearly exclusive white
residential districts between Slauson Avenue and the northern edge of Watts. As late as
the 1940 Census, only one of five Watts tracts housed a majority black population; 52.5%
of the people in Tract 286 were black, while no other district had a percentage of black

54
de Graaf: 346.
55
William Woodman, Jr., "William "Brother" Woodman, Jr.," in Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, ed.
Clora Bryant (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press, 1999), 109. Smith, Great Black Way, 13-14.
56
Earl Hanson and Paul Beckett, Los Angeles: Its People and Its Homes (Los Angeles, Calif.: Haynes Foundation,
1944) 116-17. In tracts 251 and 256, north of Slauson, the Census reported populations of 43.9% Negro and 55.1%
“White” (251) and 70.0% and 29.2% (256). In tracts 268 and 269, just south of Slauson, the Census counted zero black
residents out of 2,828 (268) and one black resident out of 1,505. (269). The 1940 census aggregates U.S.-born ethnic
Mexicans with native whites. There were insignificant numbers of Mexican-born residents in tract 251, but 4.1% of the
population of tract 256 was born in Mexico, suggesting that many of the native-born “whites” in those tracts were of
Mexican ethnicity. In tracts 268 and 269, 1.2% and 1.5% of the respective populations were Mexican-born.
141
population above 28.4%.
57
Restrictive covenants, rather than police power, were the
principal instrument for excluding black residents. Black expansion into Central Avenue
in the 1920s was sufficient to invalidate many covenants attached to single properties, as
courts ruled that enough black residents occupied an area to make the racial “hazard”
described in the covenants a manifest reality and thus nullify the covenants.
58
White
homeowners in turn adopted the strategy of “block restrictions,” covenants that linked
entire city blocks in agreement not to sell or rent to black occupants, and enforced by
home protective agreements. These techniques preserved a domain of whiteness
extending from Slauson as far south as 92
nd
street at the northern edge of Watts.
59
One of
the most publicized legal challenges to racially restrictive covenants involved the Laws
family, who in 1945 were held in contempt of court for refusing to vacate a home that
they owned, but could not legally occupy, on 92
nd
Street.
60
To the west of Central
Avenue near Watts, 1940 census tracts in the City of Los Angeles were nearly all white.
61

To the east of Alameda Street, the city of South Gate jealously guarded its restricted
character, as did the Willowbrook area of Los Angeles County to the South.
62
A

57
Lloyd Horace Fisher, The Problem of Violence: Observations on Race Conflict in Los Angeles (Chicago: American
Council on Race Relations, 1947) 6. The 1940 census is problematic for gauging ethnic Mexican populations because
Mexicans are aggregated with whites and differentiated by nativity between native and foreign-born. In tract 286, the
1940 census listed 33.4% of the population as Native Whites and 12.1% as foreign-born whites, though presumably a
high percentage of both were of Mexican descent.
58
Bond, "Negro in Los Angeles", 86-87.
59
Ibid. 85-86. Bunch, "Past Not Necessarily Prologue."
60
Carey McWilliams, "The House on 92nd Street," The Nation, June 8 1946, 690.
61
Hanson and Beckett, Los Angeles: Its People and Its Homes 117. In 1940, the three Watts tracts, 285 (North), 286
(Southwest), and 286 (Southeast) had black populations of 12.8%, 52.5%, and 28.4%, respectively. Though tract 286,
the blackest Watts tract, bordered the Athens area to the west of Central Avenue, the adjacent Athens tracts 283 and
284 were respectively 99.8% and 97.5% white. The Green Meadows tract 280, west of Central and roughly north of
104
th
Street, was 99.3% white.
62
Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven. Fisher, The Problem of Violence: Observations on Race Conflict in Los Angeles.
142
generation of musicians who grew up in Watts in the 1920s and 1930s recalled that
Watts and The Avenue remained spatially separate and somewhat culturally distinct.
63

Black residents of Watts, to a greater degree even than those in the Central district,
shared space with many other ethnic groups. Saxophonist Cecil “Big Jay” McNeely, who
pioneered a raucous R&B style, was born in Watts in 1927. McNeely remembered that
“it was a mixed community, all nationalities were there. It was complete peace at the
time. Spanish kids, Orientals, and whites. We all went to school together, no
problems.”
64
The Woodman brothers, Britt and William Jr., contrasted the community in
Watts with the intense segregation activities to the north. Recalling the hostility that
faced black Angelenos in the space between Slauson and Watts, Britt insisted that “Watts
was beautiful.”
65

Woodman’s assessment of the beauty of multiethnic space was at odds with the
social vision of many Anglo leaders of Los Angeles at the time. In one of the major
works to address the eclipse of multiracial places in Los Angeles, Mark Wild argues that
reformers “invested in Los Angeles as a white spot envisioned immigrant and nonwhite
populations as distinct, bounded ethnic communities, that could either be isolated from
white populations or incorporated, one ethnic group at a time via Americanization
programs, into the broader urban community.”
66
Wild argues that this investment

63
Buddy Collette would speak of the music he made with Charles Mingus and the Woodman brothers as “the Watts
part of what we brought to Central Avenue.” Buddy Collette, "Buddy Collette," in Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los
Angeles, ed. Clora Bryant, et al. (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press, 1999), 141.
64
Cecil McNeely, "Cecil "Big Jay" Mcneely," Ibid., 179.
65
Britt Woodman, "Britt Woodman," Ibid., ed. Clora Bryant, 115. Woodman, "William "Brother" Woodman, Jr.," 103-
4.
66
Wild, Street Meeting 39.
143
motivated a “corporate reconstruction,” a process of separating minority groups from
each other, isolating them, and subjecting them to Anglo domination.
67
Wild’s thesis is
provocative, not least because it bears so directly on the problems of contemporary Los
Angeles, a metropolitan area in which nonwhites constitute a majority of the population
but elite whites exercise a disproportionate degree of political power. However, we need
to assess the idea of this “reconstruction” in light of the way in which political power was
exercised and the way in which selective incorporation (and exclusion) of minority
groups was carried out through the conceptualization and enactment of social boundaries
in Los Angeles. Wild’s argument invites closer consideration of the completeness of this
reconstruction, the unity and cohesion of the agents involved, the instruments used to
enact it, and the relationship between representations of places and specific political
projects of reconstruction and resistance.
To be sure, represented ideals of place, like the “White Spot,” mattered; As Greg
Hise and Todd Gish argue, the history of planning in Los Angeles, conceived broadly as
the effort to enact social ideals in place through “reconfiguration of urban space to meet
economic, political, or social needs,” is animated by these sorts of ideals.
68
Early projects
of corporate reconstruction were expressed architecturally in various ethnic marketplace
developments, through which Anglo developers sought to realize profits by installing
sentimentalized and stereotypical representations of ethnic life in the place of residential
neighborhoods in which ethnic minorities had previously lived. As Phoebe Kropp notes,

67
Ibid. 4.
68
Greg Hise and Todd Gish, "City Planning," in The Development of Los Angeles City Government: An Institutional
History, 1850-2000, ed. Hynda Rudd, et al. (Los Angeles, Calif.: City of Los Angeles Historical Society, 2007), 332-
33.
144
the famous Olvera Street in Los Angeles’ historic core supplanted the troubling
presence of Mexicans in the civic center with a more manageable presence based in
leisure and consumption that symbolically juxtaposed bucolic “Mexican” lifeways with
the unfolding of progress in the Anglo city.
69
Christine Sterling, the reformer and real
estate entrepreneur behind Olvera Street also sponsored a recreation of the city’s
Chinatown, displaced by the construction of Union Station. However, this “China City”
was embraced by neither Chinese nor Anglos as a commercial site and burned to the
ground within a year after its construction.
70
These sites point to the way in which
representations were deployed to stage manage the presence of minorities in the city, a
process that has been identified as “Southern California’s first culture industry.”
71

The history of these sites shows that some Anglos made the city legible and
readily understandable by attaching monoracial symbolic significance to multiracial
places in Los Angeles, particularly near the city’s historic original core in the prewar
decades. However, by the 1920s Los Angeles had expanded well beyond its original
borders, and the sort of multiracial areas that concerned elites came to stretch far south of
Downtown, in the case of Central Avenue and Watts, and to straddle the city limits to the
east. Outside of a few small central sites, the process of reconstruction was more halting,
and the pre-World War II approach to ethnic and multiethnic communities remained
characterized by a sort of benign neglect. Along Central Avenue, white observers in the
Depression era tended to represent the area as exclusively Black and ignore its multiracial

69
Kropp, "Citizens of the Past?"
70
Wild, Street Meeting 59.
71
Michael Nevin Willard, "Nuestra Los Angeles," American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004): 809.
145
character. They also appeared largely content, before the Second World War, to treat
black inhabitants with more or less benign neglect, so long as they could imagine Central
Avenue as a black colony peripheral to the city proper, an example of “distinct, bounded
ethnic communities that could… be isolated from white populations.”
72
A 1933 report on
Central Avenue by Times reporter Gardner Bradford struck two discordant tones,
alternating racist condescension and respectful admiration of the achievement of black
business owners on the Avenue. What reconciled the two was the portrayal of Central
Avenue, whether as a plantation or an ethnic enclave, as a space apart from the rest of the
city. Bradford introduced his piece thusly: “Carefree and happy, Los Angeles’ colony of
50,000 Negroes maintain ‘a city within a city’.”
73
This “Negro city,” bounded by Ninth
Street, San Pedro Street, Slauson Avenue, and Long Beach Boulevard constituted “a
different world” where, in the author’s unfortunate words, “droves of picanninies romp in
the streets.” The author remarked on the excitement caused by preparations for the
Juneteenth festivities the following day; though he expressed bemused indifference to the
origins of the holiday, he took it as a reminder “of the existence of the large local colored
community to which we seldom give a thought.”
74
As for the impact of the Depression
on Central Avenue, Bradford asked only “have they forgotten how to laugh and dance
and sing?” Fortunately, no:

72
Wild, Street Meeting 39.
73
Gardner Bradford, "Our Gay Black Way: Central Avenue," Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1933.
74
Ibid. Juneteenth observes the anniversary of the announcement of emancipation by Union forces in Texas in 1865,
two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation had been made effective. Though Bradford noted the
preponderance of Texas migrants among Los Angeles’ Negro population, he thought it sufficient to portray the holiday
as a celebration of emancipation whose date was chosen for reasons inscrutable to whites, the implicit we of Bradford’s
audience.
146
The Negro has always taken care of his own. For that matter, he has been on
speaking acquaintance with depression since that dire day in 1619 when the first
black cargo was dumped on Virginia soil. A lot of sunshine, a little food—on
these he has subsisted for generations and the Los Angeles Negro colony, rather
than shrinking under the white man’s self-created burden, has continued to thrive
and expand, a city within a city, with a business and social structure all its own.
75

The thoughtlessness with which Bradford regarded Central Avenue was not universal or
total, but the Avenue in prewar Los Angeles attracted white attention only in particular
circumstances.
These cases illustrate the key point that ideals and representations do not reform
space in isolation from other elements of urban political economy or cultural exchange.
Hise and Gish also argue that Anglo-dominated spatial practices translated ideals into
material distinctions in the landscape, through the application of political and institutional
controls over places.
76
And de Graaf has shown that concern with race was been
“omnipresent” in city government in early twentieth-century Los Angeles, often through
indirect policy actions that “rested on the presumption of Anglo superiority, and of Los
Angeles being a better city if their interests and culture prevailed.”
77
The divergence
between the ideal of the “white spot” and the residential practices of Angelenos of color
is not simply evidence that elites in Los Angeles misjudged the places they encountered
in the space of representation of the metropolis, it is evidence that selective perception,
packaged as representations of places, worked in the political and symbolic economy of

75
Ibid.
76
Hise and Gish, "City Planning," 338.
77
Lawrence B. de Graaf, "The Changing Face and Place of Race in in Los Angeles City Government," Ibid., 781.
147
metropolitan places, subjecting places to state action and sometimes doing work to
change them.
Wild suggests that one key overarching theme suggestive of social boundaries
was the idealistic separation of the “city of homes,” an emergent Anglo ideal, from the
city of vice, crowding, and polyglot diversity.
78
This ideal informed the application of
police power in Los Angeles that was racist and aggressive against minorities. Police
racism was a distinctly spatial practice, in constant dialogue with the presencing activities
of communities of color. The parceling and rating of local places in a hierarchy of social
value and tailoring policing practices according to that hierarchy has long been a
principal stock in trade of the Los Angeles Police Department, with different strategies
applied to different places in the city.
79
And policing decisions have also impacted the
quality of life of residents and the reputation of whole communities.
In his history of the LAPD and its troubled relationship to ethnic Mexicans in the
city, Edward Escobar notes that the urban police force is an institutional artifact of a
moment in which class and ethnic difference threatened to destabilize relations between
the urban industrial bourgeoisie and the working classes on whose disciplined labor they
depended, a relationship particularly structured in Los Angeles by the polarization of
Anglo and Mexican (and later African American) populations.
80
The enforcement of the

78
Wild, Street Meeting 42-43.
79
Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles
Police Department, 1900-1945, Latinos in American Society and Culture; 7 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999) 173. Sandra Bass and John T. Donovan, "The Los Angeles Police Department," in The Development of Los
Angeles City Government: An Institutional History, 1850-2000, ed. Hynda Rudd, et al. (Los Angeles, Calif.: City of
Los Angeles Historical Society, 2007), 151-52. Bass and Donovan’s account is a synthesis of arguments presented by
Escobar and by Gerald Woods, The Police in Los Angeles: Reform and Professionalization, Modern American History
(New York: Garland, 1993).
80
Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity 28-9.
148
law has had both racial and class inflections, most obviously in the LAPD’s
suppression of labor radicalism and unionization, but more subtly and pervasively in the
enforcement of a host of municipal codes which, while not explicitly racist, have been
operationalized in ways that made spatial distinctions and cultural differences between
wealthy Anglos and poor communities of color sites of police action. These included
principally sumptuary laws pertaining to the general category of vice, housing codes, and
the licensing of social establishments.
Police power for decades had worked to ensure that the distribution of vice was
coterminous with the distribution of non-Anglo and nonwhite people. In the early 20
th

century, the Chinatown district adjacent to the old Plaza and downtown was the
predominant vice district in the city.
81
By the 1920s, growing ethnic communities
resented the intrusions of Anglos seeking liquor, prostitutes, and gambling, but lacked
political power to fight either vice itself or its politically and culturally negative
association with their communities. In 1902, the Los Angeles City Charter was amended
to allow the passage of “sumptuary laws”, which banned gambling, prostitution, and
associated activities within the city limits. After the passage of the 1913 “Red Light
Abatement Act” by the Council, enforcement focused on keeping vice out of wealthy
Anglo districts, making Chinatown and areas of Mexican settlement north of the Plaza
along with Central Avenue into de facto vice districts and justifying rigorous police
presence there, though corruption and municipal willingness to keep these vice districts
“open” so long as they did not spill into white areas meant that the police were often

81
Wild, Street Meeting 23.
149
present simply to ensure containment, make token arrests, and collect bribes.
82
This
pattern was repeated at various times in Chinatown and along Central Avenue. Often,
arresting minorities appeared to be the principal goal, with stopping criminal activities
either coincidental or neglected entirely. It was widely acknowledged that the police
detachment patrolling Chinatown in the 1920s collaborated with Chinese organized crime
families to arrest independent operators of gambling and prostitution, an arrangement
highly beneficial to both parties.
83
The California Eagle in 1925 complained of the
police presence in the black “Eastside” district, arguing that the police targeted black
residents for arrest and harassment but did little to stop prostitution that maligned the
public virtue of the community.
84
Along Central Avenue in 1927, the NAACP
complained that two white vice officers made more than three thousand arrests in four
months. If extrapolated on a per capita basis across the city, the entire vice squad at that
rate would have made more than six hundred thousand arrests, leading the NAACP to
charge racial bias and police harassment (though upstanding members of the community
detected no drop in illicit activity).
85

If the LAPD presence in minority communities did not achieve the pretense of
controlling or eliminating vice, it did create opportunities for harassment, selective arrest,
and the general criminalization of ethnic difference. Sumptuary laws that addressed

82
Ibid. 23, 133-34. Romo, East Los Angeles 76, 130. Lawrence B. de Graaf, "The Changing Face and Place of Race in
in Los Angeles City Government," in The Development of Los Angeles City Government: An Institutional History,
1850-2000, ed. Hynda Rudd, et al. (Los Angeles, Calif.: City of Los Angeles Historical Society, 2007), 745, 48.
83
de Graaf, "The Changing Face and Place of Race," 745.
84
Flamming, Bound for Freedom 275-76.
85
de Graaf, "The Changing Face and Place of Race," 748. Observers at the time suggested that white patrons of black
prostitutes were unmolested by the police, who cooperated with “Negro henchmen” to keep this lucrative trade going.
Certain racial boundaries were evidently more observed in the breach. Bond, "Negro in Los Angeles" 264-67.
150
public drinking or drunkenness (and national Prohibition) further enabled the
aggressive policing of ethnic Mexicans, both because Mexicans did not share the rigid
taboo on alcohol that many contemporary Anglo Protestants held, and because Mexican
communities lacked the abundance of private and semi-private places to consume alcohol
that wealthier areas had.
86
Sumptuary laws in effect elevated cultural and socioeconomic
differences to the level of criminality and constructed minority neighborhoods as zones of
occupation.
It was impossible to completely cordon off all racial minorities from other places
in Los Angeles, though the advocates of segregation chose to defend certain highly
symbolic sites of labor and leisure, in addition to residential restrictions. The area’s
beaches were solidly segregated, with only two small stretches (one known as “the
inkwell”) open to black bathers. “Swim-ins” in 1927 led by the militant ascendant
president of the local NAACP, H. Claude Hudson, resulted in arrests and did not stem the
tide of restrictive covenants placed on the use of beachfront property.
87
Many parts of the
metropolis were “sundown towns,” where African Americans (and to a lesser extent
Mexicans) faced police action against their presence outside of work.
88
Musicians of
color were welcomed to play at clubs in suburban Glendale and Norwalk, and on Slauson

86
Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity 25.
87
Flamming, Bound for Freedom 271-74.
88
One black jobseeker in the early 1930s was told by a foreman at a shipyard “not to let the sun go down on me in
Long Beach.” Keith E. Collins, Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-1950 (Saratoga, Calif.: Century
Twenty One Pub., 1980), 49. This man was also denied employment, and even after the institution of a wartime Fair
Employment Practices Commission working class white neighborhoods around the harbor were gauntlets of prejudice
for black shipyard workers.
151
Avenue, but not to mix with the clientele or linger long in returning home after a
gig.
89
Youth in particular demonstrated an affinity for movement and socializing across
the region. This required a second spatial strategy on the part of police, a mapping of
exclusion overlaying the map of containment. In the months before the Zoot Suit riots in
1943, police harassed Mexican youths who were outside of their racially prescribed place
when visiting the dance halls and amusement parks near Venice Beach.
90
As Anthony
Macias argues, the policing of musical and youth culture “suggested a broader social
dynamic in which two contrasting modes of civil society—one of multiracial musicians,
dancers, and entrepreneurs, the other of white urban elites and law enforcement—played
out… with the public freedom and cultural values of Los Angeles at stake.”
91
This
freedom was directly constituted by the ability to refuse to conform to socially-prescribed
boundaries of race, and encountered resistance that was organized around those same
boundaries.
Over time, the effective abatement of vice in uniformly Anglo residential districts
(and its tolerance in minority communities) made multiracial contact virtually
synonymous with vice in the police map of Los Angeles. Most notably, the authorities
were cognizant of the prospects of racial mixing in the jazz clubs and cabarets along
Central Avenue, places that encompassed “almost the complete knowledge white folks

89
Coney Woodman, "Coney Woodman," in Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, ed. Clora Bryant (Berkeley,
Calif.; London: University of California Press, 1999), 101. Woodman, "William "Brother" Woodman, Jr.," 109-11.
William Douglass, "William Douglass," in Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, ed. Clora Bryant (Berkeley,
Calif.; London: University of California Press, 1999), 241-42.
90
Anthony F. Macias, "Bringing Music to the People: Race, Urban Culture, and Municipal Politics in Postwar Los
Angeles," American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004): 696.
91
Ibid.: 693.
152
have of the Negro colony.”
92
For many public authorities, including the LAPD,
however, a little knowledge seemed a dangerous thing. Consequently, racialized
boundaries of community were reflected in a third set of practices, based in the idea that
places where the races mixed were particularly dangerous to the social order. This
attitude came into effect at the close of the 1930s, a period of notorious corruption,
culminating in the graft-ridden mayoralty of Frank Shaw. Elected in 1938 with a reform
mandate, Mayor Fletcher Bowron interpreted the mandate to straighten out the police
force in terms of place, seeking to cut out the graft that Shaw’s LAPD had pulled out of
the bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution that flourished at the margins of interracial
nightlife on Central Avenue.
93
Bowron championed and the City Council passed by 1940
stricter closing laws, stopping the legal sale of liquor at 2:00 AM, a move that had the
greatest effect on the interracial clientele of Central Avenue’s nightclubs; while black
after-hours clubs flourished, the laws subjected white late-night patrons to police
harassment to which they were unaccustomed and effectively discouraged most
interracial nightlife until after the Second World War.
94

Vice enforcement and sumptuary laws targeted spaces of musical, leisure, and
even sexual contact between the races. Simultaneously, the increased professionalization
of policing in the city, though it resolved many major problems of corruption and graft,

92
Bradford, "Our Gay Black Way: Central Avenue."
93
Bass and Donovan, "The Los Angeles Police Department," 154-55.
94
Stephen L. Isoardi, "The Eastside at High Tide," in Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, ed. Clora Bryant, et
al. (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press, 1999), 199, Marshal Royal, "Marshal Royal," in Central
Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, ed. Clora Bryant (Berkeley, Calif.; London: University of California Press, 1999),
35. Anthony Macias shows that Charlotta Bass and the California Eagle were fully aware of the racial implications of
the crackdown. Macias, "Bringing Music to the People: Race, Urban Culture, and Municipal Politics in Postwar Los
Angeles," 693.
153
placed the strategies of racial minorities to maintain and expand their presence in the
city squarely at odds with police practices that worked to maintain and harden boundaries
of race. The June 3-13, 1943 “Zoot Suit Riots” are the most infamous incarnation of this
conflict; ethnic Mexicans claiming the right of access to downtown streets near the
barrios of East and Northeast Los Angeles were beset by gangs of white servicemen,
who, abetted by the LAPD, served notice by force that the streets of downtown belonged
to white Anglos. The riots were not an aberration; rather they were merely an extreme,
but logical, outgrowth of decades of institutional policies on the part of the Department
that cast ethnic Mexicans as inherently criminal and subject to containment in the space
of the city.
The development of the police practices on a “scientific” basis also enfolded the
concept of the boundary; since “professional” crime deterrence involved drawing and
enforcing a racially bounded map of the city’s social space, ethnic minorities who crossed
racial boundaries were literally and figuratively out of place and subject to harassment
and arrest.
95
Social space and the perception of racial difference were mutually
constitutive; since the police concentrated both crime and minorities in the same districts,
the representational space of Los Angeles gave rise to discourses of the presumed
inherent criminality of Mexicans from the 1920s onward, a discourse flogged by the
LAPD despite their inability to prove (constant effort notwithstanding) a conclusive link

95
“Scientific” policing merged the disciplined collection of statistics with prevailing pseudoscientific theories of racial
difference rooted in prejudice. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity 12. Macias, "Bringing
Music to the People: Race, Urban Culture, and Municipal Politics in Postwar Los Angeles."
154
between Mexican ancestry and criminality.
96
The gathering of crime statistics by race
and area was a self-fulfilling prophecy; since the LAPD believed more arrestable crimes
occurred in minority residential areas, those were the areas they policed, leading to
greater numbers of arrests against minorities.
97

These tactics directly threatened the hard-fought gains made by African
Americans and ethnic Mexicans to claim a place in Los Angeles, often verging on
criminalizing the everyday life of racial minorities, and contributed to discourses
portraying minorities themselves as threats to public order and justified further
segregation.
98
Members of these communities fought back, with varying degrees of
success in the 1930s, perceiving police conduct as a matter, too often literally, of life and
death. One example affecting the black community of Watts directly, but involving black
Los Angeles generally, sprung from the shooting death of a black teenager, William
Teems, at the hands of LAPD officer Luther Weyant on August 2, 1930. Community
action around Teems’ death, and the way that the incident and its aftermath were reported
in the Times and the California Eagle suggest how seriously policing affected the ability
of Anglenos of color to live in the city, and the different ways in which the intersection of
race and policing was framed by the Anglo public and publics of color in the city.
On the Saturday afternoon in question, Officer Weyant broke up a craps game on
Wilmington Avenue near 116
th
Street in Watts, the sort of minor but technically illegal

96
Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity 105, 12-13. Bass and Donovan, "The Los Angeles
Police Department," 152. de Graaf, "The Changing Face and Place of Race," 741-42.
97
Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity 121-22.
98
This is a characteristic of the urban regime under capitalist modernity, in which the state suppresses the practical use
of the city by its residents and rationalizes its functions through segregation. Lefebvre, "The Right to the City," 140-41.
155
gathering that prompted many police actions at the time. Teems was placed under
arrest, but, according to witnesses, fled. The Times initially reported that Weyant fired
one shot at Teems, but later reports and witness testimony indicated that he fired three at
the youth’s back. One of these shots struck Teems in the back of the head, killing him.
99

The Times report noted that “fifteen or twenty other youths” made up a “noisy and
rough” (and presumably black) crowd at the game, implying that they constituted a grave
threat to public order.
100
These circumstances, however, mattered little to the Eagle, who
minced no words in decrying from its front page the use of deadly force in the case of a
minor crime—a crime that, the paper noted “is carried on undercover in nearly every
white club in Los Angeles” without police violence.
101
The Eagle viewed the case as no
isolated incident, headlining its October 3, 1930 front page “Police Brutality and Cossack
Method In Vogue.”
102
An initial coroner’s inquest ruled the death accidental, though the
deputy District Attorney sharply challenged Weyant’s defense attorney, giving hope to a
group of Watts citizens, Walter Knox among them, who sought justice on behalf of the
slain youth’s family.
103
Surprisingly, Judge William Frederickson agreed, and arraigned
Weyant on the charge of murder and ordered him held without bail before trial,
remarkable actions against a police officer in any year.
104
The Eagle quoted Judge

99
"Fatal Shot of Officer Described," Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1930, A3. "Boy Killed in Chase by Policeman," Los
Angeles Times, August 3, 1930, A7.
100
"Boy Killed." "Police Officer Luther Wyatt, Watts Station, Deliberately Shoots to Death 17-Year Old Billy Teems
Who Ran Away from the Scene of a Penny Crap Game," California Eagle, August 8, 1930, 1.
101
"A Clear Case of Murder," California Eagle, August 8, 1930, 1, "Police Officer Luther Wyatt."
102
"Police Brutality and Cossack Method in Vogue," California Eagle, October 3, 1930, 1.
103
"Police Slaying Held Accident," Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1930, A3. "Police Officer Luther Wyatt."
104
"Patrolman Accused as Murderer," Los Angeles Times, August 5,1930, A2. "Judge Raps Policeman in Slaying," Los
Angeles Times, August 12, 1930, A3. "Police Officer Arraigned for Killing of Boy," Los Angeles Times, August 29,
156
Frederickson approvingly: “Shooting a person who attempts to flee from arrest on a
misdemeanor charge is unjustifiable.”
105

At trial, Weyant’s defense offered contradictory accounts of the incident, claiming
alternately that Weyant feared for his life because Teems threw a piece of glass at him,
which he took for a knife, and then (confronted with the fact that Teems was shot in the
back of the head), that he shot to scare Teems into surrendering and that one of his shots
ricocheted from a rock on the ground and struck the youth.
106
This outraged the Eagle’s
reporter:
Failing [to prove self-defense] they pleaded an accident, when shown by
prosecution that even though an accident it was recklessness and carelessness
resulting in manslaughter, they pleaded the right of the defendant to shoot an
escaping prisoner tho [sic] apprehended for a misdemeanor.
107

While no one ever charged Weyant with shooting Teems out of racial bigotry, his actions
reflected on the valuation of black life by the Police and on the construction of groups of
black men as dangerous.
The case took an ominous turn for the prosecution when the jury visited the scene,
presumably because they placed credence in the defense’s claim of self-defense. Since
this visit preceded the introduction of the ricochet defense, it is possible that that theory
presented itself to the defense based on the jury’s response to their visit. It is also
possible that the all-white jury was persuaded of the need for aggressive policing by their

1930, A2. "Officer Luther Weyant Held for Murder by Judge Frederickson for Slaying Willie Teems," California
Eagle, August 15, 1930, 1.
105
"Officer Luther Weyant Held."
106
"Policeman's Trial Today," Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1930, A3. "Jurors Visit Slaying Scene," Los Angeles
Times, September 24, 1930, A3. "Death Shot Blamed on Ricocheting," Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1930, A12.
107
"Murderer of Willie Teems Acquitted," California Eagle, October 3, 1930, 1.
157
visit to a black neighborhood of Watts. Whether the jury was compelled by forensic
evidence alone is unclear, though testimony in court showed that Teems’ wounds were
inconsistent with a bullet glancing upward from the ground. The Eagle perceived that the
defense appealed to baser instincts and a fear of black people, and “pleaded in a more
cowardly way for mercy, injecting the race issue and rank prejudice” into the courtroom
(the Eagle gave no specific details on defense arguments to prove this claim; the Times
had no comment on the subject). Since many black supporters of the Teems family joined
the crowd in the courtroom, the jury waited until the evening to announce its verdict, a
move the Eagle called cowardly and shameful and suggested to be merely a ruse to
suggest careful deliberation of a long-foregone conclusion.
108
Though Weyant was
acquitted, residents of South Los Angeles did not give up. Indeed, they viewed this as a
challenge reflecting not only the Teems case but the relationship of police and the black
community.
In the same issue that bemoaned Weyant’s acquittal, the Eagle printed the story of
a Watts man unfairly arrested and roughed up by the police. Walter Knox had brought
the man to the paper’s offices in order to publicize police abuse in South Los Angeles;
the Eagle complied, reporting that the Watts residents who testified for the prosecution
in the Teems case had been subject to retaliatory harassment by the police, commenting
that it “LOOKS LIKE GEORGIA IN WATTS,” and demanding that “this section of the
city be policed by Negro officers.
109
It was not possible to achieve this end, but activists
continued to pursue the possibility of removing dangerous officers from service. Led by

108
ibid.
109
"Police Brutality." "On the Sidewalk: Looks Like Georgia in Watts," California Eagle, October 3, 1930, 1.
158
the Reverend H. Claude Hudson, a delegation of the Los Angeles NAACP that
included a South Los Angeles contingent led by Knox, appeared before the Police
Commission on October 17 to request that the Commission prevent Weyant’s return to
duty. At first, the Commission complied, dropping Weyant from the force on November
3, though he was quietly reinstated and assigned to duty outside of Watts the following
February.
110

It is worth pausing to reflect on the notable achievements of black activists in
removing a dangerous police officer from duty. This incident took place during a time
when the LAPD policed many minority neighborhoods in an arbitrary, capricious, and
too often brutal.
111
One historian has argued, however, that in this period of general
corruption, communities of color had some success in stemming the excesses of police
conduct, though most often in cases where the results shocked the public conscience.
112

Hudson had revived the local NAACP in the late 1920s in part through a vigorous
campaign against police excesses, and consolidated his own hold on leadership against
less militant compatriots by winning concessions like this one from the police.
113

Ironically, efforts at reforming the LAPD had adverse consequences for the ability of
minority communities to influence police practices. In 1934, voters approved an

110
"Reinstatement Opposed by Negro Group," Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1930, A7. "Committee of Protest
against Reinstatement of Officer Weyant Gets Hearing before Police Commission," California Eagle, October 24,
1930, 1. "Policeman Who Killed Colored Boy Loses Plea," Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1930, A5. "Officer Freed in
Killing Dropped by Police Chief," Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1930, A8. "Police Commissioners Restore Killer
Cop to His Former Post," California Eagle, February 13, 1931, 1.
111
Bass and Donovan, "The Los Angeles Police Department," 154. Readers may well question whether in this respect
the 1930s were significantly different from later eras.
112
Lawrence Brooks de Graaf, "Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930 to 1950" (University of California, Los
Angeles, 1962) 128. In 1929, ethnic Mexican activists successfully petitioned the Police Commission to ban officers
from entering private homes in search of bootleg liquor after a sudden police raid caused a young woman to miscarry
her child. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity 135.
113
Flamming, Bound for Freedom 277-80.
159
amendment to the city charter by a margin of less than one tenth of one percent to
recognize a vested interest held by police officers in their jobs.
114
Intended to make
officers less subject to political pressure, the measure, by requiring due process for
officer dismissal, made it much more difficult (bordering on impossible) for citizens to
oust officers. Following the 1938 election of reform Mayor Fletcher Bowron, the police
were further insulated from political pressures. The successful community action for
justice in the case of William Teems would have been impossible just a few months later.

Conclusion
The moralistic attention paid to Central Avenue and the East Side in the years
leading up to the Second World War does indicate a growing public concern with race
mixing and with fixing and limiting the place of ethnic and racial minorities in the city.
However, minorities had been encroaching upon previously white residential
communities for decades, and the application of public police powers was largely a
rearguard action against the tide of social practice. In white residential districts between
the Central Avenue district and Watts, and in cities like Monterey Park adjoining the
growing ethnic Mexican Eastside, the monitoring of racial boundaries was, for the most
part, a private matter, achieved through the adoption and enforcement of restrictive
covenants attached to individual house lots. This practice was sufficient to place ninety-
five percent of Los Angeles’ housing stock off-limits to black occupants by the start of

114
Bass and Donovan, "The Los Angeles Police Department," 153.
160
the war years.
115
And, while the police presence in the Avenue’s nightclubs was
noteworthy, in the 1930s it could be argued that those clubs encompassed “almost the
complete knowledge white folks have of the Negro colony.”
116
Outside of the city center
public authorities were largely content to allow the management of diversity to proceed
lot by lot, five thousand square feet at a time, or nightclub by nightclub.
The settlements of racial minorities truly aroused the attention and concerted
action of the local state only when they infringed upon the geographic, political, and
symbolic center of the city, when it was no longer possible to imagine African
Americans, Mexicans, or Asians as residents of isolated townships outside of this center.
This crisis of place emerged at a temporal moment during the Great Depression when the
status of downtown became a source of anxiety and planning attention. In the next
chapter, I discuss the way that responses to this crisis linked financial, racial and racial
concerns into an invigorated politics of place in which the past achievement of an
expanded presence by communities of color informed coordinated public projects of
segregation and erasure.

115
Lawrence B. de Graaf, "The Changing Face and Place of Race in in Los Angeles City Government," Ibid.
116
Bradford, "Our Gay Black Way: Central Avenue."
161
Chapter 3: The Public Racial Crisis of the City
Introduction: Place and Power
In the previous chapter I described the efforts of Angelenos of color to claim a
space for themselves in the city. Their efforts produced new places, which sustained
stronger communal life and enabled African Americans and ethnic Mexicans to challenge
white Anglo resistance to their presence in Los Angeles. In the late 1930s and 1940s, the
largely private resistance of white homeowners and the efforts of the police and other
public authorities to limit the expansion of minority presence in the city was joined and
superseded by a coordinated public campaign to radically remake the space of the city.
This campaign was the work of a broad coalition of public and private actors that
harnessed the power of the local and Federal state to physically destroy many of the
multiethnic neighborhoods that had emerged in previous decades and replace them with
either public housing developments or non-residential land uses in the name of protecting
the civic health of the city and the value of urban land. Such transformations, which
ruthlessly eradicate the particular places created by social life, have been identified with
the modernist practice of abstract space.
1

Unfortunately, the conceptual division between place and space has been largely
formed through a selective reading of Henri Lefebvre’s more complex and idiosyncratic
theorization of spatiality; while Lefebvre acknowledges that the dominant space of a
capitalist society is the space of accumulation, many of his acolytes have been content to
construe spatiality itself as the apparatus of that capital, arguing that capitalist states

1
For a summary of the concept of abstract space, see Lefebvre, Production 50-51. Lefebvre identifies urbanization as
the moment when capital produces its own space. Paradoxically, location appears to matter a great deal in the
operation of abstract space. Lefebvre, Production 326.
162
inevitably annihilate the particular in service of the general goal of making space
suitable for emergent forms of accumulation.
2
This obscures the way in which even the
most privileged or powerful actors over space are enmeshed in particular places whose
particular meanings are constructed socially.
3
Jeff Malpas presents a cogent critique of
simplistic invocations of spatial abstraction as the form of state or capital practice. Such
invocations assert that the state or capital view space purely as an object of manipulation,
indifferent to its specific social or physical contents. Malpas argues that
to attempt to understand human being using only the resources given through an
objective and ‘leveled-out’ understanding of space as extension is to fail to
understand the nature of the being at issue. No purely objective space can ever be
sufficient to enable the development of the concept of the sort of place that is part
of the structure of human being since such an objective space contains no
topography of the sort required.
4

Though here we need not follow Malpas into the interrogation of being, we may
profitably follow his line of inquiry to ask: where in Los Angeles has the working of
“abstract space” (accumulation, repurposing, clearance, exchange) ever been detached
from knowledge based in particular places?
In this chapter, I build upon these observations to introduce a critical expansion of
the use of the term “place” in the geographical analysis of race and power. Place, I argue,

2
Soja, Postmodern Geographies. David Harvey associates the production of urban space with the need for capital to
find a “spatial fix” to the problem of overaccumulation through investment in a circuit of capital dedicated to the
development and redevelopment of urban areas. Harvey, The Urban Experience 33, 41. Against the command of
capital to rework “space,” Harvey largely identifies the phenomenon of “place” as a defensive sensibility on the part of
working-class residents who appropriate and use elements of their surroundings but do not ultimately organize the
space itself. Organizing through “place” is thus always at the whim of the reorganization of space. Harvey, Condition
of Postmodernity 302-04. Passage critiqued in Massey, "Place in the World," 48-50.
3
The attention paid to the power of modernist planners, for example, at the expense of recognizing their action within a
spatial formation reifies, erroneously, the absolutist power attributed to the modern state and capital, Dimendberg,
"Henri Lefebvre on Abstract Space," 20-21, 29.
4
Malpas, "Finding Place: Spatiality, Locality, and Subjectivity," 35.
163
is not only apprehended from within a location or community, nor does it only sustain
social resistance to power. Knowledge of the particularity of places can also guide and
structure the publicly or privately organized destruction or exploitation of those very
places. During the late 1930s and 1940s, the particular places made by the continuing
challenge of minority communities to received racial boundaries were refigured as proof
of social disorder that threatened the city, prompting and structuring state action to
contain the settlement of racial minorities and remake the city as a set of monoracial
spaces more effectively dominated by white Anglos.
In the first section of this chapter, I discuss how a crisis of urban land values
during the Great Depression gave rise to a local coalition of real estate appraisers,
housing advocates, and municipal authorities. This coalition implemented the practices
of systematic land appraisals that have generally been attributed to the Federal
government. In the course of their appraisal efforts, this coalition invented an urban crisis
through the systematic interpretation of minority residential location as a pervasive and
contagious threat to land values. Liberals in Los Angeles city government, planning, and
housing advocacy were key promulgators of many of the discursive elements of crisis,
informed by their perceptions of the communities of color that had occupied particular
places in the city in the previous decades. In this, they were joined in an uneasy alliance
with private real estate interests which were more concerned with the profit potential of
land from which slums were cleared than with humane housing. Nonetheless, this
hegemonic bloc, however its interests and actions diverged (which they did irreparably in
the late 1940s), shared two things in common. First, they shared a sense that particular
164
places constituted a liability to the health of the city, a liability that could be traced in
whole or part to the racial characteristics of those places’ inhabitants, modifying
Progressive Era housing reformer Dana Bartlett’s 1907 declaration that Los Angeles had
“’slum people’ but no slums’,” to an embrace of a virtual identity between “slum people”
and slum districts.
5
Second, their actions over time converged in a discourse of crisis
over the boundaries of race in the city.
In the second section, I argue that the appraisal process, which has most generally
been linked to private home lending, was also used to construct a public discourse of
crisis that proposed wholesale slum clearance as a remedy to the threat posed by minority
settlement. This discourse redeployed themes in currency in national urban planning in
the service of a redevelopment discourse targeted specifically at local places as the
objects of state action. Faced with increasingly large, visible, and socially active
communities of color, Los Angeles politicians, police, and real estate agents, in concert
with Federal appraisers and often idealistic liberal housing and planning advocates,
created new ways of cataloguing racialized places, assessing their value to the civic body
as a whole, and advocating for the wholesale reordering of space through public policy.
In the third section, I argue that public housing, briefly paired with slum
clearance, reflected the eager participation of liberal municipal reformers in the
promulgation of the discourse of crisis. While public housing ostensibly sought to
replace slum districts with modern and sanitary housing, Los Angeles’ program was
promoted in ways that showed that clearing the multiracial “slums” near the city’s central

5
Dana Webster Bartlett, The Better City; a Sociological Study of a Modern City (Los Angeles: Neuner Co. Press,
1907). Cited in Brackman, "Making Room for Millions," 379.
165
core was the overriding goal. Public housing also reinforced the political economy of
place instituted by the appraisal campaigns. The city of Los Angeles Housing Authority
razed neighborhoods it considered to be blighted, but then, both because land in those
areas was systematically devalued and because relocating minorities to other areas would
threaten values there, constructed public housing in many of the same areas. These
projects and the relocations that accompanied them, I argue in the fourth section, were
public boundary politics writ large, producing a new social geography of monoracial
places. I conclude by noting the way in which this new urban form was normalized and
enforced through a more explicit policing of the boundaries of race under Police Chief
William Parker in the 1950s.

Inventing Urban Crisis: Local Implementation of Federal Lending Risk Policies
Beginning in the years of the Great Depression and escalating through the Second
World War, municipal, capitalist, and Federal agents in Los Angeles increasingly
perceived a crisis for the central city, a crisis constituted principally by the presencing
strategies of communities of color in greater Los Angeles. Thomas Sugrue has led a
movement in urban history to argue that explosive racial conflicts in urban areas date not
to the 1960s, when provocative minority activists promoted doctrines of Black Power and
Chicanismo, but to the time of the Second World War itself, when white homeowners
threatened the civic order and ousted liberal municipal regimes as a response to the
166
modest demands of minorities for fair housing.
6
In Los Angeles, I argue, this crisis
did not originate only with white homeowner populism, nor was it strictly a post-World
War II phenomenon. In Los Angeles, though the term “urban crisis” was not in coinage,
its essential formulations were in circulation even before the beginning of the Second
World War, and intensified after it.
7

Prior to the Great Depression, both public officials and private civic elites in Los
Angeles had been troubled by the presence of people of color and experimented with the
use of the local state to regulate, restrict, or reform them. Historian Lawrence de Graaf
has argued that municipal government in early twentieth-century Los Angeles was
singularly preoccupied with the issue of racial difference. This preoccupation was
expressed only rarely as overtly racial law, but frequently through the control of
institutions by white Anglos infused with a consciousness of racial difference,
specifically white supremacy. This brought selective applications of public powers to
bear on the places where Angelenos of color worked, socialized, lived, and learned in an
effort to bring those places into line with Anglo norms.
8
Greg Hise more explicitly
spatializes this expression of the urban ideal through his conception of Los Angeles as a
“border city,” in which the liminal position of national migrants with respect to the U.S.-
Mexico border has been paralleled by the immediate and daily power of a host of non-

6
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, 1st paperback ed.,
Princeton Studies in American Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). Arnold R. Hirsch, Making
the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 1998).
7
Robert Self cautions against framing white residential community identity as solely a phenomenon of defensive
homeownership, and against framing minority political activity solely in reference to these actions. Self, "Writing
Landscapes of Class, Power, and Racial Division: The Problem of (Sub)Urban Space and Place in Postwar America,"
248.
8
de Graaf, "The Changing Face and Place of Race," 740-41.
167
national boundaries (whether formal or informal, legal, administrative, or political) on
social life and opportunity, with historical racial regimes producing characteristic sets of
internal boundaries in the City of Los Angeles.
9
As I discussed in the previous chapter,
in the 1910s and 1920s, these projects of boundary-making reflected and shaped debate
over the future of the city.
But these debates did not approach the level of systematic attention devoted to the
presence of minorities in local places that emerged during the Great Depression. The
terms and content of a racialized urban crisis encompassing not simply established vice
districts but potentially the entire city originated in new property appraisal methods
promulgated by Federal agencies. This regime of appraisal explicitly tied the racial and
infrastructural character of a neighborhood to the credit risk rating of any individual
property. The Federal Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) was founded to provide
emergency refinancing of mortgages at risk of foreclosure. Because the agency also
carried out an extensive series of surveys of residential neighborhoods and marked areas
with minority residents, old housing stock, or high population densities (signifying high
loan risk) with the color red on a series of maps discovered by researchers in the 1970s, it
has become commonplace for historians to claim that HOLC introduced and mandated
“redlining”—the denial of credit both to individual minorities and to anyone seeking a
loan for a home in an area where minorities lived--as a practice of private lenders and
public planners.
10

9
Hise, "Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles."
10
This argument originated with Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
(New York: Oxford University, 1985) 203. Other authors follow Jackson in ascribing to HOLC direct ancestry of
racially discriminatory public lending and private lending decisions. Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields
168
Amy Hillier has presented an important revisionist argument. In the first case,
she argues, HOLC’s maps were generally kept secret from the general public and much
of the lending industry, and were completed in the late 1930s well after HOLC concluded
its loan underwriting activities.
11
The much larger Federal Housing Administration
(FHA) had a far broader lending mandate than did HOLC, ultimately underwrote millions
of loans, and had by the time of HOLC’s surveys begun its own project of assessing the
impact of place on the risk attending a loan. While it is unreasonable to assume that
HOLC and FHA appraisers had no contact, the agencies apparently proceeded
independently of each other, and FHA appraisers used many independent sources of
information in their work.
12

If it is no longer possible to identify a direct mandate for redlining originating
from any one Federal agency, how does one make sense of the relationship between
Federal policies and manifest discrimination in home credit? Hillier argues for
reconsidering the HOLC surveys from the point of view of HOLC’s parent organization,
the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), which sought to create a public-private
partnership in the interests of stabilizing the national real estate market, and in the
process creating a racialized market for credit.
13
FHLBB and FHA, in contrast to HOLC,

and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003) 124-25. For a full list of works following
Jackson, see Amy E. Hillier, "Redlining and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation," Journal of Urban History 29, no. 4
(2003). Flamming attributes the decline of Central Avenue’s housing stock to Federal policies following from HOLC-
directed redlining. Flamming, Bound for Freedom 352.
11
Hillier, "Redlining," 397.
12
Ibid.: 402.
13
Ibid.: 404-05, Amy E. Hillier, "Residential Security Maps and Neighborhood Appraisals: The Home Owners' Loan
Corporation and the Case of Philadelphia," Social Science History 29, no. 2 (2005): 212. The market for mortgage
credit created by the FHA and its successor institutions was fundamentally racialized as white, in that credit was not
simply distributed unequally, but the social structures and cultural understandings associated with the value of property
supported a privileged position for white property owners and inscribed the boundaries of the marketplace to exclude
169
aggressively disseminated their underwriting guidelines, and, most importantly, urged
private lenders and the real estate profession to conduct their own surveys of risk.
14

While the Depression meant that the effects of these standards would wait for full
expression until after the Second World War, we can look to the language of the
assessments as a guide to how the various actors who constituted this formation
perceived risk. HOLC surveyors were usually part of local real estate and banking
communities, as Federal agents relied extensively on the knowledge they held about
places and neighborhoods. Accordingly, the role of the Federal state in encouraging
racial homogenization should not be acknowledged in ways that marginalize the
importance of local practices. In this sense, what Lefebvre terms the “far order” value of
segregation was simultaneously projected into the “near order” practices of residential
location in Los Angeles and realized in and through the local components of that near
order.
15

In Los Angeles, Charles Shattuck, the head of the California Real Estate
Association and the National Association of Real Estate Boards, private associations of
brokers and agents which militated against racial integration, also served as the head of
HOLC’s local appraisal efforts in the 1930s, and organized a team of 26 other real estate

nonwhites. David M.P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 115-18.
14
Hillier, "Residential Security Maps," 213.
15
Lefebvre, "The Right to the City," 101. In The Right to the City, Lefebvre presents an analysis of the mutually
constitutive relationship between general and particular, abstract and concrete, and systemic and local that is a far more
concise model for urbanists than the complex conceptions of abstract and lived space put forward in The Production of
Space.
170
brokers across the city to carry out the project.
16
As Hillier argues, “FHLBB
established its City Survey Program amidst of all this activity around risk rating,
reflecting—rather than infecting—widespread neighborhood appraisal practices and
standards.”
17
Accordingly, the HOLC surveys of Los Angeles, like those of many other
cities, are indicative of currents of opinion far more pervasive than those of any one
Federal agency, and far more embedded in knowledge of local places. The Depression
years arguably marked the best opportunity for Federal intervention to break up housing
discrimination; the volume of Federal funds available to mortgages in crisis could have
forced the hands of local realtors and lenders by demanding that FHA loans be attached
to open housing.
18
The fact that Federal agencies did not do so can in part be attributed to
the national political inexpediency of such a move and the lack of resolve by FHA
leaders to make it. But it also suggests that local knowledges about places were deeply
ingrained in crafting housing policy.
Though the first round of HOLC’s City Survey Program were carried out in the
mid-1930s, Los Angeles was one of many large cities resurveyed by the agency at the
close of the decade.
19
In 1939 and 1940, HOLC appraisers in Los Angeles blanketed the
metropolitan area, alongside surveyors from the Federal Works Progress Administration
and assessors from Los Angeles’ powerful Security-First National Bank, taking stock of
residential areas and rendering judgment on the potential security of federal mortgage

16
Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism 141. Hillier, "Residential Security
Maps," 215.
17
Hillier, "Redlining," 414.
18
Flamming, Bound for Freedom 351-52.
19
Hillier, "Residential Security Maps," 214.
171
funds invested there.
20
These judgments contained in the HOLC reports are only
minimally quantitative, and rely instead upon the subjective interpretations of the
surveyors. Their comments reveal much about the way in which the concept of racialized
boundaries informed their decisions.
21
The language of “subversion” expresses a spatial
conception of how metropolitan places relate to one another and the imperative for
containing nonwhite settlement. The maps did not simply report on the conditions
present in the working-class minority districts of Los Angeles, which, as an undeniable
byproduct of structural racism, were in worse physical condition than the neighborhoods
of the wealthy, were located closer to environmental hazards, and were less affluent.
22

Nor did surveyors acknowledge the relationship between segregation,
concentration, slack zoning enforcement, and practices like subdividing houses that
contributed to “slum” conditions. As Keith Collins has noted, physical conditions in
Watts declined dramatically before, during, and immediately after the Second World
War, due to the poverty of black immigrants and the deterioration of housing stock under

20
These maps and reports are held as Los Angeles City Survey Files, U.S. Home Owners Loan Corporation, record
group 195, National Archives, Washington, D.C.. My access to them has been through the University of Southern
California Digital Archive, at http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/HOLC/. Noted hereafter by “[Area
Designation] (HOLC).”
21
As these maps and the survey reports used to construct them have become available to researchers, the assessments
of Los Angeles neighborhoods have been used by many scholars concerned with the racialization of places in Los
Angeles. It is somewhat inevitable that my independent conclusions drawn from these reports are in accord with the
judgments made by earlier researchers. In particular, the rationales for assigning the lowest (“D” or “red”) grades to
areas of Los Angeles have been much discussed. See Philip J. Ethington, “Ghost Neighborhoods: Space, Time, and
Alienation in Los Angeles,” Becky M. Nicolaides, “’Where the Working Man is Welcomed’: Working-Class Suburbs
in Los Angeles, 1900-1940,” Dana Cuff, “Fugitive Plans in the Provisional City: Slums and Public Housing in Los
Angeles,” all in Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth, eds., Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography,
and the Urban Landscape (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2001). Hise, "Border City: Race and Social
Distance in Los Angeles." Brackman, "Making Room for Millions."
22
This was no accident; zoning laws passed in 1908 and 1921 had designated most areas on the west side for single-
family home development, and opened areas near minority settlements to higher-intensity uses including industry.
Brackman, "Making Room for Millions," 382-83.
172
successive waves of subdividing; code enforcers in Watts were few and far between.
23

The city also made minimal improvement to Watts’ streets during the Depression,
effectively terminating the regime of public improvements that consolidation activists
had favored.
24
Population pressures virtually guaranteed that areas adjacent to Watts or
Central Avenue would be attractive to African Americans seeking to place themselves
outside of overcrowded conditions, in better housing, or in proximity to better transit to
work. As Collins noted, census tracts immediately adjacent to tracts already settled by
black residents were by far the most likely to experience attempts at integration.
25
These
pressures applied as well to many areas of Mexican settlement.
But appraisers did not report neutrally the effects of population pressures; the use
of “subversion” provided a tacit acknowledgment of the ways in which the efforts of
communities of color to claim parts of the metropolitan landscape threatened an Anglo
privilege rooted in living apart from minorities. In one area of Watts, given the lowest
security rating (D), the survey notes the lowness and flood-proneness of the land, the lack
of zoning, and the lack of deed restrictions, indicating of a place in which “subversive
racial elements and encroachment of industry and business [were] increasing.” Although
the surveyor noted that the area had “one of the highest concentrations of Negroes in Los
Angeles County,” it was condemned not only for what existed there, but what the
surveyor imagined would inevitably exist there in the future: “Population and
improvements are highly heterogeneous and while slum conditions do not as yet prevail,

23
Collins, Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-1950 69-71. Adler, "Watts" 238.
24
Adler, "Watts" 240-41.
25
Collins, Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-1950 72.
173
the trend is definitely in that direction.”
26
The declaration of the area as “thoroughly
blighted” was an act of geographic soothsaying.
In practice, the threshold of minority presence that constituted racial subversion
was set far lower than the mixed-ethnicity populations of Watts, the Avenue, or the east
side; small nonwhite populations were generally judged sufficient to declare entire areas
blighted.
27
In the Florence Industrial District, south of the symbolic boundary of Slauson
Avenue, the HOLC surveyor judged a three percent black population to portend the
inevitable “infiltration… of more Negroes and other subversive racial elements.”
Likewise in Northwest Compton, where the presence of a few black residents combined
with the proximity of Watts to the north threatened further “infiltration.”
28
In the West
Adams District, more affluent African Americans were just beginning a long and often
violence-marred campaign for housing integration. Here, the dangers of subversion were
rated less severely, though two surveyed areas in the district both scored a “C” security
rating, second from the lowest available, and surveyor comments suggested further
decline was possible.
29
The relatively high class status of African Americans moving into
West Adams seems to suggest that blackness constituted a “plus factor” in prevailing

26
Area D-61, “Watts” (HOLC).
27
“Nearly every block of Los Angeles that was graded “red” because of its ‘subversive racial elements’ was in truth
heterogeneous and usually had a white majority. (emphasis in original)” Philip J. Ethington, "Ghost Neighborhoods:
Space, Time, and Alienation in Los Angeles," in Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the
Urban Landscape, ed. Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 43.
28
Area D-60, “Florence Industrial District”; Area D-65, “Northwest Compton” (HOLC).
29
Areas C-117 and C-123, “West Adams” (HOLC).
174
models of cultural assimilation; white ethnics of similar accomplishment could be
accepted as nonsubversive (that is, fully white) neighbors.
30

A similar dynamic characterized assessments of the greater East Side, where
ethnic Mexicans constituted the principal “subversive” racial element, notwithstanding
the facts that Mexican immigrants were legally classified as “white persons” eligible for
naturalization and that in the 1940 U.S. Census they were counted as white. In Boyle
Heights, within the city limits, an assessor noted that “it is seriously doubted whether
there is a single block in the area which does not contain detrimental racial elements.”
31

Outside of Boyle Heights on the Eastside, appraisals exhibited less clear criteria;
appraisals weighed the danger of subversive elements against the proximity of residential
areas to the city’s industrial base. One portion of Belvedere Gardens in Los Angeles
County received a B grade, judged to be “a well located workingman’s district,” though
the “very sketchy” zoning enforcement by the County government presented cause for
concern.
32
This slack enforcement had been a draw to working people of all races to
settle outside of the city limits in order to build housing cheaply; where these owner-
occupants were black or Mexican, however, it portended subversion.
33

30
Black realtors played on this dynamic in their blockbusting efforts; while only relatively affluent buyers could afford
the properties, they would make a public show of bringing lower-class black buyers to view them, stoking white fears
in the hope of provoking further sales. Bond, "Negro in Los Angeles" 103-336.
31
Area D-53, “Boyle Heights” (HOLC).
32
Area B-101 “Belvedere Gardens” (HOLC).
33
Brackman, "Making Room for Millions." Becky M. Nicolaides, ""Where the Working Man Is Welcomed": Working-
Class Suburbs in Los Angeles, 1900-1940," in Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the
Urban Landscape, ed. Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2001).
175
This area, along with another part of nearby Belvedere, showed no apparent
infiltration of “subversive” nationalities.
34
These areas were apparently judged
sufficiently stable, despite their proximity to an area of Belvedere Gardens that received
the lowest security rating, due to the fact that fifty percent of its population consisted of
“foreign families” including “Russian, Polish & Armenian Jews, Mexicans, Italians,
Greeks, Slavonians, etc.” Within this area, assessors’ comments show that they were
operating on the scale of the neighborhood, not the block or house; they reported that
notwithstanding its proximity to higher rated areas and the presence of “a number of
small districts where type and character of improvement would warrant a higher grade,
racial hazards are so great that higher than ‘medial red’ could not be assigned.”
35
In
nearby Montebello, another redlined area, assessors declared that “there is no hope for
this area,” though the observation that “Mexicans are said to be decreasing” meant that
the area would not fall into a worse category if one were available.
36
The assessors
reserved their harshest rebuke for the settlement of agricultural workers along the San
Gabriel Wash, at the eastern edge of the greater Eastside in County territory, condemning
the settlement as “an extremely old Mexican shack district…. A typical semi-tropical
countryside slum.” The appraiser could not resist noting the infiltration of “Goats,
rabbits, and dark-skinned babies.”
37

34
Areas B-101 “Belvedere Gardens” and B-103 “Belvedere” (HOLC).
35
Area D-54, “Belvedere Gardens” (HOLC).
36
Area D-56, “Montebello” (HOLC).
37
Area D-57, “San Gabriel Wash & Whittier Way” (HOLC). This particular survey and the comparison of “dark-
skinned babies” to a wildlife nuisance are also identified in Nicolaides, ""Where the Working Man Is Welcomed"," 86.
176
The Public Implications of Racial Crisis
These Federal decisions affirmed the judgments of local white homebuyers,
realtors, and planners, who had long regarded the intrusion of nonwhites into white
residential areas as a social and cultural hazard.
38
The project of appraisal could not be
carried out without the assistance of local actors, both public and private, and depended
on the locally-specific knowledge about places.
39
In Los Angeles, local knowledge was
generated and preserved by realtors, bankers, social service agents, public housing
authorities, and the police, all of whom contributed to the space of representation in
which the appraisers operated. In an important recent work on Federal appraisals and
housing credit programs, David M.P. Freund emphasizes the way in which Federal loan
guarantees, in combination with appraisal standards that identified racial diversity with
risk, created a discriminatory marketplace for home loan credit. This marketplace,
working at the individual scale, in suburban single-family neighborhoods, literally
invested both white homeowners and the Federal government in patterns of
discrimination.
40
Freund’s argument locates causation in the workings of a market that,
its public support notwithstanding, aggregated individual private decisions about the
disposition of property. However, appraisal discourses also impacted very public urban
land use decisions. HOLC appraisers (who, in their overlapping capacity as realtors

38
Hillier, "Residential Security Maps," 214.
39
Hillier, "Redlining.", Hillier, "Residential Security Maps." In Los Angeles, Dana Cuff has noted the central role
played by local realtors in the assessment process. Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and
Urbanism.
40
Freund, Colored Property 99-100. This, of course, is a more detailed and developed discussion of the general form
of “possessive investment in whiteness” influentially described by George Lipsitz. See George Lipsitz, The Possessive
Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998)
5-6.
177
acted upon survey judgments that were formally kept secret by HOLC) and other
property risk surveys institutionalized the connection between racial boundaries and
boundaries of capital value through the local state.
If a district contained subversive racial elements, public discourse in this period
was cohering around the notion that its value could be redeemed only by excising entire
districts. This discourse was fully sustained by the judgments of the survey regime. The
City Planning Commission recognized as early as 1936 that an ongoing building-by-
building survey carried out by the Works Progress Administration could provide
information useful for plotting redevelopment.
41
Since the 1937 Wagner-Steagall
Housing Act had enabled local governments to seek federal funds for conjoined clearance
and housing projects, it would appear that institutionally HOLC officials were well aware
that its catalogues of slum areas would be used locally to target areas for demolition.
42

One appraiser noted approvingly that parts of the Boyle Heights Flats, judged hopelessly
heterogeneous, were slated for slum clearance that would culminate in the construction of
the Aliso Village housing project.
43
An appraisal of the Central Avenue district dated
March 3, 1939 described the area’s population as “uniformly of poor quality” and
pronounced the district “fit… for a slum clearance project.”
44
The racial calculus of this
particular decision was evident; appraisers ignored the vitality of the many ethnic
communities in the Flats, and routinely conflated the quality of buildings with the

41
Hise and Gish, "City Planning," 352.
42
Hillier, "Residential Security Maps," 210-11. Hillier, "Redlining," 399. Sophie Spalding, "The Myth of the Classic
Slum: Contradictory Perceptions of Boyle Heights Flats, 1900-1991," Journal of Architecture Education 45, no. 2
(1992): 13.
43
Area D-53, “Boyle Heights”.
44
Area D-52, “Central Ave. District”
178
presumed quality of their residents.
45
Through this broad-based appraisal process, a
sense of futility became attached to particular places. This presented a contradiction in
realizing the humane goal of better housing in Los Angeles; the community networks,
place ties, and social organizations that the poor had built up became irrelevant to plans
for modern housing even as they signaled to reformers the neeed for the program.
46

City action around the perceived slum crisis did not seek to protect or augment
property value in all places in Los Angeles equally. Indeed, local projects of slum
clearance and public housing constituted a form of spatial triage, in which particular
places were prioritized for rescue and others were treated in ways that ultimately made
the local crisis of value worse. The representational significance of Downtown Los
Angeles informed this metropolitan spatial triage. During the Great Depression, vacant
and underutilized commercial stock and old, decaying, and racially diverse housing
provoked a host of strategies intended to reverse the perceived decline of downtowns
nationwide.
47
These strategies on the part of financial and political stakeholders in
downtown spaces—realtors, merchants, and municipal tax collectors principally--
unfolded in the context of the growth of suburban towns, highways, and automobile
transportation that threatened to make central cities increasingly irrelevant to public life.
Many planners and urbanists welcomed crisis as the midwife of a new vision of
metropolitan form.

45
Spalding, "Myth of the Classic Slum."
46
Ibid. Hise and Gish, "City Planning," 356-57. This, too, has been characteristic of modern housing policy in
advanced capitalist societies where the provision of dwelling units supersedes the protection or valorization of use of
the urban environment, described as “the reduction of ‘to inhabit’ to ‘habitat’.” Lefebvre, "The Right to the City," 79.
47
Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It, Historical Studies of
Urban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
179
At the 1939 Worlds’ Fair in New York, two radical reimaginings of
metropolitan space entered public consciousness. Norman Bel Geddes’ Futurama
exhibition, sponsored by General Motors, attracted between five and fifteen thousand
people daily to witness its vision of highway mobility. This vision has rightly been
interpreted as a watershed of metropolitanism, though the path to its realization in greater
Los Angeles is more convoluted than one may imagine.
48
While it captured less popular
enthusiasm, the film The City, produced by the American Association of Planners, also
debuted at the fair, and, the greater immediacy with which it intersected with current
debates over urban space in Los Angeles is evident.

From its opening titles, the film is
drenched with skepticism about the viability of centralized cities: “YEAR BY YEAR
OUR CITIES GROW MORE COMPLEX AND LESS FIT FOR LIVING. THE AGE
OF REBUILDING IS HERE.”
49
The rebuilding proposed was of a piece with a liberal
desire to “redevelop the city on a human scale.”
50
However, the symbolic vocabulary it
deployed to that end show remarkable complicity with the discourse of blight assessors
had crafted from their readings of the nonwhite spaces of Los Angeles.
Opening sequences of The City used footage of working-class shanties shadowed
by and blanketed with ash from the steel mills of Homestead, Pennsylvania and the ethnic
enclaves of New York to portray the dense city as a place dangerous to children, toxic to
individuality, and corrosive of social unity. In contrast, the film juxtaposed images of an

48
Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004)
184-85. Ethington, "Ghost Neighborhoods," 33.
49
Ralph Steiner and Willard van Dyke, "The City," (Civic Films, 1939).
50
Don Parson, ""This Modern Marvel": Bunker Hill, Chavez Ravine, and the Politics of Modernism in Los Angeles,"
Southern California Quarterly 75, no. 3-4 (1993): 333.
180
idyllic New England town, in which, according to a voiceover, “the town was US and
WE were part of it.” Though this is a romanticized and ahistorical notion of rural life, it
points to anxiety over the lack of unity between the corporate and sociocultural
boundaries of cities, a comparison readily made to the districts of Los Angeles and their
racial and cultural diversity. As The City presented its case, the overbuilt and politically
entangled city was irredeemable; rebuilding an urban civilization required uprooting and
relocating it elsewhere, specifically to the New Towns. The New Towns were presented
as utopias where “safe streets and quiet neighborhoods are not just matters of good
luck—they’re built into the pattern, built to stay there.”
51
This declaration was
accompanied by beautiful shots, evoking the kinetic choreography of a Busby Berkeley
musical number, of children streaming along bicycle paths, grade-separated from auto
traffic. Where Aaron Copland’s modernist score struck dissonant tones for the crowded
city, the sound of the New Town was harmonious.
Exactly how the New Town Ideal was realized in suburban practice is the subject
for another chapter. For, while the film advocated a distinctly metropolitan model of
development, its title and its content directed viewers to locate social evils in one place.
“Maybe the question is,” asked the narrator’s voice over shots of an urban slum, “can we
afford all this disorder? The hospitals, the jails, reformatories, the wasted years of
childhood. These are future citizens.” This perspective proved highly influential in the
years after The City was released, and the film’s visual aesthetics, language, and
arguments were all quickly enshrined in the public planning and housing discourse of Los

51
Steiner and van Dyke, "The City."
181
Angeles. In part, this integration resulted from the assumption of local planning by
New Deal agencies.
52
However, in local planning, The City’s condemnation of slum
areas served the interests of local slum clearance projects without leading to the
realization of the more utopian elements of New Town planning.
53

In 1938, charitable leaders asked the City Council to take action to seize Federal
slum clearance and housing funds for Los Angeles, declaring that fully twenty percent of
houses in Los Angeles were not merely in disrepair but unfit for habitation, and an
additional thirty percent required substantial repair. This rhetoric was no doubt
overheated; the 1940 U.S. Census found only 3.8 percent of Los Angeles’ housing
“needing major repair.”
54
Nonetheless, the lesson had been learned; crisis was a pathway
to public action.
55
Public Housing advocate Frank Wilkinson would look back to the
1930s as a time when the slum problem reached crisis proportion, citing the WPA Real
Property Survey and the 1940 Census to argue that “slums blighted more than 58,000
dwellings, nearly 12 percent of the total residential units in the city.
56
Accounting for this
variance between different findings is tricky; it may be that different evaluators held
different standards of substandard housing. What is more likely, however, is that housing

52
Hise and Gish, "City Planning," 352.
53
For example, greenbelt development in the New Town mode was planned for the San Fernando Valley. Ibid., 354. In
the immediate context of the Depression, however, the City of Los Angeles turned the Federal encouragement of
planning activities toward slum clearance. Hise and Gish, "City Planning," 356. In the Valley itself, the scope of FHA
funding for private tract home development superseded the New Town model. Brackman, "Making Room for
Millions," 388.
54
"City Housing Action Urged," Los Angeles Times, May 25, 1938. Hanson and Beckett, Los Angeles: Its People and
Its Homes 19.
55
Dana Cuff, "Fugitive Plans in the Provisional City: Slums and Public Housing in Los Angeles," in Looking for Los
Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the Urban Landscape, ed. Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth (Los
Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2001).
56
Frank Wilkinson, "And Now the Bill Comes Due," Frontier, October 1965, 11.
182
discourse was affected by the practices of residential security assessors, which made
the overall character of a neighborhood a transitive property of individual dwellings; the
number of blighted dwellings increased dramatically if neighboring dwellings (or more
precisely, the neighbors) were considered.
In Los Angeles, planning research culminating in the 1941 publication of A
Preface to a Master Plan pointed up the perceived crisis neatly, urging the rebuilding of
the city along “rational” and “functional” lines. These high-minded ideals recalled The
City, and likewise called for public action on a theretofore unthinkable scale.
57
But they
also reflected a pragmatic accommodation to the economic rationality established by
residential security studies. In a volume advocating a “master plan” of slum clearance
and rededication of central space, Clarence Dykstra, modestly plotting “The Future of
Los Angeles,” stressed the need for purposeful action to maintain Los Angeles’ centrality
to Southern California, while George Eberle asked rhetorically whether it was “necessary
for one part of the urban body to die in order that new parts develop.”
58
Eberle’s question
was rhetorical, but it in fact implied two opposite and simultaneous answers, depending
on the question of scale. Yes, it was necessary for close-in residential areas like Bunker
Hill to be razed if the city were to collectively answer “No” to the “death” of downtown
as the center of the region. The intellectual foundations of housing and redevelopment

57
Mara A. Cohen-Marks, "Community Redevelopment," in The Development of Los Angeles City Government: An
Institutional History, 1850-2000, ed. Hynda Rudd, et al. (Los Angeles, Calif.: City of Los Angeles Historical Society,
2007), 419.
58
Clarence A. Dykstra, "The Future of Los Angeles," in Los Angeles; Preface to a Master Plan, ed. George William
Robbins and Leon Deming Tilton (Los Angeles, Calif.: Pacific Southwest Academy of Political Science, 1941), 3-10.
George Eberle, "The Business District," in Los Angeles; Preface to a Master Plan, ed. George William Robbins and
Leon Deming Tilton (Los Angeles, Calif.: Pacific Southwest Academy of Political Science, 1941), 127-28.
183
thus represented a bargain between liberal reformers and more conservative advocates
of private development in the city.
The onset of the Second World War produced several results that lent urgency to
this triage process. Centrality figured in the eviction of Japanese Americans from the
Little Tokyo area for internment camps in the early months of 1942, as fears of espionage
and sabotage were compounded by the proximity of this distrusted minority group to City
Hall.
59
Into this central location poured thousands of African American labor migrants,
drawn by Little Tokyo’s proximity to Union Station and the covenants that barred them
from most other parts of the city. Wartime migrants converted Little Tokyo to
“Bronzeville” in short order as 80,000 African Americans settled the area previously
occupied by 30,000 Japanese. In an insightful oral history that ostensibly focuses on
Central Avenue, R.J. Smith assesses the way in which Bronzeville represented an
intrusion of blackness into the city center, an intrusion that troubled the notion of Los
Angeles as a “White spot” far more profoundly than did the black communities along
Central Avenue and in Watts.
60
Indeed, the establishment of black settlement close to
downtown provided a key material and discursive cue to planners.
By 1941, Clark compared Los Angeles to a “bad apple,” where “in and around the
central core is found the area of decay, of slums, of vice and filth.”
61
As Norman Klein
has argued, these metaphors were powerful expressions of disgust at what the dense,
polyglot, and working-class neighborhoods represented, but they were also, to further

59
de Graaf, "The Changing Face and Place of Race," 752-53.
60
Smith, Great Black Way.
61
Charles D. Clark, "Land Subdivision," in Los Angeles; Preface to a Master Plan, ed. George William Robbins and
Leon Deming Tilton (Los Angeles, Calif.: Pacific Southwest Academy of Political Science, 1941), 169.
184
abuse the metaphor, the “core” of strategies for reform that would remove, rather than
repair, the center.
62
By 1943, the transformation of Little Tokyo into Bronzeville and
putative concern for overcrowding, sanitary conditions, and crime attending it provided
cover for municipal advocates of the ethnic cleansing of downtown Los Angeles.
63
In
that same year, the racial warfare of the Zoot Suit Riots further demonstrated the
contested nature of central space; while there were outbreaks of violence in and around
the streetcars in Watts and other far-flung districts, public attention to the riots had
already been conditioned by the notion of a “Zoot Suit” problem grounded downtown.
In 1943, City Parks Commissioner Luke Wood proposed buying land from white
owners outside of Bronzeville and creating all-black subdivisions in response to
conditions there.
64
This solution did not materialize, but the Housing Authority of the
City of Los Angeles (HACLA) in the succeeding years did the next best thing:
establishing hundreds of units of public housing for black and Mexican Angelenos, not
on land purchased in previously white districts, but in Watts and the Flats of Boyle
Heights. Housing policy became a major component, according to Wild, in the re-
racialization of local places in Los Angeles: “Within a short time one could reasonably
speak of “Black Los Angeles” and “Mexican Los Angeles,” not as ethnoracial
communities spread through the central district, but as specific territories demarcated on
the cultural map of the city.”
65

62
Klein, "Sunshine Strategy," 16.
63
de Graaf, "The Changing Face and Place of Race," 754.
64
Smith, Great Black Way 145.
65
Wild, Street Meeting 205-06.
185

“And Ten Thousand More”: Public Housing and Urban Crisis
The demise of the city’s public housing program in 1953 at the hands of a
redbaiting campaign organized by the conservative Chamber of Commerce and the Times
has been cast as the death of humane solutions to the problem of decent housing for the
poor of Southern California.
66
Housers were no doubt sincere in their desire to provide
good housing to an estimated 48,000 families in need of decent dwellings.
67
But any
counterfactual explorations of this abandoned historical potential should be tempered by
an understanding of the public housing program’s genesis in a particular moment of
spatial practice and representation, and a political economy that made it unlikely that the
utopian aspirations of liberal housers would have been realized. Ostensibly liberal
elements of the hegemonic municipal and regional power structure were as implicated as
local reactionaries in creating a sense of crisis for Los Angeles through the institutions
and rhetoric of slum clearance and public housing, and their proposals were similarly
informed by the logic of racialized boundaries. The partial public housing program
realized in Los Angeles ultimately transformed decent housing for the city’s working
class into a “second ghetto” for poor Angelenos of color.

66
Antagonism between the private housing industry and public housers was an enduring feature of debate over Los
Angeles’ housing crisis. The Times/realty bloc succeeded in killing the program in 1953 by electing Republican
Congressman Norris Poulson to replace Mayor Bowron in a campaign pitched as a referendum on the public housing
program. Under Poulson, community redevelopment was finally decoupled from the construction of public housing.
Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism. Mike Davis, Dead Cities, and Other
Tales (New York: New Press: Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2002) 138-39. Brackman, "Making Room for Millions,"
391-92. Cohen-Marks, "Community Redevelopment," 422.
67
A Special Message on Public Housing Delivered to the City Council on Monday, August 8th, 1949 by Honorable
Fletcher Bowron Mayor of Los Angeles. March 15-19, 1949, Folder "Housing Authority", Box 49, Fletcher Bowron
Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
186
Public housing was only one part of this material and discursive project of
crisis. The public housing program, the federal and state legislation enabling it, and the
desires of its advocates, were more inextricably tied to the project of “slum clearance.” In
part this was a linkage of pragmatic convenience; housing funds were distributed through
Federal programs enabling slum clearance and administered in Los Angeles through a
Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) empowered by the State Legislature, making
slum clearance a prerequisite for public housing (though, crucially, not the other way
around; both CRA and the 1949 Federal Housing Act allowed land acquired by cities to
be used for “public” non-housing purposes).
68
However, the project of slum clearance
also meant that the humane tendencies of the housers would be inseparable from the
catalogue of slum areas that had been developed in the prior decades, a catalogue that
reflected the explicit devaluation of poor people of color and the imperative to draw
boundaries around their permissible place in the city. Communities of color displaced by
urban renewal look back with deep skepticism and deserved anger at the destruction or
dismemberment of their neighborhoods by powerful outsiders who rarely sought or
regarded their views on the subject.
69

Mayor Fletcher Bowron launched the campaign for ten thousand public housing
units in an August 8, 1949 address to the City Council.
70
As a statement of the premises
underlying public housing, this speech merits close reading because it marks the way that

68
Cohen-Marks, "Community Redevelopment," 419-20.
69
Parson, ""This Modern Marvel"," 341-42, 47.
70
A Special Message on Public Housing Delivered to the City Council on Monday, August 8th, 1949 by Honorable
Fletcher Bowron Mayor of Los Angeles. In Folder “Housing Authority”, box 49, Fletcher Bowron Collection,
Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
187
a rhetoric of drawing boundaries against the slums permeated the program. Bowron
began by stating a political reality; the Federal Housing Act of 1949 had created funds for
slum clearance and public housing, funds which came in part from Los Angeles
taxpayers, and which would be spent on other cities if Los Angeles’ CRA, created in
1948, did not enter into a Cooperation Agreement with the Federal government to enact a
clearance and housing program. Bowron insisted that housing was being pursued because
of the danger of slum areas; places deviant and destructive to the life chances of any
children growing up in or near them, and “for which local taxpayers must pay and pay
heavily, in increased costs of public health, fire, police, and other municipal services.”
This assessment delved into the lurid, citing high rates of both venereal disease and
juvenile delinquency in the slums. The Mayor estimated, parroting current discourse on
the relationship of places in the city, that residents of “sections where there is good
housing” received only thirty-two cents worth of services for each tax dollar, with the
remaining sixty-eight subsidizing the slums. Bowron’s speech connected the two
imperatives of slum clearance and public housing.
71
However, the political thrust of the
speech was to place slum clearance as the principal priority of the program, with public
housing as merely necessary to effectively house the displaced population in order to
allow private redevelopment.
72
Bowron’s address fit foursquare with the decade-old
pattern of imagining people in place as obstacles to progress and the health of the city.

71
Title I provided Federal support for slum clearance, while Title III made available funds for the construction of
public housing.
72
“We cannot clear our blighted areas or make possible redevelopment unless some means can be found to house the
displaced families of low income who now occupy considerable portions of the areas marked for redevelopment.” The
pledge to clear slums was used politically to soothe voters who questioned the validity of public housing. Cuff, The
Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism 216.
188
Further, Bowron argued that the housing program would “undertake a vigorous
program of slum clearance by placing new housing projects in slum areas or bad housing
sections” that were already considered unattractive to private capital. When Bowron
affirmed that housing projects would be “located in accordance with surveys and studies
to provide the maximum in slum clearance and Community Redevelopment,” he was in
effect pledging to fulfill the racialized program of spatial reordering launched in the
1930s by moving the poor into less centrally-located districts. The surveys he referred to
had already been conducted; in marking the boundaries of slum districts, they
institutionalized as the policies of the City Planning Department the judgments—down to
the scale of the tract, block, and household--made by appraisers, realtors, and white
homeowners about racial minorities.
When private real estate interests, led by the Chamber of Commerce and the
Times, sought to shut down the Los Angeles Housing Authority, HACLA had to couch
its appeal to usefulness in a representation of the city as dangerously blighted.
Fortunately (for the Housing Authority) this representation had been rehearsed through a
decade of housing advocacy and reform beginning with The City in 1939, and carried on
in wartime master plans. In 1951, HACLA, in concert with the University of Southern
California’s film school, produced a short film called And Ten Thousand More to
dramatize the need for housing.
73
The production is not particularly notable as art. The
film was fully consistent with The City and other New Deal-era social realist visual
representations of poverty in its depictions of slum life, and in its optimism about modern

73
Algernon G. Walker and Gene Petersen, "And Ten Thousand More," (Housing Authority, City of Los Angeles,
1951). Viewed as VHS transfer from 16 mm at Moving Image Archive, School of Cinematic Arts, University of
Southern California. Thanks to Valerie Schwan.
189
(and modernist) housing developments as a social panacea.
74
Its lack of originality
was not a notable obstacle to its deployment as a political tract; its audience would have
found it a concise crystallization of the disparate assumptions about poor communities
governing even liberal reform efforts.
75
And Ten Thousand More worked on the
intersection of altruism and fear in the middle-class electorate to advance a liberal
agenda. Its rhetoric and its staging illustrate the dynamics at work in municipal planning
and housing offices.
The film’s plot follows a newsman whose editor directs him to investigate
HACLA’s request for funding for the ten thousand units. Though the newsman is
skeptical about the extent of the slum crisis, he dutifully makes HACLA’s offices his first
stop (standards for political journalism have evidently not changed much). There, he sees
maps of “blighted districts” that indicate the extent of the problem. When he goes out
into the field, the reporter is overwhelmed by the realization that “there were slums
tucked in everywhere,” though the problem was apparently of sufficiently low severity
that he “hadn’t particularly noticed them before.”
76
This was not simply a matter of
poorly-written plot; it expressed the contradiction inherent in the city’s neighborhood-
scale calculus of blight. The maps the reporter saw in the HACLA offices were not
props, but actual maps produced by the planning department precisely to map “blight”
across the city. In 1945, the City Planning Commission had designated 70 square miles of

74
Spalding, "Myth of the Classic Slum," 114. HACLA also sent out Leonard Nadel as a “one man photo unit” to
document slum conditions in late 1930s. His photographs “totally corroborated the official cliché of the blighted slum
whose dilapidated condition required not repair but slum clearance.”
75
The film was produced for screening by civic groups and for broadcast, though a ProQuest search for the title in the
Times, not surprisingly, does not reveal any listings for the film’s airing. Rick Prelinger, The Field Guide to Sponsored
Films (San Francisco, CA: National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006) 6-7.
76
Walker and Petersen, "And Ten Thousand More."
190
the city for a series of housing studies to determine which areas might qualify for
redevelopment under California’s Community Redevelopment Act. Unsurprisingly, the
areas chosen for study were south and east of downtown, the areas of nonwhite
settlement, extending as far to the west as Western Avenue.
77
Significantly, two
measures of blight chosen for graphic representation were the assessed valuation per
square foot for property and the average rent; the lowest-rated areas on both counts were
in Watts and in the industrial flats near the river (rated at under fifteen cents per square
foot—Central Avenue and much of Boyle Heights rated slightly higher at $.16 to $.25,
but in the area near Central Avenue to the south of Slauson, the tax assessor judged racial
purity to be worth an average of $.26 to $.50 per square foot). In case the point were not
clear enough, darker coloration on the maps indicated blight.
78
The judgments of the real
estate appraisers were influencing public policy. Pilot studies of blighted areas completed
in the next two years showed that the study area was virtually all “blighted” and
“marginal,” suggesting perhaps that the selection of the study area had presupposed the
results of the study.
79

Visually, the film depicted these slums not with long, sweeping shots that might
have demonstrated the uneven quality of housing; it rather used close shots of very
dilapidated housing and poor inhabitants (almost always unsupervised children or women
and children, almost always apart from any neighborhood social activity) as metaphors

77
Los Angeles (Calif.). City Planning Commission., Accomplishments, 1945, City Planning Commission 12.
78
Ibid. 15, 20-21.
79
Los Angeles (Calif.). City Planning Commission., Accomplishments, 1947, City Planning Commission (Los Angeles:
1947) 14-15. These areas corresponded roughly to the red-graded areas on HOLC’s master map of Los Angeles. This
proves not that HOLC dictated judgments of blight to local agencies, but that surveyors throughout the area study
regime shared a common sense about where the slums were and their choices of areas to survey presupposed their
conclusions. See Cuff, "Fugitive Plans," 107.
191
for the slums. Except for some panoramic shots of the Chavez Ravine hillsides, the
race of the inhabitants was the only thing that offered any clue to the specific locations.
The film did not need to perform this geographic work; if a viewer’s mental map of the
city’s racial boundaries was not sufficiently honed to locate these images in real places,
the Planning Department could provide maps sufficient to place these visuals anywhere
within seventy square miles.
These visuals were humanistic, creating a sense of the danger of abandoned rail
yards as playgrounds and framing one young black mother and her infant in a pose
evoking Dorothea Lange’s famous “Migrant Mother,” but they also fit into a deliberate
visual pattern of effacing the influence of communal life in the slums, a pattern common
to HACLA’s visual presentations of blight.
80
In its reliance on depictions of poor
minorities and effacement of more successful patterns of local presencing in “slum”
neighborhoods, combined with narration of the infectious danger of disease and crime
from their communities, And Ten Thousand More was not far removed from the rhetoric
of racial exclusion. When images of the black and brown poor of the city were
accompanied by narration that stressed juvenile delinquency rates “five, ten, even sixty
times higher than the city average,” and bemoaned that “our tax money’s wasted when
they’re [sic] spent curing slum-bred diseases,” the film made the case as much for the
quarantining of the poor as for modern public housing.
These decisions were formed in light of the perception of areas of the city as
“black” or “Mexican.” Wild argues that housing, even the incomplete program eventually

80
Spalding, "Myth of the Classic Slum," 114.
192
realized, changed the spatial practice of Los Angeles, creating monoracial areas that
reflected the wishes of civic authorities for neater, more discretely bounded racial
communities, for a multiracial order that was nonetheless contained by the limits of
liberal politics. This argument is incomplete, in that it ignores the pivotal role that
political economy played alongside ideals in guiding housing policies. Since Federal and
private assessment policies encouraged by the Federal government steered private capital
away from multiracial areas “at risk,” they institutionalized the color line as part of the
political economy of place, and created fiscal incentives and cultural support to housing
authorities to steer public housing toward those areas. Before 1943, HACLA policy
ostensibly prohibited the disturbing of racial balance of areas through the construction
and settlement of housing projects. African-American leaders protested this policy,
arguing that it hindered the Authority’s ability to house black war workers, the least
adequately housed population in the region, and succeeded in gaining a first-come, first-
served policy for placing applicants.
81

Unfortunately, the modification of HACLA’s Jim Crow policies extended only to
the acceptance of applicants for residence; interracial projects were fiercely resisted in
white residential areas and by default consigned to areas that matched HACLA’s
interpretation of the map of racial risk in the city.
82
The poor of color could occupy new
buildings, but often near the same places they had lived before. The cost of acquiring
land factored in as well; armed with racialized maps of “blight” the city could most
effectively acquire land in areas where “subversive” elements had already presenced

81
Sides, L.A. City Limits 116.
82
Ibid. 120.
193
themselves. This logic was shown in the cost assessments conducted by the city’s
planners in 1951; low cost of land was explicitly acknowledged as a principal siting
decision.
83
By 1951, the imperative to purge downtown of subversive elements, even at
the expense of exacerbating “slum” problems elsewhere, became clear. City planners had
isolated five components of the “slum” problem: minority population, density, old
housing stock, low rent, and poverty.
84
Since areas populated by minorities were already
considered blighted regardless of their density, alleviating the population density of
minority neighborhoods presented a problem in that doing so would spread blight over a
wider area. Given the political difficulty of using public housing for racial desegregation,
planners made a virtue of low land values by targeting many existing areas of minority
settlement for slum clearance and redevelopment.
85

Most of Los Angeles’ left and liberal housing advocates insisted retrospectively
that the defeated initiative for a large-scale housing project at Chavez Ravine condemned
public housing in the city to reproducing and solidifying existing ghettoes, an argument
made most forcefully and influentially by Frank Wilkinson, a HACLA official whose
leftist political affiliations were at the heart of the red-baiting that eventually killed the
Chavez Ravine project.
86
Wilkinson’s claims must be considered in light of the plans laid

83
Robert Evans Alexander and Drayton S. Bryant, Rebuilding a City; a Study of Redevelopment Problems in Los
Angeles (Los Angeles: Haynes Foundation, 1951).
84
Ibid. 4-5.
85
Ibid. 7.
86
Wilkinson, "And Now the Bill Comes Due." Mike Davis and Gerald Horne, among others, have cited Wilkinson’s
account as evidence that the failure of Los Angeles to enact its full public housing plan contributed to overcrowding,
poverty, and social unrest in Watts, MacArthur Park, and other high-density, low-income minority neighborhoods from
the 1960s through the 1990s. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1995) 215-16. Don Parson is more critical of the promise of the Chavez Ravine project
to ease Los Angeles’ conjoined problems of race, class, and social unrest, though his criticism focuses on the density of
the proposed development and the historical likelihood that it would have developed into a high-rise ghetto for the very
194
out in 1951. While the Chavez Ravine site was declared to be “the key log in the
jam”, a sparsely populated area that could absorb the overflow of slum clearance, plans
indicated otherwise.
87
Bryant and Alexander listed ten proposed redevelopment sites in
the city; of these, the City Planning Department had conducted sufficient pilot research to
set projections for eight that compared current and future populations. These eight areas
already had a population of 56,576. After “redevelopment,” these areas, which, except
for Chavez Ravine and Pacoima in the northeast San Fernando Valley, were already
defined as overcrowded, would house 77,971 people. Chavez Ravine was slated to house
a net increase of 5,573 people, and Pacoima 5,078, collectively accounting for only half
of the proposed relocation of the poor. Sites in East Los Angeles, along Central Avenue
near Jefferson and Adams Streets, and in Watts were all projected to have greater density
than before.
88

The logic of racial containment worked not simply through the abstract, far-order
ideal of monoracial places, but through the mutually reinforcing near-order practices of
mapping risk as a racial phenomenon and the local political economy of urban land. The
early public housing developments illustrated the phenomenon. The Housing Authority
set up the Aliso Village project near the Flats, the William Mead Homes at the Ann
Street Redevelopment Area northeast of Downtown, the Estrada Courts over the Fickett
Hollow area along Whittier Boulevard just before it passed east across the city limits, the

poor, and does not address the way in which the rest of the proposed housing plan accommodated and exacerbated
prevailing segregation patterns. Parson, ""This Modern Marvel"," 348.
87
Alexander and Bryant, Rebuilding a City 58.
88
Ibid. 20. For Chavez Ravine, pilot studies targeted the post-redevelopment population to increase from 3,769 to
9,342. Pacoima was planned to increase in population from 1,602 to 6,680. For the Adams area pre- and post-
redevelopment populations were set at 8,500 and 11,763, respectively. Hazard Park on the East Side was to increase
from 6,100 to 6,500 population, adjacent Prospect Park from 10,400 to 13,400, and Watts from 18,532 to 23,986.
195
Pueblo Del Rio development centered at 53d Street and Long Beach Boulevard,
approximately a mile east of Central Avenue and a mile north of Slauson Avenue, and the
Hacienda Village wartime housing development in Watts. All of these were located in
areas declared blighted and designated for slum clearance largely based upon the racial
composition of their populations.

The Public Production of Monoracial Places
Studying the impact of public housing siting decisions after the war, sociologist
Lloyd Fisher argued that powerful interests had designated Watts as the appropriate area
for wartime black settlement, resulting in racial tensions between black, Mexican, and
Anglo residents in the immediate aftermath of the war.
89
There is no need to imagine
such a conspiracy, however; this accorded with the severe need for housing, the
unwillingness of local or federal governments to demand desegregation in the private
market, and the fact that racial “blight” made land in Watts cheap to acquire for federal
war worker housing. Fisher compared the 1940 census and population studies conducted
in 1947 to conclude that the area’s population had shifted from “about equal proportion”
of Anglo, Mexican, and Black residents to (variously) five-sixths or 80 percent black.
This proportional shift was not achieved through significant outmigration of whites or
ethnic Mexicans, but through a rapid influx of black migrants and the establishment of
the Hacienda Village public housing project, “all interracial by design, but occupied

89
Fisher, The Problem of Violence: Observations on Race Conflict in Los Angeles 11.
196
almost exclusively by Negroes.”
90
Hacienda Village was a wartime project, and for
the duration was designated as housing for war workers, under a Federal policy of
nonsegregation that made Los Angeles’ public housing, briefly, the most integrated in the
nation.
91
It is instructive to compare novelist Arna Bontemps’ impressions of public
housing during the war and in the 1960s. In 1945, Bontemps and Jack Conroy
collaborated on an impressionistic history of the Watts and South Central community,
whose title, They Seek a City, expressed the hope of wartime migrants to Los Angeles.
Here, the authors saw that “calamity was avoided by a housing project.”
92
This work was
reprinted, but with strategic additions, in the year after the Watts unrest of 1965, retitled
Anyplace But Here. In this work, the authors recognized the fugitive quality of interracial
settlement and amended their earlier phrasing: “calalmity was postponed by replacing it
with a housing project…. For a few short years, Mudtown thought it had realized its
dream when it saw small Negro, Mexican, white and Filipino children splashing in a
wading pool.”
93
Twenty-one years later, it had become evident that the City of Los
Angeles had made Watts in particular into a low-rise version of what Arnold Hirsh has
termed “the second ghetto,” a publicly-planned concentration of the poor not by formal
discrimination, but by the conjoined workings of public housing and a racially stratified

90
Ibid. 7, 11. In the area north of 103d Street, 980 whites moved out during wartime, but were replaced by
approximately 5,000 new black residents. Notwithstanding this exchange, at the close of World War II, approximately
10,000 whites remained in Watts. Adler, "Watts" 262-64.
91
Sides, "Rethinking Black Migration: A Perspective from the West," 203.
92
Bontemps and Conroy, They Seek a City xvi. They referred specifically to the 400 unit Pueblo Del Rio complex,
completed in 1942, though the comparative assessment might apply equally well to any of the wartime developments.
HACLA proudly showcased the diversity of its projects during wartime, but neglected to mention that desegregation
stemmed from Federal mandate; after the war, the racialized job market did much of the work of segregating the low-
income projects.
93
Bontemps and Conroy, Anyplace but Here 9. Emphasis mine.
197
labor market.
94
After the rise of Poulson, HACLA completed less than half of its
original plan of public housing. The Nickerson Gardens, Imperial Courts, and Jordan
Downs projects were completed between 1953 and 1955; all located in Watts.
95

Central places in the city factored far more prominently in the imagination of
space used by municipal officials than did peripheral sites like Watts. After all, decisions
to move significant numbers of black residents out of Bronzeville to housing projects in
Watts and adjacent Willowbrook were met with fierce hostility by whites in the area.
This conflict first emerged when Los Angeles County sought to build emergency war
worker housing in unincorporated Willowbrook; the development would have housed
black workers. Willowbrook residents declared that their community would remain
white at all costs and that no public or private desegregation would be tolerated, and even
proposed annexing their area to Compton (at the time an all-white blue collar suburb) to
keep public housing out. This institutional conflict was expressed through the activities of
white youth gangs in Willowbrook and adjacent Lynwood, who initiated an increasing
number of fights with black and Mexican youth from Watts during the war years and
after.
96

In nearby South Gate, working-class white residents viewed the public policy
settlement of so many poor African Americans in Watts as a growing threat to hard-
earned equity in their homes, and by the mid-1960s had dug their heels in in a bitter fight
to prevent the integration of Jordan High School in Watts and South Gate High,

94
Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960.
95
Sides, L.A. City Limits 120.
96
Fisher, The Problem of Violence: Observations on Race Conflict in Los Angeles 11-12.
198
neighboring schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District that were nonetheless
starkly racially polarized.
97
Some observers have noted the increased conflict between
Mexican-American war veterans returning to Watts and newly arrived African-
Americans in the aftermath of war, conflict expressed by youth and adults alike. City Hall
certainly was aware of these conflicts by the late 1940s; major philanthropic foundations
were studying them in order to propose social work solutions to group conflict, and Los
Angeles County had already instituted a Human Relations Commission to study and
hopefully ameliorate intergroup violence.
98
Therefore, it was truly a bitter irony that the
city would deliberately antagonize ethnic Mexicans by locating more African Americans
in Watts through public housing in the 1950s. Some observers have suggested that the
establishment of Watts as a “black” area led the area’s ethnic Mexicans to relocate to the
growing “Mexican” barrios of East Los Angeles.
99
These were no doubt wrenching
decisions for individuals and families involved. It appears therefore that the city felt
content to shift racial conflict to the periphery so long as the crisis of Bronzeville and the
rest of central Los Angeles in the emerging age of the freeway was alleviated.
The prewar “urban crisis” of Los Angeles culminated in a series of ethno-spatial
public projects that moved “slum people” away from the center of the city, paving the
way for its eventual redevelopment as a center of global capital administration. Public
housing, and specifically its purposeful location in Watts and the Eastside, did create a
social landscape characterized by places that were monoethnic not only in the racialized

97
Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven 191, 210, 88-89.
98
Fisher’s study in fact emerged from this project.
99
Fisher, The Problem of Violence: Observations on Race Conflict in Los Angeles 10-11. Sides, L.A. City Limits 109.
199
imaginations of surveyors, but in demographic fact. After the completion and settling
of the three huge 1950s public housing projects in Watts, the area resembled more and
more the “second ghetto,” both in its dense and monoracial population and their
poverty.
100
By 1959, the area’s population was estimated at 95% black.
101
The regional
economy influenced this development; African Americans were the first to be released
from industrial employment after V-J Day. The combination of economic contraction,
racially skewed hiring and retention in industry, and the replacement of Watts’ housing
stock with public housing meant that Watts emphatically took on the character of
poverty. On the Eastside, public housing’s footprint was not so large, but racism affected
residents in and outside of public housing developments. The East Side was one of the
few areas in which ethnic Mexicans could settle, and the neighborhoods east of the river
became increasingly Mexican in ethnic character, particularly in Belvedere, just east of
Boyle Heights across the city limits. In Boyle Heights, racial turnover was abetted by
Federal mortgage policies and the opening of residential districts on the west side and the
San Fernando Valley to Jewish buyers but denied subsidized home loans to Jews who
would remain in the mixed environs of the neighborhood.
102

100
This term was coined to describe state-created public housing projects as places where the black poor were
consigned by public policy, in contrast to prior forms of African American ghettoes which had much greater economic
diversity. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960.
101
South Central Area Welfare Planning Council (Los Angeles County Calif.), "Watts Area Study; 1959 Report," (Los
Angeles: 1959), 1-3. This agency, an outreach of the United Presbyterian Church charged with coordinating private
charitable relief in the area of Los Angeles that included Watts, noted the problems posed by density in the Watts
census tracts that contained public housing. Watts as a whole housed 12,755 persons per square mile, more than double
the city average. The census tract containing the 1,100 unit Nickerson Gardens project housed more than 47,000
people per square mile, as did the tract containing the 700 unit Jordan Downs. The tract containing Imperial Courts, at
486 units the smallest of the postwar projects, was only slightly less dense at nearly seven and a half times the city
average. The wartime Hacienda Village project was relatively pastoral at 29,571 persons per square mile.
102
George J. Sanchez, ""What's Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews": Creating Multiculturalism on the
Eastside During the 1950s," American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004): 637-38. 22,000 Jewish families lived in the Valley
by 1950. The vast majority of these had arrived from outside of Los Angeles, so the Jewish community was not
200
Watts and the Eastside were not, of course, the only places where African
Americans and ethnic Mexicans lived in the metropolitan area; both groups mobilized in
the aftermath of the global war to defend democracy and to demand fairer housing
access, though this campaign would take decades and produce no clear victory, as
suburbanization and economic transformation changed the stakes of housing integration,
making it possible to expand the minority residential geography of Los Angeles but not
achieve truly integrated housing.
103
For some African Americans, leaving the
overcrowded ghetto in Watts and South Central meant fighting to integrate the southern
and southwestern suburbs of Inglewood, Carson, and Compton, theretofore the province
of blue-collar whites. For the more affluent, the district along Crenshaw Boulevard to the
west in the city of Los Angeles beckoned. Some of the still more affluent moved to the
new and integrated Baldwin Hills development, which was planned as an upscale and
multiracial (that is, black and white) community and remained one for some time.
104
All
of these physical migrations were accompanied by efforts to draw boundaries (principally
of class) within the African American population of Los Angeles, with residential

uprooted wholesale, and many Jews valued the heritage of Boyle Heights as both a Jewish and a multiracial
neighborhood. However, the Jewish residents who maintained residences or businesses on the east side were affected
by the shift in the center of organized Jewish life to the west; multiethnic community solidarity and ethnoreligious
solidarities were no longer mapped congruently on the landscape.
103
Two related research projects affirm this phenomenon statistically. Philip J. Ethington, William H. Frey, and Dowell
Myers, "The Racial Resegregation of Los Angeles County, 1940-2000," in Race Contours 2000 Study (Los Angeles
and Ann Arbor, MI: University of Southern California, University of Michigan, 2001). Accessed by author at
http://www.usc.edu/schools/sppd/research/census2000/race_census/research_reports/research_reports.htm. Philip J.
Ethington, "Segregated Diversity: Race-Ethnicity, Space, and Political Fragmentation in Los Angeles County, 1940-
1994," (John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, 2000). Digital file accessible at http://www-
rcf.usc.edu/~philipje/CENSUS_MAPS/CENSUS_2.html. Cited with author’s permission.
104
Lawrence B. de Graaf, "African American Suburbanization in California, 1960 through 1990," in Seeking El
Dorado, ed. Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western
Heritage, 2001), 412. Sides, L.A. City Limits 121-23, 27-29.
201
locations signifying higher status and prestige moving from east to west.
105
There is
little written about ethnic Mexican suburbanization.
106
However, to the east and Southeast
of Los Angeles, ethnic Mexicans had modest success in entering working-class
residential suburbs.
107

However, if more affluent racial minorities wished to use their movement out of
Watts and South Central as a strategy for integration (both by forcing thei issue by their
migration and by distancing themselves from the slum symbolism attached to Watts and
Central Avenue or East Los Angeles), they faced two obstacles. First, whites were
migrating out of the central city at an even faster rate, growing increasingly isolated from
nonwhites in their residential areas. White migration could be termed “suburbanization,”
but this term misleads, as it obscures the opening of the vast San Fernando Valley, most
of which lay inside Los Angeles’ city limits, as a residential area.
108
Because the Valley

105
This has been identified as a principal structural support for the 1965 civil unrest in Watts; affluent black leadership
grew increasingly detached from the life of the black poor, who for their part were increasingly resentful of the “flight”
of more successful citizens out of the established black community. Horne, Fire This Time 50-51. Sides, L.A. City
Limits 125. Community area population trends illustrate this split spatially; Central Avenue declined in population, as
did most of central Los Angeles between 1950 and 1960. Public housing in Watts absorbed the lower socioeconomic
portion of this migratory stream, while rapidly increasing populations in West Adams and Baldwin Hills absorbed the
wealthier exodus from the overcrowded Central Avenue district. Los Angeles (Calif.). City Planning Commission.,
Accomplishments, 1960, City Planning Commission (Los Angeles: 1960) 31.
106
As Romo points out, of course, the movement of Mexicans out of the Plaza and into Boyle Heights, Belvedere, and
the rest of the Eastside in the 1920s is, properly speaking, suburbanization, and, like classic white suburbs, was enabled
by the streetcar lines that tied the new settlements to industrial workplaces. The material difference stems from the fact
that this movement was motivated in part by need, and in part by the ethnic cleansing of the Plaza district, and was
followed by industry and densification. Romo, East Los Angeles 78-79. University of Southern California PhD
Candidate Jerry Gonzalez is completing a dissertation that will make a vital contribution to understanding the
participation of ethnic Mexicans in Los Angeles’ postwar suburbanization.
107
Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven 194. Sides, L.A. City Limits 110. Romo suggests that prior to World War II the
presence of Mexicans in Lynwood and other working class suburbs in southeast Los Angeles County was considered
less threatening than the presence of African Americans, enabling an earlier toehold for Mexicans in these suburbs.
This perspective is intriguing but it is supported anecdotally and does not reflect the extent to which 1930s surveyors
regarded Mexicans as a subversive racial element. Romo, East Los Angeles 85.
108
Approximately two-thirds of the land subdivisions recorded in Los Angeles City between 1945 and 1952 were in the
Valley, whose population (the part in the City of Los Angeles, excluding the cities of Burbank and San Fernando)
exploded from 112,000 in 1940 to 310,000 in 1950, and passed 400,000 in 1952. Areas in the western Valley were
growing even faster, albeit from lower initial populations, increasing by a factor of two to four or more between 1950
202
opened as a white residential section, the city of Los Angeles did not lose a
significant share of its absolute white population as nearly all other major cities did
nationwide.
109
Nonetheless, the Valley grew as a distinct and racially homogenous
section. In fact, the only sections of the Valley that were significantly open to African
American and ethnic Mexicans in the 1950s were Pacoima (part of Los Angeles) and the
adjacent city of San Fernando, located in a section of the northeastern Valley that had
been opened to minorities during its nineteenth-century agricultural and railroad
settlement days.
110
Not coincidentally, the City Planning Commission had designated
Pacoima for a blight study and possible redevelopment.
111
As I will discuss in future
chapters, the dynamics of suburbanizaton, and particularly the incorporation of new
suburban cities in the 1950s, implied an increasing resistance to metropolitan community.
For now, it is sufficient to note that, whether it ended inside or outside of the city
limits, suburban white migration contributed substantially to an increase in residential
segregation in the area after the Second World War. This segregation can be measured in
different statistical ways, but the two most germane to the redrawing of racial boundaries
are the (Residential) Isolation Index and the related (Residential) Interaction Index, which
measure the statistical likelihood that social encounters that a randomly chosen person of

and 1960. More than 100 new school sites were planned and opened in the Valley by the Los Angeles Unified School
District in this time. Los Angeles (Calif.). City Planning Commission., Accomplishments, 1952, City Planning
Commission (Los Angeles: 1952) 22-3, Los Angeles (Calif.). City Planning Commission., Accomplishments, 1960, City
Planning Commission 6, 31.
109
Horne, Fire This Time 217.
110
Ibid. 226.
111
Hanson and Beckett, Los Angeles: Its People and Its Homes 111. In Los Angeles Census Tracts 1 and 4 there were
70 and 34 black residents (1.6 and .5%) respectively, and 165 and 295 “others” (3.8% and 4.0%) respectively. While
these are not high percentages, they are well in excess of the established thresholds for racialized blight. Alexander and
Bryant, Rebuilding a City 38.
203
one racial identity will experience will be with a person of his or her own race or a
person of a different specified race.
112
Researchers have assembled data for the period
1940 to 1990 for this comparison, and concluded firmly that whites in Los Angeles
County segregated themselves from other races in the last half of the Twentieth
century.
113
Any individual member of a minority group became significantly less likely
to encounter whites in their home census tract between 1940 and 1990.
114
When viewed
from the perspective of African Americans, the picture of increased segregation is
perhaps more stark; between 1940 and 1970, the Interaction Index for blacks with whites
fell from the modest level of forty-five percent to fifteen percent, and a member of any
non-black racial group experienced less than a 10% likelihood of having black neighbors
for almost the entire period. In other words, black Angelenos were least likely to orient
their social contacts toward members of other races, and members of other races were
unlikely to make African Americans the prime focus of their social networks.
115

112
Though imperfect, the residential census tract is most often used as the geographic unit of measurement. A citywide
or countywide measure of isolation or interaction is a summary function of the indexes for all of the tracts in the wider
area, weighted to account for unequal distribution and the relative populations of different groups. In this way, a
citywide index of isolation for a racial group is a better measure of the extent to which the members of a group are
segregated than the Index of Dissimilarity, which measures the percentage of group members who would have to move
to different geographic units (tracts within a city or county) to make their distribution in every tract match their
proportion of the total area population. Ethington, Frey, and Myers, "Racial Resegregation," 6.
113
The “Index of Residential Isolation” shows “the probability that Whites, Blacks, (Asians), and Hispanics would
interact primarily with members of their own groups in their own specific census tracts.” Values for the index are
represented on a scale of 0 to 1.0; as the value approaches 1.0 the likelihood that the next person that an individual
encounters in their home census tract will be of the same race approaches 100%. For whites, this index held at 90% or
higher through the 1960 census, and above 80% in 1970. For any nonwhite individual, the likelihood of interacting
with whites in their census tract (the Interaction Index for each race with whites) fell between 1940 and 1990.
Ethington, "Segregated Diversity," 24. The decrease in white isolation is almost entirely attributable to the growth of
the Latino and Asian populations of Los Angeles and the attendant reduction of the white share of the County’s
population. Ethington, Frey, and Myers, "Racial Resegregation," 8.
114
Ethington, "Segregated Diversity," 26.
115
Ibid., 36. Ethington, Frey, and Myers, "Racial Resegregation," 9.
204
For ethnic Mexicans, figures reflect the increased Mexican population of Los
Angeles both before and especially after national immigration reforms in 1965.
Accordingly, because the Mexican share of population was increasing relative to the
white share, an individual white Angeleno grew steadily more likely to have a “Hispanic”
neighbor (though this probability was only 4% in 1950, 7% in 1960, and 14% in 1970).
Nonetheless, the probability of any “Hispanic” Angeleno having white neighbors
decreased rapidly from 1940 to 1950, and from 1960 to 1980 after a slight increase from
1950 to 1960.
116
This brief period of integration in part represents the organization of the
“G.I. Generation” of Mexican-American political and community activists, who pressed
for inclusion in American institutions (occasionally by staking out a racial position as
white ethnics); The successes and limitations of this organizing will be discussed in
further chapters; for now it is sufficient to note that the efforts of ethnic Mexicans to
settle in the suburbs was complicated by the desire of whites not to share their
neighborhoods with them.

Policing and the Naturalization of Racial Boundaries
Since whites who kept residing in the city of Los Angeles were becoming less and
less likely to encounter nonwhites in their residential lives, more affluent blacks and
Mexicans experienced a second obstacle to their spatial strategies for civil rights; they
became perversely reliant on municipal organizations, and especially the police, to tell
the story of their races. Unfortunately, this temporally overlapped with the tenure of

116
Ethington, Frey, and Myers, "Racial Resegregation," 13-14.
205
Chief William Parker, which began in 1950 and lasted until his death in 1966.
Parker’s enthusiasm for publicity and frequent racially inflammatory rhetoric, along with
his avowed strategy of protecting white middle class citizens by cordoning off minority
areas of the city and the controversial career of his protégé Daryl Gates, have earned him
recognition as the “Philosopher Cop” of Los Angeles and a place in the pantheon of local
civil rights villains.
117

It is necessary, however, to place Parkerism within a longer historical pattern, in
which the police acted as one of many agents in a broad social project of differentiating
and dividing the space of the city, rather than using his tenure to mark a qualitative turn
for the worse in police-minority relations.
118
Parker’s public statements reveal a harsh
moralism, and a refusal to accept any of the liberal sociological explanations for crime in
his era. Whereas the LAPD in 1944 commissioned a bibliography for officers suggesting
that familiarity with works ranging from Myrdal’s American Dilemma to the anti-
essentialist cultural anthropology of Ruth Benedict and Franz Boaz might ease the
hostilities between the police and minority communities that had erupted in 1943, and
established human relations training in the Police Academy in the ensuing years, Parker

117
I take this apt phrase from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Abandonment," in Annual Meeting, American Studies Association
(Oakland, CA: 2006). Those seeking a fuller analysis of Parker’s program and philosophy may see Martin J. Schiesl,
"Behind the Badge: The Police and Social Discontent in Los Angeles since 1950," in 20th Century Los Angeles:
Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict, ed. Norman M. Klein and Martin J. Schiesl (Claremont, Ca: Regina, 1990).
Minority complaints against Parker were legion, catalogued in United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings
before the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Hearings Held in Los Angeles, California, January 25, 1960,
January 26, 1960; San Francisco, California, January 27, 1960, January 28, 1960 (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.,
1960). Discussed in Sides, L.A. City Limits 135-37.
118
This is the implicit chronological argument drawn by Schiesl, "Behind the Badge."
206
held little to no truck with social theorists.
119
Armed with statistics, Parker was
unapologetic for the heavy-handed police presence in minority communities. In a famous
address to the Conference of Christians and Jews in 1955, the Chief, probably sensitive to
his audience, backed off the more racialist aspects of his worldview:
There is no inherent weakness in any racial stock which tends it toward crime.
But—and this is a “but” which must be borne constantly in mind—police field
deployment is not social agency activity. In deploying to suppress crime, we are
not interested in why a certain group tends toward crime, we are interested in
maintaining order.
120

Parker expressed the belief that “sob sisters” exploited sympathy for the poor to turn
public opinion unfairly against the police, comparing his critics to fans of professional
wrestling in the sentimentality of their moral convictions.
121

Ironically, it was Parker’s view of good and evil that resembled the moral
universe of the ring, or perhaps a B-grade western movie. For the chief, the police stood
squarely between civilization and savagery, terms that he clearly viewed as racial. As he
told a meeting of the Legal Secretaries’ Association in 1951,
The early Caucasians who settled North America came here primarily from
Europe where they were unhappy under governments they believed to be
tyrannical. These hardy pioneers carved out of a wilderness the greatest nation in
all of history and provided for us the highest level of economy the world has ever
seen.
122

119
Municipal Reference Library Los Angeles Public Library, "The Prevention and Control of Race Riots; a
Bibliography for Police Officers, Compiled by the Municipal Reference Library," (Los Angeles, Calif. Los Angeles:
n.p., 1944). Discussed in de Graaf, "The Changing Face and Place of Race," 754.
120
William H. Parker and O. W. Wilson, Parker on Police (Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 1957) 161. On the same
quotation, see Schiesl, "Behind the Badge," 157-58.
121
Parker and Wilson, Parker on Police 24-5.
122
Ibid. 29.
207
Parker’s mythology cast white Angelenos as pioneers, which both obscured the fact
that contemporary whites were seeking to separate themselves from the rest of the
metropolitan population and pointedly cast nonwhites in the role of “Indians.” Large
areas of the city were, in Parker’s mind, places of danger and disorder:
It would be difficult to devise a combination more conducive to inter- and intra-
group friction than that found in the typical American city. Rarely does history
record so many people of varied beliefs and modes of conduct grouped together in
so competitive and so complex a social structure. The confusing variety of
religious and political creeds, national origins, and diverse cultures is matched
only by the extremes of ideals, emotions, and conduct found in the individuals
which make up that structure…. Charged with maintaining this precarious order
by enforcing this confusion of laws, is the law enforcement agency.
123

These statements have been summed up in Parker’s famous phrase identifying the police
as a “thin blue line” separating civilization and savagery. As we have seen, that line in
Los Angeles has always referenced existing places, and the phrase has reverberated with
quite different tone depending which side of that line the listener occupied.
Parker’s department represented the statistical distribution of crime in ways that
revealed how completely public authority had been structured around social and
especially racial boundaries. One 1952 map of crime distribution, for example, shows the
operational areas of the Department in outline, but disaggregated from each other.
124
In
any city as large as Los Angeles, geographic division of policing responsibility is
inevitable. However, administrative necessity should not obscure an understanding of

123
Ibid. 138. This paragraph was featured in many of Parker’s speeches. As cited here, it appeared in a 1955
commentary on “The Police Administrator and Public Relations,” though it appears reprinted in the same volume from
a 1954 publication in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “The Police Challenge in
Our Great Cities.”
124
Los Angeles Police Department, "Annual Report, 1952," (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Police Department, 1952), 30-
31.
208
crime as a problem that defies strict localization, regardless of where crimes occur or
arrests are made. In particular, the concentration of arrests for vice in the Central,
University, 77
th
Street, and Newton Divisions must be viewed in light of long patterns of
steering vice to the ghetto and abating it in other areas.
125
Yet, the Department gave visual
encouragement to anyone reading its annual report to consider the Valley as a wholly
separate place from the 77
th
Street and Hollenbeck Divisions.
In this respect Parker was only carrying on the existing practices of professional
policing based on statistics, arrest counts, and the effort to quantify crime as a racial
phenomenon, and using well-established discourses on crime to justify his policies.
While Parker did promote himself as the defender of the white middle classes against
criminal minorities, this was nothing qualitatively new. Parker’s historical significance
is that, presented with a set of increasingly segregated metropolitan places, Parker
committed his department with systematic vigor to maintaining that segregation. The
parallel is unmistakeable between the notion of a “thin blue line” and the red lines drawn
in residential security maps; both demarcated the Anglo city of progress and order from
the minority city of danger. And, as both representations and material facts of lived
space, policing as a spatial practice based on publicly disseminating crime statistics, like
lending based on perceived racial subversion, created and extended the racialized
conditions they purported to describe.

125
The statistics showed that the Central (Downtown) and Newton (Central Avenue) divisions led the way with 29.8%
and 28.7% of all vice arrests, respectively. The distribution of particular vices varied and seemed to reflect arbitrary
enforcement. More arrests for “bookmaking” were made in the Central, University (West Adams), 77
th
Street (Watts),
and Newton Divisions (22.5%, 16.8%, 13.4%, 18.0%); almost half of “other gambling” arrests (46.8%) were made in
Newton Division with Central, University, and 77
th
Street Divisions registering 15.5%, 14%, and 12% respectively;
Arrests for “sex perversion” were concentrated in Central and Hollywood Divisons (42.2% and 15.5% respectively),
but arrests for “prostitution,” while also concentrated downtown (57.6%) were also frequent in Harbor and Newton
divisions (9.8% and 13.6%), but not in Hollywood.
209
Testimony to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1958 showed that every
arrest that Parker’s LAPD made in the ghetto or the barrio served as further proof of
Parker’s worldview.
126
This worldview in turn justified increasingly intrusive and brutal
contact with the residents of the ghetto and the barrio; whether they had committed
crimes or were merely occupying public space, driving, or walking the streets, Parker’s
spatial and statistical logic dictated that shakedowns, intimidation, and brutality were
justified. As one historian has argued, Parker considered it the LAPD’s mission “to
subjugate neighborhoods, not win them over.”
127
He had, accordingly, a particularly
antagonistic relationship to minority organizations who protested policing methods,
describing them as demanding “a form of discrimination against the public as a whole,”
and effectively writing African American and Mexican American constituents out of his
conception of the public.
128

If one part of Parker’s strategy was to occupy the ghetto and the barrio with his
policemen, the other half of his bargain with middle-class Los Angeles was to maintain
the commitment to eradicating race mixing as a subversive influence that had taken root
through the 1930s and 1940s. While the policing of interracial musical culture in Los
Angeles long preceded Parker’s tenure, he pursued the project of separation with
particular vigor and thoroughness, and in the social circumstances of 1950s Los Angeles,
the enforcement of racial separation had increased significance. Central Avenue’s
musicians observed the success that Parker had in driving whites out of the Avenue’s

126
Schiesl, "Behind the Badge," 157-58.
127
Horne, Fire This Time 150.
128
Parker and Wilson, Parker on Police 162.
210
nightlife in the 1950s through a campaign of “heckling” and general harassment that
alienated affluent white nightclub patrons.
129
While we should not discount the extent to
which racial privilege can be reinforced by modes of social interaction, it is clear that
nightlife became less and less avenue for interracial contact, buttressing the residential
isolation of whites in the region.
In particular, the worlds of nightlife and youth culture, fraught with the potential
for sexual contact, were subject to intense scrutiny and police intervention aimed at
redirecting white youth from interracial social scenes. In addition to closing interracial
dances, Parker’s police notoriously staked out John Dolphin’s record store near Vernon
and Central in order to warn off carloads of white teens who had traveled to the ghetto in
search of new dance singles. Their warning was instructive; while the youths were
committing no crime by patronizing this black-owned shop, the police told them that it
was too dangerous for them to be there.
130
If white youth were unlikely to have black
youth as neighbors and schoolmates, cutting off contact through musical culture
eliminated another possible avenue of interaction and another potential ground for
reworking the social boundaries of the region.

Conclusion

129
Bryant et al., eds., Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles 365. This assessment is echoed in nearly every oral
history collected in this volume.
130
Macias, "Bringing Music to the People: Race, Urban Culture, and Municipal Politics in Postwar Los Angeles," 707-
08.
211
During the 1930s and 1940s, an urban crisis was invented in the city of Los
Angeles. The identification of racial minorities with particular places in the city was a
crucial component of the construction of the crisis. The successful efforts of ethnic
Mexicans and African Americans to claim a place in Los Angeles by establishing
communities brought those communities into conflict with white racism of a new and
distinctly public character. In the context of the Great Depression, a broad coalition of
Federal agencies, local real estate agents, and municipal planners and politicians
developed strategies and practices of appraisal and targeted redevelopment that both
identified racially diverse neighborhoods as a risk to property value and guided the
destruction of existing neighborhoods and the construction of public housing that
contained the poor of color in increasingly monoracial local places.
These kinds of actions are commonly interpreted as the work of large-scale state
power, power that ignores the specificity of local places and considers all territory under
its control as part of an abstract space to be dominated in the pursuit of power or capital
accumulation. In much critical geography literature, “place” is accordingly afforded a
valorized status as the domain of defense of community institutions and values, the
means by which the particular, the different, the heterogeneous is defended against the
homogenizing force of large-scale redevelopment. I have demonstrated that “place” can
be harnessed to precisely the opposite project. In Los Angeles, public authority
destroyed many multiracial neighborhoods and replaced them with largely monoracial
housing projects. Yet this initiative was accomplished by and through the knowledge of
specific places carried by the hordes of appraisers who evaluated the neighborhoods of
212
Los Angeles between 1936 and 1940. Intimate, if selective and prejudiced,
familiarity with individual places resulted in the ranking of some of them as fit to be
preserved and some as fit only for destruction.
During the “urban crisis” of the 1930s and 1940s, the conditions of minority
neighborhoods occupied a prominent place in public discourse in Los Angeles. After
public housing and policing appeared to resolve this crisis by creating a more segregated
set of local places, black and brown communities largely receded from the symbolic map
of Los Angeles, until they emerged in a second urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. In
this second crisis, the “problems” of school integration, poverty, perceived communal
and family dysfunction, or crime, were interpreted as bounded and limited to the ghetto
and the barrio, places largely created by public policy during the prior crisis.
213
Chapter 4: The City on the Air: Broadcast Culture and Metropolitanism in Los
Angeles

“My father worked for the Southern California Gas Company at its downtown
headquarters. When I was a boy in the 1950s, my father’s city seemed as remote
as any back East. I never felt that his downtown was the center of anything,
except in the noir films of the era, where Los Angeles looked like the capital city
of regret.”
1

“Representing the metropolis is never an innocent gesture but one that is always
motivated by cultural needs and ambitions.”
2

In the previous chapter, I described many of the public actors contributing to the
discursive and material construction of an urban crisis in the city of Los Angeles,
expressing views arrayed on a continuum between Chief Parker’s hard-nosed paranoia
and the Housing Authority’s more liberal sense of unease about the fitness of the
multiracial, economically diverse city as a moral space that nonetheless converged in a
hegemonic consensus for a radical reconstruction of urban space. Further, we saw
demographic evidence of the residential separation of white Angelenos through the
decision to relocate to the suburbs. In the next chapters I examine this migration more
closely in terms of public policy and cultural discourses about place. At this point,
however, an apparent convergence of thought in the public sphere compels us to
investigate the cultural supports for different rhetorics about places. Since
suburbanization and urban renewal unfolded roughly simultaneously to the rise of

1
D. J. Waldie, Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles, 1st ed. (Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2004) 125.
2
Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity 89.
214
television as a new and dynamic medium of the mass culture in the 1950s, many
scholars have taken up the task of linking mass culture to the practices of a variety of
spatial agents, both public and private, including the individuals whose locational
decisions remade metropolitan places so dramatically. Darnell Hunt provides a useful
summary of the stakes of this investigation with his comment that “Los Angeles,”
whether defined by the city limits or as a broader region, is a set of places made
“knowable” as a “collective representation.” Representations in mass media are, in part,
the answer to the epistemological question of how one “knows” an object called “the
city.”
3

The connections between the form of mass culture and the kinds of knowledge
drawn from it at any particular historical moment require some investigation. During the
late nineteenth century, newspapers emerged as a self-consciously urban medium. As
David Paul Nord argues, these papers did not simply report on events that took place in
their cities or serve an urban readership, they sought to establish themselves as
repositories of knowledge about the city that would guide their readers to an
understanding of their lives as intertwined with an urban social collectivity.
4
Scholars
have connected the rise of television in particular to the suburbanization of American
metropolitan areas. Some cultural historians have tried to interpret post-World War II
mass culture as a screen on which dominant ideas about the corruption of the city were
projected, driving white flight to the suburbs and a rejection of the complex social

3
Darnell M. Hunt, "Representing "Los Angeles": Media, Space, and Place," in From Chicago to L.A.: Making Sense of
Urban Theory, ed. M. J. Dear and Steven Flusty (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2002), 321-23.
4
David Paul Nord, "The Public Community: The Urbanization of Journalism in Chicago," Journal of Urban History
11, no. 4 (1985).
215
entanglements of the city.
5
Others have emphasized the concurrent growth of both
the suburbs and television as “engineered spaces,” each of which validated the other as
parts of a project of purifying social spaces through technological innovation.
6
In this
account, both the media referent and the audience are suburban, and the city appears as a
distinctly “other” place, or, more precisely, place-image.
I argue that in 1950s Los Angeles, television was not a destroyer of public
interaction but a contested discursive site with different possibilities for modifying and
promoting connections between people, different means of calling into being a “fictive
‘we’” through a mediated sense of metropolitan place.
7
Broadcasters, writers and
producers worked to define the character of the city and make that character an object of
everyday knowledge diffused across the metropolitan area. This process was complex,
and what viewers saw or producers aired was not always consistent. Rather, television
content was an imaginative space where the meanings of metropolitan life were
hammered out. Both an audience’s native knowledge about places and the messages
broadcast through the medium were relevant to the meeting of the minds that was formed
in the act of viewing. As I argued in Chapter 2, bankers, planners, housing advocates,

5
Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004).
6
Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2001) 5, 33-4. Spigel’s claim that both were “engineered” spaces is at odds with much of the thrust of her
argument. Insofar as a space is “engineered” it is purposeful and its constituent elements serve a purpose; Spigel
elsewhere argues that television brought social conflicts into suburban households that were engineered out of the
geographic location through politics and economics.
7
John Stevenson, "The Mediation of the Public Sphere: Ideological Origins, Practical Possibilities," in Philosophy and
Geography Ii: The Production of Public Space, ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 199-200.
216
and the police were key agents in the production of local knowledge about place and
often promoted a sense of futility about the prospects of the city as a social space.
But it should not be assumed that broadcasters only reflected these public
discourses. In this chapter, I argue that the production side of televised place images,
which remained urban and centripetal, lagged behind the spatial practices of a
suburbanizing audience. Local television stations in Los Angeles in the 1950s were
purposeful inheritors of the legacy of urbanist media Nord describes, affirming many of
the values of urban living even as other public voices were questioning the viability of
Los Angeles as a central city and bemoaning its lack of social cohesion. Locally
produced programs and network shows set in Los Angeles in the 1950s expressed a sense
that the white middle class belonged in the city, and even provided a limited mediation of
the anxieties created by the presence of cultural and social (to a lesser degree racial and
ethnic) diversity in the city. These programs in many cases did broadcast a belief that the
presence of difference in the city made the city special, exciting, and important.
Despite the seeming connections between white suburbanization and the rise of
television, including the compatibility of television entertainment with the domestic
patterns of the single-family home and the interdependence of broadcast media and the
advertisers who supported the emergent consumer culture of the period (centered
archetypally in suburban shopping centers), we need to remember that, while television
signals pervaded the atmosphere in a seemingly placeless fashion, the stations
broadcasting those signals were located in specifically urban places. Stations were
managed by businessmen with experience as urban dwellers, and programs were
217
produced by writers whose careers in show business and news and often their
personal lives marked them as urbanites. The history of institutions and content in Los
Angeles’ television universe suggests that the medium of television was by no means
atavistically suburban. As Spigel has argued, many early television executives voiced an
apparently sincere belief in the utopian possibilities of the medium, in its ability to draw
audiences together into a collective that crossed geographical distance.
8

This observation, however, should be extended to address the geographical
specificity of that effort. The big city of Los Angeles was part of the representational
space inhabited by many television writers and producers, and their products often gave
pride of place to the center of the metropolitan region even as their audiences were
migrating out. This sensibility was reflected in public affairs and local interest
broadcasts, and even more strongly in the most popular 1950s entertainment program set
in Los Angeles, Jack Webb’s Dragnet. This program, often dismissed either as formulaic
and rote or as reactionary pro-police propaganda, significantly reflected Jack Webb’s
complex relationship with Los Angeles as a native of the centrally-located Bunker Hill
neighborhood. The 1950s run of the program mobilizes a private history that challenges
the public history of blight and abandonment in Los Angeles through a fictive (but
meticulously realistic) urban world in which abandonment could be resisted. Dragnet was
but the most popular example of a production that demonstrates that television creators
were far from fatalistic about the fate of urban places, though they generally represented
those places through a lens of white populism that only partially mediated the racial

8
Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse 36.
218
dynamics of metropolitan change. The evolution of television into a suburban
medium was halting and slow. Television in Los Angeles became suburban well after its
audience did. When suburbanites recognized and mobilized themselves as distinct from
city dwellers (a process I will discuss in the next two chapters), they demanded, and
producers provided, programs that reflected this emergent sensibility.

Television and Historical Analysis
The use of television as historical evidence is complicated by the ephemerality of
the medium, the preservation of relatively few broadcast programs, and a presumption
that television programs (as opposed to television as a social and cultural practice) lack
enduring significance, to the point that many historians have instead read for trends in the
representation of places through film, a less ephemeral medium with a stronger cultural
pedigree, though it was in steep decline in popularity the 1950s and 1960s.
9
Two authors
argue in their survey of the representation of suburban places in film that the dense visual
iconography of film and the necessity for producers to seek a convergence of taste and
sensibility with their intended audiences make films “a warehouse for their age.”
10

Though this observation would apply no less to television, the survivability of film in

9
Film declined from its peak box office performance in 1946, due both to the internal dynamics of the film industry
and to direct competition from television. In particular, corporate sponsorship of TV programming proved a more
stable mode of financing production than the forms of finance used in making films, prodding many production
companies to focus resources on television. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American
Movies, Rev. and updated. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 272-78. Indeed, while Avila recognizes the
importance of television as a growing medium consistent with emergent suburban patterns of domesticity in the 1950s,
his analysis of cultural texts is limited to films, as are other discussions of the influence of fictive images on
perceptions of suburbia, including those offered by Beuka and Muzzio and Halper. Robert Beuka, Suburbianation:
Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), Douglas Muzzio and Thomas Halper, "Pleasantville? The Suburb and Its Representation in
American Movies," Urban Affairs Review 37, no. 4 (2002).
10
Muzzio and Halper, "Pleasantville? The Suburb and Its Representation in American Movies," 545.
219
archives, even of B-grade releases, ensures that most surveys of moving image
representations of places in Los Angeles catalogue films nearly exclusively.
11
Even film
historian Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself , a documentary that exhaustively
critiques the use of locations in the city as settings of convenience or as tools for
figurative metaphor rather than as “accurate” representations of “real” places, makes little
reference to televised images of places in Los Angeles.
12

Assessing the linkage between suburbanization and television images of place is
made more difficult by a slippage between stereotypical media images of suburbs and
historically practiced suburban lifestyles. Critics who draw from film or literature as
principal texts are tempted to critique the historical phenomenon of suburban life on the
terms presented by novelists and screenwriters, notably the themes of bland affluence,
conformity, and malaise, tropes that carry upper-class condescension.
13
As Catherine
Jurca argues, the suburban novel has been promoted on the pretext that the suburb is “the
environment we love to hate,” ignoring the fact that, historically, the “we” living in
suburbs tended to be very satisfied with their homes.
14
Embedded in this filmic critique

11
Here, I use the term “B-movie” in the sense established by American film studios to designate films produced on
limited budgets, with lesser stars, and often slated for release as the secondary component of a double feature
screening. There is a second connotation of the term that corresponds to the ratings applied to films by the Catholic
Legion of Decency in response to the perceived danger to youthful morality posed by sensational films. In this scheme,
a “B-movie” was one that was considered only somewhat morally objectionable. In practice, the subject matter of B-
movies as defined by the studios often reflected the Legion’s definition, as studios gave cheaper productions freer rein
to explore themes of violence, sexuality, and moral ambiguity.
12
Thom Andersen, "Los Angeles Plays Itself," (NBC Universal Audio Video Technology, 2003). Andersen also
replicates a distinction between “real” and “represented” places that is untenable in light of the evidence that media
representations exert material force in the production of metropolitan space.
13
Beuka, Suburbianation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film 14,
Catherine Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2001) 5-7, Muzzio and Halper, "Pleasantville? The Suburb and Its Representation in American
Movies," 547-48, Teaford, Metropolitan Revolution 87-88.
14
Jurca, White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel 161. Muzzio and Halper,
"Pleasantville? The Suburb and Its Representation in American Movies," 554.
220
of suburbia is a critique of television itself as a debased medium, delivering
stereotypically idiotic content.
15
Literary studies of suburban culture are often blind to
the populist tendencies of the medium of television. In her important study, Lynn Spigel
has circumvented judgments about the position of both suburbia and TV in hierarchies of
taste to argue that television and suburbs grew together as part of the same field of
cultural cognition; through the lived, physical, constructed space of the suburbs and the
electronic, broadcast, but no less constructed and designed, space of television, people
were able to form meaning and make sense of their place in the world.
16
Yet, Spigel’s
study replicates many of the assumptions of the literary dismissals of suburban life,
focusing on popular entertainment programs of the 1950s and 1960s that had a suburban
setting or orientation. The development of this sensibility is important, but a narrow focus
on it occludes the continued presence of urban settings and themes in television culture,
and ignores the specific dynamics of setting, audience, and place—knowledges that were
present in the television experience for Angelenos of the 1950s.
The treatment of those themes and settings has much to tell us about the changing
importance of urban space in American life, and, as with historical accounts of suburban
place-images, our understanding of the impact and content of images of urban places on
the small screen is infused with presumptions drawn from the study of film. The epigram
to this chapter references film noir and its connection to Los Angeles’ image as a seat of
regret, a lost cause in the suburbanizing metropolis where memoirist D.J. Waldie grew up

15
Many contemporary filmmakers critical of suburbia, for example, draw their critiques directly from the hollowness of
sitcom representations. Muzzio and Halper, "Pleasantville? The Suburb and Its Representation in American Movies,"
548-49. However, by the late 1950s, television itself recognized and parodied the domestic stereotypes it had created in
its early programming. Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse 116.
16
Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse 5.
221
and which provided the raw material for his vivid and intimate accounts of everyday
life. Film historians interpret the significance of noir very differently; many concerned
with the politics of the film industry suggest that noir embodied the redirection of left-
wing and populist themes through narratives of individualism and moral uncertainty in a
climate of political repression.
17
I stress the particular relationship of film noir to the
moral value of places because noir as an expressive mode and a moral discourse
resonates with the discourse of futility about Los Angeles that had emerged even from
more liberal initiatives for reform. Norman Klein in particular has stressed noir’s
symbolic use of the city setting to express anxiety over the presence of racial minorities
that influenced ostensibly liberal projects of slum clearance. This relationship, Klein
emphasizes, is more figurative than documentary, a mode “utterly false in its visions of
the poor, of the non-white in particular. It is essentially a mythos about white male
panic.”
18
As a consequence, many scholars, cultural historians in particular, have fixated
on noir as the mode of postwar popular culture most germane to the moment of spatial
reconstruction of cities and have concluded that the popularity of the mode reflects a
meeting of the minds on the part of audiences and producers entailing a rejection of the
city as irredeemable.
19
Notwithstanding the representational liberties classic noir films
took with the city, their “phantasms consume our own memory of the crisis of the city.”
20

17
Thom Andersen, "Red Hollywood," in Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society, ed. Suzanne
Ferguson and Barbara S. Groseclose (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985). Lary May, The Big Tomorrow:
Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
18
Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, The Haymarket Series
(London: Verso, 1997) 79.
19
This sense is most pointedly advanced by Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight. Elsewhere, though he
laments the fact, Douglas Muzzio leaps from a brief discussion of 1940s and 1950s noir informed largely by an
impressionistic summary of its clichés to an assessment of the cinematic framing of urban space in the post-1950s city
as a hellhole. This accounts for the visual and metaphoric impact of noir films, which may be reasonably interpreted as
222
Fewer scholars have interrogated the other crucial constitutive element of noir
in its relationship to places, one that exists in tension with the expression of racial
anxieties, namely an overriding concern with the legibility, centrality, and importance of
the city as a lived environment, and a profound anxiety over the pending eclipse of
central space in metropolitan consciousness. A significant exception to this pattern is
Edward Dimendberg, who interprets noir as a reaction to the declining importance of
central space, or an eclipse of “centripetal” modes of “knowing” the city.
21
For many
critics, the significance of noir’s relation to the city was one of visual metaphors located
in urban space by coincidence, beginning with the formulaic introduction of an outsider
entering the city through the seamy underworld of downtown.
22
Accepting this framing
means accepting that noir’s meaning hinges upon symbolic, narrative, or moral framing.
What is lost is the ability to distinguish between urban reality and representation, to
discern in noir what Dimendberg identifies as “spatiality… as a historical content as
significant as its more commonly studied formal and narrative features.”
23
Specifically,
noir expressed in the postwar period “a tension between a residual American culture and
urbanism of the 1920s and 1930s and its liquidation by the technological and social
innovations accompanying World War II.”
24

timeless, but not for the films interaction with the knowledge of place carried by audiences, which is both mediated and
highly specific to the historical moment.
20
Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory 80.
21
Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity 77.
22
Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory 77-78.
23
Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity 9.
24
Ibid. 3.
223
This interpretive disjunction is compounded by a temporal problem; the
heyday of noir films peaked in the 1940s, with the genre reaching its pinnacle in the
immediate postwar era. Though Dimendberg offers a strong corrective to the tendency to
abstract the mythology of film noir beyond its historical and spatial moment of
promulgation and reception, he also suggests that televised noir in the 1950s reflected
simply an abasement or bowdlerization of the urban tropes advanced in films. As
concerns the study of Los Angeles, this is unfortunate in that it lends some critical
prestige to representations produced by migrants to Los Angeles during the 1940s and
obscures the work of television writers with deeper roots in the city as well as profound
tensions within the ascendant medium of television. Noir and noir-influenced
representations of Los Angeles on television in the 1950s represented a moment of
profound tension in this historical juncture, and transmitted a strong loyalty to the city
and its people alongside stories of crime and deviance; many TV writers knew Los
Angeles in a way that militated against totally dismissing it.

Jack Webb’s Los Angeles
No better example can be found than Jack Webb’s Dragnet, the hit police
procedural drama that debuted on the radio in 1949 and successfully crossed over to
television on January 3, 1952. In his discussion of the police procedural as a cinematic
form within the noir tradition characterized by the “appropriation of true stories,
collaboration with law enforcement agencies, location cinematography, and voice-of-god
narration,” Dimendberg dismisses its televised incarnations as the flogging of a form past
224
its prime, with Dragnet a pale, recycled imitation of its filmic forebears.
25
This
dismissal forecloses on a valuable opportunity to understand a potent, widespread, and
influential expression of an urban spatial sense about Los Angeles. Dragnet was
preoccupied with centrality—most obviously constituted by its iconic use of Los
Angeles’ city hall (in the 1950s still the tallest structure in the skyline), the role of the
LAPD, and its urban settings--with the space of the city and its susceptibility to control
by organization (rather than by the efforts of a lone protagonist).
26
Further, in an era
when movie attendance was flagging, Dragnet presented this view of urban space on
millions of small screens weekly, in Southern California and nationwide.
27
This
oversight would not be so troubling if Dragnet merely repeated film noir’s take on Los
Angeles; however, Webb’s program departed in significant ways from the fatalistic
urbanism of the genre. The 1950s run of the program reflects to an underappreciated
degree Jack Webb’s own personal history with the “capital of regret,” a private history
that both parallels and challenges the public history of blight and abandonment in Los
Angeles and was expressed in Dragnet through a fictive (though meticulously, if
selectively, realistic) urban world in which abandonment could be resisted. Webb’s

25
Ibid. 66, 75.
26
Ibid. 65-68.
27
In 1953, Dragnet’s television audience averaged approximately 30 million weekly. Michael J. Hayde, My Name's
Friday: The Unauthorized but True Story of Dragnet and the Films of Jack Webb (Nashville, Tenn.: Cumberland
House, 2001) 66. By 1954 Dragnet drew 38 million viewers on its Thursday night slot, though it only outdrew I Love
Lucy once, in November, 1953. That audience remained at about 35 million weekly in 1956 and 1957, though this of
course represented a smaller percentage of American TV sets. Daniel Moyer and Eugene Alvarez, Just the Facts,
Ma'am: The Authorized Biography of Jack Webb (Santa Ana, Calif.: Seven Locks Press, 2001) 95, 117. These figures
correspond to 1954 Nielsen shares of 60.6, or 16 million of 27 million nationwide TV sets. Richard A. Sanderson, "An
Investigation into the Elements of Documentary Film and Their Use in the Production of the Television Film Series,
"Dragnet"" (University of Southern California, 1958) 71-72. Others have assessed Dragnet’s average audience over its
seven-year run in the 1950s at a 45 share. Karen Connolly-Lane, "More Than "Just the Facts": Dragnet as Reactionary
Mythology" (1997) 17.
225
representation of “The City” in Dragnet positioned its viewers at a moment just
before urban regret had sunk in, where the redemption of the city was still hoped and
fought for, potentially encouraging viewers to reassess both the hopeless noir image of
the city and the aggressive remaking of downtown space that was occurring even as the
program aired.
Webb was born in Santa Monica in 1920. Many scholarly treatments of Webb’s
life as a prologue to his career acknowledge his birth in the beach city, but do not detail
the rest of his biography prior to his broadcast career, one going so far as to suggest that
Webb deliberately obscured his roots to perpetuate a Horatio Alger mythos of himself as
a self-made man.
28
While Webb certainly accepted that characterization, it required little
fabrication for him to claim humble roots. Soon after his birth, Webb’s father abandoned
his mother, and the family (which also included his maternal grandmother) was forced by
poverty to leave the coastal city, taking up residence in an apartment building on Bunker
Hill, becoming part of the influx that was converting the once-fashionable Victorian-era
district into a dense neighborhood of poor and working-class renters.
29
Jack was therefore
approaching adulthood on Bunker Hill just as the HOLC, FHA, and WPA appraisers,
echoing predominant noir characterizations, were condemning the area as a hopeless
slum. The area was indeed poor and crowded; Webb recalled that the neighborhood
around his apartment at 237 South Flower Street was “too poor to steal in,” that his
family received County food assistance during the Depression, and that he was

28
Connolly-Lane, "More Than "Just the Facts": Dragnet as Reactionary Mythology" 9.
29
After a lengthy tenure at 237 South Flower, Webb’s family left Bunker Hill, moving in 1938 to a rooming house
above a warehouse at Eighth and San Pedro streets, and later that year to 36
th
Street and Vermont Avenue, two other
areas prominent in the catalogue of urban blight. Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 2-4, 23-24.
226
embarrassed to have classmates see his family’s shabby residence.
30
The 1939 WPA
housing survey of Los Angeles presents “just the facts” about Webb’s home just a year
after his family moved. It was a four-story wooden apartment building, constructed in
1900, containing 66 units. These rented for $11 a month, with cold water, no heat, and
shared toilets and bathing facilities, meeting the appraisers’ definition of urban blight.
31

HOLC appraisers during Webb’s nineteenth year described the neighborhood thusly:
This is one of the older and practically obsolete single family residential sections,
having had its beginning 50 years or more ago. It has been through all the phases
of decline and is now thoroughly blighted. Subversive racial elements
predominate; dilapidation and squalor are everywhere in evidence. It is a slum
area and one of the city’s melting pots.
32

While others around him in the neighborhood were drawn to juvenile delinquency and
street gangs, Webb looked back on his youth and concluded that his asthma, large ears,
and “Buster Brown” haircut marked him as a “sissy” not only unfit for membership in,
but unworthy even of harassment by a gang. Shut out of this mode of adolescent
socialization, Webb instead developed an interest in the performing arts at ethnically
mixed Belmont High School at the foot of Bunker Hill, a course of study and a school
that he recalled fondly.
33
If Webb recognized his family’s poverty, he also recognized in
a way that security mappers and appraisers did not that the neighborhood contained

30
Ibid. 4-6.
31
WPA household census for 237 S. Flower St.. 1939. From the WPA household census cards and employee records,
Los Angeles, 1939. Digitally reproduced by the University of Southern California Digital Archive. Available:
http://digarc.usc.edu. Accessed April 14, 2008.
32
These maps and reports are held as Los Angeles City Survey Files, U.S. Home Owners Loan Corporation, record
group 195, National Archives, Washington, D.C.. My access to them has been through the University of Southern
California Department of History, at http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/HOLC/. Noted hereafter by area
designation (HOLC). This area survey, dated 2/27/1939, is designated as area D-37, “Bunker Hill”.
33
Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 12.
227
positive social elements--good people, youth with potential, and school communities
of vitality and strength.
Webb’s childhood in Bunker Hill is significant not only to his biography, but
because it positions him as an author of an indigenous perspective on a neighborhood that
was otherwise mostly represented by outsiders. Most importantly, Bunker Hill
manifested a far more complex racial landscape than was recognized by security
mappers. A 1940 survey map produced by the County Housing Authority and the WPA
presents data on housing stock, rents, and racial composition at the block scale. While
some of the 32 inhabited blocks in the area bounded by Temple, Hill, Fourth and
Figueroa Streets were home to up to thirty-eight percent “households of a race other than
white,” the median block had 7.1 percent of its households identified as nonwhite.
Webb’s block (indicated by the rectangle, second from the bottom on the leftmost column
in Figure 4.1) was thus well below that at 2.3 percent, and the six immediately adjacent
blocks had percentages of nonwhite households of 6.7, 16.7, 1, 4.7, zero, and 1. Despite
the interpretation offered by appraisers of Bunker Hill as a racially corrupted area, Jack
Webb’s immediate environs were more likely recognizable to him as a neighborhood of
working-class whites.
228
Figure 4.1: Jack Webb’s Bunker Hill
34

This would inform the way that Webb represented urban spaces in his later work,
work that was at odds with dominant portrayals of Bunker Hill in films. By the time

34
Los Angeles County Housing Authority, Real Property Inventory and Low Income Housing Survey of a portion of
Los Angeles County, California, 1939-1940, University of California-Los Angeles.
229
Webb reached adulthood, Bunker Hill’s decaying and subdivided houses had been
seized upon by Hollywood location scouts and cast as the quintessential scenery of noir.
These films used Bunker Hill as a backdrop for other more abstract existential concerns,
and the ubiquity of representations of decay and deviance attached to it embedded the
neighborhood in a collective representation of corruption and iniquity that was in fact at
odds with its vitality, poverty notwithstanding.
35
This was the view of outsiders, most
severely the novelist Raymond Chandler, whose cutting characterization of the area in
1942’s The High Window (“Old Town, Lost Town, Shabby Town, Crook Town”) was not
impeded by the fact that he had stopped living in the area nearly three decades before and
likely knew it only from the movies.
36

Webb left Los Angeles for military service during World War II, but was
discharged from the Army after an unsuccessful stint in Air Corps training. It was in San
Francisco that he began a broadcast career, voicing both current events and hard-boiled
police programs on the radio. Webb returned to Los Angeles in the late 1940s to continue
his radio career and branch out into films as an actor and writer.
37
In 1948, Webb
fatefully found work as an actor in the film He Walked by Night. This proved a turning
point in Webb’s career for two reasons. First, while an introductory voiceover described
Los Angeles as “a bunch of suburbs in search of a city,” the film from that point worked
diligently to reestablish a centripetal sensibility about Los Angeles, rhetorically fighting

35
Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory 45-46. Dimendberg, Film Noir and the
Spaces of Modernity 165. As I discussed in Chapter 2, the thresholds of nonwhite residential concentration that
constituted “subversion” in the minds of security mappers was so low that it would have been comically absurd were
not the material consequences of their judgments so great. Ethington, "Ghost Neighborhoods," 43.
36
Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory 51-52.
37
Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 43-45, Charles Anthony Varni, "Images of Police Work and Mass Media
Propaganda: The Case of "Dragnet"" (Washington State University, 1974) 4.
230
against “a centrifugal geographic tendency” by concluding its opening “sequence
with a view of Los Angeles City Hall and the headquarters of the police department,
recognizable centers of law and order.”
38

Second, and more importantly, He Walked by Night received scripting advice
from LAPD Sergeant Marty Wynn. The Hollywood cliché of workers in other
occupations jockeying to break into the pictures is grounded in the truth that the pictures
were a dominant and glamorous local industry, and LAPD officers have historically been
no exception.
39
Wynn buttonholed Webb with a plan for a realistic police procedural
serial for the radio, one that would avoid the pulpy clichés, violence, and sensationalized
action familiar to Webb from his prior acting work and to the listening public. Webb,
steeped in the appeal of action and sensationalism, at first doubted the commercial
viability of the venture, but was intrigued when Wynn offered his personal experience as
an advisor, backed by his access to the department’s case files to help plot realistic
shows.
40
Webb began to ride along with the LAPD’s officers and to “immerse himself in
the day-to-day realities of police work.”
41
This prompted Webb to create a show, starring
himself as LAPD Detective Joe Friday, that was stripped of most pulp clichés. Webb’s
gamble on a self-consciously documentary approach, turned out to be a winning play;

38
Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity 29.
39
Gene Roddenberry, an LAPD sergeant who would achieve lasting fame as the creator of Star Trek launched his
career in this way. Once established, Dragnet would pay a finder’s fee to officers who provided summaries of
particularly compelling cases. Roddenberry would subcontract the work of writing summaries (essentially story
treatments) of his colleagues’ cases in return for a cut of the fee.Hayde, My Name's Friday: The Unauthorized but True
Story of Dragnet and the Films of Jack Webb 48.
40
Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 56. Wynn’s offer piqued Webb’s interest, but as with many Hollywood
propositions, was substantially less grand in the payoff; LAPD sources insisted that neither Webb nor his associates had
“access” to the Department’s files. Rather, LAPD detectives submitted story ideas to Dragnet through their Public
Information Division. See interview with Lieutenant Merle Sutton, Public Information Division, LAPD, in Sanderson,
"Investigation into the Elements of Documentary Film" 79.
41
Varni, 4. Sanderson, "Investigation into the Elements of Documentary Film" 55.
231
although CBS radio rejected his proposal as lacking in dramatic potential, NBC
picked the show up, and Dragnet’s evocation of realism resonated with audiences.
42

By 1951 NBC rewarded Webb’s radio success by approving a television version
of the show, which first aired in January 1952. Many of the first television episodes were
shot from radio scripts with shooting instructions appended, contributing to the program’s
characteristic expository narration and the marginalization of more sensational action.
43

This success caught Webb somewhat off guard; until production for TV and concurrent
radio broadcasts could be brought up to speed, Dragnet alternated its weekly time slot on
Thursday evenings with Gangbusters, a pulpier and more violent serial about the FBI.
44

By the end of 1952, however, Dragnet solidified its hold on the airwaves and began a run
of tremendous popularity.
Radio Dragnet took the air in 1949, just before the 1950 ascendancy of William
Parker to the chief’s office, and Parker expanded the department’s support for the show.
It has become commonplace to say that Webb’s Mark VII production company was given
“access” to case files from the LAPD to craft its scripts, and in turn paid for this access
with positive representations of the Department in its programs. This is not entirely
correct. The Public Information Division of the LAPD has been at pains to point out that
no “access” was granted to the producers. Rather, LAPD detectives were encouraged to
submit to the Public Information Division summaries of cases they had worked on or
were aware of that they thought would make good episodes. The Public Information

42
Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 59.
43
Ibid. 80.
44
Ibid. 84-85.
232
Division then advanced the summaries to Mark VII and exercised a veto at both the
scripting and shooting stages of production.
45
After the debut of the television program in
1952, LAPD officers familiar with the actual cases were retained as on-set consultants to
the filming of the fictionalized versions for $25 per week.
46
The LAPD’s relationship
with the show hinged on three rules that were widely acknowleged by the producers: to
neither vilify nor glorify an officer but show the professional execution of duty; to
represent the police as average human beings; and to keep narratives aligned to the facts
of an actual LAPD case.
47

Webb’s close relationship to the LAPD, the program’s assertion that each “story
you are about to see is true” and drawn from actual LAPD cases, and the degree of
oversight exercised by the Department over Dragnet’s content has led many critical
scholars to the conclusion that the show was simply a propaganda outlet for the police.
This perception has been compounded by Webb’s frequent ex officio declarations of
support for police in general and the LAPD in particular.
48
Certainly, the image of
professional, if occasionally wooden, detectives discharging their duty methodically and
honestly was the image that Chief William Parker wanted to present to the public. Parker
was one of the first American police chiefs to grasp the utility of public relations to a
police department; while many decisions about officer conduct, promotion, and discipline

45
Varni, 6-7. Sanderson, "Investigation into the Elements of Documentary Film" 79.
46
Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 99.
47
Sanderson, "Investigation into the Elements of Documentary Film" 62. Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 58.
48
Varni, 5-6. Connolly-Lane, "More Than "Just the Facts": Dragnet as Reactionary Mythology" 11. By 1967, Webb
was very public in his belief that the police were victims of society’s hostility and indifference, and this sense of
persecution was reflected in Friday’s famous “What is a Cop?” monologue, which described the danger, low pay, and
public scorn he believed police suffered from.the public at large. A transcript of this monologue was read into the
Congressional Record in 1967. Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 171.
233
were insulated by the city’s charter from civilian oversight, Parker nonetheless
understood that public opinion could affect the resources flowing in to the department
and the public’s willingness to cooperate with police and support Parker’s own vision of
policing and society. As Parker told the Police Chiefs’ Section of the League of
California Cities in 1955,
The real problem is not that of doing a good job; it is not even that of telling the
public that it is being done. The most important and most difficult task is the
securing of a market for professional police work—a public that will demand it,
pay the cost of it, and stand behind it.
49

Sergeant Joe Friday, his partners, and their fictional cohorts certainly presented a picture
of police officers that satisfied this imperative, and stood in contrast to Parker’s less
temperate statements about police and their relationship to the community. By 1956,
Parker had issued Webb the Department’s “Citation of Appreciation” for “engendering
an increased respect for law enforcement,” an award which was accompanied by the
issuing of LAPD badge 714 to Webb. Upon his death in 1982, Webb received a full
LAPD funeral featuring a “missing helicopter” formation flyover and a gun salute.
50
The
issuing of the badge was particularly noteworthy because the image-conscious Parker had
banned this once-common practice to avoid the appearance of favoritism to friendly
civilians.
51

49
Parker and Wilson, Parker on Police 145.
50
Connolly-Lane, "More Than "Just the Facts": Dragnet as Reactionary Mythology" 13. Moyer and Alvarez, Just the
Facts 116, 209.
51
Bass and Donovan, "The Los Angeles Police Department," 158. The irony of the situation appeared lost on Webb, as
the plot of 1954’s “The Big Fraud” revolved around the fraudulent use of a police badge by a con man.
234
Presented with these facts, a person who had never seen the show could be
forgiven for assuming that the program represented pure Parkerism on the airwaves. This
is precisely the case made by Charles Varni, who contends that Dragnet was an
“ideological (read ‘public relations’) arm of the LAPD.”
52
Such an interpretation unfairly
marginalizes Webb’s role as the creator, producer, director, star, and iconographic center
of the program, rendering his personal history merely incidental to ideological
production. Dragnet’s close relationship to the LAPD served Webb’s creative need for
his procedural stories to bear the stamp of realism as much as it served Parker’s public
relations objectives, and the program, in its 1950s incarnation, bore the imprint of
Webb’s personality arguably more than it did Parker’s.
53
As the creator and star of the
program, Webb wrote only three episodes of the show’s 1950s run; however, he directed
thirty-eight episodes during this time, and exercised tremendous influence over the tone,
content, and performances of each story.
54
Yet, while Karen Connolly-Lane does focus
on Webb’s role as an auteur, she interprets the show similarly as an ideological vehicle
for a “reactionary mythology” about public order. She identifies this semiotic practice as
uniquely Webb’s, but contends that it differed little from Parker’s or the LAPD’s
institutional worldview.
55

52
Varni, 7.
53
The 1960s revival of the franchise, running from 1966 to 1970, expressed a much harsher and more moralistic take
on social problems. It is likely that over time an isomorphism born of their closely aligned professional interests
developed between Webb and Parker strengthened by Webb’s unfavorable view of 1960s countercultures. Ibid. 10.
54
Andersen referred to Webb’s attention to detail as “a rigor equaled only by Ozu and Bresson, the cinema’s
acknowledged masters of transcendental simplicity.” Andersen, "Los Angeles Plays Itself."
55
Connolly-Lane, "More Than "Just the Facts": Dragnet as Reactionary Mythology" 5. On Webb’s extensive control
as the creator of the program, see Sanderson, "Investigation into the Elements of Documentary Film" 66.
235
The waters are muddied in most critical accounts by a conflation of the 1950s
and 1960s incarnations of the program. Two theories account for Webb’s and NBC’s
collective decision to revive the franchise in 1966 after seven years off the air. The first,
well-documented, holds that Webb felt an urgent need to counter the critiques of the
police advanced by national countercultural and liberationist movements of the decade
and by local critics of the LAPD after the 1965 unrest in Watts.
56
Another, possibly
apocryphal, holds that an NBC executive approached Webb about the revival after a New
York subway mugging impressed on him the need for television programs that valorized
law and order.
57
The 1960s program has until recently been more widely available on
accessible video formats and, because it adopts much more overtly topical plots and
expresses a much harsher vision of the relationship between police, criminals, and
civilians that scholars recognize as a hallmark of Parkerism, the later version of the
program has overshadowed the earlier one.
58
Andersen uses one brief clip from the 1954
feature film Dragnet, but none from the concurrent broadcast program, leaping ahead to
the 1960s version, drawn to the conflict between the crew-cut Friday and 1960s youth

56
Varni, 5.
57
Connolly-Lane, "More Than "Just the Facts": Dragnet as Reactionary Mythology" 18.
58
My methods for surveying this earlier run include the viewing and listening of episodes held by the Archive research
and Study Center of the Film and Television Archive of the University of California, Los Angeles (hereafter UCLA
Film and Television), supplemented by others found on commercially available DVDs and still others viewed in whole
or in part online, with attention paid to the way in which images and narration reflect conscious representations of
existing places in Los Angeles. Where commercial DVD releases aggregate episodes without regard to season or
episode number, air dates have been checked against an episode list hosted on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB),
accessed by author March 20, 2008, and viewable at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043194/episodes. My survey of
plots is thematic rather than exhaustive. Those interested in the program may learn more about the particulars of the
series at a number of fan sites, most notably http://www.badge714.com/.
236
culture that animated the latter.
59
Neither Connolly-Lane nor Varni pay much
attention on the 1950s incarnation of Dragnet. This produces severe distortion of the
1950s program’s meaning; while, as Andersen correctly argues, Sergeant Joe Friday does
embody the professional “organization superman” idealized by Parker, it does not follow
from this that “Dragnet admirably expressed the contempt the LAPD had for the law-
abiding citizens it was pledged to protect and serve.”
60
There is more content to Dragnet
than policing; there is the public and the city that the police serve. Most notably, where
Parker had argued that the city was a cauldron of disorder and inevitable conflict, Webb
showed the city as a much more functional social entity. To understand what Webb
conveyed through Dragnet about Los Angeles, it is necessary to understand how he
conveyed it.
Webb’s authorship of the program manifested itself in a very distinct aesthetic
and directorial style, backed with an obsessive commitment to detail that far surpassed
the incidental use of Los Angeles’ places as settings for noir films, a conscious choice
best described as “semi-documentary.”
61
These elements of screencraft, plotting, and
realism, though they can be addressed as distinct hallmarks of production, have their

59
The 1950s broadcast version appears in “Los Angeles Plays Itself” only as parodied in the film L.A. Confidential.
LAPD officers enmeshed in corruption more historically appropriate to the 1930s watch the program “Badge of Honor”
with considerable ironic effect.
60
Andersen, "Los Angeles Plays Itself." In his chronicle of Webb’s career and the Dragnet franchise, Michael Hayde
argues that the feature film version was quite different from the television program, The longer format allowed Webb
to choose a case from the LAPD’s Intelligence Division, an organized crime investigation in which Fifth Amendment
protections frustrate the detectives. The politics of the case are reflected in uncharacteristically angry and hostile
interactions between the police and the public: “the Joe Friday of [the film] Dragnet was almost the evil twin of his
radio and TV counterpart.”Hayde, My Name's Friday: The Unauthorized but True Story of Dragnet and the Films of
Jack Webb 92. Hayde also suggests that Webb’s weariness of playing the character by the end of the show’s 1950s run
contributed to a brusque and occasionally hostile tone in Friday’s interactions with the public from the 1956 season
forward. Hayde, My Name's Friday: The Unauthorized but True Story of Dragnet and the Films of Jack Webb 121.
61
Sanderson, "Investigation into the Elements of Documentary Film" 10.
237
greatest significance in the way that they collectively constitute a fairly coherent
assertion of a civic whole that, while imperiled by crime, is defended by the police
department and the citizens who cooperate with Joe Friday in his investigations. The
1950s version of Dragnet encouraged identification with the city and proposed a fictional
universe in which humble, struggling, and flawed residents of Los Angeles could fight
the battle to preserve their city, a rearguard action against both noir image and the
changes wrought by urban renewal. The centrality of Los Angeles to the action of the
1950s program (in plot and in the imaginative geography Dragnet constructed) was
established by each program’s customary introduction: “This is the city: Los Angeles,
California”—a declaration as well of Friday’s authoritative knowledge (a centripetal
conceit). Los Angeles’ phallic City Hall and other iconic images of the city accompanied
this introduction, which served to invite viewers into the mood of realism and established
the centrality of the city.
There were occasional nods to sensationalism in Dragnet’s radio and 1950s TV
run, which were sufficient for many casual critics to label the program as an
entertainment show organized around the voyeuristic thrill of seeing a secret world of
crime.
62
In the episode “The Big Bed,” a man is killed by an old Navy companion who
believed the victim’s sister was working to undermine their friendship, with the strong
insinuation of a homosexual obsession by the killer for the victim. In this episode’s
opening, two men are shown knife fighting under the tracks of the Angels’ Flight railway,

62
Ibid. 56.
238
a few minutes’ walk from Webb’s childhood home on Flower Street.
63
This
streetscape has been a staple of noir films for its suggestion of urban danger. Perhaps the
most haunting and ominous depiction of moral corruption and depravity occurred in the
episode “The Big Cast,” in which Lee Marvin portrays Henry Ross, a suspected serial
killer.
64
Ross confesses to Friday and his partner Frank Smith that he has killed a dozen
hitchhikers, for reasons largely obscure even to himself. While this embodiment of evil
is frightening, the program nonetheless marks Friday as fully capable of containing the
threat; Ross’ final confession takes place not in the station house, but in a downtown
health food restaurant, where Ross, Friday, and Smith eat vegetables (grudgingly in the
case of the detectives) and drink fruit juice.
65
Friday’s competence and mastery remains
so complete that Ross remains uncuffed during his last free meal. Far from expressing a
reactionary urge to punishment, or to render Ross a sacrifice to purge the other sins of the
city, Friday responds almost sympathetically to Ross’ confession, suggesting that he
needs psychiatric treatment. Ultimately, however, the obligatory statement of disposition
that marks the end of the case reveals that Ross was sentenced to the gas chamber at San
Quentin.
The moral deviancy of some city dwellers was thus never wholly absent from
Webb’s concern in Dragnet. But Dragnet, at least in its 1950s run, balanced this noirish
tendency with extensive attention to the ordinary civilians encountered by its detectives

63
Dragnet, “The Big Bed” [1958-06-05], UCLA Film and Television.
64
Dragnet, “The Big Cast”, [archival recording from rebroadcast of program originally aired February 14, 1952],
UCLA Film and Television.
65
It is unlikely that Webb would choose this setting unless either the details of the actual case specified it or he was
trying to achieve some narrative purpose, possibly a swipe at the cultural left of the 1950s; vegetarians and health-food
eaters are equated with serial killers as a class of mentally ill people.
239
in the pursuit of justice. One 1952 television episode opened with Webb’s voicing of
Joe Friday over a series of nocturnal shots of downtown theaters and Hollywood
nightclubs:
This is the city, a big place. It dreams but it never sleeps. The people keep it
going around the clock, through the days, through the nights…. Some of them
spend the night getting ready for tomorrow, some of them spend it forgetting
about today, a few of them gambling for quick cash or a prison cell. In my job,
they’re the ones who keep you awake. I’m a cop.”
66

This opening, with its suggestion of nocturnal criminality, veers toward noir cliché. Yet,
in its acknowledgment of people “spending the night getting ready for tomorrow,” it also
purposefully transcends the noir conceit of “entire neighborhoods surviving merely as
hangouts for crooks.”
67
Moreover, the show’s attention to the procedural and routine
aspects of police work often overshadowed the sensational, and by design.
68
Webb’s
clipped delivery as Sgt. Joe Friday and his narration of the minute details of his and his
partners’ activities became clichés for the simple reason that they were peppered through
every episode of the program, and it behooves a critic to consider how these clichés
functioned to construct an image of the city within the confines of realism and a turn
from the lone hero of noir films to a socially connected protagonist. As Webb told Jack
Benny, “We at Mark 7 Ltd. [Webb’s production company] have always figured that most
of our success on Dragnet was due to the fact that we try to do everything authentic

66
Dragnet, “The Big Blast” [1954-04-10], UCLA Film and Television.
67
Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory 80.
68
Publications like The New Republic panned Dragnet for the mundaneness of the criminal cases it presented.
Sanderson, "Investigation into the Elements of Documentary Film" 60.
240
[sic].”
69
It is easy to dismiss the claims of a television series to authenticity,
particularly because so many of the formulaic expository elements of Dragnet episodes
approached self-parody, but that imperative guided Webb and his associates in nearly
every aspect of the program. Listeners and viewers were told precisely how many
minutes it took to travel from one location in the city to another (including transit times
from downtown to other parts of the city that sound like a cruel joke today), and were
treated to descriptions of the technical capabilities of Records and Investigations, the
catalogue of old cases, perpetrators, and methods that usually proved more useful for
solving crimes than Smith and Wesson.
These elements of Dragnet’s narration were so common and well known that
Webb even parodied them in an appearance on the Jack Benny Show. In their opening
dialogue, Benny asserted to Webb that he recognized Dragnet plots from Charlie Chan,
introducing a parody sketch in which Benny (as Chan) and Webb (as “Number One
Son”) solved a mystery. The sketch featured all the staples of Dragnet, culminating with
Webb and Benny “pulling up” to a crime scene with Webb pulling Benny in a rickshaw.
Now that these elements have passed into self-parody, it is easy to forget that Dragnet
built its following on the pretense that it represented with unprecedented realism the daily
activity of police officers. It is difficult to state with authority how successfully Webb
convinced audiences of Dragnet’s authenticity based solely on the cachet of LAPD
involvement. We do know that the show was popular, and, given Webb’s preferences to
reduce drama (extending to casting, makeup, and the vocal deliveries of the actors), we

69
“Jack Benny Program” [1959-11-01]. UCLA Film and Television.
241
can presume that without a belief in the show’s authenticity, it would have had
limited appeal to viewers. Occasionally this credulity went overboard; desk Sergeants at
LAPD headquarters grew used to telling tourists that Sgt. Friday was out of the office
when they came to find him, and Webb received letters asking him to enlist Sergeant
Friday to help fix viewers’ traffic tickets.
70

Dragnet’s claim on authenticity was sufficient to blur the line in less sophisticated
viewers’ minds between truth and fiction. But realism also worked to negotiate Webb’s
commitments to representing Los Angeles. Dragnet, far more than necessary for a
national program with a large part of its audience unfamiliar with Los Angeles,
represented places in the city both as essential parts of the show’s action and as
realistically rendered locations reflecting the city’s actual geography. In part, this was
attributable to the LAPD’s insistence that Dragnet represent the “facts” of a case with
substantive accuracy, and in part due to the fact that the provision of case details by the
Department provided a path of least resistance to writers. However, from the point of
view of production, Webb’s attention to detail far surpassed the limits of these mandates,
approaching the point of compulsiveness. Webb’s biographers, as well as contemporary
critics, have noted as Dragnet trivia that Webb stocked his sets with surplus furniture and
telephones from the LAPD’s Supply Division, and even replicated details as small as the
flecking of floor tiles in his recreation of Police Headquarters.
71

This attention to detail was not merely in service of the commercial gambit of
authenticity, but allowed Webb to hew closely to his own version of urban truth. This

70
Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 136.
71
Ibid. 147.
242
commitment could not be accomplished on the small screen (for 1950s sets, quite
small) in the same way that it could be on the broad expanse of a theater screen. Yet
Webb was quite intent on doing everything in his power to ensure that Los Angeles as
Dragnet portrayed it matched the city of Webb’s memory and experience.
72
Though the
smaller screen size, compressed shooting schedule, and lower budgets for television
prevented extensive location shooting, Webb and his writers and producers compensated
by using stock establishing shots gathered en masse, and keyed to the settings evoked by
the show’s scripts.
73
Since the scripts were mandated to hew closely to the material facts
of LAPD cases, the resulting narratives placed actions in locations that would be familiar
and comprehensible to Angelenos viewing the show, more so than to outsiders. This
attention corresponded to the treatment of addresses and street intersections on the
program. Though addresses given were rarely “real,” they were deliberately crafted to
mirror addresses that would have existed in the neighborhoods. Harry D’Arcy, the
show’s Production Supervisor, averred that the program would eschew taking any license
with the neighborhood character of the true investigations it referenced in both casting
and set-construction, “If it was in a lower part of town with the people of that district we
play that type of thing, if possible.” This included the effort to “make up an address that
sounds right” for the particular district referenced.
74
These addresses were most often
created by reference to an intersection of a known street with a second whose true-life

72
As critics like Klein and Andersen have demonstrated, extensive use of location shooting in no way corresponds to
an “accurate” representation of urban places or the civic body as a whole.
73
“The idea of dramatizing his show in a tiny room with plywood sets was unacceptable to Webb…. He wanted sets
that looked like the real headquarters, the real homes, the real bars, the real factories.” Hayde, My Name's Friday: The
Unauthorized but True Story of Dragnet and the Films of Jack Webb 41. In particular, the emphasis on homes, bars
and factories connected Dragnet to a working-class urban world.
74
Sanderson, "Investigation into the Elements of Documentary Film" 86.
243
referent closely paralleled the other, or by changing a named street’s orientation. In
the 1952 episode “The Big Blast,” for example, a murder occurred at 543 W. Bixel St.;
the actual Bixel Street runs north-south, but it is a sufficiently short street to mark it as
part of the Westlake District, just west of Downtown.
75
The detectives’ search for clues
leads to the victim’s estranged husband, whose given address at “1543 East Workman”
references a fictitious street, but reinforces his blue-collar occupation as a swing-shift
worker at a steel mill on Alameda and places him on the working-class eastside. Thus,
Dragnet enacted a cognitive mapping of the social space of Los Angeles that was
disciplined by local knowledge, its national audience notwithstanding.
The rigor of this mapping enabled Webb to make certain statements about the
city. Webb’s sympathies were evident (unlike Parker, whose persona reflected many
qualities, but not sympathy), and lay with people struggling to do right in an environment
unconducive to it, and all too often failing.
76
Webb’s sympathies for his characters and
his occasional expression that their corruptions and failings might not be total were a
departure from the conventions of noir films. This has been dismissed as sentimentality
characteristic of television’s clumsy and formulaic adaptation of noir, but in many ways

75
Dragnet, “The Big Blast”, UCLA Film and Television. As of 1939, HOLC appraisers had accorded the area a
“medial yellow” grade, noting that the white collar single-family houses of the district were giving way to income-
generating apartment buildings, and was “definitely declining.” HOLC, area C-93, “Lafayette Park”. By 1960, the
Westlake district was fully in decline, having lost more than ten percent of its population since 1950. Los Angeles
(Calif.). City Planning Commission., Accomplishments, 1960, City Planning Commission 31.
76
This sympathy is an element that is obscured by the conflation of the early and late incarnations of Dragnet.
Speaking of the 1960s version, Andersen laments “Friday’s heavy-handed irony” and contempt for “the grotesques and
lunatics he encountered every week.” Andersen, "Los Angeles Plays Itself." These citizens—permissive parents,
radicals, hippies, recreational drug users, civil libertarians, and spoiled Baby Boom children of California affluence are
subjected to Friday’s (and Webb’s) scorn to the extent that they are removed from the middle-class and honest
working-class characters of the earlier program.
244
this sympathy constitutes a more authentic and indigenous viewpoint on the city.
77
In
important ways, formula and repetition heightened the impact of Webb’s urban vision,
rather than lessening it. Because Dragnet began each program with the commencement
of a police investigation, rather than with the commission of a crime, civilians rather than
criminals occupied a great deal of the screen time, a convention that enabled the
purposeful depiction of ordinary people.
78
Though LAPD cases provided the pool of
potential stories, Webb exercised considerable discretion to produce stories based on
cases that provided the greatest potential to humanize the “innocent bystander” or the
witness to a crime.
79
Webb deliberately deglamorized these bit performances; in the first
two years of Dragnet on television, he cast one hundred fifty actors who had no prior
screen experience, insisted that they be made up only as they would on the street, and
directed them to adopt an underplayed speaking style in most of the show’s dialogue.
80

Rather than the classic noir universe of police and criminals, Webb crafted a universe in
which regular civilians were prominent partners of the police, and in which much of the
onscreen action revolved around what these ordinary people told Joe Friday about the
crime under investigation and about their lives.
One radio episode involving the arrest of a bank robbery suspect exemplifies the
convergence of plot, character, and setting that Webb valued. It also showed the balance

77
One critic states simply and dismissively that noir was artlessly and clumsily “recycled in television series such as
Dragnet and The Naked City.” Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity 75.
78
Interview with Harry D’Arcy, in Sanderson, "Investigation into the Elements of Documentary Film" 84.
79
These points were stressed in an interview by Sanderson of Harry D’Arcy in Ibid. 59, 84.
80
Ibid. 61, 66-69. When casting the radio program, Webb told actress Peggy Webber, a regular on the show, “’I don’t
want anybody who sounds like an actor.’” Hayde, My Name's Friday: The Unauthorized but True Story of Dragnet and
the Films of Jack Webb 36-37.
245
that Webb achieved between couching his sympathy for minor characters and
maintaining a gritty realism that included the potential for urban crime to affect a civilian
neighborhood.
81
When Sergeant Friday learns that Carey, a career criminal, has shot a
bank guard in a robbery and fled capture, he seeks clues to his whereabouts by visiting
the criminal’s mother, in “a rundown apartment on the east side of town.”
82
Absent visual
demonstration of her poverty, this description and the reference to place set the scene;
although out-of town audiences may not have grasped the distinction between east and
west that divided Los Angeles’ socioeconomic geography, the reference grounds the
program in a knowledge of place that is local and fulfills Webb’s commitment to realism.
Carey’s mother recounts a tale of woe, lamenting her own inability to raise her son in the
context of poverty, fatherlessness, and temptation. Though Friday and partner Ben
Romero hardly laud the outcomes of her parenting, their response is not unsympathetic to
her struggles. The action of the story follows the detectives out to the San Fernando
Valley, where Carey has taken a hostage in a suburban house; refusing to be taken alive,
he is finally gunned down by the police (an outburst of violence that was uncharacteristic
of the program as a whole, as gunplay occurred in very few episodes).
83
On first reading,
the episode plays as a glorification of Parker’s “thin blue line,” with a warning of

81
Dragnet (radio program), “Bank Robber Carey Is Trapped in a Home” (Title from Cassette label). catalogued as
“unidentified episode”, Tape no. 477, accompanies “The Big Grab”, episode 305, UCLA Film and Television. This
episode is likely “The Big Siege”, which aired on the radio on May 24, 1955 and was adapted for a television episode
which aired March 8, 1956.
82
Like many of the place references in Dragnet the significance of locations was complex; audiences in Los Angeles
would certainly have recognized the characterization of the East Side, while audiences from elsewhere may have
learned to equate “east” with negative social connotations through the program.
83
In his survey of fifty episodes, Sanderson found shots fired in fewer than twenty. Sanderson, "Investigation into the
Elements of Documentary Film" 63. In this regard, Webb followed the preference of the LAPD to downplay violence
and emphasize professionalism. Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 59.The action-packed plot of this episode
illustrates a dilemma of preservation; episodes in which little “happens” are often more characteristic of the program as
a whole, but are less likely to be remembered as significant as entertainment.
246
downtown crime following white Angelenos from the central city to the Valley,
placing the LAPD at the barricades, using all technological means (including riot guns
with “penetration gas shells” and “triple chaser gas grenades”) to defend the space of the
home (a Parkerite conceit three times over). That zeal extends to officers pledging to
“blow the roof off if we have to” to get the fugitive out, a move that the homeowner
probably would not have appreciated. But the tale of “Bank Robber Carey” plays too as
an inverted chronicle of Webb’s rise from Bunker Hill to broadcast stardom; Jack Webb,
had he been a youth tough enough to run with a gang, could have entered a life of crime
and become the titular bank robber gunned down by police at the end of a hostage siege;
while Carey is unsympathetic and clearly dangerous, Friday regards his doom with a
touch of empathy.
This motif of desperation, of people ground down by life, was far more prevalent
than the depravity or wanton criminality characteristic of noir films or other crime shows
of the time. As Webb’s biographers argue, “a $20 robbery was as significant as a
$20,000 crime in Dragnet’s universe.”
84
Even crimes that appeared horrific acts of evil
were often revealed to have more mundane roots, as Friday voiced in one introductory
sequence, crime was often no more or less than the simple outcome of people “gambling
for quick cash or a prison cell.” In “The Big Blast,” a young mother is reported murdered
in her home, shot to death by an unknown assassin in front of her 11 year old son. Friday
and the audience eventually learn that the shooter was hired by the boy’s father, who was
afraid that his estranged wife would keep him from seeing the boy. The roots of this

84
Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 64-5.
247
crime lie in desperation, not in depravity. Even Henry Ross (the serial killer played
by Lee Marvin in “The Big Cast”) expresses his motivations in ways that mirror Webb’s
understanding of crime as a mundane and even banal fact of urban life. As Ross tells
Friday, most of the crime stories in books and on TV misrepresent crime by making it
overly dramatic, a pursuit of money or love, rather than a random and senseless
phenomenon.
They always build it into something big, somebody’s always killing somebody
else for a million dollars or maybe over a woman…. That’s where they get it all
mixed up…. I’ll bet there’s a thousand murder cases in your files without a
reason; some people kill, that’s all…. Maybe for a few bucks, maybe for nothing.
They just do it, that’s all.”
85

Dragnet’s audience sees Ross not during his murderous career but, after an initial scuffle
with the detectives, as a rather docile suspect; the program is an interrogation drama, and
not much of one at that. The show’s writers play this plot as a self-reference to their own
rejection of pulp, and perhaps a rejoinder to the CBS radio programmers who had
rejected the Dragnet concept in 1949. Ross acknowledges almost sheepishly the
unsatisfying nature of his story: “Suppose I told that to a writer—somebody killing a guy
for eighteen bucks. Wouldn’t make much sense, huh? They’d tell me it’d never sell.”
86

As one colleague of Webb’s noted, many of Dragnet’s plots reflected Webb’s sense that
criminals were often relieved, as Ross was, to be captured by the police.
87

As with the Housing Authority’s production of And Ten Thousand More (a pro-
public housing short film), Webb’s sympathetic renderings of city dwellers admitted of

85
"Dragnet: The Big Cast," ed. Jack Webb (1952). ARC-FTL-UCLA
86
Ibid.
87
Sanderson, "Investigation into the Elements of Documentary Film" 63.
248
assimilation into a narrative of futility. If crime in the city was not the result of
thoroughgoing corruption, but rather a senseless and random phenomenon, the viewing
public could take little comfort in its depiction as such. The cumulative weight of weekly
stories of crime could have seemed more and more at odds with Joe Friday’s abiding
purpose of protecting the innocent, delivering the guilty for punishment and, where
possible, steering the wavering middle to the side of lawfulness. This is not always easy;
in “The Big Blast,” the misguided passion of the father is mirrored by the resignation of
the dead woman’s neighbors, who, the audience learns, failed to call police because they
thought the shots they heard were the reports of a car backfiring. Though this could have
been an honest mistake, the audience is invited to speculate that these residents of the
declining Westlake district just west of downtown were either used to hearing shots and
too jaded to report them. Yet, these instances were overshadowed by the overall
representation of the city and its people that Dragnet evoked, that of respectable and
ordinary people cooperating with authorities to preserve the city as a fit space for living.
Both the scope of Dragnet’s challenge to the noir image of the city and the
limitations of that challenge were most apparent in the program’s treatment of race, or
more precisely its selective evasion of it. Whereas Parker’s public statements referenced
racial danger directly and constructed it as a threat to the white middle class, Dragnet
(until its 1967-1970 reincarnation when the 1965 Watts unrest made this impossible)
largely avoided the direct mention of race or the direct depiction of minority
communities. Although Parker directed LAPD resources to the barrios and ghettos of the
south and east sides and lambasted those who criticized this exercise in racial profiling,
249
Dragnet’s subjects, and, one would assume, its audience, were overwhelmingly
white. Sanderson argues that this was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Public
Information Division. In an interview with Sanderson, Lieutenant Merle Sutton, a
ranking officer in the division at the tail end of the show’s 1950s run, claimed that the
LAPD exercised control over the programs to avoid any suggestion that the department
“would be critical of any group or segment of the people, because we don’t hold such
attitudes and we wouldn’t want anyone to get the opinion that the police department was
critical of some group of people or population segment.”
88

The relative invisibility of communities of color in Dragnet followed from this
dictate. This was most fully on display in “The Big Little Jesus,” an episode which first
aired at Christmastime in 1953 and was rerun as Dragnet’s holiday episode in future
years. The episode focused on the theft of the baby Jesus from a nativity scene at the
Mission Catholic Church in the historic Plaza area. This was the site of the founding of
the Spanish city of Los Angeles, and Webb’s execution of an episode involving the
contemporary community of ethnic Mexican Catholics there crystallized the
Anglicization of the city. The parishioners, led by Father Rojas, display a highly
emotional response to the theft that marks them condescendingly as humble, simple, and
essentially premodern people, though the fact that the theft turns out to be the work of a
young boy who didn’t realize the harm caused by his prank at least departs from
contemporary police depictions of ethnic Mexicans as a racialized criminal menace.
Webb’s disengagement from the lives of contemporary ethnic Mexicans in the city was

88
Ibid. 82.
250
reflected in the casting of Joe Carioca, Jr. in the part of the young thief. The senior
Carioca was known to Webb as a voice actor in the Disney animated feature The Three
Caballeros, leading Webb to assume that the family was both Mexican and Spanish-
speaking. In fact, the Cariocas were Portuguese and spoke no Spanish; Joe Jr. had to learn
his Spanish lines phonetically.
89
In most other cases, however, minorities were largely
invisible from Dragnet. As a representation, this was highly dishonest; it displaced real
racial problems in Los Angeles by erasing racial difference. However, in light of
Dragnet’s popularity, it is significant that such a representation of Los Angeles in the
putative age of white flight repudiated, if only by omission, the notion of the city as a
racially corrupted dystopia.
The character of Sergeant Joe Friday in this selective way expressed what
Michael Denning has called an “Ethnic Americanism”—the expansion of mass cultural
validation to non-Anglo whites beginning in the 1930s--that likewise departed from Los
Angeles’ enduring reputation as a WASP stronghold.
90
Webb recalled the choice of his
character’s name was purposeful; free of ethnic connotation, “Friday” could personify the
professional manning the thin blue line as “Jewish or Greek or English or anything. He
could be all men to all people in their living rooms.”
91
Of course, this ethnic
Americanism was largely limited by the bounds of whiteness. Though Friday’s first
partner on the radio and television program was named Ben Romero, suggesting an

89
Hayde, My Name's Friday: The Unauthorized but True Story of Dragnet and the Films of Jack Webb 74.
90
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth-Century, The Haymarket
Series (London; New York: Verso, 1996) 47. See also May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the
American Way.
91
Moyer and Alvarez, Just the Facts 61.
251
ethnic Mexican presence in the department, this character, played by the white actor
Barton Yarborough, spoke with a Southern drawl and had little in common with the
Mexicans who preoccupied Chief William Parker.
92
After Yarborough’s death mandated
a recasting, Ben Romero was replaced as Friday’s partner by Ed Jacobs (whose name
suggested the character might be Jewish) and later by the archetypally Anglo Frank
Smith.
93

Seen as a weekly meditation on the relationship of whites to the city, Dragnet
repudiated Parker’s (and film noir’s) dire warnings about diversity as a precursor to
chaos. In part, Webb achieved this by creating a fictive civic body for the city that erased
much of that diversity. But this fiction was rooted, as argued above, in Webb’s
experience of Bunker Hill in the 1930s, when many blocks were solidly white. As Webb
knew the city, representing it as a community of working-class whites was perfectly
authentic. A sentiment voiced by Friday in 1954’s “The Big Fraud” episode illustrates the
program’s commitments clearly. Berating a captured con man who has posed as a police
officer to exploit his victims, Friday calls to mind not simply the law, but the violation of
a particular public trust he imagined as shared by the respectable residents of Los
Angeles, declaring “I live in this town, I live here and I like it.” If noir tends to represent
“urban topoi on the verge of destruction” from urban renewal and the depredations of the

92
As Hayde writes, Yarborough initially voiced Romero in diction that made the detective sound like a stereotypical
hillbilly before Webb and the producers instructed him to discard the affectation in favor of his natural speech. Hayde,
My Name's Friday: The Unauthorized but True Story of Dragnet and the Films of Jack Webb 29. A relevant
comparison can be made to Eugene Biscailuz, Los Angeles County Sheriff from 1932 to 1958. Biscailuz, his Spanish
surname notwithstanding, was of French Basque and Yankee heritage and identified more with the romanticized
“Spanish” past of California than with its Mexican inhabitants. Pitt and Pitt, Los Angeles a to Z: An Encyclopedia of the
City and County 51.
93
The radio episode “The Big Sorrow” allowed Friday to voice Webb’s loss of a professional partner and to carry on
Romero’s legacy in the most apt way, by hunting down two escaped convicts. [1951-12-27], UCLA Film and
Televison. The episode was converted to television as a belated tribute to Yarborough, airing on September 25, 1952.
252
dangerous classes, with white ethnics fleeing the scene, Friday in the 1950s run of
Dragnet stood, fleetingly, in opposition equally to the bulldozer and the exodus.
94
In
subsequent chapters, I will discuss the reincarnation of Dragnet in the 1960s in light of
the transformation of the metropolitan area. The later version of the show held no such
attachments to the city and much less sympathy for its people because the ordinary whites
who lent the 1950s version so much of its humanity were much less prominent in the
fictive city of Dragnet’s second run. Perhaps too, the show’s white viewers were no
longer able to connect their lives to such a fictive version of the city.

Urban Travelogues and Centripetal Metropolitanism on Local Television
Since Dragnet dramatized the LAPD, its spatial references, circumscribed by the
city limits, tended toward downtown and Hollywood locations; the occasional foray into
the Valley, the suburban space within the city limits, provided the sole suburban setting
for the program. This appears at odds with the received notion of television as the
medium of the suburbs, and might prompt one to wonder if Dragnet’s urbanity
represented the idiosyncratic convergence of Webb’s personal experiences, his close
professional relationship with the LAPD, and the particular resonance of the character of
Joe Friday. In many respects however, Dragnet’s centripetal urbanism was mirrored by
other contemporary programs; in the 1950s, many local news and public affairs programs
broadcast from Los Angeles presented a point of view that privileged the central city and
did not at first accept the centrifugal premise of suburbanization. Local stations worked to

94
Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity 64.
253
assume the mantle of relevance to the metropolitan public and establish their civic
importance by self-consciously representing a vision of a common urban community.
These stations produced programs that oriented viewers toward an understanding of
metropolitan Los Angeles centered on the city and its neighborhoods.
One of the best examples of this was the weekly documentary program The City
at Night, hosted by Ken Grau on the local independent station KTLA (Channel 5) from
1950 to 1960. The program began a second run in 1961 hosted by Bill Stout, with its
name changing to “Line of Sight” midway through the run.
95
The program used early
remote camera technology to shoot location footage around Los Angeles, and, as Grau
recalled, was “your surprise program of the week,” organized around the conceit that not
only the audience, but the production crew and the announcers as well, were kept in the
dark about where they would be shooting until just before the equipment trucks rolled
out.
96
This convention was often observed in the breach, with the station leaking a
program’s subject matter and locale to the Times television columnist Walter Ames if it
promised to be particularly entertaining.
97
The element of surprise viewers experienced
evoked the sense that in the big city anything could happen, and one might find oneself
enmeshed in any number of unpredictable, but enjoyable, adventures.
98
These topics

95
The First Twenty Years: KTLA’s Twentieth Anniversary Show (1967-05-28), UCLA Film and Television.
96
The First Twenty Years: KTLA’s Twentieth Anniversary Show (1967-05-28), UCLA Film and Television.
97
Walter Ames, "Fans Moan over Lack of Grid TV; Christmas Show Set," Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1956, A14,
Walter Ames, "Frosty Frolics Has Wedding on Ice Tonight; Crosby Host to Bogart, Bacall on Show," Los Angeles
Times, February 13, 1952, 22. Ames would pepper these reports with winking acknowledgments that suggested the
leaks came from the top at KTLA: “Don’t tell [Station Manager] Klaus Landsberg I told you but his City at Night
Show at 10 is visiting the annual Elks March of Dimes Circus. It’s supposed to be a secret.” Ames, "Frosty Frolics."
Even while spilling the beans, Ames honored the basic conceit of secrecy: “I don’t get much opportunity to tell you
where KTLA’s City at Night show is going. Tonight, however….” Ames, "Fans Moan."
98
These urban possibilities are captured by geographer Michael Johns’ argument that the 1950s represented the peak of
American urbanism. Johns uses “peak” in a literally geometric sense analogous to the point of intersection between two
254
were often far from gritty, and those that can be tracked from the Times television
listings included circuses, university homecomings, the Club Deauville’s “Aqua Follies”
revue, and the like alongside more civic minded subjects as the Los Angeles Braille
Institute. Nonetheless, The City at Night was recognized locally as a “public affairs”
program, and widely honored as such, perhaps because its mission flattered the
centripetal sensibility of the station managers.
99
California Governor Earl Warren
honored KTLA for achievement in local broadcasting in 1951, citing The City at Night as
central to the station’s potential for civic enrichment.
100

The City at Night was considered by the station to be a prestige program; the
station was institutionally invested in the program as an example of the high-minded
potential of the medium as a vector of social coherence. This utopianism may today be
dismissed as the self-justification of the tycoons of a corporate medium that is universally
associated with banal entertainment corrosive of human intelligence. However, it ran
deeply through the culture of early television stations, who believed idealistically in the
power of moving images (an adjective with a purposefully double meaning) to bridge
social division. If in retrospect the placement of the television set in the single-family

lines; while this point was temporally imprecise, spanning some period of years in the 1950s, it was by definition
poised at the intersection of ascendancy and decline. In particular, Johns identifies the romantic and sexual excitement
associated with “downtown” places. Michael Johns, Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s (Berkeley,
Calif.: University of California Press, 2003) 23-24.
99
The categories for which The City at Night was honored or nominated in the local Emmy awards varied as the young
industry evolved. In 1951, it won for “Public Service,” in 1952 was nominated in the “Hollywood Achievement”
category of “Best Public Affairs,” and in 1955 was nominated for “Best Documentary or Educational Program.” "Alan
Young, Gertrude Berg Win TV Honors for 1950," Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1951, 2. "Bishop Sheen Named Top
Personality on TV," Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1953, 2. Walter Ames, "Nominees for Local TV Shows Revealed;
Cornell to Do'wimpole Street'," Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1956, B6.
100
"Alan Young, Gertrude Berg Win TV Honors for 1950."
255
house on the suburban fringe seems to militate decisively against this unity, this was
by no means evident in the early 1950s.
This esteem from the producers was matched by the enthusiasm of local critics,
but not always by the viewers. By 1954, Ames revealed to his viewers that the station’s
and the program’s success would be celebrated by a broadcast from KTLA’s new color
studio on Sunset Boulevard. At the end of City at Night’s run, local critics lamented the
turn of programming toward national network shows, claiming that these were
homogenized and insipid. Cecil Smith served as the Times television critic in the early
1960s, and his reviews expressed an occasionally bitter sense that the medium had failed
to live up to its earlier potential. Lamenting the fact that City at Night was passed over
for a local Emmy for the 1960 season, Smith felt called to question the entire enterprise:
I have no idea what television’s true function is—to amuse, to amaze, to shock, to
titillate, to send the pulses pounding and the spirit soaring, to uplift the soul or to
aid digestion, to act as a soporific, to instruct, to elucidate, to give light in
darkness, to widen horizons or (more often) narrow them, to be a window on the
world or just to sell products.
101

In the same piece, Smith accused the voters representing local network-affiliated stations
of excluding deserving shows on independent stations from the awards, most pointedly
The City at Night, noting “if so, this is sad—local TV contributions can and sometimes
are enormous in a community.”
102

Two years later, Smith attacked the local television industry for foregoing local
awards for the 1962 season as signs that the stations were abandoning their responsibility

101
Cecil Smith, "The TV Scene--Chalk One up for Television," Ibid., October 16, 1961, A14.
102
Ibid.
256
to engage and shape a metropolitan public. Though the prior year’s awards had again
passed over The City at Night, Smith’s judgment that the awards were a farce was
overcome by his conviction that:
Local television has reached such a deplorable state—the level of cheap movie
houses grinding out endless reruns of old shows—that any efforts it makes to
produce or present a program of quality, intelligence, and public service should
certainly be noted by the industry.
103

Looking nostalgically back at The City at Night in 1965, critic Walt Dutton lamented the
business-driven lapsing of programming that made “a station look public minded even if,
in the eyes of the ratings people, no one out there is watching.”
104
Reading between the
lines, we can infer that part of what Dutton was lamenting was the gradual departure of
local television from its prior mission of representing a civic identity, one that Times
critics like Dutton and Smith assumed would be centered in Los Angeles.
105
Ironically,
the program’s first broadcast in color was from the 1956 General Motors “Motorama”
auto show, a venue the program had visited before in 1951.
106
Glamorous automobility
signaled arguably more than any other subject the forces at work unraveling the fictive
bonds of community the program sought to establish. In part, Smith blamed the rising
influence of network programming, seeing the impulse to pursue a broader audience as
corrosive of local engagement and productive of insipid programming. Praising the new

103
Cecil Smith, "The TV Scene--Local Stations to Forego Emmys," Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1963, C10.
104
Walt Dutton, "Local Television Has Awakening," Ibid., December 31, 1965, A16.
105
This presumption was an institutionalized part of the Times’ civic mission, as Dorothy Chandler, wife of publisher
Harry Chandler, spent the better part of the late 1950s and early 1960s leveraging contributions to build venues for high
culture in the area north of Bunker Hill, with the intention of creating a civic acropolis downtown. Mike Davis, City of
Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990) 72.
106
The First Twenty Years: KTLA’s Twentieth Anniversary Show (1967-05-28), UCLA Film and Television.. Walter
Ames, "Color Show Set for Gm Motorama," Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1956.
257
“Line of Sight,” Smith complained that “local documentary, once a mainstay of local
TV, has become a sometime thing.”
107
As a general complaint, this may have been true.
However, there were instances where even network programming in the late 1950s
retained an intense focus on the local, the particular, and the diverse, and located them in
the city of Los Angeles.
Debuting in 1959, On the Go was a CBS network morning program, hosted by
Jack Linkletter, the son of popular TV personality Art Linkletter. Like The City at Night,
it took advantage of mobile videotape equipment to gather its stories outside of the
studio. In part, the show’s initial focus on Southern California was dictated by
Linkletter’s academic career—he was finishing his studies in English at the University of
Southern California when the show’s production began. While On the Go later covered
18,000 miles and visited 60 cities in the United States and Canada, the 1959 season was
set in and around Los Angeles, though it did make a foray to the Las Vegas Strip.
108
And
how it represented places in Los Angeles as the camera followed Linklater through the
course of “going places, doing things, and meeting people in their pursuit of happiness”
was significant: the show’s content was predominantly urban. Linkletter envisioned his
program as serving an audience of suburban housewives taking a morning break after
getting children and husbands fed, clothed, and out the door, suggesting that producers

107
Cecil Smith, "The TV Scene--Video Specs Will Fill Tube Tonight," Ibid., November 29, 1961, A12.
108
Art Ryon, "Ham on Ryon: Game Called Because of Automation," Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1959, B5. Hedda
Hopper, "Entertainment: Films Stage Music," Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1959, A8. Ryon noted with
considerable irony that Linkletter, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa, made five As and one B in his final semester, with
the lone B coming in telecommunications.
258
and audiences might converge through a window on the urban world.
109
We may
recognize a certain condescension in the idea that the television might be a housewife’s
window on the wider world, but at the same time the show gave those housewives
considerable credit for interest in an urban world that cultural history often claims they
were rejecting. Among the edgier subjects catalogued by the UCLA Film and Television
Archive are: The Bracero program and guest workers in California agriculture; the
California Institute for Men (State Prison) in Chino and the California Institute for
Women at Corona (which Linkletter visited at Christmastime to hear the story of mothers
separated from their children by incarceration); the City of Hope cancer hospital;
treatment facilities for epileptics, alcoholics, and drug addicts; and the Midnight Mission
serving the city’s homeless and destitute.
110
And, if excitement, provocation, or enriching
experiences were to be found, the program often suggested that the city was the place.
Linkletter, though a veteran of his father’s House Party program, was only twenty-one
when On the Go first aired, and his youthful optimism infused his enthusiasm for urban
exploration: “’I’m young and want to find out things. I think all people feel that way.
Some of the places we visit help satisfy their curiosity.’”
111
Though Linkletter suggested
that a studio program would make the housewife-viewer feel that “again she’s trapped
between four walls,” mobility itself cannot account for the choice of locations.
112

109
Cecil Smith, "On the Go to Beam World to Housewife," Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1959, G3. Ron Tepper,
"Interest for Housewife: Jack Linkletter Aims for the Curious," Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1959, G4.
110
Subject information for On the Go is available through the online catalogue of the UCLA Film and Television
Archive at http://cinema.library.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First.
111
Tepper, "Interest for Housewife."
112
Smith, "On the Go."
259
The show made an earnest effort to showcase various areas of the city, and to
portray them positively or at least evenhandedly. Occasionally, the result was a comic
effect, as when the suit and tie-clad Linketter ventured to the Venice Gashouse, a Beat art
studio and performance space, to interview the artists and leaders of the largest
countercultural movement on the Los Angeles scene.
113
As Sarah Schrank has written,
the Gas House, under the leadership of Eric “Big Daddy” Nord, was “town hall, watering
hole, and crash pad for the authors and painters who lived in or visited the beach.” This
was an outcome of a self-consciously entrepreneurial strategy by local artists, who sought
to militate against the effects of spatial dispersal on Los Angeles’ artists by forming a
more coherent “scene” in the low-rent precincts of Venice.
114
This scene-making had
broad cultural resonance both in Los Angeles and in the mediated cultural life of the
United States, with popular magazines and television alternating between voyeuristic
curiosity and moralistic condemnation of the beat lifestyle.
115
On the Times television
page, Fred Danzig went so far as to opine that “the Beatniks’ great contribution to
American culture will be that they supplied TV comedians, comedy writers, and
choreographers with a full season of material” in 1959.
116
On the Go, too, captured
many images of beat ennui, and many sounds of clichéd free jazz music, emanating from
the denizens of the Gas House.

113
"On the Go: Venice West No. 2," (CBS, 1959). ARC-FTA-UCLA.
114
Sarah Schrank, "The Art of the City: Modernism, Censorship, and the Emergence of Los Angeles's Postwar Art
Scene," American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004): 673-74.
115
Ibid.: 679.
116
Fred Danzig, "Rowe Show Has Long Row to Hoe," Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1959, A10.
260
The comic value of Linkletter’s encounter with the beats notwithstanding, On
the Go’s visit indicated that television producers were far more willing than many public
officials and local civic organizations to accept the challenge of the Beats to social
homogeneity. Around the time of On the Go’s visit, the Gashouse and the Venice Beats
were locked in a serious struggle, though peppered with the rhetoric of the absurd, with
Venice neighborhood associations and Chief Parker’s police department over the threat
that their activities allegedly posed to the social order.
117
Even before the Gas House
episode was aired, the Venice Civic Union attempted to pressure both CBS and its local
affiliates to suppress the episode, writing to the network that “’Unless you can see or find
another story in Venice that will prove to the world we are not a slum area and this
community is made up of hard-working, respectable people, we ask you to hold up
release of the show.’”
118
This effort was rebuffed, and the episode aired on August 20
th

and 21
st
, just prior to the commencement of hearings before the Police Commission over
the Gas House’s entertainment license. The program probably contained enough images
of ennui, race-mixing, and non-gainful activity to convince the Commisson, already
hostile to the beats, that their opposition was justified.
However, the program as it aired also bore out the fears of the Civic Union in that
it refused to offer a blanket condemnation of the beats and sought to engage them on their
own terms and understand their philosophy. Linkletter interviewed Lawrence Lipton,
author of The Holy Barbarians, a 1959 tract that served as a statement of purpose for the
Venice beats and a declaration of their willful alienation from square society, and gave a

117
Schrank, "Art of the City."
118
"Venice 'Beatniks' Battle 'Neatniks'," Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1959, WS1.
261
respectful hearing for Lipton’s call for “new values.” Arthur Richter and Julie
Meredith were among other prominent beat artists interviewed, with Linkletter
questioning Richter about his exploration of the “redone book” format, in which paint
applied to the pages of old books refigured the meaning and form of prose. Some of his
questions were somewhat obtuse, and reflected, wholly appropriately, the sensibility of a
college undergraduate in their orientation toward the big ideas raised by the beats, as
when Linkletter suggested that it ran “counter to your whole philosophy of life” for
Richter to sell his works for money. But, by waiting for Richter’s answer, Linkletter rose
above criticisms of the beats as dilettantes, hypocrites, or flakes. In his response that he
lived “in poverty involuntarily” and would, if he had money, “spend it as fast as anybody
else and with as much fun and as much beauty,” Richter connected the Gas House to the
program’s classically American interest in the “pursuit of happiness.”
119

One can only guess at the response a suburban housewife may have had to the
spectacle of the Gashouse; perhaps she may have been horrified, or intrigued, or even
inspired. Many may have been unsettled by Arthur Richter’s claim that “there is no such
word as security; a man who works, has a trade, builds his possessions up to a mounting
sum, and then he walks around the corner and is mowed down by a truck.”
120
But many
may also have recognized in it some of the contemporary criticisms of suburban life. And
On the Go lent considerable credence to the beats’ claims to an inalienable right to self-
expression as part of a healthy society. In the aftermath of McCarthyism and amid the
growing militance of the post-Brown civil rights movement, this was no idle expression

119
"On the Go: Venice West No. 2."
120
Ibid.
262
of a civic credo, but a definite political stance. The relation of television and
grassroots politics in this case confounds our expectations; here, it was not television that
was trying to portray the Gashouse Beats as a social menace, but the organized residents
of an urban neighborhood. And it was not the cosmopolitan residents of the city who
sought to protect an oasis of nonconformity as an essential part of the social fabric of the
big city, but the ostensibly homogenizing force of television. The Venice Civic Union
was sufficiently outraged by Linkletter’s evenhanded treatment of the beats to claim
before the Police Commission that On the Go was a willing publicity tool of Nord and his
associates.
121

For all of its intended appeal to suburban housewives, or perhaps because of it,
the Gas House episode was not the only occasion when On the Go looked to the arts and
artists in urban places as a source of its subject matter. Another 1959 episode introduced
viewers to the effort to save Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers from demolition by the City
Building Department.
122
Supplemented by an audio recording of Rodia’s Italian-accented
English describing his idiosyncratic project, Linkletter opened the program with an
ostensibly evenhanded statement of competing views of the Towers, alternately viewed
as “a work of art and a horrible mass of nothingness.”
123
First, he interviewed Bill
Cartwright and Nick King, the two white men who had bought Rodia’s former property,
and who described for the audience their intention to develop a local cultural center and

121
"Filed with Commission: Beatnik Affidavit," Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1959, WS1.
122
For an excellent description of the context of this preservation movement, see Sarah Schrank, "Nuestro Pueblo: The
Spatial and Cultural Politics of Los Angeles' Watts Towers," in The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics,
and Everyday Life, ed. Gyan Prakash and Kevin Michael Kruse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
123
"On the Go: Watts Tower," (CBS, 1959).
263
to preserve the towers as a public monument.
124
Then, Bill Manley of the Los
Angeles Building and Safety Department countered with his dispassionate professional
opinion of the Towers as “the biggest pile of junk in Los Angeles,” supplemented with
the personal view that “I don’t think there’s anything here to appreciate.”
125
These views
were then countered with an interview with Art and Architecture associate editor Jules
Langsner, who described the Towers as part of a “found art” tradition of taking “objects
that you would think of as having no value, or interest, or no beauty, and discovering
and making patterns out of the discarded refuse of our civilization.”
126
Heady stuff for
the housewife whom the show’s producers imagined as tuning in at 9:00 in the morning
as “she takes a break for a cup of coffee before hitting the dishes and the housework.”
127

While On the Go was able to engage with the intellectual content of found art, it
was unable or unwilling to engage so directly with the black and Mexican community
surrounding the Towers. Set entirely within Rodia’s former property, Linklater’s
engagement with the community consisted of interviews with white artists and Rodia’s
Mexican-American neighbors, who expressed their sense that Rodia’s former neighbors
wanted his towers preserved for the public, while appearing somewhat bemused by the
attention paid by white artists (pictured painting on easels at the base of the towers) to
their working-class neighborhood. As Schrank argues, preservationists generally
portrayed the towers as an entity separate from the surrounding neighborhood because the

124
Cartwright and King purchased the property for $3,000 in 1958, and were active in reframing the towers as a work
of art possessed of civic importance in order to forestall their demolition. Schrank, "Nuestro Pueblo," 285-86.
125
"On the Go: Watts Tower."
126
Ibid.
127
Smith, "On the Go."
264
case for the preservation of art was politically sounder than the case for protecting a
poor minority community.
128
Still, one must pause to reflect on the remarkable fact that a
1959 television program, aimed squarely at an audience of suburban housewives, was
proposing that a plot of land at 107
th
Street and Avalon Boulevard in Watts, by that time
long-since designated as a blighted slum by property assessors and more recently made
one by the locational decisions of the Housing Authority, might be a destination for self-
realization through aesthetic contemplation.
129
Television was a crucial medium for this
message in 1959, because of changes in local transportation infrastructure. After the
demise of the local streetcar system, which had a major hub in Watts for lines between
the harbor and beach areas and downtown, metropolitan traffic increasingly bypassed
Watts on dedicated freeways. Anglenos living outside of Watts by 1959 were unlikely to
see the towers except on television.
130
And, it is perhaps even more remarkable that a
program would direct its viewers in the modern, clean, and newly-minted suburbs to
consider the “discarded refuse of our civilization” as a site of civic heritage. Ironically,
seven years later, Noah Purifoy and Judson Powell presented their work “66 Signs of
Neon” at the Watts Towers Art Center. The assemblage of three tons of riot debris
attracted significant attention, but was hailed largely for the darkness of its vision,

128
Schrank, "Nuestro Pueblo," 288-89.
129
Indeed, at the same time as the Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts was working to save the towers, the
city’s Building and Safety Commission was ordering the demolition of three thousand residential properties as part of a
campaign of slum clearance. Ibid., 280.
130
Ibid., 281.
265
reflecting the conflicted relationship between the Towers as a cultural site and the
community of Watts.
131

The complicated nature of representing ethnic diversity in Los Angeles to a
television audience of white Anglos was more completely demonstrated in another
episode, in which Linkletter visited Olvera Street, described as “a city within a city” and
“a little bit of Old Mexico.”
132
Linkletter was not a Spanish speaker, and his halting
greeting of “Buenos… dias?” offered to Mariano Valdez, the general manager of the
marketplace, was wholly unnecessary given Valdez’s fluent English. Other cultural
misapprehensions abounded. While Valdez and other ethnic Mexican business managers
interviewed described their arrival in the United States in the 1920s, during the heart of
the Great Migration, their status as residents for three decades of Los Angeles’
modernization was poorly integrated into a travelogue narrative that suggested the
continued foreignness of Mexicans, reinforced by images of handicrafts and an old
woman making tortillas by hand. Linkletter asked Valdez if Mexican immigrants found it
easier to live in a Mexican community “instead of integrating,” a question that obscured
the obliteration of residential communities in the immediate vicinity of Olvera Street, the
predominant American nativity of ethnic Mexicans prior to the immigration reforms of
1965, and the workings of racial exclusion from Anglo neighborhoods. For his part,
Valdez answered charitably, stressing that his own children were upwardly mobile and
integrated into society, and offering, perhaps ironically, that his own choice of residence

131
Ibid., 288-90, 94-95. Purifoy had long sparred with preservationists about the need to integrate the towers with the
cultural and educational needs of Watts’ inhabitants, and the Watts Towers Art Center was founded as a separate entity
from the Rodia property.
132
"On the Go: Olvera Street," (CBS, 1960). ARC-FTA-UCLA
266
with other Mexicans reflected no prejudice against Anglos! Linkletter’s closing
statement that “anybody who comes to Los Angeles really doesn’t see Los Angeles
unless they come to Olvera Street” was, in its own way, true, reflecting a valuing of
Mexican people on highly limited terms, and under strict conditions of racial
containment. The setting of Olvera Street exposed many Anglonormative presumptions
about urban space, and the difficulty attendant on addressing the actual presence of
Mexicans in Los Angeles as citizens, businessmen, or socially integrated members of the
civic body. For all this, however, the fact remains that, insofar as the civic identity of
Los Angeles was (except for the bounded space of Olvera Street) presumed to be Anglo,
On the Go rejected any framing of the city as given over to minorities and abandoned by
whites.
In one of its ventures to Los Angeles’ suburbs, On the Go found noteworthy
subject matter in the story of a family that transgressed many of the expectations of
suburbia as a site of affluence and racial homogeneity. Visiting Mr. and Mrs. Charles
Conley of Covina, Linkletter began his broadcast outside their tract house, noting that
the family resided in a “no down payment for veterans tract home” like their neighbors,
“all the same on the outside.” After this tweak of suburban homogeneity, Linkletter
claimed that “inside this home is… a family you’ll never forget.”
133
The Conleys had,
after 25 years of childless marriage, adopted five children, three of whom were mixed-
race orphans from Korea. The themes of the program were the generosity of the Conleys,
who struggled to raise their adopted children on Charles’ wages as a delivery truck driver

133
"On the Go: Conley Family," (CBS, 1959). ARC-FTA-UCLA
267
for a local grocery store chain, and their explicitly-acknowledged courage in deciding
to raise a mixed-race family. On this latter score, Mrs. Conley expressed her hope that
the race of her “Oriental” children will not become a problem, though she acknowledged
the likelihood that “in time, it will be.”
134
This challenge to the constructed homogeneity
of postwar suburban tracts was purposeful, if gentle.
In other episodes, the urban subject matter was far grimmer, and revealed the
fundamental problem of representing the city as a civic whole; if one were to embrace
individual expression, artistic inspiration, and ethnic diversity as civic goods located in
urban space, that embrace entailed unavoidable negative aspects as well. This was never
clearer than when Linklater visited the Volunteers of America alcoholism treatment
facility on Skid Row, an episode for which the producers reduced the customary
introduction from “meeting people in their pursuit of happiness” to simply “meeting
people.”
135
On the Go followed a very sympathetic framing of the problem of alcoholism,
and Linkletter expressed hope for the continued sobriety of his interviewees, but that
narrative framing exhibited all of the contradictions of other liberal efforts to grapple
with urban space in Los Angeles. Above all, the show definitively placed the city’s
alcoholism problem in Skid Row. Linkletter tapped his connections to USC to interview
Professor William Heinman, who offered a discouraging assessment of the issue of urban
blight and its human casualties. Noting that “no city is getting ahead of its blight,”
Heinman opined that the effort to purge the city center of vagrants was ill fated. The
alcoholic denizens of Skid Row had “resigned from competitive society” and, if their

134
Ibid.
135
"On the Go: Skid Row," (CBS, 1959). ARC-FTA-UCLA
268
haunts around Fifth and Main Streets were razed, “they’ll find a new blighted area in
which a new Skid Row will develop.”
136
While this assessment was a caution against a
vulgar geographical determinism, it did reinforce a clear equation between vibrant,
dynamic places and the winners of society, and suburban audiences could be forgiven for
taking away the lesson that downtown Los Angeles was, notwithstanding the efforts of
kindhearted doctors and the occasional success story, a doomed place synonymous with
bums and drunks.

The Emergence of Suburbanity on Local Television
These episodes reflect breaches and fissures in the presumed cultural unanimity of
suburban themes in mass culture, rather than a universal or even predominant trend in
broadcasting. Critics have, with justification, focused on the picket-fenced normalcy of
1950s sitcom suburbs as a cultural indicator. It is significant to note, however, that On the
Go represented an investment of capital and development by a national television
network, which fully expected its audience to respond favorably to its content, based on
the idea that, while sitcom suburbs existed in a placeless relationship to social trends, the
human audience for television programming still held attachments to the real places of
the city as sites of cultural life, commerce, and excitement. There is reason to believe
that, by 1960, both local and national television producers were being drawn grudgingly
away from the effort to champion a centripetal civic culture. Among the last episodes of
The City at Night, airing in 1960, demonstrated that white Angelenos were evidently

136
Ibid.
269
tiring of urban surprise; the episode “recorded the crumbling majesty of Bunker Hill,”
visually depicting a landscape of defeat with images of moribund Victorian houses,
exteriors marred by neglect and by the iron fire escapes grafted to them to support their
subdivision into single-room apartments.
137
This broadcast followed the City Council’s
approval in 1958 of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency’s plan to raze
136 acres of land on Bunker Hill, and preceded the first acquisitions of land in 1961 and
the first demolitions in 1962.
138
In this context, The City at Night collaborated with the
CRA’s agenda. The show expressed nostalgia for past “majesty” but fully accepted the
CRA’s contention that it was “crumbling” and irredeemable. Evidently, the “city at
night” was no longer a place where many viewers wished to imagine themselves.
The program was revived in 1961. Its subjects were no longer held secret, and the
retooled program represented far more an attempt at showcasing “local color” than at
representing a coherent bond of community across the region, with plans for shows on
plastic surgery, music, art, mathematics, burlesque, “poker palaces,” and “oddities of
Southern California.”
139
The City of Los Angeles had faded in importance in the
worldview of these television producers; while urban locations still presented some hope
for attracting viewer interest, their framing as “oddities” suggests that the metropolitan
viewing public was less inclined to view the city as the center of their lives, and less
inclined to accord the central city pride of place in their imagined community. In this
transformation, the representation of Los Angeles gave way to a set of representations of

137
"The First Twenty Years: Ktla's Twentieth Anniversary Show," (1967). ARC-FTA-UCLA
138
Cohen-Marks, "Community Redevelopment," 426-28.
139
Cecil Smith, "Bimbo Foresees Whale of a Show," Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1961, A10.
270
a “Los Angeles” more nebulously bounded and less connected to the political body of
the city, represented in disconnected places and a small number of iconic images.
140

This trend, toward the depiction of places in Metropolitan Los Angeles as loosely
affiliated was expressed in Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, a “magazine” type program that
ran on KNXT (later CBS2/KCBS) in Los Angeles between 1964 and 1970. Born Ralph
Bernard Snyder in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1920, Story (who adopted his less ethnic air
name in 1948 at the suggestion of station management), was a veteran of local radio and
television. On KNX-CBS radio in the 1950s, Story “revolutionized” the morning news
format “by giving weather and traffic reports,” information invaluable to a metropolis on
the go. Story also had a stint hosting quiz shows among his other on-air roles. The
revelation of corruption in quiz shows killed the genre, though Story was never
implicated in any wrongdoing and emerged “clean as the Gerber baby” from the
scandal.
141
Looking for a new gig, Story was approached by station management to host a
“magazine” style show about greater Los Angeles in 1964. The idea for the program
originated with the station’s managers, who felt the need to carry on in some form the
tradition of local documentary programs through a “prime-time public service program.”
Initially, Story was skeptical of the show’s prospects, remembering himself as “the
pigeon assigned to it.”
142
The program’s tone and content would prove to be strong

140
For a discussion of this phenomenon based in the late 20
th
Century, see Jerome Monnet, "The Everyday Imagery of
Space in Los Angeles," in Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the Urban Landscape, ed.
Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2001).
141
Don Page, "That's the Story of Ralph's Life," Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1965, D24. "Ralph Story's Series on
L.A. Seen Sundays," Los Angeles Times, September 11, 1966, WS_A12.
142
Page, "That's the Story."
271
indicators not only of the elasticity of “public service” as a descriptor of content, but
also of the shift in local television’s framing of the city and the metropolitan area.
From the opening credits, an animated illustration of a nighttime road giving the
perspective of a driver cresting a hill to see the distant lights of the Los Angeles basin,
Ralph Story’s Los Angeles reflected the perspective of a visitor to the big city, if not from
Story’s Midwest then from the growing suburbs. Story purposefully deployed a folksy
demeanor, speaking with a slight twang and voicing gently ironic comments on a
metropolis that many viewing “visitors” may have found both strange and wonderful.
One critic admired how Story’s folksiness “dealt with the insults fired at Los Angeles,
quoting W.C. Fields’ observation that the city was ‘Double Dubuque’ and Carl Reiner’s
comment that the new high-rise buildings ‘look like the boxes Disneyland came in’.”
143

However, if Story defended “Los Angeles,” it was hardly on the terms by which a
New Yorker, a Bostonian, or a Chicagoan might defend his or her turf; the program lent
itself rather to the imagination of Southern California at its best as a region of regular
folks. One brief segment from 1967 addressed the theme of embarrassment through a
series of on-street interviews with people about their embarrassing moments.

Shot in
nondescript locations, the segment suggested not only that Angelenos were no
sophisticated city slickers, but that one major knock on the region, its purported
phoniness, could be easily defused by showing Angelenos as capable of embarrassment.
Story concluded by praising this show of “honest emotion,” chided critics who would
place this honesty “someplace else,” and suggested that it compared favorably to the kind

143
Cecil Smith, "Offbeat View of an Upbeat City," Ibid., January 16, 1964, C10.
272
of humble sociability one might encounter in “Iowa.”
144
In the same program, Story
toured the harbor at Newport Beach in Orange County. This segment posed the beach
cities and the lifestyle associated with them as a site of metropolitan prestige. Not
coincidentally, these cities were close to Lakewood and other new, though much more
modest, cities in southeastern Los Angeles County. It seems likely that these cities
figured more prominently in the imagination of residents of the southeastern quadrant of
the county than Downtown or Hollywood, though Story was compelled to describe his
visit as a look at “how the upper half of the other half lives,” delineating his audience
both from the inner city and the more princely realm of the fabulously wealthy.
145

Cecil Smith, the past champion of The City at Night and the Times’ vision of a
region centered on the new acropolis downtown, inevitably compared Ralph Story’s Los
Angeles to its predecessor, and found that it “has neither the depth nor the skill of Bill
Stout’s old ‘City at Night’ but it does offer a gentle, parenthetical comment on the way
we live, which has value.”
146
In other columns, Smith grudgingly conceded that Story
was the most active contemporary chronicler of the region (“I love this town and it could
use a defender or two.”), despite the fact that Story’s folksy mannerisms grated on
Smith’s critical sensibilities. On its debut, Smith wrote that Story’s was a
gentle show which, apparently, will ruffle no feathers but offers information in a
nice, soothing, bland manner. It’s a bit on the folksy side, but not stomach-
turning folksy, and Ralph has a nice turn of phrase.
147

144
"Ralph Story's Los Angeles No. 164-C," (KNXT, Los Angeles, 1967). ARC-FTA-UCLA.
145
Ibid.
146
Cecil Smith, "The TV Scene: Story's Insights to a Megalopolis," Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1964, C12. In his title,
Smith grudgingly accepted the notion of “Los Angeles” as a “megalopolis” in which the City of Los Angeles occupied
no privileged position among the vastly growing suburbs.
147
Cecil Smith, "Offbeat View of an Upbeat City," Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1964. Smith’s phrase “this town”
clung to the idea of “Los Angeles” as equivalent to “The City of Los Angeles.”
273

Smith’s faint praise was hardly sufficient to damn the program, however. The show
frequently topped the ratings for its time slot and won a local Emmy award for the 1965
season.
148
Enthusiasm for Story’s delivery or loathing of it constituted a culture war in
miniature over the image of “Los Angeles” on the local small screen. In one column
where he printed letters from his readers, Smith voiced the opinion of one that Story’s
“twangy, whiny voice” was irritating and his material trite. Another reader, however,
took up Story’s defense, not only identifying folksiness as “part of his charm,” but
accusing Smith and other critics of snobbery, writing “We enjoy his show—haven’t
missed one since the series began. Guess we’re just plain folk.”
149

Story’s show went far afield in chronicling life in “Los Angeles” and a critical
assessment of the program must make an effort to construct a cognitive map out of the
program’s varied subjects over its seven years on the air. Two episodes in particular,
however, addresses the way that Story figured the expansion of the megalopolis as a
populist tale of mobility and assimilation through suburbanization. In one, airing in
1967, Story endeavored to “pay humble respect to a colorful and distinguished group of
our citizens,” to “tell the story of the Japanese in Los Angeles, and to penetrate some
Oriental mysteries.”
150
This rather stereotyped introduction gives way to a more
comprehensive look at the present status of Little Tokyo. The episode demonstrates that
by 1967 the former residential enclave had largely given way to commercial and

148
Don Page, "That's the Story of Ralph's Life," Ibid., December 10, 1965.
149
Cecil Smith, "The TV Scene: Postman Drops Them Off, Runs," Ibid., August 5, 1964, C13.
150
"Ralph Story's Los Angeles No. 165-C," (KNXT, Los Angeles, 1967). ARC-FTA-UCLA. Thanks to Hillary Jenks,
whose research on Little Tokyo brought this episode to my attention.
274
industrial land uses, becoming a site where Angelenos might consume exotic
delicacies and purchase goods from Japanese-owned businesses. The episode includes an
acknowledgment of the injustice of internment, but allows viewers to imagine a happy
resolution, one that places Japanese Americans in the context of the major narrative of
the postwar metropolis, suburbanization. Through their presence in a central commercial
district, the Japanese American community contributed to “making L.A. a sophisticated
and worthwhile place to live” through consumption and the suggestion of “Oriental
mysteries” enlivening the otherwise blighted central city. Yet, as for the Japanese
themselves, “as luck would have it, they are not prisoners of the urban jungle,” instead
commuting in to their Little Tokyo businesses from suburban cities.
151

In one of the few episodes that did draw an explicit spatial linkage between a
place in the city of Los Angeles and the growing suburban fringe, Story used his
November 21, 1965 broadcast to assess the meaning of Boyle Heights to the metropolitan
area.
152
Since the episode was produced shortly after the Watts unrest, it is possible that
Story wanted to present a more encouraging example of minority incorporation in Los
Angeles as grounds for optimism.
153
This informed his approach; Story introduced the
segment as a story of immigration and exodus of successive ethnic groups, first the Jews,
and, perhaps optimistically, of ethnic Mexicans. Story characterized Boyle Heights, a
place well-known as ethnically “other” to suburban Angelenos, as “our own permanent

151
Ibid.
152
"Ralph Story's Los Angeles No. 84," (KNXT, Los Angeles, 1965). ARC-FTA-UCLA.
153
As Horne argues, the convening of the McCone Commission to study the Watts unrest occurred in a context in
which public authorities openly debated whether ethnic Mexican community interests might also be advanced by
rioting. Horne, Fire This Time 259-60.
275
promised land,” suggesting at once that the area was in some way part of a
metropolitan collectivity and that that relationship was constituted in the repeated cycle
of migration out of the neighborhood to greener pastures in the suburbs.
154
In the course
of introducing an interview with Joe Kovner, the publisher of the Eastside Sun
newspaper, Story described the Jewish phase of this cycle, in which “the Los Angeles
River parted and the children of Israel moved westward, in the direction of Beverly
Hills.”
155
Interestingly, Story acknowledges the force of freeway construction through
Boyle Heights as part of the motive force of this exodus; over shots of the Golden State
Freeway slicing through Hollenbeck Park, Story intoned: “they destroyed homes,
desecrated parks, people fought them…. Fought them all, and lost.”
156
But, by connecting
this episode discursively to the history of the Jews of Boyle Heights who decamped to the
West Side, Story suggests that the loss was, ultimately, for the best.
Story obscured much of Boyle Heights’ history by implying that the Jewish
exodus made way for “the children of Mexico,” establishing a linear pattern of ethnic
succession that masked the long history of multiracial settlement in the neighborhood.
157

He further extended his narrative of succession and outward mobility by interviewing
Julio Gonzalez, a community relations worker who, proving the point, has moved his
family eastward to the suburb of Pico Rivera, one of the few new suburban cities that
welcomed ethnic Mexicans in some of its tracts. The suburban aspirations of Mexicans
in Los Angeles were shaped by forces of racial segregation, economic stratification, and

154
"Ralph Story's Los Angeles No. 84."
155
Ibid.
156
Ibid.
157
Ibid.
276
community solidarity that all lay outside of the framing of this story.
158
In his
concluding assessment that the continued Mexican exodus might leave “vacancy for
another lost tribe” in Boyle Heights, Story structured the importance of Boyle Heights to
the metropolitan area as a place where everyone might ultimately be from, an ephemeral,
if synchronous, reminder of the urban past of metropolitan “Los Angeles.”
159
In
presenting Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights, classic ethnically-identified neighborhoods in
central Los Angeles, Ralph Story’s Los Angeles paradoxically told viewers a tale about
suburbanization, a tale that cast suburbanization as a great experiment in populist
democracy, that might, with some work, create a suburban “Los Angeles” open to all.
Like On the Go, Ralph Story’s Los Angeles struggled to deal with the presence of
ethnic communities, except insofar as they could be subsumed into a noncontroversial
narrative about metropolitan places that revolved around the potential for gradual and
automatic assimilation through the suburban migration. The more difficult questions
raised by growing conflicts between Mexican and Anglo Los Angeles were not
addressed, an elision that extended to Story’s treatment of one of the historical roots of
that conflict, the 1847 Battle of La Mesa, a prelude to the capture of Los Angeles by
American troops.
160
During this episode, Story’s cameras provided contemporary views
of the site of the battle, centered around the parking lot of Crocker-Citizens National
Bank amid the industrial landscape of the greater Eastside, as well as the Pueblo de Los

158
A fuller understanding of the suburbanization of ethnic Mexicans and other Latinos in the region awaits the
completion of Jerry Gonzalez’s dissertation A Place in the Sun. Gonzalez argues that migration to suburbs like Pico-
Rivera did not reflect perfect assimilation, as color lines were drawn both within and between suburban places where
Mexicans sought to settle.
159
"Ralph Story's Los Angeles No. 84."
160
"Ralph Story's Los Angeles No. 166-C," (KNXT, Los Angeles, 1967). ARC-FTA-UCLA.
277
Angeles, to accompany his narration of the events of the battle. As Story’s camera
fixed on the monument to the American dead located in the parking lot of the bank, the
peripheral actions of Anglo businessmen and housewives performing the mundane tasks
of commerce rendered the scene either wryly humorous (as was Story’s intention) or
more bitterly absurd (as the Chicano descendants of the Mexican defenders might have
found it), and perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the way that conquest reformed the
landscape in ways that obscured the fact of conquest.
Story dispensed with U.S.-nationalistic platitudes and described the battle as a
naked conflict over land, wryly explaining that the Californios “had no claim to
California, except that they owned it,” and that the Americans “had no claim to California
except that they wanted it.”
161
Yet, this acknowledgment was shoehorned into a distorted
narrative of the battle’s historical connection to the present. Story recounted that “having
fought their Gettysburg and won, the Americans marched up what is now Downey Road
to Los Angeles,” a comparison that inverted the identities of invaders and defenders that
attended the 1863 battle.
162
That the battle of La Mesa and its outcome would be
compared favorably to Gettysburg was reinforced by Story’s deployment of the first
person plural: “If La Mesa had gone otherwise, we in Los Angeles would all be
celebrating Cinco de Mayo.”
163

Giving Story the benefit of the doubt, this usage may not have been intended in a
purposefully racist or nativist way. Story had been willing to concede, after all, that the

161
Ibid.
162
Ibid.
163
Ibid.
278
conquest of the Californios was better understood as a land grab than a noble effort to
advance American democracy. Rather, Story expressed the same logic that would
account for the presence of Mexicans in contemporary Boyle Heights as part of a saga of
immigration (rather than also of conquest and occupation). Story recounted with some
wit the exploits of American soldiers on reaching the Pueblo in Los Angeles, noting that
the soliders got so drunk on liquor abandoned by the Californios that a few dozen
defenders might have repelled the invading force “and perhaps even saved some of that
liquor.” Yet, Story argued, they “may have known that more invaders would come, and
that Los Angeles one day would be a near-solid mass of Gringos, so perhaps as a matter
of strategy, they chose to get out while the getting was good.”
164
Though of course the
Californios did not get out, holding on during an interregnum of shared power for a
quarter of a century before Anglo settlement and racism crushed their political power, in
the narrative of the program, conquest was transformed to surrender, facilitating a
mythology of Anglo innocence and Mexican foreignness that would be seriously
challenged in coming years by the rise of the Chicano movement. My search of the
topics of the program revealed few overt references to African Americans and their
communities, though in the fateful days of August 1965 when civil unrest roiled South
Los Angeles, Story did serve as an anchor on The Big News, KNXT’s nightly news show,
where his folksy style was, to say the least, much more subdued.
165
I will discuss the
ways that television news framed the region in the context of social and political

164
Ibid.
165
"The Big News, August 13, 1965," (KNXT, Los Angeles, 1965). ARC-FTA-UCLA. The subjects of the program
are searchable via the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s online catalogue at http://cinema.library.ucla.edu.
279
struggles for African-American and Chicano liberation in the final chapter of this
dissertation.

Conclusion
The representation of urban places on local television in Los Angeles in the 1950s
was riven with contradictions; in contrast to the archetypal suburban sitcoms (accorded a
privileged position in the surviving universe of old programs), locally produced and
oriented programs were much more sanguine about the city as a central location,
expressed a sense that the white middle class belonged there, and even provided a limited
mediation of the anxieties created by the presence of cultural and social (to a lesser
degree racial and ethnic) diversity in the city. These programs in many cases did
broadcast a belief that the presence of difference in the city made the city special,
exciting, and important. It is difficult to judge how audiences received this mandate,
though we have evidence that by the early 1960s local station managers and print media
critics were unimpressed by the tastes of the metropolitan audiences and frustrated that
prestige programs—those that were thought to have civic value--went unwatched. In any
case, the impact of popular and mass culture on public consciousness of Los Angeles as a
space or network of places in the 1950s was decidedly more ambivalent than many
observers have argued. Understanding this ambivalence requires us to refine our
understanding of how representations relate to the set of places in a society at a historical
moment of spatial development—how mediated encounters with a place relate to
physical, personal navigations of that place, and how factors outside of the media
280
encounter impact the kinds of receptions that are possible. We need to take seriously
how producers of culture draw their ideas from the spaces they live in, and resist the
temptation to consider mediated images of place as sufficient indicators of spatial
practices, or to imagine a clear correspondence between cultural representations and
social life. This is particularly true since the representation of urban space in Los Angeles
in the 1950s was so divergent from the concurrent practice of suburbanization; even
though local TV producers emphasized the virtues of diversity and centrality, their
audience (that is, the white and upwardly mobile, and therefore valued part of the
audience) kept moving to the suburbs. In the next chapters, I turn to the production of
suburban cultural and political hegemony, and invite consideration of the way in which
the work of creating new suburban places affected the attitudes of suburban whites
toward different places in the metropolitan area. This process was long, and its
instruments of change at first lay outside of the domain of mass culture, at the level of
grassroots politics. The political actions of suburbanites to craft local culture and
politically empowered local governments explains a large part of the divergence between
early local television and the programming seen in the 1960s; because, and after, the
suburbs grew more powerful and wealthy, television became more suburban. In the next
chapters I turn to the political work involved in this transformation. If a cultural result
was the seemingly ingenuous folksiness reflected in Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, it should
become clear that this charm masked the operation of shrewd political organization that
melded the populism of working-class whites to the political economy of the region and
the state. Making place for Midwestern folksiness is a story of southern California
281
history, in which discourses of family, hometowns, and local self-rule were the stuff
of high-stakes politics.
282
Chapter 5: “The Lakewood Story” and the Rule of Homes

Introduction: Producing the Suburban Frontier in Los Angeles County
In 1950, construction began on one of the largest residential developments ever
built in the United States. The Lakewood Park Corporation, a collaborative venture of
two large-scale “community builder” construction companies, Biltmore Homes and
Aetna Construction, created a suburban residential community that would soon house
more than 70,000 people. Like other fast-growing suburban areas of Los Angeles County
after World War II, Lakewood was unincorporated territory. The County of Los Angeles,
ruled by five elected Supervisors, provided public services to these areas and was happy
to increase its influence and client base as a governmental agency. In 1953, the adjacent
city of Long Beach attempted to annex Lakewood. In 1953 Lakewood’s developers and
many of its residents joined forces in a group called the Lakewood Civic Council to
defeat annexation. The Civic Council reflected the mutual place-based interests of a
large real estate corporation and the homeowners who had purchased the modest tract
homes in the development, and mobilized the resources of the corporation and the energy
and participation of the homeowners.
By the time of the annexation battle, Lakewood’s developers had already begun to
consider incorporating Lakewood, principally to shield their holdings, which included a
large shopping mall at the center of the development, from taxation. Many homeowners
questioned whether incorporation would increase their property taxes. Advocates of
incorporation successfully appealed to homeowners to sign incorporation petitions in
283
1953 by the conjoined promises that incorporation would protect neighborhood
quality and home values and that an innovative plan to obtain services by contract from
the County would limit the need for property taxes. The County Supervisors supported
the so-called “Lakewood Plan,” and cleared the way for an incorporation election by
approving the petitions and the boundaries for a proposed city late in 1953. On March 9,
1954, Lakewood voters, by a three-to-two margin, voted to incorporate a new city. As I
will discuss in subsequent chapters, the Lakewood Plan had a profound influence on the
metropolitan politics and landscape of Los Angeles County as it influenced further
incorporations.
Scholars ranging from local historians to public sector economists and public
policy analysts have debated which interests were determinative in producing
incorporation. Much that has been written about Lakewood frames this history as a binary
question of agency; was incorporation under the Lakewood Plan something done to
residents or something done by them? Two strands of explanation predominate, though
neither is sufficient. In one, an elite-centered view typified by Gary Miller’s economic
examination of city incorporations in Los Angeles County, the interests of large
landowners and the County government set the agenda for incorporation, while the
interests and desires of local residents, selected through a process of socio-economic
sorting by elite developers to form a pre-molded political bloc, have been reduced to the
284
desire to limit property taxes. In this view, citizens were largely free riders on the
elite agenda, accepting incorporation as a means of obtaining services without additional
cost.
1

In a more populist view promoted by the City of Lakewood and embraced by
many residents, the incorporation was an organic expression of popular desires for self-
government and the protection of a local identity engendered by homeownership,
evidenced by the mobilization of citizens on petition drives, the decisive margin of
victory for incorporation, and the continued satisfaction of residents with their city.
2
To
Donald Waldie, a Lakewood native, memoirist, and currently the city’s Public
Information Officer, the city is an imperfect, but genuinely popular expression of
ordinary people’s desires for community and decent life.
3
One incorporation activist
claimed on the twenty-fifth anniversary of incorporation that she “was never a bit
disappointed. By joining ourselves together as a group representing a locality, we were
not going to be eaten alive by other cities.”
4
Another early settler remembered the
incorporation as the fiftieth anniversary approached, saying “people in our area wanted a

1
Gary J. Miller, Cities by Contract: The Politics of Municipal Incorporation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981) 33,
37. Charles Hoch, "City Limits: Municipal Boundary Formation and Class Segregation in Los Angeles Suburbs, 1940-
1970" (University of California, Los Angeles, 1981).
2
Lakewood (Calif.), The Lakewood Story: History, Traditions, Values (Lakewood (Calif.): City of Lakewood, 2004) 5.
Allison Leslie Baker, "The Lakewood Story: Defending the Recreational Good Life in Postwar Southern California
Suburbia, 1950-1999" (University of Pennsylvania, 1999).
3
Waldie’s own writings should be distinguished from the publications of the City of Lakewood, as they delve far more
deeply into the role of elites in shaping social space, and investigate the contradictions of attachment to places that were
conceived with community as a mere incident. D. J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1996), Waldie, Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles.
4
Juanita Knox, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project. 1979, Local History, Iacoboni Library, Lakewood,
CA. (Audiocassette transcribed by author)
285
city of our own, so in 1954, Lakewood City was born.”
5
These themes of organic,
local democracy and satisfaction are key components of the civic narrative many
Lakewood residents share.
6

In this chapter I argue that the roles of elites and ordinary residents in producing
Lakewood were mutually dependent upon one another. Building a politicized sense of
place identity that supported incorporation was a negotiation between elite interests and
the public. A particular group of place entrepreneurs brokered this mediation. Some of
these were public relations professionals like Don Rochlen, who worked for the
Lakewood Park Corporation. Though his salary was paid by the company, Rochlen was
sufficiently open to the ideas of local professionals like John Todd (an attorney who
wrote much of the contract language of the Lakewood Plan and served for decades as the
City Attorney of Lakewood) and the dozens of other citizen activists to understand the
value residents placed on their homes, and astute enough to recognize that the local
political economy of Lakewood enabled a harmony of interests between developers and
residents who both viewed the city of Long Beach as an antagonist. The political
economy of development and the cultural mythologies of community were mutually
necessary to each other in Lakewood’s history; mythology, like capital or racial
discrimination, was a material factor in producing the social landscape. Although
Lakewood’s physical existence was the work of elites, the votes of thousands of people

5
Dorothy Anderson, Take Your Place in History Community Essays. 2003, Material hosted online by the City of
Lakewood, viewable as digital document at http://www.lakewoodcity.org/about_lakewood/community/writestuff.asp.
Hard copies in author’s possession.
6
The use of oral histories and self-penned histories from longtime residents is problematic as it submerges the voices of
people who were dissatisfied with Lakewood, or who moved away. However, they are valuable evidence of the
continuity of certain themes in the civic culture of the city that underlie a particular politics of place.
286
of modest means were critical to determining the area’s political fate. In the course of
the anti-annexation and incorporation campaigns (and after cityhood), place
entrepreneurship revolved around consolidating and promoting “The Lakewood Story”, a
politicized civic narrative that focused residents’ energies on protecting a community
defined as different from other urbanized spaces in the region.
7
Over the years, several
aspects of this narrative have remained constant, including safety, recreation, and
homeownership.
8

One of the most important products of the synthesis of elite and popular interests
that took and made place through civic narrative was an idea of “home rule”, a notion
encompassing, in varying degrees, local control, participatory democracy, and anti-
metropolitanism, and exemplified by Lakewood. As a political principle applied through
the Lakewood Plan, home rule is often incoherent; a place like Lakewood is affected by
decisions at a variety of scales, both proximate and remote, and incorporation as a
contract city only partially insulated Lakewood from these institutional pressures.
However, “home rule” in Lakewood also meant, quite literally, the “rule of homes”, a
political formation in which homeownership, citizenship, and political interest were

7
In 1953, the Civic Council produced a film by that title that advocated for incorporation, and in 1959, the City of
Lakewood produced a film by that title to promote the city as a place of safety, prosperity, sociability, and good
governance. The phrase has been the title of various other publications of the city’s Public Information Office, a
municipal public relations agency as part of the city government. In addition to the 1953 and 1959 motion pictures, I
have found in the Local History collection of the Iacoboni Library the use of the phrase “The Lakewood Story” in a
1970 promotional pamphlet for the city’s “Sky Knight” helicopter patrol program, a 1970s vintage pamphlet “The
Lakewood Story: From Bean Fields to Boulevards, from dreams to a planned community”, a mid-1990s pamphlet “The
Lakewood Story: How neighbors and volunteers made a community and a city”, and a 2004 book published for the 50
th

anniversary of the city’s incorporation.
8
Baker, "The Lakewood Story: Defending the Recreational Good Life in Postwar Southern California Suburbia, 1950-
1999". Although I will be concerned in greater part with the effect of The Lakewood Story on places outside Lakewood,
Baker’s work is instructive to anyone interested in the history of Lakewood. She and I use many of the same sources
(although my encounter with them preceded my reading of her work), and accordingly I note where our interpretations
of those sources converge or depart.
287
merged.
9
Lakewood’s settlers had made significant capital and social investment in
their homes, and quite sensibly viewed the politics of incorporation as a means of
protecting those investments. It is impossible to understand politics in Lakewood without
understanding that the notion of Lakewood as a “city of homes” is a central part of “The
Lakewood Story.”
10

I look in the first section of this chapter to the work of elites, and to their
economic interests in Lakewood. In sections 2 and 3, I investigate the enticements
offered to Lakewood’s settlers, people of modest means drawn by the growth of local
industry and the promise of stable, well-paid union jobs, and the goals many of them
hoped to achieve through their substantial investment in Lakewood. In section 4, I sort
through conflicts involving the County of Los Angeles, the City of Long Beach, the
Lakewood Park Corporation, and Lakewood residents that pushed elites to favor
incorporation of the area as a city. In Section 5, I analyze the ways in which popular and
elite interests were joined through political mobilization to determine Lakewood’s
political status, and in which the civic narratives formed in political conflict continued to
inform the concept of “home rule” in Lakewood after incorporation.

9
I take this insight and phrasing directly from Robert Self’s discussion of suburban homeowner politics in the Oakland
area. Self, American Babylon.
10
This designation is repeated in pro-incorporation material and in various incarnations of “The Lakewood Story”
produced by the city’s Public Information Office. A book prepared for the fiftieth anniversary of cityhood touted the
“persistence of Lakewood values that emphasize neighborhoods, homes, and families.” Lakewood (Calif.), The
Lakewood Story: History, Traditions, Values 113.
288
Building the Suburban Frontier in Lakewood

Lakewood existed as a named and populated, albeit semi-rural, community area
for decades prior to the intervention of the Lakewood Park Corporation. The Montana
Land Corporation had bought 3,500 acres in southeastern Los Angeles County, the
construction firm of Legg, Griffith, and Walker had built several residential subdivisions
in the area beginning in 1942 to house war workers at the massive Douglas Aircraft plant
at Carson Street and Lakewood Boulevard, and the 1950 population of the area
approached 40,000.
11
Despite the area’s economic dependence on Long Beach’s
industry, the most prominent local figures were those with an investment in the semi-
rural landscape that prevailed outside of the few residential subdivisions. One such
figure was Lee Hollopeter, owner of the local water company. Though the increased
demand for his water through development had made Hollopeter wealthy, by 1952 he
would still declare “I don’t like cities.”
12
These local leaders created a minimal civic
structure. When the Lakewood Park Corporation initiated its plan, the County
Supervisors directed them to meet with the only going representative organization, the
Taxpayers’ Association.
13
One leader of that group, attorney John Todd, would become a
major force for the incorporation of the city of Lakewood.

11
"Scope of L.A. Area Growth Disclosed," Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1952, 6. This population figure refers to a
“Greater Lakewood”, and includes areas that later were annexed to Long Beach, and are distinct from the Lakewood
Park construction project that followed. Legg, Griffith, and Walker reference in John Sanford Todd, Richard Howland,
and Lakewood (Calif.), John S. Todd: Father of the City of Lakewood: A History (Lakewood, Calif.: City of Lakewood,
2004) 4.
12
Bob Johnson, "Part Two: Just a Country Boy at Heart," Mirror, June 17, 1952.
13
John Todd, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
289
The massive scope of the Lakewood Park development occasions some awe
for the acumen, ambition, and organization of its corporate builders. LPC was a
collaborative venture of two of the largest residential construction companies, Aetna
Construction, led by Ben Weingart and Louis Boyar, and Biltmore Homes, led by Sydney
Mark Taper. They accomplished a radical transformation of the semirural landscape of
the area in less than three years dating from late1949, when they bought out the entire
stock of Montana, including title to all land and its own irrigation-oriented water
company, for $9 million, and proposed to build a residential development for 70,000
people centered around a shopping center.
14
On its own, that “$100,000,000 shopping
center of 90 stores… would occupy 157 concrete acres… within four minutes’ drive of
every home.”
15
When Don Rochlen, a public relations officer for the company, presented
his proposal to Long Beach and Lakewood area leaders, he provoked reaction ranging
from skepticism to hostility. One Long Beach Councilman asked if Rochlen’s bosses
planned to sell houses to the gophers that inhabited the beet fields.
16
Another
commentator looked back, with a good deal of romanticism for the semirural past of
Lakewood, and wrote that the introduction of this proposal marked the moment when “[a]
way of life became an ad, and a landscape California will not see again became real
estate.”
17
The LPC worked fast to build its planned project of more than 17,000 single-

14
Bob Johnson, "A Tale of Two City Slickers," Mirror, June 16, 1952, Lakewood (Calif.), The Lakewood Story:
History, Traditions, Values 24. "Lakewood Community's Development Speeded," Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1950,
E2, "Lakewood Development Is Rapidly Furthered," Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1950, E2, "Large New Lakewood
Development Now Open," Los Angeles Times, April 2, 1950, D1.
15
Johnson, "A Tale of Two City Slickers."
16
Lakewood (Calif.), The Lakewood Story: History, Traditions, Values 40.
17
Johnson, "Part Two: Just a Country Boy at Heart."
290
family homes, opening construction within a month of acquiring the property.
18
The
application of assembly-line methods, power tools, and labor specialization (4,000
workers in 35 teams) allowed the company to build this “instant city” at astonishing
speed; 17,500 homes went up in thirty-three months, covering nearly seven square miles,
including 7,000 in the first six months, with 133 miles of paved streets. At the peak of
construction, a house was finished at a rate of better than one every eight minutes.
19
By
the end of 1950, ground had also been broken for the May Company’s anchor store in the
Lakewood Center.
20

This accomplishment reflected political connectedness. Though the builders were
certainly “connected” in the sense of personal influence and familiarity with the
bureaucratic and political requirements of construction in Los Angeles county, I use the
term more to refer to the way in which the interests of large developers operated within a
nested set of policies from the national to the local scales. As Kenneth Jackson and
others have demonstrated, Federal housing policy from the 1910s forward emphasized
both the desirability of suburban homeownership as an American ideal (encompassing
racial, class, and gendered ideology in a mode of domesticity) and the utility of single-
family home construction as an economic stimulus that enlisted skilled building trades
unions in a coalition with financial institutions and the automobile, petroleum, and tire

18
"Project of 15,000 Homes to Start in Two Weeks," Los Angeles Times, February 5, 1950, E1, "Vast Homes Project to
Total 17,150," Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1950, F2.
19
Lakewood (Calif.), The Lakewood Story: History, Traditions, Values 29-32. "125,000 Population Seen Nearing for
Lakewood," Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1952, E9, Ray Day, "Lakewood Park: The City They Built in 6 Months,"
American City, May 1951, 100-02.
20
"May Starts Store at Lakewood Park," Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1950, 40, "Work Advances on New
Lakewood Park Stores," Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1950, G14.
291
industries to demand and win extensive governmental support for suburbanization.
21

The Great Depression threw the housing industry into chaos, with significant numbers of
homeowners defaulting on the short-term, non-amortizing mortgages that were the
dominant lending instrument of the time. In 1933, the Roosevelt Administration
established the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), which directly refinanced
more than a million short-term loans to longer term, self-amortizing loans. HOLC also
regularized appraisal practices that identified density of construction and neighborhood
racial diversity as risks to the safety of a loan, legitimizing a set of prejudices as public
policy.
22
In the following years, the effort initiated by HOLC to systematize appraisal
penetrated both Federal and private lending in ways that privileged racially exclusive
suburban single-family developments as recipients of Federal loan guarantees. The
Federal Housing Administration, established by the National Housing Act of 1934 as a
stimulus to private housing construction (as an alternative to a public works program to
boost employment), guaranteed 25-30 year mortgages written by private lenders, on the
condition that the properties meet physical standards and predetermined definitions of

21
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic
Books, 1987), Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000, Dolores Hayden, Redesigning
the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life, Rev. and expanded. ed. (New York: W.W.
Norton, 2002). This support, often outright subsidy, began in principle with the ratification of the Sixteenth
Amendment in 1913, establishing the constitutionality of a Federal income tax, which exempted income paid as interest
from taxation (although a miniscule number of home mortgages or taxpayers were initially affected by the tax). The
Federal Road Act of 1916 and the Federal Highway Act of 1921 established Federal subsidies for road construction,
both directly and through grants to state governments.
22
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier 196-97. A fine discussion of the interpenetration of private realty interests, individual
prejudice, and public policy is provided by Dana Cuff’s treatment of Charles Shattuck. In private life, Shattuck was
President of both the California Real Estate Association and the National Association of Real Estate Boards, in public
life, an officer of HOLC with jurisdiction over appraisal mapping. Shattuck was one of many similarly positioned real
estate officers who wrote the anti-integration policies of NAREB into public policy. Cuff, The Provisional City: Los
Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism 139-41.
292
acceptable risk—that is, HOLC guidelines.
23
FHA construction standards favored
single-family houses and made suburban location of those houses most economical, and
defined racial diversity as a threat to the security of investment in real property.
24
After
the Second World War, the incipient program of subsidy established by FHA truly
expanded the ranks of the homeowning middle class, as the 1944 GI Bill extended FHA-
type loan insurance to homes purchased by veterans regardless of price, and the
continued strength of the “Highway Lobby” of auto, tire, petroleum, construction, and
labor union interests led to the 1943 formation of the American Road Builders
Association, a lobbying agency whose successes included the creation of a Federal
Highway Trust Fund that mandated that gasoline tax revenues be put toward highway
building, enabling the aggressive implementation of the 1956 Interstate Highway Act,
securing federal subsidies for the construction of roads to link far-flung residential
developments to employment.
25

The FHA and associated policies favored large-scale “community builders”, who
used the programs to secure capital on a scale unattainable for smaller builders, further
shifting the balance of the housing market toward large, exurban tract development.
26
In
some cases, the LPC’s opportunism in seizing the opportunities offered by Federal
subsidy seemed outrageous. Most notably, the company organized financing for

23
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier 203-04.
24
Ibid. 206-07. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land
Planning 145.
25
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier 248-50.
26
Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia 176. Marc Weiss argues that this resulted from the
influence of “bankers, builders, and brokers” in designing and implementing the FHA. Weiss, The Rise of the
Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning 142, 46-47.
293
construction by setting up financing for construction costs through loan guarantees
under Section 213 of the National Housing Act, a program intended to support
cooperative housing construction in rural areas. The past agricultural use of Montana
Land Company holdings was sufficient to qualify Lakewood as rural, the intentions of the
LPC to build a city of 70,000 notwithstanding. Ben Weingart directed employees to buy
nominal stock in one of two to three hundred “co-ops”, which were legally dissolved
after construction was completed, returning the houses and lots to conventional sales
escrow. Weingart was questioned in U.S. Senate Banking Committee hearings about the
practices, but never charged with any crime.
27
Though unseemly, none of LPC’s
practices were technically illegal. In fact, the FHA’s Long Beach office had praised the
company’s use of Section 213 as a creative means of accomplishing its principal goals—
putting people of modest means into privately owned and privately built homes.
28

These incentives and rewards extended through the state and local scales as well,
though in the form of regulatory and bureaucratic rather than financial considerations.
Particularly in Los Angeles, large-scale private builders won a variety of courtesies
enabling them to engage in building on a massive scale as local and County authorities
brought their policies in line with the Federal government’s preference to resolve the
housing issue through private industry.
29
Lakewood Park Corporation spokesman
Rochlen noted that the “simple organization” of the county government was easier to deal

27
"Building of Fantastic Profits Told FHA Quiz," Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1954, 1. Lakewood (Calif.), The
Lakewood Story: History, Traditions, Values 33. The imprecise figure of 200-300 shell cooperatives reflected their
purposeful dissolution after financing was secured and Weingart’s reluctance to provide documents related to the
dissolved entitities.
28
"Extensive Home Tract's Financing Plan Lauded," Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1951, E4.
29
Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism 113-15, 225-27.
294
with from the builders’ point of view than a city government, and the company
recognized that “the county gives the builder a lot of advantages…. There is less red
tape. They furnish resident inspectors and other conveniences.”
30
The County
government also allowed smaller minimum lot sizes than nearby cities. The LPC clearly
preferred to build under the oversight of County inspectors and under County zoning
regulations.
31
The arrangement was mutually beneficial, as the Supervisors held a vested
interest in housing the rapidly growing population of unincorporated areas, and, by
making mass construction in its territory more attractive to builders than city territory,
ensuring that the growing population would feed the client base of the County
government.
Much of the contemporary press ignored this deep penetration of government
subsidy and support for private development, essentially a quasi-public housing policy of
homeownership for moderate-income whites. This bias was the counterpoint of
nationwide conservative hostility to public housing. Senator Joseph McCarthy first
polished his Communist-hunting credentials in Senate hearings on the pro-public housing
Taft-Ellender-Wagner Housing Bill, at which he found an able ally in William Levitt,
who also testified to his view that labor unions, zoning, and building codes were the
prime obstacles to solving the housing problem.
32
Locally, the Los Angeles Times and the
Chamber of Commerce took up the crusade against public housing and made Lakewood a

30
Quoted in Harry Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a
Socially Cohesive Community" (University of California, Los Angeles, 1954) 10.
31
Ibid.
32
Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 130-31. The anti-Communist crusading of
McCarthy, Levitt, and others watered down the housing bill that passed as the Housing Act of 1949 to the degree that
the Act principally enabled slum clearance rather than housing construction.
295
parable for privatism as a solution to the area’s massive war-driven housing shortfall.
At just the moment that Lakewood was being constructed, the Times and Chamber were
conducting a red-baiting campaign against public housing. Hearings in 1952 targeted the
Los Angeles Housing Authority and revealed the leftist affiliations of administrator Frank
Wilkinson, leading to purges of the agency and a vicious 1953 election in which the
moderate, good-government Republican Bowron (hardly a Red) was replaced with
conservative Republican Congressman Norris Poulson, who had run on a pledge to end
the city’s public housing program.
33
The Chamber of Commerce and the Times
simultaneously used their joint platform to promote Lakewood as an examplar of a
(superior) private housing policy. In an April 1952 article, Lakewood’s rapid construction
was portrayed as a model for growth through standardized, efficient, technologically
sound methods fostered by private enterprise. Glowing descriptions of industrial
production techniques and technological innovation implied that private enterprise would
solve through efficiency what public housing proposed to solve by law. The Lakewood
Chamber estimated in 1952 that the greater Lakewood area would house 125,000 people
within a year, testimony of “what private enterprise is doing to meet the housing demand
in Southern California.”
34
By 1955, L.A. Chamber President Charles Detoy wrote an
article in the Times, accompanied by photographs of a row of houses being framed by
well-organized teams of segmented laborers and aerial photographs of suburban streets.
According to Detoy, developments like Lakewood showed that “Los Angeles, city,
county, and metropolitan area has met the challenge of fantastic growth with a creativity

33
Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism 290-94.
34
"125,000 Population Seen Nearing for Lakewood," E9.
296
and resourcefulness characteristic of the Southland.”
35
The implied meaning of
“creativity and resourcefulness” was that they were antonyms for “public.”
The Times, when not bashing public housing, was busy collaborating with the
LPC on selling its homes. “Articles” in the Times’ real estate pages about Lakewood
were often barely-reworded press releases from the LPC’s sales office that grafted
opening paragraphs to LPC boilerplate about the conveniences and features of LPC
houses, in which different buyers spouted identical phrasing about “large, bright kitchens,
with their inlaid linoleum, stainless steel drainboards, double sinks, built-in garbage
pulverators, commodious cupboards and drawers, and big dining area”, the “convenience
and roominess of the floor plan”, the ample closets, and the quality of workmanship.
36
In
one example—again, reported as a news story--Lakewood Park Salesman Jim Wade
revealed how impressed he was with the homes for sale—he bought one himself:
“One of the basic principles of successful salesmanship is to know and believe in
the product you’re selling…. And after living here for more than two months
we’re more enthusiastic than ever about our place. I guess I just naturally impart
some of this enthusiasm when I find myself thinking of our own home when
explaining the dwellings’ features.”
37

More than it revealed a salesman’s belief in the product, this piece, and others like it,
showed the support of both the Times and local political elites for suburban, private
construction.

35
Detoy, Charles. “For 10 Years… 500 Residents a Day!”, LAT, 1/3/1955, p. D18.
36
Thanks to Daniel HoSang for his suggestion that this practice may have been a courtesy extended to developers as a
thanks for ad space purchased by developers. Examples of these pieces include "Closet Space Pleases New Resident of
Lakewood Park," Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1950, E2, "Joy of Owning Home Told by Lakewood Park Housewife,"
Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1950, F2, "Lakewood Park Buyers Find Privacy Provided," Los Angeles Times, September
24, 1950, E2, "Vet Home Buyers Cite 'Feeling of Belonging'," Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1950, E2, "Yule Has
New Meaning to Homeowning Vets," Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1950, E2.
37
"Salesman at Lakewood Park 'Sold' on House," Los Angeles Times, October 8, 1950, E3.
297
In the Los Angeles area, one other set of factors connected the Federal and
local scales to drive suburban growth. Lakewood grew up within the World War II and
Cold War strategic imperative of decentralizing production in industries like aircraft (an
imperative that also reflected the aircraft industry’s need for factory and runway space),
which required housing attractive to the white skilled labor favored by the industry.
38

The links between the aircraft industry and suburbs like Westchester, Burbank, and North
Hollywood were replicated in Lakewood, where the continued growth of the Douglas
plant in north Long Beach (along with oil refineries in Long Beach and Signal Hill and
the Vernon industrial zone to the north) was a draw for workers and a distribution hub of
federal defense dollars as wages and salaries.
39
The plant provided the rationale for
building Lakewood Village in the 1940s, and remained an employment anchor of the
area. In a 1978 interview conducted by Lakewood High School students, Taper
acknowledged the importance of the industrial-residential nexus: “Industry is very
accessible to Lakewood. And this was the ideal place for a bedroom community which
would serve all the industrial areas which either adjoin or are very close to it.”
40
By the
1970s, one in ten Lakewood households drew either pay or a pension from Douglas.
41

Multiplier effects meant that defense spending decisions affected nearly all local
households.

38
Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis, Creating the North American
Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) 132-3.
39
Lakewood was part of the first wave of what Scott and Soja describe as dispersed “technopoles” of aerospace and
defense industry that showed the military-industrial complex’s footprint on Southern California. Allen John Scott and
Edward W. Soja, eds., The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996) 9.
40
Sydney Mark Taper, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
41
Lakewood (Calif.), The Lakewood Story: History, Traditions, Values 28.
298
The scope of Boyar, Taper, and Weingart’s ambition was not only realized in
the size of their residential project, but in its design (highly innovative for its time)
around the massive Lakewood Center shopping plaza, conceived from the beginning as a
draw on those workers’ wages through regional consumer spending.
42
As a two-headed
project, Lakewood would not only serve the surrounding areas, it would be served by
their residents as consumers. J.K. Eikenbaum, the first managing director of the
Lakewood Center, recalled that the sheer mass of workers who commuted to the Long
Beach Douglas plant but spent their paychecks elsewhere reflected not simply a need for
housing, but the opportunity for profit if retail and housing were developed together:
At that time they had 48,000 people employed in the Long Beach plant, and these
people that worked there came from all parts of the city [metropolitan area] and
most of them averaged two hours to get to work and two hours to get home….
Mr. Weingart recognized this and came to me for the commercial end.
43

From Eikenbaum’s point of view, Weingart’s obligation was to get 20,000 homes built
per year. The housing shortage would be leveraged to put shoppers in the orbit of his
mall, not the other way around: “The shopping center aided the selling of homes, but
there was never a problem selling homes…. You’d see a carpenter working one day and a
little girl on a tricycle the next day.”
44
The construction of houses on 50 by 100 foot lots
has been described as a “Fordist” model of construction, designed to produce high
residential density to promote the shopping center, even when that density was at odds

42
In her comprehensive account of the relationship of suburban shopping centers, Cohen argues that such integrated
retail-residential development was not widespread until the late 1950s, and that new suburban residents often found
themselves without adequate retail outlets nearby. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass
Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003) 258.
43
J.K. Eikenbaum, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
44
Ibid.
299
with the traditional marketing of suburban houses as oases of peace and quiet.
45
As
Waldie observed, “density is what developers sell to the builders of shopping centers.”
46

The developers of Lakewood and the Lakewood Center also perceived their
project as one of reorienting consumer spending, particularly away from Downtown Long
Beach. Concessions were made in the design of the Lakewood Center to ensure that it
would be more attractive to shoppers, particularly in the provision of parking for 10,000
cars (or 2 ½ square feet of parking per square foot of retail space).
47
This regional focus
persisted in promotional materials for the City of Lakewood through the following
decades. One promotional booklet, one of a series published by a local firm specializing
in city promotions, noted in 1968 that “Lakewood is a city built for shoppers”, and not
only for resident shoppers, but “the center of a shopping area which includes over a half-
million people.”
48
Indeed, while the spectacle of houses sprouting on the plain gained
public attention, the commercial potential of the Lakewood Center drove development
from the company’s point of view. Lizabeth Cohen has insightfully analyzed the
production of a “landscape of mass consumption” characterized by suburban shopping
centers, served by highways and parking lots, and designed with the explicit intention of

45
Both Fishman and Jackson trace the roots of suburbanism to the promotion of garden homes on spacious lots and
suggest that postwar suburbanization represented a betrayal of this ideal in the name of profit. Fishman, Bourgeois
Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. More recent accounts of suburbanization have
documented the longstanding existence of working-class suburbs where economy trumped space as an organizing
principle. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven.
46
Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir 12. John Farrell, Ben Weingart & Weingart Foundation (Los Angeles,
Calif.: Weingart Foundation, 2002) 85.
47
Notes on Lakewood History Meeting, January 18, 1969. 1969, Folder "Lakewood History", Local History, Iacoboni
Library, Lakewood, CA. Day, "Lakewood Park: The City They Built in 6 Months." The provision of off-street parking
had plagued downtown shopping districts for decades. Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) 302-08. Suburban shopping center developers were particularly confident
that their parking lots could be designed in ways that catered to the presumed preferences of female shoppers.
Isenberg, Downtown America 175-83. Cohen, Consumer's Republic 258, 66-77.
48
Lakewood, California, Beverly Hills (Windsor Publications), 1968, p. 19.
300
capturing the spending of the emergent white middle class.
49
In many respects, the
complex of Lakewood Park homes and the Lakewood Center epitomized the
“Consumer’s Republic,” to such an extent that elites’ investment in the social landscape
appeared reducible to creating homes as containers for consumers. However, as I will
demonstrate in the next chapter, Lakewood residents became such ideal consumers only
gradually, as they realized financial benefits from their residential locations and gained
sufficient confidence in their financial security to consume more freely.

“New Frontiers of Security”: Selling Community In Lakewood
Lakewood had antecedents in other developments of small, affordable, and mass-
produced houses on former agricultural lands. Fritz Burns had completed 3,230 single-
family homes in Westchester in western Los Angeles County between 1941 and 1944.
50

Later, Burns and Henry J. Kaiser had collaborated to build 1529 units in 1949 alone in
the Panorama City develoment in the San Fernando Valley.
51
Even these did not come
close to satisfying housing demand. People came to purchase Lakewood Park homes at
mind-boggling rates. Twenty-five thousand people, drawn by publicity generated by
Rochlen, came to the sales office on the first day of sales in 1950, the peak visitor volume
in that year reached 30,000 in one day, and in April of 1950 typical sales ranged from

49
Cohen, Consumer's Republic 257-58. The phrase “Landscape of Mass Consumption” is the title of and organizing
rubric of a section of this work.
50
Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis 143. Cuff, The Provisional City: Los
Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism 246-49.
51
Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis 201-02.
301
thirty to fifty houses daily.
52
In the first year after groundbreaking, the company sold
8,000 houses for nearly $80,000,000 sales volume.
53
Nearly all of the homes built in the
thirty-three months of construction were sold during that time. One buyer compared the
scene to “an Oklahoma land rush.”
54

Sales officers sold future houses through models and pictures, and the lack of
finished streets meant that many buyers could not even go to see their house lot; they had
to imagine their homes through the thin iconography of pins on a map of a yet-unbuilt
community. Marine Sergeant Donald Versaw and his wife Amelda bought a home
despite his pending remobilization, and his recollections reflect the degree of abstraction
necessary to imagine Lakewood as a home. In the summer of 1950, Amelda asked him to
make a drive from Oceanside, near San Diego, to view model homes at Lakewood.
“’Where the hell is Lakewood?’” was Donald’s remembered reply.
55
While the
development had been the subject of extensive Los Angeles-area and some national
media attention, Versaw’s reaction illustrated that Lakewood was still by and large a
place of the imagination. When they put their payment down, it was necessary for the
Versaws to relate to their house in imaginary, rather than tangible form: “When I went to
Korea our new house was just a pile of boards and a bathtub on an empty lot.”

52
Lakewood (Calif.), The Lakewood Story: History, Traditions, Values 5. "Housing: Birth of a City," Time, April 17
1950, 99-100.
53
"Lakewood Park's Home Sales Reach $80,000,000," Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1951, E1.
54
Donald Versaw, Take Your Place in History Community Essays.
55
Ibid.
302
Thankfully, on his return, “I found Amelda had made our [now finished] house into a
beautiful home.”
56

The Versaws’ story was extreme, but not unique. While Mr. Versaw was perhaps
too preoccupied with going to Korea to imagine the transformation of a pile of boards
into a home, other Lakewoodians were confronted, even before they decided to buy, with
the task of making homes in a new community and becoming suburbanites, a transition
that was not as easy as popular memory of the age might suggest. Dolores Hayden has
observed that suburbia “is a landscape of the imagination where Americans situate
ambitions for upward mobility and economic security, ideals about freedom and private
property, and longings for social harmony and spiritual uplift.”
57
The Lakewood Park
Corporation encouraged its buyers to think of their purchases not merely as the
acquisition of a house and a 5,000 square foot lot, but as an entrée into a new way of life.
In one 1950 print advertisement, the company declared “living in Lakewood is more than
owning a home. It is the means by which to grow and share in the future of a city that is
new… that will open new frontiers of security to untold thousands in countless ways.”
58

This phrase is rich with a host of contradictory meanings, not least the fundamental
antagonism of “frontier” and “security”. Most residents were first-time homebuyers,
raised in times when home mortgages were expensive and frequently defaulted, incomes
were unpredictable, and the flexibility of renting made economic sense.
59
Several of the

56
Ibid.
57
Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 3.
58
"Win Again! (Display Ad 90)," Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1950, F3.
59
It is important to remember that the “American Dream” of homeownership, and the assumption that a home could be
a source of financial security for wage workers through equity, are both extremely novel propositions. Indeed, in the
303
first settlers of Lakewood Park recalled that their decision to buy a first home was
prompted by the lack of available apartments.
60
When they entered the sales office, these
settlers learned that Federal loan programs made the purchase of a new home in
Lakewood cheaper than renting an urban apartment. Still, the mantle of homeownership
was taken up cautiously in Lakewood. To convince first-time buyers that their long-term
investment in place would be a safe one, the Lakewood Park Corporation’s sales pitches
insisted that “throughout the years, your home and neighborhood will retain the dignity,
charm, and stable value that only Lakewood’s complete planning can offer.”
61
These
pledges were not merely sales hucksterism, although they certainly were that. They also
represented a kind of social contract between the Lakewood Park Corporation and its
buyers; sales pitches fixed aspirations and expectations, and in the years of the early
1950s, the ability of the place to fulfill those desires would determine the civic
attachments of residents to their neighbors and their place.
Another factor that united Lakewood’s residents—a factor woven into the social
contract of “dignity, charm, and stable value”-- was their whiteness. The Lakewood
Park Corporation followed FHA-driven logic to ensure racial homogeneity. In the
Montana days, when Lakewood Village was advertised as “the White Spot of Long
Beach,” this was accomplished by means of “restrictions of an all-inclusive nature” that
barred the sale of lots to Negroes, Mexicans, and Jews.
62
Restrictive deed covenants had

city of Los Angeles, a bitter fight to continue wartime rent control was being fought by activists who viewed an
affordable apartment as the pinnacle of opportunity.
60
Dorothy Anderson and Jean Gilkison, Take Your Place in History Community Essays.
61
"New Horizons for Veteran Home Buyers (Display Ad 187)," Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1950, J3.
62
Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir 73, 160.
304
been ruled unenforceable by the 1948 Shelley vs. Kraemer decision, and in 1949 the
FHA had announced that it would stop insuring mortgages on property with restrictions
the following year, but racial integration was still viewed as bad for business.
63
The
Lakewood Park Corporation was not as outspoken in its position as William Levitt, who
publicly declared a policy of racial exclusion against black buyers and insisted that his
company could not be expected to solve the nation’s housing shortage and its racial
problems at once.
64
Sales officers of the LPC did, however, work in disciplined practice
to steer buyers of color elsewhere.
65
Woodrow Smith, a sales officer who became a
Lakewood resident and City Councilman, recalled that
I’d say, “Now, you’re a reasonable person but these are the facts of life, and you
know it as well as I do; if you move in here, you are not going to have any
neighbors that are going to like you. It may not be in your best interest, so you
better think about it carefully before you make this decision. I can’t prevent you
and I won’t, but you’d better think about it.”
66

There were, of course, very real financial reasons why white buyers would have rebelled
at having black neighbors. The institutionalized policies of the FHA and its
Underwriting Manual for assessing the risk of loans on a neighborhood basis “exhorted

63
The interval between announcement and implementation of what were clearly illegal restrictions served mostly to
allow speculators to attach restrictions to their property in time to beat the FHA’s deadline. Jackson, Crabgrass
Frontier 208. In any case, the application of racial restriction ensued through the extralegal practices of lenders, sales
offices, and the ostensibly race-neutral policies of the FHA to protect the “stability” of residential neighborhoods.
64
As of 1949, after Shelley, the New York State FHA director reported to the NAACP and other interested parties that
he could not use coercive means to secure the removal of the following language from a development prospectus
offered by the Levitts: “’No dwelling shall be used or occupied except by members of the Caucasian race, but the
employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted.’” "FHA Can't Prevent
Negro Housing Ban," New York Times, March 19, 1949, 12. When the NAACP and others later brought suit against
the FHA, the case was dismissed on the grounds that none of the Federal agencies subsidizing suburban housing had
any statutory obligation or authority to prevent patently illegal racial discrimination. "U.S. Court Bars Suit to End
Housing Bias," New York Times, March 17, 1955, 24.
65
Farrell, John. Ben Weingart & the Weingart Foundation, Los Angeles (Weingart Foundation), 2002, p. 103. Even in
an account published by Weingart’s own foundation, this practice was too blatant to ignore.
66
Woodrow Smith, Oral History interview conducted by Allison Leslie Baker, 11/20/1996, in Baker, "The Lakewood
Story: Defending the Recreational Good Life in Postwar Southern California Suburbia, 1950-1999" 93.
305
segregation and enshrined it as public policy,” regarding any settlement of racial
minorities in an area as evidence of an irreversible process of decline, and thus a barrier
to granting mortgage insurance to a prospective future buyer.
67
Independent of any
prejudices they may have held (and without excusing those prejudices that did exist), the
hypothetical white Lakewood buyer of the salesman’s imagination would be acting not
only out of irrational bigotry but also out of a rational assessment that racial integration
threatened property values.
68
By punting ultimate responsibility to the assumed prejudices
of whites, sales agents denied both their own culpability in evading the spirit of the
Shelley ruling and the institutional framework of racial preferences that subsidized the
building and sale of homes. Potential black buyers generally found it easier to look
elsewhere; unlike in older neighborhoods where blockbusters could leverage the fears of
individual white owners to sell to black buyers and, in turn, provoke further opening,
Lakewood homes were sold by one seller, and the company could afford to turn black
buyers away when thousands of whites waited outside the sales office doors. Some
subdividers recognized this untapped market and offered black homeowners lots in
Compton and other cities, but this opportunity was effectively denied in Lakewood.
69

Consequently, the direct violence and hostility that marked integration of residential
neighborhoods in Los Angeles and in other cities were administratively thwarted in

67
Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier 213.
68
David Freund demonstrates that Federal housing policies created a market for mortgage credit explicitly organized
around the protection of homogenously white neighborhoods. Freund is less convincing in his claim that the rules of
this market largely superseded bigotry in whites’ consciousness as the principal motive to resist integration. Freund,
Colored Property.
69
Sides, L.A. City Limits 126.
306
Lakewood by policies and practices that made the community almost uniformly white
by design.
70

Sales policies were applied to exclude Mexican-American homeseekers as well,
but with less completeness. Some Spanish-surnamed families were among the first
settlers of Lakewood. Baker has suggested that the Lakewood Park sales office allowed
some families to claim “Spanish” rather than “Mexican” heritage to evade restrictions, a
practice not uncommon at the time.
71
The status of ethnic Mexicans in Lakewood is
complex, and is indicative of the liminal racial status they held in Los Angeles County.
At this time the “G.I.” generation of American-born ethnic Mexicans attempted to craft a
Mexican-American ethnic identity, as opposed to a national or racial one, that stressed
assimilation and commonality with European (that is, white) immigrants and their
descendants even as recent racial violence against Mexicans across Greater Los Angeles
called into question the viability of that strategy.
72
It is important to keep in mind that
the racial terms used to identify populations have shifted over time; while characteristics
like surname or ancestry may be sufficient today to mark a person as racially nonwhite, in
1950s Lakewood, a claim to “Spanish” heritage, along with sufficient means (and
perhaps light skin) was apparently a satisfactory claim to belonging for both ethnic
Mexicans and their white neighbors. Roland Garcia was even designated as “Lakewood’s

70
By comparison, the residential integration of the older suburb of Compton in the 1950s pitted black buyers excluded
from newer developments against whites in a confrontation that often erupted in violence and generally was marked by
the threat of violence. Sides, "Straight into Compton."
71
Baker, pp. 95-6.
72
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American.
307
Birthday Boy” when he was the first child born in the incorporated city on April 16,
1954.
73

Investing in Community in Lakewood
Cohen has argued that the economic imperatives, cultural enticements, and
infrastructure of consumerism defined postwar civic culture. However, while the
prospect of joining in a “Consumer’s Republic” formed part of the national context of
suburbanization, it ultimately was not the whole of the desire animating Lakewood’s
settlers. For one thing, many of Lakewood Park’s early settlers were engaged in
renegotiating their class status as workers, new homeowners, and, only contingently,
potential consumers. Joseph Eikenbaum looked back on the growth of Lakewood as a
community of skilled workers as a sufficient condition for developing a community of
consumers:
people that I would call blue-collar workers… very valuable for any community,
the plumbers, the electricians, the carpenters… they all earned big money, they
are all good citizens, and they make for a good society, and Lakewood started to
develop along that line, and then you saw a good, solid community.
74

Taking the place set out for them in the landscape of mass consumption, though, did not
automatically create consumers, the designs of the LPC notwithstanding. If we are to
avoid viewing these residents as cogs in the machinery of consumerism, we must
understand what it was that they valued in their homes. The sales pitch of security did

73
Roland Garcia, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project. Garcia does not address the issue of “Spanish”
identification, but it is difficult to imagine that his birth would have been publicized as a symbol of the future of the
city outside of the frame of “ethnic” identity.
74
Eikenbaum, Ibid.
308
not stop resonating when settlers put up their down payments or moved in—it
informed the expectations of security that they carried forward, expectations that were to
be realized through place.
Nearly all of these settlers were part of military veteran families, a requirement to
take advantage of advantageous financing and low down-payment terms and home sales
offered at priority to veterans. Back in civilian life, many took up skilled trades, but
particularly for Korean War veterans, reintegration to a civilian economy in recession
could be difficult. Within these families, the yet-to-crest wave of the national baby boom
was evident, with an average adult age of twenty-nine and as many as a hundred children
on each block. At first glance, the fact that Lakewood’s settlers averaged $5,100 in
family income, measured against a national average of $3,100, seems to affirm a rosy
nostalgia for affluent suburbs.
75
However, static income statistics cloud the dynamic
reality of class. Lakewood’s settlers were people with prospects, and often with well-
paid manufacturing jobs, but with little past accumulation of wealth. Federal support
allowed them, the overwhelming majority of whom had never owned a home before, to
move into private houses, to pay less of their monthly income for housing than did
renters, and to begin to build equity as a financial asset. Even so, the benefits of
ownership did not kick in immediately. With 4% FHA loans, the monthly payments for a
two- or three-bedroom home ranged from $43 to $54, often the maximum price point for
the buyers.
76
When 21-month old Kathlyn Strong’s family moved in to a house on

75
Statistics on income and age from Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir 37. On children, Lakewood (Calif.), The
Lakewood Story: History, Traditions, Values 91.
76
Lakewood Story (2004), p. 39.
309
Hazelbrook Street in August, 1954, her recently-demobilized father had just taken a
job in a refinery that doubled his previous Navy pay (now clearing about $130 from each
biweekly check), but still carried a history of low wages and lack of credit that made it
impossible for his pregnant wife to open a charge account at May Company to buy
maternity clothes.
77
The Strongs were pushing the bounds of their financial resources to
buy their home (Kathlyn’s account would place her family income, about $3,400 yearly
after taxes, within the middle range for Lakewood families). Lakewood was affordable to
working-class buyers in ways that other suburbs were not:
We moved that morning because Dad had to be at work at Richfield Oil Refinery
that afternoon. It took five carloads to bring our worldly possessions down Clark
Street…. We had looked at a two-story home out in Norwalk, but at $75.00 a
month, this house was priced way beyond our means. Dad’s take-home pay was
about $130.00 every two weeks!
78

Even at these prices, quaint to twenty-first century Angeleno homebuyers, most reported
little discretionary income after paying them.
79
As Rosemarie Coleman recalled, her
house was a dead lead for door to door salesmen because her family’s budget was
stretched tight.
80
Even filling a home with furniture or other accoutrements was difficult
at first. Don Versaw recalled hearing many of his fellow buyers ask LPC sales agents if
the furniture, books, and knickknacks that filled out model homes came included with

77
Kathlyn J. (Strong) Bird, Take Your Place in History Community Essays.
78
Ibid.
79
Baker likewise reports that Lakewood Park’s original settlers recalled their early years in the development as
anything but affluent. Baker, "The Lakewood Story: Defending the Recreational Good Life in Postwar Southern
California Suburbia, 1950-1999" 79-80.
80
Rosemary Coleman, Take Your Place in History Community Essays.
310
purchase!
81
Waldie recalls of his family and neighbors in the early 1950s that
“nobody had any money.”
82

Though they may have stretched to furnish their houses, Lakewood settlers found
that their property did hold out the possibility of upward mobility. This was manifest
most simply in lower-than-rent mortgage payments that would never go up, but also in
the promise that Lakewood could be a lasting home for people of moderate means
without turning into a slum. While it is often assumed that suburban migration reflected
an innate hostility toward cities, in 1950 this was not entirely the case. Rather, the
Lakewood Park Corporation’s advertisements were emphatic that what they were
building and selling was a better city, one that would differ from others that its settlers
had known, promising better forms of social life through “the birth of an entire new
future city” that presented “an unprecedented opportunity for wide-awake men and
women,” and would be “the perfect place to raise your family and fulfill your plans for
the future!”
83
One ad, shown here as Figure 5.1, represented the benefits of buying in
Lakewood in potent visual form, depicting a vortex swirling above a Cape Cod house.
But, unlike a destructive tornado, this was a storm of benefits—freeways, schools, jobs,
and shopping, all focused on the home.
84

81
Versaw, Ibid.
82
Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir 38.
83
"America's Biggest (Display Ad 103)," Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1950, F3.
84
"New Horizons for Veteran Home Buyers (Display Ad 187)," J3.
311
Figure 5.1: New Horizons

It is difficult to gauge the effect that these sales pitches had on the consciousness
of buyers, whether they followed buyers’ wishes, created them, or some synthesis of the
312
two. Oral histories and other retrospective accounts by Lakewood settlers indicate
that the idea of a modern, forward-looking city did indeed resonate with buyers. Bob and
Barbara Brent’s recollections of moving to Lakewood typified the situation of many
young families starting in Lakewood, often poor in dollars but rich in optimism:
I’ve never experienced so much friendliness and comraderie [sic]. We were all
about the same age, most, if not all, had young children and we were all
financially challenged! But we had faith in our future and looked forward to
making a good life for our children and ourselves.
85

The sales pitches of Lakewood Park, whether these were advertisements, reworded press
releases published by the Times, or in-person presentations by salesmen, balanced
appeals to the aspirations of buyers with recognition of their past experiences; those
seeking to “move up” could take their inspiration from the knowledge that “OVER 1,000
DISCRIMINATING HOME BUYERS” had already taken the plunge, while workers,
veterans, and survivors of the Depression could note the references to value achieved
through technology and planning to create solid, durable houses which would need few
repairs.
86
These appeals may have been among the most effective. Juanita Knox was a
settler in Lakewood Village in 1952, who recalled “for the money spent… we got a real
bargain for $8,500…. We weren’t making that much money, $165 a month… we really
thought this was the best home built… as a matter of fact, I still think it was built better
than some of those $10,000 homes.”
87
Since buyers were investing in a community as
well as their own homes, LPC ads personalized the development by introducing

85
Bob and Barbara Brent, Take Your Place in History Community Essays.
86
"Win Again! (Display Ad 90)," F3.
87
Juanita Knox, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
313
prospective buyers by name and face to their future neighbors, who occasionally
crowed from the newsprint
“You Bet We’re Buying Our Home at LAKEWOOD” say Mr. and Mrs. Jimmy
Lacy. Jim is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. He now works in aircraft assembly,
and he knows construction. Jim says, “What I like about Lakewood homes is the
sound, solid way they are put together. There is no skimping or cutting corners to
save a few cents. I like the convenient location too!”
88

In one particularly sentimental instance, a Veteran and his family were quoted gushing
over the possibility of moving in to their new home in time to decorate it for Christmas.
89

These sales pitches, along with the pricing of the homes, the terms of loans, and
racial restrictions created a homogenous demographic profile, with nuclear families
headed by veteran, skilled, manual workers predominating. The Long Beach Press-
Telegram in 1953 engaged in a bit of pop sociology that paralleled the work of national
magazine columnists in trying to get a handle on “How Mr. Lakewood Lives”. Noting
that statistically “Mr. Lakewood is 32 years old, works within 15 miles of his new home,
which is equipped with television, earns $4,400 per year, and supports his wife and two
children,” the paper followed the family of Charles Daniels, one such median individual,
to flesh out the contours of what that entailed in daily life.
90
Charles was a Marine
veteran of Okinawa, and worked as a research technician at a chemical plant in Vernon
In this case, “Mr. Lakewood” reflected a heightened social capital among Lakewood
settlers relative to other places. While few families were objectively wealthy,
Lakewoodians did possess more education and were more likely to work as craftsmen,

88
“Display Ad 31”, LAT, 6/1/1950.
89
"Yule Has New Meaning to Homeowning Vets," E2.
90
“How ‘Mr. Lakewood’ Lives”, Long Beach Press-Telegram, 2/8/53, p. B4 (evening edition).
314
technicians, or professionals, and to earn more money, than residents of Long
Beach.
91
“Mr. Lakewood” was, by 1953, learning to consume, optimistic that his future
income would ease time payments on things like televison sets, which, like 98 percent of
Lakewood families in 1953, Daniels owned.
92
In fact, Daniels paid almost as much as his
$70 monthly mortgage payment towards his monthly payment on his television and
furniture, prompting him to remark of his above-average salary “it all goes”.
93
Though
many residents were cash-strapped, they also possessed social capital that allowed them
to view their homes as investments in a promising future. Accordingly, they began to
orient their political behavior toward protecting those investments.
For many people, the challenges of moving into a newly-built subdivision
engendered, if only by necessity, a sense of neighborly cooperation. This need for
cooperation was heightened by the number of young children growing up in these new
neighborhoods. Virginia Davila, who arrived in 1950, remembered that her five children
were joined by nine from across the street. This kept the ice cream man in business,
though parents made other concessions to economy: “There sure were a lot of hobos at
Halloween.”
94
The early days of Lakewood Park domesticity offer an interesting view of
the relationship between suburban space and family-rearing. Feminist geographers, most
notably Dolores Hayden, have argued convincingly that neighborhoods of single-family
homes represented a “triumph of prescriptive architecture of gender on a national scale,”

91
The Lakewood Story: From Bean Fields to Boulevards. n/d, Folder "Lakewood History", Box Lakewood Economics
Forecast to Lakewood History, Local History, Iacoboni Library, Lakewood, CA.
92
Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir 38.
93
Bud Lembke, "How "Mr. Lakewood" Lives," Long Beach Press-Telegram, February 8, 1953, B4.
94
Virginia Davila, Take Your Place in History Community Essays.
315
a reassertion of the separation of public and private roles by gender, and blunted a
host of collectivist strategies for childrearing that animated other planned housing
models.
95
However, if domesticity in Lakewood validated the nuclear family as the
essential unit of social reproduction, Lakewood families found that the exigencies of
raising children on limited means nonetheless promoted certain forms of sociability, not
least because, as regional charity administrators warned at the time, the settlement of
thousands of families with young children in suburban areas outside of established
networks of aid utterly confounded the abilities of social aid agencies to help.
96
Mildred
Francis moved in to a house on Hersholt Avenue in 1950, but since her family couldn’t
afford a refrigerator on her husband’s $290 montly salary as a rookie LAPD officer, “our
new neighbor would leave her back door open so we could keep the baby’s formula in
her refrigerator.”
97
Jean Gilkison found that children actually formed a social bridge
between families: “There were about 42 homes in our block, we knew 41 of them, as the
42
nd
lady worked.”
98
In general, the shared (gendered) labor required to raise children and
to tame the “crabgrass frontier” was the key to socialization:
just wide open spaces and lots of dirt. It didn’t take long to get acquainted with
our neighbors, help each other out with child care, weekends spent sharing cost
and labor to put up fences, plant lawns, gardens, and flowers. We formed
friendships and our children formed friendships, some to last a lifetime.
99

95
Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life 58.
96
"Housing Tract Problem Hits Community Chest," Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1953, 31.
97
Mildred J. Francis, Take Your Place in History Community Essays.
98
Jean L. Gilkison, Ibid.
99
Bob and Barbara Brent, Ibid.
316
This neighborliness, however, bore no necessary connection to a civic commitment to
Lakewood in the first years of settlement in Lakewood, though advertisments assured
buyers that “in the years to come you will look back with pride and say, ‘I was there at
the beginning!’”
100
In the “Mr. Lakewood” piece, by contrast, the Press Telegram
reported that Lakewood’s typical family maintained ties to their old hometown, was
indifferent to their neighbors, and viewed neighborhood sociability in terms of squeezing
in a round of golf at the Country Club in between solitary yard chores.
101
Ruth Kupersmit
remembered a friendly relationship with neighbors that lasted from their move-in in 1951
until the husband, a bricklayer, built a new stone wall between their houses.
102

Community could mean different levels of civic involvement.
In many cases, though, bonds of neighborliness became a foundation for a civic
culture and a politics of place. The architectural historian Dana Cuff has explored
neighborliness as a mediation between the citizen and civil society, that personalizes the
impersonal and makes the interpersonal pressures of habitation a potential source of
political identification with the fate of a place.
103
What galvanized civic identification
was the perception of a threat to the Lakewood way of life. What exactly constituted a
Lakewood way of life was in flux at this time. In the early 1950s, there was considerable
conflict between the social and organizational leaders of “Old Lakewood”—centered in
the Lakewood Village section built in the 1940s--and the arrivals in the new subdivisions.

100
“Display Ad 103”, LAT, 6/4/50, p. F3.
101
“How ‘Mr. Lakewood’ Lives”, Press Telegram 2/8/53. The article describes Charles pausing from mowing the
lawn to “look… longingly down the street to where Hayter Ave. terminates at Lakewood Country Club. ‘Some day
soon, I’m going to go over there and take up my golfing where I left off years ago.’”
102
Ruth Kupersmit, Take Your Place in History Community Essays.
103
Dana Cuff, "The Figure of the Neighbor: Los Angeles Past and Future," American Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2004).
317
While many of the Old Lakewood residents controlled organizations like the
Chamber of Commerce and the Taxpayers’ Association, some newcomers found them
both overly conservative and reluctant to extend leadership to the numerically superior
residents of the newer areas.
104
Many observers attributed the Village’s prejudices to the
preponderance of Jewish and Catholic settlers in Lakewood Park.
105
Some Old Lakewood
leaders, most notably John Todd, would find ways to make common cause with
newcomers over the fate of the area, but the division persisted. Although the moment
when “Old Lakewood” dominated the landscape had passed, and its dominance of the
civic culture was passing, Old Lakewood did give a crucial inheritance to the culture of
the new Lakewood, an antipathy toward Long Beach. In the fusion of old and new
Lakewoodians, Long Beach, more than Los Angeles, emerged as a symbol of “other”
space, as the “old” city to which Lakewood compared itself as “tomorrow’s city”.
Viewed from the urban planner’s perspective, Long Beach was flush with revenue
from oil and aviation; “the town with too much money” was an unlikely candidate for the
role of urban other.
106
But the working people who settled Lakewood Park and the
businessmen of Lakewood Village encountered Long Beach from a different angle, most
often on the streets in passage to work and to do business, and from this perspective,
several factors hurt its stock. Both Old Lakewood businessmen and the LPC felt the Long
Beach interests were overambitious and sought to keep regional trade focused on

104
Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a Socially Cohesive
Community" 26.
105
Lakewood (Calif.), The Lakewood Story: History, Traditions, Values 24. Baker, "The Lakewood Story: Defending
the Recreational Good Life in Postwar Southern California Suburbia, 1950-1999" 74-75, Waldie, Holy Land: A
Suburban Memoir 74.
106
This designation came from a Saturday Evening Post article in 1952. Miller, Cities by Contract: The Politics of
Municipal Incorporation 17.
318
Downtown.
107
At the same time, that downtown had grown congested, making
parking scarce to Lakewood shoppers arriving by car, who had to contend with vandalism
and hubcap theft in the side streets off Pine Avenue, walks of several blocks to stores,
and parking lot rates that amounted to being “’held up’ for from 25 cents up, mostly
up.”
108
Long Beach’s wealth took the form of oil and gas revenues, pushing the city’s
fiscal situation upwards out of proportion to the wealth of its population. When
Lakewoodians looked at Long Beach, they may have seen people who made bad
neighbors. Unlike the homeowners in Lakewood Park, who embodied Taper’s sense that
homeownership made better citizens, Long Beach seen from Lakewood looked like a city
of renters and landlords.
109
In contrast to the promise inherent in Lakewood’s newness,
Long Beach’s status as an “old” city was in itself problematic, encompassing aesthetic
and political concerns associated with age.
110

Finally, Long Beach had a relatively small but significant black population by the
early 1950s, in part due to the wartime construction of housing projects in the North Long
Beach area (to the west of Lakewood) for workers in the city’s war plants, which had

107
Mark Taper: “We felt that if Long Beach had annexed the area they would have held back any business
development in this area to compel people to shop in the downtown Long Beach area.” Notes on Lakewood History
Meeting, January 18, 1969.
108
Kaleialil, Kale W., Letter to the Editor, Press-Telegram, 1/14/53, P. A12. This was general complaint against urban
downtowns across the United States as their customers grew more auto-mobile. Recent scholarship has suggested that
rather than downtowns “dying” as a result of post-World War II suburbanization, automotive traffic had long made
urban downtown retail unappealing. Fogelson dates the downtown parking crisis to the 1920s across the United States,
while Isenberg contends that World War II restrictions on driving artificially preserved the centrality of downtown
retail against trends toward more ordered and less heterogenous shopping districts supposedly favored by white
housewives. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 282-83, Isenberg, Downtown America 161, 89.
109
Mark Taper, Juanita Knox, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project. “Lakewood Is Our Home Town”
(pamphlet), Lakewood Civic Council, 1953, reprinted in Klissner.
110
As Howland retrospectively summarizes the discourse in his introduction to Todd’s history of Lakewood,
“Lakewood was a new community in ascendance, and Long Beach was an old city in decline, they thought.” Todd,
Howland, and Lakewood (Calif.), John S. Todd: Father of the City of Lakewood: A History 43. John Todd, Lakewood
25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
319
been partially desegregated by Federal mandate in 1942. White Long Beach city
officials were as animated by the desire to limit black settlement in their city as those in
any other city in the region, in part because of the growth of all-white suburbs on their
border. They took advantage of the first lifting of Federal war worker housing
requirements to demolish this housing, and by so doing actually reduced the city’s black
population between 1950 and 1960. However, according to the logic of the Federally
organized market for home loan credit, that population still constituted a racialized risk
to the security of property values in Long Beach.
111
Furthermore, even after the removal
of public housing, the areas of North Long Beach still compared unfavorably to the built
environment of Lakewood, and seemed to one Lakewood observer a “forgotten area…
there were ruts in the streets and the area was generally deteriorating.”
112

The image of Long Beach in the mind of Lakewood grew more important because
of regional politics. In 1951 John “Bud” Wentz, an administrative assistant to the Long
Beach city government, completed a masters thesis advocating the annexation of
Lakewood by Long Beach.
113
Wentz argued that the move would be mutually beneficial,
but prophetically expected some resistance from Lakewood residents. Wentz counseled
Long Beach officials to “promote the confidence and understanding of the thousands of

111
Waldie and Baker differ on the growth of black population in Long Beach between 1940 and 1950. Waldie fixes the
black population of Long Beach at 2,000 of 164,000 residents in 1940, with desegregation of war industry swelling the
black population to 15,000 by 1950. The destruction of public housing developments built for black war workers in
1947 was part of a decline toward a black population of 9,500 in 1960. Baker identifies much lower, but faster-
growing figures, claiming that the black population of Long Beach increased from 610 to 4,267 between 1940 and
1950. Baker, "The Lakewood Story: Defending the Recreational Good Life in Postwar Southern California Suburbia,
1950-1999" 98, Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir 161.
112
John Todd, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
113
John Budd Wentz, An Analysis of the Advisability of Annexing All or a Part of the Lakewood Area to the City of
Long Beach (Long Beach, Calif.: 1951).
320
potential Long Beach citizens” living in Lakewood.
114
The actions of the Long Beach
City Council could hardly have been less faithful to that ideal. At first, resistance was
strongest in the narrow circle of the Old Lakewood business leadership, represented by
the Taxpayers’ Association and the Chamber of Commerce, who feared that Long Beach
would subordinate Lakewood to downtown. Lee Hollopeter was quoted saying that “’I
wouldn’t believe the Wentz report if John Wentz wrote it on a stack of Bibles.’”
115

When the prospect of Long Beach annexing Lakewood appeared to affect not
only the interests of a small number of businessmen but the security of tens of thousands
of homes, opposition to annexation became widespread. Perhaps the most significant
episode of threat came in early 1953, when Long Beach announced plans to place an
“Honor Farm” rehabilitation facility for habitual alcoholic offenders along the “shotgun
strip”, a narrow band of land owned by Long Beach (and shaped like a shotgun) that ran
east-west from the San Gabriel River to the Douglas plant along Carson Street, nearly
bisecting the Lakewood area (see Figure 5.2).

114
Ibid. 136.
115
Bob Johnson, "The Lakewood Crisis: Annexation Hinges on Water, Dollars, Cents," Mirror, June 19, 1952.
321
Figure 5.2: The Geography Unincorporated Lakewood

322
Most Lakewoodians wanted no part of “Hangover Palace” and wrote letters to
the Press-Telegram, as Mrs. Patricia Hatch did, arguing that “as one parent, among many,
I desire to raise my family in the best atmosphere possible. My idea of good
surroundings does not include an honor farm.”
116
Not wanting Hangover Palace to drag
down the price of its unsold homes, the LPC was also part of the resistance. Don
Rochlen, according to press accounts, was a conduit of information between the Long
Beach City Council and Lakewood residents, and hinted that he was aware of plans that
included a possible sit-in of the Council chambers.
117
But the protest campaign was most
sympathetic when it was represented the local mothers who packed the Long Beach
Council chambers, carrying signs reading “Keep YOUR JAIL OUT OF LAKEWOOD”
and heckling council members with “catcalls, groans, and jeers”, and marched with their
children 700 strong to Long Beach City Hall.
118
Protests were to no avail, as the City
Council voted to approve the project, but something was gained. In the course of her
letter to the editor opposing the Honor Farm, Mrs. H.C. Biley inadvertently testified to
how far the civic culture had developed:
Last summer we returned to Long Beach, and home, after being away twelve
years. After looking the situation over, we decided to buy in Lakewood Plaza.
The places were so neat and kept up so well, we just knew what kind of people
lived out there, and, believe me, I am happy with what I’ve found. The people are
very civic-minded and very concerned with the welfare of their children.
119

116
Hatch, Patricia, Letter to the Editor, Press-Telegram, 2/12/53, p. A16.
117
"Lakewood Women Fight Honor Farm," Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1953, A26.
118
“As Lakewood Residents Turn Out in Force to Oppose Honor Farm”, Press-Telegram, 2/10/1953, p. B1; The
Lakewood Story (2004), p. 45; Baker comments on child safety as an entrée for women into civic activism;
119
Biley, Mrs. H.C., Letter to the Editor, Press-Telegram, 2/15/53, p.
323
Indeed, the common conditions of raising young children and keeping up homes had
become a kind of cultural glue to Lakewood residents, particularly women and mothers.
The Honor Farm episode became a critical episode in orienting civic values around what
Baker calls “the creation of the ideal ‘suburban family safe place’.”
120
The episode also
established Long Beach as the wrong kind of place. This concern resonated deeply with
Lakewoodians not simply because Long Beach threatened to site undesirable land uses in
territory adjoining Lakewood; the Honor Farm controversy unfolded in the context of a
crisis over the political status of Lakewood. The Wentz report had made explicit Long
Beach’s intentions to annex Lakewood, and after the Honor Farm episode, it was only
natural for Lakewoodians to fear the worst from annexation. As one writer put it, “if the
Long Beach prison farm is indicative of what the Long Beach city fathers have in mind
for Lakewood in general, then perhaps we’d better paddle our own canoe.”
121

Conflict and Crisis: Deciding the Political Future of Lakewood
The crisis of Lakewood’s political status had been brewing even as the Lakewood
Park Corporation announced its plans. Like Lakewood, many of fastest-growing areas in
Los Angeles County lay outside the boundaries of incorporated cities. The League of
California Cities (Los Angeles Division) estimated that the population of unincorporated
Los Angeles County had grown by 183.4 percent, from 323,572 to 917,147 between 1930

120
Baker, "The Lakewood Story: Defending the Recreational Good Life in Postwar Southern California Suburbia,
1950-1999" 8.
121
Ditty, A.W., Letter to the Editor, Press-Telegram, 2/8/53, p. A10. Another writer, Robert W. Frazier, commented
that “Many Lakewood people who have stood firmly for annexation to Long Beach now wonder if the wheels care.”
Letter to the Editor, P-T, 2/13/53 p. A8.
324
and 1950, compared to slower (though still rapid) growth of 74.1 percent in the
cities.
122
The settlement of so many people outside of the jurisdiction of municipal
government created conflicts over taxation and spending that grew increasingly
contentious. The Los Angeles Mirror published a lengthy series of articles in 1952 under
the rubric of a “crisis” around the status of Lakewood and other unincorporated areas,
asking “are city-dwellers taxed to provide county-dwellers with urban comforts and
services?”.
123
While the Mirror and reporter Bob Johnson answered that question in the
affirmative, the resolution to the issue remained unclear.
One party to these conflicts was the County of Los Angeles. Because the County
operated under a home-rule charter that gave its elected Board of Supervisors unusual
autonomy relative to the State Legislature, the County was both entitled and obligated to
provide basic municipal services to populated unincorporated areas under its
jurisdiction.
124
This presented both an opportunity and a challenge to the County.
Growth in unincorporated Lakewood created a pool of residents in a “political no-man’s
land” represented only by a single County Supervisor (Lakewood-area builder Herbert
Legg) that would be a stable client base for the expansion of the County government, but
it also strained the capacity of the County’s social service systems (and the general fund

122
McMillan, Don. Report of City-County Committee, League of California Cities, Dec. 13,1950, in Fletcher Bowron
Collection, Box 47/Folder “Consolidations (Incl. Lakewood Plan). Wentz, An Analysis of the Advisability of Annexing
All or a Part of the Lakewood Area to the City of Long Beach 82.
123
Editor’s Note to Johnson, "A Tale of Two City Slickers.": “Basically, the situation is a quarrel between cities and
counties over the question: The Mirror feels that the immediate future of Lakewood, ‘the city that never was a town’,
may hold the answers to that question—or some of them.”
124
Mark B. Feldman and Everett L. Jassy, "The Urban County: A Study of New Approaches to Local Government in
Metropolitan Areas," Harvard law review 73, no. 3 (1960): 546, 60-61. Los Angeles County was the most populous of
11 California counties operating under home rule charters.
325
that paid for them).
125
Despite predictions made after the end of World War II by
California State government analysts that the needs for services would prompt an
increase in incorporations to secure them, the provision of services by Los Angeles
County allowed voters to delay incorporating.
126
As long as the County provided services
and the residents of unincorporated areas paid the same property taxes to the County
general fund as did residents of cities, non-incorporation was a bargain. The Lakewood
Taxpayers’ Association agreed. As John Todd recalled, most of the leadership of Old
Lakewood viewed talk of incorporation as “worse than slurring motherhood.”
127

The incorporated cities took a decidedly different view, resenting what they
considered a subsidy to county areas paid for out of their citizens’ county property taxes.
The League of California Cities charged that seventy unincorporated urbanized areas in
the county drew $9.6 million in county general fund taxes paid by city taxpayers in 1949
to pay for services applied only to the unincorporated areas.
128
This subsidy was directly
rooted in the fact that the established cities maintained their own police, fire, and library
(among other) systems, paying for expensive infrastructure and administration at the
same time as their residents were contributing to the County system. In the area of
policing, for example, a Haynes Foundation survey concluded that “the Sheriff’s
Department has become practically a municipal police department serving these

125
Bob Johnson, "Problem in Government: 'Vacuum Areas' Vs. Cities," Mirror, June 18, 1952, Johnson, "A Tale of
Two City Slickers."
126
Barthell, Russell and John C. Bollens, Memorandum of Information Relative to Municipal Incorporation in
California, Berkeley, CA (University of California Bureau of Public Administration (November 20, 1947), p. 1.
127
Todd, Howland, and Lakewood (Calif.), John S. Todd: Father of the City of Lakewood: A History 6.
128
Bob Johnson, "Lakewood Crisis: Lakewood Groups Oppose Tie-up with Long Beach," Mirror, June 20, 1952.
"Untaxed Suburban Cities Held Living Off Others," Los Angeles Times, October 25, 1950, 28.
326
regions,” and estimated that “incorporated cities paid 83 percent of the $4,000,000 it
cost to run the Sheriff’s Department in unincorporated territory.”
129
Since the residents of
the unincorporated areas owed political loyalty only to the County Supervisor of their
district, leadership of the cities concluded that the Supervisors had every incentive to
disburse general fund revenues to the benefit of their most loyal constituents. The League
made a mantra of the subsidy, arguing that eighty-three cents of every dollar spent in the
unincorporated “vacuum areas” was drawn from taxes paid by city residents, costing
every city taxpayer twenty cents per hundred dollars of assessed value while taxpayers in
the unincorporated areas dodged an estimated one dollar per hundred hike in their County
tax bills that would have ensued if they paid for their own service departments.
130

Growth in unincorporated areas was hitting city taxpayers in the wallets.
Adjusting this relationship could work to the advantage of the cities and their
elected officials, who fought through the League of California Cities a public relations
and legislative battle against the free ride. In 1950, the League’s Los Angeles Division
concluded that “so gross an inequity as this misuse of the funds raised from general
county property taxpayers deserves a fundamental remedy…. Legislation that would
prohibit counties from providing the unofficial cities with special services at the expense
of the general county taxpayers.”
131
One legislative proposal, to ban the development of

129
Bigger and Kitchen, "How the Cities Grew," 37.
130
The League reached this conclusion by counting assessed valuation for purposes of the County’s general property
tax. 83.35% of the $4,843,238,295 assessed value in the County lay within city borders."Untaxed Suburban Cities
Held Living Off Others," 28. Edwin A. Cottrell and Helen L. Jones, Characteristics of the Metropolis, John Randolph
Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, Los Angeles. Metropolitan Los Angeles, V.1 (Los Angeles, Calif.: The Haynes
Foundation, 1952) 61-62.McMillan, Report of City-County Committee, Los Angeles Division, League of California
Cities, Dec. 13, 1950; Johnson, "Problem in Government: 'Vacuum Areas' Vs. Cities."
131
McMillan, LCC/LA Report of City-County Committee, Dec 13, 1950.
327
unincorporated areas unless they formed taxing districts, gained little traction; it
antagonized the powerful constituency of large-scale builders, and as far as development
was concerned, the horse was already out of the barn.
132
In 1951, the State Assembly
passed legislation introduced by the League that would create mandatory single-purpose
assessment districts for property in densely settled but unincorporated areas. These
assessments would be used to pay for police, fire, and other cost-intensive County
services. The legislation would also have barred county taxes paid by residents of
incorporated cities from being applied to the service bill for the unincorporated areas.
This bill was killed by the Senate, which referred it to committees for study.
133
The 1951
proposal also set up a power struggle between the League of California Cities and the
County Supervisors Association. Los Angeles County Counsel Harold Kennedy,
representing the Supervisors, opposed a new service district bill in 1953, but the League
and the Supervisors Association achieved a compromise proposal early in 1954 that
promised to “end the friction over complaints that suburbanites are getting a free ride at
the expense of people who pay both city and county taxes.”
134
Later events made this
compromise largely irrelevant.
The other option, which appeared even more attractive to cities like Long Beach,
was to reinvigorate the process of annexation. Throughout the early 1950s, a host of bills
were proposed in the State Legislature that would have either eased the process of

132
Cottrell and Jones, Characteristics of the Metropolis 62.
133
Ibid. 109.
134
"Legislation for Special Tax Districts Prepared," Long Beach Press-Telegram, January 14, 1953, 1. Morrie
Landsberg, "California Cities, Counties Back Services Tax for 'Fringe Areas'," Long Beach Press-Telegram, January
16, 1954.
328
annexation for existing cities, or made annexation mandatory when an
unincorporated area adjacent to a city reached a certain population density or valuation.
135

Although a massive residential development like Lakewood included thousands of
children and thus posed a potentially huge service obligation, many in Long Beach felt
that this liability was more than balanced out by the future tax value of the houses and
especially of the Lakewood Center shopping mall. By 1951, Long Beach was weighing
not only the desirability of annexing Lakewood, but possible strategies to accomplish that
end. The Long Beach City government published John Wentz’s thesis as a book which
became the handbook of annexationists.
136
The “Wentz report” advanced the case that
legislation would soon force Lakewood to join a city, incorporate, or be forced into
service districts and that annexation to Long Beach would be the most mutually
beneficial.
137
These benefits notwithstanding, Wentz recognized the resistance to
annexation present in Lakewood’s civic culture, and advised the annexation of Lakewood
in chunks or “increments”, beginning with the most favorably disposed.
138
Long Beach
would solicit signatures from 25 percent of the voters in each increment in order to call
an election on the annexation.
139
Long Beach’s position was aided by the fact that the
Lakewood area was almost entirely surrounded by Long Beach, as the city had purchased

135
Cottrell and Jones, Characteristics of the Metropolis 62.
136
Wentz, An Analysis of the Advisability of Annexing All or a Part of the Lakewood Area to the City of Long Beach.
Wentz also distilled his argument in a 1952 article in Western City, the publication of the League of California Cities.
John Budd Wentz, "Should Lakewood Annex to Long Beach?" Western City, January 1952.
137
Wentz, An Analysis of the Advisability of Annexing All or a Part of the Lakewood Area to the City of Long Beach
134.
138
Ibid. 107-08. Summarized by Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a Gigantic Real Estate
Operation into a Socially Cohesive Community" 55-7.
139
Wentz, An Analysis of the Advisability of Annexing All or a Part of the Lakewood Area to the City of Long Beach
102. Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a Socially
Cohesive Community" 57, Ed Lundberg, "Annexation Talk Boils in Lakewood," Los Angeles Times, July 5, 1953, A2.
329
thin, uninhabited “shoestring strips” of land surrounding Lakewood on the north, east,
and south (essentially, the Lakewood area would have filled the northeast quadrant of a
greater Long Beach), as well as a “shotgun strip” along Carson Street that bisected the
Lakewood area. These strips allowed Long Beach to satisfy the requirement of physical
adjacency and annex any increment of Lakewood (ultimately, Long Beach did annex the
area south of the “shotgun strip”, excluded due to non-contiguity from the Lakewood
incorporation).
Long Beach escalated its campaign to annex Lakewood in 1952 and 1953. Since
annexation required first the signatures of a sufficient number of local property owners in
each increment, and then the approval of a majority of voters in an election, Long Beach
turned first to the established property owners and civic leaders of the area, the
Taxpayers’ Association and the Chamber of Commerce. Some members of the
Taxpayers’ Association were intrigued by the possibility that annexation could preserve
low tax bills better than inclusion in a service district (perceived to be the most likely
resolutions of Lakewood’s status), and sought to permit Long Beach to present the thrust
of the Wentz report to the Association. Others, believing continued non-incorporation
viable, remained implacably hostile to annexation, voting down the resolution by 49 to 39
after two hours of debate.
140
The issue split the Taxpayers’ Association into pro- and
anti-annexation factions that pushed this single issue to the center of the local political
agenda.
141

140
Johnson, "Lakewood Crisis: Lakewood Groups Oppose Tie-up with Long Beach."
141
John Todd, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project. Todd, Howland, and Lakewood (Calif.), John S.
Todd: Father of the City of Lakewood: A History 12.
330
By 1953, Long Beach had drawn up the boundaries of its annexation
increments and began to circulate petitions among Lakewood property owners. Allies of
annexation began to present a litany of economy-based arguments for annexation. One
pamphlet insisted that resisting Long Beach’s overtures was “like kicking a millionaire
uncle in the teeth and telling him you don’t want to belong to his family.”
142
Other
pamphlets asserted that only special interests profited from Lakewood’s unincorporated
status, while “all of us who have no personal axes to grind” favored annexation for the
sake of economy, parks, and representation by elected Councilmen in Long Beach.
143
On
March 12, in the first annexation election, affecting the “Plaza 3, 4, 5” increment in the
southern end of Lakewood (the name refers to the formal names of the subdivisions
involved), voters went for annexation by a vote of 1,173 to 574. More elections were
scheduled for the summer, and on July 30, voters in the “University” district went for
annexation by 348 to 316.
144
If these results continued, momentum for annexation of the
whole of Lakewood would be nearly irresistible.
The Lakewood Center’s owners were not thrilled with the possibility of
annexation, and began in 1953 to investigate the previously unthinkable prospect of
incorporating a small city, including the legal minimum of 500 inhabitants surrounding
the mall to protect the area from taxation or restrictive regulation on development.
145

142
“Honest Facts About Annexation to Long Beach”, n/d, folder Lakewood: History: Long Beach Annexation Attempt;
Box: Lakewood History: Al Martin Partners-Lakewood Center Mall, Iacoboni Library, Lakewood, CA.
143
“Joining Long Beach Makes Sense” and “Here’s Why your Neighbors are Working For Annexation to Long Beach”
(pamphlets), reprinted in Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a Gigantic Real Estate Operation
into a Socially Cohesive Community".
144
Ibid. 57. Summary of annexation increment election results.
145
John Todd, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project. Notes on Lakewood History Meeting, January 18,
1969.
331
This created a crisis for the civic representatives of the rest of Lakewood, who
realized that they faced a choice of annexation to Long Beach, inclusion in a series of
service districts, or incorporating a city with neither industry or a large retail complex to
supply tax revenues. It became increasingly evident to Todd that the fate of Lakewood
would lie with an incorporated city. The resolution of the crisis through incorporation
was set in motion by a 1953 meeting of the minds between Todd and Don Rochlen. On
hearing of the LPC’s intent to incorporate, Todd responded with a proposal for a larger
city that would satisfy both the company and the anti-Long Beach element of
Lakewood’s citizenry:
I suggested that it would be better if we incorporated all the area, if we were
going to prevent annexation we couldn’t just sit back and remain unincorporated,
the only way to prevent annexation and to have our own say and a word in our
destiny was to form our own city.
146

Todd thus linked the LPC in an alliance with the anti-Long Beach remnants of the
Taxpayers’ Organization and the Chamber of Commerce, which commissioned three
studies of the fiscal ramifications of annexation and incorporation. The first, the so-
called Stevenson Report received by the Chamber on June 17, recommended annexation
to the larger and wealthier city as the most prudent course of action. The Chamber
shelved this report and commissioned two other studies in an effort to keep the hope of
incorporation alive.
147
The economic rationale behind the Stevenson Report was
compelling to many potential voters. Opponents of cityhood were quick to point out the

146
John Todd, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
147
"Chamber Asks More Data for Lakewood Plans," Los Angeles Times, June 26, 1953, 18, Klissner, "How Agencies
of Communication Can Convert a Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a Socially Cohesive Community" 80.
332
potential costs of running city service departments, costs which could only be paid by
taxes on homeowners or by taxes on sales and commercial property that were sure to
alienate the most powerful institution in town. One faction that opposed both annexation
and incorporation encouraged Lakewoodians with the slogan “Let’s Stay as We Are”,
and later circulated a flier comparing Lakewood to the incorporated city of South Gate,
asking “Is it Worth $46.59 extra taxes Just to Be Able to Say Lakewood ‘City’ instead of
Lakewood?”
148

An interesting solution was possible in theory: incorporating Lakewood as a city
but securing municipal services by contract from Los Angeles County. All cities in the
county at the time contracted for some of their services (chiefly assessment and public
health and welfare), but while the County honored more than 400 individual service
contracts in 1954, no city contracted for all major services.
149
This solution was first
proposed by one David Perry, who circulated petitions in April 1953 under the auspices
of a group called the Lakewood Better Government Association, which opposed
annexation on the grounds that Long Beach would waste Lakewood’s tax money, to
incorporate Lakewood as a contracting city to ease initial costs but with a transition to
traditional service departments within a few years. Perry’s proposal did not gain traction
because the prospect of funding service departments still raised the specter of high taxes
unless the proposed city could annex industrial land in nearby Paramount, a move that

148
Carson Gardens Committee for a No Vote on Incorporation, “The Tale of Two Cities With True Facts”, pamphlet,
1954. Digital document hosted by the City of Lakewood, accessible at
http://www.lakewoodcity.org/news/displaynews.asp?NewsID=439
149
Feldman and Jassy, "Urban County," 546.
333
would have conflicted with Lakewood’s non-industrial self-image.
150
Contracting
was revived when the second and third Chamber-commissioned studies were filed. The
report of UCLA Economist Philip Neff, received in June, and the “Boyle Report”,
commissioned in October and received in December, 1953 from the Boyle Engineering
firm of Santa Ana, went beyond the Perry plan and the Neff Report to contend that
incorporating on a permanent contracting basis could allow a city of Lakewood to
function without high property taxes. With the Boyle Report in hand, Todd went to work
crafting the particulars of a contract plan. It remained to win two battles with petitions
and ballots.

Mobilizing Community in Lakewood
The issues of annexation and incorporation, though closely related and contested
by many of the same activists at around the same time, were two separate political
concerns. Stopping annexation was a necessary but not sufficient prelude to
incorporation. Both, however, required the mobilization of the community, and the
importance of homes to Lakewoodians ultimately proved to be the rhetorical glue that
held the two phases of the campaign together. After the honor farm controversy, the
climate of civic organization in Lakewood became energized, as residents felt they had a
vital stake in the fate of the area. Though the pro-annexation Press-Telegram insisted
that “Mr. and Mrs. Lakewood” (the aforementioned Mr. and Mrs. Charles Daniels) “have
no views on the question of whether Lakewood should annex to Long Beach” and

150
Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a Socially Cohesive
Community" 67-68.
334
planned “to get the pictures hung and the grass growing in their yard before they
worry much about community problems,” in fact the question of annexation had more
bearing on the home-centered orientation of Lakewoodians than did a nice green lawn.
151

A local journalist, Harry Klissner, described the intensity of organizing in Lakewood,
counting seven neighborhood organizations in favor of annexation, and eight opposing
it.
152

Among these, however, one was most important—the anti-annexation Lakewood
Civic Council, formed in May 1953. Along with John Todd and local professionals and
businessmen including Jim Knox, Times reporter Bill Burns, realtor Gene Nebeker, Ken
Veeder, and attorney Angelo Iacoboni, Don Rochlen took a leadership role, extending the
Lakewood Park Corporation’s public relations operations to grassroots organizing.
Lakewood Park Corporation cash followed, along with contributions from local private
utilities, who did not want to surrender customers to Long Beach’s public utilities.
153

Elite support helped the volunteers who staffed the Civic Council and the later spinoff
group the Lakewood Committee for Incorporation (founded in October 1953), to
mobilize at great intensity. John Todd and another local attorney, Angelo Iacoboni, were
the principal strategists for Lakewood’s resistance to annexation. If more than 50 percent
of property owners in each of the annexation increments signed a protest petition, the

151
Lembke, "How "Mr. Lakewood" Lives," B4.
152
Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a Socially Cohesive
Community" 27.
153
Martin J. Schiesl, "The Politics of Contracting: Los Angeles County and the Lakewood Plan, 1954-1962,"
Huntington Library Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1982): 228. Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a
Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a Socially Cohesive Community".
335
elections could be blocked.
154
This task was difficult, because there were many
owners of small house lots in the area and little time to prepare the protest petitions,
though the effort was aided by a legal loophole. Annexation advocates were required to
wait for a period of twenty-one days between announcing their intention to gather
signatures and collecting them. Protest petitions had no such restrictions, and this gave
opponents a three week head start.
155

With the resources of the Lakewood Civic Council, volunteers were mobilized to
gather the signatures. Women, though they were not well-represented in the ranks of
leadership of the Civic Council, provided much of the labor and energy and a healthy
dose of credibility, established through the Honor Farm controversy, as parents
concerned with the security of their community. For example, while Jim Knox was an
officer of the Civic Council, it was Juanita Knox who hit the pavement, saying of their
friends and neighbors, “They were either involved or I broke their neck!”
156
The door-to-
door efforts of the petitioners were supplemented by print and film materials. The Civic
Council’s backers paid for a campaign of fliers and a complimentary delivery of the Los
Angeles Daily News featuring anti-annexation editorials and pro-independence reporting
along the following lines: “Those fighting annexation are imbued with the pioneer spirit
of growing up with a fresh, slumless, energetic community.”
157
The rhetoric of protecting

154
Lundberg, "Annexation Talk Boils in Lakewood," A2. "Lakewood Annexation Election Held Assured," Los Angeles
Times, July 1, 1953, 28.
155
Miller, Cities by Contract: The Politics of Municipal Incorporation 19. Ironically, the three week waiting period
was described in the explanation of annexation procedures contained in the Wentz Report. Wentz, An Analysis of the
Advisability of Annexing All or a Part of the Lakewood Area to the City of Long Beach 102.
156
Juanita Knox, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
157
Jack Jones, "Will Long Beach and Lakewood Join Hands?" Daily News, June 6, 1953, 14.
336
suburban homes was effective. Lakewood Residents gathered sufficient signatures to
block elections affecting most of the increments.
158

Long Beach contested the validity of protest petitions, leading to a lawsuit. On
August 5, Superior Court Judge Frank Swain upheld the protest petitions and enjoined
Long Beach from holding scheduled annexation votes on the 6
th
, 7
th
, 14
th
, 20
th
, and 27
th
of
August, though his decision did not prevent Long Beach from attempting annexation in
the future.
159
Activists knew that it would be difficult to mobilize the same intensity to
resist further campaigns, but the push against annexation created networks that could be
exploited by incorporation advocates:
We decided that we could not do this again every year, it was just too much work.
And… at the time we started carrying petitions against annexation we started
talking incorporation at the same time…. We knew exactly where to go and how
to get the signatures and get ‘em fast.
160

Ironically, Long Beach gave the Civic Council a chance to solidify its position by holding
the five annexation elections in defiance of the court.
161
Though the elections had been
pre-emptively nullified and would carry little weight, Long Beach hoped the results
would show that public sentiment favored annexation. The Civic Council turned its
rhetoric toward promoting the essential unity of Lakewood. In contrast to the
incremental strategy of Long Beach’s annexations, the Civic Council argued in its

158
"Petitions Hit Lakewood Vote on Annexation," Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1953, A1.
159
"Court Hears Plea on Vote in Lakewood," Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1953, A1, "South Lakewood Vote on
Annexation Set," Los Angeles Times, July 22, 1953, A1, Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a
Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a Socially Cohesive Community" 57.
160
Juanita Knox, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
161
"Lakewood Area Vote Today, but It's Held Illegal," Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1953, A13, "Lakewood to Vote
Despite Court Order," Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1953, 2.
337
pamphlets that Lakewood’s political status was something “the whole community
should decide together.”
162
Figure 5.3 reflects the Civic Council’s opposition to
annexation and to Long Beach’s chosen tactics.
163

Figure 5.3: Resisting Annexation

On August 6, voters in the “Plaza 1 and 2” increment rejected annexation in a
nullified election, and voters similarly affirmed the court decision with their votes on

162
“Piecemeal Annexation: How They Work It” (pamphlet), Lakewood Civic Council (1953), “A Look Into a Crystal
Ball” (pamphlet), Lakewood Civic Speakers Bureau (1953), electronic documents hosted by City of Lakewood,
accessible at http://www.lakewoodcity.org/news/displaynews.asp?NewsID=427. “Lakewood Is Our Home Town”
(Pamphlet), Lakewood Civic Council, 1953. Reprinted in Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a
Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a Socially Cohesive Community".
163
“Piecemeal Annexation: How They Work It” (Pamphlet), (1953). Image from City of Lakewood.
338
August 14 and 27. In only one voided election, held for the “Heartwell-Wardlow”
district south of the Shotgun Strip on August 20, did voters go for annexation, though by
the narrow margin of 1180-1045 (this area would eventually be annexed to Long Beach
after the incorporation of the City of Lakewood).
164
As de facto referenda on the
existence of a unified place identity for Lakewood, these election results were a
springboard for incorporation.
While the issue changed, much of the home-centered rhetoric remained the same.
The Civic Council’s and Committee for Incorporation’s arguments through the fall of
1953 illustrate the continuity of home-based rhetoric across the shift from anti-annexation
to pro-incorporation politics. This continuity of rhetoric eased Lakewood voters through
the shift by representing anti-annexation and incorporation as essentially the same battle.
In the course of urging voters to turn out on August 27 to defeat the final annexation
measure in West Lakewood, one local organization made the leap, arguing in a pamphlet
that “sentiment is building up rapidly in favor of forming OUR OWN CITY of
Lakewood.” This pamphlet discussed the advantages of contracting (though it distorted
the findings of the Stevenson report to favor incorporation), and stressed the importance
of political control to protecting homes.
165
One anti-annexation pamphlet urged readers
to “look into a crystal ball” to see the positive consequences of staying out of Long
Beach, namely the protection of “the finest planned residential community ever built”:

164
Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a Socially Cohesive
Community".
165
“The Biggest and Best Part of Lakewood is Still FREE!”, West Lakewood Civic Association (1953), electronic
documents hosted by City of Lakewood, accessible at
http://www.lakewoodcity.org/news/displaynews.asp?NewsID=427.
339
Yes, the future of Lakewood is beautiful if a person will take the time to
evaluate it today. It will be a community without slums, without skid-rows,
without the bar hangouts that create the crime problems of the other communities
our size, our children will have the proper environment in which to become good
American citizens. It can be said that Lakewood has the opportunity to have a
utopia of community living. Through a united people who are interested in the
future of Lakewood, we can make this Utopia not just a possibility, but a
reality.
166

The twelve-minute film The Lakewood Story likewise carried forward the themes of
suburban home rule that animated resistance to annexation, but began to make the case
for the value of a city government as an instrument to advance the interests of
homeowners and parents. This film was the brainchild of Don Rochlen. And was shown
at more than 300 block-level kaffeeklatsches, to 4,850 people. The Lakewood Park
Corporation donated twenty projectors for the campaign.
167
The kaffeeklatsch was a
quintessential tactic of suburban political organizing, and one that by virtue of its location
in private homes tended to link public politics with private property.
168
The Lakewood
Park Corporation, of course, carefully managed the meetings, supplying the film and the
refreshments and, some observers argued, distributing the film only to candidates who
supported incorporation strongly.
169

Klissner estimated the price of the whole campaign, including court costs, the fees
paid to lawyers like John Todd, printing of pamphlets, the rent of Lakewood Park-owned
houses for campaign headquarters, and the production of The Lakewood Story at about

166
“A Look Into a Crystal Ball” (pamphlet), Lakewood Civic Speakers Bureau (1953).
167
Notes on Lakewood History Meeting, January 18, 1969.
168
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2002).
169
Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can Convert a Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a Socially Cohesive
Community" 112.
340
$70,000. While the Civic Council did charge a nominal one dollar fee for
membership, the dues of the grassroots were clearly not covering even a tiny share of
these costs. Most of the $70,000 came from the local water company, owned by this time
by LPC partner Louis Boyar.
170
Proponents of annexation and opponents of incorporation
denounced the special interests and the prospect of a “company town” ruled by the
shopping center.
171
Mark Hannaford moved to Lakewood in 1954, too late to be a voter
on the incorporation issue. Even though he later became a City Councilman, he claimed
that he would have voted against incorporation in 1954 because he saw it as “motivated
by pride on the part of the residents, but… financed by the special interests of the
developers of the city and the utilities.”
172
Although Hannaford leaned against
incorporation, other residents who heard the same arguments supported it by a 3-2
margin. The fears that Long Beach’s annexation and land use policies provoked in
Lakewood’s residents, and the perception that their investments in their homes were
directly threatened, provided an opportunity for elites to engage the public as allies. John
Todd recalled a tactical decision to focus on the evil of Long Beach: “We even took
pictures of North Long Beach…. If you annex to Long Beach, this is what’s going to
happen to you, and do you want to be part of an old city?”
173
The Civic Council had
earlier claimed that “As ‘East Long Beach’ we could expect, judging by past

170
Schiesl, "Politics of Contracting," 228.
171
“Do You Want to Live in A Company Town” (pamphlet), Center Lakewood Committee For a No Vote on
Incorporation (n/d, 1954 approx). Digital document hosted by City of Lakewood, accessible at
http://www.lakewoodcity.org/news/displaynews.asp?NewsID=439. Klissner, "How Agencies of Communication Can
Convert a Gigantic Real Estate Operation into a Socially Cohesive Community" 89-93.
172
Mark Hannaford, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
173
John Todd, Ibid.
341
performance, to be another North Long Beach—a poor, neglected step-child paying
taxes for uncertain and inadequate services.”
174
The Civic Council’s broadsides,
pamphlets, and, most dramatically, the 1953 film The Lakewood Story, continued to
reference threatened homes. The film recapitulated the notion that suburbanization was
about living in clean, ordered communities without noise and industry.
175
The film also
represented Lakewood’s homogeneity as a positive attribute.
176
This attitude was shared
by many residents who felt, sensibly, that civic unity was easier to achieve in a
community where demography, economics, and homeownership created common
interests and concerns. One recalled that “we don’t have the same variation in
neighborhoods” making it “easier to pull together.”
177
North Long Beach was precisely
the kind of bogeyman the film depended upon for its impact. Keeping the focus on Long
Beach allowed homeowners to regard themselves, and not the company, as the initiators
of the campaign, creating political legitimacy. This interpretation was supported by the
development of an ethos of community in which the city as both a political entity and a
cultural and social phenomenon was the organic product of people’s will. The LCC
recognized the need to bring this impulse to the forefront, and push the interests of the
Lakewood Park Corporation, the Lakewood Center, and the utility companies as far out
of the public discourse as possible. Rather than an economically interested party, the

174
“Why Your Tax Dollar Buys Better Services For Less in a Free Lakewood”, Lakewood Civic Council, pamphlet
(1953), Digital document hosted by City of Lakewood, accessible at
http://www.lakewoodcity.org/news/displaynews.asp?NewsID=427.
175
Baker, "The Lakewood Story: Defending the Recreational Good Life in Postwar Southern California Suburbia,
1950-1999" 53.
176
Ibid. 98.
177
Harold Judson, Lakewood 25th Anniversary Oral History Project.
342
company was represented as a planner, an agency that provided nice neighborhoods,
but then got out of the way.
178
Whatever interest the Lakewood Center or the utility
companies had in incorporation paled in comparison to one crucial political calculation:
If incorporation would keep Lakewood out of Long Beach, it was good for homeowners.
Nearly 12,000, or 37 percent, of Lakewood’s homeowners signed the incorporation
petitions circulated by approximately 600 volunteers, far more than the 25 percent needed
to win a boundary hearing from the Board of Supervisors. After the approval of the
city’s proposed boundaries by the Supervisors on October 23 and of the validity of the
petitions on December 1, incorporation advocates began the final push toward an election
on March 9, 1954.
179
At the same time, a slate of candidates, most veterans of the
incorporation movement, ran to fill the first city council should the incorporation
succeed. The rhetoric of home rule was prominent in their campaign literature. A
campaign flier for Angelo Iacoboni argued that “the next logical step after owning your
own home is owning your own community.”
180
J.R. Lester Boyle wrote, in a letter to the
Committee for Incorporation that was copied and mailed to Lakewood voters on February
23, less than two weeks before the incorporation vote, that the contract plan would

178
“A Look Into a Crystal Ball” (pamphlet), 1953.
179
"City Status Wins Favor in Lakewood," Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1953, H2, "Incorporation Discussion Set
for Lakewood," Los Angeles Times, November 15, 1953, H2, "Lakewood's City Petition before Board," Los Angeles
Times, December 2, 1953, 32.This election was to incorporate the northern part of Lakewood, with a separate petition
and election for “South Lakewood”, the area below Carson Street, to follow. Since the areas were non-contiguous,
separated by the Shotgun Strip and the Douglas plant, it was proposed in theory to incorporate two cities and operate
them jointly. In practice, the southern area had been more disposed to annexation by Long Beach and ultimately voted
for annexation.
180
“Meet Angelo M. Iacoboni,” (1954). Digital document hosted by City of Lakewood, accessible at
http://www.lakewood