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Order before zoning: land use regulation in Los Angeles, 1880-1915

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Order before zoning: land use regulation in Los Angeles, 1880-1915

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ORDER BEFORE ZONING

LAND USE REGULATION IN LOS ANGELES

1880 – 1915

by

Kathy A. Kolnick

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
(PLANNING)

May 2008

Copyright 2008 Kathy A. Kolnick
ii

Epigraph

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse
dies away without the sympathy of the community.
—William James
iii
Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to Karrie Carls Rice, Billy Carls, Käthe
Peterson Konczak, Justin Solarski, Ian Solarski, Josh Arcisz, Ryan Kolnick, Taryn
Kolnick, Zach Arcisz, Jessica Arcisz, John Rohan, Morgan Arcisz, Marissa Rohan
and Daniel Kolnick; and to Autumn Rice, Rachel Konczak and Bryanna Konczak—
with the fond hope that they might each find the inspiration and drive to push beyond
expectations.
This work is also dedicated to the memory of four individuals who have had
enormous impacts on my life: Rena Sivitanidou—dear friend, as well as confidant,
instructor and advisor, her loss is still felt while her inspiration remains; Rob Mier—
who showed such an intense interest in my well-being, even during his most difficult
times, and who was adamant that I pursue this doctorate; Käthe Basse Hageman—
vivid in my earliest memories, she gave me love, as well as creative space and the
courage to use it; and most of all, Fred Hageman—steadfast and unquestioning
supporter of my dreams.
iv
Acknowledgments

The size of the supporting cast must increase exponentially with the duration
of the project, so there are quite a few to thank in this particular case! All have
contributed in large or small ways at various times, but none insignificantly.
At USC, Bill Baer provided a solid foundation in property law, and taught me
the value of precision, especially in legal argument and interpretation. Bob Biller
gave invaluable guidance during my exams. Gen Giuliano’s support and friendship
were at times just the spark needed to keep at it. Jennifer Wolch is an awesome
committee member. I am grateful for her exceptionally cogent advice at both the
commencement and culmination of this project, as well as her reminder to breathe in
the midst of it. David Sloane—historian, counselor and friend extraordinaire—
provided an important link to financial support. Greg Hise, chair of my committee,
planted the first seeds of this topic—not my first choice for a research direction but I
can imagine no other so appropriate. His scholarly model continues to inspire.
The Historical Society of Southern California provided financial assistance
through several Haynes Research Stipends. Central to my ability to make a living
while completing this research was support from the Center for Research on Crime
(formerly the Social Science Research Center).
Dace Taube at the Regional History Center at USC is truly, as Mike Davis
has written, the guardian angel of LA researchers. It is a sublime pleasure to call her
v
my friend. I have also benefited greatly from the friendship and aid of Hynda Rudd at
the City Record Center, as well as Jay Jones, Mike Holland and Todd Gaydowski.
Throughout my life, I have been inspired by my teachers and advisors,
unstinting in their generosity and unwavering in their support; among them are: Jay
and Bill Hinz, Charlie Hoch, Rod Holzkamp, Dave Ranney, Wim Wiewel, Anne
Wilson and Curt Winkle. And most especially, Chuck Orlebeke.
Besides my family (you know who you are), many friends and colleagues
have contributed, among them: Michael Agelasto; Julie-Anne Boudreau; Chen
Yanping, Hong Hailing and Hong Hao; Tara Clapp; Geoff deVerteuill; Ursula
Dörge; Ann Ernst (as well as Jerry, Jon, Allison, Jason and Amanda); Karen
Gesiakowski; Todd Gish; Stacy Harwood; John Jessee; Kiran Lalloo; Jon Lang;
Liang Hongwen; Giao Luong; Ma Siwen; Tim McDonald; Flo and Ed Mikel;
Gaynell Mitchell; Ramsey, Malina and Luke Miura; Ingrid and Rein Niinemae; Tom
O’Brien and Greg O’Neil; Qi Qin; Margarita Samaniego; John and Christie Sergo;
Ruth Sidler; Gayle Simundza and Tom Kirkman; Paula Sirola and Goetz Wolff; Sun
Huasheng; Siva Tian; Xu Hua; Yang Lidan; Helen Wen and Chalice Wilkerson (who
deserves credit for inspiring my journeys with her own audacious choices).
Finally, it is a pleasure to thank four incredible women who have offered
endless amounts of strength, boundless wisdom, unwavering loyalty and infinite
support—and who remain models of involved and principled lives. I count myself
lucky to know them: Renia Ehrenfeucht, Karen Hennigan, Allison Tom-Miura, et la
trés chère Liette Gilbert.
vi
Table of Contents

Epigraph ii

Dedication

iii
Acknowledgements

iv
List of Tables

ix
List of Figures

x
Abstract

xii
Chapter 1 Beyond Boisterous Roosters and Carpet Beaters—The
Evolution of Municipal Controls on Land Use in Los Angeles 1
Introduction 1
A New Narrative 3
The Received Wisdom 12
The Foundations of Land Use Regulation 17
Urban Order, Law and Property, Nuisance 17
The Property Rights Question 27

Recognizing Community—Balancing Rights and
Responsibilities in Society 29
Police Power and Local Government 33

Setting the Scene: Land Use and Regulation in Los Angeles before
the Annexation of California to the United States 39
Native Californians before the Spanish Entrada 40
Spanish Settlement 41
La Ciudad de Los Angeles in an Independent Mexico 44

Setting the Scene: Population and Jurisdictional Shifts in California
and Los Angeles after 1850 46
Overview of State Population Growth 46
Los Angeles: City within a County 48

Getting into the Spirit of the Day—Growth Through
Annexation and Consolidation 51
Local Narratives / Community Impacts 58
Chapter 1 Endnotes 66
vii

Chapter 2 Regulating Land Use—Searching for a Workable Strategy 88
Introduction 88
Conceptual Precursors to the Separation of Land Uses 92
Rapid Growth, Rapid Change 94
Wards and Growing Heterogeneity 97

Conflagrations and Plagues: Approaches to Fire Safety and Public
Health 104
Fire Districts 104
Public Health 110

“The Undersigned Being a Property Owner”—Popular Pressure for
Expanding Single-Purpose Districting 113
Animals in the City 116
“The Cows Must Go” 119
Oleophobia 121
The Crying Sanitary Evil of Los Angeles 124
Reactions to Chinese Immigration 126
Los Angeles Regulates Chinese and Laundries 132
The 1904 Residence Districts 134
Conclusion 139

Chapter 2 Endnotes

140
Chapter 3 Regulating Land Use—Smoldering Conflicts Burst Out into
the Open 156
Introduction 156
First Steps Towards Making a Manufacturing District 157
Los Angeles Cannot Have Too Many Factories 157
Regulation of Animal Slaughtering 160
Creating a District for Odium 162
The Fire Creates Opportunities 165
The Ballot-Box Alternative 170
The Electorate’s Desire to Be Heard 170
Testing the Initiative Process 175
Ballot Results and Analysis 179
Conclusion 183

Chapter 3 Endnotes

186
viii

Chapter 4 “There Must Be Progress”—The Shift to Citywide Districts 194
Introduction 194

Pressures for Change: The Need for Districts in a Transforming
Urban World 195
Residences vs. Industries 197
Where Shall the Factories Be? 202
First Industrial Districts 203

Building Legal Precedent for Expanded Police Powers in Los
Angeles 213
Quong Wo Case 213
Montgomery Case 222
Restricting the Location of Brickyards—Prelude to Hadacheck 226
“The Penalty for Underestimating Growth” 231
Hadacheck Case 241
Aftermath of the State Court Rulings in Los Angeles 245
An Epidemic of Land Use Regulation Begins 248
Creating More Industrial Space in Los Angeles 252
Spread of Districting around the United States 254
Conclusion 257

Chapter 4 Endnotes

262
Chapter 5 Regulating Land Use—The Search for Appropriate Balance
Continues

275
Organizing to Zone 278
Looking Back . . . 282
Conclusion 285

Chapter 5 Endnotes

295
References by Source

300
Bibliography

327
Appendix I: Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting
Ordinances, 1904-1921

349
Appendix II: Important US Supreme Court Decisions Impacting Land Use
1873- 2006 360
ix

List of Tables

Table 1: Population of Incorporated and Unincorporated Los Angeles
County, 1850-1910

50
Table 2: Annexations and Consolidations to the City of Los Angeles, 1850-
1912

55
Table 3: Other Incorporated Municipalities in Los Angeles County 1850-
1910

83
Table 4: Residential Density Change, 1850-1910, City and County of Los
Angeles

96
Table 5: Ward Descriptions, 1891

103
Table 6: Comparison of Chinese and Mexican Population with the Total
Population of Los Angeles, 1850-1910

127
Table 7: Los Angeles City Population by Ward, 1880-1900

142
Table 8: Results of Vote on Slaughterhouse Initiatives, Los Angeles, 5
December 1904

180
Table 9: Analysis of Slaughterhouse Initiative Voting Compared to Votes
Cast in Los Angeles Mayoral Race, 5 December 1904

181
Table 10: Annual Changes to Los Angeles Districting Regulations, 1909-
1921

253
Table 11: Additions to Los Angeles Land Area, 1915-1930 278

x

List of Figures

Figure 1: Boundaries of Los Angeles prior to 1915

6
Figure 2: California Population Share Comparisons (1850-1930): Los
Angeles with San Francisco, Six-County Southern California
Region with Remainder of State

47
Figure 3: Comparison of the Population Growth Rates of Los Angeles City
with the Rest of the Los Angeles County, 1860-1910

51
Figure 4: Los Angeles Annexations and Consolidations prior to 1915

54
Figure 5: Sites Related to James Lacey and Dr. Unger, 1894-1908

61
Figure 6: Los Angeles Ward Boundaries prior to 1889

100
Figure 7: Los Angeles Ward Boundaries after 1889

102
Figure 8: Central and General Fire District Boundaries in Center City Los
Angeles, 1874, 1882 and 1910

108
Figure 9: Westlake Oil Districts, 1900

124
Figure 10: Residence Districts, July 1904

138
Figure 11: Industrial Districts, February 1908

205
Figure 12: Residence Districts, August 1908 and September 1908

207
Figure 13: Industrial Districts, December 1909

211
Figure 14: Quong Wo Laundry Neighborhood

215
Figure 15: Location of Chinese Laundries Impacted by LA Industrial
District Ordinance #21966 N.S., March 1911

218
Figure 16: Montgomery & Mullin Lumberyard Neighborhood

224
Figure 17: Hadacheck Brickyard Neighborhood

235
xi
Figure 18: 1910 Brickyard District

238
Figure 19: Recommended Industrial Districts, March 1911

250
Figure 20: “Big Transplanting Job to Be Done Here”

258
Figure 21: Industrial Districts, October 1921 280

xii
Abstract

In this dissertation I examine how civic actors defined public welfare and
police powers by developing a specific land use regulatory regime at a particular
place and time—Los Angeles from 1880 to 1915. It is a story about conflicts over
land uses and long-established regulatory responses such as fire limits, building
codes and single-purpose districting. It goes beyond familiar accounts however to
uncover the particularity of local response, how individuals and civic organizations
instigated a process of increasingly precise ordinance-writing directed towards
particular ethnic groups and industries. The result was a series of regulations that by
1909 divided the entire city into residence and industrial districts, and by 1913 had
survived court challenge. The city council used this legal imprimatur both to address
continuing land use conflicts surrounding existing development and to attract and
direct future growth.
Regulations to control land uses were created as part of a fundamental
purpose of local government—to maintain and enhance public welfare through state-
granted municipal police powers for the general benefit of the entire community. I
contend that the roots of United States municipal land use regulation lie deep within
the country's urban and legal histories, within ideas about order and disorder, law,
property and the balance of individual and community rights. In the United States
these are manifest in a legal code, with court oversight when regulations are
challenged as going too far. The regulation of land use represents a contested
meeting point in the negotiation between private property interests and individual
xiii
rights on the one hand, and community interests and shared public welfare
responsibilities on the other.
1
Chapter 1

Beyond Boisterous Roosters and Carpet Beaters: Municipal Regulation
of Land Use in Los Angeles

Introduction
In 1930, the New York Times published an article on municipal progress
entitled "Cities Then and Now." It was based on Edward M. Bassett's contribution to
the twenty-first anniversary issue of The American City, the preeminent magazine for
planners and city administrators devoted to reporting on the development and
improvement of cities through systematic and progressive methods. According to
Seymour Toll, if anyone could be considered the father of American zoning, it would
be Bassett. Past president of the National Conference of City Planning, Bassett
looked back at what he termed the progress of zoning legislation in the United States
since the inaugural year of the magazine's publication in 1909 when, as he termed it,
the "first glimmerings" of zoning had appeared.
1

In that year, he wrote, the United States Supreme Court confirmed the
authority of Boston's municipal police powers in creating differential height districts
in the important ruling in Welch v. Swasey (1909). Later that same year, Los Angeles
applied its own police powers in a series of regulations dividing the entire city into
industrial or residence districts, and used these to demand the ouster of various
businesses from residence districts. The city then successfully defended its practice
in the second of the two landmark Supreme Court cases supporting municipal police
powers that Bassett cited, Hadacheck v. Sebastian (1915).
2

2
It is perhaps unsurprising that Edward Bassett would privilege several court
cases, and these particular cases, as instrumental in the development of zoning in the
United States. After all, Bassett had been charged with the foundational legal
research in the years preceding New York City’s adoption of comprehensive zoning
regulations in 1916. Few knew better than Bassett the history of court cases
involving land use regulations in the United States and the importance of convincing
the courts of the constitutionality of these local regulations.
3

Bassett’s association of “progress” with "zoning legislation" would also have
been recognizable to early twentieth-century readers, exposed for decades to the
optimism of scientific discovery, to connote a steady movement in only one
direction, towards the progressive betterment and even perfection of society. "No one
[at the time] sensed the fact that these decisions betokened a new science [of
zoning]." Bassett meant that these court decisions, and the enforcement of the
municipal regulations that provoked the original suits, were not understood at the
time as the significant breakthroughs in urban regulation and order that he believed
they were—breakthroughs on a path towards what he viewed as the improvement
and perfectibility of city organization, and cities themselves, through land use
districting.
4

Edward Bassett was perhaps attempting to create a legitimizing history for
zoning in the popular media, backdating to concrete and important legal events in
1909 those "first glimmerings" of the country's first comprehensive zoning regulation
of 1916. However, his analysis was misleading because his “history” of land use
3
regulation by the state was not backdated far enough and thus, perhaps inadvertently,
initiated the chorus of voices that has mischaracterized governmental land use
regulation as a twentieth-century phenomenon in the United States.

[T]he battle for city planning will have to be largely fought out
in the courts
— Alfred Bettman
5

A New Narrative
In this dissertation, I argue that contrary to Bassett's assertion, the twentieth-
century form of zoning was but the most recent manifestation of what University of
Chicago legal scholar Ernst Freund termed the shifting police power function of
government to provide for the public welfare. The following chapters will show how
the local perception of public welfare and police powers within a state and national
legal context led to the development of a land use regulatory regime in a particular
place—Los Angeles—through the auspices of a great variety of civic actors. I further
contend that the roots of United States municipal land use regulation lie deep within
the country's urban and legal histories, within ideas about order and disorder, law,
property and the balance of individual and community rights.
6

I show that land use regulatory controls in the United States are embedded in
long-held beliefs about order and appropriate property use that are manifested within
the legal code, with court oversight when regulations are challenged as going too far.
Secondly, land use regulations administered by local governments represent a
contested meeting point in the negotiation between private property interests and
4
individual rights on the one hand, and community interests and shared public welfare
responsibilities on the other. Finally, regulations to control land uses were created as
part of a fundamental purpose of local government—to maintain and enhance public
welfare through state-granted municipal police powers for the general benefit of the
entire community.
7

This dissertation investigates the regulatory history of Los Angeles—a city
more popularly known for ad hoc design and development than for thoughtful
planning for future conditions. It tells a familiar story, as common today as it was a
century and more ago, about land use conflicts over particular land uses, noxious
industrial facility siting and other nuisances (whether per se, thought to be in the
“wrong” location, or existing through negligence), about the appropriate objectives
for and means to attain economic growth. The dissertation also recounts the
particularity of response in Los Angeles, generated by individuals and civic
organizations through a city council process of increasingly precise and judicially-
sound ordinance writing, and directed towards particular ethnic groups and
industries.
8

The temporal focus begins with the 1880s. Some thirty years after Los
Angeles was incorporated as an American city, the completion of a second railroad
connection with the eastern portion of the country inaugurated a flood of new arrivals
and associated real estate development, and strained the abilities of the city to cope
with growth. The narrative ends in 1915, when annexation of the vast San Fernando
Valley ushered in new spatial and political dynamics (see Figure 1 for pertinent
5
boundaries). Also in this year, as mentioned above, the Supreme Court saw no reason
to overturn the state court’s 1913 verdict in Hadacheck upholding the city’s
districting ordinances. The city council used this legal imprimatur thereafter to
address the increasing land use problems and conflicts of existing development with
a progressively more complex districting scheme that sought to direct future
development.
Local governments nationwide used their police powers in attempts to quell
disorderly growth as urbanization and industrialization intensified in the three or four
decades prior to the 1916 New York City zoning regulation. To solve the problems
created by this growth, they employed long-established regulatory tools such as fire
limits, building codes and single-purpose districting. Local regulations that limited
particular uses and created variations of districting proliferated in cities across the
country before 1916 as most cities encountered similar problems of escalating
density and use conflicts.
9

How public welfare is defined locally and how these police powers are
manifested to address particular local land use conditions and situations is a process
that varies from place to place. Also variable are individual land users' abilities and
desires to participate in this process, to promote particular land use patterns and to
raise constitutional objections when regulations seem to infringe on their property
rights.
10

6
Figure 1
Boundaries of Los Angeles prior to 1915
(compared to present day boundaries, including extent
of LA in 1850 and approximate location of Plaza)
0 10 miles
San Fernando Valley
Venice
San Pedro
and Wilmington
Hollywood
Plaza
Boundary of LA upon incorporation in 1850
(also extent of 1781 Spanish pueblo land grant)
Extent of LA before 1915 annexation
of San Fernando Valley
Current boundaries of LA
Long Beach
Los Angeles River

7
Regulatory change and the creation of legal precedent in the United States is
generally incremental and primarily local. Zoning grew out of these innumerable
local efforts to maintain order, and safeguard and enhance public welfare—
components of the fundamental police powers with which we have invested our
governments. In reality, the creation of land use regulations in the United States has
occurred since the colonial period, tested each step of the way in various court
jurisdictions. Contrary to Bassett’s assertion, this dissertation will show that the
“first glimmerings” of zoning in Los Angeles appeared decades before 1909, as it
had in other cities, and that the particular form of zoning activity grew from the
particularity of local circumstances.
11

The analysis portrays this process as one of broad, sometimes uncoordinated,
other times deliberate, citizen involvement that existed at the individual,
neighborhood and organizational levels. As Deverell, Sitton and Sonnenshein show
for later periods, and Dan Johnson describes in terms of environmental concerns at
the turn of the last century, grassroots political activism by individuals and
community-based groups has had a long and vibrant tradition in Los Angeles. Further
evidence of this tradition will be shown in the narratives of this dissertation, when
concern about changing land uses specifically and the changes wrought by growth in
general provoked various responses from land owners and users. Rapid population
and industrial growth from the 1880s onward raised administrative, environmental
and quality of life issues for citizens and their city government alike. A city council
that responded quickly to particular petitioner demands to quell land use conflicts
8
with increasing numbers of restrictive ordinances both encouraged continued broad,
democratic participation and struggled to keep up with the mounting individual
pleas, complaints and neighborhood petitions as new conflicts emerged.
12

Some property owners fought back in court, inadvertently helping the city to
refine the scope and hone the wording of the regulations to a point where they were
generally acceptable to the courts, if not all landowners, by the mid-1910s. Business
organizations such as the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce supported the idea of
districting (as zoning was known before the late 1910s) in principle, as long as it
created a constant and congenial climate for their boosterism, housing speculation,
plant expansion and business recruiting efforts, and did not go too far in limiting the
possibilities for industrial growth. The finer-grained portrayal in this dissertation—
with emphasis on individual and collective contributions to local regulatory
change—adds necessary nuance and clarification to the narrow perception of Los
Angeles as a city where real estate developers and big business, wanting to minimize
their own risks in development and investment, steered local government towards
increased municipal regulation of land uses.
13

The analysis in this dissertation also refutes the widely held view that
municipal land use controls are primarily a twentieth-century phenomenon in the
United States that spread nationwide after the adoption of a comprehensive zoning
ordinance in New York City in 1916. This traditional narrative of land use regulation
begins much too late. Urbanized citizens have developed localized sets of laws
pertaining to land use during the entire history of the United States. These laws are
9
part of our basic legal and cultural heritage. They reflected local perceptions of
public welfare as expressed in the evolving needs and desires of (predominantly)
urban residents, as well as attitudes towards order and disorder. For example, city
governments have long-regulated building construction materials and methods as
well as the storage of certain materials in commercial centers. They have declared
particular uses or activities to be public nuisances and required them to be abated.
Cities have attempted to regulate various sites of “disorderly behavior” such as
saloons and houses of prostitution. And they have acted positively to promote one
use over others, privileging community benefits over individual property rights.
14

Protests against regulation, both today and historically, are often couched in
individual and private property rights language. When the city council debated
adoption of its first residence districting ordinance in 1904, after much public protest
about various encroaching businesses, the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper
published an editorial in vehement opposition to what it deemed would be a gross
violation of individual property rights. The solution to land use conflicts could be
had, it added, through private interventions such as deed restrictions. Language today
is not much different, with the oft-added argument that government land use
regulation is a recent, twentieth-century imposition. Protestors yearn for a return to a
regulation-free golden past of sacrosanct, universally-understood private property
rights that never in fact existed and is historically incorrect.
15

To the contrary, generations of Americans have clashed over private property,
sometimes in fundamental ways. And the institution has survived and come
10
out the better for it. Social conflict has been the norm, with periods of calm
punctuated by flare-ups of sharp dispute.
16

Eric Freyfogle suggests that keeping this in mind during the most recent
“flare-up” of debate over eminent domain and growth plans (and more generally,
questions over the appropriate level of land use regulation that have resulted in a
flurry of recent ballot initiatives and court cases) would encourage a recasting of the
debate toward the essential question of the “proper contemporary balance” between
individual and community rights in property, and what actions better serve the public
welfare without damaging the institution of private property in the United States. A
more nuanced historical understanding of the search for an effective balance between
individual and community property rights regarding land use regulation—developed
through the agency of multiple and varied actors, at the local level both within and
without government, and based on long-standing traditions of regulatory property
controls—might support more informed decisions about improving, altering or
replacing current regulation.
17

Moreover, the almost total focus on the zoning efforts of New York City—
admittedly trail blazing in comprehensiveness—that has dominated much of the
planning literature causes historians to overlook or certainly minimize the
contemporaneous efforts and innovations taking place in other cities across the
country. From New York and other East Coast cities, across the country to the
Pacific, as well as in every city in between, daily life was affected by industrial
restructuring—the growth of corporate industry with branch plants and centralized
11
control, intensified land use and new worker-manager relationships—with great
impacts on the economy, as well as transport and communications technology
innovations, increases in population, and advances in natural and medical science
knowledge. Intensifying urban land uses caused increased conflicts that traditional
tools and remedies (central business district fire limits, private nuisance suits and
single-purpose districts, for example) were not equipped to handle. All local
governments would have struggled to respond to these pressures, and to the concerns
of their constituents, in varying degrees. At the heart of this dissertation is the city
council of Los Angeles, how it reacted to these changes and stresses, and how it
attempted to balance the needs of very vocal individual landowners and users with
those of their neighbors and the city as a whole. While all cities confronted the same
problems, however, Los Angeles alone worked towards solutions that included
protections for industrial as well as residential uses.
18

In the remainder of this first chapter, I will present the traditional narrative of
land use regulatory history, and then describe the major themes of order (and
disorder), law and property, public welfare (that is, the balance of community and
individual rights) and the police power in more detail. Included also is essential
background on land uses and regulation in Los Angeles prior to 1850 (before the
introduction of American law and government), and the nature of post-statehood
population shifts and growth pressures that impacted the economy of Los Angeles. In
the three chapters that follow, I then divide what is a complex flow of local events
from the 1880s through 1915 into discrete and meaningful periods that illustrate a
12
halting process of greater and more systematic municipal oversight over land uses. In
conclusion, we will see that this longer history of land use regulation as illustrated by
Los Angeles begins to more adequately account for the deep roots of land use
regulation within United States property history and places that history more
correctly within the realm of public welfare and the traditional police powers of local
government. The cumulative effect of the numerous individual petitions, testimonies,
ordinances, nuisance suits and judgments created a momentum to search for more
effective land use regulatory strategies. This momentum was aided by a climate of
growth and local boosterism, municipal government reform, activist civic
organizations as well as a vibrant real estate sector.

One of the great questions which will press for an early
solution will be whether American cities should . . . divide the
city into zones, as some European cities now do, and limit the
buildings in each zone to certain uses, with separate
restrictions for each zone.
— Frederick L. Ford
19

The Received Wisdom
Zoning has been the method most often mentioned as key to improving the
physical layout, public health and efficient working of the city. Since the so-called
"birth" of the city planning profession, dating from the First National City Planning
Conference held in Washington DC in 1909, land use zoning has been the
fundamental legal, regulatory and planning tool employed in the United States.
20

13
This almost nationwide-wide technique is of crucial importance as it shapes
the built environment of cities and can determine uses for generations. It allows
municipalities to establish zones under state-devolved local police powers to
promote public health, safety, morals and the general welfare of the people living and
working within a community. More simply, it is the practice of dividing a
municipality "into districts for the purpose of regulating the use of private land." A
master plan often sets guidelines for each district covered by a zoning ordinance for
the height and bulk of structures, lot coverage, and the particular use of property and
buildings. Its purpose is to counteract any uses that would decrease the enjoyment of
private and public property that is the right of each city resident and all residents
collectively. These enjoyments primarily revolve around the preservation of the
character and value of established neighborhoods, the creation of orderly new
communities and the prevention of offensive uses in whatever form they might
occur.
21

According to a linear history, the practice of zoning—or districting as it was
originally known—was first nationally promoted at the inaugural city planning
conference in 1909 as a rational, Progressive Era solution to what many attendees
saw as an increasingly spatially- and socially-disordered urban environment. A
number of speakers at the conference discussed the advantages of adopting a more
extensive and uniform zone system of districting that would protect residence areas
and allow industry to freely and efficiently develop in others. Some pointed out that
Germany had already achieved great success with innovative urban zone systems.
22

14
Frederick L. Ford, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Lawrence Veiller, Alfred Bettman
and others suggested that the problem of disorderly growth was one of the "great
questions" facing American cities. These and other speakers continued to espouse the
zone system at talks around the country, in journal and newspaper articles, and at
subsequent annual planning conferences.
23

With the support of real estate, insurance and development interests, New
York City attempted to answer that “great question” in 1916 with a comprehensive
ordinance that regulated use, bulk and height of structures on private property. This
comprehensive ordinance eventually became a model for other cities. The federal
Commerce Department's Advisory Committee on City Planning under Herbert
Hoover promoted city planning and zoning in the early 1920s and published a
uniform zoning template in 1926, all targeted to help protect residential areas and
encourage real estate development. That same year, ten years after New York City
implemented its zone plan, the Supreme Court ruled in Euclid v. Ambler Realty
(1926) that a zoning plan was an appropriate and constitutional use of a city's police
powers.
24

The "great question" of zone systems, land use regulation and judicial
response in the United States was settled for much of the rest of the century by that
decision; the validity of zoning ordinances adopted in cities and towns all across the
country was confirmed. Authors such as S. J. Makielski Jr. and Seymour Toll have
described the impact of financial and real estate markets in supporting this
movement. Individual business and property owners, and real estate developers
15
generally favored the spread of zoning, especially as they found ways to exploit their
own interests. No serious legal challenges were heard at the federal level until the
1970s when the issues surrounding emergent historic preservation and environmental
protection movements provoked legal challenges. These challenges have continued
amid intensified concerns about regulatory impacts on property rights.
25

Marc Weiss, in particular, has made the case in his influential book that
community builders—large-scale land developers—were the primary agents in
promoting the spread of land use regulation across the country, starting after the mid-
1910s. The changes occurring in the residential real estate development sector of
more extensive tracts, new industrial construction methods, recognition of the
limitations of private deed restrictions, larger investments and thus increased risk, all
inspired the real estate, financial and construction sectors to lobby for increased
public land use controls to serve their own interests. While Weiss persuasively
argues his view, this narrative captures only one of the actors involved in promoting
greater, more uniform laws at a particular time of tremendous growth in housing
production and changes in industrial America that was ripe for greater federal
government intervention. The wide acceptance of Weiss's narrative since its
publication has served to solidify the notion of land use regulation as a recent
phenomenon, devolved from the actions of a small, influential group and imposed on
the larger polity.
26

This conventional grand narrative of land use regulation in the United States,
chronicling major actors and national achievements during the twentieth century, has
16
endured despite the critical changes of historical interpretation that have occurred in
other areas of urban, urban planning and legal history over the past half century. It is
not a complete story as no single narrative, even a widely disseminated one, can be a
final account, and perhaps warrants extra skepticism in proportion to the wide
dispersal and acceptance. Perceptions of events, institutions and processes change
over time as new interpretations gain favor and new concerns become apparent, as
new records come to light or known records are re-examined, as new analysts
examine the records and bring fresh insights from alternative perspectives and new
contexts that have not previously been tested.
27

For example, a number of cities across the country had passed zoning-type
ordinances previous to New York City's in 1916, some upheld by the courts when
challenged, others not. The most successful of these in surviving court challenge and
thus setting a precedent for future zoning initiatives (to wit, those in New York City)
were the ordinances that divided the entire city of Los Angeles into residence and
industrial districts by 1909. These Los Angeles innovations do receive brief mention
in zoning histories, in part because of the court rulings. Unexamined until now is the
background of these cases as well as the impact they had on further local regulatory
activity.
28

More recent examinations of the history and effects of zoning have brought to
light other less salutary effects. In 1973, Kenneth Jackson wrote that zoning resulted
in keeping "poor people and obnoxious industries out of affluent areas" through such
elements as minimum lot sizes and restrictions on multi-family housing. Zoning
17
"reinforce[s] long-standing patterns and practices of racial discrimination and
segregation" while protecting the spatial interests of those in power, writes Yale
Rabin. June Manning Thomas and Marsha Ritzdorf have explored similar themes.
The environmental [in]justice literature explores the convergence of polluting-
industry facility siting; economically-based, racialized patterns of housing; and
environmental regulations to expose continuing unfair practices and limited choices.
All of these effects and practices can be seen in early districting in Los Angeles.
These and other critical examinations of the effects of zoning and planning on
particular communities compel a re-examination of the origination of land use
regulations and bring to light a more nuanced—and in the case of this dissertation,
additionally a more locally-nuanced—narrative that adds depth and richness, and
better mirrors the messiness, the reality, of engaged social and political life in United
States cities at the turn of the last century.
29

[T]he ultimate purpose of city planning is . . . to direct the
physical development of the city by every means of control
within the power of the municipality in such a manner that the
ordinary citizen will be able to live and labor under conditions
as favorable to health, happiness, and productive efficiency as
his means will permit.
— Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.
30

The Foundations of Land Use Regulation

Urban Order, Law and Property, Nuisance: The notion that people who
gather in cities should be able, as Frederick Olmsted declared at the First National
City Planning Conference in Washington DC in 1909, "to live and labor under
18
conditions . . . favorable to health, happiness, and productive efficiency" is both an
ancient and contemporary one. Cities throughout history have attracted inhabitants
who desired to gain the numerous benefits that accrue to living in close proximity to
many other like-minded individuals: the safety provided by a shared ability to
cooperate and protect themselves, increased economic activity and prospects of
larger markets, access to a greater variety of associations and institutions that a more
complex society can provide, as well as prospects for greater material wealth. If large
numbers of people are to live together within cities, they must find ways to
administer and maintain social and spatial order. City planning, with a strong dose of
land use districting, was the answer, in Olmsted's thinking.
31

More individuals pursuing their own ends cheek-by-jowl in a finite
geographic space would necessarily challenge the creation of social controls, as well
as increase the risk and actual occurrence of conflict. How to lessen conflict? How to
mediate it? Most importantly, how to create and maintain social order over time?
People living in a society cooperate to create both informal and formal order within a
system of norms and rules. According to Robert Ellickson, these norms are enforced
through sanctions to encourage or require compliance. Ordinary behavior (that
behavior that meets the minimum standards of normalcy) is required, pro-social
behaviors are often encouraged, while anti-social behaviors are discouraged or
prohibited, and punished. Suttles describes this range as a continuum that ranges
from benign socialization through coercion. The sources of these rules, according to
Ellickson, are 1) individuals who, through personal ethics, exercise self-control and
19
informally contract with one another; 2) social forces that establish norms and exert
informal controls more broadly within societal groups; 3) non-governmental
organizations that enforce their own rules, and 4) governments that pass laws and
enforce them through the institution of a state-sanctioned legal system. As we shall
see in this dissertation that focuses on local government in Los Angeles, these
sources of rules are interlinked and interdependent, one influencing another in turn,
with varied degrees of access and power available to individuals and groups.
32

Eric Monkonnen qualifies cities as naturally disorderly because of the
relatively intense use of space by such a great variety of people, while Claude Fischer
compares cities to rural places, saying cities are naturally more disorderly but that
controls are better evolved there. In cities, he continues, "shared understandings are
weak, expectations unclear, and the social process can easily . . . collapse . . .
Behavioral expectations are not shared." Among the reasons that Fischer states that
cities do not fall into a Hobbesian state of chaos given such weak shared
understandings are efforts to maintain order on an individual level (such as wariness,
stereotyping and public etiquette) and on the community level, through struggles to
preserve homogeneity, and through avoidance, dominance and negotiation. These
efforts prevent disorder. "Things do not fall apart [entirely], they just limp along"
until urban society can adjust the controls. Carl Smith describes responses to
disorderly events and situations in Chicago (the fire of 1871, the Haymarket
Bombing and unrest at the workers' town of Pullman). "[D]isorder became part of the
definition of urban life" in the latter nineteenth century, he said; the consideration of
20
which was also a means of "improving the established order, and [asking] related
questions of what the city and the nation were and what they should be." Cities came
to be viewed as the "disorderly embodiment of instability, growth and change."
Furthermore, the particular definition of disorder was employed to justify local
regulation.
33

Visual signs of disorder, in particular, in the environment "reflect powerfully
on our inferences about urban communities," according to Sampson and
Raudenbush. They continue:
[D]isorder triggers attributions and predictions in the minds of insiders and
outsiders alike. It changes the calculus of prospective homebuyers, real estate
agents, insurance agents, and investors, and shapes the perceptions of
residents who might be considering moving. Evidence of disorder also gives a
running account of the effectiveness of residents seeking neighborhood
improvement, and that record may encourage or discourage future activism.
34

Visual signs could be found in the rapid urban population growth as well as the many
economic, technological, social and cultural changes occurring in growing cities that
transformed the daily life and social relations of urban residents. While rapid growth
and an expanding economy signaled prosperity and greater wealth to some, costs
were incurred from the point of view of many city inhabitants. Among the detriments
were the greater and greater numbers of newcomers who crowded into
neighborhoods, placed stress on public resources, brought rural or unfamiliar
customs and mores, sometimes spoke different languages, perhaps did not
understand local laws, and thus created unease and nervousness in longer-term
inhabitants. Anxieties about these changes, fears of what Foucault termed the "dark
21
places in the city" where vice, crime and disease could be concealed, contributed to
demands for urban administrations to do something about those places.
35

That "something" led to increasing regulation to exert controls in various
aspects of urban life. Spatial use regulation on the local level was one demonstration
of social control activity. In Los Angeles and other North American cities, that
process required navigating a complex contextual field that included the changing
legal traditions of the late nineteenth century, concerns about as well as the definition
of the public welfare, and the authority of government within the police power.
Law is the primary means that our society employs to institutionalize order:
through dynamic rules, both written and unwritten, in both civil and criminal
spheres. The law is created, built up, amended and replaced through the agency of a
great many individuals, institutions and forces (often, and perhaps for the most part,
uncredited). Some laws derive from custom and general practice (such as the
Common Law); others are codified by legislated regulation. To be accepted and
effective, several attributes are necessary, according to anthropologist Leopold
Pospíšil. Law must be administered by an accepted and legitimate authority—in the
present case, the Los Angeles municipal government. It must be perceived to apply
universally and with impartiality. And there needs to be a corrective means of
redress, sanctions that bring about a renewed sense of balance and harmony in the
relations between individuals with each other and their community. In the period
examined by this dissertation, we shall see how one set of local regulations was
tweaked through practice and application, rewritten to apply more and more
22
generally to all land within the city and all uses, and over time and after vetting in the
court system, gained greater if not universal acceptance.
36

Much of United States law dealing with property and land use has deep roots
in English common law and custom that developed prior to urbanization and
industrialization. The colonists in pre-Revolutionary British North America set up
local governing systems organized with common law and chartered regulatory
schemes on the model of the English municipalities (by definition, self-governing
towns) with which they were most familiar. The new federal government of the
United States also drew much of its legal foundation, structure and organization from
this principal influence. Courts necessarily turned to English statutes and the
decisions of English courts of law in crafting juridical opinions applicable to disputes
in the United States until sufficient domestic precedent was established, illustrating
the propinquity of English and United States legal traditions and the influence of
English law and tradition on the young American legal system.
37

Nineteenth-century courts gradually became more actively involved in social
control amid changing domestic legal doctrines, a move that reflected the concerns
of the larger society. Horwitz describes three phases in the evolution of court
administration of property law, moving from maximum individual liberty in the early
1800s in using what was primarily agricultural property to one based on reciprocal
rights and duties more in keeping with the mid-nineteenth century urbanizing
world—with balance maintained by benevolent and objective court decisions.
Finally, in the third stage, by the late nineteenth century, courts backed away from
23
many restraints on harmful land use activities—“any productive activity was
reasonable regardless of the harm that results.” Freyfogle concurs, stating, “Property
law displayed a distinct favoritism toward development and intensive land uses, in
line, largely, with American culture generally” and mirroring the shift from an
agrarian to an urban society.
38

By the early 1900s, as Willrich describes this, there was a general shift in
thinking about social responsibility and individual liberty where society and all the “
. . . needs, duties, risks” within the “realm of everyday collective life” took on greater
significance. What to do about the rapidly expanding, industrializing cities with tens
and hundreds of thousands of new workers from rural America and overseas to be
assimilated? What to do:
. . . about the fragile fabric of social life among the common lot: the home,
life, sexuality, moral habits, health, and economic security of urban wage
earners and their families? The question of how this endangered and
dangerous terrain ought to be governed put enormous pressure on liberal
ideology, law, and governing institutions at every level of the polity.
39

Courts increasingly accepted that “purposeful state intervention” (as in greater
reliance on a broadening body of local statutory law) was an acceptable legal course
for government to follow, where laws no longer served primarily to mediate between
the individual and government but rather conditioned the conduct of the individual
within society. The courts too played their part on this social conditioning stage,
moving away from a more theoretical stance in law administration towards what
Roscoe Pound described in 1909 as “law in action”—the practical application of the
law in the real world in ways of benefit to society.
40

24
While society, governments and the court system were grappling with
modern societal changes and how to respond, much of the foundation of property law
was mired in traditional powers of nuisance law granted to towns and cities for
centuries; for example, nuisances in English towns were regulated during the time of
Richard II, while the power to control the slaughter of animals within walled towns
can be found in the statutes of Henry VII. The common law of nuisances deals with
violations of common interests after they occur, such as the already-operating factory
that spews smoke throughout the neighborhood. Neighbors can demand the
abatement of a nuisance that inhibits their quiet enjoyment of home and land. A
police agency or court then makes a judgment in the particular case as to whether or
not a nuisance exists and damage has been inflicted. Municipal corporations also
have the right and responsibility under the police power to adopt such regulations as
will limit in advance those uses and occupations that either are nuisances per se or
tend to become nuisances in certain situations and conditions.
41

The well-known instructional adage, Sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas [use
your own so as not to injure another], often cited in legal articles and court decisions,
embodied, according to William Novak, the "complete and powerful moral and
political philosoph[y]" of property in society and was part of the "common law
blueprint . . . [for] well-regulated governance" in the United States. It implies a basic
understanding that property rights are always contingent on the rights of others.
Anyone who exercised her own rights to the detriment (or lessening) of the rights of
others was subject to government or legal intervention. “Nuisance” is perhaps one of
25
the most vitally important concepts to understanding legal attitudes towards property
and its regulation.
42

Nuisance law is primarily a negative and reactive concept (that is, it is
generally used to stop an activity after the activity injures), does not require a statute
or regulation to exist as a precept and "results from any action, . . . by which any one,
in the pursuit of his own ends and otherwise within his own rights [that is, on his
own property], interferes abnormally and unreasonably with the rights of others."
Olmsted, writing in 1905 as the vice-president of the Department of Nuisances of the
American Civic Association, goes on to explain that exactly what is deemed
abnormal "depends upon standards and circumstances of the period and the
community as interpreted by the courts." In other words, a nuisance use one place is
not necessarily considered a nuisance in another location or at another time.
43

Nuisances can be private (between two land owners) or so large or affecting
so many that they become public. Private nuisances can be mediated or brought to
court where the relative rights of each landowner ideally are balanced before a
decision is rendered. Abating a public nuisance (for example: maintenance of a fire
trap in the center city; factory smoke, fumes or smells that spread over a wide area;
the transmission of contagious disease) is the responsibility of the local governing
body to enforce for the good of the community. This idea was manifested in fire
district ordinances and rudimentary building codes that were common in American
cities throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Courts routinely accepted
the validity of these regulations because they relied on a concept of nuisance
26
abatement and avoidance. American courts also attempted to create a more concrete
structure for land use nuisance decisions by employing a three-tier test: activities
deemed nuisances per se, activities that were inherently lawful but in the wrong
location, and activities in the proper location but performed negligently.
44

Horwitz wrote that where law and land use intersected in the latter nineteenth
century, the legal system sought to “accommodate the tremendous expansion of all
forms of ownership spawned in a dynamic industrial society.” This resulted in widely
differing judicial opinions. In majority opinions, the federal Supreme Court
continued to support the regulation of property use in its purely immediate and
physical sense. Dissenting opinions, however, commencing with the Slaughterhouse
Cases in 1873 and in Munn in 1877, began to show a broadening definition of
property beyond its immediate use value to include also exchange value. The
dissenting thread became the majority in the First Minnesota Rate Case (in 1890),
which accepted that expected earning power and other intangibles (later to include
such items as goodwill, patents and copyrights) also came under the umbrella of
property rights. The Slaughterhouse Cases also marked a watershed in the re-
interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to apply to economic regulation—an
argument often used by property users in Los Angeles and throughout the country in
the following decades in legal arguments against escalating local regulation. These
two threads (the expanding definition of property and the increased rights of
businesses) coincided with the growing court acceptance of expanding local
governmental statutory authority and variable local interpretations of nuisances.
45

27
The Property Rights Question: Central to most if not all conflict over land
use—whether between two owners or between a landowner and a governmental
entity with jurisdiction over the property—is the question of the appropriate balance
between the individual rights of one owner and those of a neighbor, or that of the
owner juxtaposed with those of the larger community (or for that matter, the interests
of the community in how the two owners settle their differences). To begin to answer
these questions, it is necessary to look first at the institution of property in the United
States. That private property has been important to the development and prosperity in
this country seems clear. How and why is less so.
46

The classical Lockean tradition of liberty gained and held through property,
an individually-oriented shield from government interference and coercion, is
perhaps the best-known and most popularly accepted vision of property. Property
pre-dated government in Locke’s proverbial "state of nature" and was there for the
taking in the land-rich American colonies for whoever would work it (a narrow
vision used to justify preempting native American rights to land). This interpretation
would have made sense in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to land-hungry
colonists who would never have had the opportunity to be landowners in England.
The system of fee simple land ownership that developed in the United States allowed
for clear titles and easy exchange. In the twentieth century, scholars in the widely
recognized law and economics subfield—where market rationales have been adopted
as the foundation for most property relations—also privilege these individual wealth-
enhancement and exchange aspects of property.
47

28
Early evidence of this commodity emphasis was apparent during the
Constitutional era, a reflection of the great economic and social changes of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Congressionally-mandated land survey
imposed an arbitrary boundary and registration system on public lands in order to
commodify this resource, divide it into salable pieces, standardize and rationalize
record-keeping and registration, and finally raise money for the public treasury.
Courts too have reflected this view, with decisions from Munn onwards that have
expanded on the primacy of individual rights to the economic value of property. This
well-known and very powerful concept underlies much of the property-as-individual-
right rhetoric and belief, and discounts the validity of any government-imposed
limits on free and unfettered individual use.
48

While the wide-spread belief in the primacy of individual property rights and
property as commodity has given this view “greater credibility and legitimacy in our
political environment,” according to legal scholar Gregory Alexander, in actuality
“[t]here is no single American traditional meaning of property in American legal
thought. Rather, there have been multiple traditions of property throughout our
history.” The classical liberal individualist view has thus obscured other visions and
historical verities, such as the strong ties to English civic republican traditions, the
use of property to promote community over individual interests, as well as legal
history research on the long tradition of state activity in private property interference
and regulation. The broader social purpose of property and its connection to liberty
was a major concern of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and others in
29
formulating our basic federal institutions. Critical legal theorists such as Carol Rose
and Margaret Radin privilege the proper role of property in civil society as arising
from and mediating social relations—“propriety” as Alexander designates it.
Washington State Supreme Court Justice Philip Talmadge cautions that “the lack of
attention . . . to the needs of society and the social responsibilities of property
ownership . . . ” by those who espouse extreme individual property rights beliefs “is
both dangerous and mythical.” Talmadge shows that property cannot be understood
outside of a societal context; owners have responsibility for the communities in
which they live by virtue of their ownership.
49

Recognizing Community— Balancing Rights and Responsibilities in Society:
Locke’s narrative of property was a "politically convenient" story at the time he told
it, and fitting for his time, as Eric Freyfogle explains, but his story of individual
property rights ignores how property actually operates. Important to remember, he
writes, in agreement with Talmadge, is that property is a social institution that does
not exist outside of society. Without a societal context where other people and other
properties are involved, there would be no need for regulations, and no need for
governments to administer them. And thus the community (the local and immediate
manifestation of society) is intensely involved in the relations surrounding property.
Community well-being is tied to how property is used.
50

This is no abstract exercise; the importance of community rights and goals
surrounding property is evident in the colonial foundations of the United States. John
Hart, in responding to what he observed as the recent premise of courts “that colonial
30
legislators regulated land only minimally,” asserts that the “right of landowners to
control and utilize land remained subject to an obligation to further important
community objectives reflected in legislation.” He continued, “the statutes and
ordinances pursuing broad public objectives are so numerous and varied, so widely
distributed, that they cannot be viewed as anomalous.” Land patents (that is, rights to
land) were granted to colonists in exchange for performing certain improvements
(such as clearing land and fencing) that would benefit the community. Land could be
taken away for not doing so. Regulations directed owners towards preferred uses,
and also discouraged underdeveloped or underused land. For example, various mill
acts required flooding of lands and milling operations to benefit the community in
appropriate riparian areas, even when flooding damaged the interests of individual
neighbors. Private lands had to be made available for public use for hunting and
fishing. Colonial governments dictated where dwellings should be placed to “shape
[the] spatial configuration of local communities;” controlled density; and limited
subdivision, heights of structures and building materials—all in the interests of the
community and its betterment. Hart found no constraints on regulating individual
land uses in any of the formal documents of the colonies (the charters or enabling
acts). All the many regulations were promulgated on increasing benefits to society
(the colony community) by directing how property could be used.
51

William Novak, too, questions the “mythical past” of the primacy of
individual rights in American history that Judge Talmadge addressed. Like
Freyfogle, Novak’s goal is to reclaim nineteenth-century American history from the
31
individualistic myths to which it has been relegated and recall its communitarian
concerns. In The People’s Welfare, he examines the nineteenth-century “well-
regulated society” based on a “plethora of bylaws, ordinances, statutes, and common
law restrictions regulating nearly every aspect of early American economy and
society.” Regulations themselves serve a public purpose in restricting individual
activity for the good of the community. The welfare of the community was
paramount in the particular regulations concerning public safety, economy, space,
morals and health.
52

In the late nineteenth century, community welfare was threatened by
environmental changes in cities. Worries about congestion, disease, pollution, as
well as the economic effects of nearby intensely-used property were paramount. The
effects of one property owner’s use of property could have potentially greater
impacts on increasingly large numbers of individuals, and on the community. Taking
action, though, was difficult. Olmsted wrote in 1905 that the “community often
suffers in the aggregate a very great and altogether unreasonable amount of
discomfort and material loss from the selfish action of some of its members before
rousing itself to the point of securing relief.” It was the responsibility then of the
State to guard the welfare of the people, of the community, through regulation.
Olmsted was concerned here with abating nuisances and upholding the “standards of
life normal to the community.”
53

Alfred Bettman wrote in 1914, looking back at the recent past, that the battle
over ordinances that restricted factories from invading residence districts was a battle
32
that was just “the contemporary phase of the constant conflict between the demands,
on the one hand, for the free and untrammeled use of private property, and, on the
other hand, the desire of the community to restrict such use for community benefit.”
Popular sentiment questioned the equitable treatment of all the community members.
“Shouldn’t the rights of a community be superior to the rights of a single unit of that
community?” asked a Baltimore editorial in 1916. “Is every man’s home to run the
daily hazard of being robbed of its value by the unrestrained actions of some
inconsiderate lot-holder?” The newspaper editors were reacting to pressures on
residential development in the city and responded that “the community itself gives
value to property.” If the community did not exist, land would not be so valuable,
which is why city land commanded a higher price than rural land, said the editorial.
The question then was how far could we go to limit an “owner’s freedom of use”?
“Every man who invests in urban property, invests his money in ‘the effects’ of
community influence, not solely in the naked land itself.”
54

Why, then, should the community not have some positive, defensible rights.
Why should restrictions and regulations be howled down as un-American in
their nature when such restrictions and regulations are for the sole purpose of
giving peace, comfort and general protection to the “community” at large?
55

Similar sentiments about contemporary community rights can be heard from
the environmental movement that has raised awareness of the possible consequences
of current development and consumption trends into the future. While this has led to
new types of commodified property, such as the development of a market in tradable
rights to pollute, it also leads to deeper questions of what is a reasonable use, a
33
sustainable use, in light of future needs. The rights of the community of future
owners, both individually and in common, have rarely been given much weight in
property conflicts until recently.
56

Sam Bass Warner wrote that this conflict between individual interests and
rights and community needs has resulted in “today’s disordered, inhumane and
restricted city” where city governments are unable to effectively respond to growth
and its effects. Freyfogle disagrees, observing that conflict is a positive and valuable
aspect of property and regulation. He finds the conflict over what property means and
clashes over how it operates in our modern American society reason for optimism.
“. . . [T]he institution [of property] has survived and come out the better [because of
the debate].”
57

. . . whereby the individuals of the state, like the members of a
well governed family, are bound to conform their general
behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighborhood, and
good manners, and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive
in their respective stations.
— William Blackstone
58

Police Power and Local Government: The fundamental role of government is
to regulate for public health and safety, to maintain peace and generally to provide
for the public welfare. We as a society have conveyed a portion of the social
obligations surrounding property (Blackstone’s “propriety,” that is, the proper
relations among individuals as a result of their ownership of property) to the state to
manage, in the form of the police power: the duty of the state to oversee the welfare
of the community as a whole and the power to enforce restrictions for the greater
34
public good. It is through this authority that the various municipal and state
restrictions on land use have been implemented, from fire districts, to use and
location restrictions. The general application of the police power to land use
regulations through zoning was affirmed nationally in 1926, when the US Supreme
Court granted the appeal of the city of Euclid, Ohio and sustained its local zoning
regulation, and has remained little questioned until the last decades of the twentieth
century. But the basic power and the responsibility of government to control the use
of land had existed and been well-accepted (if never precisely defined) long before
the 1926 Euclid case.
59

The police power is the most comprehensive of government powers—in
Foucault’s ominous view, "the police includes everything"—and perhaps the
vaguest, according to the broadest definition where the precise components and
definitions of the public health, safety and welfare are not permanent but change over
time and vary according to local need in different places.
60

In the United States, police powers derive from the Tenth Amendment, which
reserves to the states all powers not explicitly delegated or prohibited by the US
Constitution, and are constrained by the Fifth Amendment (prohibiting takings
without compensation) and the Fourteenth Amendment (due process). It is then
assigned through state constitutions to local municipalities. California’s original
1849 constitution did not give much independent authority to local government; this
changed after the 1879 constitutional convention when provisions for greater powers
were given to the largest cities, and further devolved with an 1896 amendment that
35
gave cities power over all municipal affairs not explicitly subject to general state
laws.
61

Judge Thomas Cooley considered the proper extent of legislative power in his
influential and oft-reprinted 1868 treatise on its constitutional limitations. Generally
distrustful of the increasing significance of statutory law, he worried about its control
by the few who could then exploit the many, and arbitrary and inequitable
regulations in an era of government expansion (especially when they limited the
activity of business concerns). That said, Cooley accepted the broad scope of the
police power, but within what he viewed as the essentially democratic common law
tradition that would limit any excesses, through the intercession as needed of the
court system. Legal scholar Christopher Tiedeman published the first comprehensive
examination of the police power in 1886. He linked it to public policy and practical
applications within public law, part of a movement away from the then-prevalent
classical legal science that he viewed as remote from everyday life. Ernst Freund, a
founder of the University of Chicago law school and administrative law scholar,
authored a review of the police power within US law up to 1904 that remains
influential today. Freund analyzed judicial decisions in all areas of law to proffer a
comprehensive analysis of the extent of police powers at the turn of the twentieth
century. He defined the police power in terms that have continued meaning and
resonance: “The police power is not a fixed quantity, but the expression of social,
economic, and political conditions. As long as these conditions vary, police power
will continue to be elastic and capable of development.” He described the police
36
power as having two opposing attributes, a positive means of furthering the public
welfare, and a negative power of restraint and compulsion.
62

The broad and relativist definition of the police power that had evolved
through Freund’s time was not universally accepted. Views ranged from outright
opposition to the idea that the community might have superior rights to the
individual, to the cautious and conservative acceptance of the possibility of changing
ideas, sometime in the future. Federal Supreme Court Justice D.J. Brewer
passionately denounced what he viewed as the then-current too expansive
interpretation of police power as plainly destructive to property in an 1891 address to
Yale Law School graduates. He discussed the “spoliation and destruction of private
property through the agency of that undefined and perhaps indefinable power, the
police power of the State.” Judge Brewer was vehement when he offered that
acceptance of municipal police power “ . . . is the refuge of timid justices to escape
the obligations of denouncing a wrong . . . ” The “wrong” of which he spoke
occurred when “private property is sacrificed,” when it was physically destroyed,
when regulation diminished its value, and when its free use was forbidden.
63

In published comments in 1912 on several court cases, another observer
voiced a negative opinion of the current use of the police power as too strongly
biased against the individual. The court “admits there is a gross injustice done to the
individual . . . but that under the police power as now conceived, the state may do
apparent injustice to the individual in order to guarantee the health, safety or general
welfare of the community itself,” according to A.H. Robbins. “The new idea of social
37
justice is playing havoc with the old principle of the sanctity of individual liberty and
rights in property. All such rights, under this modern conception of justice, [are] held
in strict subservience to the superior rights of the whole community.” He continued,
“As the dawn of a new day of ‘social justice’ is flooding the east with its splendor,
the night of everlasting doom is fast settling down on the long and eventful era of the
supremacy of the individual unit in society.”
64

The National Municipal Review, in a 1916 article, described three recent
court decisions decided on the basis of municipal police power—the writer felt the
police power was too broadly defined in all three decisions. The three districting
cases in three cities involved livery stables, smoke nuisances and brickyards (the
Hadacheck brickyard case, described in detail in Chapter 4). In all three cases, the
court ruled that the police powers of the municipalities gave them authority to
regulate these property uses. More representative and appropriate, according to the
author, was a Maryland case where an auto dealer was refused a permit to build a
showroom on his property because it was in a residential district. The court overruled
the permit denial, saying it deprived the dealer of the right to improve his lot just
because the character of his building was different from what surrounded it. The
court interpreted this as an aesthetic concern that was not covered by the police
power authority. But the author did concede that times can change. “What at any
time constitutes a nuisance is a matter of contemporary public opinion. The time may
come when a store in a residence district will be recognized as a nuisance.”
65

38
At the other extreme were those early advocates who realized that this was
the avenue through which districting (or zoning) laws could be enacted and justified
in the courts. Alfred Bettman observed in 1914 that the pendulum had swung from an
emphasis on protecting property and the individual to the then-current concern with
protecting community. Urban life and industrial development required this change. If
planners would but carefully study and report on nuisances, urban ills and conditions,
he suggested, and adopt ordinances based on these scientific observations, then the
courts would more readily accept their public welfare basis. This would not happen
quickly:
. . . [W]hile the police power might not expand as speedily as the impatient
social workers and city planners may desire, it will be found to be capable of
development so as to permit such restriction of the use of private property as
enlightened public opinion deems necessary for the promotion of the safety,
the health, the comfort and the welfare of the community.
66

The congestion and confusion in cities had reached such a state, according to Frank
Backus Williams, that land use regulations had become the “expedient” remedy. He
wrote that absolute individual property rights had never existed in the United States
and the State always had the right and duty to control property use.
67

Bettman’s advice to rely on scientific analysis and empirical studies was a
recommendation that had also resonated with municipal administrators through their
own professional organizations, such as the National Municipal League, for some
years. Urban problems in the age of Darwin could be solved through “science” and
“scientific method.” Ever more professionalized administrators, municipal officials
and citizen-commissioners could investigate problems, collect data and analyze
39
issues—results would show the correct and rational path to solve problems. Theories
of evolution indicated that change and progress were not only possible but also part
of the optimistic natural order of “growth and collective improvement,” as Robert
Wiebe described it. Scientific efficiency and standardization would not only increase
positive outcomes, they would help to “purify” government, ridding it of the vice and
corruption of machine politics and special interests. It was within this new municipal
system of reform and improvement that the deep-rooted foundation of government
action—the police power—could be more aggressively applied by more-autonomous
city governments against the increasingly visible urban disorder and change of the
early twentieth century. Local governments by the early 1900s were primed to create
progressively more pro-active and restrictive laws, backed up by courts sympathetic
to state intervention and superior local knowledge.
68

Setting the Scene: Land Use and Regulation in Los Angeles before the Annexation of
California to the United States
The history of the regulation of land uses in Los Angeles commences with a
succession of peoples, settlement patterns, national jurisdictions and legal traditions,
all before the imposition of United States law and tradition in the mid-nineteenth
century. These earlier land usage patterns and the relative permanency of the built
environment have impacted decisions about then-current and future land uses. While
the implementation of the American legal system, commencing in 1848, has largely
prevailed over (and at times obliterated) previous systems, this next section
40
acknowledges the land that now makes up the city of Los Angeles as a palimpsest of
previous decisions, customs, governments and property regimes. There are three
major successive groups of peoples, traditions and national governments who
contributed to this pre-United States narrative.
Native Californians before the Spanish Entrada: First, as Carey McWilliams
writes, “. . . the dead hand of the Indian is everywhere upon the land" and these first
settlers have had ". . . a profound influence on the development of Southern
California." When the Spanish soldiers and Franciscan missionaries journeyed
northward to expand European settlement, spread Catholicism along the Pacific
Coast into Alta California in the late 1700s and to assert the two-hundred-year-old
territorial claim of the faraway Spanish king, the land upon which they established
their many missions, presidios and pueblos was hardly terra nullius. Numerous
indigenous tribal groups were distributed throughout Alta California. The ancestors
of the Los Angeles-area Tong-va (known as Gabriellino to the Spaniards, in
reference to the San Gabriel Mission) and the other Native Americans in Alta
California had been in residence for upwards of ten thousand years, with well-
established territories, co-existence patterns and self-governing organizational
structures. These Native Americans who inhabited the area the longest can be
credited with the original choice of a site for the future city of Los Angeles.
69

Tenure or "land ownership" of these hunting and gathering places was
recognized as long as occupancy continued, in what Carol Rose calls a "norm-based
property regime" of informally understood yet efficient customs. It existed as long as
41
use was maintained, devolving to the group or village as a whole rather than to
individuals. Any separation of land uses that occurred within and surrounding Tong-
va settlements in Southern California occurred through customary use and without
the regulatory structure with which we are now familiar; a formal and more complex
regulatory structure was unnecessary. Simply put, basic requirements for the spatial
organization of uses within a settlement would have revolved around a rudimentary
(that is, unscientific) understanding of a healthy living environment—what we today
term public health concerns—and would have developed through centuries of trial
and error. These requirements could conceivably have included proximity to potable
water and adequate food supplies, and isolation from unhealthy, unsavory or profane
land use practices that could damage those resources, such as refuse accumulation,
butchering and burials.
70

Spanish Settlement: When the Spanish decided in 1781 on a location for their
civic outpost near the San Gabriel Mission in Southern California, they followed the
lead of the local Tong-va and selected a spot on the coastal plain near the confluence
of the Los Angeles and Arroyo Seco Rivers, where water and land for cultivation
were abundant. The four square leagues of the Spanish colonists' pueblo were either
adjacent to or completely enveloped the existing Tong-va settlement of Yangna.
71

Castilian law governed the operations of settlements in the Spanish New
World. This was more customary than codified law, though both systems coexisted
(similar to English common and statutory law). Ownership of the lands of Alta
California remained with the Spanish king, in keeping with long-standing Spanish
42
traditions, while use rights were granted to the various settlers. The Spanish and
Mestizo colonizers would have been quite comfortable with this Castilian-based
tradition of crown property ownership accompanied by common use rights, a long-
established system back in Spain. Exported to the New World in the sixteenth
century, it then spread throughout Spanish-claimed lands through at least the
eighteenth century. The king commonly made land grants to municipalities for the
benefit and use of their inhabitants (while retaining crown ownership in all
remaining property). Use rights to most lands were held communally; decisions on
the particulars were determined locally and based on long-standing Castilian custom.
This is precisely the arrangement used in the creation of the California pueblos,
missions and presidios. Some lands in each settlement were set aside for individual
use, with an implicit understanding of the stability of that use right through centuries
of prior experience in Spain; the remainder of the lands, as in the frequent municipal
grants in Castile, were intended for common use and benefit.
72

The physical layout of this new Spanish settlement, El Pueblo de Nuestra
Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciúncula, was calculated, as were all
Spanish New World colonial settlements, according to the strictures of the Laws of
the Indies. This late sixteenth-century document of the Spanish royal court drew
from classical city design antecedents and Castilian communitarian land use
traditions— as well as New World pre-Colombian street grid and plaza urban
design—to direct the layout and land use of Spanish colonies in a functional and
uniform manner. The central plaza of Los Angeles was laid out in the approximate
43
center of the twenty-seven square miles of the pueblo; the corners of the plaza
reached towards the four cardinal direction points to funnel the prevailing breezes
through the settlement, as specified by the Laws. Surrounding streets were thus laid
out following this northeast orientation of the plaza—an orientation that continued to
influence the direction of streets once the pueblo expanded beyond the immediate
plaza area. Land surrounding the central plaza was granted to the small group of
original pobladores, or colonists, and their families as solares (residential sites).
Twenty-nine dwellings were completed as well as necessary public buildings for the
small, slow-growing community. Outside the formally created settlement, scattered
permits for cattle grazing were granted.
73

The Spanish settlers, although from a different culture, approached land usage
similarly to the Native Americans they displaced during their forty years of
sovereignty of Los Angeles. The colonies in Alta California reflected the existing
domestic agrarian and pastoral economic organization of the Spanish homeland.
This, as well as the small and dispersed settlements, made complex or codified land
use regulations unnecessary. The interests of all were generally (or ideally)
considered in conflicts over boundaries and use of lands. The Laws of the Indies are
mostly silent on particular land use separation issues beyond the loose grouping of a
residential and civic core surrounded by farming. Mentioned only is the location of
hospitals for infectious diseases (downwind) and the site of businesses producing
“filth”—animal slaughtering and tanning—required to be carried out distant from the
settled parts of the pueblo and down river from irrigation and drinking supplies.
74

44
La Ciudad de Los Angeles in an Independent Mexico: The small settlement
changed little after independence from Spain was realized in 1821 and over the
intervening twenty-five years until American annexation. Much of the regional
population was dispersed across the many ranchos of varying size granted first by
petition from the Spanish governor and later by the Mexican government to
numerous claimants. Officially reclassified as a ciudad (city) when it became the
territorial capital in 1835, Los Angeles eventually grew to about sixteen hundred
Spaniards, Mexicans, Mestizos, US citizens—many of whom converted to
Catholicism, married local women and gained Mexican citizenship, thus qualifying
for land grants—and other settlers. Pastoral and agricultural land uses predominated
as the Mexican national government adopted laws to promote both increased
immigration (in 1824) and land grants (1828). The local ayuntamiento (city council),
headed by an alcalde who had authority over both administrative and judicial
concerns, administered these policies at the local level.
75

Within the boundaries of the original pueblo, land uses remained essentially
the same as they had in Spanish times: residential and small-scale agricultural.
Growth occurred adjacent to the core plaza area as the former pueblo became
relatively denser, consisting of public buildings, public houses, trading stores and
other commercial structures, surrounded by adobe residences. Development also
spread along the main routes south towards San Pedro and the primitive harbor, and
northeast, along the route to the former mission lands of San Gabriel. Wine
production flourished on the agricultural lands between the settlement and the Los
45
Angeles River. Little domestic industry had been established thus far; the scale of
any existing production would also have been quite small. Outlying rancho lands,
carved up into numerous private land grants, were used for cattle grazing,
slaughtering, and hide and by-product export production—the one existing industry
that could have precipitated conflicts over nuisance land uses. But because these
activities were greatly dispersed in a sparsely settled region, they had little effect on
what few neighbors there were at the time. Thus any complaints about the types of
uses that generally precipitate nuisance land use conflicts would have been
minimal.
76

Up until the advent of the American governmental system in the 1850s, then,
land uses in the small, slow-growing Spanish and Mexican settlement of Los
Angeles and its environs were primarily pastoral/agricultural and residential, with a
small central commercial core. Industrial growth, of the kind experienced in the mid-
nineteenth century by the growing cities of the East Coast, had not yet occurred. Few
land use regulations had been established. It was only after several more decades,
after annexation to the United States, the arrival of increasing numbers of immigrants
living at greater densities, the long process of settling ownership claims after the
imposition of the American property law system (for the most part, the California
Land Commission favored the American newcomers over the long-established
Californios), as well as the parallel changes in the structure of the local government
and economy, that conflicting visions of appropriate land use increased among the
46
city's inhabitants. A more-formally regulated land use structure to address the
increasing conflicts over uses then became more necessary to preserve order.
77

Setting the Scene: Population and Jurisdictional Shifts in Los Angeles and California
after 1850
Overview of State Population Growth: Though Carey McWilliams (1973)
characterized Los Angeles and Southern California “an island on the land,” the area
was hardly isolated from the rest of the state, especially after the 1870s. While
admittedly different in character, history and political culture, the city was fully
connected to the rest of the state and impacted by what occurred elsewhere. The
shifting statewide population dynamic was one important factor influencing the local
economy as well as pressures for changes in land use regulation in Los Angeles in
the time period of this dissertation. Figure 2 below indicates the considerable and
growing share of state population in Los Angeles and the entire six-county Southern
California region after 1880.
78

47
* Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura Counties.
Source: Population share computed from US Decennial Census records 1850-1930.

California’s population center was solidly located in the northern part of the
new state when California entered the Union as a state in 1850. San Francisco’s
population share alone dwarfed that of both the southern region and Los Angeles at
the time of incorporation (shown by the paired solid lines in Figure 2 above), with
ten times as many people as the whole southern region and more than twenty times
the population of either Los Angeles city or the rest of the county. Almost forty
percent of all California residents were located in San Francisco in 1850, then the
major port as well as the gateway to the gold mining territories inland to the
northeast. San Francisco lost population share during the 1850s with the surge of
population growth that occurred around the areas of gold extraction. Sacramento was
48
the beneficiary of this shift; its population had boomed by 1860, doubling in size.
Whatever impacts on Los Angeles were small, given the small base. San Francisco’s
share again grew after the end of the Gold Rush, when immigration to Sacramento
and its surrounding region slowed, though it never regained its pre-Gold Rush
level.
79

The population share of the southern California counties remained small in
relation to the entire state for the first thirty years of statehood (see the paired broken
lines in Figure 2 above) while migrants continued to arrive from the north and the
east. Growth accelerated in the 1880s when the railways made travel to the western
coast more convenient and direct, and the place promotion campaigns of various
civic and business organizations combined to entice the settlers to the southern
coastal areas. The flood of European immigrants was well underway by this point,
swelling the Eastern population centers and pushing ever westward, while the flow
of rural migrants to urban areas also accelerated. After 1880, Southern California’s
six-county population share grew at the expense of the rest of the state, becoming the
premier population center around 1930, while Los Angeles city eclipsed its northern
rival to become the most populous city in the state by 1920 (and the tenth largest in
the country).
80

Los Angeles: City within a County: While most of the following discussion
will focus on the growth dynamics within the City of Los Angeles that impacted land
use and regulatory decisions, people were likewise moving to unincorporated and
49
(later) incorporated communities in the remainder of Los Angeles County. This
section briefly depicts the relative growth rates in the county.
Almost equal numbers of people resided inside the city of Los Angeles and
beyond its borders in the unincorporated county in 1850. While the absolute
numbers remained small, growth was steady in the entire county (Table 1 below).
The city almost tripled in population size its first decade. The growth rate slowed
during the second decade, but by 1880 city population had again doubled. The
decennial census indicated that more people were settling in other areas of the
county than Los Angeles through the 1880 census count. By 1890, the absolute
totals had drawn about even while the rate of increase in the city of Los Angeles had
zoomed to 4.5 times that of the previous decade. From 1890 through 1910, Los
Angeles’s population grew at a much more rapid pace than the rest of the county,
testament to a number of factors, including the place promotion efforts of the Los
Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and other civic organizations, the completion
of competing railroad lines in the 1880s terminating inside the city, and the
availability of subdivided plots at easy terms affordable to working-class and
middle-class families, as well as concentrated employment opportunities that
provided the means for purchase and were connected to residential areas by a
growing street railway system. The same growth factors that enabled Los Angeles to
surpass the other Southern California communities in attracting new residents also
worked to enable the city to lead the entire six-county region to compete on a more
equal footing with its more-established northern rival, San Francisco.
81

50
Table 1

Population of Incorporated and Unincorporated Los Angeles County
1850-1910

Incorporated
Los Angeles City
Unincorporated
Los Angeles County
Other Incorporated Cities
in Los Angeles County
Population Growth Population Growth Population Growth
1850* 1610 -- 1920 -- -- --
1860* 4385 172.36% 6576 243.50% -- --
1870* 5728 30.63% 9101 38.40% -- --
1880* 11183 95.23% 21390 135.03% -- --
1890 50395 350.64% 38233 78.74% 12826 --
1900 102475 103.34% 42357 10.79% 25466 98.55%
1910 319198 211.49% 82898 95.71% 102035 300.67%
* Orange County was part of Los Angeles County until 1889.
Source: US Decennial Census 1850–1910 (recalculated to remove population of other Los Angeles County cities as
they incorporated, laalmanac.com—last accessed 28 January 2008).

Los Angeles did not remain the only incorporated city in the county. A
portion of the county’s population growth could be found in other incorporated
municipalities anxious to further increase their own populations and territories, as
well as their taxing and bonding capabilities. By 1890, ten other communities in Los
Angeles County had incorporated and were competing with Los Angeles and the
county for residential and industrial growth. The largest of these were Pasadena, to
the north at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, and Long Beach, to the south at
the mouth of the Los Angeles River along the coast.
82

The entire region drew new settlers—primarily from the Midwest and eastern
portions of the country. Los Angeles was the preferred destination for the majority of
these immigrants to Southern California. As Figure 3 below indicates, the growth of
Los Angeles far outpaced that of the rest of the county after 1880 (both
unincorporated areas and the increasing number of incorporated municipalities
51
surrounding the larger city). The rate of growth slowed after 1890 in both the county
as a whole and Los Angeles city, but after the boom years, a slow down meant
populations that “merely” doubled instead of tripling or more as in previous years.
The numbers of arrivals continued to be quite large, as shown in Table 1 above,
driving a large residential and commercial construction sector and placing significant
pressures on the city government for services and infrastructure. What had been a
dusty pueblo in 1850 of sixteen hundred residents living a pastoral life had grown
into a thriving and economically complex industrial city of over one hundred
thousand inhabitants by the beginning of the twentieth century.
83

Figure 3
Comparison of the Population Growth Rates of Los Angeles City
with the Rest of the Los Angeles County
1860 - 1910
0%
100%
200%
300%
400%
1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910
Growth Rate
Incorporated Los Angeles City
Rest of LA County

Source: US Decennial Census records 1860-1910

Getting into the Spirit of the Day—Growth Through Annexation and
Consolidation: A final essential dynamic to consider is the growth of Los Angeles in
land area. Increasing city size through additional land acquisitions became more
52
and more common in late nineteenth-century American cities. Population growth,
evolving government administration and fiscal structures, economies of scale, as well
as concerns for utilities (especially water supplies), were some of the reasons.
Philadelphia, Chicago and New York City all grew tremendously during the
nineteenth century through annexation.
84

The territorial growth of Los Angeles is in keeping with these competitive
and acquisitive urban growth trends that trumpeted the benefit of bigger and more
modern cities. The city eventually added territory to reach more than four hundred
and fifty square miles by the 1930s after more than eighty separate annexations or
consolidations. Until the cities of the south and southwest United States grew in size
after World War II, Los Angeles remained by far the leader in the city area
sweepstakes. Bigger equaled a higher national profile, one that could be promoted as
part of a campaign to attract even more growth. Growth translated into more regional
standing as large cities had the wherewithal to not only attract more business and
residential growth but also in terms of increased bonding power to plan ever-larger
public works projects which in turn would repeat the cycle and bring more growth.
More political power regionally and nationally resulted to make such projects
materialize through the influence of registered votes and representation in
Sacramento and Washington DC. The president of the Santa Monica Chamber of
Commerce declared that not only was city growth the “spirit of the day,” it was “the
thing that all big, broad-minded Americans believed in, for strength lies in
numbers.”
85

53
When Los Angeles became an American city in 1850, its boundaries included
the same amount of territory as it had during the previous seventy years as a pueblo
under the jurisdiction of first Spain and then Mexico (see Figure 4 for locations and
additions). The slightly more than five-mile square parcel straddled the Los Angeles
River about twenty miles north of the coast. Outside of the annexation of a narrow
extension of land running east-west along the southern boundary in 1859, no other
boundary changes were made for the first forty-five years of the now-American city’s
existence; that is, until 1895, all of the city’s population growth described above
occurred within those same twenty-eight square miles.
86

54
Figure 4
Spanish pueblo [1781] and
original US city boundary
1850
1859
1895
Highland
Park
1896
Southern
1896
Western
1899
Garvanza
1899 University
1906
Shoestring
1909
Colegrove
1910
Hollywood
1910
East Hollywood
1912
Arroyo Seco
Los Angeles River
Hoover
Western
Crenshaw
Fountain
Slauson
Manchester
Present city boundary
Wilshire
Arroyo Seco River
[now Martin Luther King]
Santa Barbara
Exposition
0 3 miles
[Note: San Pedro and Wilmington consolidations (1909), and the southern portion
of the Shoestring annexation (1906), are shown only on inset map]
Los Angeles Annexations and Consolidations
prior to 1915
Los Angeles Prior to 1915
(compared to present limits)
Southern Extension
Plaza
[approximate
location]

55

During this forty-five year span, Los Angeles grew from sixteen hundred
residents to more than fifty thousand—all inside of the original boundaries.
Surrounding incorporated cities (Pasadena being the largest) and the unincorporated
areas near the city were also attracting new residents to suburban residential real
estate developments as well as new agricultural, commercial and industrial
establishments. Beginning in 1895 in Los Angeles, and during the next four years,
residents of several contiguous neighborhoods petitioned for annexation to the city
that they so closely identified with (see Table 2 below for a complete list of the Los
Angeles annexations and consolidations pertinent to this dissertation).
Table 2

Annexations and Consolidations to the City of Los Angeles
1850-1912
Date Name
Area of
addition
(sq mi)
Cumulative
Area (sq mi)

1850

Original 1781 Spanish land grant

28.01

28.01
1859 Southern Extension 1.20 29.21
1895 Highland Park 1.41 30.62
1896 Southern & Western 10.18 40.80
1899 Garvanza 0.69 41.49
1899 University 1.77 43.26
1906 Shoestring 18.64 61.90
1909 Wilmington* 9.93 71.83
1909 San Pedro* 4.61 76.44
1909 Colegrove 8.72 85.16
1910 Hollywood* 4.45 89.61
1910 East Hollywood 11.11 100.72
1912 Arroyo Seco 6.90 107.62

* Consolidation

Source: Davis 1934.

56
When sufficient signatures were verified on the annexation petitions, special
elections could be scheduled. Both Los Angeles city residents and voters within the
proposed annexation each had to approve the change by a simple majority. Voting
numbers were often low, and sometimes only a few votes tipped the scales towards
victory for those who favored (or opposed) annexation. Proponents of annexations,
including the Chamber of Commerce and residential real estate developers,
organized in an attempt to sway voters for the “good of the community.” They held
out carrots that included electric lighting, sewer connections, improved postal
service, library access, fire protection and lowered insurance costs as well as cheaper
or better utilities, including, most importantly, water. Property taxes could even
decrease, they said. Those opposed posited that taxes would increase to pay for the
increased services that many were not interested in. The saloon owners were one
business group opposed because of the high license fees they would have to pay the
city, and fearing that increased municipal police oversight of their businesses would
cause them problems.
87

Five parcels were added to the city through four special elections between
1895 and 1899. These parcels to the south, west and northeast all lay in the path of
the most intense development efforts for middle-class residential real estate outside
the incorporated boundaries and as such were desirable additions to the growing city
in need of increased property values that boosted government bonding powers. This
in turn supported the growing public investment in infrastructure and city services.
Los Angeles had doubled in population from 1890 to 1900, to one hundred thousand
57
residents. This fifty percent increase in the land size of the city, especially when it
consisted of prime residential real estate, benefited the existing city.
88

The city’s focus concerning the next three increases in land area was narrow:
to gain access to coastal lands for a deep-harbor port. With the opening of the
Panama Canal coming in 1914, Los Angeles would then be well-positioned to greatly
exploit both domestic and foreign trade possibilities as well as effectively compete
with San Francisco and other more-distant ports up the Pacific Coast. The
“Shoestring Extension” was annexed in 1906. This expansion added a large section
of industrially developing lands south of the city boundary as well as a narrow strip
of city land, sometimes less than a half-mile in width, reaching south sixteen miles
towards the coast. Now contiguous to the two incorporated cities on the southern
coastal bay, Wilmington and San Pedro, the three cities voted to merge under Los
Angeles’s jurisdiction in the summer of 1909. These three additions increased the
incorporated city land area by more than seventy-five percent.
89

Voters approved four more annexations over the next three years. By this
point, planning for the aqueduct and harbor was underway, and the vote for the
municipal bonds scheduled. Care was taken with the timing of special elections to
make certain that the residents in these new territories, given the high assessed land
values, would bear their share of the bond debt. With the final addition of these
additional lands on the west and north, another thirty square miles of city land were
added with a total increased assessed valuation, as well as more residents and more
voters, a larger governable area of increasingly diverse and complex interests and
58
needs, and ever-increasing conflicts over how the land should be used in some
already-developed areas (such as Hollywood) and potentially-developing areas. From
1900 to the final pre-San Fernando Valley annexation in 1912, the city had tripled in
size. Over three hundred thousand people called Los Angeles home (inset to Map 1-2
above shows present-day limits of Los Angeles compared to 1912).
90

Local Narratives / Community Impacts
The following situations—all examples of land use conflicts from turn-of-
the-last-century Los Angeles, and the ways in which courts and individuals addressed
these conflicts—might individually seem amusing, anachronistic and perhaps
inconsequential. In the aggregate, however, they take on more significance. The
individuals depicted in these examples—as well as in the rest of this dissertation—
were all motivated to act—to do something—in response to changes in the world
around them, in response to perceived threats to established living-patterns or
investments, or in response to municipal actions (or inactions) they liked or disliked.
With a variety of motivations, they appealed, circulated petitions or took matters into
their own hands. They complained, organized their neighbors, wrote letters to the
newspapers and petitions to the city council, provoked fines and went to court. Some
let others speak for them. Some were silent, by choice or circumstance.
The land use regulatory ordinances they responded to in Los Angeles are
representative of a gradual change in the way local governments dealt with land use
conflicts across the United States. Subsequent to the Civil War and accelerating from
59
about the 1880s onward, city governments pushed the boundaries of what was
deemed permissible under the police power (the premise underlying government’s
power to act for its constituents). This occurred in response to a number of factors,
which included increasing demands for expanded services (such as police and fire
protection, and public utility systems) as urban populations grew dramatically, as
living densities increased and as conflicts multiplied over the appropriate uses of
land in the context of improving urban life. The growing professionalization of
government was another inducement, supplying both the enlightened manpower for
administration and enforcement, and the aura of more scientific rationales in solving
problems.
91

In the 1880s and 1890s, Los Angeles, like many cities across the country, still
employed a complex and uncoordinated system of nuisance-based sanitary codes,
fire limits and single-purpose districts (land use regulations that addressed a single
type of use or occupation, and often a specific incidence at a particular time and
place) as a means of mediating conflict, and maintaining and improving public health
and welfare. The general aim was to create spatial and social order, which included
regulating industry-by-industry and neighborhood-by-neighborhood which
businesses were appropriate and what could locate where.
In our first example, in 1894, Los Angeles city health inspector Dr. Francis
W. Steddon proposed an ordinance to amend the city's health, sanitary and quarantine
regulations to add steam carpet-beating establishments to the already-listed manual
carpet cleaning businesses prohibited within one hundred feet of a home, school or
60
church. While the record gives no indication of the reason for the health inspector's
proposal or whether it was a specific situation that inspired it, neighbors of an
unwanted land use would generally take their nuisance complaint directly to the city
council or the health inspector. In this case, the city council agreed with the health
inspector of the need to protect residential neighborhoods and unanimously adopted
the ordinance. Businessman James Lacey was subsequently cited under the ordinance
the following year. (See Figure 5) He protested to the local police court judge that his
commercial operation was a clean one, but nevertheless was found guilty of
continuing to operate in a residential area in defiance of the ordinance and fined
twenty-five dollars.
92

61
Figure 5
Sites Related to James Lacey and Dr. Unger
1894 - 1908
Bellevue Ave (Sunset Blvd)
Beaudry
Beaudry
Custer
Pearl St (Figueroa)
Bartlett St
Alpine St
Centennial
New Depot
Centennial
Alpine
Street
School
Churches
pastor
Bunker Hill
Grand
Angelino
Heights
Crown
Hill
Bunker
Hill
Unger home
1908
Lacey home and cleaning plant
after 1896
Lacey cleaning plant
after 1903
Lacey home and cleaning plant
1894-1895
0.00 0.25 mile
Churches and pastors' residences
Dr. Unger's residence
James Lacey carpet-beating plant and residences

62

The carpet-cleaning business owner immediately filed an appeal, questioning
the constitutionality of what he thought was unequal treatment per the regulation. In
prohibiting his business, the city was unfairly limiting his individual rights to use his
property. The ordinance was arbitrary, Lacey declared, and the issue of whether or
not the conduct of his carpet-cleaning business at that location could be deemed a
nuisance was up to the courts to decide when neighbors filed a civil nuisance suit,
and not the city council in an ordinance before a specific offense had even
occurred.
93

The California Supreme Court ruled in August 1895 that the Los Angeles city
council was acting within its constitutionally-vested police power rights, as well as
obligations, to protect public health. The court agreed that Lacey's business did not
constitute a nuisance per se. This did not matter. The point was that the city's police
powers allowed it to—and existed in order to—regulate the operation of businesses
for health and sanitary reasons so as to protect the public welfare. The public and
community rights outweighed Lacey's individual rights in this case. The Los Angeles
Times called this 1895 case one of "considerable local importance" to the operations
of local government as the court confirmed the city’s land use regulatory power.
94

Fourteen years later, in another case, Dr. Charles Unger, one of Lacey's
neighbors, was arrested several times and eventually brought into police court. Unger
was party to a continuing dispute with another neighbor over the noisy roosters she
kept on her residential property—a common complaint voiced around the city at that
63
time. He was frustrated by the lack of response from the city council. For unknown
reasons, Unger decided to fight back on his own terms to protect his property
interests rather than in the civil courts through a private nuisance suit.
95

Dr. Unger shot the offending rooster, and when his neighbor replaced it, he
created his own noise-making contraption that he operated in retaliation whenever
the rooster crowed. Arrested for destroying the peace in his own turn, he was
supported by the half of the neighborhood that did not appreciate the sound of
"boisterous roosters" and other farmyard animals in their urbanizing residential
district. The other portion saw Unger as "an enemy of the rural instincts" of the
neighborhood, as the newspaper put it, in an area that had now been densely settled
for a good twenty years.
96

This variety of conflicting views about which property rights were stronger
(individual or community), whether Los Angeles was urban or rural, or whether it
should be industrial, residential or even remain agricultural, played out often in news
reports and city council petitions. And the lines between opposing views were not
always clearly drawn. In one 1908 case that blurred the line, neighboring petitioners
from a district where homes were rapidly spreading had recently petitioned to be
included within the "cow limits" district (areas of the city where the number of dairy
cows per property was strictly limited or prohibited altogether). Eighty people then
amended their petition with another, asking that one neighbor “a poor woman, . . .
[who] brought up two children and had hard struggling to support them,” be granted
an exception so that she could keep her cows (as well as her chickens). Losing her
64
cows would “work a great hardship . . . indeed, perhaps, rendering her almost poverty
stricken.” The neighbors—who had no problem asking the city to restrict the
property rights of cow-owning neighbors to favor their view of neighborhood public
health and safety—were willing to relinquish voluntarily a portion of their own
individual property rights so that their impoverished neighbor might maintain her
nuisance use.
97

By the time of the complaints about "boisterous roosters" in 1908, the city
council in Los Angeles had already begun to abandon immediate and direct
intercession in land use conflicts between individuals. Citizens could no longer count
on the council to react swiftly and with little discussion to the innumerable petitions
they penned when dissatisfied with the activities of neighbors—residential and
industrial alike. These later petitions were frequently marked “filed” (noted in the
minutes and then put away with no action taken). Increasingly from 1908, the council
crafted ever-more intricate ordinances that pro-actively regulated uses throughout the
city in residence and industrial districts. Additionally, as the council, city attorneys,
and building and health inspectors all gained experience and confidence in
administering these land use regulations, the council acceded to the courts the job of
determining their appropriateness. And the courts of this time period, as Michael
Willrich has pointed out, “were the true laboratories of progressive democracy,
flexible instruments of public welfare and social governance,” willing to grant to
cities reasonable latitude to intervene in land and property conflicts. Finally, while up
until the 1890s, the Los Angeles city council had seemed to act chiefly with the goal
65
of reducing immediate conflicts between property users when adopting new
ordinances, by the 1910s there had been a transition. They had developed regulatory
tools—the residence and industrial land use districts— to move beyond immediate
conflicts. These districts enabled the city council to incorporate a broader vision of
how the city could and should be ordered into the future.
98

66
Chapter 1 Endnotes

All references to City Council minutes, ordinances and petitions throughout this
dissertation refer to documents of the City of Los Angeles and are located at the Los
Angeles City Record Center (LACRC) unless otherwise noted.

1
"Cities Then and Now" in The New York Times (14 Sept 1930). Bassett 1930; Toll
1969: 143. British planner Thomas Adams (1932) likewise places the beginning of
comprehensive zoning in 1909, with the passage of the English Town Planning Act,
and the Los Angeles zoning ordinance of the same year.
Toll describes the "first glimmerings" of zoning that appeared to Bassett himself
when he "was taken off [his] feet" in admiration for Werner Hegemann's 1908 city
planning exhibition viewed during a visit to Düsseldorf and thereafter devoted
himself to the cause of city planning (Toll 1969: 144).

2
Welch v. Swasey 1909. Hadacheck v. Sebastian 1915. The Hadacheck Supreme
Court case affirmed municipal authority not only to create use districts but also to
force the removal of a pre-existing business that was deemed no longer to suit the
new district—certainly a frightening prospect to the business community and
property owners generally in the United States. Toll called the decision
"extraordinary for its time" (1969: 182), but as we see in this dissertation, not exactly
an unexpected decision given the history of court decisions up to that time.
Residence district (rather than residential district) was the term used in Los
Angeles and other cities, as well as in the contemporary literature, to signify a zone
comprised primarily of homes, a neighborhood commonly viewed as residential, or a
development aspiring to be seen as residential. In Los Angeles, this terminology is
employed from 1904 in various regulations designating residence districts. I maintain
that usage throughout this dissertation when referring to these districts.

3
Both Toll (1969: 194-202) and Scott (1969: 154-160) detail Bassett's efforts and
contributions to the comprehensive zoning ordinance in New York City. See also
Revell (1999: 68-72), as well as Bassett's own account (1936).

4
Widespread perceptions of the failure of local government to adequately face
contemporary urban problems contributed to the desire for change and a spirit of
reform that grew at the turn of the last century. This led, throughout the latter half of
the nineteenth century, to efforts to professionalize city departments and workers, the
growth of services, as well as a concurrent growth in expectations that local
governments should provide a greater variety of services. (Wiebe 1967; Teaford
1984: 132-173; Monkonnen 1988). At the same time, the court system and the
professional legal field were changing; law education changed rapidly after 1870
with increased numbers of schools, accreditation, and with a new emphasis on case

67

studies (Friedman 2002: 29-43). A more active local government, creating ever more
statutes, resulted in an increased occurrence of rulings on constitutionality in the face
of challenges to governmental activism (Horwitz 1977: xii).

5
Bettman 1914: 113.

6
Freund 1904: 3; "Cities Then and Now" by Edward Bassett in The New York Times
14 September 1930; Bassett 1930; Babcock 1979. See also Talmadge 2000: 857.

7
Morton J. Horwitz gives a broad overview of property law and how attitudes
towards it changed in the United States both before (1977: 31-62) and after (1992:
145-167) the Civil War. Hart (1996) extends the narrative of land use law back to the
colonial era. Jacobs’ edited volume (1998) presents a range of current views of
property. See Eric Freyfogle's On Private Property (2007), where he describes the
constant tensions between private and public interests in land ownership and argues
the ultimate healthiness of continuing and better-informed debate and negotiation on
the subject. For public welfare, William Novak's (1996) case studies of late
nineteenth century municipal issues concerning public health, safety and space are an
excellent starting point for understanding the dynamic that underlies so much of local
government activity. On police power, Freund (1904) remains essential, while
Talmadge (2000) presents a succinct history with observations of police power’s role
regarding property.

8
The three types of nuisances (King 1986: 81) and nuisances in general are discussed
more fully later in this chapter. A nuisance per se is an activity commonly agreed to
be a nuisance wherever and whenever it might occur, like animal slaughtering.

9
Frank Backus Williams reported that many cities in the United States had some
variety of districting in operation by 1916 in "Establishing Building Districts—A
Word of Warning" in The American City (1916; vol XIV (5): 509). Minneapolis
created both industrial and residence districts in 1913 (H. G. Benton. 1913. "The
Establishment of Industrial and Residential Districts by Ordinance in Minneapolis"
in The American City 9 (6): 519-521). Wisconsin, Illinois and New York legislatures
all passed empowering acts to allow certain cities to create residential districts. And,
of course, Los Angeles was recognized for the city's emphasis on the establishment
of industrial districts. The resultant court cases were also noted (Veiller 1914;
Shurtleff 1915).

10
For a rearview look at public welfare as a shaping force (in contrast to liberal
individualism) in various fields at the turn of the last century, see Novak (1996); for
a normative ecological view of its application to property into the future, see

68

Freyfogle (2003; 2007). The classic volume on the Police Power by Ernst Freund
(1904) is still the gold standard on police power analysis and its temporal and spatial
variability. Rosen (1986) describes the unequal abilities of individuals to exercise
power in land use decision-making.

11
Sources on longer history: Hart 1996; Baer 1997: 72.

12
For political activism in the early 1900s around environmental issues, see Johnson
(2005). For 1920s progressivism generally in Los Angeles, see Deverell and Sitton
(1994). Specific detail starting before the turn of the last century on politics and John
Randolph Haynes's contribution to direct democracy and progressive reforms in Los
Angeles can be found in Sitton (1992). More recent discussion about public
participation (surrounding charter reform) in Los Angeles can be found in
Sonenshein (2006).

13
Some of the individual property owners who appealed to higher state and federal
courts regarding disputes with Los Angeles municipal authorities over land use
ordinances (and the year of the court ruling) include James Lacey (1895), Caroline
Dobbins (1904), Andrew Pfahler (1906), Quong Wo (1911), William Montgomery
(1912) and Joseph Hadacheck (1913; 1915). More details on these cases can be
found later in this dissertation.
By 1904, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce urged the city council to set
aside areas of the city for industrial districts wherein "every possible manufacturing
industry" could be established to further the city's growth (Minutes of the Los
Angeles Chamber of Commerce (henceforth LACC Minutes), 30 November 1904,
carton 003). Chamber members, as well as members of the Merchants and
Manufacturers Association, were actively involved in city council and other study
committees to shape the ordinances and create districts (see, for example, LACC
Minutes, October 1909, carton 005 and December 1910, carton 006).

14
Los Angeles first adopted its own version of the New York City model of
comprehensive zoning law in 1921 (Ordinance #42666 New Series [hereafter, N.S.]
adopted 19 October 1921). This ordinance replaced all earlier districting and
excepting ordinances and confirmed the patterns of residence and industrial
districting for already-developed sections of the city. See Appendix I for a list of Los
Angeles districting ordinances 1904-1921.
Of course, land use conflicts also occur in rural areas, and were, as Eric Freyfogle
(2007: 30-45) writes, significant shapers of the US legal culture surrounding the
protection of property for much of our early history. But, in part because of the
dispersed nature of rural uses, the industrial land use conflicts with which I am
primarily concerned in this dissertation are less likely there than in more densely

69

populated and intensely used urban areas. It is no accident that municipal land use
regulation evolved greatly with the increase of urbanization and industrialization of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
For examples of the ways in which unique local cultures and settlement histories
influence local attitudes towards property use and regulatory systems, see Carl
Abbott's sketch of Oregon's historically unique political cultures in different
geographic regions (Abbott, Howe and Adler 1994: 206-207); Sonya Salamon's
comparison of the differences in attitudes about appropriate property use between
descendents of German immigrants and those of Anglo-British heritage in Wisconsin
(1992); Christopher Tomlins' description of the formation of early American legal
culture in the colonies through the particular charters issued for different settlements
(2001); and McWhiney and McDonald's tracing of attitudes differing by geography
towards another type of property, livestock (1985).

15
Ordinance #9774 N.S. adopted 25 July 1904. Los Angeles Examiner editorial 20
July 1904.
Numerous property rights organizations today endeavor to limit governmental land
use regulations that they feel are detrimental to "making reasonable use of private
property," as the Pacific Legal Foundation writes [www.pacificlegal.org—last
accessed 8 January 2008]. This view derives from what these organizations see as a
founding American principle of the preeminence of individual liberty and strict
limits on government authority. In their view, the power of government to control
private property should be quite limited. Another organization, the Reason
Foundation, reiterates the view that governments should have limited powers to
control how owners use their own property. Additionally, the loss of value when
regulations limit an owner's use is seen as a further infringement on property rights
[www.reason.org—last accessed 8 January 2008].
While the focus of this research is on municipal or public regulation of property
use, private remedies to address land use conflict were (and are) available. Private
covenants (also termed deed restrictions), especially in subdivisions of numerous
properties, can establish threshold construction investments, property use limits,
particular styles and structure placement on the lot, with the purpose of guaranteeing
to investors and home purchasers certain neighborhood standards. The first modern
usage occurred in Riverside IL in 1871 (Burgess 1994: 30). See Holleran (1998: 65-
83) for a description of deed restrictions in nineteenth-century Boston. The classic
document explaining the benefits of deed restrictions is Helen C. Monchow's Use of
Deed Restrictions in Subdivision Development (1928), though she admits "private
initiative alone is not adequate" (ibid.: 4). Until a 1948 Supreme Court ruling
(Shelley v. Kramer) that deed restrictions prohibiting ownership or occupancy by a
particular race were unenforceable, covenants frequently barred Blacks, Jews,
Chinese and others.

70

16
Freyfogle 2007: xv.

17
Freyfogle 2007: xv. In the chapter on zoning in Frank So's "green book" on local
government planning (Kelly 1988: 251-284), the origins of zoning are generally
attributed to health and safety concerns about tenement housing, with very brief
mentions of the Laws of the Indies, the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and
Ebenezer Howard's garden city concept. Seymour Toll (1969) ascribed the US legal
institution of zoning to New York City zoning efforts in the early twentieth century,
where the book's title, Zoned American, equates the local with the national zoning
movement.

18
See Patricia Burgess's research on the development of land use restrictions in
Columbus, Ohio (1994). Raphaël Fischler has added more context to zoning history
in New York City, Montreal and Toronto (1998; 1999; 2002). Efforts in Boston are
described by Michael Holleran (1998). Andrew King (1986) focused primarily on the
local and state legal precedents to Chicago’s development of land use regulation
(King is frequently cited for having originated the term “prehistory of zoning”).
Urban periodicals provide a contemporaneous overview of regulations adopted
throughout the country. Examples include: Minneapolis residence and industrial
districts (American City December 1913 Vol. 9 (6): 519-521); New York,
Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois specific state delegation of authority and
authorization of police powers to create districts (American City Vol. 10 (6): 525-
529).

19
Frederick L. Ford, city engineer of Hartford CT, in an address at the first National
Planning Conference (National Conference on City Planning 1909: 72 [emphasis
added]). “The conditions which now exist point conclusively to the necessity of more
restrictive regulations concerning the occupancy and use of private property” (ibid.).

20
Birth of zoning comments by Edward Bassett in “Cities Then and Now” in The
New York Times (14 September 1930). Olmsted 1909: 65-66; Bassett 1930.

21
Bassett 1936: 22; Institute for Training in Municipal Administration 1948: 32-33,
218-223; Lewis 1949: 254. Use of the term enjoyment (or quiet enjoyment) in
descriptions of property rights is a legacy from our agrarian past, a concept that
privileged quiet and freedom from disturbance by neighbors or government, whether
by noise, smell or incursion. Never an absolute right, it has become a more relative
term in post-agrarian times (Freyfogle 2007: 47-54). Houston is the largest major city
without zoning, having voted to reject it in referenda in 1948, 1962 and 1993
(McDonald 1995: 137).

71

22
The idea that zoning came from Germany has persisted since the first national
planning conference when Olmsted's speech gave evident credit for the German
origination and development of modern zoning concepts and the efficient
administration of zoning regulations.
This broad idea of city planning has been worked upon for fifteen or twenty
years with the diligent patience and technical erudition with which the
German is apt to pursue his ideals, and has been of influence not alone in
Germany but in many other countries . . . (Olmsted 1909: 65-66).
In particular, he detailed the impressive results of separate use districts for residence
and industrial districts in Germany, which he stated had contributed to stability and
growth. Olmsted, who became the first head of the national planning organization,
pointed out that there was much to be learned, "especially from Germany" (Olmsted
1909: 70).
Credit was continuously given for Germany's influence on American zoning from
the first appearance of histories of American city planning and zoning (for example,
Koester 1914; Williams 1922; Lohman 1931; Adams 1932; Bassett 1936 and Lewis
1939). More recently, Richard Babcock (1979: 416) traced the idea of regulating all
private land, central to the 1916 New York City comprehensive ordinance, back to
observations of the system that was used in German cities. Thomas Logan (1972;
1976) continued the theme in his "Americanization of German Zoning" when he
wrote that zoning was conceived in Germany in the nineteenth century. American
planners then "used the precedent as part of their argument for its adoption" in the
United States (Logan 1976: 377).
As local governments in the United States developed before the turn of the last
century into more professionalized organizations to provide public goods, the affinity
towards and interest in things German can be seen in the considerable number of
popular and scholarly books and articles published on the German government and
administrative scheme (see, for example, Goodnow (1893); Owen (1893) and
Gerhard (1895)). Perhaps the best known of the books was authored by Albert Shaw
(1895), later long-time editor of the Review of Reviews, writing on European
government systems where he highlights the German system. Of particular interest to
early planners was Thomas Horsfall's 1904 book, written to help solve problems of
congestion and housing in Manchester. His oft-cited book The Example of Germany
was praised by the younger Olmsted in his 1909 planning conference address (66).
American architects and engineers reported numerous European study trips (though
the purpose of these trips seemed more closely linked to City Beautiful civic
improvement and beautification schemes, best represented perhaps by Haussemann's
Paris boulevards). Finally, German planners such as Werner Hegemann found a
lucrative livelihood in selling their experience and consulting services to cities in the
United States and Canada (Collins 2005).

72

Logan and his predecessors ignored the historic legal context and overlooked the
existence of domestic regulations long in force before the specifics of the German
zone system were widely known or studied by American planners. Additionally, no
regulatory system could have been imported from another country and applied in the
United States if a hospitable domestic legal framework was not already in place. This
reference to the German example of good urban management was actually more of a
political strategy to gain acceptance for districting (zoning) regulation already in use.
The notion of an imported zoning idea has persisted, and gives unfortunate credence
to both popular and legal critiques of land use regulations as a recent imposition on
private property rights (Fischler and Kolnick 2006).

23
Frederick L. Ford remarks (National Conference on City Planning 1909: 70-73);
see also the addresses by Henry Morganthau (ibid.: 59-62) and Frederick Law
Olmsted, Jr. (Olmsted 1909: 63-70). See also, for example, B. Antrim Haldeman's
remarks in Boston (Haldeman 1912; National Conference on City Planning 1912:
173-188), Lawrence Veiller’s and Alfred Bettman's comments in Toronto (National
Conference on City Planning 1914: 92-114), and Veiller's speech in Cleveland
(National Conference on City Planning 1916: 147-158).

24
Advisory Committee on City Planning 1922; Advisory Committee on City
Planning and Zoning 1926; Euclid v. Ambler 1926; Lewis 1949: 259-263; Weiss
1992.

25
By 1927, five hundred and twenty-five cities had adopted zoning ordinances (Scott
1969: 248). On business support for zoning, see Makielski (1966: 11-40) and Toll
(1969: 158-163). Regarding other business benefits, see for example the National
Association of Retail Grocers’ use of zoning laws to limit location of competing
chain stores in the 1920s (Beninger 1986: 340-341) and telephone company attempts
to direct location of upper class residential communities through local zoning for
more profitable service delivery (Fischer 1992: 108). [Thank you to Tom O’Brien for
bringing these two cases to my attention] Two key Supreme Court cases are Penn
Central Transportation Co. v. NYC (1978) and Nollan v. California Coastal
Commission (1987). South Burlington County NAACP v. Township of Mount Laurel
(Mount Laurel I 1975 and II 1983) raised the issue of fair housing related to zoning
codes at the state level (See Appendix II for a list and description of key land use
regulation court decisions).

26
Weiss 1987. In the early decades of the twentieth century, private covenants were
frequently described as inadequate and “ineffective” while the municipal police
power was the better solution (for example, Veiller 1914). A 1917 Chicago report on
building districts and restrictions critiqued private covenant systems, saying that they

73

worked only for the wealthy, were clumsy in operation, generally disliked by the
courts, and finally that they were established by developers with little concern for the
rest of the city (King 1986: 64-67).
Susan Chase (1995) details how deed restrictions were used by professional
developers over forty years in fast-growing areas of the county surrounding
Wilmington DE. See Beito, Gordon and Tabarrok (2002) for favorable views of
private remedies to land use conflicts. Nelson (2002) in particular describes the
proliferation of various types of neighborhood associations (including gated
communities and common interest associations) and has proposed “private collective
property rights” as a workable private alternative to municipal land use controls.

27
de Certeau 1988: 9; Scott 1996;. Benjamin 1997.

28
Early accounts of zoning that include references to judicial rulings on Los Angeles
regulations include: Williams 1922; Baker 1927; Pollard 1931; Whitnall 1931;
Bassett 1936. The oft-cited cases upholding industrial districting in Los Angeles are
Quong Wo (1911); Montgomery (1912); and Hadacheck (1913) and (1915). Lincoln
Trust (1920) challenged the validity of the New York City 1916 ordinance and
failed. Scott (1969:153-160) gives a brief background of the efforts to develop New
York City's ordinance.

29
Jackson 1973: 210; Rabin 1989: 101; Thomas and Ritzdorf 1997. The United
Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice (1987) report was the first national
study to draw attention to hazardous waste sites, surrounding demographic patterns,
lack of economic alternatives, as well as the lack of political power of those
communities—supplemented by locally-focused empirical studies such as Pastor,
Sadd and Hipp (2001) and Marcelli, Power and Spalding (2001).

30
Olmsted 1909: 65-66.

31
Lyndon Johnson, discussing the importance of cities and the necessity for
rebuilding them and reestablishing healthy communities in his Great Society speech
in May 1964, quoted Aristotle: "Men [sic] come together in cities in order to live.
They remain together in order to live the good life" (www.americanrhetoric.com/
speeches/lbjthegreatsociety.htm—last accessed 27 February 2008).

32
Suttles 1985: 3; Ellickson 1991: 123-136.

33
Hobbes 1651; Monkonnen 1981: 540; Fischer 1982: 2-23; Smith 1995: 6-9. I
broaden Sampson and Raudenbush's definition of public space (1999: 605 n.3) to
include all areas to which persons have legal access (streets, sidewalks, parks, public

74

buildings) as well as the "public sectors of private buildings"—that is, that aspect of
private development that affects the public.

34
Sampson and Raudenbush 1999: 603-604.

35
Foucault 1980: 153; Suttles 1985: 3. Claude Fischer writes that while small towns
and rural areas also exhibit these conflicts, the "complexity of urban infrastructure"
in cities tends to create "chronic problems" surrounding "collective goods" that
increases the magnitude of conflict in general in comparison to the non-city and the
"concrete interests at stake are more often sizeable" (1982: 13-14 and n.7).

36
Leiser 1969: 49-62; Pospíšil 1971: 39-96.

37
Hogue 1986: 8. I do not mean to imply the monolithic influence of the Common
Law tradition. For example, Malay (2000) described three antecedents to land and
property attitudes that he examined in colonial Massachusetts: religious moral
imperatives to transform the wilderness into something useful (i.e. marketable), local
concerns with scarcity and conservation, and common law traditions. As my concern
here is primarily with the legal precursors to land use regulation, I have concentrated
on the common law.
The principles of common law developed in England as general social rules aimed
to maintain social stability and the power of the gentry while also allowing flexibility
to respond to social changes. From the thirteenth century on, it became increasingly
common to rely on a legal system to settle conflicts that previously would have been
up to the individuals involved to resolve for themselves. While common law is not
codified as we would understand it, legal decisions were eventually loosely
organized as writs that served as templates for legal actions in areas such as
contracts, inheritance, nuisance and property. Reasonability of previous decisions (a
distant medieval relative of the modern-day concept of stare decisis, or precedent)
was assumed. Exported to the former colonies, application was broader with the
greater middle class contact with the legal system because of property ownership,
contractual arrangements, and so forth. By the nineteenth century in England and in
the United States, legislative and statutory law had become the primary source of
law. Still, our judicial system draws on common law for many fundamental
principals (Hogue 1986: 15-16, 185-186).
North American colonies and settlements in territories under the control of France
and Spain likewise maintained regulatory and governing systems based on home
country systems. While these systems were influential in the development of local
property legal regimes and certainly shaped the particular local spatial development
as well as regulatory customs (which would need to be incorporated and brought into
agreement with United States law), they had less influence on the state and federal

75

court system of the young country. As noted below, the courts turned to England for
precedent in land use decisions until sufficient domestic case law had been created.
Concerning domestic precedent in case law, it was not until 1835 that a state court
opinion on the legality of fire districts was published without reference to English
antecedents (Wadleigh v. Gilman 1835). By that time there were sufficiently sound
and convincing domestic court cases for the judiciary to draw from.

38
Horwitz 1977: 101-103; Freyfogle 2007: xvii. The general idea of judicial review
is long-standing, brought from seventeenth-century England to the American
colonies, and is written into some state constitutions. Article 3 of the US
Constitution authorizes review of federal statutes. The Judiciary Act of 1789 gave
the Supreme Court jurisdiction over appellate and state court decisions and by 1803
was used to deal with state statutes (Horwitz 1977: 101-103).

39
Willrich 2003: xxv [emphasis added].

40
Pound 1909: 59; Willrich 2003: 119-120.

41
Freund 1904: § 111.

42
Novak 1996: 42.

43
Olmsted 1905: 35.

44
Courts supported local governments in New York City, Charleston and
Philadelphia that developed systems of fire districts to control the use of property,
construction requirements, the kinds of materials that could be stored and the
occupations that could be carried out within the fire district boundaries (Wadleigh vs.
Gilman 1835; Alexander v. Greenville 1877; Ford v. Thrallkill 1889; Olympia v.
Mann 1890). King 1986: 81 citing Cooper v. Randall (1869) from the Illinois
Supreme Court on the three-tier model.

45
Horwitz 1992: 145-146. Slaughterhouse Cases (1873); Munn (1877); First
Minnesota Rate Case (1890). The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution
(ratified 1868) was one of a trio of Reconstruction-era amendments originally
intended to protect the rights of Black Americans. Guaranteeing the equal rights and
privileges of all citizens, its meaning has been broadened to include business and
corporate entities. See Labbé and Lurie (2003) and Maltz (2003: 85-112) for detail
on the Slaughterhouse Cases where the courts first accepted this reasoning.
The re-examination of use and exchange values in the political economy work of
John Logan and Harvey Molotch (1987) has become a useful addition to the

76

vocabulary and conceptual toolbox of planners. Logan and Molotch are explicit in
their use of these terms to explain property in land, and take the useful step of
emphasizing the intersection and interweaving of these values in the dynamics and
tensions of land use competition and conflicts among different users of space. For
them, use value is comprised of several factors connected to the neighborhood, such
as security, informal support networks, identity, and shared interests (1987:103-110).
Use value is also situated solidly in the present, in their analysis, with little attempt to
connect use value to the complex and interconnected historical beliefs that
Americans have developed and attribute to property.

46
Richard Schlatter’s (1951) Private Property: The History of an Idea is a good
starting point. For various interpretations of the history of property in the American
context, see Scott (1977); Schultz (1992); Ely (1998).

47
Locke 1690; Alexander 1997. Epstein (1985) is the classic example of the
libertarian individual rights-based approach to property while his more recent work
(1998) recognizes its tension with community and the common good in real life
situations (though still upholding its primacy).

48
See Hildegard Binder Johnson’s (1976) excellent analysis of the National Land
Ordinance of 1785 and rectangular land survey that have shaped so much of our
understanding of commodified property as well as the fundamental arrangement of
much of the American built environment. Munn v. Illinois (1876) described in
Appendix II.

49
Alexander 1997: 7. For property and civic republicanism, see Harrington (1656)
and Pocock (1975); for an example of legal research into governmental controls on
property, see Hart (1996) and in particular for the development of this process in
New York City, see Hartog (1993); for the characteristics of contrasts between
property as commodity and propriety, see Radin (1993) and Rose (1994). Talmadge
2000: 857-861, 901-904.

50
Freyfogle 2007: 9-10.

51
Hart 1996: 1252, 1257, 1259-1281.

52
Novak 1996: ix-x.

53
Olmsted 1905: 35.

77

54
Bettman 1914: 113; [n.a.]. 1916. “Should a Man Do as He Pleases with His Own
Property?” The American City. Vol. XIV (3): 221.

55
[n.a.]. 1916. “Should a Man Do as He Pleases with His Own Property?” The
American City. Vol. XIV (3): 221.

56
Freyfogle 1999.

57
Warner 1995: 25; Freyfogle 2007: 9-10.

58
Blackstone 1796: 162-175.

59
Euclid v. Ambler 1926; Talmadge 2000: 857. For more recent questioning of these
government police powers, and their extent, see post-1987 Supreme Court cases
listed in Appendix II.

60
Freund 1904: 2; Foucault 1979.

61
An Overview of the History of Constitutional Provisions Dealing with Local
Government (www.library.ca.gov/CCRC/reports/html/h_loval_government.html—
last accessed 22 October 2002).

62
Cooley 1868: 572-597; Tiedeman 1886; Freund 1904: 3; Jones 1967: 755-759,
762-763; Alexander 1997: 245-246, 249.

63
Brewer 1891: 10-11. Brewer was a long-time outspoken critic of the expansive use
of the police power, having dissented in the Kansas case leading to Mugler v. Kansas
(1887) when he was a Kansas Supreme Court justice (Hylton 2000: 6).

64
Robbins 1912: 314-315.

65
“Zone Ordinances—Recent Decisions on the Police Power” National Municipal
Review. 1916. Vol. 5 (2): 323-324.

66
Bettman 1914, quote at 114. Louis Brandeis introduced the idea of using empirical
and factual extra-legal data to prove his argument in Muller v. Oregon (1907)
(thereafter known as the original Brandeis Brief), particularly in cases dealing with
social health and welfare. This scientific-basis was readily adopted by districting and
city planning interests, as Bettman and others demonstrate.

67
Williams 1915: 470-471.

78

68
Wiebe 1967: 136, 147; Fox 1977: 5-22; Schiesl 1977: 111-132.

69
McMilliams 1946: 22-23; Gumbrecht 2001: 26-29. See Banner (2005) for a
general discussion of the term terra nullius. Both Gumbrecht (2001: 26-29) and
McWilliams (1946: 24-25) give a minimum number of more than 100,000 Indians
resident in California at the time of Spanish settlement. Archeologist Brian Fagan
estimates the population to be about 300,000 (2003: 4) while McWilliams suggests
the number could have been as high as 700,000 (1946: 24).
People had long occupied the fertile lands and thrived in the mild climate of what
later became California. In his survey of native settlement, Fagan posits the date of
earliest settlement to at least 11,200 B.C. (2003: 22-24). These residents of Southern
California had prospered in what was one of the highest concentrations of Native
Americans in North America. In the lands adjacent to the Los Angeles River alone,
the Spanish newcomers found at least forty-five villages of up to several hundred
inhabitants each, perhaps as many as five thousand people. The Los Angeles River
that flowed year-round and the other rivers that flowed intermittently during the year,
fed by the surrounding mountain ranges, provided more than adequate fresh water
supplies. The rich alluvial soils, regularly renewed by flooding, and varied terrains
provided habitats conducive to diverse and plentiful plant, animal and marine life;
given such a bountiful environment, agricultural practices were not crucial for
subsistence (Robinson 1948: 5-11). Life in California before the Spanish entrada
was however not a completely bucolic existence. Fagan (2003) describes the broad
changes in weather patterns that affected annual yields of foodstuffs and created
recurring difficulties in maintaining sufficiently nutritious diets.

70
Rose 1994: 5. Carey McWilliams described the California Indians as living in ". . .
small land-owning politically autonomous groups" (1946: 25). I have found no other
reference to land ownership regarding the Native Americans of California in this
time period.

71
For a brief overview of Spanish settlement in Southern California, see Gumprecht
(2001: 35-44) and McWilliams (1946: 29-48). The Tong-va would certainly have
been familiar with the Spanish newcomers by the time the Los Angeles pueblo was
founded, as the nearby Mission San Gabriel had been established ten years earlier, in
1771.
The Laws of the Indies specified that the amount of land granted to a pueblo would
be four square leagues (27.04 square miles) "according to the character of the land"
(Book 4, Title 5, Laws 6 and 10 of the Laws of the Indies (Crouch, Garr and
Mundigo 1982: 6-10)). A Spanish league was about two and three-fifths miles
(Robinson 1948: 34 and n.1 same page).

79

72
Vassberg 1989; Engstrand 1993. The primary purpose of the pueblos was to serve
as a source of agricultural supplies for the military presidios and other Spanish
settlements, avoiding the more costly shipments from Mexico and Spain. By 1791,
Los Angeles served that purpose quite successfully, producing more grain than all
but one other Spanish settlement in Alta California (the nearby San Gabriel Mission)
(Robinson 1948: 39).
The use rights of the original Indian occupiers were technically recognized as well
(with the Franciscans acting as trustees) though in reality were little enforced, while
the traditional usage cultures of the Native Americans were quickly obliterated (Dana
and Krueger 1958: 35; McWilliams 1946: 37-38; Ebright 1989: 3-4). In theory, the
lands appropriated from the Native Americans for missions and pueblos were to be
returned to their use when they had set aside their customary habits, become good
Christians and had adopted "civilized" ways, which included giving up their pastoral
hunting and gathering semi-nomadic existence in favor of settlement and agriculture.
In reality, the plunder of mission wealth in advance of secularization left the
neophytes without their entrusted lands (McWilliams 1946: 38). Also, as the Indian
post-colonization mortality rate was so high, there were relatively few left who could
have pressed claims even if they had any power within the community to do so. The
successor governments of Southern California had no incentive to recognize Indian
land claims until more recent times.
This is in contrast to British colonial policy in North America, which also
theoretically recognized the property rights of the people they found occupying the
land of North America, that looked to outright purchase of land through treaty
agreement (however unfair the treaty or grossly inadequate the amount of
remuneration offered) (Banner 2005: 95).

73
Crouch, Garr and Mundigo’s book (1982: 6-19) is the most accessible source on
the Laws of the Indies. Vassberg 1984: 83-86; Kostoff 1991: 113-115; Engstrand
1993: 209-212; Low 1993: 83-86; Gumbrecht 2001: 43-44. The rest of the pueblo
lands were divided into agricultural use (suertes), municipal land for rent (propios
that brought in revenues to support local government functions), common lands
within the pueblo (ejidos) and pasture (dehesas). Plots to be used for farming were
apportioned to each household from the lands between the plaza and the river where
soils were good and irrigation convenient. After five years, those settlers who had
followed through on the required improvements to the land received formal
possession to the solares and suertes.
Traces of the original Spanish central city street orientation are still quite obvious
to anyone traveling within the area of the original pueblo west of the Los Angeles
River. For example, heading west (actually northwest) from downtown, the street
grid abruptly switches to a more strictly east-west pattern after reaching Hoover

80

Street, indicating the boundary between Spanish and Mexican old Los Angeles and
those areas developed after the advent of American jurisdiction and the imposition /
extension of the national US Geological Survey to the city.
A note on the name of the pueblo: there is debate about which of several variations
on the original name of the Spanish pueblo is correct. The one used here is from
Sonenshein (2006: 26).

74
Crouch, Garr and Mundigo 1982: 15 (thank you to Liette Gilbert for the reminder
about this section of the Laws of the Indies); Engstrand 1993: 228; Gumprecht 2001:
42-49. As the sale of cowhides and byproducts was the primary export industry of
the region into the Mexican period, this might have been an important and necessary
regulation. With the growth of the cattle industry on the dispersed ranchos located
some distance from each other and the pueblo, any possible nuisance impacts likely
had little significance in actual practice.

75
Robinson 1948: 39-40, 45-52; Engstrand 1993: 231; Gumprecht 2001: 47. Army
veterans received several of these first land concessions in the vicinity of the pueblo
almost immediately after its founding by the Spaniards, in 1784, through the
authority of Alta California governor Pedro Fages. Juan José Domínguez established
Rancho San Pedro (including at that time the Palos Verdes peninsula). José María
Verdugo received Rancho San Rafael, at the confluence of the Los Angeles and
Arroyo Seco Rivers north of the pueblo. Manuel Pérez Nieto requested the lands east
of Mission San Gabriel and south to the coast (including Long Beach). These
original grants within what was to become Los Angeles County were later
subdivided into many smaller, though still sizable, ranchos and confirmed by the
Mexican government after 1822. Cattle grazing was the primary use of these lands
into the first decades of the American period (Robinson 1948: 45-52).

76
Robinson 1948: 35; Gumprecht 2001: 47-48. Dana denigrated the Californios as
an idle people who could "make nothing for themselves" and thus had to import, at
great price, most goods around South America or trek them cross-country (Dana
2000: 67-68).
By the time Dana's ship reached Alta California in 1835, the cattle hide industry
was in decline; Dana discovered "the scarcity of hides, which was yearly greater and
greater" (Dana 2000: 80). This "fine plane [sic]country, filled with herds of cattle",
surrounded the Pueblo (which Dana never visited, required as a sailor to remain on
the ship except when allowed ashore to unload trade goods and replace them with
hides for the journey back to Boston) (ibid.: 86). Notwithstanding the decline of
hides, the "desolate-looking" San Pedro still shipped out more cowhides than any
other spot on the Pacific coast in the mid-1830s, according to Dana. When word
spread that Dana's ship the Pilgrim had anchored in the isolated harbor, individuals

81

and brokers from the Pueblo sent oxcarts laden with hides—more than two thousand
of them in one weeklong harboring—to exchange for sugar and other goods (ibid.:
86-87).

77
See Robinson (1948) for a detailed examination of the conflicting rancho land
claims and the long, drawn-out settlement process in the second half of the
nineteenth century. Anne Howell (1998: 4) describes two regulations. The first
recorded land use regulation, she says, was a prohibition in 1838 on manufacturing
adobe bricks within the city limits without permission. Another required all animal
slaughter to take place on the edge of the settlement.

78
McWilliams 1946. This southern California region would eventually become Los
Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura Counties.
Imperial County, in the southeast corner of the state, is excluded. See Carey
McWilliams (1946: 4-6) for an eloquent description and justification of this
configuration of the region. See Ethington (2007) for another take on the growth of
Los Angeles.

79
When California entered the Union in 1850, fewer than ninety-three thousand non-
Indians were resident in the entire state. More than a third resided in San Francisco.
The second largest city in the state was Sacramento, with 6820 people who had
arrived since the city’s recent founding in 1849, in conjunction with the discovery of
gold. The entire six-county southern California region was home to just 4328 people.
And of those, just 1610 non-Indians resided in the former pueblo now incorporated
as the city of Los Angeles.
By way of comparison and context, the ten largest cities in the United States in
1850 were located either along the Atlantic Coast—New York, Baltimore, Boston,
Philadelphia, Brooklyn and Spring Garden (adjacent to Philadelphia)—or along one
of the great river trading routes—Cincinnati on the Ohio River, Albany on the
Hudson River, and St. Louis and New Orleans on the Mississippi River. A bit more
than a half million residents lived in the largest of these cities, New York, while the
tenth largest (Albany) contained fifty thousand people. Chicago in 1850 had a
population of less than thirty thousand (twenty-fourth largest city that year). Not one
other city between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Coast, besides San
Francisco, had yet attracted a sufficient number of residents to make it over the
threshold of the one hundred most populous cities in the country in 1850. The
population center was solidly located in the eastern portion of the country (Gibson
1998).
San Francisco’s official 1850 census results were destroyed by fire, thus it was left
off the list compiled in a 1998 Census Bureau working paper (Gibson 1998, table 8).
The population figure for San Francisco (34,776) that is generally used to represent

82

the 1850 census figure is from an 1852 state census. San Francisco would then have
placed twenty-second on the list. The threshold for entry to the list of one hundred
largest urban areas in 1850 was 7250, the population of the smallest city to be listed
(Easton PA).

80
Chicago had become the second largest city in the country by 1890, after New
York City; nineteen of the one hundred largest cities were now located west of the
Mississippi River. Los Angeles had grown to become the fifty-seventh largest city by
1890 (Gibson 1998). Los Angeles first entered the register of one hundred largest
cities in this year. If one considers that the population of Los Angeles was just
11,180 in 1880, and that the threshold size of the hundred largest urban areas that
year was 19,743 (Springfield IL), the magnitude of this population increase in
relation to other US cities becomes even more striking.
The April 1906 San Francisco earthquake and resultant fire that destroyed the
center of that city undoubtedly worked to the advantage of efforts in Los Angeles to
attract residential, commercial and industrial growth as local boosters used the event
in their promotional efforts. For example, while the Chamber of Commerce
discussed setting up a relief committee to raise funds to aid the city, member W.C.
Patterson pointed out the opportunity available to take advantage of the situation to
lure companies to rebuild instead in Los Angeles (LACC Minutes, 25 April 1906,
carton 004).

81
Los Angeles County was formed in 1850 with 4340 square miles. The next year it
was enlarged to include what is now Orange County and parts of San Bernardino
County to the Nevada border, increasing in area to 34,520 square miles. San
Bernardino County was split off and independently incorporated in 1853. Orange
County was not separated from Los Angeles County until 1889, thus for California’s
first four decennial censuses, the population of Orange and Los Angeles Counties
was combined [www.csac.counties.org/default.asp?id=77—last accessed 28
February 2008].

82
Twenty-three other Los Angeles County municipalities incorporated before 1910,
as shown in Table 3 below. Most remained small towns during the period covered in
this dissertation. Only Pomona, besides those mentioned previously in the chapter,
grew to more than ten thousand residents by 1910 (laalmanac.com—last accessed 28
January 2008).

83

Table 3

Other Incorporated Municipalities in Los Angeles County 1850-1910*

Anaheim** 1878 Azusa 1898
Pasadena 1886 Covina 1901
Santa Ana** 1886 Alhambra 1903
Santa Monica 1886 Vernon 1905
Monrovia 1887 Glendale 1906
Pomona 1888 Huntington Park 1906
Long Beach 1888 La Verne 1906
South Pasadena 1888 Hermosa Beach 1907
Compton 1888 Sierra Madre 1907
Orange** 1888 Claremont 1907
Redondo Beach 1892 Inglewood 1908
Whittier 1898

83
McWilliams 1946: 113-137, 161-182; Starr 1990; Fogelson 1993: 63-84.

84
Philadelphia was enlarged in 1854 when the city incorporated all entities within
the county, its border then contiguous with the former Philadelphia County. Chicago,
about ten square miles when originally incorporated in 1837, jumped ahead of
Philadelphia in size by 1889 with the annexation of Lake and other surrounding
communities, adding another hundred and fifteen square miles in area. Chicago’s
outward growth continued over the next decade; its area stood at a hundred and
ninety square miles by 1900. The consolidation of New York’s five boroughs in
1898 to create a megalopolis cemented New York City’s place as the preeminent
American city in size and population (Jackson 1985: 142-143).
Cities increase land size in one of two ways. Annexation refers to the extension of
incorporated borders to include a previously unincorporated area. Consolidation
occurs between two or more incorporated municipalities. While forced annexations
were common in other cities (ibid.: 147-148), in Los Angeles, the citizens of the
areas affected vote on the proposal. Agreement was made ahead of time about which
government would remain and how existing government facilities and departments
would be integrated, as well as responsibilities for bonded indebtedness.

85
A.F. Webster, president of the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce, speaking of a
proposed consolidation of Santa Monica and Ocean Park (“Bay Cities Getting
Together Toward Greater Los Angeles” Los Angeles Times 28 March 1909).

86
Robinson 1948: 41. Los Angeles corporate claims to landownership (as opposed to
private ownership claims to individual lots) were recognized based on an 1851
congressional act that automatically recognized those California towns already in

84

existence on 7 July 1846. Robinson writes that while Los Angeles had requested
sixteen square leagues in its petition, the city received a US patent only for its
original four leagues—the land granted to the pueblo at its establishment in 1781.
Individual lot claims within this boundary were then settled locally once the state
legislature approved the city’s charter (ibid.: 41-42).

87
Fogelson 1993: 223-228. “Battle of the Ballots” Los Angeles Times 19 March
1896; “Bay Cities Getting Together toward Greater Los Angeles” Los Angeles Times
28 March 1909; “Santa Monica to Vote on Annexation Today” Los Angeles Times
22 August 1917.

88
Steve Erie (2004: 51-52) describes this as a new public development strategy
beginning with an 1899 bond issue of two million dollars approved by city voters to
take over the private water company. Additional bond issues, such as one for twenty-
four million dollars in 1907 for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, were only possible
because of the increased valuation of the added property located within the city
limits. The additional property taxes to be paid from newly annexed areas, as well as
the increased total assessed land value for the city that permitted increased levels of
borrowing (according to state municipal limitations) were all pluses from the city’s
point of view in regards increasing land area.
The first special election for annexation on 3 October 1895 failed to carry the
proposed new city area when one of the four neighborhoods in the South and
Western territory (namely, University) voted the measure down. A second election
held the next day resulted in Highland Park joining the city. Highland Park voters
favored the annexation by a vote of precisely 21-12 (thirty-three votes cast in all).
City voters overwhelmingly favored both annexations (by 3.5-to-1 and 3-to-1
respectively) but balked at going to the polls two days in a row. Over a thousand cast
their votes on October 3rd; just four hundred and fifteen the next day. The Southern
and Western annexation easily carried when a third special election was held 21
March 1986, this time without the recalcitrant University area. Garvanza, bordering
Highland Park northeast of the city, was annexed effective June 1899. The
annexation of the University area finally succeeded, also in June 1899 (Ordinance
#2991 N.S., special election authorized 19 August 1895 and defeated 3 October
1895; Ordinance #2992 N.S. adopted 19 August 1895, special election held 4
October 1895; Ordinance #3393 N.S. adopted 10 February 1896, special election
held 21 March 1896; Ordinance #5733 N.S. adopted 17 April 1899, special election
held 23 May 1899; Ordinance #5734 N.S. adopted 17 April 1899, special election
held 24 May 1899; Special election results: City Council Minutes 8 October 1895,
30 March 1896 and 29 May 1899).

85

89
See Erie (2004: 52-55) for a description of the “Free Harbor Fight” and
background on these three additions to Los Angeles’s land area (Ordinance #13447
N.S. adopted 26 December 1906; Ordinance #18374 N.S. adopted 28 August 1909;
Ordinance #18414 N.S. adopted 28 August 1909).

90
See Chapter 4 for more discussion regarding the Colegrove annexation, also the
location of Joseph Hadacheck’s brickyard. “Bond Election Faces Delay” Los Angeles
Times 13 January 1910. Ordinance #18795 N.S. adopted 27 October 1909;
Ordinance #19448 N.S. adopted 7 February 1910; Ordinance #19571 N.S. adopted
28 February 1910; Ordinance #23964 N.S. adopted 9 February 1912.

91
Wiebe 1967; Teaford 1984; Monkkonen 1988. For background on earlier
municipal change, see Teaford (1975) and Hartog (1983).

92
Los Angeles City Ordinance #2288 N.S. adopted 27 August 1894, amended by
Ordinance #2469 N.S. on 26 November 1894 (Los Angeles 1900: 168-169). "Action
of the City Council Sustained" Los Angeles Times 16 April 1895. Koslow 2007: 489-
490.
Lacey had operated the family business in Los Angeles for ten years, primarily
serving residential customers near the Plaza. He had recently moved his business
west to a larger property at the corner of Centennial and Bartlett, across the street
from his own home on Bellevue Avenue (soon to be renamed Sunset Boulevard) and
in concert with the ongoing residential expansion to the northeast, west and south
from the commercial core of the city. By 1895, this residential neighborhood within
an easy walk of the center of Los Angeles was almost completely built out.
The Alpine Street School was located diagonally across the street from the cleaning
plant. Two Methodist Episcopal churches were located on the same block as the
business. One, the Epworth M.E. Church, adjoined Lacey's commercial property.
Ironically, it was this church, of which Lacey was a member and later a trustee, that
by its location triggered the citation and the fine (though the proximity of the
elementary school no doubt contributed).
It is not difficult to imagine that the health inspector had received complaints from
neighbors about the new carpet business that had moved into the populating
neighborhood. Rapidly increasing numbers of residents of the contiguous
unincorporated neighborhoods to the northeast, west and south of Los Angeles voted
in 1895 and 1896 to annex to the city, increasing the city size by close to fifty
percent. The city continued to grow in these directions through annexation and
consolidation over the next two decades; numerous newspaper accounts throughout
the 1890s stressed that the majority of new housing starts was occurring in these
directions.

86

Thanks to Chris Boone (associate professor at Arizona State University) for
bringing to my attention the state supreme court case that resulted from this
ordinance.

93
Ex parte James Lacey 1895.

94
Ex parte James Lacey 1895 : 328-329, 331. "Two Local Test Cases Argued and
Submitted for Decision" Los Angeles Times 23 April 1895; "The Ordinance
Sustained" Los Angeles Times 4 August 1895. Municipal police power was
specifically added to the new state constitution in 1879 (Sargent 1917: 21).
"Now that the point in contention has been decided," Health Officer Steddon
declared his intention to investigate the various cleaning plants in operation. William
Lacey soon built a new home nearby, on Custer Street just south of Sunset
Boulevard. He operated the cleaning business out of a shed in the back (without
reported problems with neighbors or the health officer) until about 1903 when he
ultimately followed the continuing westward real estate development and relocated it
to a commercial district on Sunset Boulevard in what is now the Echo Park
neighborhood. "The Ordinance Sustained" Los Angeles Times 4 August 1895;
"Doings of Builders and Architects" Los Angeles Times 27 April 1902; "Angelino
Heights" Los Angeles Times 14 September 1903. City directories and Sanborn
Insurance maps were used to determine later Lacey residence and business locations.

95
"Women Define Real Nice Man" Los Angeles Times 21 May 1908.

96
"Women Define Real Nice Man" Los Angeles Times 21 May 1908. A few months
later, in a residential neighborhood on the south side of the city, Rudolph Basshard
petitioned the city council for relief from the "boisterous roosters" kept by his
neighbors, complaining of the thousands of hours of sleep lost and the suffering of
his fellow Angelinos. He even sent suggestions that described how a prohibiting
ordinance would benefit the city: a market would develop for roosters that crowed
below the average, as well as another suggestion to develop and market tiny muzzles
to prevent roosters from fully articulating when crowing. He, too, was told that this
was a private, not a public, nuisance and that the city government would do nothing.
Petition #536 submitted 27 June 1908; Petition #565 submitted 3 July 1908.

97
Petition #669 submitted 10 August 1908.

98
Willrich 2003: xxvi. When the Los Angeles Superior Court found a 1906 building
ordinance containing industrial districts to be unconstitutional in 1908, the city
attorney did not pursue an appeal. This is the only case I have found where the city
did not appeal to defend their districting ordinances. Instead, the city attorney crafted

87

a separate replacement industrial ordinance, adopted in 1908, presumably answering
the superior court’s objections. In all subsequent challenges to the industrial and
residence districts, and in most challenges to the earlier single-purpose districts, the
city attorney’s office appealed any courtroom losses to defend city land use
ordinances.
88
Chapter 2

Regulating Land Use: Searching for a Workable Strategy

Introduction
A curious visitor to present day Los Angeles, wandering the blocks
surrounding the historic center of the city near Olvera Plaza, would understandably
be puzzled while considering how the city came to be situated and organized as it is.
A check of the map shows that the ocean coast is far distant to the west and south.
The historic core does not appear to be located at a major transportation crossroads,
even a former one, despite the proximity of Union Station adjacent to the east and
the Hollywood Freeway canyon creating a visual and real boundary with the
remainder of downtown spreading out to the south. It is difficult to imagine the
concretized Los Angeles River a few blocks farther east, with a trickle of water most
of the year, as having any real use; certainly it does not look like a “real” enough
river to have attracted any significant settlement, let alone supported it with river
trade to serve the factories and foundries that once thrived along its unstable banks.
The massive structures of the civic center lie blocks away to the south, across the
“canyon” while the commercial center’s high-rises tower beyond that. A residential
renaissance has only recently commenced to re-people the central city, creating
echoes of the vibrant neighborhoods and the industrial-residential land use conflicts
that spread out in all directions from the Plaza a century and more ago.
1

89
Many factors influence individual locational decisions about where to live, to
work, to start a business; factors that both push from other locations and pull towards
others. As true today as in Los Angeles of the 1880s through 1910s, they range from
national (and global) economic cycles to affordable interstate and international
transit options to neighborhood gaps and opportunities to weather patterns to
geographic chance (the existence of rivers and fertile soils). Formal locational
theories attempt to explain why an activity or land use occurs in one place and not
another, how the value of land impacts the uses to which it is put, and thus the uses
and values surrounding it, and the causes of these differences. Park, Burgess and
McKenzie called them “patterns of regularity” in the location of human activities.
The nineteenth-century agricultural land rent theories of Ricardo and von Thünen,
for example, were based on factors such as soil fertility and access to markets, and
would have been less useful in describing the locational patterns emerging in Los
Angeles in the late nineteenth century. More contemporaneous theories were those of
Richard Hurd and Graham Romeyn Taylor. City land has one purpose, according to
Hurd, which is to provide a place for a building. The economic rationale is nearness.
He proposed that value in urban land results from economic rent, which is related to
location, convenience and proximity to utilities. Taylor accentuated what he in turn
observed: commercial and industrial location in industrial suburbs, as factories
moved out of central cities in search of larger tracts of cheaper land and perhaps
greater control over surroundings.
2

90
Beyond issues of individual affordability and access, choices on where
specifically to locate homes or to construct factories did not rely solely on whether
the district was zoned residential or industrial—especially as “zoning” as we know it
post-dated the founding of many United States cities by decades or even centuries.
The existing urban community would have exerted choices, too, and controls
concerning location. Collective and public rights to a safe, productive and healthful
city were exercised through the police power in the form of municipal land use
regulation—such as public health ordinances, building codes and fire districts—and
were an accepted if not always welcomed facet of urban life, based on traditional and
established municipal government powers.
Los Angeles is popularly portrayed as a city unlike others in the United
States, with an atypical development history. While the particulars differ, as they do
in all cities, in actuality there are many points of resemblance arising from shared
national cultures and institutions. Local, regional and national economies are
necessarily nested, linked and inter-dependent. The diffusion of technological
innovation—in the various sectors of manufacturing, food processing,
communications and transportation—further linked places, though development and
flows were often uneven. A common legal structure shaped state and local
regulations, limited by state and national constitutions that ensured a shared baseline
of fundamental precepts while admitting local distinctiveness.
3

In this chapter, I answer this question: In light of the then-understood notions
of individual property rights, legal precedents and customs such as nuisance and fire
91
districts, and the power of local governments to protect the public welfare through
the use of the police power, what strategies were available to the residents of Los
Angeles through their local officials to cope with the rapid growth and changes in
their community after the 1870s until the turn of the twentieth century?
Investigated first are the public health regulations, shifting fire district
boundaries and several examples of single-purpose districts that multiplied greatly
and covered ever more uses in the 1880s and 1890s in Los Angeles. These
regulations were initiated primarily at the behest of petitioning individuals and small
groups of neighbors, aroused quick response in the city council, and were just as
quickly altered, amended or rescinded in subsequent city council action.
The genesis of a 1904 regulation is then more closely examined. This
ordinance restricting the location of Chinese laundries is credited with creating much
of the foundation for the city’s land use regulation that followed. Chinese laundries,
and more precisely the Chinese proprietors of these businesses, had been targeted up
and down the Pacific coast by a wide variety of local ordinances. Many of these were
struck down when taken to court, while subsequent ordinances were recast to pass
constitutional muster. The Los Angeles city council followed suit, with various
attempts to restrict the location of Chinese laundries, Chinatown and Chinese
residents themselves through fire limits, public health regulations and small single-
purpose districts, until finally in 1904 the council created the first districting
ordinance in the country intended to protect homes, entirely prohibiting Chinese
hand laundries in three residential districts. These land use cases from roughly 1880
92
to 1904 will indicate how the city council resolved—or attempted to smooth out—
conflicts over land use, and developed at least temporarily-effective solutions in a
situation of rapid urbanization and modernization.
4

Conceptual Precursors to the Separation of Land Uses
The separation of land uses within human settlements in all cultures is a
necessity for the survival of the inhabitants. People have sensed this for much of
human history, long before they began to gain more exact knowledge of the causes
and sources of accidents, illness and disease, in a more or less gradual best-practice
learning process. The basic concept underlying this customary behavior of separation
is a general awareness that health and welfare are promoted by some activities, while
potentially damaged by others. For example, the waste and refuse of daily life would
be tossed outside the inhabited area, perhaps in a particular or designated area. The
need for clean drinking and cooking water would tend to require that the customary
location for other uses such as butchering, laundry and bathing might be
downstream. Certain activities or more specialized occupations would be required,
again either by custom or by regulation, to be undertaken within certain quarters or
districts, or outside the settlement entirely, where smells, blood, threat of fire would
be less. Over time these customs and taboos might become more normalized through
codes of conduct or laws. In an American city like Los Angeles, this would take the
form of municipal regulations, or ordinances, called for by individuals, civic
93
organizations, various city officers (such as the health inspector) or initiated by the
city councilmen, as local situations warranted.
5

A second conceptual foundation that sets up an acceptance for the separation
of land uses is the existence from prehistory into the modern era of the city wall.
While walls functioned as defensive devices to protect whatever they encircled from
external danger, they came to have additional purposes. A wall encircling a village or
city of whatever size will inevitably create at a minimum two discrete districts—the
portion within (“us”) and that part outside (“them” or that which is foreign). The
very material-ness of this boundary created a much more concrete delineation
between the two spheres, as well as a fixed boundary of influence, of the extent of
effective control. And so besides marking districts of safety within and danger
without, a city wall represented a perimeter of control within and of lessened control
outside. Land could be used for activities outside the city walls that might be more
strictly controlled if the use occurred inside the city gate. Walls also helped to create
the perception (as well as the reality) of a safe space for growth and development.
We can see this in the necessity to expand the walls as a city grew and became too
dense to be contained any longer within the walls. Development would spill out
beyond the walls, and be included within a newer set of city walls (if security
concerns made them necessary). Uses relegated to the outer areas of the walled city
might also eventually be pushed outside the walls, and those uses already without the
walls would consequently be pressured to move even farther out. Use districts, even
informal ones, were thus not set but rather were always in flux, depending on the
94
given expansion (or retraction) in the size of the settlement. Given the rapid
economic and demographic changes occurring in Los Angeles in the last decades of
the nineteenth century then, it follows that solutions to land use conflicts would
likewise be transitory.
6

Rapid Growth, Rapid Change
The size and composition of the population of Los Angeles changed
dramatically in the final decades of the nineteenth century and resulted in the
eclipsing of the older Californio land traditions by the new American culture,
economy and legal system. The rancho system, legacy of Spanish and Mexican land
grants, and the very Spanish appearance of Los Angeles “changed overnight,”
according to Carey McWilliams, as hordes of settlers with a completely different
legal and economic heritage arrived. That new heritage did not recognize the
traditional más ò menos property boundaries and pastoral economy and instead
substituted a cash economy focused on real estate, subdivision and land speculation.
The first land boom occurred at the end of the Civil War when men who had left
military service made their way west with their families in search of work, reputed
high wages and new opportunities—especially once the transcontinental railroad was
completed to San Francisco in 1869. Starting at just over fifty-seven hundred people
enumerated in the 1870 census, Los Angeles almost doubled in population by the
time of the next census, to more than eleven thousand. The opening of the Southern
Pacific Railroad in 1876 allowed much easier and direct movement from eastern
95
cities; a second wave of speculative fever arrived with the land demands created by
the arriving train passengers. After the Santa Fe Railroad was completed ten years
later and prices to travel from the more easterly areas of the United States dropped,
the rate of growth was even higher. A third land boom began in the late 1880s, when
the population peaked at around eighty thousand, then dropped to about fifty
thousand by the time of the 1890 census.
7

As Table 4 below indicates, while the population remained low in absolute
terms throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, the density of settlement
increased at a rapid rate. This overall increase in density from under four hundred
residents to more than seventeen hundred per square mile must have seemed
enormous, as were the increases in the 1890s and 1900s to more than twenty-three
hundred and thirty-seven hundred, respectively, per square mile. The urbanization of
the former pueblo of Los Angeles was well underway.
8

96
Table 4
Residential Density Change 1850-1910
City and County of Los Angeles

Los Angeles City
Los Angeles County
(Outside LA City)
9

Residents per
square mile
Percentage
increase in
density
Residents per
square mile
Percentage
increase in
density
1850 57.48 — 0.45 —
1860 150.12 161% 1.43 221%
1870 196.10 31% 1.98 38%
1880 382.85 95% 4.58 132%
1890 1725.27 351% 12.59 175%
1900 2368.82 37% 16.79 33%
1910 3748.22 58% 46.26 176%

Source: City area at each Decennial Census, from Davis 1934;
Author’s calculation based on city and county population in US Census 1850-1910.

Many Midwestern farmers cashed out and headed west to Southern
California. They had benefited from several years of good harvests in the 1880s as
well as rising land prices and favorable shipping costs when the railroads expanded
and competed by dropping freight rates. Responding to the promotional efforts of
railroads and civic organizations, they invested in land and homes, fueling the boom
in real estate and town formation in the later 1880s. Migration continued through
economic booms and busts over the next decades, stimulated by continuing local
booster campaigns.
10

Nationally, homeownership was increasing as more families found it an
accessible and affordable means of wealth acquisition. Within a concentrating
business and industrial climate, it was more difficult to accumulate wealth through
97
operating small-scale businesses. Incomes were increasing for non-farm workers
(thirty-five percent nationally from 1890-1920). Locally in Los Angeles, developers
created subdivisions of affordable small lots and economical construction in an effort
to capture a broader segment of the new arrivals. The proportion of families owning
their own homes in Los Angeles was much higher than any other city in the United
States by 1900. After agriculture, the most important industry in Los Angeles was
real estate development and home construction.
11

Wards and Growing Heterogeneity
In the midst of this growing urban complexity, new Los Angeles charters
created geographically-defined districts, or wards, (smaller political divisions) from
whence representatives were elected to the city council. At first, these wards were
not much differentiated as to land use; until the early 1880s, the city was still
comprised primarily of an homogenous mix of residential and commercial uses. By
the mid-1880s, industrial uses were beginning to constitute a larger share of the land
area in some of the wards—particularly in those along the Los Angeles River where
the main railroad routes were located, as well as in some of the older portions of the
city—while residential neighborhoods continued to expand in the west and northeast
wards. Working-class residents and newer low-income immigrants also located in
the wards along the flats near the river, close to the factories, occupying older and
cheaper housing.
12

98
The system of ward districts, common to cities throughout the United States
in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was the primary means of establishing
representation for local citizens. During the same period, the powers of the city
council shifted and narrowed, and each city councilman (as the elected ward
alderman was known in Los Angeles) endeavored to maximize the benefits to his
own constituents. The city councilman was the person responsible for obtaining
services, improvements, licenses and permits within his ward. His primary interest
was in representing both the voters who resided in his district and the business
concerns co-located there—constituencies with often widely divergent concerns. The
councilman was also often a businessman, often a business owner—though the
business might be located in another ward—and thus was ever mindful of his own
interests.
13

Up until the late 1870s, Los Angeles was divided into three wards. According
to the city charter, each should contain roughly equal numbers of white male
inhabitants. These original wards were straightforwardly demarcated by two parallel
east-west lines that extended from border to border just north of the Plaza and at
First Street. (See the upper map in Figure 6) Ward One and Ward Three extended
across, respectively, the entire northern and southern city boundaries; each covered
about three times the area of the much-narrower Ward Two, indicating that the
population remained densest in the central portion of the city. Demographic
differences between neighborhoods were already apparent at this time, if not
politically exploited in the same manner as ward differences were later (especially
99
just after the turn of the last century). The Plaza area around Calle de los Negros
(also known as Nigger Alley) as well as “Sonoratown” adjacent to the north along
Upper Main, location of the oldest adobe structures, Chinatown, Mexican
neighborhoods and numerous taverns and houses of prostitution, contrasted markedly
with upper-class neighborhoods such as Paredon Blanco, on the bluffs of Boyle
Heights across the river.
14

During the 1870s, city population doubled to just over eleven thousand. The
city council adopted a resolution to increase the number of wards to five in mid-
1878, in time for the December general municipal election. These wards were to be,
as before, roughly equivalent in population. Besides the increased number, the
resolution depicted boundaries that for the first time followed the route of major
streets. The northern-most and southern-most wards (Wards One and Five), where
population was the sparsest, remained the largest in land area. (See the lower map in
Figure 6) Evidence of the direction of residential development can be seen in the
configuration of Wards Two, Three and Four. Ward Two, encompassing the Plaza
area, remained narrow on its western end and widened to the east, encompassing
more though less-densely settled territory. The more-westerly Ward Three and
easterly Ward Four, separated by Main Street, were carved from the old Ward Three.
The need to create new wards south of the Plaza and to the west gives an indication
that population concentrated here.
15

100
Figure 6
Los Angeles Ward Boundaries prior to 1889
Three-Ward Configuration prior to 1878 Charter
Hoover
[Sunset]
Macy
Mission
First
Alameda
Los Angeles River
Arroyo Seco River
Upper Main
Ward 1
Ward 2
Ward 3
Santa Barbara
[now Martin Luther King Dr]
Present city boundary
Fountain
Bellevue
Plaza
Five-Ward Configuration from 1878 until 1889 Charter
Ward 1
Ward 2
Ward 3
Ward 4
Ward 5
Los Angeles River
Arroyo Seco River
[Sunset]
Bellevue
Mission
First
Brooklyn
Ninth
Main
Fifth - Sixth
Hoover
Fountain
Present city boundary
Alameda
Plaza
Santa Barbara
[now Martin Luther King Dr]
Beverly
2 miles 0

101
The 1890 census would confirm the tremendous rate of growth: four and one
half times the number of residents counted just ten years previously. The new city
charter, adopted in 1889, had been written to respond by increasing the number of
wards again, to nine. The boundaries of these nine wards remained roughly the same
over the next two decades, changing only to incorporate newly annexed areas
contiguous with the adjacent ward. (See Figure 7) Ward districting was dropped in
favor of at-large elections in 1909, in keeping with the general nationwide reformist
trends. No doubt, this was additionally a pragmatic change in Los Angeles, given the
continuing growth of the city through annexation of parcels that would have
necessitated constant adjustments in ward boundaries.
16

102
Figure 7
0 2 miles
Showing nine wards created by 1889 City Charter
and including annexed territory prior to 1906
Los Angeles Ward Boundaries after 1889
Ward 1 Ward 2
Ward 3
Ward
8
Ward 7
Ward 6
Ward 5
Ward 4
Ward 9
Seventh
Washington
Figueroa
Main
[now Olympic]
First Beverly
Fountain
Arroyo Seco River
Los Angeles River
Hoover
Vermont
Arlington Santa Barbara
[now Martin Luther King Drive]
Slauson
Mission
Plaza
Tenth

103
By this time, too, the wards were distinctly different in character, and were
often referred to as such in newspaper accounts (for example, Ward Seven and Ward
Six were often referred to as the workingmen’s wards or union wards, while the
western wards were called the “better” wards, or the “high class” wards). The health
officer, in his 1891 annual report on conditions in the city, excerpted below in Table
5, gave a detailed description of the ward differences that he observed. As we shall
see in this chapter and the next, attempts were made to use wards as the basis for
different types of use districts, peaking in 1904.
17

Table 5

Ward Descriptions, 1891

Ward Descriptions of property and residents
1 Principally residence property, some stores and lodging houses, numerous
small dwellings, thickly settled.
2 Newly settled in western portion. Eastern portion oldest settled, thickly
populated, many adobe houses, Mexicans, Italian tenement houses,
Chinese, business blocks and a few hotels [Plaza location].
3 Western half: sparsely populated, residence property. Eastern half:
business blocks, residences, hotels and many boarding houses.
4 Residence property, principally for richer classes, some business property.
5 Residence property for richer classes, mostly isolated dwellings.
6 Mostly suburban, orange groves, vineyards, residence property, sparsely
populated [settled later, also by “richer classes”].
7 Thickly settled, small dwellings, factories, retail business blocks. Many
poor Mexicans and Negroes. Many tenement houses greatly crowded,
unimproved land in southern portion.
8 Many tenement houses greatly crowded. French, Germans, Italians,
Greeks, Negroes, Mexicans, Chinese. Crowded [repeated in original].
Many small dwellings, wholesale business blocks, many second and
third class hotels, factories, railroad headquarters, gas works.
9 Sparsely settled, much unimproved land. Some fine residences [on the
bluffs east of river].

Adapted by the author from the Los Angeles Health Officer’s Annual Report, 1891 (LACRC)
104
Conflagrations and Plagues: Municipal Approaches to Fire Safety and Public Health
Two long-standing natural risks to human settlements were outbreaks of
diesease and fire. While settlements remained small and dispersed, the dangers of
widespread outbreaks of contagious disease would be limited by the amount of trade
and contact between different settlement groups. The same can be said of fires: a
building fire might have devastating consequences for the occupants or owners but
will be less likely to directly affect many neighbors given the long distances that
flames would need to leap to reach them. Nuisance affects related to noxious land
uses would be minimal. These risks changed as people began to live geographically
closer together at greater densities and to use urbanized lands for different and more
intense functions. Communicable disease and fires spread more easily when people
have more daily contact with each other and live closer together.
18

Fire Districts: Fire, which is both elemental to human existence when
manageable and a basis for fear when uncontrollable, seriously threatened the very
existence of the denser human settlements that began to swell in the early modern
era. Wherever people began to collect in larger numbers, and the uses of urban land
increased in variety and intensity to serve the needs of more residents and increased
trade, the risk of fire increased. This was especially true in center cities, frequently
the oldest sections of cities, with the oldest structures, as newer development spread
out. Adjacent to ports, waterways and shipping, these became commercial and
business districts where goods were warehoused and flammable goods might be
stored. Risk increased again where structures—both commercial and residential—
105
shared common walls, and yet again where more economical construction (or earlier
construction) demanded the use of wood.
The power to control building materials and uses of structures on property
within fire limits (or districts) is perhaps the best known and most pervasive of the
early land use restrictions. Edward Bassett called it “incomplete zoning” but also “a
true form of zoning because different districts were covered by different
regulations.”
19

“One of the crucial public safety concerns [ . . . fire] did not merely endanger
the people’s health or economy or morality, it threatened their very being,” wrote
William Novak. The movement of the population from rural areas to cities, and the
resultant increased intensity of land use, increased the risk of fire that could affect
large numbers of structures and inhabitants. For example, the City of London
historically experienced devastating fires, most famously in 1666. Lacking modern
fire-fighting skills, access to ready water supplies, and the fire-fighting institutions to
prevent the spread of conflagrations once started, urban governments resorted to
prevention through regulation. They created “districts” encompassing the most
densely settled and intensely used spaces where building materials were limited to
those that would not readily burn and prohibited cheaper wooden construction. As
cities grew, more complex sets of fire limits were created, with multiple districts,
often formed of concentric circles of gradually lessening restriction. The most
restrictive laws were reserved for the central core, usually the densest developed, and
also frequently the location of the most valuable commercial land and property. They
106
also controlled the types of allowable occupations that could make use of those
structures, forcing those uses more susceptible to accidental fires to move further
from the center to more sparsely settled areas. This experience in England, and in the
city of London in particular, is important to the history of the implementation of
municipal fire limits and regulations in the United States. The English settlers in the
American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries naturally drew on
their knowledge and experience of urban life, government and regulation in what
was the commercial center and largest city in England.
20

As American cities of the nineteenth century increased in number and size,
and as urban populations grew denser, the public welfare risk of uncontrolled
conflagration and damage grew. While municipal fire limits were commonly
adopted, city centers around the country continued to experience great losses from
these fires. Efforts to reduce fires took place on two different levels: the building and
the district. Individual buildings have incorporated improved fireproofing technology
in building construction since the end of the eighteenth century, nudged by both
building codes and consumer demand. In an effort to protect the welfare of the city as
a whole, municipal governments took the same actions that they had since colonial
times: they demarcated whole districts where fire resistant construction materials
were required and certain land uses were forbidden or greatly restricted.
21

Generally, no state-enabling act was passed to specifically grant cities the
power to create districts for fire safety. “[T]hey seemed to have grown up as part of
the implied legislative powers of a municipality,” in Edward Bassett’s view, “legal
107
fire fighting” as he termed it. Courts affirmed over and over the right and power of
cities to draft restrictions, generally upholding the inherent police power of cities to
protect its citizens and structures from fire danger; after the Civil War, this became
the predominant legal view.
22

Whilst adobe was the predominant building material in Los Angeles, large
destructive fires were rare. The growing number of American settlers, however,
disdained adobe and built of wood and brick in the growing city center, according to
Robert Fogelson, while merchants stored ever-larger quantities of flammable
materials such as hay and kerosene. Fires increased in frequency and magnitude. Fire
limits were first established in the 1855 Revised Ordinances. Two districts were
described; the smaller one centered on the Plaza area presumably the more restrictive
(presumably because while the boundaries of the districts were described, there is
nothing in the original ordinance to identify prohibited uses). By 1860, a clarifying
section had been added to limit storage of more than one ton of flammable materials
such as hay, grass and straw; or to build a frame structure, within the defined small
area around the Plaza.
23

For most of the 1870s, fire district boundaries remained fairly fixed. After
1879, though, the city council revised the limits at least annually, and sometimes two
or three times in one year. Keeping up with downtown commercial growth and
construction proved a constant game of catch up. The maps in Figure 8 portray a
representative selection of fire district ordinances. The two top maps, from 1877 and
1882, each show the two nested districts of the General Fire Limits.
108
Figure 8
Los Angeles River
San Pedro
Bellevue [Sunset]
Figueroa
Pico
11th (Olympic)
6th
1st
Macy
Mission
Alameda
Los Angeles River
1874 Fire Districts
Plaza
Los Angeles River
Alameda
Mission
Macy
1st
6th
11th (Olympic)
Pico
San Pedro
Figueroa
Bellevue [Sunset]
1882 Fire Districts
Plaza
1910 Fire Districts
Los Angeles River
Alameda
Mission
Macy
1st
6th
11th (Olympic)
Pico
San Pedro
Figueroa
Bellevue [Sunset]
Beverly
Plaza
0 2 miles
Central and General Fire District Boundaries
in Center City Los Angeles *
* For 1874 and 1882: note small Central District #1 (dark gray). Everything else within General Limits (tan) is in District #2.
For 1910: only Fire District #1 (dark grey) is depicted. Not shown for 1910: District #2 (San Pedro), #3 (Wilmington),
#4 (Hollywood), #5 (remainder of city not included in Districts #1-4).
General fire district
(less restrictive)
Central fire district
(most restrictive)

109
The ordinances listed what was unlawful within the general limits; for
example, storage of more than small quantities of flammable materials, manufacture
of acids or explosive materials, and the manner of storage and waste removal. Within
Fire District #1 (the smaller, shaded districts on the map), furthermore, the
ordinances specify a building code whereby only non-combustible materials could be
used on new construction or additions, while specifications for outside and party
walls, roofs, windows, doorways, and brick and mortar quality were spelled out.
Open trash fires were prohibited. Note that in just five years from 1877, the council
decided to more than double the area of the General Fire Limits because of the
downtown growth. In the 1910 ordinance, most of the early General Fire Limits area
had been incorporated into District #1. By this time, the city council had adopted
separate detailed building codes and had begun to fashion industrial and residence
districts in separate ordinances (detailed in Chapter 4). The fire districting code in
1910 then applied only to the most dangerous, flammable and explosive property
uses.
24

That the successive fire district ordinances were generally accepted by the
Los Angeles populace as an appropriate limit on private property rights is evident
from the lack of court challenges in the records. The limits were often in dispute,
though. Numerous petitions to the city council were penned by property owners
desirous of an exception from the fire district, generally to build a frame structure.
The boundaries were sometimes redrawn to exclude blocks or properties of
petitioners, sometimes to allow an existing business to remain in operation. Financial
110
hardship was the predominant reason for requests for exceptions. The council also
received requests to extend the boundaries, generally from property owners anxious
to prevent substandard construction in the neighborhood, as poor quality structures
would cluster just outside the fire limits. Infractions were dealt with by the police
court and fines were levied. The council carefully protected the central business core
from fire with the general agreement of the city’s inhabitants, and the prodding of the
fire insurance companies.
25

Public Health: Sanitary reform and improvement was a fundamental concern
of nineteenth century government officials. Filth theory (a belief that disease arises
from dirty environmental conditions) drove many campaigns to clean up (or drive
out) properties, neighborhoods, and whole communities. The later, more
scientifically-based germ theory transferred policy focus from dirty conditions to the
germs contained by those conditions (not much of a change perhaps). Belief that
clean fresh air and plentiful light produced healthier bodies and a more proper
society led to such reforms as the tenement laws in New York City.
26

Local boards of health and health officers, widespread by the nineteen
century, worked to prevent the spread of contagious disease and avoidable illness.
Authorized under local police powers to safeguard public welfare—which expanded
in scope in the latter nineteenth century in tandem with land use regulatory responses
to urbanization, density and industrialization—their field ranged beyond traditional
powers of quarantine to include such subjects as oversight of public markets and
food sales, materials storage, water quality, sewage treatment, trash pickup,
111
cemeteries and burial practices, hospitals, factory operations, the keeping of live
animals and the disposal of dead ones. Recent immigrant populations were
frequently the focus of sanitation campaigns, as public health officials endeavored to
assimilate newcomers into more healthful “American” conduct. Other groups (like
the Chinese in Los Angeles, as we shall see later in this chapter), were viewed as so
far outside of the bounds of “normal” behavior that they, their homes and businesses,
and their very existence in the city were considered public nuisances whose
abatement could not come too quickly if public health was to be preserved. Local
health codes, once adopted, retained the force of law, and were enforced through
inspections, citations, fines and mandatory abatement of nuisances.
27

The Los Angeles common council authorized a salary to hire a health
inspector in 1873. While standards were recommended for such land uses as stables
and rooming houses, and vaccination programs were regular, sanitation was his main
concern. After all, by the booming 1880s, Los Angeles’s reputation as a healthy city,
“renowned the world over as [a] resort for invalids,” was at stake. Health Officer
Walter Lindley continued in his annual report to the council, “[I]t behooves us . . . to
put it in the very best sanitary condition.” The major public nuisances on which he
reported that year were sewage and Chinatown. Annual health officer reports through
the 1880s announced the number of nuisances cited (415 in 1886), the annual
accumulation of new sewers constructed, and the “very large number of Earthen
privies that have been Abated and replaced with patent Water Closetts.” Increasing
challenges due to the rapid population increases of the 1880s and 1890s were horse
112
manure, dead animals and garbage. Health Officer MacGowan recommended
building a crematory in 1889. Besides these activities, the health officer also
investigated reports of disease, and maintained regular reports of births and deaths.
28

After the 1889 charter created a permanent board of health (only
intermittently convened since 1873), and required further professionalization by
including more physicians on the board, the health inspector’s office became the
primary source of public nuisance abatement. In 1891, for example, 3723 nuisances
were abated, almost six hundred cases involving dead animal removal, and over a
third involving sewerage problems. More than six thousand nuisance complaints
were examined and corrected in 1892, primarily through inspections but also through
citizen complaint and petition (the police department abated another thirteen
hundred). “By the exercise of much patience, pertinacity and tact, we are usually able
to get citizens to make some changes in the sanitary conditions of their premises as
we have desired.” The health officer indicated that in only twelve cases were
complaints issued through the police court and the offending parties arrested. Three
years later, three inspectors canvassing the entire city investigated more than twenty
thousand sanitary nuisances. A major issue brought up in the 1895 annual report
concerned non-resident owners of empty lots overgrown with weeds and often used
to dump garbage. The health officer complained that the state legislature had not yet
empowered municipal boards of health to issue liens against these properties to cover
the costs of the city abating the nuisances.
29

113
Residents petitioned directly to the board of health at regular monthly
meetings about nuisances. Inspectors investigated and property owners were notified.
Some petitions were referred to the city council when other city departments had
jurisdiction. The board of health also lobbied the city council for additional or
changed regulations, based on inspection findings. These included new plumbing
codes, sewer connection requirements, food sales and preparation ordinances, as well
as a comprehensive new sanitary code. In all these activities, concerns over public
health led to limitations on individual rights when inspectors and public health
officers felt that the welfare of the city was affected.
30

“The Undersigned Being a Property Owner”—Popular Pressure for Expanding
Single-Purpose Districting
Municipal fire limits offered limited protection for the commercial core of the
city, primarily from destructive fires, and were amended to take into account the
expanding central area as well as new industries and technologies. Outside the
central business district, and for any land uses involving non-flammable activities,
nuisance law provided recourse for landowners alleging their individual property
rights were damaged. They could sue in court—private nuisance suits against their
neighbors for impinging on their own property use and enjoyment. Or they could
take complaints to the city health officer, charged with abating public nuisances
within the city.
31

114
Beginning in the 1880s, Los Angeles property owners increasingly banded
together to petition the city council to abate nuisances. Residents hand-wrote or
typed their petitions, placed their signatures upon them and often circulated them to
the neighbors to add their own names and addresses. Invariably, each petition began
with some variation of a statement that the signer[s] was a resident, a property
owner, or a taxpayer—in effect asserting his or her individual property rights. The
council, concerned with the health of the local real estate sector (as well as their
voting constituents), more often than not complied with neighborhood wishes.
Residents used the petition process more and more frequently from 1880 through the
early 1900s to request that the council create various single-purpose districts—areas
designed to limit or control particular uses of property—to protect their homes and
businesses.
32

Local citizens regularly demanded single-purpose districts to apply “social
zoning” limitations on particular behaviors and occupations deemed unsavory or
immoral, at least in certain areas of the city. Bawdy houses (houses of prostitution)
were one of the uses so restricted. Limits were also placed on the type of building
that could be used as a bawdy house. A one-story house was off-limits, as was
operation on the ground floor or basement of any structure, to avoid street-level
visual confrontation with the business. By the turn of the century, districting
restrictions had concentrated almost all brothels to the area just north of the old Plaza
and adjacent to Chinatown—a low-income Mexican and Chinese neighborhood—in
what had become the red light district.
33

115
Liquor sales districts applying to wholesale (bottle stores) and retail (saloons)
establishments were created, expanded, contracted or removed through the agency of
individual and neighborhood petition to the city council, and often ignored due to
government corruption—if news accounts are to be believed. Perhaps this is one
example where the influence of the newer more conservative residents from rural
midwestern areas can be seen. Early in the 1900s, the civic Righteousness League of
the Church Federation “declared open war” on liquor stores and bawdy restaurants,
according to the many newspaper accounts. Representatives of the group (as well as
local churches) appeared at the city council en masse with petitions to greatly limit
the locations where liquor stores and saloons could conduct business. The city
council also recognized one of the side effects of more restrictive regulation within
the city: the relocation of liquor stores (in this situation) to land just outside the
jurisdiction of the city, primarily on unincorporated county lands where regulation
and enforcement was weaker.
34

Land uses associated with illness, dying and death triggered another group of
conflicts. Cemeteries were gradually zoned out of the city. Morgues (providing
undertaking or mortuary services) were increasingly unwelcome in residence
districts—at least according to the Los Angeles Realty Association. Hospitals also
were unwanted. Though many invalids came to Los Angeles for health reasons, their
concentration (especially that of impoverished patients) in a hospital or sanitarium
was not looked upon kindly, especially where property values were concerned.
Medical care of a non-disease nature was also affected. A neighborhood turned out
116
en masse, according to news reports, to protest the location of a maternity hospital in
the Westlake neighborhood. The groaning of the patients constituted a nuisance, they
said. After a number of these protests were received, the city council created a
hundred-block no-hospital district in 1904 in this Westside developing residential
area.
35

Animals in the City: Animals were an integral part of cities in the late
nineteenth century, and were in fact much more numerous than the people, with the
horse population in particular expanding at a rate several times higher than the
human population. Animals played simultaneous roles in commercial food provision,
transportation and backyard agriculture. Before the advent of motorized vehicles in
the early twentieth century, horse-power literally moved the city, and continued to be
the main source of freight movement for some time afterwards, as McShane and Tarr
write in their detailed work on urban horses. Stabling, feeding and caring for these
essential and numerous city residents required vast resources. The influx of formerly
rural residents accustomed to self-reliance in food production, as well as the
commercialization of daily life activities, and the desire perhaps to make extra
money, resulted in increasing conflicts with more urban-minded neighbors.
Contested ideas about the appropriate place of animals in the city and attempts to
balance conflicting individual land use rights took place along with renegotiated
relationships between animals and humans.
36

Health regulations initiated by the public health officer and petition-inspired
single-purpose regulations increasingly controlled and restricted many aspects of
117
animal-human relations and encounters in Los Angeles. The land uses in the central
core reflected efforts to control the presence of animals as early as the 1870s. G.M.
Baldwin and others petitioned in 1871 to abate the nuisance of a hog pen near their
properties at Temple and New High Streets, while other residents protested the
corralling of horses on Fort Street (now Broadway) near Fourth Street the same year.
Petitions complaining about the stabling of horses skyrocketed after the turn of the
last century, in tandem with the increase in numbers of teamsters and horse-teams.
Commercial development downtown and (primarily) westward housing construction
surrounded existing stabling establishments. Private barns on residential lots also
caused complaint. “Stamping and pawing of the horses at night” disturbed sleep and
prevented sales of properties unless steep discounts were given. A private
sanitarium’s business allegedly was ruined by a nearby stable on Beaudry Street “in
the midst of a thickly inhabited district,” just west of the Plaza area. Forty-eight
horses were kept on the small lot, said the complaint. Livestock, including horses,
produced “a stench very objectionable to your petitioners . . . [We feel] that the lives
and health of our families are endangered . . . [D]ay and night unbearable odors . . .
disturb and offend . . . homes and families.”
37

The only limitation available, adopted in 1899 and amended in 1905, applied
to a district downtown (extending south to Seventh Street), that required a certificate
of adequate drainage issued by the plumbing inspector and forbidding operation
within 100 feet of a public building. There was as yet no ordinance limiting the
number of horses one might keep outside this district.
118
The stabling of a large number of horses in any residential district of this city
is unavoidably a nuisance, no matter how carefully conditions therefor may
be provided. We feel that the residential districts should not be exposed to
this danger, and we are desirous that dwelling abodes shall not be compelled
to suffer the uncertainty involved in the possibility of an establishment, at any
time, by their side, of horse yards under the guise of private stables.

The sentiments in this petition prevailed. After 1908, commercial stable operators
were required to obtain a police commission license to remain in operation, though
only after presenting written approval from a majority of neighbors on both sides of
the block. Privately-kept horses in residential areas came under the purview of the
successive residence districting ordinances adopted from 1908. Numbers were
variously capped at two or four horses in later ordinances through the 1910s.
38

Roosters, representing a land use conflict first described in Chapter 1, were
not the only fowl about which city residents complained. Residents commonly kept
chickens, pigeons and other birds. When they were allowed to roam off the property,
made too much noise, or were located too near to adjoining homes, property owners
petitioned. Chicken districts resulted, where numbers and conditions of maintaining
flocks were delineated. In 1891, the use of the fire limits was proposed for a chicken
district “where lawless and unruly fowls of both sexes and all descriptions” would be
restricted, according to the Los Angeles Times. When informed of the ordinance’s
approval “restricting the rights of fowls,” a former city councilman replied that there
was no use to such an ordinance. He continued,
Now, I have had my experience with chickens and it has been a long one. I
made my living raising chickens. I have raised 1,500 on a half acre lot and my
next door neighbor never complained. I am going to raise all the chickens I
119
want either in or out of the fire limits. They can pass all the ordinances they
want to and it will make no difference to me.

If the “Chicken Champion” had supporters, they were not well-organized, as
restrictive ordinances continued to be adopted, though there is no record of their
immediate effectiveness.
39

Fourteen residents requested restrictions on roaming chickens around Bixel
and Seventh Streets in 1894. The next year, twenty residents requested another
chicken district to the north, four residents for one to the south, and eight residents
asked for one west of the original petition, extending all the way to the western city
limits. After deliberations by various city council committees and city attorney
research, ordinances were approved. Several petitions in 1896 resulted in additional
chicken districts, in areas farther south. Emma Cooke and others asked for a
restrictive district east of Alameda between Second and Ninth Streets to the river; an
ordinance in July 1897 granted that request. Several weeks later, the ordinance was
repealed after a counter-request was filed. This type of action, reaction and reversal
occurred more and more frequently as land users increasingly contested their land
use rights.
40

“The Cows Must Go”:
41
The keeping of family milk cows and small dairies
generated more complaints than any other animals, and resulted in seemingly
endlessly-amended cow districts. In 1885, a limit of two cows per property in the
area bounded by Main Street, Sixth Street, Bunker Hill Avenue and Temple Street
was approved. General consent to keep cows within the city limits was approved in
120
1887 and placed under the supervision of the board of health to ensure that nearby
residents were not inconvenienced. By 1900, complaints centered on areas of new
housing construction south and west of downtown—Vermont and Eleventh Streets,
Vermont and Twenty-Second Streets, and the Pico Heights residential developments,
for example. In 1903, petitions were received from residents further west, from
Western Avenue neighborhoods, and east, from Brooklyn Heights. Requested
districts were sometimes quite small, just a block in area. In the next few years,
larger, numbered districts were created in part from the smaller individual districts in
developing parts of the city. Residents near Cow District #3 petitioned to be included
in the district in 1909. Thirty-two other residents opposed being included, for “…it
will be a great detriment to us in not getting fresh milk direct from the cows in our
neighborhood, as we prefer it to regular dairy milk, which is from ten-twelve hours
older when we receive it.”
42

Household milk cows and, to a lesser extent, other animals, continued to be
the subject of numerous petitions over the next twenty years as urbanization and
residential expansion continued. Also contributing was the annexation of formerly
unincorporated properties where some residents then availed themselves of stricter
city regulations and greater police oversight when they could to force removal of
backyard agricultural animals. They complained too about commercial dairies,
stables and animal lots. After 1912, when residence and industrial districting applied
to the entire incorporated city, these businesses were either granted exceptions from
121
the residence districts, incorporated into new industrial districts or required to
move.
43

Oleophobia: In 1892, Edward Doheny struck oil on his lot near West Second
Street just north of the Crown Hill neighborhood in the Second Ward. This near-
western “suburb,” as well as Angelino Heights built on the next hill north, rivaled
Bunker Hill for grand Victorian homes and quiet shady streets. The discovery of the
oil district, running two miles from north of the Plaza near the river in Ward Two,
southwest through Chavez Ravine to the Westlake neighborhood (in the Third
Ward), dramatically changed the character of these residential neighborhoods over
the succeeding years. Derricks, tanks, pipelines, cables strung across roadways;
steam- and gasoline-driven motors; as well as smoke, fires and oil running in the
street gutters became common sights. By 1895, the city clerk reported a conservative
three hundred wells in the district, perhaps based on licensing fees paid. Other
sources placed the number of wells by 1897 in the area stretching all the way to the
western city boundary at closer to twenty-five hundred wells. As Dan Johnson points
out, this is one example of the continuing conflict between economic development
and the preservation of residence areas in Los Angeles.
44

Many residents were horrified at the sight of oil derricks encroaching on their
homes. The discovery of oil caused a malady afflicting the oilmen, “oleophobia”
according to one petitioner, whereby “they lose all respect for the right of
householders.” Other residents, looking to share in possible profits, opposed any
municipal restrictions and sunk their own wells in the yards around their homes. The
122
city council attempted first to control the situation by prohibiting oil wells except
through the granting of permits; the city attorney pointed out it would be
unenforceable as well as unconstitutional. The alternatives, he said, were to outlaw
drilling completely—hardly politically or economically feasible—or confine it to
certain districts. Attempts were then made to draw boundary lines for an oil district
where drilling and derricks would be allowed, despite the fact that the extent of the
oil reserves was in dispute and a number of homeowners wished not to be included.
Permits were required for each derrick erected, though until an additional assistant
inspector was authorized in 1897, the quarterly fees often went uncollected and the
wells un-inspected. City commissions were not in agreement about how to proceed,
in part because of the complex sets of rights and benefits to be considered. Whose
rights were preeminent—individual owners, either advocating rights to drill
themselves or wanting to prevent neighboring owners from doing so, or the city itself
and the immense potential public benefit of the oil industry? The fire commission
requested a map showing the location of all boring licenses (as well as locations of
complaints) in order to set oil-drilling district boundaries. The board of health
recommended prohibiting all oil refining while the board of public works wanted to
prohibit all oil businesses.
45

During much of the 1890s, the oil industry, oil refineries and the problem of
oil wells in the hill districts west of downtown was the predominant land use issue
confronting the city council. As we have seen, the city council did not act decisively
to abate the public nuisance of the oil industry. The subject touched on important
123
local economic issues. Abundant stores of fuel oil were necessary for businesses to
operate; importing was expensive and local resources would be a significant asset in
attracting business expansion. Regulation increased over the decade, though
restraints on industry were not onerous. Additional oil inspectors were hired starting
in 1897 and monthly oil well license fees doubled. Streets were kept somewhat
cleaner of spilled oil, overhead cables were cited and removed unless granted
permission. Westside residents lobbied to protect area parks with encircling buffer
zones (see Figure 9) that became reality in 1900. By late 1902, discussions of the oil
problem petered out in the city council; except for a flurry of petitions filed in late
1905 over abandoned wells in the Second Ward, no petitions were recorded after that
time. “Nature has set definite limitations far more positive than any yet enacted by
the City Council” as the extent of downtown oil reserves revealed itself (the
numbered Xs in Figure 9 indicate dry holes or water wells drilled before the limits
were enacted). Business investment moved on to other oil fields while the backyard
drillers in this near-western district returned their attention to residential real estate
speculation.
46

124
Figure 9
Westlake Oil Districts, 1900

Source: Los Angeles Times 31 May 1900, I12
The Crying Sanitary Evil of Los Angeles
Thus far, we have seen that the residents of Los Angeles and their city
council attempted to resolve conflicts of individual and community rights over
appropriate use of property through fire limits, public health and nuisance-abatement
codes, and various single-purpose districts—all commonly-accepted legal strategies
based on nuisance and property law. These were the strategies available to municipal
governments in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The remainder of this
chapter is devoted to an examination of a particular land use case—that of hand
laundries operated by Chinese owners. After twenty-five years of adopting various
125
approaches to restrict and eliminate Chinese laundries, Chinatown and Chinese
residents themselves, a 1904 ordinance created residence districts where Chinese
laundries were prohibited. As this ordinance is touted as the first of its kind
nationally, it is important to understand how this ordinance came into existence.
47

In 1879, James Toberman, mayor of Los Angeles, presented the requisite
annual report to the city in which he enumerated the civic advances of that year. He
highlighted improvements in sanitary conditions due to better drainage and general
improvement in attention to cleanliness. Another encouraging development in public
health and sanitation, Toberman noted, was the decrease in the number of Chinese
residents. While he conceded that the labor contribution of this group of men had
been valuable to the growth and development of the city, he stated what had become
a commonly-accepted axiom among the now-majority Anglo residents of Los
Angeles:
While it is undeniable that the labor and industry of this class have been in
many forms beneficial (temporarily) to their employers it requires no
argument to demonstrate the proposition that the presence of this class of
people in large numbers amongst us is a sore evil the removal of which tend
greatly to our prosperity.
48

The city health officer in his own report spoke with pride of the sewage
system modernization and improvements of 1879 and described plans to expand the
system in the next year. He then echoed the words of the mayor, setting aside a
separate section of the report to describe Chinatown as “the sanitary evil of Los
Angeles . . . a social evil in every respect” and the “filthy” living habits of the
Chinese who resided there in the deteriorating area around the original Plaza. Los
126
Angeles’s growing reputation as a “Mecca for invalids,” he said, and as a healthy
place to live will potentially be lost if the city continues to “allow that rotten spot—
Chinatown—to grow and pollute the air we breathe and poison the water we
drink.”
49

The officials of Los Angeles, in thus recounting the city’s formal stance
towards its Chinese residents, ushered in a several-decade effort that both created the
idea and fact of a ghettoized “Chinatown” and then limited through regulation where
the Chinese could live, work and operate businesses. This endeavor coincided with
the peak of both statewide labor organizing against the Chinese and the urban
sanitary reform movement. This latter movement drew upon advances in infectious
disease treatment and popular notions of the now-dated filth theory to tackle some of
the real and perceived problems of rapid urbanization. At this time when the local
economy was based on tourism, residential expansion and housing construction, city
elites felt it crucial to maintain Los Angeles’s reputation as a healthy location and
destination. The Chinese did not fit within this portrayal.
50

Reactions to Chinese Immigration: Los Angeles had become an American
settlement just three decades prior to the 1878 reports. The once-majority Mexican
population across Southern California was gradually overwhelmed as the numbers of
immigrants from the East increased—rapidly in the years after gold was discovered
in Northern California, and then once the gold fever subsided, more slowly but still
steadily. In Los Angeles, the formerly majority Mexican population had remained
roughly constant throughout the US period of the latter nineteenth century and then
127
began to slowly grow again (Table 6). But it was always dwarfed by the
exponentially increasing number of Anglo settlers, and when noted at all, did not
produce the fears and animosities that the Chinese population did.
51

Table 6
Comparison of Chinese and Mexican Population with the
Total Population of Los Angeles, 1850-1910

Total
population
Chinese
population
Percentage
Chinese of
total
population
Mexican
population
(estimates)
Percentage
Mexican of
total
population
1850 1610 2 0.1% 1215 75.5%
1860 1860 14 0.3% 2069 47.2%
1870 5728 172 3.0% 2160 37.7%
1880 11,183 605 5.4% 2166 19.4%
1890 50,395 1871 3.7% — —
1900 102,479 2111 2.1% 3000-5000 2.9%-4.9%
1910 319,198 1967 0.6% 9700-29,000 3.0%-9.3%

Sources: US Census 1850-1910. Chinese population: Greenwald 1996, Hunter 1933. Mexican resident
population estimates from surname analysis conducted by: Griswold del Castillo 1979 (1850-1880),
Camarillo 1996 (1900-1910). The 1890 manuscript census was destroyed by fire.

At the same time that European-descended Americans were moving west to
the California gold fields, Chinese immigrants from the southern China provinces of
Fujian and Guangdong, attracted by the same promises of gold, riches and success,
made the long sea journey east across the Pacific Ocean. They came also to escape
civil unrest and poverty. Large numbers of Chinese men (they were primarily male,
as were the Anglo gold-seekers) had immigrated to the United States starting around
the 1840s. At first welcomed for their labor contributions, attitudes changed within a
few years as their larger concentration made them more visible and seem more
128
threatening. The racist beliefs and practices of the Anglo majority kept those Chinese
who had headed to the gold mining areas from fully participating.
52

Many Chinese men came for or looked for other wage-work opportunities.
Recruitment for railroad construction through the mid-1870s provided employment
for most. The laundry business fit the needs and predilections of other Chinese
workers, especially after the completion of the railroads led to a migration into the
cities. Although a low-status, relatively low-return business, there was little
competition from Anglo workers and entrepreneurs—at least at first. The tight
familial and clan social networks allowed Chinese owners to raise sufficient capital
to start a business while the same networks provided the necessary labor. Frozen out
of other occupations because of their race, within five years of the discovery of gold,
Chinese laundrymen were a common sight; within ten years, they represented a
majority of laundry workers. Between 1870 and 1890, Chinese laundry workers
constituted sixty-nine to seventy-eight percent of the laundry workforce in
California.
53

Chinese settlers became increasingly urbanized. In 1860, almost ninety
percent of the Chinese lived outside of urbanized areas, and seventy percent could
still be found in rural mining areas. By 1870, thirty-six percent had relocated to
urban areas of more than four thousand residents, a slightly higher urbanization rate
than that of the California Anglo population. Ten years later at the next census,
roughly forty percent of both Anglos and Chinese resided in cities. Virtually all
129
Chinese lived in cities and small towns by the 1890 census, having almost
completely abandoned the mining areas.
54

This increased urbanization of both Chinese and Anglos, greater proximity to
each other, as well as their economic competition within cities accounted for much
of the increase in land use conflicts that occurred from the 1880s onward. Before this
time, Chinese enclaves had kept primarily to themselves; most laundries were
located within Chinese ghettos. But with the increase both in Chinese urban residents
and in the numbers of Chinese operating and quartering in laundries outside of the
bounds of Chinatowns, competition for the use of urban space brought out the racist
attitudes of the majority Anglo inhabitants.
55

Seen through a nineteenth-century lens of beliefs about race, the Chinese
population was considered inferior, alien, and too different from the white majority
to be assimilated. Their culture, morals and personal habits were suspect, often
described as the health officer did in his annual report using words such as “filthy,”
“rotten,” “polluted,” “immoral” and “dangerous.” “Chinatown” was where Chinese
men congregated—both drawn by the comfort of familiar culture, language and
social structure in an often-inhospitable city but also relegated to these same
ghettoized environments by limitations on their movements. Of course, density,
garbage, sewer and drainage problems were severe. None of the health-related
infrastructure improvements so proudly enumerated in the Los Angeles annual
reports were located in Chinatown.
56

130
Contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, syphilis and plague spread easily in
the crowded Chinatown ghettos of Pacific coast cities. The Chinese population itself
rather than the conditions in which they lived was considered the public health
problem. The Chinese of San Francisco were likewise vilified and condemned by
health authorities. Nayan Shah catalogues similar rhetoric in that city and parallel
remedies of expulsion (outside city boundaries) and elimination. Authorities in San
Francisco and Los Angeles saw the solution as either regulating or completely
eradicating the population. Invoking municipal police power and nuisance law to
protect public health and welfare was the strategy.
57

The federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 halted new Chinese immigration.
Up to that time, immigration had increased each year since the first sizeable numbers
of Chinese immigrants arrived in the late 1840s. The Pacific coast was the entry
point, thus while other US cities had Chinatowns, the highest concentrations of
Chinese migrants remained located in this region. In the 1880s and thereafter, upon
completion of the bulk of the transcontinental railway work, most of the Chinese
railroad workers moved into cities and towns up and down the Pacific coast.
58

Widespread anti-Chinese sentiments at the time were expressed at the
municipal level through regulations intended to limit occupational opportunities and
both segregate and exclude Chinese residents. Local regulation of laundries appeared
at least by the 1870s in different cities along the west coast through the imposition of
licensing, taxes and various other rules about operations. In the 1880s, when the
numbers of Chinese residents and Chinese laundries increased, conflicts over urban
131
space increased, as did discriminatory feelings and acts against Chinese residents.
California cities made use of the new state constitution after 1879 that granted
municipalities greater powers to protect the general public’s health, safety and
welfare through state-delegated police powers. They developed a variety of
approaches. Municipal authorities required laundries to meet health and safety
regulations, including water and sewer hookups, and limitations on the hours of
operation. Laundries had to meet approval from surrounding residents. Cities also
limited the geographic area by creating districts where Chinese laundries could
operate or, alternatively, were forbidden to locate.
59

In 1885, Modesto adopted very restrictive land-use regulations that
effectively proscribed Chinese laundries in white areas. No laundry could operate
anywhere but west of the railroad tracks and south of G Street, according to the
ordinance. Laundries were defined as nuisances if located anywhere else. Chinese
laundry owner Hang Kie contested the ordinance as unreasonable. His failed appeal
to the state supreme court left him in jail for violating the new ordinance. Other
communities in California soon followed Modesto’s example and passed similar
limits, some regulations applying just to Chinese residents or laundries, and others
more broadly to all laundry enterprises. Some local and state courts immediately
struck down the most obviously discriminatory laws, only to be confronted with
revised regulations that attempted to obscure their overt racial basis. Other courts
stressed the question of whether or not local jurisdictions had sufficient police power
to regulate the use of property and ignored the racial overtones. Eventually,
132
California cities began to prevail in court with more narrowly worded regulations
couched in public welfare language. The propriety of using geographical districts for
land use regulation became established in California.
60

Los Angeles Regulates Chinese and Laundries: Los Angeles was no different
than San Francisco and other California cities; in city ordinances from 1870 to the
early 1900s, numerous regulations prohibited or limited Chinese businesses,
activities and residences, despite the relatively small numbers of Chinese residents in
the city (see Table 6 above). No other ethnic, racial or economic group in Los
Angeles was specifically or so overtly singled out for public regulation.
61

There were four Chinese laundries in Los Angeles in 1860. Though the actual
number was low, tensions over the Chinese residents of Los Angeles increased in the
1870s. Chinese labor was forbidden in any city contracts. The fire marshal reported
that he had closed down a Chinese laundry on Spring Street as a nuisance. The city
attorney was instructed to draw up an ordinance to regulate the location of laundries
in 1877.
62

A council member moved in 1879 that Chinatown in its entirety be declared a
nuisance (the same year that Dennis Kearney established a branch of the anti-Chinese
Workingman’s Party in Los Angeles). The following year:
The special committee on Chinese [formed after the mayor’s annual report in
1879] reported that they had visited that portion of the city known as
“Chinatown” and after careful examination are of the opinion that it is a great
social evil in every respect. That they find the cubic air ordinance disregarded
and violated in every hand to such an extent as to greatly endanger the health
of the city—and they recommend that the city attorney be instructed to frame
133
such ordinances as may be necessary to remove the Chinamen without the
city limits or at the extreme end of the city limits.
63

Action was delayed pending the result of a superior court suit over a similar
ordinance in San Francisco. Councilman Bernard Cohn introduced a resolution in
1882 to move the Chinese beyond the fire limits. Prodded by a petition from the
Anti-Chinese Committee, the city council asked the city attorney in 1885 to report on
the city’s right to exclude all Chinese. City councilmen suggested numerous times in
the ensuing years that the city attorney draft such an ordinance, believing the state
constitution allowed such actions. The city attorney reported in 1882, again in 1885,
and every other time the motion was put forth, that such an ordinance was contrary to
the US Constitution, as well as in conflict with a recent treaty with China. No one
could be prosecuted under such an ordinance and it would waste the court’s time, he
stated. He added that any problems with the Chinese could be dealt with under the
nuisance abatement system.
64

Between 1875 and 1885, more than fifty-five petitions and ordinances
pertaining to Chinatown, Chinese businesses and employment of Chinese workers
were received and adopted by the Los Angeles city council. These included requests
to restrict Chinese residences to a certain district, to prohibit Chinese vegetable
sellers, and to limit the locations and hours of Chinese laundries. References to the
Chinese themselves as nuisances, as dangerous to public health and something to be
abated, were common. Unable to stretch their police powers to cover the whole
134
population, efforts were concentrated on one of the main occupations of the Chinese:
as owners and operators of hand laundries.
65

Chinese laundries in residential neighborhoods were restricted by 1874 under
sanitary laws that required sewer connections of sufficient capacity. Business
licenses were required at least by 1879 of a wide range of enterprises. Laundries paid
a relatively high rate of six dollars per month, lowered to five dollars in 1885. One
councilman suggested that “aliens keeping laundries” be required to pay one hundred
fifty dollars per quarter for the privilege of doing business in Los Angeles. His
motion lost. Another restriction was adopted in 1885; laundries were limited to
operations from six in the morning to half past nine in the evening. More petitions
began to arrive, submitted by city residents, complaining about Chinese laundries
and washhouses at various locations, and about conditions in Chinatown. The list
went on and on and on.
66

The 1904 Residence Districts: Thirty people who listed addresses in the
vicinity of Fourth, Figueroa and Flower Streets in downtown Los Angeles signed and
presented a petition to the city council on 12 December 1903. Petition #1666 stated
that the establishment of laundries in residence districts was a nuisance, adversely
affected property values and requested an ordinance to protect them from Chinese
laundries. The council responded two weeks later with an amending ordinance that
included laundries in a new licensing ordinance passed earlier that year. It required
laundry businesses to acquire licenses to operate, with the cost escalating as the
number of delivery wagons increased. Such a measure would give the city the power
135
to regulate the location of laundries through the granting of licenses, though
collection procedures and enforcement in general were not well-administered. Too,
the arbitrariness of this type of scheme was well known to the council (for example,
in city attorney warnings about the unconstitutionality of licensing oil wells in the
1890s). Early in 1904, the council passed an additional ordinance that prohibited
laundries from operating within two hundred fifty feet of a church, schoolhouse,
hotel or residence, and provided for misdemeanor fine or imprisonment for
violations.
67

Meanwhile, undertakers were prohibited from opening any new businesses
within one hundred fifty feet of homes, churches or schools (existing operators could
remain). In May, the city councils’ legislative committee pondered two anti-morgue
petitions from residents that alleged that these businesses effected a “confiscation of
their property” by locating near them. In a Los Angeles Real Estate Board petition,
the organization requested relief from encroachment by undertaking establishments,
livery stables and laundries in residence districts on behalf of property owners
“whose interests have been injuriously affected.” Undertakers defended their moves
closer to residential areas as desired by their clients who felt uncomfortable traveling
to commercial districts for their services.
68

On 16 July 1904, the Los Angeles Times reported that the city council’s
legislation committee was considering the creation of residence districts to limit the
encroachment of these businesses on residence areas and that property owners had
been pushing for protection against what they termed “semi-nuisances.” All of these
136
businesses were relocating to residence neighborhoods because of the high rents
charged downtown, according to the newspaper. No doubt they were also following
their customers along the path of real estate development. City Attorney William
Burgess Mathews suggested that each of the nine councilmen “submit a district in his
ward in which the people desire protection from business encroachment.”
Councilmen Farish and McAleer (of the Third and First Wards) had residence
districts already prepared, reported the paper.
69

The Los Angeles Examiner printed a strongly worded editorial on 20 July
1904 against the proposed ordinance on the grounds that it was not proper for the
government to place limits on the use of private property. The better method, it
stated, was the use of deed restrictions combined with city’s power to control
through licensing.
70

. . . [C]ertain portions of Los Angeles are hereby set apart and
declared to be residence districts of [the] city . . .
— Ordinance #9774 N.S.
71

On 26 July 1904, the Los Angeles Examiner reported that Ordinance #9774
N.S adopted the previous day created residence districts in the First, Second and
Third Wards, that the districts were “contiguous” and that they were created “for the
purpose . . . of excluding laundries and wash houses from their limits.” Boundaries
were drawn to include residence areas and exclude existing business areas. (see
Figure 10) Councilmen Skilling (Second Ward) and Farish (Third Ward) promoted
the idea as constitutional, “upheld by decisions in the East.” They likely referred to a
decision by the Illinois Supreme Court to affirm the prohibition of livery stables
137
within a designated residence district where a majority the owners petitioned to abate
the nuisance of an operating business. This adoption of “local option” to give
property owners the power to guide land use regulation was an important addition to
municipal police powers in California (see Figure 10).
72

138
Figure 10
Ward 1 Ward 2
Ward 3
Ward
8
Ward 7
Ward 6
Ward 5
Ward 4
Ward 9
0 2 miles
Fountain
Hoover
Western
Santa Barbara
(now Martin Luther King Drive)
Figueroa
Slauson
current city boundary
Los Angeles River
Mission
Beverly / First
Seventh
Washington
Main
Olympic]
Res Dist #2
Res Dist #3
Residence Districts, July 1904
Los Angeles City Ordinance #9774 N.S.
Tenth
[now
Res Dist #1

139
Conclusion
In retrospect and on the surface, the ordinance seemed quite a breakthrough
in land use regulation as Los Angeles became the first city in the United States to
create residential districts where certain industries would be prohibited. In reality, it
was less and more than that. It was less because while called a “residence district”
ordinance, intended to restrict “semi-nuisance” businesses from encroaching upon
homes, the ordinance in its final form was much narrower. Despite all the agitation
for restrictions on many different businesses and occupations conducted in residence
areas, and the plan to create a residence district in each of the nine wards, as
suggested by the city attorney, the final 1904 ordinance created only three residence
districts, not nine. And instead of prohibiting the list of nuisance industries currently
in dispute from these districts, only one was named in the final ordinance: laundries.
And laundries, based on the evidence found in the city records, were perceived to be
a Chinese-controlled sector. Other businesses were successful in lobbying against
inclusion. Essentially, the ordinance created yet another single-purpose district, albeit
larger than the norm, based on racist perceptions of Chinese residents.
73

While these efforts were never very successful in their intended use (except
as evidence of continuing animus towards the Chinese population and their lack of
local political influence), they did contribute significantly to the incremental process
of creating a judicially approved, functionally districted city. Other events in 1904
perhaps prevented the city council from completing the task of designating nine
residence districts, one within each ward.
140
Chapter 2 Endnotes

1
Fogelson (1993), while perhaps no longer the “definitive account” of Los Angeles,
as Robert Fishman wrote in the foreword to the new edition (xv), is still the best
starting place for a history of the development of Los Angeles. Valuable, too, are
Kevin Starr’s (1990) and Carey McWilliams’s (1946) Southern California regional
histories. See Blake Gumprecht (2001) and Jared Orsi (2005) on the Los Angeles
River, flood control efforts and the concretization of its banks. Olvera Plaza (also
known as El Pueblo) is itself an imagined city center on the site of the original
permanent settlement—originally a 1930s re-creation of a romanticized Spanish-
Mexican past (Hata and Hata 1990: 75), located near the then-new Union Station—
that bears but slight resemblance to the historical reality of the site and its
surroundings.

2
Hurd 1903: 1, 13; Taylor 1915; Park, Burgess and McKenzie 1925: viii; Alonso
1964.

3
Licht 1995. Michael Dear (1996: 76) has written that “. . . LA has continued to be
regarded as an exception to the rules of US metropolitan development,” perhaps
because of a lack of in-depth historical studies that other cities have spawned.
Authors such as Bill Deverell (1994, 2004), Steve Erie (1992, 2004), Blake
Gumprecht (2001), Greg Hise (1997, 2004), Becky Nicolaides (2002) and Mark
Wild (2005), to name just a few, have over the past decade published results of
extensive research that explains both the particularities of Los Angeles as well as the
city’s unexceptional-ness.

4
Ordinance #9774 N.S. adopted 25 July 1904. Los Angeles engineer Huber Earl
Smutz (1930: 58) declared that as far as anyone could tell, Los Angeles authorities
were the first to create residence districts in 1904.

5
These include some of the occupations that traditionally were deemed to be
nuisances per se, such as the slaughter of animals and the operation of rendering
plants or tanneries, as well as morgues and cemeteries.

6
Fischer 1982: 8. Fischer writes of the division of public and private spheres of cities
and perceptions of disorder as a “historical constant” of cities related to walls and the
construction of an us/them dichotomy.
Both within and outside the city wall there too was a hierarchy of acceptable uses, a
gradation of acceptability. More noxious interior uses were located towards the outer
walls of the city, while the center was reserved for more benign and less noxious
uses and often, higher status residents and activities (Jackson 1985: 15-16). Outside
the wall and farther from the center, control of use, activity and behavior gradually

141

decreased. Later, in places where city walls no longer served defensive purposes,
they still functioned as a convenient boundary or marker both for customary ideas
about appropriate land use and for actual regulations. The wall then could be used as
a “natural” boundary between allowed uses and prohibited uses, and also the
delineator from whence prohibitions were marked. See, for example, the various
Elizabethan and Jacobean proclamations that forbade land used for new construction
or for the subdivision of dwellings for more than one household within (at various
times) three, five or ten miles from the city walls of London (Knowles and Pitt 1972:
12-25).

7
Cleland 1941: 26-45, 213-229; McWilliams 1946: 65-69; Robinson 1948; Lothrop
1993: 263-264.

8
Gumprecht 1991: 84. The surrounding areas of Los Angeles County grew
concurrently both in absolute numbers and density, but with thirteen to forty-six
people per square mile from 1890 to 1910, at overall densities that were nowhere
near as high as those in the city.

9
Calculated from US Census totals (subtracting Los Angeles City population) and
the following county areas (with Los Angeles city area removed): Los Angeles
County was incorporated in 1850 with 4340 square miles, increased to 34,520 sq mi
later that year, then decreased to approximately 4881 sq mi after 1853 when San
Bernardino County was created from parts of Los Angeles, San Diego and Mariposa
Counties (1860-1880 in Table 4). Orange County split from Los Angeles County in
1889. Removal of its 798 square miles left the approximately 4083 square miles of
present-day Los Angeles County (1890-1910 in Table 4). This includes mountains
and other lands that are not developable, so the density on buildable land will be
understated.

10
McWilliams 1946: 113-128; Starr 1990: 45-61; Davis 1992: 22-30; Lothrop 1993.

11
US Census 1902, table 90, page 134. In older industrial cities in the East and
Midwest in 1900, home-ownership rates ranged from twelve percent in New York
City, to twenty-two percent in Philadelphia, and twenty-five percent in Chicago. On
the Pacific Coast, San Francisco had a twenty-four percent homeownership rate,
Portland thirty-one percent and Seattle thirty-two percent. In Los Angeles,
homeowners comprised more than forty-four percent of the population.

12
Los Angeles 1873: 91-92; Los Angeles 1878: 12; Resolution §724 (Caswell
compilation) adopted 18 July 1878; Los Angeles 1889: 12-13. The three-ward
configuration resulted in ten city council representatives: three each from Wards One

142

and Two, and four from Ward Three. Beginning in 1874, four councilmen were
elected from each ward. When five wards were created, each elected three
representatives to the city council—now numbering fifteen. Finally, the city council
was reduced to nine members in 1889 with the division of Los Angeles into nine
wards.

13
Teaford 1984: 15-32.

14
Los Angeles 1873: 9, 91-92. The language included on white males is a holdover
from the pre-1870 period when suffrage was limited to white males. (Stephenson
1910: 282). Thank you to Diana Ybarra for information on Paredon Blanco and
Boyle Heights’ early history.

15
Los Angeles 1878: 12; Resolution §724 (Caswell compilation) adopted 18 July
1878. This version had no mention of white males in the resolution. The new ward
configuration was also used for the next decennial census in June 1880. As the
figures in Table 7 below indicate, two years after creation, the wards were not
equivalent in population size. This indicates either very rapid growth in some wards
or the presence of many non-male, non-white, non-voting residents. It is also
possible that the original boundaries set two years previously did not succeed in
creating equivalent voting districts. The census figures do support the fact of greater
residential density in Wards Two and Three—and perhaps expectations of greater
growth in Ward Four.
Table 7

Los Angeles City Population by Ward, 1880-1900
(using Ward Five, with the smallest population in 1880, as the base)

1880 1890 1900
Ward Population
Ratio
(compared
to Ward 5)
Population
Ratio
(compared
to Ward 5)
Population
Ratio
(compared
to Ward 5)
1 2311 1.8 5318 2.2 8341 (0.8)
2 3375 2.6 8627 3.6 12134 1.1
3 2618 2.0 7492 3.1 12063 1.1
4 1574 1.2 5795 2.4 16785 1.6
5 1305 1.0 2426 1.0 10747 1.0
6 -- -- 3210 1.3 14044 1.3
7 -- -- 6855 2.8 13532 1.3
8 -- -- 6928 2.9 8594 (0.8)
9 -- -- 3744 1.5 6234 (0.6)

Source: US Decennial Census 1880,1890, 1900

143

16
Los Angeles 1889: 12-13. Again, the population size of each ward is not
equivalent, according to the 1890 census. In terms of voting power, several wards
appear to have many more possible voters. In Table 7 above, Wards Two and Three,
for example, have more than three times the population of the smallest in population,
Ward Five). Conversely, regarding the potential influence of a vote by the city
councilman representing the ward, those wards with the smallest populations have
influence out of proportion to their size (Wards Five and Six, for example). By 1900,
the ratios have narrowed considerably and appear more equitable.

17
See also Mark Wild (2005: 9-37) for wonderfully rich and detailed descriptions of
neighborhoods within the wards, especially Wards Six, Seven, Eight and Nine.

18
Martin Melosi (2000: 27-28) explores the threats of fire and epidemics from the
perspective of the development of an adequate and safe water infrastructure system.

19
Bassett 1936: 22.

20
Novak 1996: 54; Wermiel 2000. Fires had repeatedly destroyed large sections of
London. Successive regulations adopted starting from 1189 through the eighteenth
century established limitations on land use with the expressed purpose of protecting
the health and welfare of the city and its residents. These limitations restricted
occupations within reconstructed areas (those considered “noisom or perilous”),
prohibited a change in use from dwelling to “any more noysome or offensive use”
(Knowles and Pitt 1972: 21, 33), regulated the keeping of nuisances, forbade the
construction of tenements or the conversion of buildings to multifamily purposes,
required that lots made vacant by fire be rebuilt within certain time limits or be
subject to confiscation (and distribution to someone who would presumably rebuild
and put the property to productive use), recognized view rights under certain
circumstances, and set minimum lot sizes. Additionally, building regulations
controlled construction materials and mandated attention to party walls and other
means to impede the spread of fire. Repeated major conflagrations, as well as
concerns that population growth and over-crowding contributed to the severity of the
ever-returning plagues, no doubt influenced the building codes promulgated in
London’s first Assize [court] of Buildings, created in 1189, to regulate reconstruction
as well as the use of property, and mitigate disagreements “that at times arise
between neighbors in the city touching boundaries . . . between their lands.” Over the
next five centuries, the successive rulers of England enacted various restrictions on
building within London, and within ten miles of the city wall. These acts were
intended to both control movement of people into the city as well as the use of land
in and around it. Ward-situated meetings (wardmotes) addressed the general welfare

144

of the ward; residents could be summoned for the specific purpose of the removal of
nuisances (Knowles and Pitt 1972: 5-43).
The resemblance between English and American concerns about urban fires, and
the similarity in the manner of addressing fire risks, can be seen in the earliest state
court cases to rule on the constitutionality of municipal fire districts and the
restriction of inflammable nuisances in the United States. The Pennsylvania Supreme
Court decision in 1799 in Respublica against Duquet was the first high court
affirmation of the constitutionality of municipal fire districting. Arguing the
commonwealth’s side, Jared Ingersoll, prominent Pennsylvania jurist, framed the
question as whether or not the assembly’s enabling act was constitutional. Ingersoll
described Philadelphia in terms of a “great community” entrusted with self-
governing powers to make laws binding on the property of all inhabitants for the
welfare of the city as a whole. The aim of the 1795 law was not to take away
property rights but importantly to “strengthen . . . the security of property” by
lessening the fire risk for all owners (Respublica against Duquet 1799 at 10-11
[emphasis added]). This was no different than the “strong remedies” adopted by
English parliament to rebuild London after its many fires. Ingersoll pointed out that
other cities, such as New York City and Charleston, had adopted similar districting
regulations to prevent fire losses, to abate this “most dangerous nuisance,” in their
center cities.
In 1795, the state assembly had granted the commonwealth of Philadelphia specific
rights to prohibit wooden buildings in certain districts of the city. Philip Duquet
brought suit against the city after he was then charged with violating the resulting
city ordinance when he built a wooden house in the fire district. His defense counsel
contended that cities have no rights to make laws affecting private property and thus
the current ordinance was beyond the commonwealth’s powers. In addition, he
declared the assembly acted improperly in delegating its powers. In rebutting these
arguments, the counsel for the commonwealth referred to statutes adopted by the city
of London more than one hundred years previous in the aftermath of that city’s great
fire, where materials as well as the manner of building were specified, and
punishment was named (gaol) as well as various other regulations “to guard against
future unhappy accidents by fire” (ibid. at 13). State assemblies are not restricted in
granting incorporation charters that delegate government powers to safeguard the
health and welfare of the local community and are historically common, contrary to
the defense position in Respublica. Most importantly, it is the city corporation that
knows best the local conditions. While the assembly was correct in delegating this
power to the city, they also recognized that the precise streets to be restricted and the
particular specifications of the regulation were a local matter: the local government
knows best the local conditions.
Both the defense and the commonwealth cited Parliamentary experience, rules of
municipal incorporation and acknowledged the source of American legal custom by

145

reaching across the Atlantic for precedent. Chief Justice Shippen, in giving his
opinion upholding the constitutionality of the ordinance, recognized the danger to the
prosperity and very existence of cities when he referred to the construction of
wooden buildings within populated portions of the city as an “evil” to be prevented.
The “well governing and welfare of the city” requires that a city, in the person of the
mayor and city council, have the power to adopt whatever ordinances and regulations
“they may judge proper” (Respublica against Duquet 1799 at 18). The authority to
adopt this type of land use ordinance that constrained individual rights for the benefit
and welfare of community rights was clearly established by the end of the eighteenth
century in the United States.

21
Wermiel 2000: 1-2. Building regulations of London with certain requirements for
firewall construction predate the eighteenth century, but perhaps were not as readily
enforced as later regulations.
Prompting for improved construction and fire safety came from another important
actor: the growing fire insurance sector. Insurance companies gradually discarded
their traditional methods of determining risk solely by building use while
disregarding construction techniques and materials. During the second half of the
nineteenth century, this growing industry adopted innovations that allowed a much
greater objectification of risk. Modern information management techniques, precise
actuarial tables, meticulous records and statistics, and frequently updated surveys and
maps were introduced. These helped to quantify the dangers of fire and imagined the
built environment as an “accumulation of fire hazards” with lesser or greater costs to
insure. Insurance companies influenced client businesses directly by documenting
specific hazards, publishing survey results, and almost universally insuring for less
than full replacement cost. They also lobbied municipal governments, supported the
professionalization of fire-fighting, and generally favored enlargements of fire
district areas where more stringent controls applied and opposed individual and real
estate sectors efforts to reduce district size. As fire insurance companies grew in size
and influence toward the turn of the last century, they wielded an increasing
influence on both the business community and land use regulation through municipal
fire limits regulations (Tebeau 2003: 89-125, 169-201).
Insurance companies commonly capped the insured amount of a property at
seventy-five percent of replacement cost to both guard against arson fires and
encourage safe practices. They also influenced how companies did business. For
example, examining data over a ten-year period, underwriters could show precisely
that losses (to insurers) from fires in buildings unoccupied at night were three times
higher than those occupied—premiums could be set accordingly, or policies withheld
completely (Tebeau 2003: 92, 170). Sanborn maps indicate this as a pertinent factor:
close examination of detailed notes on factories shows that the presence of a night
watchman was noted as well as the frequency of inspections.

146

In another effort to combat destructive fires, volunteer fire-fighting organizations
began to give way to professionalized municipal fire departments in the nineteenth
century. See Monkonnen (1988: 105-108) and Novak (1996: 51-82). In Los Angeles,
the LAFD was authorized as a paid force in 1885 (Gaydowski 2007: 186).

22
Bassett 1936: 22; Novak 1996: 54. The relationship between state and local
governments was interpreted in 1868 by Judge John Dillon of the Iowa Supreme
Court and became widely accepted by the end of the next decade. Dillon’s Rule
established that local government powers are limited to what is expressly granted (or
necessarily implied by that grant) by the state and to what is absolutely essential to
the local government in carrying out its charter. In other words, the municipal
corporation (the city or town) was viewed as a creature of the state in which it was
located, unless explicitly granted home rule powers (Dillon 1872). The police power
to oversee the general health and welfare of the city’s inhabitants was generally
interpreted as part of the inherent powers of a municipality (Bassett 1936: 22).

23
Los Angeles 1855: 24-25; Los Angeles 1860: 38-39; Fogelson 1993 25-26.

24
Ordinance §397 (Caswell compilation 1878) adopted 7 May 1874 (amended in
1874, 1875, 1877); Ordinance #48 Old Series (hereafter, O.S.) adopted 23 January
1882; Ordinance #19901 N.S. adopted 17 March 1910. The city attorney requested a
six-month moratorium on fire limits changes in 1893 because boundaries were
changed so frequently and then became so irregular that they were impossible to
enforce (“The City Council” Los Angeles Times 17 May 1893).
Fire limits were concentrated in non-residential areas despite the evidence that the
majority of fires were residential—from 1897 to 1915, just fifteen percent of
reported fires took place in commercial and industrial structures (Annual Reports of
the Board of Fire Commissioners of the Los Angeles Fire Department, SCWRH).
The value of commercial properties was recognized as integral to the welfare of the
community. The loss of a single factory not only resulted in direct personal loss to
the owner (and investors), but also rippled throughout the local economy. A fire that
spread from building to building would have even greater impacts. Insurance
companies contributed to the ever-changing fire limits boundaries, with
communications to the city council about their surveys of conditions and
recommendations for action (for example, “Withdraw Objections” Los Angeles
Times 18 March 1897).

25
“Fire Commissioners” Los Angeles Times 3 March 1892. For example, a man was
fined two dollars in police court for attempting to build a frame house within the fire
limits. He eventually built with brick, as required in the ordinance (“Police Court
Notes” Los Angeles Times 25 July 1895).

147

26
Peterson 1983; Melosi 2000: 103-117.

27
Novak 1996: 191-233; Schilling and Linton 2005: 99; Molina 2006: 1-11.

28
Koslow 2007. See the Annual Reports of the Health Officer of Los Angeles City,
1879 (carton B-96), 1884 (carton B-98), 1886 (carton B-101), 1889 (carton B-108)
LACRC.

29
Annual Reports of the Health Officer of Los Angeles City, 1891 (carton B-109),
1892 and 1895 (carton B-110) LACRC. Weed- and rubbish-filled vacant lots were
still a concern in 1904, as indicated by a Los Angeles Times Sunday Real Estate
Section (14 February) editorial about the difficulty of administering liens on
“thousands and thousands of lots” that it would take to clean up the mess. The real
estate sector and title insurance companies opposed any action, alleging it would
cause complications in transferring titles and would discourage investment.

30
Los Angeles Times 15 August 1894.

31
Los Angeles 1878: 450; Newmark 1948.

32
Petitions to the city council from 1880-1910 were examined to find those petitions
concerned with land use conflicts, which were roughly categorized and tallied for
each year.

33
Los Angeles 1878; Los Angeles 1887; Romo 1983: 76. The city attorney made a
cautionary comment during discussion in 1895 about prostitution on Alameda Street
regarding a recent North Carolina Supreme Court ruling that the residence of a single
prostitute did not constitute a house of ill fame (City Council Minutes 11 November
1895).

34
“Borderline Grog Shops” Los Angeles Times 15 June 1900.

35
“Care of Indigent Consumptives” Los Angeles Times 26 January 1904; “Hospital
Ordinance” Los Angeles Times 3 May 1904. Care of indigent tuberculosis patients
was restricted to a small area near Elysian Park in 1904.
The Hollywood Cemetery Association bought one hundred acres west of the then-
city limits in 1899. Surrounding residents and investors attempted to have the county
restrict use of the land for this occupation, arguing that while a cemetery is not a
nuisance per se, it becomes one when in close proximity to residences (or planned
residential development, as was the case here). The state supreme court reversed the
finding of the local superior court, supporting the cemetery’s case (“The Cemetery

148

Fight” Los Angeles Times 17 May 1899); this area was annexed to the city in 1910 at
which time the city’s regulations took effect. Within the first years of the twentieth
century, cities around the country were prohibiting cemetery expansion or continued
internments in residential areas. Growing numbers of West Pico-area residents
protested continued use of the Rosedale Cemetery (founded in 1884 on West
Washington Street). By 1907, Rosedale and Evergreen Cemetery (on the eastern edge
of the city) were the only cemeteries still active within the city limits. Almost twenty
thousand residents signed petitions to shut them down in 1907; the city council opted
only to forbid any expansion in land area (“Victory for Cemeteries” Los Angeles
Times 17 December 1907).

36
Philo 1995: 664-667; McShane and Tarr 1997; Lassiter and Wolch 2005.

37
Newmark 1948: 39. See the City Council Minutes for 8 December 1902, 14 and 28
September 1903, 23 November 1903. McShane and Tarr (1997) detail the conditions
of stables and the support industries required for the care of horses. An examination
of occupations for one small Los Angeles neighborhood indicates that fully thirty-
eight percent of the male adults were employed as drivers or laborers (see Chapter 3,
at note 25).

38
Ordinance #6101 N.S. adopted 20 December 1899, amended by #11599 N.S. on
14 September 1905 (Los Angeles 1910). City Council Minutes 11 November 1907.
Ordinance #16108 N.S. adopted 20 February 1908. Ordinance #17194 N.S. adopted
30 September 1908 (Los Angeles 1910). See Chapter 4 for residence districting after
1908.

39
“Street Work” Los Angeles Times 3 February 1891. “Chicken Champion” Los
Angeles Times 10 February 1891.

40
Petition #1033 received in 1894 (carton B12), Petitions #155, #163 and #1061
received in 1895 (cartons B12 and B14). Petitions #583 and #880 (City Council
Minutes 17 May 1897, 12 July 1897, 9 August 1897 and 23 August 1897).
Ordinance #3193 N.S. adopted 18 November 1895. Ordinance #3246 N.S. adopted
18 November 1895. Ordinance #4418 N.S. adopted 12 July 1897. Ordinance #4501
N.S. adopted 23 August 1897.

41
“The Cows Must Go” Los Angeles Times Sunday Real Estate Section 6 March
1904.

42
Ordinance #325 O.S. approved 14 July 1887. Petitions #111, #121, #138, #167 and
#222 received in 1900 (cartons A1 and A2); and Petitions #876 and #1254 received

149

in 1903 (cartons A6 and A8). Ordinance #121 N.S. approved 26 February 1900.
Ordinance #19040 N.S. approved 20 October 1909 (superceded by #23660 N.S.
approved 3 November 1911). No bulls were allowed to be kept in the city (numerous
petitions complained about cows allowed to mate in full view of the public, at times
next door to an elementary school). Petition #193 filed 23 February 1909 and
Petition #313 filed 30 March 1909 (carton A27).
In a letter to the council dated 30 March 1909, C.A. Snelling [no address given]
touchingly explained the continued importance of keeping a family milk cow, and
hinted that the commercial dairymen were part of the pressure to restrict keeping
family milk cows:
Dear Sir, I understand there is a proposition to come before your
Honorable Body the City Council to banish the cows from our city as a
public nuisance.
Now this ordinance if passed will be unjust to the poor people of our
city. We have a cow which we bought about two months ago.
I have six children at home which I am doing my best to support. Two
of these are babies and must have milk. There is a family overhead that has a
baby that is supplied by our cow and one diagonally across the alley that is
also supplied with milk from our cow.
Our grocery bill is reduced also by about $2 per week since we have
had the cow, which is a great item to us in the pinched times through which
we are passing.
A family near us had a delicate babe which they were feeding on the
milk of their cow. They sold the cow and the babe died, the physician said
because they changed the milk from one cow to another. They now have
another delicate little one and another cow upon whose milk they are feeding
it. If this ordinance passes they will have to dispose of their cow, change the
milk and endanger the life of this second little one. I presume there are
numbers of such cases in the city.
Dairy cows cost all the way from $35 to $80. To [beef?] those cows
they will bring all the way from $15 to $22. We having bought at dairy prices
will be forced to sell at beef prices which you will see is very unjust to us.
Again we understand the dairyman’s two-fold object. First that they might
get us out of the way that they may have full sweep of the market and run up
prices on the poorer people. Second, we being forced to sell that they may
buy a lot of cheap dairy cows from $25 to $30 which is or acts as class
legislation which is not right.
So far as a public nuisance and a menace to health is concerned we
fail to see how this can be if people keep their places right, any more than in
the keeping of a horse. If some will not keep their places clean let the Health

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Officer whose duty it is set them out and not force us all to sacrifice a part of
our living on their account.
In view of all these things are we asking too much when we humbly
beg you to use your influence against this unjust ordinance knowing what a
hardship it will work on us poorer people?
I thank you very much for your kindness to me in the past. May the
Lord bless you. Yours fraternally . . . (Petition #335, Carton A27).

43
See Chapter 4 for a more complete description of industrial districts and residence
district exceptions.

44
City Council Minutes 16 December 1895. Sanborn Insurance Maps. Comer 1986:
32-33; Tygiel 1994: 21; Johnson 2005: 80-81.

45
Petition #521 submitted 1894 (Carton B-11). City Council Minutes 29 April 1895,
5 August 1895, 23 December 1895 and 30 December 1895. Merry Ovnick (1994:
105) found that by 1900 Los Angeles wells annually produced oil valued at three
million dollars (four million barrels of oil).

46
Relative emphasis on then-current land use issues based on author’s tabulation of
City Council Minutes subject index entries in 1890s and 1900s. City Council
Minutes 15, 18 and 22 March 1897. “Where Oil Isn’t” Los Angeles Times 31 May
1900. Johnson 2005: 82-83. Johnson describes the abandoned oil derricks that
lingered for years in these neighborhoods. Residents from the Second Ward near
Belleview (now Sunset Blvd) and Beaudry Avenues submitted petitions #1257,
#1259 (carton A-16), #1538, #1586 and #32 (carton A-17) from September to
December 1905 to complain of the remaining derricks in their eight-block
neighborhood. Of the 117 wells at the beginning of 1904 only twenty-nine remained.
Oil prices had dropped to the point where production costs were higher than
price/barrel; owners of the remaining wells did not care to invest money into closing
them and removing derricks and other equipment. Property owners wanting to
develop their residential properties asked the city to deny operating permits and
require operations to cease.
Activity continued in the city council on the subject of oil refineries. By 1894,
enough oil was produced locally to support domestic refining. The city council made
several attempts over the next decade to restrict operations of refineries, as well as
gas works, which were primarily located in the Los Angeles River districts. In 1896,
the city attorney was instructed to compose an ordinance prohibiting all oil refineries
within the city. Despite his objections—that it would “lead to bitter resistance in the
courts” if enforced and would not require closure of currently-operating refineries
unless a nuisance could be proved (which could be done without the ordinance)—the

151

council approved the ordinance at a special meeting (City Council Minutes 6 and 13
January 1896; Ovnick 1994: 105).

47
Ordinance #9774 N.S. adopted 25 July 1904.

48
Annual Report of the Mayor of Los Angeles, 1879 (City Council Minutes 11
December 1879). The number of Chinese residents of Los Angeles had dropped by
half over the previous two or three years, according to the mayor. Between the
census enumeration years of 1870 and 1880, the Chinese population had grown by
over three hundred and fifty percent—the highest growth rate of any ten-year period
(US Census 1870, 1880).

49
Annual Report of the Health Officer of Los Angeles, 1879 (City Council Minutes
11 December 1879). I am indebted to Hynda Rudd, (now-retired) Records
Management Officer of the Los Angeles City Record Center, for giving me a copy of
this report in the early stages of this research.

50
Saxton 1971; Peterson 1983: 13-15; Anderson 1987.

51
For the racialized relationship of Mexicans to the Americans in California, see
Almaguer (1994: 45-104). Omi and Winant’s work (1994) informs my basic concept
of the formation and politicization of “race” and “racism”.

52
Saxton 1971; Siu 1987: 44-47.

53
Ong 1981: 95, 100-101. The Chinese laundrymen, and hand laundries generally,
constituted one sphere of a commercializing laundry sector developing in concert
with industrialization in the nineteenth century. The steam laundry (a term in
common usage by the 1850s) had become by the latter decades of the century a larger
concern where some hand power might still be employed, but powered machinery
and a factory structure predominated (Mohun 1999: 15-45). Examination of Los
Angeles city directories indicates that steam laundry ownership was one hundred
percent Anglo and location tended to be in the more factory-dense areas of the city.

54
Ong 1981: 98.

55
Examination of Los Angeles city directories indicates the locational diffusion of
Chinese laundries.

56
Annual Report of the Health Officer of Los Angeles, City Council Minutes 11
December 1879; Ong 1981: 100-101; Wong 1995; Shah 2001: 3; Molina 2006: 15-

152

30. See Almaguer (1994: 153-182) in particular for the construction of Chinese as
the “other” in nineteenth century California society.
Roberta Greenwood has detailed the municipal neglect of the Chinatown-area as it
spread to the east side of Alameda Street from the old Plaza area, before its
demolition to make way for Union Station in the early 1930s. Paved roads, electric
streetlights and improved sewers were some of the improvements that lagged far
behind other areas of downtown and the rest of the city (Greenwood 1993: 41-46).

57
Shah 2001: 51-57. He writes that the health authorities went so far as to exclude
Chinese deaths from the city’s mortality statistics, denying even in their deaths that
the Chinese residents were part of the population (ibid.: 57).
Chinese laborers were of course not seen just as a health hazard that accompanied
urbanization. That view was part of larger issue that influenced ideas about the
Chinese immigrants. The prevalent anti-Asian sentiments were part of the Pacific
Coast-wide “moral panic” directed towards the Chinese. “Moral panic” refers to a
situation where a group of people is defined as a threat to society out of all
proportion to any danger they might actually pose (Cohen 1980). Rapid labor market
changes due to ebbs and flows of workers and economic instability contribute greatly
to ethnic conflict and protest (for additional Chinese labor market contributions and
problems, see McWilliams 1946: 84-91). On the Pacific coast, when the economy
contracted, as it did during several late nineteenth-century recessions, frustrations
were directed primarily against the Chinese. Anti-Chinese and white workingmen’s
groups attracted many members. Race riots broke out in many areas on the Pacific
coast in the 1870s and 1880s (Olzack 1987). One of the worst in the United States
occurred in Los Angeles in 1871. Known to us as the Chinese Massacre, nineteen
Chinese men were beaten to death or hanged by a large mob, with alleged municipal
complicity (McWilliams 1946: 91-92). Inflammatory publications such as P. W.
Dooner’s Last Days of the Republic (1880) contributed to stereotypes and hysteria
over Chinese immigrant workers, their customs and an alleged plot by the Chinese
emperor to take over the country.

58
The US Census enumerated 758 Chinese immigrants in 1850, 35,565 in 1860,
63,042 in 1870 and 104,468 in 1880 (mostly male, very few females had
immigrated). After a small natural increase in 1890 (after the Exclusion Act), the
Chinese population in the US declined over the next decades. The majority of
Chinese resided in California, but that proportion fell after 1860 (from 9.2% in 1860,
to 8.7% in 1880, and down to 3.1% in 1900) (Daniels 1988: 27).

59
Sargent 1917: 21; Ong 1981: 106. The new state constitution (adopted in 1879)
was specific on the police powers of cities to “make and enforce within their
respective limits all such local, police, sanitary, and other regulations that are not in

153

conflict with general laws.” (Article XI—Local Government, Section 11 of the
California State Constitution). General dissatisfaction with state legislative meddling
in local affairs led to expanded local powers and limits on the legislature (Sargent
1917).

60
In re Hang Kie 1886. Ex parte Emil Moynier 1884 (in San Francisco, restricted
operating hours and mandated approval through certificates from both the health
officer and the board of fire wardens). Barbier v. Connolly 1885 (also in San
Francisco, the US Supreme Court returned this suit about the operating hours and
certificate requirements to the lower court, stating that this was a valid police
regulation covered by the regular powers of the municipality). Laundry operator
Soon Hing also appealed this San Francisco regulation to the federal Court, with the
same result, in Soon Hing v. Crowley 1885. Stockton CA made it unlawful to operate
laundries anywhere in the inhabited portion of the city, alleging they were injurious
to public health and safety. The ordinance was overturned, Judge Sawyer writing,
“This ordinance does not regulate—it extinguishes” (In re Tie Loy 1886, also known
as the Stockton Laundry Case). San Francisco attempted to regulate all Chinese
residents out of the city limits, in the Bingham Ordinance. The circuit court struck it
down as unconstitutional in a pair of cases argued together, In re Lee Sing and In re
Sing Too Quan 1890. The state supreme court struck down a local option ordinance
in Chico that was too arbitrary, it wrote, leaving it to the capriciousness of neighbors
to decide what one could do with one’s property in Ex parte Sing Lee 1892.

61
Private regulations (or deed restrictions) addressed other groups, such as Blacks
and Jews.

62
City Council Minutes 14 September 1876 and 23 February 1877. Fire Marshall
report in City Council Minutes 27 April 1876. Chinese American Museum of Los
Angeles (www.camla.org/history/timeline.htm—last accessed 17 July 2007).
Other examples include a cubic air ordinance with minimum sleeping space
requirements (City Council Minutes 26 February 1880), motions for removal of all
Chinese residents outside the city limits (numerous proposals in the city council in
1880, 1882, 1885, 1887 and 1889), and participation of council members in meetings
of the Chinese Exclusion Society (City Council Minutes 1901), restrictions on the
location, hours, sanitary conditions of laundries and the imposition of licensing that
differed from non-Chinese laundries (City Council Minutes 1875-1902).

63
City Council Minutes 26 February 1880.

64
City Council Minutes 25 March 1880, 22 April 1882, 30 June 1885, 14 July 1885,
18 August 1885. Los Angeles Times 12 April 1882 and 2 May 1882.

154

65
City Council Minutes 1875-1885 (volumes 10-20).

66
Ordinance #3 O.S. adopted 28 February 1879. Ordinance #162 O.S. adopted 19
March 1885. City Council Minutes 3 November 1885, 8 May 1890. Petitions #347,
#526 and #601 in 1887.
Not all petitioners opposed Chinese residents of Los Angeles and their businesses.
Neighbors signed petitions supporting the presence of particular Chinese laundries in
their neighborhoods. For example, E.R. Brainard and others submitted a petition to
the police commission in 1887 in support of Quong Ching, asking that he be allowed
to continue operating his laundry on Temple Street (Board of Police Commissioners
Minutes 7 December 1887, LACRC).

67
“Laundries Barred: Woman Beats the Chink Wash-Shops” Los Angeles Record 8
January 1904. Ordinance #8097 N.S. adopted 28 February 1903. Ordinance #9051
N.S. adopted 30 December 1903. Ordinance #9080 N.S. adopted 11 January 1904.
Collection of license fees was not very rigorous. For example, out of the seven
hundred to eight hundred lodging houses operating in the city, only seven had paid
the required license fee during the current quarter. (Los Angeles Times 22 July 1904).
Only a third of the oil well operators had paid their licensing fees in 1895. It was
only after a full-time oil inspector was hired that more compliance was achieved.
(City Council Minutes 16 December 1895 and 20 December 1897.

68
“Undertaker Fights It” Los Angeles Times 26 February 1904. “To Protect
Residence Sections” Los Angeles Record 24 May 1904. Petition #511 filed 23 May
1904.

69
“Mayor signed the Morgue Law” Los Angeles Times 16 July 1904. The municipal
records do not indicate why only these particular businesses were singled out at this
time, when the minutes show that hospitals, packing houses and slaughter houses had
been more contentious issues over the previous months, judging by the amount of
time taken up in discussion during council meetings. According to the City Council
Minutes, hospitals appear in twelve city council actions, packing houses in twenty,
and slaughter houses in thirty-nine. Morgues (undertaking establishments) and
laundries each appear six times, and livery stables just once. (Indices to City Council
Minutes, Volumes 68 and 69, 13 July 1903 through 31 December 1904). Likewise,
there is no indication in the official record of where the inspiration to create residents
districts came from.
Mathews was city attorney from 1900 through 1906, elected to three consecutive
terms. He then served on the charter reform committee from 1906 to 1909
(Municipal Reference Library 1970). later becoming a respected California judge.

155

Finally, the term semi-nuisances that the newspaper applied to the above land uses
might have been an effort to soften the tone. It has no legal basis; there is no tradition
of semi-nuisance as applied to land use as there is with nuisance law.

70
Los Angeles Examiner 20 July 1904.

71
“An Ordinance setting aside certain portions of the City of Los Angeles as
residence districts, and prohibiting the carrying on of certain occupations within such
districts.” Ordinance #9774 N. S. adopted 25 July 1904 [emphasis added].

72
Los Angeles Examiner 26 July 1904. The likely court case was Chicago v. Stratton
(1896). According to the Los Angeles Times (28 May 1904), attorneys for the
morgues, laundries and stables argued that rents were too high in the business
district; to forbid them to move to outlying (i.e. residence) districts would not only
force them out of business but “would make funerals so expensive that the average
man or woman could not afford to have one” and renting conveyances would be out
of reach because of the cost. Wearing “dirty linen would of necessity become the
prevailing fashion” if laundries could not follow the real estate development.
California courts had previously not looked kindly on local option, stating it gave
some property owners arbitrary power over other owners, and that municipal
authorities could not re-delegate their state-delegated police powers (for example, in
Ex parte Sing Lee 1892 at 359-360). It should be noted that this Los Angeles
ordinance was never tested in court.

73
In the city archives, laundries are listed alternately as either a “laundry” business or
“Chinese laundry” business where these terms appear to be synonymous. The terms
“steam laundry” or “French hand laundry” were used to denote non-Chinese owned
businesses.
Expanded single-purpose laundry districts were created two years later in amending
ordinances to Ordinance #9774 N.S.; these were explicitly named “laundry district”
ordinances (Ordinance #12675 N.S. adopted in March 1906. Ordinance #12838 N.S.
adopted in June 1906). All three of these ordinances were repealed in 1909
(Ordinance #19443 N.S. adopted 16 December 1909) when the industrial and
residence districting ordinances covering the entire city went into effect.
156
Chapter 3
Regulating Land Use—Smoldering Conflicts Burst Out into the Open

Introduction
In 1904, the Los Angeles city council adopted an ordinance that created
several residence districts. Essentially functional single-purpose districts intended to
outlaw the location of Chinese laundries in residence districts, there is no evidence
the ordinance was enforced. One possible reason is that other events intervened. The
new direct legislative powers of the initiative and the recall, recent progressive
reform amendments to the city’s charter, were both tested that same year, and
dominated local politics. Their immediate use revealed popular dissatisfaction with
city councilmen, with local ward-based machine politics, and with general city
council ineffectiveness and conservative reaction to growth pressures and conflicts.
1

Enough residents were unhappy for whatever reasons—with the factory down
the block, with the flood of immigrants to the city, with city council decisions that
impacted daily life, with real and perceived threats to their property rights—that they
signed petitions to invoke the initiative process in an effort that would ultimately
directly influence development in the city. When the largest slaughterhouse operating
in the city burned in May 1904, surrounding residents initiated a protest that spread
citywide. While the immediate issue—the location of slaughterhouses in Los
Angeles—was narrow, the potential negative implications for the industrial and
economic climate seemed clear. In this chapter, I concentrate on this one event and
157
one case, the burning of the Cudahy Slaughterhouse in May 1904 and the restrictive
regulations surrounding meat slaughtering in Los Angeles, to highlight what was
indeed a pivotal year in the development of land use regulations.
2

First Steps Towards Making a Manufacturing District
Los Angeles Cannot Have Too Many Factories: People living in rural areas
can raise crops and livestock, and slaughter animals for their own needs. But once
rural residents relocate to urbanizing areas and became wage-earners, as increasing
numbers did in the second half of the nineteenth century, their ability to personally
supply the household with food diminishes and families depend more and more on
commercial sources within the food market system for provisions. Those in Los
Angeles who desired to take advantage of the mild climate could continue to grow
fruits and vegetables on small household plots. Milk cows and small animals (such
as chickens, ducks and rabbits) could be raised privately in urban spaces, though as
shown in Chapter 2 this resulted in increasing land use conflict and was gradually
subject to greater restrictions. The “all-round grocer-merchants” and “combination
grocery-saloon” of the 1850s gradually gave way to separate grocery stores as well as
more specialized markets. By the 1880s, Los Angeles compared favorably with cities
of similar size in terms of numbers and variety of stores in relation to the
population.
3

Butcher shops increased from a single establishment in Los Angeles in the
early 1850s, to thirteen (according to the 1860 Census), and then fifty meat markets
158
by 1880. At first, butchers did their own slaughtering. By the late 1870s, as
residential districts such as Bunker Hill and Boyle Heights developed outside the
central city, several larger firms that consolidated slaughtering operations began to
supply the butchers and meat markets with their products. In the days before home
refrigeration when daily shopping was the norm, butchers as well as other retail
markets located within and adjacent to concentrations of homes for ease of access.
Butchers could not slaughter animals at these neighborhood markets in residential
areas. If they did not operate their own remote slaughtering facilities they thus
became dependent on the wholesale suppliers. Retail meat markets expanded in
concert with population growth, their numbers and locations keeping pace with the
expansion of the city. By 1896, the city directory listed 119 meat markets; ten years
later the number had almost doubled. Wholesale slaughterhouse companies supplied
most of their goods.
4

Julius Hauser began his meat trade in Los Angeles in 1882 with a retail store
on Main Street. He added a slaughterhouse and packing plant in 1891 a mile beyond
the southwestern border of the city to better supply his own growing retail operations
as well as other markets. Besides meat, he also invested in real estate in Los Angeles
and surrounding areas. Hauser supplied sausages to markets throughout Southern
California, and held government contracts for fresh as well as packed meat for places
such as the Soldiers’ Home for veterans.
5

The other German butcher, Simon Maier, had arrived in Los Angeles in 1877,
after emigrating from Bavaria and having successfully concluded several business
159
ventures around the United States. During the 1880s and 1890s, he sold meat out of
his retail shop on North Spring Street, delivering meat throughout the city from his
distinctive wagon pulled by a team of six horses. Maier’s slaughterhouse was located
outside the city limits, just east of the First Ward on unincorporated county land.
6

Several other small local slaughterhouse operations existed, such as Sentous
Brothers at Los Angeles and Aliso Streets (who later moved north on San Fernando
Road to a site near the river) and a pair of Chinese butchers (referred to only as
“Chinese butchers” in the regular agriculture and commodity reports in the
newspapers).
7

In 1892 an outside competitor joined this mix of local owners and operators.
Michael Cudahy was one of four brothers from Ireland who had settled in Milwaukee
in 1849 and had all become successful meat packers through various partnerships.
Several large companies had consolidated control of the livestock and meatpacking
industries in the East and Midwest by the late 1880s and were competing for other
regional markets at the end of the nineteenth century. It was as part of this
competitive strategy that Cudahy began an expansion into Los Angeles. Branches of
Swift and Armour, two of the other national firms, opened in Los Angeles by the late
1890s but their operations remained small. Maier, Hauser and Cudahy butchered
ninety percent of the meat consumed in the city by the turn of the last century.
8

Cudahy petitioned the city council just before Christmas 1892 to amend the
ordinance on slaughtering in the city to allow operations on land he had optioned on
the river flats in an eleven-acre triangle formed by the Southern California Railroad
160
line, the Los Angeles River and Macy Street. While some of the councilmen
questioned the appropriateness of the business adjacent to residential sections, others
thought that attracting a nationally prominent enterprise to Los Angeles would
enhance the value of adjoining properties. In a letter to the editor, a visitor to the city
who signed only his initials wrote, “By all means urge this great enterprise, as well as
all others of the kind . . . Los Angeles can not have too many factories.” Eventually,
the proponents won a majority; the ordinance was passed on Christmas Eve.
9

The Los Angeles Times editorialized in favor of increasing the numbers of
factories, especially increasing them in that area between Alameda and the Los
Angeles River “evidently destined” to be the manufacturing district of the city, and
congratulated the mayor for promptly signing the ordinance:
10

The neighborhoods surrounding [Cudahy] can hardly be classed among the
aristocratic suburbs . . . The large class of people who find employment in
these establishments gather about them with their little homes . . . Those who
find no objections to their environments live there, and those who do not like
it can sell out at a good profit and locate somewhere else.
11

T.B. Brown, attorney for Simon Maier, declared that if the Cudahy Company
was granted permission to open within the city boundaries, Maier intended to operate
in the city, too. The Ninth Ward councilman moved that the slaughterhouse district
be amended to include Maier’s property adjacent to the Cudahy plot.
12

Regulation of Animal Slaughtering: Since colonial times, American courts
have traditionally ruled that slaughtering is always a nuisance and can rightly be
carefully controlled to protect the public welfare. In the late nineteenth century when
modern disassembly methods, increased mechanization, refrigeration, and better
161
drainage and sewage systems were developed, slaughterhouses came to be treated
industrially, more like the factories that they closely resembled. At least from the
outside, they appeared to be better neighbors (besides the distressed sounds of the
live animals). This changed neither the attitudes of neighbors nor court rulings.
13

The location of the slaughter of animals in Los Angeles has been subject to
regulation since the first ayuntamiento (town or common council) of the American
era. Just two months after the chartering of Los Angeles as a city under the
California constitution, on 4 April 1850, the common council prohibited the
slaughter of cattle in the streets. In 1852, the city proscribed the use of the zanjas, the
conduit for the city’s water supplies, for the slaughter of cattle (as well as for
bathing, clothes washing and dumping). According to the Los Angeles Star
newspaper, an ordinance was approved 2 March 1855 that required all commercial
slaughtering to take place in a city corral. Any person could slaughter an animal for
personal consumption within the city limits outside of a restricted district: north of
Virgin (now Alpine) Street and south of Sixth Street, and more than two hundred
yards from the acequia (irrigation ditch).
14

The city’s health officer was charged with preventing the sale of bad meat
from 1873 (part of his duties regarding the “abatement of nuisances”), while
inspections of health hazards and other nuisances were under the purview of the city
marshal. The next year, under a “Resolution Regulating the Prevention of Nuisances
and Providing for the Public Health,” commercial slaughter was prohibited anywhere
in the city without city council license. Most slaughtering continued outside the city
162
limits until the Cudahy Company’s petition was granted in 1892 to operate on Macy
Street between the Plaza and the Los Angeles River.
15

Creating a District for Odium: In the late spring of 1900, Leo Gardner, the
wholesale meat buyer, presented a petition to the city council on behalf of the
Hobson Brothers meat concern of Ventura (as well as reputed East Coast investors).
They wished to extend the legal slaughterhouse district to build and operate a new
slaughterhouse in the First Ward, a bit northeast of the Cudahy plant and east across
the Los Angeles River, on five acres recently optioned by the investors. William
Dunn, former city attorney (1894-1898) who represented the applicants, pledged to
the city council that the plant would operate in full conformity with all the sanitary
laws set by the board of health. He assured them that this increase in competition
would be a great economic benefit to the city as well as the neighborhood and lessen
dependence on imported canned goods from the east. He described how the new
plant would employ up to a hundred workers and be a boon to the growing industrial
sector. The “modernity” of the new plant and its equipment was stressed. The
Hobson Brothers’ petition cited the 1892 ordinance that created the original district
for the Cudahy Company, authorizing the city council to designate additional
slaughterhouse districts as needed upon request. In addition, Dunn presented two
petitions signed by eighty-nine business and property owners in the immediate area
that were supportive of increasing competition and employment in the meat industry.
Amendment of the district seemed assured, as both councilmen from the First Ward
163
and the nearby Ninth Ward voiced support, in large part because the nearby property
owners did so.
16

But in the following week, after the petitions were referred to the board of
public works for investigation, opposition to the new slaughterhouse and the
possibility of a neighboring “butcher town” grew, not only among First Ward
residents but additionally among those of the Ninth Ward adjoining to the south.
They feared “confiscation of thousands of dollars” through lowered property values
and declared it a “menace to health and happiness.” Between the Cudahy plant on the
west, and the Simon Maier plant just outside the city limits to the east, no matter
which way the winds blew, they currently could not escape the odors, as described in
at least eight petitions with over two hundred names. Simon Maier, looking to either
better compete through expansion near the rail lines or delay the approval process in
order to increase opposition—both accusations were voiced—petitioned to further
extend the slaughterhouse district to include a parcel of his own, adjacent to and
northwest of the Cudahy property, where he proposed to operate a public
slaughterhouse.
17

The city council was saddled with the decision of whether to signal their
approval for continuing this land use and to initiate a de facto plan with the creation
of a larger slaughtering and packing house district along the river where rail access
was plentiful; or to consider the present anxieties of the residential inhabitants and
restrict any additional industrial development of this sort. After the board of health
and the health officer inspected the property and neighborhood, and having declared
164
the location “unobjectionable”, the city council voted five to four on 11 June 1900 in
favor of the industrial “plan,” while Mayor Eaton approved it two days later. The
new district became effective immediately.
18

The entire approval process—from the first petition to extend the district east
of the river to the effective date of the approval to expand the district both east and
west of the river—lasted barely three weeks. Within twenty-one days, with little
substantial discussion and some input by but little weight seemingly given to
residential constituents, the city council made a decision that would make a
difference in the kinds of land uses desirable along the Los Angeles River in the
central part of the city. While the decision might damage the interests of some
residential neighbors in the First, Eighth and Ninth Wards, the city council reasoned
that economic benefits to the city as a whole were much greater and outweighed the
interests of perhaps a less important (or powerful) group of small property owners
and working-class residents. The pledges by Hobson Brothers and Simon Maier to
invest one hundred and two hundred thousand dollars, respectively—along with the
prospects of increased employment and domestic production and decreased reliance
on food sources imported from other parts of the country—spoke louder than the
council protests and written petitions which were the only tools available to residents
in 1900.
19

These tools were soon augmented. John Randolph Haynes, local physician
and proponent of progressive governmental improvements, first put forward an
amendment of the city charter that included several mechanisms of more direct
165
political power to the citizenry in 1898. The referendum would allow city
government to poll voters during a regular election about a particular issue. Voters
themselves could petition the city council to consider legislation through the
initiative process. If said petition received a high enough number of valid signatures,
the proposed legislation would bypass the city council completely and become law.
Fifteen amendments to the charter were proposed at the general election on 1
December 1902; thirteen were approved. The referendum and initiative, proposed
together in one amendment, passed by more than a six to one majority. The recall—
the un-election of an elected official before the end of his term of office—was
approved by a vote of more than four to one. The revised charter, incorporating these
elements of direct legislation, was ratified by the state legislature in January 1903.
20

The Fire Creates Opportunities
On Tuesday night, 24 May 1904, a fire began on the third floor of the Cudahy
Packing Company’s main building. The flames spread rapidly, fueled by the
company’s stores of lard and other flammable meat byproducts. The glow from the
fire was visible throughout the city, attracting neighbors and spectators to the bright
spectacle; they covered the surrounding embankments fifteen deep for most of the
night, cheering on the firefighters with shouts of approval. The six engines and many
hose companies of the municipal fire department labored until the early hours of the
morning, trying to gain control over the flames before they could consume the
company’s structures.
21

166
They were unsuccessful. The five-story main building of the largest
slaughterhouse in Los Angeles was destroyed, a loss of about three-quarters of the
Cudahy Company’s total capital investment of $400,000. Valuable modern meat
packing machinery—reportedly irreplaceable on the Pacific Coast—was destroyed.
And one hundred and seventy people were immediately put out of work.
22

The Cudahy family’s local representative, Michael Cudahy, when reached at
home in Pasadena, seemed to accept the fire as a normal risk to business when he
confidently and matter-of-factly declared, “It will be rebuilt as soon as the ashes
cool.” Estimates of the time to complete the new plant were ninety days; provisions
of hams, bacon and lard from other factories were brought in so that orders could
begin to be filled on the next Monday.
23

Clara I. Dosch, along with many of her neighbors, disagreed. The widowed
milliner’s home at 944 Lyons Street backed up to the Cudahy property on the plant’s
west side. When she appeared before the city council three weeks after the fire, on
Monday, 13 June 1904, she presented a petition signed by twenty-three of the
residential neighbors of the Cudahy Plant—ten of whom lived on Clara Street, one
block to the west, and several from the blocks just west of the plant, fronting Macy
Street. The petition signers were primarily laborers employed in nearby businesses: a
teamster, two house painters, a plasterer, a blacksmith and a local saloon bartender.
Additional signers included a chef, a musician, and the proprietor of a small foundry
business as well as the resident-owner of a small construction company.
24

167
The petitioners represented a cross-section of the residents of the Eighth
Ward: laborers and small business operators, many newly-arrived immigrants of
Italian and French heritage, as well as others who had arrived in Los Angeles in the
previous decades. Part of the massive influx of residents who contributed to the
doubling of the city’s population from 1890 to 1900 to more than one hundred
thousand people, they were employed primarily as factory workers for the growing
industrial base of the city; in the building trades laboring to keep up with the
commercial, industrial and residential needs of the expanding city; and in various
service sectors. Many widows resided in the neighborhood (according to city
directory listings). In order to make ends meet, many of these women took in single
working men as boarders, or as tenants of the even-smaller cottages built at the rear
of their properties.
25

This neighborhood in the southern section of the Eighth Ward was a mixture
of small cottages, densely built, primarily within the previous fifteen years and
constructed at the same time as the numerous small businesses and larger factories
spreading both north and south along the west bank of the Los Angeles River. This
ward contained some of the oldest developed parcels within the city boundary, as
well as the eastern portion of the original Spanish pueblo. Where originally the land
between the pueblo and the meandering oft-flooding river was consigned to
agricultural use, it now sprouted industrial concerns, while the rest had been
subdivided into narrow building lots for housing affordable to working people.
26

168
The petitioners articulated a long list of reasons to prohibit reconstruction of
the Cudahy plant on the same site, and furthermore demanded the repeal of the
slaughterhouse district ordinance that allowed the Cudahy Company to continue to
operate at that location. They had long tolerated the “existing evil” of the
slaughterhouse with the “squealing and bellowing of animals” and the “noxious,
offensive and poisonous odors” in close proximity to a “densely peopled section” of
the city and a large elementary school. Now that it had been destroyed was the
opportunity for the city council to prohibit slaughterhouses in that settled part of the
city. Move it somewhere else where there is “unlimited vacant land” requested the
petitioners. “The thing ‘smells to heaven’— it needs no argument to prove its claim
as a complete and unmitigated nuisance.”
27

Robert Todd, city council member for the industrial Eighth Ward, spoke out
at the meeting in agreement with the petitioners and in opposition to one of the larger
industrial concerns in his district. He described the “sickening odors” he could often
smell at his own home ten blocks southwest of the Cudahy plant. The city health
officer testified, however, that the Cudahy plant had been in compliance with what
he termed the very strict public health ordinances governing slaughterhouse
operations in Los Angeles. “But, you know,” added Dr. Powers, “that a
slaughterhouse even at its best is not a dwelling house and there are necessarily many
things connected with it which are unpleasant.”
28

With no other discussion, the Macy area residents’ petition was referred to
the city council’s legislation committee for further research. Residents and
169
developers in many areas of city were already frustrated that businesses were
invading their neighborhoods. The Cudahy fire and resultant discussions about
whether or not it should rebuild on-site, along with other proposals by locally-owned
slaughtering companies to expand within the city limits, resulted in further increasing
tensions. Where should these industries locate?
29

While the Cudahy Packing Plant was in complete compliance with the city’s
single-purpose districting and public health regulations—at least as reported by the
inspecting officers—the plant’s operations on its eleven acres had expanded to a
point where it could not avoid affecting a large surrounding area. There was no way
given the nature of the slaughtering business that the company could confine the
sights, sounds and smells of its operations to its own property. Nearby residents, and
even those living at a greater distance, could not help but be reminded of the
existence of their industrial neighbor. Once it burned, the residents saw an
opportunity to be rid of the nuisance, to force it to move outside the city boundaries
as surrounding communities were starting to do, and to reclaim what they felt was
the residential character of the neighborhood.
30

Adding fuel to the smoldering fire, Simon Maier began to fence off his long-
vacant fifteen acres between the Cudahy plant and the residences on Date Street. He
declared he planned to build a new up-to-date slaughtering facility on this site that
also fell within the existing single-purpose slaughterhouse district.
31

And finally, Julius Hauser had purchased eighteen acres in the Sixth Ward at
Ninth Street and Santa Fe Avenue at the end of April 1904. Rumors immediately
170
circulated that he would build a slaughterhouse at this location, while he insisted it
was bought purely for speculative purposes and might be subdivided later. Much of
the surrounding lands had been subdivided by this time and working-class cottages
had sprung up on some of the plots. This area, just blocks from the west bank of the
river, also contained numerous railroad lines and industrial developments, which
contributed to the growing sense of the appropriateness of an industrial use for this
parcel. Julius Hauser’s parcel was part of the new slaughterhouse district
unanimously approved—quietly and with no public comment—by the city council,
on the same date that Hauser’s petition for the additional district was received, on 11
April 1904.
32

The Ballot-Box Alternative
The Electorate’s Desire to Be Heard: Just four years after the council’s
approval of the expanded slaughterhouse district near Macy Street and eighteen
months after the state ratified the new charter, citizens of Los Angeles used their new
charter rights to articulate concerns about their neighborhoods, their dissatisfaction
with the city council’s response to residential property interests and disagreement
with the nascent and ad hoc industrial locational policy that threatened their
neighborhoods. In 1904, when the Cudahy facility burned and plans were announced
to rebuild at the same location in the Eighth Ward, the surrounding residential
neighbors protested. As other companies proposed new facilities there and in the
nearby Sixth Ward to the south, and the city council could not come up with a
171
satisfactory response, residents circulated petitions to place this issue on the ballot as
an initiative during the regular municipal election in December.
33

Both Hauser and Maier hurriedly began construction preparations on their
respective properties before the end of June 1904. In response, Sixth, Seventh and
Eighth Ward residents thronged the city council chambers on Monday, 27 June 1904,
to voice their protests. Property owners from the Ninth Street vicinity of Hauser’s
proposed slaughterhouse described how property values had already dropped at the
news of the potential future use of the site. Henry Harrison, owner at Ninth Street
and Santa Fe Avenue, complained that he had tried to sell his property once
construction commenced and could get only one-fifth the previous value and
described the “widows and orphans whose little property is confiscated” by the
slaughterhouse to be located here. After an hour of fielding the numerous complaints,
Council President Bowen promised that a special meeting would be called at the end
of the week once the city council members had had a chance to investigate the
building site in person.
34

At that meeting, the council was about to grant the protesting petitions and
rescind the new district, but then, in executive session, decided to hold off on any
decisions for a few weeks. Hauser, Maier and Cudahy were told that any construction
(or reconstruction) would be at their own risk until the matter could be settled.
Hauser’s representative, I.B. Dockweiller, requested time for Hauser to speak to
neighboring owners before any other meetings took place, and pointed out, rather
disingenuously, that Hauser had bought the property with the understanding that
172
slaughtering was a legal use for that land. One of those nearby owners admitted that,
according to the current ordinance, this was true, but that the ordinance was passed
and published in one day several months ago, giving people residing in that district
no chance to protest.
35

The Los Angeles Times—at least, its real estate editors—favored keeping this
area of the Sixth Ward as a residence district and wrote that Hauser would
experience no financial losses as he could easily subdivide the property and sell it off
for more than he paid. Housing had also been constructed across the river in the
Boyle Heights area—“neat and attractive homes” around Hollenbeck Park—and in
addition, a number of institutions on the bluffs east of the river would suffer from the
smells (for example: the Catholic Orphans Asylum and the Aged Peoples Home).
Meanwhile, the Merchants and Manufacturers Association and Eighth Ward
businessmen (as well as other groups of property owners in the Eighth and Ninth
Wards), worried that the restriction on land uses would eventually spread to include
other types of industrial uses, petitioned in support of Cudahy and the current
slaughterhouse district.
36

By this time, petitions were also circulating for the recall of the Sixth Ward’s
councilman, James Davenport. He was accused of being instrumental in the
slaughterhouse district addition in his ward, a charge he vehemently denied and
attempted to prove by moving to rescind the district at the council meeting of 18 July
1904. Davenport stated, “I have been asked by scores of the residents of the eastern
section of my ward to have the district abolished.” He insisted that Hauser had
173
originally misrepresented his intentions, having stated only that he would operate a
packinghouse, and never having mentioned that slaughtering would be carried out on
site. Davenport concluded: “I have visited the site of the proposed plant, and I am
now convinced that the majority of my people do not want slaughterhouses. They
feel that the places would become nuisances.”
37

Councilman Farish of the Third Ward had also visited the site with the
legislative committee when the ordinance was first proposed in April. At that time,
he thought it an excellent location for expanded industrial use, in part because the
committee had encountered no opposition, and because they thought the additional
employment would be a benefit to the community. Now that he had heard the other
side, he was ready to rescind the district. Several of the councilmen wanted to wait
until the full council was available to vote, for several reasons. First, because the
Eighth Ward district (containing Cudahy) was not included in the motion, and
secondly, they felt that if they were going to wipe out one district, now was the time
to wipe them all out. Action was thus deferred until the following Monday
afternoon.
38

At a special meeting on 25 July 1904, the council heard hours of testimony:
attorneys for all the different interests, expert witnesses testifying about either sweet-
smelling modern abattoirs or the bloody and foul conditions to be expected from a
slaughterhouse, as well as residents and business owners. One of the lawyers for the
protestors showed that only ten percent of the petition signers favoring the
continuance of the Eighth Ward slaughterhouse district actually lived within the
174
ward—perhaps an indication that at least some of the city’s voters were satisfied to
have the district remain where it had been for twelve years, far from their own homes
but close enough for convenience. Davenport moved for a vote to have the city
attorney draw up an ordinance to rescind the new district. At that point, Hauser’s
attorney presented several witnesses whose land surrounded his property who said
that they would “welcome the establishment with open arms.” When the vote was
finally taken, Robert Todd refused to support the motion to rescind the district
because it did not address the interests of his Eighth Ward constituents. This gave the
majority to those opposed to repealing the district. The only ordinance approved that
Monday was one requiring that the prospective slaughterhouse builders submit their
plans as a sanitary precaution.
39

By the end of that week, opponents of the slaughterhouses had organized a
mass meeting of five hundred men and women at the Church of the Neighborhood
on Wilson Street in the Sixth Ward, where resolutions were accepted condemning
the city council vote as illegal and deceptive and alleging widespread fraud in the
signing of petitions. Listeners were told that neighborhood organization was
important during this “new era [that] was dawning [for the citizens’] voice . . . in
public affairs.” Plans were made for similar gatherings in the Seventh, Eighth and
Ninth Wards in the next days. Ninth Ward Councilman Nofziger was invited to listen
to his constituents at one of the mass meetings in Korbel’s Hall at First and State
Streets. He, who had voted against repealing the district on 25 July 1904, surprised
the council with a proposed ordinance on 8 August 1904 to repeal what had become
175
known as Julius Hauser’s slaughterhouse district in the Sixth Ward. This ordinance
was also defeated, under a suspension of the rules.
40

One week later, the full city council reversed course and voted unanimously
to rescind the district in the Sixth Ward, blocking Hauser’s construction. When Kern
(Ward Seven) then moved to have the city attorney draw up an ordinance to wipe out
all the slaughterhouses “in one fell swoop,” First Ward Councilman McAleer (who
had been the one to place the motion to rescind the Sixth Ward district that day)
reminded the council that the Cudahy facility had been operating legally and with
little complaint at its location for many years. He warned the council of the danger of
giving the impression that the city was opposed to business and that they would also
risk demands for the removal of other kinds of manufacturing plants from other
neighborhoods. Forbidding any slaughtering within the city limits would be “the
biggest mistake the Council can make.” Kern disagreed, and pointed out that
eventually the city would be forced to restrict slaughtering operations. The people
would demand it. Why not check it now before the great plants are built? But the
votes did not materialize to block all slaughtering within the city limits; instead,
Councilman Farish proposed that it be submitted as a referendum to a vote of the
people. The council did not take up that idea.
41

Testing the Initiative Process: While the business establishment was
generally relieved that the situation was settled—investors reputedly had hesitated to
invest in the areas where the slaughterhouses were disputed—the residents of the
working-class neighborhoods were not appeased. Mass meetings and organizing
176
continued throughout the next weeks. Encouraged by the successful petition process
and recall of the Sixth Ward city councilman in August and September, petitions to
ban all slaughterhouses within the city limits were drafted and circulated.
42

The Anti-Abattoir Committee had hoped to garner enough signatures on its
initiative petitions—fifteen percent of the total votes cast in the last mayoral
election—that the restriction on all slaughtering would go into effect immediately as
a city ordinance initiated by direct legislation. The committee was disappointed when
that goal was not reached. But because the number of signatures, more than a
thousand primarily gathered in the working-class Sixth, Seventh, Eighth and Ninth
Wards, exceeded the five percent threshold, the city council had the choice of either
adopting the ordinance without amendment or placing the question on the next
ballot. The council opted for the latter alternative. The initiative vote—the first test
of the direct initiative in the United States—was approved for the ballot at the next
general election on 5 December 1904.
43

The process of direct democracy was soon to be further tested. Three more
initiative petitions were presented and rapidly verified by the overtaxed city clerk and
his deputies working day and night over the next week. All had the requisite number
of signatures to appear on the ballot. The council accepted them with great
consternation because of their contradictory nature. One, circulated by supporters of
Hauser’s packing business, would have allowed slaughtering only in the Sixth Ward.
A second, supporting the Cudahy Company, maintained only the long-standing
177
Eighth Ward slaughterhouse district. A final petition, of unclear provenance, allowed
slaughtering in both the Sixth and Eighth Wards.
44

In a circular distributed by the Cudahy Packing Company, the company urged
voters to vote “for” the question making the Eighth Ward the only location where
slaughtering for public sale was legal. The consequences of the vote going against
the company’s interests would be felt by city consumers: higher prices for meat as
costs of moving the company’s operations and transportation of products were
passed on, unemployment of local workers, and the loss of a significant contributor
to the local economy. The Cudahy Company also professed confidence that, should
the initiative vote go against the company’s interests, they would ultimately prevail
in the courts.
45

This confidence seemed well placed. The United States Supreme Court had
just ruled in another Los Angeles districting case in favor of the company and against
the city’s attempts to re-draw an existing single-purpose land use district. Along the
Los Angeles River, just a few blocks north of the Cudahy plant, there was a similarly
mixed neighborhood of small, working-class homes and a growing district of various
industries from brass works to oil refineries. Caroline Dobbins had sued the city for
changing the gas plant district in 1901 immediately after granting her a permit to
commence construction of her own gas plant and without any changes in the
neighborhood having occurred. On appeal from the state high court, the federal court
reversed the judgments of the lower court under the Constitution’s due process and
property rights provisions and upheld the plaintiff’s permit as a contractual
178
obligation of the city. According to the majority opinion, while a municipality is
obligated to protect the public welfare and regulate the location of nuisance
industries through its police powers, this cannot be arbitrarily enforced where no
changes have occurred that would have motivated the regulatory amendment.
46

This was promising news for the Cudahy Company as it had been legally
operating within the appropriate district and conforming to all public health
regulations before the fire. There is no evidence of complaints or any popular
movement to remove the plant before the fire. Nothing in the neighborhood had
changed since the fire and thus they believed that legal precedent had been
articulated in Dobbins v. Los Angeles that would allow them to rebuild at the same
location no matter the result of the initiative vote.
Campaigning intensified in the weeks leading up to the election. Cudahy and
Maier interests opposed those of Hauser. Business interests campaigned primarily
against the complete ban, but also feared that either of the one-ward limiting districts
would send an unwelcoming signal of instability to the business world. Eighth Ward
residents urged voters to support both the all-city ban and the Eighth Ward ban
initiatives, angry that the Sixth Warders did not support them after the Eighth Ward
had helped in the fight to rescind the Sixth Ward slaughterhouse district over the
summer. Sixth Ward union members held campaign meetings in support of “their”
question. The city attorney expressed concern about the proper course if multiple and
conflicting initiatives were approved. Patrick Cudahy, president of the national
enterprise, arrived in town to support the company’s interests. After more than a half
179
million pieces of campaign literature were deposited at the post office the week
before the election, the postmaster had to petition the postmaster general for
permission to deliver mail on Sunday in order to keep up with the load.
47

Ballot Results and Analysis: The four separate qualifying ballot questions
were not mutually exclusive, but just one received enough votes on 5 December
1904 to succeed, avoiding the necessity to turn to the courts to resolve the issue. And
because the successful initiative question was the one that maintained a broadened
slaughterhouse district including both wards, business owners did not need to go to
court to protest the result.
The initiative question to ban all slaughterhouse operations anywhere within
the city’s borders failed, forty-five percent to fifty-five percent, primarily because of
heavy opposition in the Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards (see Table 8 below). The
ballots cast in the wards most directly affected by slaughterhouse operations (Wards
One, Six, Seven and Eight) voted fifty-three percent in favor of a total ban. Just two
wards favored allowing slaughtering solely in the Eighth Ward: Ward Three and
interestingly, Ward Eight itself. Fifty-five percent of votes citywide opposed this
measure. Even stronger opposition was evident in the result of the ballot on
maintaining slaughtering only in the Sixth Ward, with seventy percent opposing
citywide. In fact, only six of the 108 precincts citywide favored it. The highest
opposition was seen in the Westside wards, while the lowest, at fifty-five percent
was in the Eighth Ward, where, as noted, angry sentiments were aroused because of
alleged Sixth Warder disloyalty. Finally, regarding the last initiative that maintained
180
the status quo of slaughtering districts in both the Sixth and Eighth Wards, every
ward and all but four precincts preferred this alternative.
Table 8

The Ward Six precinct where Hauser’s parcel was located (in the ward where
union and neighborhood organizing had been the strongest) voted eighty-three
percent to ban all slaughtering, twenty-six percent in favor of continuing in the
Eighth Ward, sixteen percent to continue it in the Sixth Ward and just nineteen
percent to continue it in both wards. Feelings in the Eighth Ward precinct
surrounding the Cudahy property were not quite as strong. Sixty percent favored an
outright ban to slaughtering within the city limits, sixty-one percent to keep it in the
Eighth Ward, fifty-two percent to keep it in the Sixth, and sixty percent for the status
quo alternative.
48

In 1912, John Randolph Haynes assessed the early implementation of the
initiative, referendum and recall for the National Municipal Review. He compared
the votes cast for these direct measures with those cast for mayor, which he points
181
out “almost always greatly exceeds that cast for other offices.” In two elections, 1909
and 1911, the percentage of those voting on ballot initiatives was seventy-three and
seventy-nine percent of those cast for mayor. Following Haynes’s reasoning, in
assessing the overall involvement of mayoral voters in answering each of the four
1904 initiative questions, we find that the voter participation was just forty percent
overall, much lower than the results Haynes reported.
49

Table 9

The highest voter participation was for the alternative that proposed banning
slaughterhouses entirely, over fifty-two percent of mayoral votes (Table 9 above).
The question of keeping Ward Six as the sole site of legal commercial slaughtering
accumulated the lowest voter participation rates of all four initiatives, with just
182
twenty-eight percent of mayoral voters voicing an opinion by casting a vote. Voter
participation on the proposal to maintain slaughtering only in Ward Eight was
slightly higher, at thirty-four percent overall. Finally, on the scheme to keep
slaughtering in both Ward Six and Ward Eight, forty-seven percent of the number of
mayoral voters voted. Overall, voters in the west side Wards Three, Four and Five
were motivated to cast a higher percentage of ballots on each of the four questions,
based on the number of votes cast in mayoral race. Voters in Wards Seven and Eight
had the lowest participation rates of all the wards on each ballot initiative.
Voters might well have been confused at their first encounter with ballot
initiatives, as well by a confrontation with four closely-related ballot questions at one
time. Also contributing was the heated campaign rhetoric published in the
newspapers and mailed to their homes, and contradictory voting instructions from the
various concerned parties. It is not possible to say for certain the cause of the low
overall participation rate (in comparison to votes cast for mayor) and the disparities
between the west side and working-class wards, though there are a number of
possible scenarios. It is possible that the wards with higher concentrations of
immigrant, working-class voters might have had less understanding of the ballot
even though they should have been the most motivated to cast a ballot on issues
directly concerning them. Westside voters might have been more motivated to vote
against ward-based machine political interests or might have been less influenced by
vehement political rhetoric before the election.

183
Conclusion
John Randolph Haynes later stated that the voters using “keen judgment
selected the best one” of the four ballot initiatives. Perhaps that was so—at least
from the standpoint of reassuring business interests and confirming the future
industrial expansion in Los Angeles in the near-river districts where development
was already occurring. It certainly was not the best choice for residents living in the
shadow of factories, for those like Clara Dosch and other petition signers who
thought the Cudahy fire was an opportunity to strengthen the residential character of
the neighborhood by forbidding its reconstruction. Instead the neighborhood
acquired not just a restored Cudahy plant but also a second slaughterhouse, as Simon
Maier subsequently moved his operation from beyond the city’s eastern border.
These industries operated for decades (the Cudahy plant into the 1950s), long after
the modest working-class homes had disappeared, gradually replaced by other
industrial concerns, and later, freeways and redevelopment.
50

The results of the initiative vote—along with the constitutionality of direct
legislation itself—were challenged in court when Andrew Pfahler, a local butcher,
was charged a year later with slaughtering pigs within the city but outside the
slaughterhouse district. Pfahler received financing from local liquor and saloon
interests attempting to head off a restrictive initiative vote on city alcohol sales.
Represented by Robert Todd, former city council member for the Eighth Ward
(location of the Cudahy and Maier slaughterhouses), he appealed the case directly to
the California Supreme Court on a habeas corpus plea. That court upheld the
184
constitutionality of the amended charter and confirmed the initiative provision in a
six-to-one ruling decided in October 1906.
51

The successful ballot initiative was the one that maintained broader
slaughterhouse districting, essentially the status quo. It took place in a politically
charged atmosphere where a councilman was recalled from office, and was aided by
a strengthening politically progressive element opposed to ward-based machine
interests. As proponents of direct legislation averred, it satisfied the electorate’s
desire to be heard, to participate in the process and perhaps in this case, to have a say
in local land use issues. Even though the numerous and voluminous petitions seemed
to indicate a great deal of resistance to the siting of slaughterhouse operations within
the city boundaries, the voting result did not bear this out. The failing proposition to
ban slaughterhouses entirely from the city received a closer vote (forty-five percent
favoring, fifty-five percent against) than the successful one that maintained
slaughtering districts in the two wards (sixty-seven percent for, thirty-one percent
against). This supports one of the arguments for direct legislation: that it creates a
“safety valve” for the electorate when the elected leaders cannot or do not make a
decision. In this case, the voters were perhaps voicing frustration with the overall
approach of ad hoc single-purpose land use districts made by the city council.
52

Nineteen hundred and four was a banner year for land use regulation in Los
Angeles. First, the regrettable long-standing hostility towards the Chinese population
as well as increasing concern about the quality of residential neighborhoods led to
the creation of residence districts in several wards. This action built on evolving
185
notions of police power limits to municipal authority as articulated by the courts (in
this case, an Illinois supreme court opinion). While in reality these districts were no
different than the functional single-purpose districts long in use, the concept
underlying their creation resonated within the city and set the stage for later
acceptance of more and more complex districting efforts.
Secondly, the grassroots reaction to the conflicts about laundry and
slaughterhouse locations and the city council’s efforts to encourage industrial
expansion while only minimally appeasing residential concerns and individual
property rights indicated the depth of discontent among the residents of Los Angeles.
The city council would need to more carefully balance individual and community
rights as well as residential and business needs in the future.
53

Interestingly, the evidence does not indicate that the Chamber of Commerce
was involved in these 1904 land use conflicts until late November. Days before the
election, the Chamber’s committee on manufactures presented a report generated by
Michael Cudahy’s request of support to allow slaughterhouses to continue operating
in the Eighth Ward. In response, the Chamber adopted a resolution supporting the
location of all manufacturing plants along the Los Angeles River from Buena Vista
Street (near where Broadway crosses the river north of present-day Chinatown) south
to the city limits. Every possible manufacturing industry should be encouraged—and
Los Angeles “should set aside a sufficient district . . . within which all manufacturing
and slaughtering plants should be located.” The city did indeed attempt to “set aside
a sufficient district” over the ensuing years.
54

186
Chapter 3 Endnotes

1
The charter amendments were approved in a local election on 1 December 1902 and
approved by the California legislature on 30 January 1903 (In re Andrew Pfahler
1906 at 73). See Fogelson (1993: 207-213) for an overview of machine politics and
progressive reforms in Los Angeles, including charter reforms. Fogelson describes
the recall of Mayor Arthur Harper in 1909 (ibid.: 212-213). The power of the recall
was first used on an elected official in 1904 when Sixth Ward City Councilman
James Davenport was removed from office over accusations of bid rigging regarding
the city’s newspaper contracts for legal notices (Haynes 1912: 594). Also at issue
was his support for Hauser’s Sixth Ward slaughterhouse district, as discussed later in
this chapter. There was also an attempt to recall the Sixth Ward city councilman in
1906; the clerk found the petitions insufficient and no recall was held (ibid.).

2
A slaughterhouse is an enterprise where animals are killed and then possibly
butchered and processed (at least split into sides or quarters), or sent elsewhere for
processing. A packinghouse might or might not be engaged in slaughtering on the
premises before butchering for “packing” or putting up in barrels or other containers.
These two terms were used interchangeably in many of the city records and
newspaper accounts I consulted, regardless of the functions performed. The public
seemed to have conflated the two terms, bestowing on both equal animosity and
opposition. The term “abattoir” was imported from France in the later decades of the
nineteenth century, perhaps as a way to linguistically distance from the activity “by
exorciz[ing] all images of violence” (Traverso 2003: 35-36). It was not just the
killing of animals but also the butchering process that neighbors opposed. I will use
the term “slaughterhouse” in this chapter unless the reference is specifically to a
packinghouse enterprise that receives meat for processing from other locations, in
proper names or within quoted excerpts.

3
Friedmann 1980: 434-435, 442-443.

4
Los Angeles City Directories 1896-1906; Friedmann 1980: 438. The concentration
of slaughtering operations into large wholesale operations began in the 1860s when
companies such as Armour and Swift competed to capture urban markets in the East
(Yeager 1981: 117).

5
“Julius Hauser” Los Angeles Times 1 January 1895. “Soldier’s Home: Provisions
Purchased” Los Angeles Times 28 February 1897. “Flames on a Hill Made Great
Spectacle” Los Angeles Times 25 April 1902.
Hauser’s property was part of the 1896 Western annexation to the city. I have not
uncovered any evidence of complaint about his slaughterhouse operations at this
location, and no mention at all during any of the 1904 initiative discussion that

187

continued operation at this location might also be jeopardized depending on the vote
results.

6
“News and Business” Los Angeles Times 13 March 1891; “Pioneer of Early West
Days Dead” Los Angeles Times 21 April 1931.

7
City Directories. “Business Financial and Commercial Report” Los Angeles Times
20 October 1897.

8
Clemen 1923: 164-165; Skaggs 1986: 96-98.

9
“Building Boom” Los Angeles Times 29 May 1892. Ordinance #1523 N.S. adopted
24 December 1892. “Letters to the Times” Los Angeles Times 29 December 1892.
Henry Rueger, Map of Greater Los Angeles (1902) Los Angeles Public Library HS-
28.

10
“Common Sense about Manufactures” Los Angeles Times 2 January 1893. Simon
Maier and the Hobson Brothers petitioned in 1900 that the adjacent land northwest of
Cudahy’s plant as well as a parcel across the river (in Ward 1) be included in the
slaughterhouse district. An ordinance was adopted to accommodate this request.
(Ordinance # 6298 N.S. approved 13 June 1900) Simon Maier did not make a move
to construct his slaughterhouse there until 1904, after the Cudahy fire.

11
“Common Sense about Manufactures” Los Angeles Times 2 January 1893. The
“little homes” in which Eighth Ward workers resided were in developments like the
Macy Street Tract, advertised in early 1890s brochures as “Three blocks northeast of
the Plaza, three blocks west of Cudahy Packing Company—No Street Car Fare—No
Adobe” and within walking distance to three quarters of all factories in the city
(Petition #648 submitted 18 August 1894 (carton B11); real estate brochure in
author’s possession). Lots sold for around four hundred dollars in 1894 and within
ten years were densely built out (“Real Estate Transfers” Los Angeles Times 20 June
1894).
William Mead, owner of the tract, started out in real estate development by
providing lots and homes for working-class families in this part of the city. He later
purchased the remaining Griffith estate lands south of Griffith Park in 1910 and
developed the north end of the Los Feliz neighborhood—for a much different
clientele. He was also an early president of the City Planning Commission (“Foothill
Lands to Be Opened” Los Angeles Times 18 June 1922. “Mead Rites Set for
Tomorrow” Los Angeles Times 25 November 1927).

12
“Adjourned Session on the Packing-House Question” Los Angeles Times 24
December 1892. It is unclear from the city’s records whether Simon Maier’s land

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was actually added to the slaughterhouse district in December 1892 upon his original
request, or after the 1900 petition.

13
Skaggs 1986: 49, 109. Commonwealth vs. Upton 1856 at 476 (The judge stated
that the slaughterhouse in question was always a noxious practice and a nuisance
subject to abatement even though it had operated for twenty years far from the
boundary of Worcester, Massachusetts). Ex parte Heilbron 1884 at 611. (The
California supreme court too calls slaughtering a noxious land use, and quotes
Justice Miller from the Slaughter-House Cases (1872): “The regulation of the place
and manner of conducting the slaughtering of animals, and the business of
butchering within a city . . . are among the most necessary and frequent exercises of
this [police] power.”).
Slaughterhouse regulation was not just a local matter. Federal regulation of the
meat industry grew at the turn of the last century, though it affected smaller and local
enterprises more than the larger and often better-capitalized national concerns (Igler
2001: 168).

14
Los Angeles 1855: 22-23; Cleland 1941: 107; Friedmann 1980: 437-439;
Gumprecht 2001: 62.
As was the case in much of the regulation of slaughterhouses, enforcement was a
major impediment. In Los Angeles, the water continued to be befouled (Friedmann
1980: 437; Gumprecht 2001: 62). There are numerous references to a city corral,
public slaughterhouse or city market intended to be used as a municipal slaughtering
facility. Friedmann (1980: 438) writes that detailed ordinances accompanied another
such attempt in 1859-1860, to concentrate the sale of fresh foods and meat in a
public market. This experiment was abandoned.

15
Los Angeles 1878: 236. The original ordinance was passed 10 July 1873. The
health officer absorbed the job of inspections to identify nuisances after the original
ordinance was amended on 6 August 1874 and again on 1 March 1877 (Los Angeles:
1878: 235-238).

16
“New Industry Proposed for East Los Angeles” Los Angeles Times 2 June 1900.
“Abattoir Bobs Up Again” Los Angeles Times 10 June 1900. Petitions #336 and
#337 filed 4 June 1901. “Slaughtering in the City” Ordinance #1523 N.S. approved
29 December 1892. Municipal Reference Library 1970.

17
“First Ward Citizens Protest Against Abattoir” Los Angeles Times 9 June 1900.
Petitions #368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 377 and 378 filed 11 June 1900. City
Council Minutes 11 June 1900.

189

18
“Granted Both Requests: Packing-House Fight Ended” Los Angeles Times 12 June
1900. “Signed the Ordinance: Packing House Measure Officially Approved” Los
Angeles Times 14 June 1900.
The city council was divided in support for the expanded district. Councilman
Todd (Ward Eight) refused to sign off on the Public Health Board’s report. Charles
Toll (Ward Five) asked that the two districts be voted on separately; Simon Maier’s
attorney successfully argued to keep them combined. Louis Vetter (Ward Three)
discovered that the district was inaccurately drawn and included the Macy Street
School. The ordinance was quickly rewritten to exclude the school. In the final vote,
the representatives of the Third, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Wards voted “no” on the
ordinance. City Council President Herman Silver, of the Fourth Ward, broke the tie
in favor of the additional slaughterhouse districts. Because the petitions of the
residents and businesses closest to the Hobson site did not object, he felt it the “duty
of any Councilman to grant the wishes of the people.” He did not mention the
interests of the working-class residents near the Cudahy and the proposed Maier site
(City Council Minutes 11 June 1900; “Granted Both Requests: Packing-House Fight
Ended” Los Angeles Times 12 June 1900).

19
“Abattoir Bobs Up Again” Los Angeles Times 10 June 1900.

20
In re Andrew Pfahler 1906; Haynes 1912; Sitton 1992: 42. Many thanks to Tom
Sitton for his insights on John Randolph Haynes, an introduction to the Haynes
papers at UCLA and his recommendation of the 1912 article.

21
“Big Cudahy Plant Gone” Los Angeles Times 25 May 1904; “Second Fire, Hot
Cooler” Los Angeles Times 26 May 1904.

22
“Big Cudahy Plant Gone” Los Angeles Times 25 May 1904. No mention was made
about the loss of any livestock.

23
“Commonsense about Manufactures” Los Angeles Times 2 January 1893; “Big
Cudahy Plant Gone” Los Angeles Times 25 May 1904; “Commercial: Cudahy
Packing Company” Los Angeles Times 27 May 1904.

24
Petition #612 in 1904 (carton A-11); Los Angeles City Directories from 1904 and
1905.

25
Los Angeles City Directory 1905. Using this city directory, one of the few “reverse
directories” published at this time in Los Angeles, I found 442 listed individuals
residing within a several-block radius of the Cudahy plant. Thirty-eight percent (169)
were employed as “laborers” or drivers. Thirty-eight ran small businesses (for
example, groceries) out of their homes, another twenty-nine had small businesses

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elsewhere. Three worked for the city. There were nine managers, primarily working
for neighborhood factories. The rest, roughly fifty percent, were skilled and semi-
skilled laborers who generally worked close by in the surrounding factories,
warehouses and businesses.

26
Gumprecht 2001: 57.

27
Petition #612 in 1904 (carton A-11).

28
Robert E. Todd was first elected to the Los Angeles city council in 1898. He
served three terms and did not run for re-election in 1904—perhaps a reason he was
willing to speak up against one of the largest industrial concerns in his ward. “Mrs.
Dosch Versus Cudahy” Los Angeles Times 14 June 1904; Los Angeles City
Directory 1904.

29
City Council Minutes 13 June 1904.

30
Los Angeles City Ordinance #1523 N.S. concerning “Slaughtering in City” was
approved in 1892. It named two districts where slaughtering was permitted, one of
which contained the Cudahy property north of Macy Street. “. . . Ordinance which
prohibits the maintaining of slaughter houses, soap factories, onion-drying factories,
grease rendering establishments, etc., within the city limits.” in “South Pasadena”
report in Los Angeles Times 18 April 1904.

31
“Adjourned Session on the Packing-House Question” Los Angeles Times 24
December 1892.

32
Petition #374 received 11 April 1904; Ordinance #9366 N.S. adopted 11 April
1904; “Among Owners and Dealers: Ninth and Santa Fe” Los Angeles Times 1 May
1904; “House and Lot: Ninth and Santa Fe” Los Angeles Times 1 May 1904; “Mrs.
Dosch vs. Cudahy” Los Angeles Times 14 June 1904; “Want Lines Changed” Los
Angeles Times 26 June 1904; Sanborn insurance maps of area.
Another slaughterhouse district of five acres had existed just east of the Los
Angeles River for many years. According to the newspaper, the Armour Company
had requested the re-districting but had never built on the property (“District for
Undertakers: Councilmen Tackle Question of Limits” Los Angeles Times 16 June
1904). As described in this chapter, Hobson Brothers, a large meat packing concern
of Ventura County, requested an ordinance creating the district in 1900. I have not
located anything in the city’s record that mentions Armour’s interest in the property.

33
This is the same year (1904) that the three residence-only districts were created in
Wards One, Two and Three. I speculate that one reason this ordinance was never

191

amended to include the other wards as planned is that the residence districts were
being created at the same time as the Cudahy plant burned, around May 1904. The
city and the city council were distracted not only by this event, and by the
controversy over the changed slaughterhouse boundaries to allow another
slaughtering facility to locate in Ward Six, as well as the intense petitioning efforts to
qualify the initiatives for the December ballot. Additionally, the first use of the recall
provision of the charter amendment that summer to recall the Sixth Ward
councilman J.P. Davenport doubtless diverted the attention of the other councilmen.

34
“Packers in a Hurry” Los Angeles Times 23 June 1904; “Want Lines Changed” Los
Angeles Times 26 June 1904; Petitions #692 and #695, received 27 June 1904;
“Want Prohibitory Ordinance” Los Angeles Times 28 June 1904; “Slaughter-houses:
Committee Investigates” Los Angeles Times 29 June 1904.

35
“Packing-houses in Abeyance” Los Angeles Times 1 July 1904; “The Slaughter-
house Nuisance” Los Angeles Times Sunday Real Estate Section 3 July 1904.
In the meantime, the Cudahy slaughterhouse was operating on a reduced scale in
the remaining undamaged buildings, while reconstruction moved forward on the
foundations of the burnt-out facilities, with expectations to resume full-scale
operations by October (“Dollars of Cudahy’s” Los Angeles Times 9 August 1904).

36
“That Proposed Slaughter House” Los Angeles Times Sunday Real Estate Section
10 July 1904;. “Business Men’s Protest” Los Angeles Times 19 July 1904; Petition
from Merchants and Manufacturers Association received 21 July 1904; Sanborn
insurance maps.

37
City Council Minutes 18 July 1904; “To Amend District—Conditions
Misrepresented” Los Angeles Times 19 July 1904.

38
City Council Minutes 18 July 1904; “To Amend District—Conditions
Misrepresented” Los Angeles Times 19 July 1904.

39
City Council Minutes 25 July 1904; “Slaughter Houses Are Allowed to Stand” Los
Angeles Examiner 26 July 1904.

40
“Denunciation Falls Upon Council” Los Angeles Examiner 30 July 1904. The
meeting was held in a working class area popularly known as “The Neighborhood”
that had been “American” before a transition to Italian and Black residents, as per the
Handbook of Settlements (Woods and Kennedy 1911: 13). The Handbook continued,
“Many people own their own homes and small shops in the community. Warehouses
and packinghouses are encroaching upon the residence part of this district (ibid.).

192

Six votes would have been necessary to pass the ordinance when the full council
was not present. Farish, Kern, Nofziger and Bowen voted for the ordinance, while
Todd, Skilling and McAleer voted against it—“There were many things which were
forced upon their wards which were disagreeable to their constituents and which
other members of the Council would not help them get rid of” (“Nofziger Gives a
Surprise” Los Angeles Times 9 August 1904).

41
Ordinance #9815 N.S. adopted 15 August 1904; “Dying Pigs to Quit Squealing”
Los Angeles Times 16 August 1904.
At this same meeting, an ordinance was passed calling for a special election on 16
September 1904 in the Sixth Ward for the recall of Councilman Davenport, after
petitions with sufficient signatures were verified. Support of the slaughterhouse
district was only one of a number of accusations against Davenport; chief among
them was his alleged support of the anti-union Los Angeles Times’ bid for the city’s
printing contract over a lower bid by a unionized newspaper. As the Sixth Ward was
heavily populated with union members, the petitioners had little difficulty in getting
sufficient signatures for the recall (Allswang 1996).

42
“Objectionable Manufacturing Plants” Los Angeles Times 21 August 1904.

43
City Council Minutes 18 October 1904, 24 October 1904, 26 October 1904;
“Abattoirs: Initiative Legislation” Los Angeles Times 18 October 1904; “Anti-
Abattoir Petition is Now Sufficient” Los Angeles Times 28 October 1904.

44
City Council Minutes 31 October 1904, 2 November 1904, 7 November 1904, 14
November 1904; Slaughterhouse petitions presented to the Los Angeles City
Council, October and November 1904 (cartons A10 and A12).

45
“Packing-House Urges Voters” Los Angeles Times 24 November 1904.

46
“At the City Hall” Los Angeles Times 2 November 1901; “Want Gas Permit” Los
Angeles Times 15 November 1904; Dobbins v. Los Angeles (1904).

47
“Slaughter House Fight Warms Up” and “Slaughter House Fight Causes Feud
Between Wards” Los Angeles Record 1 December 1904; [untitled] Los Angeles
Times 2 December 1904; “Flood Came” and “Prospective Muddle Over The
‘Initiative’” Los Angeles Times 3 December 1904.

48
City Council Minutes December 1904.

49
Haynes 1912: 589.

193

50
Ibid.: 590.

51
In re Andrew Pfahler 1906; “Bitter Fight on Initiative” Los Angeles Times 14
January 1906; “Supreme Court Will Decide” Los Angeles Times 16 January 1906;
“Referendum Still Sticks” Los Angeles Times 14 October 1906; Sitton 1992: 60-61.
While Pfahler’s attorney Todd declared his intention to appeal the ruling to the
federal Supreme Court, there is no record that this occurred. Pfahler was remanded to
the police court in Los Angeles.

52
See Fogelson (1993: 210-212) on the political atmosphere. Sitton (1992: 35-36) on
arguments for direct legislation.

53
Two more slaughterhouse district initiatives appeared on the ballot, in 1916 and
1917. When the San Fernando Valley was annexed to Los Angeles in 1915, it
included a long-operating slaughterhouse. An initiative vote held in October 1916 to
try to regularize its operations resulted in a resounding loss for the slaughterhouse
(19,842 yes votes, 28,267 no votes). Though the 1915 Hadacheck Supreme Court
decision had confirmed the city’s power to use its police powers to remove nuisance
industries, the city council no longer actively exercised that power, preferring to
create residence exceptions allowing businesses to remain in operation. In this case,
an exception was not possible as the council could not change a citizen-initiated
regulation. A second vote on the same question was held in June 1917, after an
extensive “educational campaign” by the company. This time the initiative to expand
the slaughterhouse district succeeded—52,763 yes votes, 18,855 no votes (City
Council Minutes 24 October 1916 and 5 June 1917. “Ask for Vote on Slaughter-
House” Los Angeles Times 27 August 1916; “Test Ordinances” Los Angeles Times
15 Dec 1916; “New Chance for Slaughterhouse” Los Angeles Times 16 January
1917).

54
LACC Minutes 30 November 1904, LAACC, RHC.

194
Chapter 4
“There Must Be Progress”—Creating Citywide Districts

Introduction
In this chapter, I focus first on the municipal regulatory shift to citywide land
use districting in Los Angeles after the 1904 slaughterhouse initiative vote, with
particular focus on the years from 1908 to 1913. These new districts dominated
though did not entirely replace the traditional single-purpose districts long in use.
Second, these districting ordinances resulted in a number of significant court
cases where landowners and business operators asserted their preeminent individual
property rights in opposition to city powers. The decisions in these cases served to
clarify the extent to which a municipal government in California could exercise state-
granted police powers to regulate private property use for the public’s welfare. They
directly influenced the direction of land use regulation in Los Angeles. The locations,
situations and conditions of Ex parte Quong Wo (1911), Ex parte Montgomery
(1912) and Ex parte Hadacheck (1913) decided at the state level (and the 1915
federal appeal Hadacheck v. Sebastian) are considered.
1

Finally, Los Angeles was certainly not alone among American cities in facing
increasing conflicts over locational issues, confronting challenges to traditional land
use regulations and in pushing the boundaries of what was considered constitutional.
Los Angeles’s innovations are put in a national context of change in local land use

195
regulation prior to the spread and acceptance (beginning in the 1920s) of the more
comprehensive citywide zoning ordinances with which we are today familiar.

Pressures for Change: The Need for Districts in a Transforming Urban World
In the latter portion of the nineteenth century, local urban economies in the
United States became more dependent on industrial development with more far-
reaching markets. Industries themselves were evolving from the predominant form of
a single owner who directly oversaw business operations to larger and more diverse
concerns, with multiple branches, often in different cities, offering a variety of goods
and services, and overseen by an expanding professional management staff.
2

Industrial plants grew ever larger, and consequently had more pronounced
effects on neighboring property owners of all types. Changes in transportation
technology allowed some people to move farther away from downtowns and
factories, while the workers who remained pressed for better conditions to protect
their own homes and individual investments adjacent to factory lands. Conflicts over
land use increased as densities increased. Government officials strove to protect
residential interests, as well as their own re-elections, in ward-based local urban
governments. In the increasingly regulatory-rich climate of the late nineteenth
century, the proliferating districting restrictions adopted by local governments and
the sustaining judicial decisions, seemed to have a distinctly anti-industry bias.
3

This predominant concern nationally with protecting homes, quality of home
life and residential land values coexisted with the tremendous industrial growth and

196
urban change of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The growth of corporations,
both in number and size of operation, attracted workers from rural areas and other
countries—part of the massive population transfer accelerating from the mid-
nineteenth century that contributed to a rapidly urbanizing nation. These laborers,
their growing numbers of middle managers and all the small businesses that served
them energized urban real estate markets. Greater urban densities and residential
investment, the changing nature of employee relationships in larger concerns,
growing separation of homes by economic class, and of homes from workplace,
greater knowledge of public health and medicine, municipal investment in
infrastructure and services, the rise of the regulatory state and growth of municipal
powers, growth in demand for services—all of this signaled a sea change in the
nature of cities, the scope of government activities, and the interrelationships of city
dwellers, local governments and businesses.
Continuing international immigration and domestic rural migration into
cities—both feeding industrial job growth—along with the burgeoning white-collar
residents, rapidly enlarged the urban population and increased the variety of interests.
Cities expanded into formerly rural, peripheral spaces. Governments
professionalized, and became service-providing corporations. Good government
reform groups attracted more supporters and achieved electoral victories, but then
were faced with the task of running governments. Businessmen’s associations and
trade groups boosted the competitive advantage of their own local markets and home
products (as well as their own businesses and investments). As the first decade of the

197
twentieth century dawned, all of these efforts took on more importance and urgency,
and became more deliberate and strategic in focus.
4

It shall be unlawful... to erect... within the residence district...
any stone crusher, crushed stone yard or bunker, rock, sand or
gravel loading, distributing or receiving station, rolling mill,
machine shop, planing mill, foundry, carpet beating
establishment, livery stable, riding academy, hay barn, wood
yard, lumber yard, public laundry, wash house, coal yard,
briquette yard, gas works, mattress factory, soap factory,
fertilizing plant or factory, tallow rendering plant or factory,
tannery, glue factory, brick yard, brink kiln, chemical plant or
other establishment for the manufacture of chemicals or
chemical products, dog or cat hospital, or any store or place
where dogs or cats are bred, sold, exhibited or kept for
breeding, sale or exhibition, . . . warehouse or other
establishment for the storage of goods, wares or merchandise,
winery, brewery, or plant for the distillation of alcoholic
liquors, or blacksmith shop . . .
— Los Angeles Residence District Ordinance (1916)
5

Residences vs. Industries
The long roll call of business enterprises listed above, with a few later
additions, as well as other industries singled out for separate single-purpose
districting, included those firms generally thought incompatible enough with homes
that they needed to be completely prohibited from operating within the rapidly
growing residential districts of Los Angeles. The list was a familiar one, having
appeared in various formats in fire limits regulations, in building codes and in
residential districting ordinances, over the preceding decades. It seemed to make
sense to focus on a vigilant protection of a homes in a city whose local economy had
depended so strongly on residential real estate development since the first hints of its

198
future potential appeared during initial growth spurts in the 1870s. Like other
American cities, municipal efforts in Los Angeles to control land uses in the decades
just prior to the turn of the last century were primarily centered on the protection and
good health of residential areas.
6

The population of Los Angeles had doubled between the 1890 and 1900
census, to more than one hundred thousand people. In 1903, it was thought to be
more than 130,000. The Chamber of Commerce estimated that more than three
hundred thousand people resided within the city limits of Los Angeles by the end of
1908, a figure born out by the census enumeration of 1910. New residents needed
housing: annual building permits had increased from about two thousand in 1900 to
more than seventy-five hundred in 1907, mostly for residential construction. New
residents also needed work, and proved to be a workforce attractive to the business
sector and valuable for attracting yet more new business, in a reciprocal relationship.
The value of local manufactured products rose from twenty-one million dollars in
1900 to over fifty-five million dollars in 1907 as the number and size of factories
increased.
7

While not completely setting aside the early focus on residential use of land,
the Los Angeles city council began to pay increasing attention to where industries
could and should be located, prodded by individual businesses and local
entrepreneurial elites—the Los Angeles Times newspaper, for example, and other
organizations, the most prominent of which was the Los Angeles Area Chamber of
Commerce. After years of telling factories where they could not locate, through fire

199
limits, health codes and single-purpose district ordinances, the city council began in
1908 to create industrial districts where factory operations could locate by right.
Here, plants would presumably be safe from protests from homeowners. After much
trial and error, setbacks in court, and protests from factories and businesses already
located in what, through regulation, became the “wrong” districts, Los Angeles
rewrote districting ordinances to encompass already thriving industrial areas and
withstand court challenge, and began to refine and enforce them with greater energy.
By the time that the city adopted its first comprehensive zoning ordinance in 1921,
Los Angeles had already been formally directing industrial growth into particular
districts for fifteen years, with at least three major industrial districting ordinances
and almost two hundred amending or excepting districts.
8

The eventual adoption of comprehensive zoning ordinances forced cities
across the United States to think in terms not only of where the residential areas
would be protected but at the same time of where the factories should be able to
operate. Charles Cheney, secretary of the California Conference on City Planning,
wrote in 1920 that the “best way to work out boundaries of residential districts is to
work out first the business and industrial boundaries—what is left forms the
residential zones.” Whether this was done successfully or not is another question!
But considering the question in the first place and fixing industrial district
boundaries would conceivably aid in the economic development of a city. That was
the conclusion reached in Los Angeles by the business and civic organizations even
before the reality of a comprehensive zoning code became more widespread in the

200
1920s. The question of where, then, the businesses listed at the beginning of this
section could safely operate was attacked vigorously in Los Angeles by city council-
created committees as well as business groups. While the ordinances passed by the
council were not always well-coordinated, as the numerous home- and business-
owning petitioners could attest, the set of regulations taken as a whole indicate that
the city was not only identifying the districts already settled by factories but
attempting to make enough land available for future business use.
9

During the five years following the 1904 initiative ballot, when Los Angeles
voters chose to maintain the small districts in the Sixth and Eighth Wards where
commercial slaughtering operations could legally be carried out, the city council had
ultimately settled on an ordinance that created an enlarged, protected residence
district that covered all of the city not located within a specified industrial district.
The council viewed this as a means to protect the growing residential neighborhoods
within the city from the encroachment of what were generally perceived by the
protesting neighbors to be unsuitable businesses. In parallel fashion, the protected
industrial districts would be a mechanism to encourage growth of industry in certain
quarters that would thereafter be immune to residential objections and free from the
necessity to convince the neighbors and the city council to allow operations.
As depicted in the previous chapters, individual landowners, groups of
neighbors and business people prior to 1905 were comparatively influential in
defining the discourse about land use, in deciding which ordinances were adopted
and where limiting districts were be located. There was a direct and immediate

201
conduit for local and individual participation in local government through the
petition process. The Los Angeles city council, because it reacted quickly to many of
the landowners’ concerns with amended districts and new regulations, assisted in
creating a more complicated administrative situation that invited ever more petitions
as conflicts over land use continued, and increased, as the city expanded.
These individuals who successfully petitioned to protect their homes and
neighborhoods—primarily from outside the working class residential quarters of the
Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Wards—were joined during this period by several
citywide civic organizations. These organizations had both increasing influence and a
heightened sense of the appropriate direction in which that growth should be
channeled. The Chamber of Commerce, the Merchants and Manufacturers
Association and the Los Angeles Realty Board worked independently to influence
the districting efforts of the city council. As early as 1906, they had also begun to
work together to promote the city in Eastern publications. By 1910-1911 they had
joined forces in a city-sanctioned advisory committee that recommended a much
more coordinated system of land use controls for industries. We can now see that this
was part of a transition to citywide districts. At the same time, the city council,
operating within a pragmatic political sphere, needed to make immediate responses
to constituent concerns and land use conflicts.
10

202
Where Shall the Factories Be?
11

Though Los Angeles’s first conscious attempt at creating “safe” districts for
housing in 1904—safe as in protected from the evident unhealthy side effects of
industries locating nearby as well as their threat to residential land use values—had
perhaps been sidetracked by other pressing political events in that same year, it was
not forgotten. The aborted effort was a manifestation of the influence of Los
Angeles’s old guard of residential real estate-focused development. This contrasted
with the then-current reformist political development of progressive change. Two
direct consequences of the new city charter amendments, adopted in 1902 through
efforts to incorporate progressive reforms, were the recall election of the Sixth Ward
city councilman during the summer of 1904 and the December 1904 initiative vote
on the location or prohibition of slaughterhouse districts within the city (discussed in
Chapter 3).
The operations of the Los Angeles city government began a shift of focus and
purpose in the last decades of the nineteenth century, from a limited-function,
reactive custodial position where development strategies remained the purview of a
private sector focused on real estate and boosterism, to a much more activist “state-
centered growth regime” by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century,
which aggressively sought industrial expansion through public works investment.
Massive water, power and harbor projects then in the planning or early construction
phase were intended to provide the necessary infrastructure for industrial growth as
well as residential needs. But the business insecurity caused by residents’ opposition

203
to industrial location in various neighborhoods could impede growth as much as the
lack of traditional infrastructure and would prevent the full benefits of the great
public service investments from being achieved. This insecurity—combined with
some of the speculative excesses and subsequent boom-and-bust cycles in the
residential real estate sector of previous years—added to the perception of business
and civic organizations, local newspapers and the city council that some kind of
change was necessary to create more residential and industrial stability and attract
increased investment in development.
12

But what to do? For more than thirty years, and resembling other cities across
the country, Los Angeles had created hundreds of single-purpose districts in reaction
to protests and petitions from its citizens. As an alternative, regulating functional
land uses by creating districts, or zones, for different broad uses could minimize
developers’ insecurity and provide a better foundation for their increased investment.
The transition to this broad districting of land uses as either industrial or residential
was not sudden; nor was full understanding of the impact that this type of regulation
could have on future development and land use. Evidence of the gradual shift can be
seen in the initial emphasis on protecting residential development alone (as in the
1904 residence district ordinance). Only slowly were more comprehensive efforts
enacted to balance protections for factories.
First Industrial Districts: In March of 1908, the Los Angeles Superior Court
held that the May 1905 building code was unconstitutional and therefore
unenforceable. The code required that any factory within the corporate limits of the

204
city outside of a residential district, using a power source other than water or animal,
had to apply for a permit from the fire commission to operate. The only requirement
of the commission was that it notify all property owners by mail of the hearing and
then heed their concerns. The board “shall have the power to grant or refuse such
permit. No other guidelines were listed.
13

According to city attorney Leslie R. Hewitt, the court’s 1908 ruling left Los
Angeles with no effective means to control industrial location apart from the
traditional case-by-case nuisance law and unwieldy single-purpose districts. The
council had been working to create a set of industrial districts in early 1908 before
the superior court ruling, adopting an ordinance in February describing six districts,
including wording similar to that in the invalidated building code. (see Figure 11)
The fire commission reported to the city council with a recommendation to
immediately prepare a replacement industrial district ordinance. “The passage of
such an ordinance is desirable at the earliest possible moment for the public peace
and safety preventing the invasion of the residence districts by factories.”
14

205
Figure 11
Industrial Districts, February 1908
LA City Ordinance # 16170 N.S.
(showing wards and northern portion
of 1906 "Showstring" annexation)
"Shoestring" annexation
Dec 1906
Ward 1
Ward 2
Ward 3
Ward
8
Ward 7
Ward 6
Ward 5
Ward 4
Ward 9
0
4 miles
Western
Slauson
Manchester
Fountain
current city boundary
Hoover
Ind Dist #6
Ind Dist #1
Ind Dist #5
Ind Dist #2
Ind Dist #3
Ind Dist #4
Los Angeles River

206
The city attorney reported back after research that he believed the city had the
authority and the power to regulate the erection, operation and maintenance of the
factories described in the 1905 building code. A special city council committee of H.
H. Yonkin (Ward Six), Harry Lyon (Ward Seven) and Bernard Healy (Ward
Eight)—representing the wards where industries were already concentrated—was
appointed in March 1908 to define the locations of the factory districts where the
listed business types could locate by right. Mayor Arthur Harper sent a message of
concern about the effect on the local economy when the council still had not acted
after a month. “The erection and operation of several enterprises, which would give
employment to a number of men, have [sic] been delayed pending passage of this
ordinance, and I would respectfully suggest that prompt action be taken relative
thereto.”
15

In May, the boundaries of Industrial District #1 created by the February
ordinance were adjusted while in June another amendment was approved that applied
to the storage of various materials in the same district. The city council then turned
its attention to the issue of where residence districts should be located. In August
they adopted an ordinance creating six residential districts, primarily protecting
already developed areas. The next month, the councilmen adopted a pair of
ordinances to cover both residential and industrial districts and eliminate overlapping
boundaries. They redrew the residence district boundaries, after protests, to exclude
industrial areas (primarily in Ward 1 adjacent to the Los Angeles and Arroyo Seco
Rivers) and include more residential land (as shown in Figure 12).
16

207
Figure 12
Residence Districts, September 1908
LA City Ordinance #17136 N.S.
Residence Districts, August 1908
LA City Ordinance #17058 N.S.
Note: RD #6 is not shown as it was erroneously
contained entirely within the borders of RD #1.
"Shoestring" annexation
Dec 1906
Ward 1
Ward 2
Ward 3
Ward
8
Ward 7
Ward 6
Ward 5
Ward 4
Ward 9
0 4 miles
Res Dist #1
Res Dist #3
Res Dist #2
Los Angeles River
Ward 1
Ward 2
Ward 3
Ward
8
Ward 7
Ward 6
Ward 5
Ward 4
Ward 9
"Shoestring" annexation
Dec 1906
Res Dist #5
Res Dist #4
Res Dist #2
Res Dist #3
Res Dist #1
Los Angeles River

208

Over the next nine months, many petitions and protests were received and
heard, and amendments to the two ordinances were adopted. By the summer of 1909,
city council members as well as business organizations realized that the expanding
city was coming to a crossroads where hard decisions would have to be made about
the allocation of lands for various uses. A larger factory section was necessary, as the
allocated space (in the September 1908 ordinance) had become too small, but where
should it be? Whenever a factory applied for a license to operate, nearby residents
drew a “sacred circle” around their neighborhood in an effort to block the
application.
17

Councilman Dromgold of the First Ward had suggested an ordinance in
October 1909 that created several more or expanded industrial districts along the
river. The remainder of the city was by this time blanketed under a residence-only
classification where, on a case-by-case basis and with approval of neighbors, new
industrial districts could be created as “exceptions” that might be as small as one city
block, or even one parcel and building.
18

“This settled the question—for about five minutes,” according to the Los
Angeles Times. The industrial district again proved too small, and did not account for
expansion or growth within the city’s boundaries. The threat of losing new
enterprises to other jurisdictions or unincorporated areas of the county, where
settlement was less dense and risks to invest and operate were lower, was very real.
The many factories and businesses already in place in what had now become a part

209
of the expanded residence district were left in a limbo, at the mercy of the neighbors,
where any change in operations or replacement of equipment could prompt demands
for their ouster. If, for example, the steam engine used to power a plant gave out and
the owners wished to convert to a more modern and cleaner electric engine, this was
forbidden without neighborhood and municipal review and could trigger a
requirement to move.
19

City council discussion favored a return to the original river-adjacent
industrial district that had been adopted in 1908, giving the responsibility to the fire
commission for approval of operating permits and dropping the residential
designation for the rest of the city entirely. This backtracking would not have been a
helpful solution. It would have made the city vulnerable to lawsuit by again giving
the fire commission arbitrary and discretionary approval of land use, while removing
even rudimentary oversight over development in residential neighborhoods. The
Chamber of Commerce was undecided about a solution: tight restriction would
inhibit business attraction and expansion while factories encroaching on residential
developments would make nearby homes and home-sites unmarketable. The
Merchants and Manufacturers Association favored an expandable river-adjacent site,
without giving responsibility to the fire commission. The Los Angeles Times stated
the obvious: “the location of the factory district is probably the most difficult
[decision for the city], and is one loaded with great possibility of mistakes.”
20

In November 1909, a joint committee of the city council, the Merchants and
Manufacturers Association and the Chamber of Commerce began an investigative

210
tour of the city. The goal of the survey was to acquire the ability to efficiently
segregate different functional use districts, increase the size of the industrial districts,
and figure out a way to protect factories from the “rapacious [residential] property
owners” who blocked every attempt to expand the industrial base of the city. The two
major business associations hoped to create business areas so well-integrated with
the transportation system that they could inaugurate a nationwide campaign of
industrial recruitment into Los Angeles. The result of this collaborative effort was
the industrial district ordinance passed in December 1909 that enlarged the industrial
area on both sides of the river, completely blanketing the Eighth Ward, the north and
east half of the Seventh Ward, and adjacent areas of the Fifth and Sixth Wards along
the former southern boundary of the city at Slauson Avenue. Only one small
industrial district in a residence area remained, in the Fourth Ward, on Pico west of
Figueroa, where the Los Angeles Interurban Railway Company’s powerhouse was
located (Figure 13).
21

211
Figure 13
Industrial Districts, December 1909
LA City Ordinance #19500 N.S.
(showing wards and recent annexations)
Ward 1
Ward 2
Ward 3
Ward
8
Ward 7
Ward 6
Ward 5
Ward 4
Ward 9
"Shoestring" annexation
Dec 1906
"Colegrove" annexation
Oct 1909
0
4 miles
Crenshaw
Western
Slauson
Manchester
Hoover
Fountain
Los Angeles River
current city boundary
Ind Dist #3
Ind Dist #2
Ind Dist #4
Ind Dist #1
Ind Dist #7
Ind Dist #6
Ind Dist #5

212
In the meantime, though, the residence district that covered all remaining
parcels, first created in August of 1909 and affirmed in another ordinance in January
1910, remained in force. Existing business enterprises located throughout the city
had continued to operate where they had been established before any industrial
regulatory restrictions. They could be protested against as nuisances, in the
traditional fashion, on a case-by-case basis as surrounding land uses changed—often
from agricultural or vacant land to residential use—when nearby neighbors took their
opposition to the city council. But after the two ordinances were adopted, in
December 1909 (industrial districts) and January 1910 (residential districts), the city
itself began to take the initiative and adopted a more aggressive stance towards
industries in residential areas. While numerous exceptions to the residence district
ordinances had been adopted (see list from 1909-1921 in Appendix I), the city also
began to exercise more muscle in forcing the relocation or closure of businesses in
various locations around the city.
22

The three following cases illustrate this new activist municipal response to
industrial operation outside the designated districts. Three business owners—Quong
Wo, Robert Montgomery and Joseph Hadacheck—took the city to court when told to
move their businesses in March and April 1911, arguing that the industrial ordinance
overstepped the limits of municipal authority, impinged on their individual property

213
rights and took away their business opportunities. All three failed in their appeals,
and served to confirm the police power of the city to regulate land use for the welfare
and benefit of the city’s interests.

Building Precedent for Expanded Police Powers in Los Angeles
The courts had generally been loath to limit the powers granted to
incorporated municipalities by the states. A number of appellants—represented by
laundry owner Quong Wo (Flower and Seventh Streets downtown), lumberman
William Montgomery (on Avenue 61 in Highland Park), and finally Joseph
Hadacheck (at Pico and Crenshaw on the western edge of the city)—felt that Los
Angeles municipal government had overstepped its state-granted powers and was
improperly telling businessmen where they could do business when all three were
cited for remaining open in the residence district. The courts, they said, were
necessary to exert control and protect industry and individual property rights. As
there were approximately five hundred other industrial concerns still operating in
what were now deemed, by ordinance, residence districts, business interest in this
litigation was understandably intense.
23

Quong Wo Case: The neighborhood at Flower and Seventh Streets has
undergone a number of transformations over the past hundred and twenty years.
Many of the 1920s commercial buildings are still in evidence along Seventh Street
and the north-south intersecting streets, from the period when this was the
commercial center of Los Angeles. In the late 1880s, the center of business activity

214
was still located around Broadway and Third Streets while Flower and the
neighboring
streets in the eastern Fourth Ward were in the process of becoming a neighborhood
of fine single-family homes. By the end of the twentieth century’s first decade, the
commercial center had expanded south along Broadway, Main and Spring Streets,
while the former neighborhood of homes now included all manner of multiple-
household dwellings (apartments, flats, lodging and boarding houses), churches on
almost every block, as well as undertakers, livery stables, laundries and various
stores. Some of the fine frame homes had been moved to other locations around the
city as the fashionable districts expanded and moved south on Figueroa Street and
north and west into the hills.
24

Quong Wo had operated a hand laundry service near the intersection of
Flower and Seventh Streets for almost fifteen years. (Figure 14) His business
prospered (along with several other Chinese laundries nearby) as homes were built in
the surrounding blocks, and continued to prosper as he served the newer residents in
the many flats and apartments. He likely drew even more customers from these
newer residences where wives, the principle customers of Chinese laundries, did not
have the facilities to take care of the full range of laundry chores at home.
25

215
Figure 14
Flower St
Seventh St
Eighth St
Hope St
First Baptist
Church
D
D
D
D
D
D
D
D
D
D
S
Flats
Flats
D
Flats
Flats
Church
Flats
Flats
Flats
Flats
D
D
D
D
D
D
D
Dance
hall
Livery
Quong Wo
Chinese Hand Laundry
S
S
Flats
Flats
Flats
D
D
D
D
D
D
Figueroa St
D = dwelling
S = store
Plaza
0.0
0.1 mile
Quong Wo Laundry Neighborhood
Flower / Seventh Street in Los Angeles
Based on Sanborn Insurance Map 1906

216
Up until 1895, most of the city’s laundries (both Chinese and non-Chinese)
were tightly clustered along a corridor a few blocks either side of Main Street and
East First Street. Four years later, the increased number of Chinese hand laundries
had begun to locate several blocks to the west (in the Second and Third Wards) as
well as south (on the border of the Fifth and Sixth Wards). When the first residence
district was approved in 1904, a few more Chinese laundries had opened in the
southwest sections, in the Fourth and Fifth Wards, while the non-Chinese laundries
had not greatly extended their locations from the Main Street corridor. Neither
segment of the laundry industry expanded much from 1904 to 1910; the small
number of additional laundries had not dispersed far from the center of the city
despite the increases in population and property development.
26

When the residence district ordinance went into effect in January 1910,
Quong Wo and the other Chinese laundrymen did not have reason to be overly
concerned. After all, public laundries and washhouses were listed in the first part of
Section 2 of the ordinance, which stated they were barred from the residence district
only when “power other than animal power” was used. Chinese laundries
traditionally depended on hand labor of family and clan members, and not on costly
motorized equipment that required more capital investment. Only hay barns, wood
yards and lumberyards were prohibited outright in the residence district, in the
second clause of Section 2. But in March 1911, the city council amended the
residential district ordinance to single out hand laundries, in response to a request by
Guy Eddy, the city’s prosecuting attorney. These businesses were removed from the

217
first clause in the new ordinance and inserted into the second, along with the
lumberyards. According to the amended ordinance, they were now banned
completely from the residence district.
27

Two police officers made the rounds of eleven Chinese hand laundries (and
one Japanese concern) located within the residence district on 13 April 1911 to
ascertain the name of each owner and to warn them to cease operations, per the new
ordinance (see Figure 15). None did. After Assistant City Prosecutor Ray Nimmo
issued complaints against each one, the laundrymen were arrested. While the others
paid the fines imposed, Quong Wo, represented by attorneys George Hupp and Frank
Hill, took his case to the local police court on 8 June 1911 where he was judged
guilty and sentenced. Quong Wo, in refusing to pay the one hundred dollar fine, was
sent to the county jail. His attorneys immediately instituted habeas corpus
proceedings, a strategic move that bypassed the superior (county-level) court and
brought the case more speedily to the appellate court. According to the newspaper,
attorneys had picked his case to test the constitutionality and applicability of the
districting ordinance to businesses already operating when the residence district was
created around and under them.
28

218
Figure 15
7
11
12
5
4
3
2
8
9
10
Hill
Grand
Flower
5th
Hoover
6th
7th
Central
Figueroa
Jefferson
Beverly / 1st
Temple
Los Angeles River
1
6
Plaza
0 1 mile
Location of Chinese Laundries
Impacted by LA Industrial District Ordinance #21996 N.S.
March 1911
1 Hop Wah, 917 Temple
2 Sam Kee, 241 N Figueroa
3 Wo Yick, 351 S Flower
4 Yee Yuen, 806 W 6th
5 Quong Wo, 721 S Flower
6 Hop Chung, 2312 Thompson
7 Chung Quong, 645 W Jefferson
8 Charlie Wong, 645 S. Olive
9 Wing Lee, 506 W 6th
10 Sing Kee, 751 S Olive
11 Sing Lee, 817 E 5th
12 Toki Muto, 2789 W 10th
Industrial districts
Chinese laundries

219
In July, the assistant city prosecutor traveled to San Francisco to present the
city’s case to the appellate court, while Quong Wo remained in prison claiming
discrimination against the laundries for a lengthy list of reasons. For one, hand
laundries must by necessity locate within residence districts, he said, close to where
customers are located. Quong Wo felt that his prosecution was an arbitrary charge;
he had operated at that address for many years and thus had “an accumulation of
property rights.” Washing clothes is a “necessity, harmless and not a nuisance,” and
is not “dangerous to health, morals, safety or comfort of people.” By contrast, a
number of steam laundries operated near homes (none appeared to have Chinese
owners). They were not targeted for removal, according to Quong Wo. The
laundryman had several testimonials from nearby residents that the operation of his
laundry had not affected their safety or health, nor that of any other resident that they
knew of. And finally, the existing industrial districts were located too far from
Quong Wo’s customer base and were often sooty and smoky; he could not sustain his
business if forced to move there.
29

The other eleven Chinese laundry owners originally charged supported the
case; if the suit failed, they could all be compelled to move. In previous decades,
courts had struck down most of the ordinances adopted in Los Angeles and other
Pacific coast cities to force Chinese businesses, including laundries, to cease
operations or relocate (preferably outside the city limits—see Chapter 2). The
districting ordinance, if allowed to stand as then formulated, might finally be
successful in closing down the Chinese hand laundries—long after the so-called

220
“Chinese issue” had ceased to be a prominent subject of discussion within the city
council. The proportion and visibility of the Chinese inhabitants of the city had
continued to shrink with the great influx of Anglo-European settlers from the other
regions of the country.
30

If the ordinance was upheld by the court, not just the Chinese enterprises but
all businesses operating in the declared residence district would be at risk. Already,
many businesses in the residence district were suspending operations and delaying on
the renewal of leases. “Very considerable losses” were already incurred. The ruling,
the Los Angeles Times noted, was “of great significance to the present and future
layout of the city” and more immediately, to the five hundred businesses currently
operating within the residence districts.
31

Without regard for these local economic concerns, the state high court
accepted the city’s position and affirmed in October 1911 in Ex parte Quong Wo the
constitutionality of the residence ordinance as a proper use of the municipality’s
police powers. It stated that there was no question about the city’s power to regulate
certain occupations carried out in certain locations for the public welfare; there were
many judicial precedents from around the country. “Private interests must be made
subservient to the general interests of the community.” In this case, the prosecution
declared, the city council was in fact acting on behalf of public health in exercising
its police powers; the court concurred with this exercise.
32

According to the court, the city had the right to create industrial and residence
districts, to change the boundaries or except certain parcels as necessary, and to

221
prohibit certain businesses within the residence district, as long as the regulations
applied equally to all. Discrimination did not exist just because hand laundries were
targeted; the regulations did not preclude complaints against other firms. It was up to
the legislative body (in this case, the city council) to decide when it was in the best
interests of the city to exercise the police power. Finally, “All property is held subject
to lawful exercise of police power.” The court affirmed that all property within a
jurisdiction was subject to public welfare concerns.
33

What was the immediate result of this ruling? Seven Chinese hand laundries
within the residence district petitioned the city council in January 1912 for leave to
remain in operation at current locations outside the industrial districts for from two
to six years, depending on the length of the lease remaining. Each petitioner
presented a conciliatory tone, with willingness to look for a suitable location within
the industrial district and to move once the lease was up. George Hupp, Quong Wo’s
attorney, drew up the individual petitions and presented them to the council. He also
was in the midst of a petition to rehear Quong Wo’s case at the state court. The city
attorney advised that granting any of the petitions would be unwise, given the
continuing litigation, and so they were all denied. In May 1912, Hupp presented three
more petitions, on behalf of the Chinese Laundry Association, and from the Chinese
Consolidated Benevolent Association and the Chinese Consul General in San
Francisco, to plead the case, and requested that all Chinese laundries be given two
years within which to move from current locations.
34

222
In fact, no more litigation took place in this particular case. The city
continued to fine-tune the districting ordinances. New court cases were filed by other
concerns to protest the effect that districting was having on businesses and
development. And what of the eleven Chinese laundries originally targeted under the
revised ordinance of March 1911? At least eight of them were operating at the same
location in 1917, while four of the laundrymen can be confirmed at the original
address through a 1928 city directory listing. Quong Wo moved earliest, in 1914, six
blocks east to south Los Angeles Street, closer to the industrial district but still not
within it. A number of factors likely led to the apparent lack of enforcement. First,
the neighborhood around Quong Wo’s Flower and Seventh Streets (as well as those
near the other laundries) rapidly changed from mixed residential to predominantly
commercial. These were no longer residential neighborhoods. Newer districting
ordinances and the 1921 zoning ordinance placed these neighborhoods in
commercial zones, where laundries could legally operate. Finally, the 1920s
commercial expansion west along Seventh Street, with large commercial and office
blocks, pushed smaller businesses out of the neighborhood. Rather than a lack of
effectiveness, change overtook the ordinances.
35

Montgomery Case: In the second case decided by the state supreme court just
ten months after Quong Wo, similar issues were argued. William Montgomery, in the
lumber business in Los Angeles at least since 1887 and in partnership with John
Mullin since around 1901, operated a lumberyard on Avenue 61 in the Highland Park
area in the First Ward. This area to the north of the city commercial center, one of the

223
earliest annexations to enlarge the city in 1895, had been included in the first
residence-only district created in 1904 (which had covered the entire ward—see
Figure 10 in Chapter 2) as well as the more recent residence districting of 1909.
Modest houses on tiny lots bordered the lumberyard to the north and covered the
parcels in the surrounding blocks to the northwest and northeast. Several railroads
cut across the area. The Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway on the south side of
the property separated the lumberyard from the commercial blocks along Figueroa
Street (see Figure 16).
36

224
Figure 16
0.0 0.2 mile
Pasadena Ave (Figueroa)
Avenue 61
(proposed)
Piedmont Playground
commercial neighborhood
single-family housing neighborhood
single-family housing neighborhood
Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe RR
commercial neighborhood
Los Angeles & Salt Lake RR
Montgomery & Mullin
Lumberyard
Based on Sanborn Insurance Map 1906
Figueroa / Avenue 61 in Los Angeles
Montgomery & Mullin Lumberyard Neighborhood
Plaza

225
Montgomery and Mullin, like Quong Wo, were each charged in police court
in 1911 with a misdemeanor and fined, after complaints were lodged with the city
prosecutor for operating their business outside an industrial district. Lumberyards fell
within the prohibited category in the January 1910 residence district ordinance (the
same category to which laundries were added in March 1911). After they failed to
win release and dismissal of the case in Superior Court, the lumbermen appealed
directly to the state supreme court for a writ of habeas corpus in May 1911.
According to the suit, the creation of the residence district that so severely restricted
the location of industries “was in excess of the legislative power” of the city and its
charter, as well as a violation of the private rights of citizens under the US and state
constitutions. In letter to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in November 1911
asking for support, the company called attention to the “alleged injustice to retail
lumber yards” caused by the districting ordinances.
37

The state court disagreed. It re-affirmed in Ex parte Montgomery in August
1912 the constitutionality of the city council’s action to create industrial districts, as
well as to enact requirements for specified businesses to be located within them
rather than in declared residential areas. The city has broad discretion in the use of its
police powers, said the court, and just because an appellant alleges a particular case
of “unfairness” the courts will not limit those powers. These powers are expressly
given to the city through the state constitution. And finally, because the residential
district ordinance was found to be valid and constitutional in Ex parte Quong Wo,

226
there was additionally no reason to rule differently in this analogous case, said the
state supreme court in its opinion.
38

Restricting the Location of Brickyards—Prelude to Hadacheck: The
circumstances of brickyard regulation in Los Angeles, the history of this industrial
sector and the Joseph Hadacheck brick-making enterprise, illustrate the effects of the
changing regulatory environment on one particular industry.
Brick kilns and brick yards, like many potentially nuisance industrial
concerns (depending on where located or how operated), did not feel the restrictive
bite of local ordinances in Los Angeles until the city grew large enough and dense
enough that conflicts became unavoidable. Even so, the relationship between various
nuisance-causing industries and the city was not entirely adversarial. For example,
the brick-making business was necessary for the city’s economic development. New
construction using brick was part of the vision for a modern Los Angeles that
supplanted the adobe structures of the Mexican era. The rapidly growing city needed
bricks in great quantity for construction, especially in the commercial and industrial
core where fire limits prohibited new wooden construction. The municipality itself
was a large and steady customer, ordering, for example, millions of bricks a month
for new sewer construction necessary to support the rapid population growth. There
was not only a general interest to attract and promote industrial growth to maintain
and improve the economic health of the city as a whole, the city had specific interests
as a customer of sometimes locally unwanted businesses.
39

227
Masonry brick manufacture had been transformed in the mid-nineteenth
century from a small-scale hand-made craft by the German invention of the clay
extrusion press. Formerly, brick had been made by hand; primarily by Chinese labor
in nineteenth-century Los Angeles. Now, this German invention allowed automation
of the industry while introducing much greater quality control. The development of
the continuous ring kiln and the tunnel kiln shortly thereafter gave brick-makers the
means to greatly increase the size of operations, as well as their impact on adjacent
neighborhoods. These new kilns, powered by coal or oil, belched smoke and fumes,
while the clay excavation and preparation process produced dust and left large open
pits and trenches. Newspaper reports in the first years of the twentieth century
disparaged the owners of the brickyards in Los Angeles for “throwing dust and
smoke in the eyes of citizens” and in some cases, for the consequences of dynamite
blasting on neighboring residence districts.
40

The first restrictive ordinance aimed at the brick industry was adopted in
1890. It was perhaps directed in part towards Thomas F. Joyce, an Irish immigrant
who was an early brick-maker in the city. He originally leased land in the eastern
portion of the Third Ward near the present intersection of Flower and Fifth Streets
for a brick-works before moving the operation north to a site on Yale Street (in the
eastern Second Ward). Neighbors there then requested a limitation on brick making
in what they deemed a residential neighborhood, just a few blocks west of the plaza
and the traditional original city center.
41

228
Several brick kilns had been located within or close to nearby Chavez Ravine
to take advantage of the easily accessible clay deposits. It was an area of mixed
industry and housing, as well as institutional uses—the Orphan’s Home, several
hospitals, the pest house and the quarantine station were located there. The proposed
restricted district was just to the north and east of the kilns, and contained an
excavated area that had once been used as a brickyard but was not currently [in 1890]
in operation.
42

Some ten years passed before the issue of brick kiln location re-surfaced, this
time in another part of the city. In late 1901, citizens made complaints about the dust
and smoke thrown up by the newest brickyard of Henry Jensen, Joseph Hadacheck’s
former partner in earlier brick-making ventures, at Sixteenth and Western Streets.
Teachers at the Harvard Military School, nearby at Pico and Western Streets,
reportedly often had to keep windows and doors closed because of the smoke and
dust. While this area was still sparsely settled, a growing number of land owners with
ambitious or “pretentious” plans for future development “denounced” the brickyard
as a nuisance and demanded it be closed because it would do “serious harm” if
allowed to remain. P.F. Schumacher suggested that brickyards should obtain the
consent of the majority of the property owners before being allowed to continue
operations.
43

The city council responded in December 1901 with an ordinance that was not
targeted to a particular district, but rather was citywide in effect. It did not prohibit
brickyards entirely. Instead, it attempted to control operations by requiring the

229
issuance of a permit giving license to carry on such business. The ordinance applied
to all currently operating brick kilns within the city limits as well as any proposed
new kilns, and superceded all previous restrictions, districts and permissions.
Following up on the spirit of Schumacher’s proposal, the permitting process required
that nearby property owners be given a hearing in order to voice support of or
opposition to the business proposal. The city council would then have the discretion
to issue a permit or withhold permission to operate.
44

There was a rush to turn in applications before the February 1902 deadline
imposed by the ordinance. Applicants included the owners of extant brick
manufacturing yards in the vicinity of Sixteenth and Western Streets (that is,
Jensen’s and Hadacheck’s brickyards, those that directly precipitated the licensing
ordinance), operators in Chavez Ravine, and the rest of the manufacturers who were
primarily located just east of the Los Angeles River.
45

Most of the applications were approved; those brick-making enterprises could
then continue operations as before. Jensen’s and Hadacheck’s were not. Harry
Chandler, the newspaper publisher, and other nearby property owners opposed
Jensen’s; Jensen was able to negotiate with the council for a five-month extension to
wrap up operations. Hadacheck’s application was only provisionally approved,
giving him another three months to operate in this location. Extensions were debated
and then granted him over the next two years, and then nothing more about this area
and brick making appears in the municipal record. Sanborn insurance maps updated

230
around this time depict the neighborhood as a built-up residential area, with no
remaining pictorial evidence of brickyards or brick manufacturing.
46

The problem of the location of brickyards cropped up several more times in
the next eight years, part of the general increase of locational conflict issues within
the city that is evident in the city’s records. Four years after licensing was
inaugurated, in 1906, an ordinance created another brickyard-banned district, with
little fanfare or discussion, located northwest of downtown along Sunset to
Alvarado—an expanding commercial corridor with residential developments
extending beyond it to the north and south. Why the city did not just withhold a
license to operate here is unknown as there is no evidence of a petition or other
discussion of the area. Protests about dynamite blasting in nearby Chavez Ravine
that damaged house foundations and disturbed residents set off discussion in August
1908 in the council and propelled council members to visit the site themselves. The
Los Angeles Brick Company demonstrated their blasting technique and agreed to
lower the levels of explosives; the police commissioner was instructed to follow up
with closer attention. Though complaints in Chavez Ravine continued, this brickyard
remained in operation until the late 1920s.
47

Henry Jensen eventually left the brick business after his licensing application
was denied in 1902, for the local real estate business. Hadacheck had purchased eight
acres of land farther west in 1902—outside the then-current city limits—on Pico
Street just east of what became Crenshaw Boulevard. Once his final three-month

231
extension resultant from the 1902 licensing ordinance expired, Joseph Hadacheck
moved his brick burning enterprise to his new location.
48

“The Penalty for Underestimating Growth”
49
Up until 1902, there had been
little development in Hadacheck’s new surroundings outside of dairying, small
vineyards and other farming ventures, and scattered homes. That changed
dramatically after the brickyard’s move. Los Angeles’s population grew rapidly in
that first decade of the twentieth century, from one hundred thousand residents to
more than three hundred thousand at the next census. The easily-subdivided flat
plateau lands west of the city that had drawn Hadacheck’s brick business also proved
attractive to many of the area’s new residents, as well as numerous real estate
developers. Residential construction starts in the western portions of the Fourth and
Fifth Wards in these years were higher than in any other area in the city except the
neighboring, similarly-level southwestern section of the Sixth Ward. In the years
between 1900 and 1907, most of the population growth occurred here, in both the
western portions of the incorporated city, and beyond the city boundaries on county
lands to the west.
50

Conflicts increased on a neighbor-to-neighbor level as property owners
endeavored to maximize their investments with whatever improvement brought a
greater return at the time. As the demand for residential areas increased, owners of
undeveloped lands, as well as homeowners, sought increasingly to limit uses of
adjacent properties. Deed restrictions, often imposed by the sub-divider, could and
did specify uses, values of structures built and their placement on parcels developed

232
by a particular owner. A major disadvantage was that they had no impact outside the
boundary of the development. Disputes also increased at the city level as council
members, civic and business leaders and homeowners associations debated
competing visions for the city’s future.
In the summer of 1909, several neighborhoods just outside of the western
border of the city began to talk about the advantages of annexing to Los Angeles. In
the 320-acre Dayton Heights development, the main issue was the neglect by the
county government of local streets. In Colegrove, Cahuenga, Arlington Heights and
other unincorporated real estate subdivisions, water was the subject driving residents
to consider joining with the bigger city to their east; residents were caught in a
dispute between the Hollywood Water Company and the county supervisors over
rates. “We are a part of Los Angeles, as far as interests and associates are concerned,
and we must of necessity come within her limits.”
51

In mid-August 1909, the Colegrove annexation campaign and petitions were
set to go. Within two weeks, the completed petitions were turned in to the city clerk
for the sufficiency examination. About sixty-three hundred valid signatures were
needed, a threshold the petitioners easily met; an election was set for October.
52

The proposed Colegrove annexation area was already the site of many
residential subdivisions. In some, many homes had been built. Others existed only in
the imaginations of the owners and developers, or as promotional brochures and
newspaper ads. The several streetcar lines running through the area, connecting it to
the central city of Los Angeles, could hardly keep up with growth in the burgeoning

233
western districts. Single-family homes dotted the blocks surrounding Hadacheck’s
newer brickyard near Pico Street and Crenshaw Boulevard while denser development
with only scattered vacant lots could be found just a few blocks farther away,
towards the city limits to the east. Even though higher taxes would likely result from
annexation, most residents felt that this would be more than offset by lower water
and insurance rates, improved police and fire protection services and, eventually,
more parks and improved streets and sewerage. The only expected opposition came
from owners of unimproved property who were perhaps loath to pay higher taxes on
their speculative investment holdings.
53

Annexations were advantageous, too, for Los Angeles. The city would gain
about fifteen thousand residents before the next census, along with fifteen hundred
voters. Perhaps most importantly, the thirteen million dollar increase in assessed
valuation (expected to rapidly increase in the near future as more lots were sold and
homes built) would increase the maximum possible level of bonded indebtedness (in
accordance with state limitations). The annexation vote easily passed in both the city
and Colegrove; the election was certified on 27 October 1909. The city attorney
subsequently ruled that all of the newly annexed territory was part of the residence
district created in August. The city acquired an increasingly residential section with
growth potential while the new city inhabitants gained the security of the city charter
and ordinances. They quickly took advantage of their new protections.
54

In January 1910 property owners protested what they termed the public
nuisance created by the operations of the Hadacheck Brickyard Company near the

234
southeast corner of Pico Street and Crenshaw Boulevard (see Figure 17) as well as an
additional brickyard, just to the north and west. The “pall” of smoke, ash and
noxious gases that settled over the “high-class homes” in the vicinity was “injurious
to the health and comfort” of residents, they said. Most of the petition-signers had
moved to the vicinity after Hadacheck began to make bricks; they had a very
different vision for the future of their neighborhood.
55

235
Figure 17
Central Arlington Heights
(appoximate location)
Boulevard Heights
Country Club
Terrace
Oxford Square
16th Street (now Venice Blvd)
Pico Blvd
Crenshaw Blvd
Bronson Ave
12th Avenue
La Fayette Square
Arlington
Chamberlain & Hubbard
Brickyard
Hadacheck Brickyard
Country Club Drive
5th Avenue
Victoria Place
Country Club Park
0.0
0.3 miles
Hadacheck Brickyard Neighborhood
Pico / Crenshaw Area of Los Angeles
Locations of brickyards, approximate locations
of selected residential real estate developments* (1906-1913)
* Locations of real estate developments from real estate brochure maps,
newspaper descriptions and street department frontage maps.

236
Peter Marion was the first to sign the petition. A post office carrier, and the
only person from outside the neighborhood to sign the petition, he has no evident
connection to property near Hadacheck’s brickworks, in contrast to the other signers.
Mrs. Ione M
c
Cahan signed the petition, as well as her neighbors, retailer Herbert
Gustin and Samuel Watson, president of the Hollywood Cemetery Association. They
were among the original investors in the Victoria Park residential development in
1908. Their fine, spacious homes with large lots are still standing, just west of
Crenshaw Boulevard. At least ten homes had been built between 1905 and 1909 on
Crenshaw Boulevard and Twelfth Avenue (the north-south streets bordering the
Hadacheck Brickyard) just east of Victoria Park and south of Pico Street. Several of
the residents of these more modest homes—including widows, carpenters and other
trades people—also signed the petition.
56

Samuel Barry signed it. So did William M
c
Endree, Seth Olmstead, Leonard
Woodward and Arthur Anthony. All five were builders or developers of new
residential subdivisions nearby on the west side. Most also lived in the
neighborhood. Another developer who added his name, Emil Firth, had just
commenced advertising his residential subdivision, Oxford Square, located adjacent
to the second brickyard, in 1907.
57

Robert M
c
Garvin owned the property next door to Hadacheck’s business. A
salesman for a realty firm downtown and later partner in a firm developing the
Boulevard Heights tract directly north across Pico Street from Hadacheck’s
brickyard, he too signed the petition. And Simon Mansfield, long-time resident of the

237
parcel adjacent to M
c
Garvin’s, signed the petition. His occupation, listed in city
directories through 1913, illustrates perhaps the evolution in how some of the long-
term property owners in the neighborhood might have thought of themselves as the
neighborhood changed from outlying agricultural uses to suburban residential, and as
real estate speculation increased. He was first listed as a farmer, then a rancher, and
then by 1913, he had declared himself a real estate broker.
58

Upon receiving the petition and after some research, city attorney Leslie
Hewitt declared that,
Some businesses have been held by the courts to be nuisances per se and the
same may be abated at any time. Other businesses may or may not be
nuisances, depending upon the matter of operation of the same. Brick kilns
fall within the latter class . . .

If, upon investigation, it is found that the brickyards in question are creating a
nuisance, are injuring property, or are menacing the health of the persons
residing nearby, the continuance of the nuisance may be forbidden.
59

In March 1910, after more investigation and a visit to the brickyards, the city council
unanimously agreed to declare any brickyards in this small district of about three
square miles (that included the two already-operating brickyards) as public nuisances
and unlawful to operate. Mayor Alexander, however, thought the thirty-day notice of
the ordinance was too short a time given business owners’ investments in property,
buildings and equipment. “Owners should be given a reasonable amount of time to
close up business or remove from the district where they will be prohibited.”
Concerned here (and in several other cases before the city council) about giving a
harsh and unfriendly signal towards business, the mayor returned the ordinance to the
council without signing it—in effect, vetoing it. The council reconsidered, but

238
decided that it should stand as written, and by voting unanimously to adopt the
ordinance overrode the lack of mayoral signature.
60

Figure 18
Wilshire
Western
Washington
western city boundary
Pico
Crenshaw
Hubbard & Chamberlain brickyard
Hadacheck brickyard
0
1 mile
1910 Brickyard District
Showing locations of the two brickyards
(LA City Ordinance #19989 N.S.)
Plaza

239
These nearby residents were perhaps mollified by the swift reaction of the
city council in April to ban brickyards with a new single-purpose restrictive
ordinance that applied to their neighborhood (and despite the extension of the
residence districting to cover Colegrove). As we saw illustrated by the story of Dr.
Unger and his neighbor’s crowing rooster in Chapter 1, the city council had become
more and more unwilling to step in with a new ordinance to solve each new local
land use dispute detailed in a petition. Though the city council did not entirely
abandon old strategies in the years before Los Angeles adopted a comprehensive
zoning code in 1921—this brickyard ordinance in Colegrove was a case in point—
single-purpose districts stayed on the books but were less frequently the preferred
solution to land use conflicts.
61

Later that year, the Los Angeles Times accused the city council of showing
favoritism to the west-side neighborhood that petitioned against the brickyards. Over
four hundred Boyle Heights residents had submitted a petition in October 1910
protesting against the continued operations of Southern California Brick, Simons
Brick, Standard Brick and Los Angeles Brick Companies—all operating within the
industrial district. They articulated many of the same concerns and felt they had as
good a case as the west-side residents. The legislative committee, chaired by city
councilman Josias J. Andrews, voted to deny the east-side petition because
Hadacheck’s situation and the legality of the ordinance was currently in court.
Within days, the current city council president, Robert Martin Lusk, resident of
Boyle Heights, prevailed on the committee to re-examine the concerns of the

240
petitioners. According to the Times, city councilman “Uncle Jerry” Andrews was an
investor in the Victoria Park development and favored the single-purpose district
purely to improve the prospects of his investment. No single-purpose brick district
was ever created to benefit the Boyle Heights community. Instead, the disputed
businesses remained part of the industrial district, free to operate. The legislative
committee recommended only that brick kilns in the industrial district operate “as
nearly innocuous as possible” while any firms outside the district be given two years
to close up shop.
62

Meanwhile, back in the Pico Street neighborhood, Joseph Hadacheck
continued to operate his business in violation of the new single-purpose brickyard
district. He was thus charged 7 March 1911 in police court. By the time his case
came before the state court in 1913, the city council had shifted increased emphasis
to enforcement of the more broadly-framed residence and industrial districting
ordinances outlined above. With strengthened resolve by reason of the previous
judicial victories, the city stood its ground in court. For his part, Hadacheck did not
want to lose his business operation again due to the city’s regulatory changes,
thought it unfair to him personally and fought back, appealing to higher courts.
63

From the city council’s perspective, creating effective residence and
industrial districts would benefit the entire city, though it might mean short-term
financial losses for some, like Hadacheck. If the city was to move beyond the narrow
and individual concerns of many current residents and increase business attraction
and growth, it would have to administer regulations that fostered that development.

241
An editorial stated, “The future development of the city hinges very much on the
increase of our manufacturing industries.” In the effort to create and promote
attractive investment opportunities, districting could increase investor confidence
and aid the city and interested civic organizations. The health of the city’s residents
would improve if homes could be separated from the more noxious factories. The
wealth of the city would improve if both homebuilders and factory investors could
confidently invest. Certainly those realtors, developers, media owners, bankers and
investors who were part of the growth coalition of civic elites who wielded enormous
influence over the municipal government would prosper. And these elites reasoned
that if they themselves prospered, then that meant the whole city prospered with
more jobs and more homes. Individuals would suffer when forced to move or shut
down businesses, to be sure, while the public gained. The costs of incurring these
pains over the short-term would be much more than offset by later rewards.
64

Hadacheck Case: Neither the Quong Wo nor Montgomery case was appealed
beyond the state level, perhaps because the attorneys and owners did not feel the
cases were strong enough to warrant further expense or effort, or perhaps the owners
were able to make other satisfactory arrangements. Quong Wo moved his business to
Los Angeles Street, a primarily commercial street, by 1914 and remained in business
there until at least 1918. Montgomery and Mullin Lumber, one of the largest firms
affected by the districting ordinances, operated from Fourth and San Pedro Streets
after 1914, but also received a three-year time extension at the Highland Park
location through 1916. Montgomery took over the Hollywood Lumber Company at

242
6600 West Santa Monica Boulevard by 1928; he had also moved his residence
farther west to Hollywood by that time.
65

The Hadacheck case perhaps appeared stronger than the other two, as the
brick-maker had operated at his location well before it was incorporated into the city
and before nearby properties had been developed. It is also possible that the
Hadacheck case proceeded solely because the owner had the desire and the means to
proceed. One newspaper narrative described Joseph Hadacheck as a “wealthy” brick-
maker who had already invested a “small fortune” in his legal fight and who was
willing to pursue his case and could afford to finance his appeal.
66

After procedural delays, briefs were submitted in Hadacheck’s case in police
court in March 1912. Hadacheck pleaded not guilty and filed a writ of habeas corpus
directly to the California Supreme Court in November 1912; his appeal was heard in
May 1913. Attorneys for Hadacheck argued that when he had purchased his eight-
acre tract back in 1902 it lay outside the city limits, distant from residential
development. He had reportedly installed expensive machinery, excavated clay from
numerous points in the property, and was burning bricks of fine quality in his kilns
for a number of years before residential development encroached on his property.
Then in 1909 the city annexed the surrounding area, extended the residence district
to include his property and finally created the brickyards district in response to the
newer residential neighbors’ petition.
67

From Joseph Hadacheck’s perspective, the city’s demand to stop operations
was unreasonable. In his appeal to the state court, Hadacheck hinted at a diminution

243
of value (the property was “far more valuable for brick-making than for any other
purpose”). The property was worth eight hundred thousand dollars as a brick-making
enterprise, according to his later statement to the federal Supreme Court. As
residential property, it might be worth sixty thousand dollars—except that the
excavations reportedly made the land useless for other development. Furthermore,
brick manufacture must be done on site, he said, where suitable clay is available. It
would be uneconomical for Hadacheck to transport his high quality clay to another
location outside the district. “If the ordinance be declared valid he will be compelled
to entirely abandon his business and will be deprived of his property.”
68

The state court, in ruling unanimously for the city, referred to its earlier
decision against Quong Wo regarding his laundry business that affirmed that the
police power of a city extended to the regulation of professions and businesses in
order to promote the public welfare. It was the local governing power that was in the
best position to do so because of its better knowledge of all the circumstances.
Because a local government was presumed to be acting with regard to the rights of
all parties in the application of its police powers, the courts could not negate a lawful
ordinance the purpose of which bore a reasonable relation to the restriction within
the police power.
69

The police power to suppress nuisances includes any uses of property that
impair public health and welfare. It is not limited by “the fact that the value of
investments made in the business prior to any legislative action will be greatly
diminished.”
70

244
A business which, when established, was entirely unobjectionable, may, by
the growth of population in the vicinity, become a source of danger to the
health and comfort of those who have come to be occupants of the
surrounding territory. If the legislature should then prohibit its further
conduct, the proprietor can base no complaint upon the mere fact that he has
been carrying on the trade in that locality for a long time.
71

The US Supreme Court did not overturn this interpretation in 1915. Though
Joseph Hadacheck had operated for a number of years before residential
development closed in on his business operation, the prevailing land use in the area
had in fact changed over the years. The court held that even though legal when
originated, a business may become illegal because of changes in the surroundings
over time.
No person can lawfully exercise an absolute dominion over the land of which
he is an owner. His use and enjoyment of [his property] must have reference
to the rights of others, and be subordinate to general laws, which are
established for the benefit of all.
72

The individual rights of an owner are contingent upon those of his neighbors. No
length of time, said the court, can legitimate a nuisance. “The public health, the
welfare and safety of a community, are matters of paramount importance, to which
all the pursuits, occupations and employments of individuals . . . must yield.”
73

Hadacheck had turned to the equal protection clause of the Constitution in
voicing his federal appeal, stating that his competitors in other areas of the city were
not equally regulated and that many other businesses, no matter how objectionable,
were still allowed within his own district.
74

The city’s counsel countered with a number of examples to refute both of
Hadacheck’s contentions. The Court decided that Hadacheck’s charges were

245
“illusive,” and that his allegations of discrimination were merely speculative and not
factual. The “good faith” of the city in legislating for the public welfare must be
assumed when no contrary evidence is presented, as the state court had ruled. The
federal court would not contravene in this case where the state court had already
considered the facts and affirmed that the city had acted appropriately and
constitutionally in responding to changing land uses.
75

Despite Hadacheck’s arguments of unfairness, in 1915 the US Supreme Court
let the state court’s judgment stand, agreeing that the municipality acted within its
police powers. According to the state’s ruling in 1913, Los Angeles could indeed
regulate the location of industries, even already existing ones, to the extent of
requiring the cessation of activities, if it benefited the public welfare. Hadacheck was
legally required to abandon his brick manufacturing business at that location.
76

Aftermath of the State Court Rulings in Los Angeles: After the first two
decisive and favorable state court rulings described above, the city prosecutor
announced a campaign in January 1913 to begin what the Los Angeles Times termed
a “general uprooting” of proscribed industries still located in residence districts. A
number of businesses, including blacksmiths, lumberyards, laundries and various
factories had already relocated once the state high court announced its decision in
Montgomery the previous year. One hundred and nineteen establishments were found
by the prosecutor’s office to remain in residence districts; many would eventually
receive multi-year extensions to find suitable alternate locations. The Los Angeles
Times, in a dramatic account that seemed both critical and supportive, described the

246
“ruthless . . . surgery” the city was to undertake and the terrible toll on business
owners. The newspaper continued with a prediction that the city would soon not have
any “unsightly spot” to disturb the restful calm, and
. . . [E]ngines of progress will flock by themselves where there is plenty of
room to expand, and where the clash and clangor and bustle of a modern
industrial city will have its fullest sway and contribute to its largest degree to
the ultimate towards which the finger of destiny already points the way.
77

While the initial cost to the uprooted owners would be great (speculated to be as high
as five million dollars), the benefits to homebuilders would be well worth the
expense because there would be “more room for industrial development, more room
for home building.”
78

The city had requested help from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce to
set aside a district for manufacturing in 1907; the Chamber’s Manufacturing
Committee was given leave by the board to “act as necessary.” By 1908, the
Chamber began to organize periodic “Prosperity Weeks” with store window displays
of home products, factory open houses and public events to highlight the importance
of industry to the residents of Los Angeles. The Chamber had originally proposed a
bureau of manufacturers in 1905 to coordinate promotion efforts but support was not
then strong enough. In 1908, they suggested the city create a municipal commission
on manufacturers, and repeated the suggestion in 1911. When the city again did not
act, the Chamber did. Chamber Vice-President Percy Clark declared:
There is no systematic work being done along the line of encouraging
industrial and manufacturing enterprises to locate in this city . . . The time has
arrived when this organization should establish a bureau of industrial
information . . .
79

247
In 1912, organizational work began to attract three hundred subscribers (each
contributing one hundred dollars annually) to underwrite a fulltime staff to research
and support Los Angeles industry. Their efforts included: first, counteracting the
appearance of an anti-business slant due to the city’s campaign to enforce the
residence and industrial districts; secondly, promoting the city; and finally, enticing
factories to choose Los Angeles over competing cities and developments with their
own booster promotions.
80

The competition included several nearby developments in unincorporated Los
Angeles County. For example, by 1911, the El Segundo Land and Improvement
Company began to offer free factory sites in its industrial districts. The company
announced residential development for workers adjacent to the huge Standard Oil
plant under construction about twenty miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles on
the coast. Newspaper display ads in 1912 and 1913 touted the advantages of
Torrance, “the modern industrial city” for factories and workers, located near the San
Pedro harbor district. As early as 1905, the little town of Vernon incorporated as a
welcoming site for manufacturing. Vernon, one of a number of industrial and
working-class residential suburbs developing along a corridor south of the future Los
Angeles industrial districts, was home to a number of plants that had moved from the
larger city before 1913.
81

In contrast, the Los Angeles Times described the ever-changing industrial
districts within the city limits of Los Angeles before 1913 as “kaleidoscopic” and
“chaotic,” and the factories as “hunted and hounded” or greeted with a “howl of

248
protest” by anyone with a weed-filled lot and a grandiose imagination. The paper
credited the Chamber as well as the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association with
inspiring the general “awakening” of Los Angeles’s residents after years of hostility
to the need for a “sane settlement,” for retaining factories and for nurturing
manufacturing growth within the city. William Foulke of the National Municipal
League pronounced the enforcement of the industrial ordinance to be of the “greatest
importance to the future growth and beauty of the municipality.”
82

An Epidemic of Land Use Regulation Begins
The Los Angeles city council had created its first professed residence-only
districts in 1904 over a limited area in three wards; districting of the entire city into
either residence or industrial areas was achieved in 1909. These districts were then
amended and altered in the next few years as unincorporated lands were annexed, as
other municipalities were consolidated, as conditions and development patterns
changed, and as petitions requesting changes and alterations were received. Once the
courts affirmed the city’s police powers to create use districts in 1911 and 1912, the
perceived and actual authority of the city grew stronger. Additionally, as the city
gained experience in the creation of districts, the members of the city council created
more encompassing and nuanced lists of classes of industries. Districts were more
thoughtfully—or strategically—crafted to move from an appearance of “no” to
industrial growth to a resounding “yes” of welcome.
83

249
The earliest example of this can be seen in the March 1911 report of a
committee created by the city council consisting of members of the Chamber of
Commerce and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association. After a very thorough
inventory of land uses within the city, the committee presented a recommendation
first to create three classes or categories of industries and then suggested appropriate
geographical boundaries for each class (see Figure 19).
84

250
Figure 19
Recommended Industrial Districts, March 1911
LA Advisory Committee Report
"Shoestring" annexation
Dec 1906
Colegrove annexation
Oct 1909
Hollywood consolidation
Feb 1910
East Hollywood
annexation
February 1910
Class "A" - heavy industries
Class "B" - medium industries
Class "C" - buffer industries
0
2 miles
Figueroa
Main
Beverley / First
Washington
Seventh
Tenth [Olympic]
Plaza

251
The class “A” district would be the area of heavy industry (oil refining and
asphalt, iron and steel mills, smelting, slaughtering, rendering and the like) and
would be located primarily along the river. This is very similar to the combined area
of the industrial districts from the December 1909 ordinance. Class “B” industries
would be located in the area just west of the “A” district, but no farther west than the
line between Los Angeles and Main Streets. Lumberyards, paper products, hardware
manufacturers and laundries could locate here. The class “C” district was meant as a
buffer between the industrial areas and the homes, apartment houses and hotels in the
rest of the city; only businesses that would have little effect on adjacent parcels could
locate here. This district was comprised of two separated sections. The first was
located to the south of the “B” district. The other extended west from the west side of
the “B” district to just past Figueroa Street. Separate districts were described for San
Pedro and Wilmington, with one industrial district in each where all three categories
could locate.
85

One section of the report conservatively recommended, perhaps in reaction to
efforts to remove them, that established industries be protected, even if located in the
“wrong district.” Another provision was for petitioning by new businesses eligible to
locate within a residence district (or by established industries wishing to expand).
Signatures from a percentage of the adjacent frontage owners would be necessary for
a license to operate. Still another interesting aspect of this report is that there is
evident recognition of the development of different kinds of businesses along
corridors. Up and down Central Avenue, San Pedro and Los Angeles Streets, these

252
areas were recognized as class “B” districts, with “C” industries allowed to locate in
between. And, while other industrial areas were eventually created elsewhere in the
next decades as the city annexed more territory, these 1911 districts fairly accurately
describe the extent of industrial development as it actually existed in the central
portion of Los Angeles.
86

Creating More Industrial Space in Los Angeles: The members of the city
council did not adopt the suggestions of the advisory committee. Instead, they
continued to amend the existing industrial and residential ordinances to make space
for new and existing factories. (See Table 10 below) These were primarily in the
newly annexed areas of the city, though some resulted from petitioning by existing
businesses that found themselves located in the residential districts. Expansion of
industrial areas occurred in one of two ways, either through the creation of a new
industrial district or the making of a “residence exception.”
87

253
Table 10

Annual Changes to Los Angeles Districting Regulations, 1909-1921

New
Residence
Exceptions
New
Industrial
Districts
1909 25 -
1910 20 1
1911 13 -
1912 8 12
1913 27 5
1914 1 1
1915 10 1
1916 4 5
1917 8 12
1918 2 4
1919 11 3
1920 6 11
1921 4 11
Sources: City Council Minutes 1909-1921; Los Angeles 1921.

The seven original industrial districts created by the 1909 ordinance were
enlarged by the addition of sixty-six industrial districts from 1910 until up to a few
months prior to the adoption of the city’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance (in
1921). These additional districts tended to be more thoughtfully debated and created
than residence exceptions as they were more permanent declarations of intentioned
land use. Some of these districts contained larger areas of undeveloped land and were
promoted to attract additional industries.
88

Residential exception was the technique used to protect an existing business
(or a small contiguous grouping of industries) in a residential area. Exceptions first
appeared after the 1908 and 1909 districting ordinances. Similar in concept to a
“nonconforming use” in today’s parlance, it allowed a previously legal business to

254
continue operating as long as no major changes were made to the use, building or
source of power, and as long as a majority of nearby property owners did not object.
These were intended to be temporary districts, in force until the business could
relocate or close altogether. Many were in newly annexed areas that now fell under
municipal rules; many covered just one parcel or building. Though the California
state and federal courts had declared it constitutional to require what were considered
as nuisance businesses to be removed from residence districts, an anti-industry
reputation was one the city council and civic organizations were at pains to avoid. By
1912, petitioning businesses could pick up a preprinted exception application form
from the city clerk. The city council adopted a large number of exceptions in 1913
after numerous petitions circulated in the wake of the state supreme court rulings;
applications and new exemptions dwindled after that.
89

Spread of Districting Around the United States: Los Angeles might have been
early in initiating zoning activities, but the city was certainly not alone or unique as
the United States entered the second decade of the twentieth century. Many attempts
were made to guide development by separating uses in what were thought to be
rational patterns. An important factor for success (or at least a judicial finding of
constitutionality) was authorization from the state government. For example, Grand
Rapids, Michigan created residential districts in 1910. But because the city had no
specific grant of delegated police power from the state, the Michigan Superior Court
found the ordinance to be unconstitutional. In contrast, an ordinance in Boston that
divided the city into two building height zones in 1907 as a means to control density

255
and the types of development possible was found to be constitutional when
challenged in the state supreme court. The city had been authorized by the state to
perform that police power function.
90

In an “epidemic” of legislative activity, several states authorized the creation
of residence districts in 1913, the same year that the city of Los Angeles prevailed in
defending industrial districts at the state high court. The Wisconsin legislature
authorized cities with populations over twenty-five thousand (eight cities at that
time) to create residence districts. Milwaukee’s version of districts resembled Los
Angeles’s in that it was made retroactive and could require established businesses to
move. Minneapolis’s ordinance from February 1913 allowed for the creation of
residential and industrial districts, again retroactive in application, upon petition by
the residents or businesses. In practice, it applied to so-called “better” suburban
areas. The Minnesota state legislature later in the year legalized this action for cities
larger than fifty thousand residents.
91

A number of cities in New York created residence districts after state law was
amended to authorize them. Syracuse, Utica and New York City all acted in 1913.
The New York City ordinance was specifically not retroactive—nor was its more
famous successor in 1916 (as well as all subsequent districting and zoning around the
country)—it explicitly grandfathered in all currently legal uses of property.
92

Not all states were swept up in the districting fervor at this point. Chicago
sent a draft bill to Springfield in 1913 to amend the powers of cities and towns to
give them specific powers to create residence districts. The governor vetoed

256
authorization on the advice of his attorney general who felt it was unconstitutional—
perhaps he took to heart the belief in the exceptionalism of the California courts. In
1914, Chicago went ahead with an attempt to create residence districts on a block-
by-block basis upon petition of residents. Because this was not explicitly authorized
by the state under the general nuisance power, the court decided that this was “undue
interference” with businesses by residential property owners, and would not allow
the regulation to stand. In all the states where cities were specifically authorized the
police powers to create districts, the courts declined to interfere with the legislative
bodies.
93

Within Southern California, other communities not only competed with Los
Angeles to attract manufacturing, they also faced the same kinds of land use debates
as they considered whether or not to adopt districting to direct industrial location.
Redondo Beach had an industrial district ordinance on the books by 1913; an
undertaker who had been unaware of the ordinance when he opened his new business
was forced to shut down. Monrovia, one of the oldest incorporated communities in
Los Angeles County, debated establishing a small industrial district in the summer of
1913 after homeowners complained of public garages in residential areas. The
Pasadena city council considered the addition of industrial districts to the revised
building ordinance between 1911 and 1914, repeatedly surveying suitable locations
and likewise repeatedly listening to the protests of residential inhabitants of the
proposed locations. The Arroyo Seco Parkway Committee was joined by the South
Pasadena Chamber of Commerce in opposing an industrial district that might

257
damage the natural beauty of the Arroyo, asking only that the stone crushing business
could remain until the city’s paving project was completed. Finally, Venice residents
petitioned to keep lumberyards and factories out of their neighborhoods. A joint
committee of the Boosters Club and local merchants canvassed the city and
recommended that the “welfare of Venice” demanded the creation of an industrial
zone.
94

Conclusion
A powerful 1913 newspaper graphic of a towering California Supreme Court
judge with a model-sized Los Angeles arrayed before him, manifestly yanking up
factories to situate them elsewhere, was published shortly after the judicial decisions
in the Quong Wo and Montgomery cases and the announcement of the campaign to
remove businesses from the residence sections. (Figure 20) It is a compelling image,
and one that highlights the role of courts in confirming at least the legality of
districting (or zoning, as it later came to be known) as a legitimate municipal
function, as well as the perception (and reality) of the power of court decisions.
95

258
Figure 20
“Big Transplanting Job to Be Done Here”

Source: Los Angeles Times 5 January 1913, page II1
The Quong Wo and Montgomery cases established an answer within
California to the question of the limits or extents of municipal police power rights
and responsibilities regarding land usage, as granted by the state constitution. Los

259
Angeles began a more rigid policy of segregating functional land uses once these
cases were concluded. Hadacheck’s subsequent state suit, resolved in favor of the
city, had less of an effect on the local evolution of land use districting—it covered no
new ground. But because he and his attorneys chose to appeal the case to the US
Supreme Court, and lost when the state court’s ruling was affirmed, the impacts of
Los Angeles’s districting efforts were more far-reaching and better known (at least,
outside legal circles) in setting a national precedent.
Apart from the administration of fire and building districts that limited
certain dangerous land uses, construction materials and occupations in urban areas,
the primary public means of separating uses before districting (or zoning) had been
through public or private nuisance suit. This method of judicial zoning worked well
enough in pre-industrial societies despite its sporadic nature. With greater
urbanization, more service-oriented governments and more complex economies, the
nuisance suit was less effective. The employment of the single-purpose district to
regulate location, often created at the prompting of citizen petitions to local
government, and defensible through municipal police powers, was a later tactic that
also fell victim to the increasingly complex and fast-paced changes taking place in
cities. Both methods were reactive: the city council responded when constituents
requested change. Neither method was useful in anticipating the future.
Prior to 1908, the Los Angeles city council acted to regulate different land
uses throughout the city primarily upon petition from individual property holders or
small groups of owners by creating single-purpose districts that limited a particular

260
industry or land use. The city’s victories in the protests brought by businessmen
Quong Wo, Montgomery and Hadacheck challenging its districting ordinances
bolstered the efforts of the Los Angeles city council to come up with an initial
strategy for industrial and residential location and growth during this time period:
each of these two sectors could, at least theoretically, be allowed to develop within
separate districts without impinging on the expansion of the other.
96

The favorable court rulings also meant that the city could not be charged with
takings (requiring compensation to owners, now known as regulatory takings) when
undertaking districting in an ostensibly non-discriminatory manner for public welfare
benefits under the police power—another incentive to work towards a more
comprehensive strategy of allotting lands for different functional uses. Nevertheless,
the city began a shift towards the principle of “grandfathering” existing industries
located in “wrong districts” after 1911, a principle that was followed in New York
City’s more comprehensive zoning ordinance of 1916 and subsequent zoning
regulations throughout in the United States.
97

Overcoming the perceived hurdle of the constitutionality of districting not
only permitted and encouraged the Los Angeles city council to continue with
attempts to control and direct the location of development, but also signaled to
municipal governments around the country that the courts could sustain similarly-
intended and worded efforts in municipal land use controls. Planning expert
Lawrence Veiller had written early in 1914 that Los Angeles’s districting strategies,
and the California court decisions that had resulted up to that time, were too unusual

261
to be applicable or to meaningfully influence cities in the rest of the country. While
his point of view on national implications was not precisely refuted by the US
Supreme Court when it let the state court’s ruling stand against Hadacheck’s property
use rights in December 1915, the decision did send a strong indication that the Court
would not interfere with local state-authorized regulations.
98

Contrary to assertions of the extraordinariness of the California Court’s
decisions, or the alleged paucity of legal precedent to New York City’s 1916 zoning
law, as the cases discussed in this chapter indicate, the exercise of police power with
reference to land use to promote public welfare was evolving into a well-accepted
city function in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth in Los Angeles.
99

262
Chapter 4 Endnotes

1
Ex parte Quong Wo 1911; Ex parte Montgomery 1912; Ex parte J. C. Hadacheck
1913; Hadacheck v. Sebastian 1915.
Throughout this chapter I will use the term “districting” to describe what we would
now call “zoning”—“Districting” is the word used in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries to describe the activity of limiting specific land uses in particular
places. Writers in the American City municipal journal began using the terms
“zoning” and “zone system” in articles around 1912 (for example, see Haldeman
1912).

2
Chandler 1977.

3
Wiebe 1967: 133-134; Monkonnen 1988: 69-110; Licht 1995: 133-165.

4
The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce expressed an elevated concern with the
promotion of “home products” by 1903 (Members’ Annual, March 1904: 27, carton
#040, LAACC, RHC) and continued to act on those concerns through local
promotions and educational campaigns thereafter.

5
Excerpt from Residence District Ordinance #33761 N.S., Section 2, adopted 16
February 1916 (Los Angeles 1921).

6
Most land use court cases talked about the deleterious effects of factories on
surrounding homes, no matter which was developed first. Veiller (1914: 525)
mentions that Los Angeles, alone of US cities, (after 1908, that is) focused on
industrial areas in addition to housing districts

7
LACC Members’ Annual Reports, 1900-1910 (carton #040, LAACC, RHC).

8
Los Angeles building code Ordinance #11017 N.S., adopted 8 May 1905 (created
industrial districts). Invalidated by the Los Angeles Superior Court in March 1908.
Los Angeles Ordinance #42666 N.S., adopted 19 October 1921 (the first citywide
comprehensive zoning code). The issue of enforcement, of course, is a whole
separate issue.

9
Cheney 1920: 31.

10
LACC Minutes 31 May 1906 (carton #004); 6 October 1909, 13 October 1909, 6
April 1910 (carton #005); 21 December 1910, 18 January 1911, 15 March 1911
(carton #006) LAACC, RHC.

11
“Factories To Build, Where?” Los Angeles Times 3 October 1909.

263

12
Erie 2004: 47. See also Monkonnen 1988: 212-214; Erie 1992: 519-521; Fogelson
1993: 85-107 and Warner 1995: 98-104.

13
Ordinance #11017 N.S. adopted 10 May 1905. [I have not been able to locate the
Superior Court case transcript or information on who was cited by and then
challenged the building code, or on what basis; but based on similar cases in other
cities, I concluded that the court likely ruled against the city because of the
arbitrariness of a permit-granting process—there was no place where a factory could
operate without going through the permitting process and no clear guidelines on
granting a permit. Courts looked unfavorably on arbitrary regulations.]

14
Ordinance #16170 N.S. adopted 25 February 1908; City Council Minutes 9 March
1908.

15
City Council Minutes 17 March 1908 and 13 April 1908.

16
Ordinance #17058 N.S. adopted 26 August 1908.

17
“Factories To Build, Where?” Los Angeles Times 3 October 1909.

18
Ordinance #18526 N.S. adopted 3 August 1909. It replaced ordinance #17136 N.S.
from September 1908 and established that all land within the city’s borders not
within a designated industrial district would be considered part of the residence
district.

19
“Factories To Build, Where?” Los Angeles Times 3 October 1909.

20
Ordinance #16170 N.S. adopted 25 February 1908. “Factories To Build, Where?
Los Angeles Times 3 October 1909. “Will Repeal It: Residence-District Law” Los
Angeles Times 29 September 1909.

21
“Making Room for Factories” Los Angeles Times 12 November 1909.

22
The city council adopted an ordinance in December 1909 that repealed many of the
single-purpose districts that had previously been established (including the original
1904 residence district). Evidently the council felt that the residence and industrial
districting ordinances as they existed at that point were sufficient to address the land
use separation needs for the city. (Ordinance #19443 N.S. adopted 16 December
1909).

23
“City Is Called to State Case” Los Angeles Times 8 July 1911.

264

24
House moving was quite common in Los Angeles, starting about the 1890s (“Feats
of Modern House Movers Make Archimedes Roll Over in His Grave” Los Angeles
Times 25 July 1926). For example, in 1908 Arthur L. Klock moved his own home to
1557 Curran Street in Echo Park, as well as the houses now located at 1571 and 1572
Curran Street, from this neighborhood (Echo Park walking tour lecture, December
2004). A few blocks southeast, owners planned to move five large homes from what
had been an elegant quarter. Cunningham and O’Connor Mortuary Company had
purchased property in their midst and planned to move their business from their old
location on Main Street where the rents were now too high, they said. Grand Avenue
at Tenth Street where the houses were located was now a commercial district,
according to one of the company’s partners (“Five Palatial Homes Will Be Moved to
Avoid Morgue” Los Angeles Record 11 May 1904).

25
While the earlier (1888) Sanborn insurance maps indicate the existence of Chinese
laundries (without operators’ names), the city directories first list Chinese laundry
businesses in 1895. Quong Wo appears, operating at 312 West Third Street in that
year, moving south to the 721 South Flower Street address the next year. Paul Siu
(1987) indicated in his study of Chinese laundries in Chicago that they tended to
cluster and prosper in areas with high concentrations of apartments, like that of
Seventh and Flower Streets.

26
Los Angeles city directories for 1895, 1899, 1894 and 1910.

27
City Council Minutes 31 January 1911; Ordinance #19563 N.S. approved 10
January 1910 and Ordinance #21996 N.S. approved 8 March 1911. The council
minutes do not indicate a reason that City Prosecutor Guy Eddie made this specific
request of the Legislation Committee to amend the residence district. In October
1910, seven non-Chinese laundries had petitioned to be included within the industrial
districts. As most of them were in close proximity to the boundaries, the Public
Welfare Committee recommended in November that the industrial districts be
extended to encompass these businesses. (Petition #1569 filed 18 October 1910; City
Council Minutes 1 and 9 November 1910). This same committee was working on
general recommendations for the industrial districts, presented 20 December 1910,
that included concerns about making the industrial areas too large (City Council
Minutes). The question of extending the industrial districts was tabled to enable the
enlarged advisory committee to meet and carefully deliberate. Banning Chinese hand
laundries from the residence district (the effect of the changed ordinance) would
certainly not have been a very politically sensitive act, given the history of attitudes
towards the Chinese residents and businesses in Los Angeles.

28
“Have to Get Out” Los Angeles Times 14 April 1911; “He’s the Goat: Quong Wo
Fined” Los Angeles Times 8 June 1911. “Industrial Law at Highest Bar” Los Angeles

265

Times 6 July 1911. The last two articles state that there was an effort to pick one case
to test in court. Financing came from other industrial concerns located within
residence districts as well as Chinese laundry owners (“Says It’s All Said Already”
Los Angeles Times 17 November 1911.
One hundred dollars in 1912 was worth about $1880 in 2003 dollars. (McCusker
2004).

29
“Industrial Law at Highest Bar” Los Angeles Times 6 July 1911; “Laundry Fight
Up: Higher Court to Hear” Los Angeles Times 9 July 1911; Ex parte Quong Wo 1911
at 225.

30
Ong 1981. The City Council Minutes Index regularly included “Chinese” as a
main subject entry between 1875 and 1899 because of the large number of
discussions and situations depicted in the minutes. After 1900, matters related to the
Chinese population or businesses were rarely referred to directly in the minutes; the
word “Chinese” no longer appeared as a separate subject index entry.

31
“Industrial Law at Highest Bar” Los Angeles Times 6 July 1911.

32
“Says It’s All Said Already” Los Angeles Times 17 November 1911; Chancellor
Kent, quoted in Ex parte Quong Wo 1911 at 232.

33
Ex parte Quong Wo 1911 at 220-221.

34
Petitions #146-153 filed 23 January 1912; City Council Minutes 30 January 1912;
Petitions #807-809 filed 7 May 1912.

35
Los Angeles City directories from 1911 to 1930. Sanborn insurance maps show
changing building footprints in neighborhoods.

36
Neighborhood composition from Sanborn insurance maps of the area.

37
“To Pass upon Police Powers” Los Angeles Times 16 October 1911; “Ordinance
Held Constitutional” Los Angeles Times 8 August 1912; Ex parte Montgomery 1912;
LACC Minutes, 29 November 1911, carton #006, LAACC, RHC.

38
Ex parte Montgomery 1912 at 459.

39
Deverell 2004: 133-135. In one of the many city council minutes entries regarding
municipal needs for brick, the council instructed the city clerk on 7 November 1904
to advertise for 1.9 million brick, the amount needed for sewer and construction
work in the remainder of that month alone.

266

40
Spalding 1931: 323. Much of the labor force was Mexican and Mexican-American
by the early years of the twentieth century (Deverell 2004: 129-171). According to
Guinn (1902: 1202), Jensen’s brick was known for being produced by “white labor”
at his plant at Washington and Sixteenth Streets.
“Smoky Brickyards Protested Against” Los Angeles Daily Times 20 December
1901; Powell v. Brookfield Pressed Brick 1904; Numerous Los Angeles Times
articles from August 1908; “How Bricks Are Made with Modern Methods” in The
Architect and Engineer September 1908: 65; Spalding 1931: 323; Pfeifer et al. 2001.

41
Los Angeles 1900: 33-34; Spalding 1931: 323. Joyce moved his Los Angeles
Brick Company to Chavez Ravine at this time, while maintaining the Yale Street
property. Discovering that this property was within the oil belt, he gave up brick
making in 1897 and went into the oil business (Spalding 1931: 324). The “Brick Kiln
Limits” Ordinance #642 N.S. was approved on 19 April 1890 (Los Angeles 1900:
33-34). The April revision was intended to correct an error in a January ordinance in
drawing the boundaries to include a portion of the Second Ward. (“Miscellaneous”
Los Angeles Times 15 April 1890). An examination of all city council petitions
submitted to the city council from 30 December 1899 through 14 April 1890 gives
no clue as to the reason Ordinance #642 N.S. was adopted. Local newspapers did not
present any evidence of complaint.

42
Sanborn Insurance Maps 1888.

43
“Smoky Brickyards Protested Against” Los Angeles Times 20 December 1901.

44
“Brickyards—Regulations” Ordinance #6861 N.S. approved 21 December 1901.
(Los Angeles 1910: 113-114).

45
Hadacheck filed a petition on 23 January 1902 (#108) requesting to operate
through the end of his lease in May 1902. Henry Jensen petitioned on 25 January
1902 to remain open at his location (#109). Two weeks later he amended his request
(petition #220, 17 February 1902) to operate another six months at which time he
had a buyer willing to subdivide the lots. Other petitioners included: C.G. Berg
(petition #110, 30 December 1901); Joseph Simons, president of the Simons Brick
Company (petition #7, filed 6 January 1902); the Los Angeles Brick Company
(petition #8, filed 6 January 1902); and C. Paye (petition #44, filed 13 January 1902).

46
Petition #110 filed 27 January 1902; City Council Minutes 10 March 1902.
Property owners had to return to the city council in the late summer of 1902 to ask
again for the removal of Jensen’s brickyard. They alleged he had made no move to
begin closing operations (petition #825 filed 5 September 1902).

267

47
“Brickyards—District” Ordinance #13,077 N.S. approved 14 July 1906. (Los
Angeles 1910: 114). This is the commercial strip to which James Lacey had moved
his carpet-beating business by 1903 (see Chapter 1).
“Crack o’ Doom Due?” Los Angeles Times 5 August 1908; [untitled] Los Angeles
Times 12 August 1908; “Chavez Blasts Too Shaky?” Los Angeles Times 14 August
1908; “Must Reduce the Charges” Los Angeles Times 15 August 1908; “Subdued
Blasting: Chavez Ravine Compromise” Los Angeles Times 22 August 1908; “Chavez
Ravine Blast Anew” Los Angeles Times 16 September 1908; “C. of C. Protects
Industry” Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce Bulletin 22 November 1926, Vol. 1
(12): 2 (LAACC, RHC).
Chavez Ravine, isolated and virtually bypassed by city services and neighborhood
improvement over the next forty years, was the site of La Loma, Bishop and Palo
Verde, the three neighborhoods forcibly vacated through eminent domain in the
1950s. Dodger Stadium now occupies the site (Normark 1999).

48
Los Angeles city directories 1901-1917; Guinn 1902: 1202; “Fair Charms of the
City Beautiful Conspicuous in the Wilshire District” Los Angeles Times 23 October
1907; Ex parte Hadacheck 1913 at 418.

49
“It’s hard luck, but I guess it is the penalty we must pay for underestimating the
growth of the city.” Comment by one of the businesses finally forced to move out of
a residence area in 1913. “Industrial Plants to Be Pulled Up by the Roots” Los
Angeles Times 5 January 1913.

50
Calculated from Los Angeles Times Sunday Real Estate Section weekly accounting
of permits issued and actual construction starts and completions (23 October 1907).

51
“Talk of Merger with City” Los Angeles Times 10 August 1909; “To Take Hand in
Water War” Los Angeles Times 20 August 1909; “Move Fast to Join the City” Los
Angeles Times 21 August 1909. Actually, the Colegrove Board of Trade and other
organizations had been working towards annexation for more than a year, but had
kept it quiet because of the furor over the consolidation balloting of San Pedro and
Wilmington that took place at the end of August 1909 to advance the harbor project
(“Move Fast to Join to City” Los Angeles Times 21 August 1909).

52
“Move Fast to Join the City” Los Angeles Times 21 August 1909; “Sixth Election
in One Year” Los Angeles Times 5 September 1909.

53
“Human Sardines in City Street Cars” Los Angeles Times 28 April 1907;
“Thousands Go Out of Farther Cars” Los Angeles Times 21 October 1907; “Homes
Built in Victoria Park” Los Angeles Times 20 December 1908; “Annexationists Get
Many Signatures” Los Angeles Times 29 August 1909; “Southwestern Ambitions”

268

Los Angeles Times 4 September 1909; Sanborn insurance maps, volume 7-1907 and
volume 8-1921. Unless otherwise noted, building construction dates come from the
City of Los Angeles, Zone Information & Map Access System (ZIMAS), which can
be accessed at zimas.lacity.org.

54
“Sixth Election in One Year” Los Angeles Times 5 September 1909; “Annexation
Boomed” Los Angeles Times 4 October 1909; “Big West End in City Fold” Los
Angeles Times 20 October 1909; See Erie (1992: 540) on property valuation and
impacts on municipal bond ceilings.
Overall, eighty-five percent of the voters in Colegrove approved the annexation
(ranging from seventy-three to ninety-eight percent in the six precincts). A canvas of
the city’s vote totals indicated that ninety-five percent of those voting welcomed the
new addition. Six hundred Colegrove residents voted, while just over six thousand
Los Angeles city voters cast ballots [of a population of three hundred thousand—
evidence perhaps, of “ballot fatigue”] (Residence districting by Ordinance #18526
N.S. adopted in 3 August 1909; City Council Minutes 26 October 1909). Report of
the city attorney’s ruling: “City Hall Brevities” Los Angeles Times 17 November
1909.

55
Petition #108, filed 25 January 1910 (carton A-30). The other brickyard, Hubbard
and Chamberlain, also near the intersection of Pico and Crenshaw Streets, was still
operating in January 1912. The company then petitioned the council for permission
to operate for two additional years to “wind up their business.” After neighbors
testified that they were willing to allow the company to operate only until the end of
the summer of that year, the owners agreed, and closed the business in August 1912
(City Council Minutes, 9 and 16 January 1912).

56
Peter Marion’s address and occupation: 1909 city directory. Perhaps he circulated
the document as he walked the neighborhood delivering the mail. City directories,
Sanborn insurance maps, the Los Angeles Times online historical archives and the
City of Los Angeles, Zone Information & Map Access System (ZIMAS) were used
to develop profiles of the people who signed the petition.

57
Samuel Barry was a salesman for the David Barry and Company real estate and
investment company, representing numerous properties in the southwest section of
the city, including Victoria Park (city directories 1909-1913; Los Angeles Times
obituary in September 1936). William M
c
Endree was associated with the Boulevard
Heights development (city directories 1909-1913, Los Angeles Times 10 December
1905, and numerous display ads from 1906-1910), Seth Olmstead with the Kinney
Heights development on West Adams Blvd (city directories 1909-1913). Leonard
Woodward was a builder and contractor (city directories 1909-1913).

269

58
Petition #108, filed 25 January 1910; city directories 1908-1913; “Homes Built in
Victoria Park” Los Angeles Times 20 December 1920; “Real Estate Notes” Los
Angeles Times 1 September 1907; Pico Street map (OM-1030), February 1906, Los
Angeles Bureau of Engineering; Sanborn Insurance Maps for 1907 and 1921.

59
City Council Minutes 15 February 1910.

60
City Council Minutes 23 February 1910, 1 March 1910, 22 March 1910, 5 April
1910; “Brickyards—District” Ordinance #19989 N.S., adopted over veto, 5 April
1910 (Los Angeles 1910); Ex parte Hadacheck 1913 at 418.

61
Los Angeles 1910; Los Angeles 1921.

62
Petition # 1531, presented 11 October 1910; City Council Minutes 6 December
1910, 13 December 1910; “Boyle Heights Brickyards” Los Angeles Times 4
December 1910; “Call-Down for ‘Uncle Jerry’” Los Angeles Times 7 December
1910; “Homes Built in Victoria Park” Los Angeles Times 20 December 1908.

63
“In the Inferior Courts” Los Angeles Times 8 March 1911. A complaint was
originally filed against Hadacheck in 1910 after the April ordinance was adopted, but
a challenge to the ordinance prevented its application until a hearing could be held on
the demurrer [written complaint alleging there was no basis for original police
complaint and requesting dismissal; must be ruled on before proceeding]. In both
Quong Wo (1911) and Montgomery (1912), decided at the state level, the court
supported the city’s districting efforts as a reasonable use of municipal police power.
Hadacheck had been forced to close an earlier brickyard because of the 1902
licensing restrictions [previously detailed].

64
See Logan and Molotch (1987: 62-74) on the organization of growth coalitions;
Novak (1996) on the growth and use of local regulation. Los Angeles Times
editorials: “Let Us Broaden Out” 23 September 1908 and “Inspiring Facts” 27
September 1908.

65
City Directories 1912-1930; “Industrial Plants to Be Pulled Up by the Roots” Los
Angeles Times 5 January 1913. Interestingly, according to Los Angeles city
directories, only two of the original eleven Chinese launderers named in the police
warrants moved after the court’s decision in Ex parte Quong Wo in 1911. Seven
were still operating at their original locations in 1917, and four remained as late as
1928!

66
“Test of City’s Law ‘Way Up” Los Angeles Times 17 May 1913.

270

67
“Involves Others” Los Angeles Times 2 March 1912; “Ado about Hole in Ground”
Los Angeles Times 13 November 1913; Ex parte Hadacheck 1913 at 418.
It is unclear what transpired between the date of the ordinance in 1910 and
Hadacheck’s appearance in police court in 1912. Presumably, he continued to
operate the brickyard. Otherwise, why continue the appeal? The other brickyard in
the neighborhood, Hubbard and Chamberlain, had been denied an extension in 1912
and stopped operating that year; Hadacheck might have been charged at that time.
Another petition, submitted in September 1912 by neighbors, describes the clay pit
as a garbage dump. There is no mention of continued brick manufacture (Petition
#1804 filed 24 September 1912). The petition was referred to the board of public
works. Several weeks later, the inspector made his report:
I have made an inspection of this property—the driveway is south of Pico
Street, between Woolsey and Norton Avenue . . . It is very dusty. The hole
where the cans are being dumped is very deep and very large, and will be an
eyesore until it is filled in, at any event. At present the dumping is carried on
on the west side of the hole, and cans are allowed to pile up about three feet
above the natural ground surface, which makes them very noticeable to the
residents of the neighborhood. This dump is being used principally by the city
non-combustible collectors. If the driveway were oiled and the cans kept
shoveled down level with the natural ground surface, and dirt thrown over the
top when the pile gets nearly level with the ground, a great deal of the
nuisance would be avoided, and dumping could go on there for a long time to
come, without making it any more offensive than the hole itself would be.
(City Council Minutes 8 October 1912).
Evidently, Hadacheck had stopped digging clay for brick at this location by the time
his case was heard at the state supreme court (in 1913), and was perhaps collecting
fees for using the pit as a dump.

68
Ex parte Hadacheck 1913 at 418; Hadacheck v. Sebastian 1915 at 405. A walk
south on Bronson Avenue from Pico Street shows Hadacheck’s statement—that the
land was worthless for residential development—to be untrue. Bronson cuts directly
through Hadacheck’s former property. One, two and four-family structures, all built
between 1922 and 1926, now line the street. The newspaper reported much
development activity in this area by 1921. (“Development of West Pico Increasing”
Los Angeles Times 13 November 1921).
Also of note in the Hadacheck case: The argument of the diminution of the value
of an owner’s property because of a regulatory change was used here for the first
time in a land use case. This claim in land use court cases is now common. (Kramer
1995: 47-49).

69
Ex parte Hadacheck 1913 at 419.

271

70
Ibid. at 420.

71
Ibid. at 421 [emphasis added].

72
Hadacheck v. Sebastian 1915 at 475 [emphasis added].

73
Hadacheck v. Sebastian 1915 at 476.

74
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted in 1868 in the
aftermath of the Civil War to guarantee due process rights to all citizens, was
increasingly used by industries in the latter portion of the nineteenth century and into
the twentieth to protest disparities in treatment (often regulations that limited
business in some way). Thus, Hadacheck’s protests were couched in due process
terms, and not in the regulatory takings language that we would expect to see today
(Kramer 1995: 47).

75
Hadacheck v. Sebastian 1915 at 413-414. This upholding of the superior rights of
more recent property holders and newer or evolving uses was not unique to the
California courts. There are many illustrations from case law. For example, in
Kentucky in 1866, a man was cited for keeping unhealthy and smelly animal pens in
the city of Covington. This despite the fact that he had been there for thirty years, the
property had been outside the city limits when he began operation at some distance
in the country near to which there had been no settlements. The court held that the
pens were now injurious and detrimental to the broader public good and could be
declared a public nuisance (Ashbrook vs. Commonwealth of Covington, Kentucky
1866).
In another case, a long-established paint factory in Detroit was required to close in
1890 when the high court of Michigan upheld the lower court’s finding of a nuisance
violation of an 1884 ordinance, again despite the fact that the factory had been in
operation twenty years at the same location, though before the area was developed
with other businesses and rental residences. The city had extended its boundaries
while the owners of adjacent properties had constructed residences. The community
became more populous over time and then could not sustain the continuation of a
noxious business. While the court voiced hesitation about abating a nuisance
consisting of a legitimate business, felt it in some ways unfair, and hoped that some
other remedy might be negotiated, in the end the court decided in favor of the city,
upholding the ordinance and the city’s police powers to act to maintain public
welfare (People v. White Lead Works 1890).
Finally, a slaughterhouse operating in Massachusetts since the 1830s was found to
be a nuisance, and was required to cease operations in 1856. Again, homes had been
built and roads extended to the formerly remote location as the town grew. The
defendant’s contention was that he had an absolute right to continue his business in

272

the same place and manner because he had been there long before the town
expansion occurred. The court disagreed (Commonwealth vs. Upton 1856).

76
Ex parte Hadacheck 1913; Hadacheck v. Sebastian 1915. The state supreme court
did advise that there was no [current] regulation that would prevent Hadacheck from
excavating the clay and transporting it to another location for brick manufacture (Ex
parte Hadacheck 1913 at 412).

77
“Industrial Plants to Be Pulled Up by Roots” Los Angeles Times 5 January 1913.

78
Ibid.

79
LACC Minutes 23 October 1912.

80
LACC Minutes 1 May 1907; 29 May 1907; 18 September 1907; 23 September
1908 (carton #004, LAACC, RHC); numerous entries from September-November
1911 on “Prosperity Week” in LACC Minutes (carton #006, LAACC, RHC). There
are numerous short reports on the efforts and promotion in the local newspapers from
1911-1912.

81
EL SEGUNDO: “Refinery Site Nucleus of Industrial Center” Los Angeles Times
10 September 1910; “Chimneys – A Change of Heart” Los Angeles Times 17
November 1915; “Millions in New Factories” Los Angeles Times 8 July 1916 (as
well as numerous display ads). TORRANCE: “Large Interests Are Combined” Los
Angeles Times 30 June 1912; “Model City for Workers” Los Angeles Times 27
October 1912. Ads for Torrance appeared in the Times on a number of occasions, for
example, 20 October 1912 and 5 January 1913. VERNON: “Vernon Declares” Los
Angeles Times 3 October 1905; “Like Smell of Smoke and Freely Admit It” Los
Angeles Times 21 December 1913; “Vernon Fast Becoming One of the West’s Great
Factory Centers” Los Angeles Times 14 June 1914. For an account of the
development of the working class and industrial suburbs south of Los Angeles, see
Nicolaides (2002).

82
“That Million” Los Angeles Times 15 January 1911; “Industrial Plants to Be Pulled
Up by Roots” Los Angeles Times 5 January 1913.

83
The Chamber of Commerce and Merchants and Manufacturers Association were
embarrassed to promote Los Angeles and offer inducements for factories to locate
within the city. (“Making Room for Factories” Los Angeles Times 12 November
1909). The tremendous growth of the “city of homes” at times overshadowed the
need to allow for industrial growth. “While Los Angeles is constantly bidding for
more factories, more capital, more employment and more business, its City Council

273

and some other influences are discouraging further industrial enterprises” (“Bidding
for More Industries and Yet Discouraging Them” Los Angeles Times 10 July 1910).
By 1915, the Los Angeles Times editorialized about the welcome improvements that
the city had made, about the “industrial awakening such as has come to few other
cities” (“Chimneys—A Change of Heart” Los Angeles Times 17 November 1915.

84
City Council Minutes 7 March 1911.

85
Ibid.

86
Ibid.

87
The table in Appendix I contains a full list of the residential districting and
excepting ordinances, as well as the industrial district ordinances, from 1904-1921.

88
City Council Minutes 1909-1921; Los Angeles 1921. See Appendix I for a list of
the ordinances.

89
“City Hall Brevities” Los Angeles Times 20 December 1912; “Industrial Plants to
Be Pulled Up by Roots” Los Angeles Times 5 January 1913.
Laundrymen Hop Wah and Sam Kee took the city to court in 1915 over the denial
of their separate exemption petitions for businesses on West Temple and North
Figueroa Streets in the residential district. The city appealed when the superior court
ruled that the city was required to renew an operating license to each business under
Ordinance #20000 N.S. Judge Thomas of the California Appeals Court reversed the
finding of the superior court after City Attorney Albert Lee Stephens presented the
case. “The question . . . has been so thoroughly settled in this state that we shall not
burden the record nor impose upon the profession the hardship of reading any
discussion by us of this case.” The judge went on to write, “There is such a wealth of
decisions from all over the United States, . . . presenting exhaustive, thorough, and
able arguments” concerning the constitutionality of the districting ordinances, that
the judge listed the names of just twelve of them from the state and federal level.
Sam Kee and Hop Wah v. Wilde 1919 at 533-534.

90
James Ford in American City May 1913: 477.

91
Benton 1913; Veiller 1914: 525, 527. Wisconsin state statutes, Chapter 743
included Milwaukee, Green Bay, La Crosse, Madison, Oshkosh, Racine, Sheboygan
and Superior. Minnesota Statutes 1913, Chapter 420 included Minneapolis, St. Paul
and Duluth.

274

92
New York State Laws of 1913, Chapter 774, authorized second-class cities to
create residence districts that were limited to one- and two-family dwellings. There
was no attempt to list prohibited industries (Veiller 1914: 527; [no author] 1916;
“Inhibition—Permission—Compulsion” in American City 1916 Vol. XIV (4): 325).

93
Bassett 1914: 154; Veiller 1914: 529; People v. City of Chicago 1914. Veiller
(1914: 528-529) wrote that while he himself was encouraged by the decisions in
Quong Wo, Montgomery and Hadacheck in California, others cautioned him that it
was “not safe to follow the decisions of the California courts, as they are not highly
esteemed by the legal fraternity.”

94
REDONDO BEACH: Los Angeles Times 20 November 1913. MONROVIA: Los
Angeles Times 13 July 1913. PASADENA: Los Angeles Times 12 January 1912, 23
October 1912, 18 September 1913, 25 March 1914. SOUTH PASADENA: Los
Angeles Times 19 March 1914, 22 March 1914. VENICE: Los Angeles Times 13
April 1912, 26 April 1912.

95
“Industrial Plants to Be Pulled Up by Roots” Los Angeles Times 5 January 1913.

96
Shurtleff 1915: 94. One glaring exception to this process, as we saw in Chapter 2,
was the city’s ostensible public health campaign against the Chinese residents of the
city where the council, public health officers, as well as the police and fire
commissioners and uniformed personnel united in efforts to rid the city of Chinese
residents and businesses through the application of various land use restrictions.

97
Committee report on industrial districts in City Council Minutes 7 March 1911;
Advisory Committee on Zoning 1926; Toll 1969: 182-183.

98
Shurtleff 1915: 94. Veiller (1914) described the three California cases of Quong
Wo, Montgomery and Hadacheck in a talk to the Sixth National City Planning
Conference in 1914 as “not highly esteemed by the legal fraternity” (529), and also
mentioned the focus on industrial districts over residential and the disruption to long-
established businesses that happened to be located in what were now designated as
residence districts (525).

99
Toll 1969: 182; Willis 1993: 4-5.

275
Chapter 5
Regulating Land Use—The Search for Appropriate Balance Continues
What at any time constitutes a nuisance is a matter of
contemporary public opinion. The time may come when a
store in a residence district will be recognized as a nuisance.
— National Municipal Review April 1916
1

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, when citizens complained
about particular land uses in Los Angeles that disturbed them, submitted petitions or
appeared in person at city council meetings to air their concerns, the council often
responded hastily. City councilmen responded without much thought to
consequences beyond resolving the immediate issue, voting at the conclusion of a
short discussion to create a new ordinance or directing police to cite the offender.
Specific nuisance uses could be required to be abated. The council used several other
methods to control the types of acceptable land uses at this time: single-purpose
districts and the more general fire districts (and to a lesser degree, building codes
related to fire safety) that controlled where industries and businesses could be
located. These nuisance suits and more-traditional control practices, the product of
long-established customs and legal precepts derived from state police powers to
maintain the public health and welfare, proved decreasingly effective in the midst of
the significant growth and industrialization taking place in Los Angeles and cities
across the country.
Too, the question of what was acceptable was shifting. Mixed use
neighborhoods—for centuries the normative human settlement and development

276
pattern—were no longer considered as uniformly viable. Artisans no longer lived
behind the workshop along with their apprentices. The workshop became a factory,
and employed greater numbers of workers who maintained their own households
separate and sometimes distant from the plant. The factory expanded, produced a
greater variety of products for an expanding marketplace, and required greater and
greater inputs of materials and mechanized power, constant transit access and more
intensive land use. These processes naturally created a larger divide between
residential and industrial uses.
Within this altered economic system, conflicts over adjacent land uses
increased; land use ordinances proliferated and, especially in Los Angeles, favored
industrial use. By the early twentieth century, the Los Angeles city council attempted
to regularize controls through the creation of districts. This inaugurated a pattern to
more formally separate residential from industrial and commercial land uses in order
to decrease conflict, with the promise that it would create more opportunities for
economic development. As courts “routinely upheld the state and local regulation of
dangerous buildings . . . objectionable trades . . . [and] occupations . . .” the city
council crafted more explicit ordinances that covered increasing portions of the city.
By 1915, these ordinances were well-established if still constituting a piecemeal land
use system.
2

Emboldened by the state court rulings that fairly consistently upheld
municipal police powers to regulate land use, the city council in Los Angeles
continued to amend the residence and industrial districts after 1915 (see list in

277
Appendix I) and thus strengthened the land use patterns already stressed in the
existing districting ordinances. Neighborhoods closest to the Los Angeles River and
the old business core became ever more industrial and commercial, while residential
use of these areas diminished. The dense neighborhoods of aging housing stock and
the working-class residents living in these congested conditions became increasingly
marginalized as residential land use concerns as well as real estate focus shifted to
other, less-developed and higher-value sections of the expanding city.
3

In the absence of any other formal zoning administrative organization within
the local government, the city council itself had to deliberate and rule on any
changes, as each exception from the residence district and each additional industrial
district required a new ordinance, discussed and approved by the appropriate city
council committees and vetted by the city attorney. And, with the 1915 addition of
much of the San Fernando Valley, as well as continuing annexations and
consolidations thereafter (see Table 11 below), these newly incorporated areas
needed to be integrated within the overall yet still piecemeal plan. In the fifteen years
from 1915 to 1930, city land area increased from just over one hundred square miles
to almost four hundred and fifty square miles, with most of the annexation growth
concentrated in the five years ending in 1919. One would be hard pressed to find
more than a handful of pages in the many volumes of city council minutes for the
late 1910s and into the 1920s that did not contain lengthy discussion about land use
and zoning issues, or proposed changes to them.
4

278
Table 11

Additions to Los Angeles Land Area
1915-1930

Year
Number of
Annexations or
Consolidations
Additional square miles
(to nearest mile)
Total square miles
(to nearest mile)
1915-1919 17 256 364
1920-1924 28 45 409
1925-1930 21 33 442

Source: J.J. Jessup, City Engineer, “Map Showing Territory Annexed
to the City of Los Angeles” in Fogelson 1993: 226-227.

Organizing to Zone
By the late nineteenth century, a number of cities around the United States
had established municipal art commissions due to the growing concern of civic
business elites regarding the appearance of urban streets and civic centers. Los
Angeles followed suit in 1903 with its own civic beautification group, the Municipal
Art Commission. Staffed by volunteers, it advised the city council, undertook
beautification projects and endeavored to educate city residents about the importance
of civic improvement. In 1907, the city council hired Charles Mulford Robinson,
best-selling author and promoter of the concept of city planning, to visit the city and
make a survey of recommended civic improvements. Though the report was received
enthusiastically, funds were not appropriated for publication for another two years,
while the resultant committee formed in 1910 to act on the recommendations
accomplished little.
5

279
Several attempts were made in the next years to create a permanent and
officially-sanctioned group to advise the city council on land use and planning issues.
The city charter was amended in 1911 to allow the appointment of a city planning
committee, while state-authorizing legislation for planning trailed in 1915. The city
council drafted regulations to create commissions first in 1913 and again in 1917 but
never passed them. A voluntary City Planning Association formed in May 1914 after
interest was piqued by a traveling educational exhibit on “scientific city
development” from the New York City Planning Bureau with an accompanying
series of lectures. Regular meetings were held on subjects such as excess
condemnation, transportation issues, housing conditions and subdivisions. After an
“international survey of city planning commissions” requested by the city council,
members wrote an ordinance regarding the formation of a city planning
commission.
6

Not until late 1919 were efforts to create a city planning commission
successful. Drafted by Gordon Whitnall (first secretary of the City Planning
Association) and submitted by the Chamber of Commerce, the ordinance called for a
large advisory committee comprised of three members each from seventeen
prominent Los Angeles civic organizations. Adopted in March 1920, Gordon
Whitnall was named secretary the following July, shortly after the commission’s first
meeting. The second project of the commission (the first was a street plan) resulted
in a land use zoning plan in October 1921 that covered the entire city. This plan
repealed many of the districting and zoning ordinances previously described, while it

280
confirmed a good deal of the existing conditions created by the earlier industrial and
residence districting (Figure 21 below shows the zoning for the downtown area).
7

Figure 21
San Pedro
Sunset
Figueroa
Pico
11th (Olympic)
6th
1st
Macy
Mission
Alameda
Plaza
Los Angeles River
0 2 miles
Zone D - Light Manufacturing
Zone E - Any Structure Not Prohibited
Industrial Districts, October 1921
LA City Ordinance #42666 N.S.
Center city detail adapted from District Zoning Maps, Official Atlas (1922) *
* Except for small pockets of Zone A, single-family housing, in the northeast corner of this map,
the remainder of central LA was zoned "B" for multi-family dwellings, schools, churches, institutional uses
and professional offices. Surveying continued through May 1922 to complete the zoning maps.

281
The citywide zoning plan was not without controversy. The commission had
to tread carefully amongst all the many interests as district-by-district, in-the-field
city surveys were transformed into zone maps. For example, the Realty Board had
earlier in the year lobbied for an exclusively residential district from Vermont
Avenue west to the city limits while various business sectors pushed for extending
commercial and industrial zones on the west side to counter allegations of the
monopoly granted to already-existing businesses. The city planning commission held
meetings in different areas around the city as work progressed on the survey in an
attempt to explain what was needed and to hear neighborhood concerns. Property
owners with widely differing conceptions of the future presented opposing scenarios.
Some vociferously fought the districting. The commission was heartened when, in
October 1924, Judge McLucas of the Superior Court ruled against George Lee
Miller’s bid to construct a four-flat in the West Adams District in an area the
commission had designated for single-family homes in the 1921 plan.
8

The new city charter adopted in 1925 reduced the size of the commission
from fifty-one to a more manageable five members, with a budget and genuine
authority, and established for the first time a city planning department within Los
Angeles city government to implement recommendations. This department was
helmed by director-manager Gordon Whitnall and consisted of five administrative
divisions: official plans, zoning, building lines, subdivisions, and public building and
recreation areas. The 1930 zoning ordinance adopted now-standard language;
included height, area and density requirements; and spelled out procedures for public

282
notice, hearings and variances. In basic form and tone, this document largely
resembles the structure and wording found in the present-day zoning documents used
in Los Angeles as well as many other United States cities.
9

Looking Back . . .
Though zoning documents have changed little, transformation of land uses in
Los Angeles has continued. What has this meant for the particular disputes over land
use described in this dissertation? After all, these were sites of great conflicts
between neighbors, countless hours of debate in the city council and by various civic
organizations, and at times major public battles carried out in the courts and at the
ballot box. What became of the properties and disputes?
The Chinese who inherited the dilapidated space within the old Plaza area
gradually expanded east of Alameda Street, and then were displaced when that site
was taken to construct Union Station in the 1930s, moving a few blocks northwest.
The overt opposition to their laundry businesses and their very presence in the city
gradually dissipated as the labor conflicts ended. All the newer residentially-zoned
areas by definition could not contain commercial uses such as laundries. What had
been a residential district surrounding Quong Wo’s laundry on Flower Street was
completely rebuilt as a retail and commercial district by the late 1920s and is now a
focus of the recent residential migration back to the downtown, with conversions of
old commercial buildings to multi-family use and new residents seemingly happy
with (at least some) urban mixed uses.

283
The Montgomery Lumberyard site in the Highland Park neighborhood can
still be identified; it now contains a storage facility and one-story office building.
The residential area of small homes that surrounded the lumberyard has endured and
appears to have changed little; few of the houses have been replaced over the
intervening one hundred years. The adjacent Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad
line that served the lumber business has been resurrected as a public transit train line,
with cars running several times an hour all day through the neighborhood.
The Cudahy Slaughterhouse on what is now Cesar Chavez Avenue (formerly
Sunset Boulevard and, before that, Macy Street) just west of the Los Angeles River
remained in profitable operation until the 1950s. The Macy Street neighborhoods of
working-class residents that had fought so hard to keep the slaughterhouse from
rebuilding after the fire did not fare as well. Over the intervening century they have
completely disappeared, obliterated by freeways, altered street patterns, the train
station, the county jail complex, a transit bus yard and a large city government office
complex.
Still standing at Olympic Boulevard and Santa Fe Avenue is the Julius
Hauser meat plant in the former Sixth Ward. After the 1904 conflict over whether
this would be a residential or industrial neighborhood, the factories eventually “won”
the locational battle here too. A few residential blocks remain to the north, isolated
by freeway construction in the 1950s. Just two small houses remain adjacent to the
old Hauser plant property, almost completely hidden away by over-grown shrubbery,
the last holdouts of a century-old land-use conflict.

284
As for the Hadacheck Brickyard on West Pico Street, multi-family housing
built in the early 1920s now covers the site declared to be “unsubdivideable” and
unfit for any other use by its brick-making owner almost a century ago. To a
pedestrian walking up and down the neighborhood streets, there is absolutely no
discernable clue that a nuisance land use, subject of a landmark Supreme Court case,
once operated here. The nearby Victoria Square neighborhood, new at the time of the
Joseph Hadacheck’s case and whose owners were anxious to exclude businesses like
Hadacheck’s, appears to have prospered.
Finally, we return to the residential neighborhood just west of the Plaza
where we began this narrative, where James Lacey moved his carpet cleaning
business in 1894, ran afoul of a city land use ordinance and ended up losing when he
fought it in court; and where fourteen years later Charles Unger shot his neighbor’s
crowing roosters in a fit of pique when the city council would not intervene to
prevent the noise. What of this neighborhood, then full of new houses and newer
construction along the westward path of city expansion? The residential quality of
the property that the health inspector, the neighbors and the city council with its
ordinances fought so hard to protect is no longer there at all, now excavated and
concretized into various freeways, ramps and reconfigured arterials, inhabited only
by homeless individuals sheltering under the overpasses. There is no longer a “there”
there to zone.

285
Conclusion
In his examination of the Chicago criminal court system, Michael Willrich
describes Progressive conceptualizations of the social causes of disorderly behavior
in the early twentieth century as well as the growing application and acceptance of
“sociological jurisprudence” to improve society. He situates his narrative within
three spheres: the institutional, the legal and the local. These themes apply equally
well to this dissertation. A study of Los Angeles during the same time period covered
in Willrich’s research reveals the development of land use regulation to confront
another type of disorder and likewise engineer improved conditions.
10

Like City of Courts, this is necessarily an institutional story. As formal
municipal institutions charged with city planning and zoning appeared only
subsequent to the period of this study, the city council emerged as the primary locus
of reaction and action. Responsible in the abstract with overseeing the public welfare
of the city through the application of its police powers, members of the city council
addressed a host of concrete problems faced by the expanding and industrializing
city. They sought solutions to ever-increasing conflicts between property users
through the body of law surrounding property that codified relationships between
owners and protected both individual and community interests. When this body of
law did not provide solutions adequate or appropriate to meet new problems of
modern urban life, the council and its attorneys pushed legal boundaries to fit these
new issues, in a messy ad hoc process. When then brought to court by unhappy land
users for venturing too far beyond the bounds, the city council tried again, and

286
again, altering the wording of ordinances in accordance with court critiques until
they withstood challenge. This method was not deliberate, and the destination was
not known when the process began in earnest in the 1880s. There was “no single-
minded pursuit of goals inspired by higher authorities,” no straight-line, neat
Progressive chronology. It is only in retrospect, knowing where we have ended up,
that we can distinguish a path and assume a purpose.
11

The need for an entity charged with oversight of the hitherto generally
uncontrolled development coincided with the evolving structure of a
professionalizing municipal government. Examining the land use regulations
debated, adopted and enforced in Los Angeles permits a detailed depiction of how a
municipal government structure associated with local city planning evolved to create
the foundation of acceptance of a zoning commission and later zoning codes. People
must see laws as legitimate, fair in procedure and fair in outcome before they will
comply with them.
12

Any discussion of the origins of land use law is quite obviously also a legal
story. The relationships between individual landowners have been codified in laws
originally inherited from the European colonizers of the Americas (primarily English
law in the case of the United States) and continually altered to fit the situation and
experiences of the American landscape and politics. The general policy of strong
protections for individual property rights in the United States contributed to the
healthy economic development of the country. But at the same time, these
protections came about through an implicit understanding that the community and

287
the country as a whole were served well by these protections. If individual
landowners disturbed the use rights of other owners, or the larger community, the
community through the arm of government acted to control the transgressor.
13

This theoretical sketch of property rights is made tangible at the local
regulatory level. Local municipal land use ordinances carry the force of law.
Violations are criminal cases that may be handled through lower-level police and
superior courts; law is “applie[d] in the first instance” here and requisite sanctions
applied. Land owners and users, who might have deliberately provoked police action
when in disagreement with local ordinances, and then unhappy with the local court
implementation of a regulation that impeded a particular land use, had recourse to
further legal appeals to state and federal courts. Conversely, the city attorney could
appeal rulings that invalidated municipal regulations that he (city attorneys were all
male at this time) believed to be appropriate and constitutional. It is at this appeals
level—higher state courts as well as federal courts up to the Supreme Court level—
where law is “settled” and precedents applicable to other jurisdictions and states are
created.
14

Finally, following Willrich, this is necessarily a local story. Public welfare
concerns reside primarily at the municipal level; states delegate to local
municipalities the police powers to oversee public welfare. The police power itself is
an ephemeral concept, with a meaning that changes as societies and their needs
change. City council members, ordinary businessmen for the most part, developed
ordinances to control land use in response to very personal demands from a variety

288
of directions: entreaties from individual citizens, pressures from local business
interests, apparently dispassionate or scientific reports from professionals such as
health or building inspectors, consultants or outside groups such as insurance
companies, and finally advice from the city attorney’s office.
Here also is a local story that is intimately entwined with the economic
development and health of the city down to the lowest and broadest levels of
participation. Individuals, many of them land-owning and land-using residents of Los
Angeles, were affected daily by the manner and intensity of neighboring land uses,
and the creation or amendment of land use regulations. Whether a family could
maintain their backyard milk cow or flocks of egg-laying chickens, whether a
laundrywoman could operate her cottage business, whether a company could
continue operations on long-held land, whether an investor would continue plans to
relocate a branch operation to the city or abandon them in favor of another locality.
All of these economic events would be affected not only by neighbors exercising
similar choices and rights, but also by the proliferation and type of land use
limitations enacted. Individually and collectively, in increasing numbers from the last
decades of the nineteenth century as Los Angeles grew in area, population and
economic complexity, all of these interests voiced their concerns to the city council.
Through petitions they demanded redress against their neighbors. They expected
action by the city at a point when city governments nationwide were becoming more
active and responsive. These interests continued their demands to be heard, formally
through the petitioning process, through neighborhood, political or labor organizing,

289
through Progressive-era governmental reforms such as the voter initiative, and
finally, through the courts where the results of the rulings in their cases amplified
their voices far beyond their properties and perhaps their expectations.
Of course, not all residents or owners had the “desire” or the “ability” to be
heard, or had the power to be heard equally well from the beginning to the end of the
time period of this study, from 1880 through 1915. Power relationships altered as
Los Angeles grew. For example, when a charter amendment replaced the wards with
an at-large voting system after 1909, any strength the working-class and union voting
blocks in the Sixth and Seventh Wards possessed was diluted. Individual residential
complaints, especially by lower-class residents in working-class neighborhoods, had
less and less of an impact over time, as successive zoning codes were adopted. Their
voices (primarily in the form of initiative petitions) could be heard up through the
earliest decades of the twentieth century. Once a citywide zoning system based on
“scientific” surveys of existing uses was adopted, residential protests, especially in
older neighborhoods, declined. Homeowners in new developments moved into a
spatial environment that was already controlled for industry and undesirable uses.
Business owners most certainly had greater resources (financially and through
information networks). Perhaps this is why the precedent-setting court cases were
originated by industrial interests and not homeowners.
15

In this dissertation, I have examined the day-to-day administration of
government to address the nature of legal change in land use regulations in Los
Angeles in the decades just prior to the adoption of modern-day zoning. I have

290
studied how this change was evident in and impacted the daily lives of city residents
and business operators. This change took place in an “arena of debate and
disagreement,” as Tomlins described it, with multiple participants possessing varying
resources to influence the outcome. The court system was increasingly receptive to
accepting an overt role in shaping society (parallel to Willrich’s description of how
criminal courts operated in Chicago) by upholding broad municipal police powers to
determine land use within the city. This research adds considerable depth to the
general question of how regulation is created and how, in particular, land use
regulation was fashioned at the turn of the last century from the ground up. The
research also broadens our knowledge of an important aspect of the history of zoning
in the United States, extending our understanding geographically and temporally.
16

This story of land use regulation in Los Angeles is in many ways a familiar
one. Similar to local governments across the country, the city turned to remedies
such as fire districts, building codes and single-purpose districts to resolve conflicts
and minimize nuisance land uses. The contentious issues were similar to those of
other cities. For example, slaughterhouse locations and operations were everywhere
intensely regulated as nuisances per se. As homeownership rates increased across the
country, industrial and commercial property uses adjacent to or in residential
neighborhoods provoked protest. The ever-larger and more intensely land-using
factories were definitely not welcome. Hand laundries, funeral homes, stables,
hospitals and sanitaria, and various other service businesses dependent on proximity
to customers were not uniformly embraced. Like other cities, enlarged public transit

291
systems (and over the early decades of the twentieth century, increased access to
privates autos) allowed workers with sufficient resources greater choice to live
farther from factories and offices, in neighborhoods exclusively of homes. The
process of greater separation of urban land uses increased around the turn of the last
century through a common set of conditions and changed living patterns that
included greater regulation.
17

At the same time, there was a particularity of response to land use conflict in
Los Angeles that was unique to that city. This was in part due to its demographic
make-up. The influx of Chinese men after the 1870s, former gold-seekers and
railroad workers, coincided with an era of great labor upset and protectiveness up
and down the Pacific Coast. Racial antagonisms in Los Angeles were made manifest
in roughly three decades of campaigns to rid the city of its Chinese residents. When
this movement failed (in part, for Constitutional reasons), civic energies were
diverted to increasingly onerous restrictions on where and how the Chinese residents
could conduct their businesses—particularly hand laundries. This was the racialized
foundation of the first protected residential districts in the United States, adopted in
Los Angeles in 1904.
Also exceptional in this narrative of Los Angeles is the focus on industrial
location and development. While the process started out similarly to other US cities,
with pressure on the city council to protect homes from encroaching nuisance
businesses, the path diverged from the norm with the mounting appeals to protect
factories from home-owners’ complaints, received from an active business

292
community. Within a relatively short span of time, this emphasis grew into a
powerful collection of interests—a growth coalition—that sought protection for
factories from nuisance complaints by the creation of safe industrial districts around
them, where they could operate by right. By the beginning of the 1910s, this
industrial development focus was further enlarged to not only protect existing sites
but to encourage the location and expansion of future industrial development. Once
the city council had implemented industrial district regulations that the courts were
willing to accept, local business organizations inaugurated vigorous national
campaigns in an authentic if ad hoc public-private partnership of industrial expansion
policy.
18

The act of protesting against the siting of all sorts of land uses is no historical
artifact. Protectionist and oppositional NIMBY (not in my back yard) objections to
local development are now so commonplace that strategies to circumvent, blunt,
collaborate with or concede to “the local opposition” are an accepted part of any new
project proposal—whether for private development or public facility siting, or
human services provision. One government-based method still employed, according
to Michael Dear, is the strategy to change zoning regulations to allow new uses by
right—similar to the effect of the industrial districts herein described that protected
the factories located within them. More recent zoning innovations such as overlay
zones, as well as over-riding state policies, mediation and threats of litigation are
also employed. Federal and state civil rights-based legislation provide another
avenue.
19

293
Finally, the efforts of municipal governments to significantly separate
functional land uses, an accepted planning strategy during much of the twentieth
century and the basis of American zoning, are now doubted. By the early 1960s,
critics such as Jane Jacobs questioned urban renewal bulldozer policies and
promoted the finer-grained and denser mixing of land uses as necessary for
successful, safe and vibrant neighborhoods. Vertical mixed uses (for example, the
early 1960s Marina City and the 1976 Water Tower Place in Chicago) gained
acceptance in urban areas while horizontal mixed use has achieved some following
since the 1980s through the efforts of designers such as Peter Calthorpe, Andrés
Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. New mixed residential and commercial
developments like the Paseo Colorado in Pasadena have become more accepted and
more common.
20

Still, there are limits to the degree of propinquity that residents will accept.
The residential movement back into center cities across the US, such as has occurred
in Chicago, Philadelphia and more recently in Los Angeles, illustrates the amount of
spatial sharing currently possible. Unwelcome if long-time inhabitants of these
marginal neighborhoods—public housing residents, immigrants, people of color, and
the homeless—are again losing ground to wealthier investors and residents.
Industries are again the target of residential neighbors. For example, municipal
efforts to preserve the economically-beneficial small factory operations in the
Clybourn Corridor industrial belt of Chicago over the past two decades in the face of
gentrification has been less than successful, especially given the more recent

294
redevelopment of market-rate housing on the former Cabrini-Green public housing
site. Los Angeles is rapidly losing manufacturing space in the old industrial districts
near the Los Angeles River, so carefully and laboriously protected a century ago, as
regional, national and international forces interact and result in increasing pressures
to convert industrial to non-industrial uses. In 2004, the city’s Office of Economic
Development published a study outlining the current situation and strategies to retain
industrially-zoned land in Los Angeles.
21

Whether or not the initiative will be successful will play out over the next
decades. What is important to note is the similarity of the questions asked. What is
the appropriate balance of industrial and non-industrial land uses that will best
promote the interests and welfare of the city? What is the best way to negotiate
between individual property interests of owners and investors and the community
interests in a diverse local economy that includes a wide spectrum of land uses?
While immediate land use conflicts might only momentarily be solved through
changes in policies and regulations, the enduring discussion of appropriate balances
of individual and community rights, responsibilities and needs that occurs at local,
state, regional and national levels is a positive aspect of property, as Eric Freyfogle
has pointed out, and a reason for optimism about our democratic process.
22

295
Chapter 5 Endnotes

1
“Zone Ordinances—Recent Decisions on the Police Power” (1916) in National
Municipal Review 5 (2): 323- 324.

2
Novak 1996: 21. Of course, private market forces in the guise of real estate
developers were already separating land uses through the subdivision design and the
use of deed language that restricted non-residential uses within developments.

3
Among the many surveys of these left-behind neighborhoods that describe the
marginalized people and congested conditions are Kienle 1912; Matthews 1913; the
Community Survey by the California Commission on Housing and Immigration
1918; Sokoloff 1918; Kirchner 1920; Sterry 1922; Bond 1936; Wardell 1936 and
Gustafson 1940. Mark Wild (2005: 9-37) provides an excellent overview of these
neighborhoods from a longer historical perspective.

4
Figure 1 in Chapter 1 shows the extent and direction of city growth through the
present. From 1931 through 1993, there were 205 additional annexations and
consolidations (as well as a number of detachments and exclusions), which in total
added another twenty-seven square miles to city area, to the 469 square miles of
today (Ethington 2007: 689-695).
An important question that I have not addressed here concerns the enforcement and
effectiveness of these many regulations. I would argue that the enormous population
increase with its accompanied need for expanded commercial and industrial
operations both for goods and employment, made it difficult if not impossible for the
city council to keep statutes up-to-date and effective, especially when the ordinances
themselves were experimental in nature. Enforcement could have increased once
sufficient numbers of code enforcement officers, public health inspectors, the oil
inspectors, as well as any other designated personnel were trained to recognize
nuisances and hazards. If the records of the police courts (the courts of first contact)
exist, it would be useful to examine them to discover the level of enforcement of
land use and districting regulations during the time of this study. I have dealt only
with the enforcements that resulted in appeal to state and federal courts.
Even so, conditions are never static. And land use conflicts will not magically
disappear with new laws. Because the social relationships surrounding property
endure, conflicts will logically persist, too. Land use laws will not make them
disappear but will perhaps over time give a structure to mediating conflicts.

5
See Blackford (1993: 84-90) and Hise and Gish (2007: 340-343) for more detailed
accounts of Robinson’s work with the Municipal Art Commission in Los Angeles.
Scott (1969: 43-46) describes the nationwide municipal arts movement that began in
the late nineteenth century as both inspired and confirmed by the 1893 Columbian
Exposition in Chicago. Robinson himself wrote not long after the fair:

296

To say that the world's fair created the subsequent aesthetic effort in
municipal life were therefore false; to say that it immensely strengthened,
quickened, and encouraged it would be true. The fair gave tangible shape to a
desire that was arising out of the larger wealth, the commoner travel, and the
provision of the essentials of life; but the movement has had a special
impetus since 1893 (Robinson 1899).
The formation of Los Angeles’s Municipal Arts Commission followed the creation
of a municipal Parks Commission (1889) and a Playground Commission (1904); the
appearance of all three in Los Angeles indicate both the widespread interest in
nascent planning at a larger scale for the improvement of urban life and the emerging
more-complex and professionalized administrative structure of city government
espoused and promoted by organizations such as the National Municipal League and
the League American of Cities.

6
City Council Minutes in 1913 and 1917; “City Planning Exhibit” Los Angeles
Times 12 April 1914; “Excess Condemnation” Los Angeles Times 16 September
1914; “City Planners Give Banquet” Los Angeles Times 9 October 1914;
“Transportation Discussion” Los Angeles Times 7 January 1915; “To Hold Foot Rule
on City” Los Angeles Times 13 February 1915; “City Planners Programme” Los
Angeles Times 18 March 1915; “Anniversary Dinner” Los Angeles Times 5 May
1915.

7
Ordinance #39906 N.S. adopted 5 March 1920; Ordinance #42666 N.S. adopted 19
October 1921; Scott 1969: 149-150; Howell 1998: 10. The Chamber of Commerce
later took credit for “fathering” the planning commission, though the efforts of many
had contributed to its creation over some years (LACC Stenographer’s Notes 27
August 1921, LAACC, RHC).
Gordon Whitnall served as the consultant-secretary of the commission, the only
paid staff member until 1925. The 1921 zoning plan had no provisions for setback
requirements or height limitations. Despite the example of New York City’s 1916
regulation, height restrictions in Los Angeles were still covered separately by the
building code (adopted in 4 June 1906 and amended thereafter) that set one hundred
fifty feet as the maximum height citywide for Class “A” buildings (Ordinance
#12800 N.S, Section 16. Height limits for Class “B”, “C” and “D” buildings were
lower: one hundred, eighty-five and fifty feet, respectively). Also omitted were
setback requirements, addressed to this point only within private development deed
restrictions. This was remedied a few months later with Ordinance #42882 N.S.
adopted December 1921.
What the zoning ordinance did include was innovative. Unable to complete metes-
and-bounds descriptions quickly enough under the tight schedule to meet deadlines
(about two weeks for each of the proposed twenty-three districts—“Zoning Progress”
Los Angeles Times 9 January 1921), Whitnall and the commissioners created zone

297

mapping, the first zoning ordinance in the United States to include mapping (when
challenged in Miller v. Board of Public Works in 1925, the Federal Supreme Court
declined to review the state court’s acceptance of the constitutionality of mapping in
place of metes-and-bounds descriptions). Additional zones beyond the elementary
“residence” and “industrial” were created. Hierarchical in nature, they began with
Zone “A” at the top, where only single-family residential structures could be built. In
Zone “B”, multi-family structures, schools, and anything allowed in Zone “A” were
allowed. Zone “C” was for business use (commercial and retail), as well as any
residential use. Zones “D” and “E” were for light and heavy industry, plus any of the
“higher” uses (Howell 1998 10-11).

8
“‘Zoning’ Laws Are Denounced” Los Angeles Times 28 May 1920. The Wilshire
Improvement District was one example of organized opposition, created specifically
to take the city to court over the zoning ordinance. (“Industrial Districting Law Is
Called Illegal” Los Angeles Times 6 June 1920. “Zoning Protests Keep Mounting”
Los Angeles Times 6 August 1920). Dr. Arthur Tibbitts was charged in July once he
began construction of commercial buildings in the Wilshire residence district. (“File
Initial Zoning Suit” Los Angeles Times 8 July 1920).
By September, the zoning committee of the city planning commission had realized
that any “wholesale zoning of large areas” as residential or industrial was not
workable, that “supply centers” (e.g., groceries, drug stores and so forth) would
necessarily need to be located close to customers. (“Work Out Zoning Policy” Los
Angeles Times 26 September 1920).
Miller appealed his well-known case to the Second District Court of Appeal, where
Judge Finlayson declared zoning unconstitutional. City Attorney Stephens
successfully argued for a rehearing at the state supreme court, at which point the suit
was decided in favor of the city. Miller unsuccessfully appealed to the federal
Supreme Court. (“City Scores in Zoning Battle” Los Angeles Times 24 February
1924; Miller v. Board of Public Works 1925).

9
Ordinance #66750 N.S. adopted in 1930; Howell 1998: 11-12. For an overview of
zoning and the Los Angeles city planning department, see Howell (1998) and Hise
and Gish (2007).

10
Willrich 2003: 4-5, 119-120.

11
Tomlins 2004: viii. Eric Foner (2002: 4) wrote in a related vein that “events are
inevitable only after they happen.”

12
Tyler 1980. For other analyses of why and when people will obey laws, see Morris
(1972), Watson (1998) and Alexander and Sherwin (2001). For Progressive support

298

of land use interventions to better control development, see Fogelson (1967: 247-
249).

13
Horwitz 1977, 1992; Novak 1996; Alexander 1997.

14
Willrich 2003: 4-5. Willrich, in describing the local court system in Chicago,
explains that judges at this level were generally less experienced in finer points of
common-law and legal scholarship, and were often influenced by local political
concerns. Were Los Angeles judges any different? Further research in this area
would begin to answer that question, as well to what extent and to what effect.

15
See Rosen (1986: 325-337) for a discussion of the nature of political power (in
particular, not just who had power, such as realtors, civic elites, but also differences
between their overt power and power derived from relationships among people—
“external institutional arrangements and social values help determine the outcomes
of conflict over public and private goals” (327).
Was this true that working-class residential protests decreased? Newspaper
accounts from the period after this dissertation research, in the 1920s and 1930s,
describe zoning code hearings around the city but focus generally on protests by
commercial and retail interests. Evidence is obvious that these old working-class
residential neighborhoods have now disappeared, for example, from the industrial
districts along the river. Did residents continue to fight, or did they quietly give up
and move their families farther away from the smokestack next door? Research
would fill in knowledge on this aspect of early comprehensive zoning codes,
especially concerning the working-class residential neighborhoods that lost
protections.

16
Novak (1996: 8) too “emphasize[d] the actual day-to-day conduct of governance”
in his work on public welfare [emphasis in the original]; Willrich 2003: 4-5, 119-
120; Tomlins 2004: vii-x.

17
Skaggs 1986: 49, 109. Several examples of slaughterhouse regulation disputes that
ended up in court are Commonwealth vs. Upton (1856) in Massachusetts, Wreford v.
The People (1865) in Michigan, the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) in New Orleans,
Ex parte Heilbron (1884) in California, and Beiling v. City of Evansville (1896) in
Indiana. All regulations were upheld. Jackson (1985) and Fishman (1987) describe
how urban residents began to move out of city centers in the nineteenth century, in
part because steam railways, streetcars and other transit systems allowed easy access
to industrial city centers. William Novak (1996) details the proliferation of
regulation in nineteenth-century America.

18
Logan and Molotch 1987.

299

19
Dear 1992: 294-297. Dear posits that NIMBY conflicts, specifically over the siting
of human services facilities, have increased. Analysis of the land use conflicts
depicted in this dissertation through a framework NIMBY-type protest would add to
our knowledge of how (or if) community opposition to development has changed
over a longer period of time.

20
Duany and Plater-Zyberk 1991; Jacobs 1992; Calthorpe 1993; Grant 2002. The
open-air Paseo Colorado replaced a traditional enclosed regional mall, the Plaza
Pasadena, in 2001.

21
Los Angeles 2004.

22
Freyfogle 2007: 9-10.

300

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349

Appendix I

Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting Ordinances, 1904-1921

(includes only representative examples of the numerous single-purpose districts)

Ordinance
number
(all N.S.)
Date
adopted
or approved
Type of district
Description
9080 1/11/1904 -— Regulates Chinese laundries
9695 1/5/1904 -— Regulates undertakers
9752 7/25/1904 -— Amends #9695 undertakers
9774 7/29/1904 Residence
Created 3 districts in 3 wards, restricted Chinese
laundries, replaces Ord #9080 to regulate laundries
10903 4/3/1905 -— Regulates laundries
11017 5/8/1905 -—
Building code (invalidated by Superior Court, March
1908)
11599 7/21/1905 -— Amends #6101 to regulate livery stables
12675 3/12/1906 Residence Amends #9774 boundaries
12838 6/11/1906 Residence Amends #9774 boundaries
13077 ??? -— Regulates brickyards
14828 5/20/1907 -— Regulates slaughterhouses
14974 6/24/1907 Industrial Creates Industrial District #5 in FIRE DISTRICTS
15515 10/7/1907 -— Regulates slaughterhouses outside city limits
16107 2/11/1908 Residence
Creating 4 districts where keeping more than 4
horses was prohibited (possibly replaced #9774, no
specific mention of laundries)
16170 2/25/1908 Industrial
Created 6 districts, office of fire marshal, and
regulated storage of certain materials
16557 5/18/1908 Industrial Amends #16170 boundaries of district #1
16646 6/3/1908 Residence
Created a district where hospitals and asylums
were prohibited (near Westlake Park)
16719 6/15/1908 Industrial
Amends #16170 storage of certain materials within
a portion of district #1
16884 7/20/1908 Residence Amends #16646 boundaries
16948 8/5/1908 Residence
Replaces #16107 creating 6 districts (district #6
duplicated a portion of #1), 4 horse maximum,
prohibiting many industries
17058 8/26/1908 Residence
Replaces #16948 creating 5 districts, prohibiting
many industries

350

Appendix I (continued)

Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting Ordinances, 1904-1921

Ordinance
number
(all N.S.)
Date
adopted
or approved
Type of district
Description
17135 9/16/1908 Industrial
Replaces #16170 creating 6 districts (eliminating
overlapping boundaries)
17136 9/16/1908 Residence
Replaces #17058 creating 3 districts (changes
boundaries to district #1. combines #2, #3, #4 into
contiguous new #2, renames #5 as new #3),
prohibiting many industries
17224 10/8/1908 Industrial Amends #17135 boundaries of district #6
17225 10/8/1908 Residence Amends #17136 boundaries of districts #1 and #2
17286 10/19/1908 Residence Amends #17136 boundaries of district #2
17542 12/21/1908 Residence Amends #17136 boundaries of districts #2 and #3
17799 3/4/1909 Industrial Amends #17135 boundaries of district #6
17800 3/4/1909 Residence Amends #17136 boundaries of district #1
18102 5/4/1909 Residence Amends #17136 boundaries of district #1
18150 5/25/1909 Residence Amends #17136 section 2
18151 5/25/1909 Residence
Amends #17136 boundaries of district #1, adds a
new district #5
18152 5/25/1909 Industrial
Amends #17135 to exclude portion of district #6
(added to residence #1)
18289 6/15/1909 Industrial
Amends #17135 sec 46 to create small district
outside #6 where carbide can be stored
18290 6/15/1909 Residence Amends #17136 to amend district #5
— 7/19/1909
Dromgold proposal to designate the residential district as any portion
of entire city not included in a specified industrial district
18462 7/20/1909 Residence Amends #17136
18463 7/19/1909 Industrial
Amends #17135 to make it unlawful to discharge
fireworks within city
18518 7/27/1909 Residence Prohibits blacksmiths and allows 2 hp motors
18526 8/3/1909 Residence
Amends #17136, section 1 establishing all of Los
Angeles as a residence district except portions
included in designated industrial districts
18564 8/5/1909 Residence
Amends #18526 to except territory from residence
district

351

Appendix I (continued)

Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting Ordinances, 1904-1921

Ordinance
number
(all N.S.)
Date
adopted
or approved
Type of district
Description
18565 8/5/1909 Residence
18566 8/5/1909 Residence
18660 8/18/1909 Residence
18661 8/17/1909 Residence
18737 8/30/1909 Residence
18750 8/30/1909 Residence
18751 8/30/1909 Residence
18789 9/7/1909 Residence
18852 9/20/1909 Residence
18853 9/20/1909 Residence
18861 9/20/1909 Residence
18942 10/5/1909 Residence
19034 10/20/1909 Residence
19035 10/20/1909 Residence
19046 10/28/1909 Residence
19111 11/1/1909 Residence
19113 11/1/1909 Residence
19127 11/5/1909 Residence
19133 11/5/1909 Residence
19213 11/11/1909 Residence
19322 11/30/1909 Residence
Amends #18526 to except territory from residence
district
19443 12/16/1909 —
Repeals more than 150 ordinances and resolutions
from 1879-1909, many of these are single-purpose
districting ordinances as well as other ordinances
related to land uses, made superfluous by ID
#19500 and RD #19563
19483 12/24/1909 Residence
19484 12/24/1909 Residence
19485 12/24/1909 Residence
Amends #18526 to except territory from residence
district
19500 12/30/1909 Industrial Replaces #17135 creating 7 districts

352

Appendix I (continued)

Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting Ordinances, 1904-1921

Ordinance
number
(all N.S.)
Date
adopted
or approved
Type of district
Description
19538 1/5/1910 Residence
Amends #18526 to except territory from residence
district
19563 1/10/1910 Residence
Replaces #17136, makes all city residential unless
included in ID or excepted from RD
19742 2/23/1910 Residence
19746 2/26/1910 Residence
19819 3/10/1910 Residence
19820 3/10/1910 Residence
19821 3/10/1910 Residence
Amends #19563 to except territory from residence
district
20161 5/3/1910 Residence Amends #19563 section 1 regarding fire districts
20412 6/11/1910 Residence
Amends #19563 to except territory from the
residence district
20450 6/14/1910 Residence
Amends #19563 to add annexed territory to the
residence district
20567 7/9/1910 Residence
20634 7/26/1910 Residence
20635 7/26/1910 Residence
20636 7/26/1910 Residence
20638 7/26/1910 Residence
20842 8/30/1910 Residence
20849 9/1/1910 Residence
Amends #19563 to except territory from residence
district
20909 9/13/1910 Residence Repeals #20849
20913 9/21/1910 Residence
21317 11/25/1910 Residence
21465 12/15/1910 Residence
Amends #19563 to except territory from residence
district
-— Mar 1911
Civic committee report to city council on 3 recommended classes of
industrial districts, based on type or classification of industry, created
corridors along certain streets
21996 3/7/1911 Residence
Amends #19563 to change Section 2 in re public
laundries, and to remove territory from district and
add to industrial district [?]

353

Appendix I (continued)

Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting Ordinances, 1904-1921

Ordinance
number
(all N.S.)
Date
adopted
or approved
Type of district
Description
22200 4/1/1911 Residence
Amends #19563 to remove territory from district
and add to industrial district
22214 4/4/1911 Residence
22215 4/4/1911 Residence
22738 6/8/1911 Residence
Amends #22798 to except from residence district
(correct #17838?)
22796 6/7/1911 Industrial Amends #19500
22798 6/7/1911 Residence Creates districts
22849 6/20/1911 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
22946 7/5/1911 Residence Amends #22849 (wrong lot numbers)
23172 8/4/1911 Residence
23310 9/5/1911 Residence
23401 9/14/1911 Residence
23402 9/14/1911 Residence
23549 10/13/1911 Residence
23550 10/17/1911 Residence
23551 10/17/1911 Residence
23703 11/15/1911 Residence
24111 1/11/1912 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
24241 2/7/1912 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #10
24633 3/25/1912 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #11
24873 4/18/1912 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #12
25082 5/16/1912 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
25083 5/16/1912 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #13
25306 6/25/1912 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #14
25988 10/1/1912 Residence
25989 10/1/1912 Residence
25990 10/1/1912 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district

354

Appendix I (continued)

Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting Ordinances, 1904-1921

Ordinance
number
(all N.S.)
Date
adopted
or approved
Type of district
Description
25991 10/1/1912 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
25993 10/1/1912 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #15, #16, #17 and #18
26095 10/16/1912 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #20
26096 10/26/1912 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
26362 11/21/1912 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #21
26551 12/18/1912 Residence
26634 1/6/1913 Residence
26635 1/6/1913 Residence
26715 1/16/1913 Residence
26716 1/16/1913 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
26724 1/13/1913 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #9
26774 1/21/1913 Residence
26777 1/21/1913 Residence
26824 1/29/1913 Residence
26825 1/29/1913 Residence
26869 2/5/1913 Residence
26870 2/5/1913 Residence
26974 2/19/1913 Residence
26982 2/28/1913 Residence
26983 2/28/1913 Residence
27315 4/9/1913 Residence
27367 4/15/1913 Residence
27414 4/22/1913 Residence
27512 5/6/1913 Residence
27515 5/6/1913 Residence
27556 5/14/1913 Residence
27661 5/29/1913 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district

355

Appendix I (continued)

Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting Ordinances, 1904-1921

Ordinance
number
(all N.S.)
Date
adopted
or approved
Type of district
Description
27662 5/29/1913 Residence
27743 6/6/1913 Residence
27744 6/10/1913 Residence
27445 6/10/1913 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
27786 6/18/1913 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #24
27869 7/2/1913 Industrial
Amends #19500 + #25993 to change boundaries of
ID #15, #16, #17 or #18
27957 7/17/1913 Industrial Repeals ID #22
28005 7/25/1913 Industrial
Amends #19500 + #24241 to change boundaries of
ID #10
28059 8/4/1913 Residence
28324 9/15/1913 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
28325 9/15/1913 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #25
28419 10/9/1913 Residence
29019 1/16/1914 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
29966 5/15/1914 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #23
31537 1/2/1915 Residence
31677 1/28/1915 Residence
31787 2/11/1915 Residence
32037 3/26/1915 Residence
32086 4/23/1915 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
32348 5/20/1915 Residence
32597 6/30/1915 Residence
32980 9/8/1915 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
33089 9/29/1915 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #26
33343 11/18/1915 Residence
33344 11/18/1915 Residence
33761 2/16/1916 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
33827 3/3/1916 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #27

356

Appendix I (continued)

Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting Ordinances, 1904-1921

Ordinance
number
(all N.S.)
Date
adopted
or approved
Type of district
Description
33872 3/13/1916 Residence
33921 3/22/1916 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
34661 8/25/1915 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #28
34760 9/15/1916 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
34782 9/21/1916 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #29
35009 11/8/1916 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
35361 12/31/1916 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #30
35476 12/29/1916 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #31
35999 2/23/1917 Industrial
Amends #19500 to add ID #32, #33, #34, #35, #36,
#37, #38, #39 and #40
36481 5/19/1917 Residence
37152 7/14/1917 Residence
37153 7/14/1917 Residence
37154 7/14/1917 Residence
37359 8/29/1917 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
37411 9/13/1917 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #41
37592 10/26/1917 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #42
37600 10/29/1917 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #43
37665 11/19/1917 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
37684 11/22/1917 Industrial Amends #19500 and #37592
37710 11/28/1917 Residence
37772 12/20/1917 Residence
37822 1/10/1918 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
38114 4/22/1918 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #44
38125 4/22/1918 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #45
38179 5/16/1918 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district

357

Appendix I (continued)

Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting Ordinances, 1904-1921

Ordinance
number
(all N.S.)
Date
adopted
or approved
Type of district
Description
38294 6/15/1918 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #46
38553 11/4/1918 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #47
38699 2/4/1919 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #48
38879 4/24/1919 Residence
39012 5/27/1919 Residence
39042 5/29/1919 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
39073 6/12/1919 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #49
39259 8/13/1919 Residence
39260 8/13/1919 Residence
39353 9/13/1919 Residence
39408 9/30/1919 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
39428 10/9/1919 Industrial Repeals ID#19
39431 10/18/1919 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
39473 10/27/1919 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #50
39480 10/27/1919 Residence
39519 11/6/1919 Residence
39619 12/12/1919 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
39685 1/6/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #51
39737 1/19/1920 Residence
39738 1/19/1920 Residence
39781 2/3/1920 Residence
39798 2/6/1920 Residence
Amends #22798 to except territory from residence
district
39827 2/16/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #52
39979 3/23/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #53
39980 3/23/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #54
40072 4/5/1920 Residence
Replaces #22798—Created 15 residence districts
(single-family and multi-family grouped together
here)
40120 4/13/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #56

358

Appendix I (continued)

Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting Ordinances, 1904-1921

Ordinance
number
(all N.S.)
Date
adopted
or approved
Type of district
Description
40121 4/13/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #55
40153 4/19/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #57
40278 5/10/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #58
40368 5/27/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to change boundaries of ID #6
40514 6/30/1920 Residence
Amends #40072 to except territory from residence
district
40537 7/6/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #59
40604 7/26/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #60
40724 8/21/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #61
40756 9/2/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #63
40961 10/21/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #64
41040 11/16/1920 Residence
Amends #40072 to except territory from residence
district
41047 11/16/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #65
41096 12/1/1920 Industrial Amends #19500 to change boundaries of ID #3
41272 1/14/1921 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #67
41286 1/24/1921 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #66
41326 1/24/1921 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #62
41350 2/1/1921 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #68
41375 8/8/1921 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #69
41626 3/20/1921 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #75
41633 4/1/1921 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #71
41639 4/1/1921 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #73
41785 4/23/1921 Residence
Amends #40072 to except territory from residence
district
41846 5/7/1921 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #75
41847 5/7/1921 Residence
Amends #40072 to except territory from residence
district
41875 5/17/1921 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #70

359

Appendix I (continued)

Selected Los Angeles Residential and Industrial Districting Ordinances, 1904-1921

Ordinance
number
(all N.S.)
Date
adopted
or approved
Type of district
Description
41909 5/26/1921 Residence
41982 5/27/1921 Residence
Amends #40072 to except territory from residence
district
41983 5/27/1921 Residence Added RD #16
41984 5/27/1921 Industrial Amends #19500 to add ID #74
42000 7/1/1921 Residence Amended boundaries of RD #5
42666 10/19/1921
Residence
and Industrial
combined
Replaces #40072, #19500 and all excepting &
amending districting ordinances - FIRST
COMPREHENSIVE ZONING ORDINANCE

360

Appendix II

Important US Supreme Court Decisions Impacting Land Use 1873 - 2006
and Selected Significant State Court Cases

NAME DATE CASE NOTES
Slaughterhouse cases 1873 83 U.S. 36 In a dissenting opinion, Judge Noah H. Swayne
wrote, “Property is everything which has exchange
value” (at page 127). Court for first time also dealt
with broader scope of rights protected by 14
th

Amendment (Maltz 2003: 85-112)
Munn v. Illinois 1877 94 U.S. 113 Rights in property cannot be taken away without
due process, but there is no vested interest in any
particular rights; statutes correctly serve to remedy
defects in common law and to adapt rights as times
and circumstances change.

Judge Field’s dissent: “There is, indeed, no
protection of any value under the constitutional
provision which does not extend to the use and the
income of the property, as well as to its title and
possession” (at page 143).
Mugler v. Kansas 1887 123 U.S. 623 Mugler claimed that prohibiting him from selling
alcohol was a taking as it deprived him of his
livelihood. Majority ruling: “A regulation, if
reasonably related to a valid public purpose, could
never constitute a taking.”
First Minnesota Rate
Case (Chicago
Minnesota & St Paul
Railway v.
Minnesota)
1890 134 U.S. 418 Court changed definition of property “from physical
things having only use-value to the exchange-value
of anything.” (Horwitz 1992:146)
Welch v. Swasey 1909 214 U.S. 91

Found that the creation of districts of different
maximum heights was a constitutional use of
municipal police power.
Hadacheck v.
Sebastian, Chief of
Police of the City of
Los Angeles
1915 239 U.S. 394 Upheld police powers of municipality to create use
districts that prohibited the operation of certain
industries in designated residence districts.
Lincoln Trust Co. v.
Williams Bldg Corp.
1920 128 N.E. 209 NEW YORK—Challenged the New York City
comprehensive zoning ordinance (1916), upheld.
Pennsylvania Coal
Co. v. Mahon
1922 260 U.S. 393 Anti-subsidence law found invalid. Homeowners
lost, mining company won right to continue mining
beneath the houses. “The general rule at least is that
while property might be regulated to a certain
extent, if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a
taking.” Beginning of regulatory takings
jurisprudence.

361

Appendix II (continued)

Important US Supreme Court Decisions Impacting Land Use 1873 - 2006

NAME DATE CASE NOTES
Miller v. Board of
Public Works
1925 234 P. 381 CALIF—State Supreme Court decision, cited in
Euclid. Four-flat apt bldg permit in a residence
district in Los Angeles was denied. Upheld city
zoning ordinance with mapping component.
Village of Euclid,
Ohio v. Ambler
Realty Co,
1926 272 U.S. 365 This ordinance “must find [its] justification in some
aspect of the police power, asserted for the public
welfare. The line which in this field separates the
legitimate from the illegitimate assumption of power
is not capable of precise delimitation. It varies with
circumstances and condition.” Pig in a parlor—not
a nuisance per se, but in the wrong place. Found
zoning to be prima facie constitutional
Nectow v.
Cambridge
1928 277 U.S. 183 Massachusetts zoning ordinance struck down as it
applied to a particular owner whose property was
zoned residential even though surrounded by
business and industrial uses. Justice Sutherland:
general welfare of community not served by
restriction; as applied to Nectow, denied use of
property without due process of law under 14
th

amendment
State v. Dexter 1949 32 Wash.2d
551
WASHINGTON—Majority upheld state right to
limit logging on private land. Important for minority
dissent from Justice Simpson: owner’s individual
property rights are without limit.
Village of Belle Terre
v. Boraas
1974 416 U.S. 1 Upheld a municipal ordinance that limited to two
the number of unrelated persons who could occupy
a dwelling designated as “single family”.
Except for the Belle Terre case, the Supreme Court did not directly address land use regulation and takings issues for 50
years after Euclid, until the Penn Central case below. During those 50 years, land use decisions remained primarily at the
state level (Kayden 1995: 295).
Penn Central
Transportation Co.
v. NYC
1978 438 U.S. 104 NYC Landmarks Preservation Law (LPL): Sought
relief + damages for the “temporary taking”. On
appeal, Appellate Division of Supreme Court said
LPL application was a legitimate public purpose.
Penn Central showed only that they were deprived
of property’s most profitable use, not that they were
unconstitutionally deprived of property. No taking
because no transfer of control of property to the
city, only restriction on the exploitation of it. 1)
Same use as last 50 years, 2) still reasonable return,
3) significant values of Penn Central’s nearby
properties a result of station operations, 4) dev.
rights provided significant compensation for any
possible losses.

362

Appendix II (continued)

Important US Supreme Court Decisions Impacting Land Use 1873 - 2006

NAME DATE CASE NOTES
Penn Central
Transportation Co.
v. NYC (continued)
Justice Brennan: Unequal burdens that promote
general welfare are not uncommon and have been
accepted in past—See Hadacheck, Miller, Euclid.
Unlike Hadacheck [and others], LPL does not
interfere with present use of property. Landmarks
Commission has not prohibited any use of air space,
just not the plans submitted so far. Can also make
use of the TDR. Rehnquist (and Burger and
Stevens) would have found that a taking, applying
the test of the majority opinion. Court did not find a
“partial taking” but recognized the existence of
same. “Penn Central Test” formula has played large
role in regulatory takings cases.
After Penn Central, Court “sidestepped the issue of what constitutes ‘too far’ despite several opportunities to rule on the
question.” See Agins v. City of Tiburon [447 US 255] in 1980, Williamson Regional Planning Commission v.
Hamilton Bank [473 US 172] in 1985, McDonald, Sommer & Frates v. Yolo County [477 US 340] in 1986.
“Mount Laurel II”—
South Burlington
County NAACP v.
Township of Mount
Laurel (bundled with
five other cases)
1983 92 N.J. 158 NEW JERSEY—Appeal in high court of original
1975 ruling (“Mount Laurel I”— 67 N.J. 151)
challenging zoning ordinance because they resulted
in excluding low and moderate income persons from
obtaining housing in the township. Established fair
share formula to measure each municipality's
obligation to provide affordable housing, and
"builder's remedy" to force municipalities to fulfill
that obligation. Fair Housing Act passed by NJ
legislature in 1985.
Nollan v. California
Coastal Commission
1987 483 U.S. 825 Scalia delivered Court’s opinion , reversed lower
court judgment: we have long recognized that “land-
use regulation does not effect a taking if it
‘substantially advance[s] legitimate state interests.’”
[Agins v. Tiburon 447 US at 260]. “...the right to
exclude [others is] ‘one of the most essential sticks
in the bundle of rights that are commonly
characterized as property.’” From Loretto v.
Teleprompter Manhattan CATV Corp. [458 US 419 at
433 in 1982 quoting Kaiser Aetna v. US, 444 US 164
at 176 in 1979] [Note 4 at 176] “One of the principal
purposes of the Takings Clause ‘is to bar
Government from forcing some people alone to
bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice,
should be borne by the public as a whole.’”

363

Appendix II (continued)

Important US Supreme Court Decisions Impacting Land Use 1873 - 2006

NAME DATE CASE NOTES
Nollan v. California
Coastal Commission
(continued)
Brennan (with Marshall) dissented: “reciprocity of
advantage” where appellants intensified
development along the coast, increased value of
property, and there was insignificant diminution of
value because of the public right of way given up
[179].
First English
Evangelical
Lutheran Church v.
County of Los
Angeles
1987 482 U.S. 304 Compensation issue: Established that rescission of
regulation is not necessarily enough and that
compensation could be required. Remanded: First
English Evangelical Church of Glendale v. County of Los
Angeles 210 Cal. App. 3d 1353 (1989) concluded
there had not been a taking. Supreme Court declined
to hear appeal (493 US 1056 in 1990).
Keystone
Bituminous Coal
Assn v.
DeBenedictis
1987 480 U.S.
1987
Anti-subsidence law similar to Pennsylvania Coal,
Court rejected argument that coal had to be left in
place in a specific mine to prevent subsidence. The
unit of property measurement was more
appropriately the entire mining operation.
Lucas v. South
Carolina Coastal
Council
1992 505 U.S.
1003
Lucas purchased two residential lots in 1986,
intending to construct homes. In 1988, legislature
enacted Beachfront Management Act that barred
any permanent habitable structures. State trial court
found this made petitioner’s property “valueless”
and ordered SCCC to pay $1.2 million compensation
for lost value. Lucas did not dispute validity of Act
as a lawful exercise of the police power, but
contended that he was entitled to compensation
regardless of these legitimate police power
objectives. SC Supreme Court: because petitioner
did not dispute law itself, that meant he conceded to
validity of law and what it required.

“When a regulation respecting the use of property is
designed ‘to prevent serious public harm,’ no
compensation is owing under the Takings Clause
regardless of the regulation’s effect on the property
value.” But SC needed to identify background
principles of nuisance and property law to prohibit
the uses that Lucas intended. Only then can state
claim that the Act takes nothing. Since they did not
do this, the state court’s decision is reversed.
Blackmun and Stevens dissented. Souter would have
dismissed the writ of certiorari “as having been
improvidently granted.”

364

Appendix II (continued)

Important US Supreme Court Decisions Impacting Land Use 1873 - 2006

NAME DATE CASE NOTES
Lucas v. South
Carolina Coastal
Council (continued)
On remand, state court found that Lucas use did not
constitute a nuisance under common law and
ordered compensation. Categorical taking: if there is
no economically beneficial use left, there is a taking
requiring compensation. This is the test. Two
exceptions available: (1) nuisance, (2) background
principles of state property law (several cases have
attempted to define these exceptions).
Dolan v. City of
Tigard
1994 512 U.S. 374 Response to Oregon state requirement to create
comprehensive land use plan where CBD property
subject to 15% open space rule. Tigard adopted
drainage plan along Fanno Creek that limited
development. Rehnquist: States have been dealing
with these questions much longer than the high
court—with varying interpretations of connection
between required dedication for proposed
development. Tests mentioned: “reasonable
relationship”, “rational basis”, and what court
thought best: “rough proportionality”

Reversed OR Supreme Court ruling, remanded for
further rulings consistent with high court. Justice
Stevens dissented, likening conditional demands to a
“species of business regulation”
Palazzolo v. Rhode
Island
2001 533 U.S. 606 Resource management council designated salt
marshes such as those on the property as protected
coastal wetlands and denied the landowner's
application to fill the property. The landowner filed
a takings action, which was rejected in state court.
The Supreme Court affirmed in part and reversed in
part. The state court erred in finding that the claims
were unripe, because the landowner obtained a final
decision from the council determining the permitted
use for the land. The state court also erred in ruling
that acquisition of title after the effective date of the
regulations (owner had been part of corporation and
subsequently became sole owner) barred the claims.
However, the state court did not err in finding that
the landowner failed to establish a deprivation of all
economic value, because it was undisputed that the
upland portion of the parcel retained significant
worth for construction of a residence. The case was
remanded so the claims could be examined under
the PENN CENTRAL analysis.

365

Appendix II (continued)

Important US Supreme Court Decisions Impacting Land Use 1873 - 2006

NAME DATE CASE NOTES
Tahoe-Sierra
Preservation
Council, Inc. v.
Tahoe Regional
Planning Agency
2002 535 U.S. 302 Another compensation question: if regulation
eliminates 100% of economic value, LUCAS
application requires compensation, if anything less,
then PENN CENTRAL analysis is used. But what
to do when regulation prohibits economic use for 32
months? Can you sever that 32-month portion of
fee simple ownership – and then discover whether it
has been taken in entirety? – “Conceptual
severance” would mean that even normal permit
process could lead to taking ruling. “Land use
regulations are ubiquitous and most of them impact
property values in some tangential way – often in
completely unanticipated ways. Treating them all as
per se takings would transform government
regulation into a luxury few governments could
afford.” [see effects of Measure 7 in Oregon]
Court of Appeals ruling was affirmed (for regional
agency and against the land owners). Rehnquist
(with Scalia and Thomas) dissented: interpreted the
ban on development as having lasted 6 years, not 32
months. Don’t agree with the “temporary” usage.
Thomas (with Scalia) dissented over conclusion that
only permanent deprivation of ownership warranted
a taking.
Kelo v. City of New
London
2005 545 U.S. 469 The city approved a development plan that called
for land acquisition and construction of a waterfront
hotel, restaurants, retail stores, residences, and office
space; also, portions of the development area were
to be used for marinas and for support services.
Nine owners refused to sell.

Court found that the development plan served a
public purpose and therefore constituted a public
use under the Takings Clause of the Fifth
Amendment. The plan was not adopted to benefit a
particular class of identifiable individuals. Although
the owners' properties were not blighted, the city's
determination that a program of economic
rejuvenation was justified. There was no basis for
exempting economic development from the broad
definition of "public purpose." The Court declined
to require a reasonable certainty that the expected
public benefits would accrue, nor was it proper to
second-guess the city's determination of the
boundary of the development area.

366

Appendix II (continued)

Important US Supreme Court Decisions Impacting Land Use 1873 - 2006

NAME DATE CASE NOTES
Kelo v. City of New
London (continued)
In 5-4 decision, found that taking private property
for economic development satisfies “public use”
requirement of 5
th
Amendment. While this case
involved eminent domain, not land use regulation,
the two have become conflated in public opinion.
The judgment of the Connecticut Supreme Court
was affirmed.

Eminent domain reform considered in almost all
states, ranging from broad, constitutional
prohibitions to procedural changes in use. Increased
pressure to limit other land use planning efforts,
including zoning, through state initiatives that bypass
legislature. For West Coast examples, look at
Oregon, Arizona, California.
Rapanos v. United
States
2006 547 U.S. 715 Rapanos charged with destroying wetlands in
violation of Clean Water Act in effort to build
Michigan shopping center.

Split 5-4 decision, with confusing guidance on
definition of “navigable waters”— remanded for
further proceedings to determine whether the
ditches or drains near each wetland were "waters" in
the ordinary sense of containing a relatively
permanent flow and whether the wetlands in
question had a continuous surface connection to
bodies that were "waters of the United States" in
their own right.

One set of petitioners recd civil and criminal
penalties because they had deposited fill material
without a permit into three wetlands. It was not clear
whether these wetlands were connected to the drains
and ditches, were continuous or intermittent, or
whether the drains and ditches contained continuous
or occasional flows of water. The second set of
petitioners was denied a permit to deposit fill
material in a wetland where a man-made drainage
ditch ran along one side, separated from the wetland
by a largely or entirely impermeable berm that may
have permitted occasional overflow to the ditch.
channels, or channels that periodically provided
drainage for rainfall.

367

Appendix II (continued)

Important US Supreme Court Decisions Impacting Land Use 1873 - 2006

NAME DATE CASE NOTES
Rapanos v. United
States (continued)
2006 547 U.S. 715 The Court held that the CWA phrase "the waters of
the United States" included only relatively
permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies
of water "forming geographic features" described in
ordinary parlance as streams, oceans, rivers, and
lakes. The phrase did not include intermittent or
ephemeral.

The opposing view led by the Pacific Legal
Foundation, asked the Court to limit the Army
Corps of Eng. jurisdiction to large lakes and rivers
that are actually navigable, and the wetlands adjacent
to those waters. This viewpoint would have removed
many important wetlands from protection of the
Clean Water Act. Not a single Justice supported this
extreme position.”
[www.planning.org/amicusbriefs/rapanos.htm—last
accessed 27 January 2008]

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kolnick, Kathy A. (author)

Core Title Order before zoning: land use regulation in Los Angeles, 1880-1915

School School of Policy, Planning, and Development

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Planning

Publication Date 04/17/2008

Defense Date 03/10/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag community and individual rights,Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,planning history,police power,Public welfare,zoning

Place Name Los Angeles County (city or populated place)

Language English

Advisor Hise, Greg (committee chair), Sloane, David C. (committee member), Wolch, Jennifer (committee member)

Creator Email kolnick@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1142

Unique identifier UC166479

Identifier etd-Kolnick-20080417 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-61051 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1142 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Kolnick-20080417.pdf

Dmrecord 61051

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Kolnick, Kathy A.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu