Concrete utopia: the development of roads and freeways in Los Angeles, 1910-1950

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CONCRETE UTOPIA: THE DEVELOPMENT OF ROADS AND FREEWAYS IN

LOS ANGELES, 1910-1950

by

Matthew William Roth

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
(HISTORY)

May 2007

Copyright 2007 Matthew William Roth

Table of Contents

List of Figures iii

Abstract iv

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 34

Chapter 2 93

Chapter 3 129

Chapter 4 178

Chapter 5 245

Chapter 6 301

Conclusion 380

Bibliography 384

iii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, 1950 2

Figure 2: Major Roads in Los Angeles, 1914 64

Figure 3: Wilshire Boulevard, 1930 113

Figure 4: The Los Angeles River Corridor, 1930 203

Figure 5: Tenth Street/Olympic Boulevard, 1930 210

Figure 6: Map showing the route of the parade marking the opening of 228
Mulholland Highway, 1924

Figure 7: The coast of Los Angeles County, c.1920 265

Figure 8: East Los Angeles and surrounding area, 1935 287

iv
ABSTRACT

This study examines the production of the public places of automotive
transportation in Los Angeles. It consists primarily of a series of detailed case studies of
the roads and freeways that helped to establish the patterns of infrastructure and
settlement in the city and region of Los Angeles, including Wilshire Boulevard, Olympic
Boulevard, Mulholland Highway, the Los Angeles River bridges, Whittier Boulevard, the
Pacific Coast Highway, and the Ramona, Arroyo Seco and Hollywood parkways.
Interrogating the physical reality of the automotive infrastructure provides the critical
perspective for this work. By relentlessly focusing on the sites and structures of
transportation, this study fills in the material history of those places that lurk behind the
grandiose narratives of politics and culture in 20th-century Los Angeles, and ultimately
revises our understanding of politics and culture as they intersect with urban place
production.

1
INTRODUCTION

Los Angeles made the cover of Newsweek in May, 1956.
1
For once, the story did
not paint Los Angeles in the reflected glory of its most visible industry -- the movies --
and the cover image did not feature any of the reliable icons. No Hollywood sign. No
Graumanns Theater. No spotlights crossing in the sky over a palm-fringed horizon.
Instead, the cover and the story inside focused on the shape of the city. The image that
represented Los Angeles was the Four-Level interchange, where two freeways met, just
outside of downtown. How did that piece of freeway come to stand for Los Angeles?
The most direct reason was that the California Division of Highways selected the
Four-Level as the centerpiece of an extensive campaign to promote freeways in the late
1940s and early 1950s. The agencys publicity department flooded the print media with
images of its swooping symmetrical ramps. State highway engineers trotted out a scale
model of the Four-Level when they attended the public meetings and local-government
hearings that occurred with increasing frequency during those formative years of the Los
Angeles freeway network. The stark mathematical purity of the interchange appealed to
the engineers idea of beauty in order and structure, and the photographs and the model
presented the Four-Level as the only feature of an abstracted landscape. Its selection as
the logo of the freeway program was also based on the circumstances of its creation. The
Four-Level was the first major piece of the Los Angeles freeways designed solely by the
state engineers, without any participation by the city engineering department that had

2

Figure 1: Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, 1950. The first three freeways (Ramona, Arroyo Seco and Hollywood) have begun to take
shape. Much of the Hollywood Freeway is shown as a dotted line because it was under construction. The portion of the Arroyo Seco
near the Four-level Interchange, intersecting the Hollywood Freeway, is also dotted, as is the eastern portion of the Ramona Freeway.
Source: Map of Metropolitan Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Automobile Club of Southern California, 1950). Used with permission; all
rights reserved.

3
originally adopted freeways as the primary approach to transportation in Los Angeles.
That design process took place in 1943 and 1944, when public and media attention was
riveted on the war effort, and when construction was impossible anyway because the
nations steel output was dedicated to military production and all available labor was
turned to the same purpose. After the war, the state highway engineers allocated newly
available highway funding to complete the Four-Level in record time, basking in a brief
glow of approval for ambitious infrastructure development aimed at resolving the
physical problems bestowed on Los Angeles during the rapid growth of the war years.
Finished in 1949, the Four-Level ran far ahead of the rest of the freeway program. It
stood in splendid isolation for four years, until the freeways it was intended to join could
be completed. The opposition that delayed those connections had no part in the
representations of the Four-level. The image of the modern city did not include the
protests, the editorials, the city council and state legislative hearings, and the lawsuits that
threatened to still freeway construction before the program could unfold. The Four-Level
became the symbol of Los Angeles because of what it omitted as much as for what it
depicted.
The state engineers and their press agents had other interchanges from which to
choose. Besides lacking the photogenic qualities of the Four-Level, they were also
marked by ferocious conflict. At the southern gateway of the San Fernando Valley,
where the Hollywood Freeway crossed under Barham Drive, a series of concrete ramps
connected the limited-access freeway with the "surface" streets of Universal City. In the
early 1950s, however, that location was caught up in more than five dozen lawsuits over

4
the landtaking and construction practices associated with freeway construction.
Questions had already arisen about the functional adequacy of the Barham ramps, which
were later closed because of the extreme peril they represented. If you look for them
today you will find them abandoned behind chain-link fence. East of the Los Angeles
River, the Aliso Interchange, later known as the "San Bernardino Split," held the
distinction of being the first structure to connect freeways together in Los Angeles. Aliso
Interchange was the most significant freeway structure in the city because it established
the first freeway crossing over the Los Angeles River and thus the pattern of the
subsequent freeway network in the vicinity of downtown, including the location of the
Four-level Interchange. But Aliso also had controversial implications and the freeway
planners did not invite close scrutiny of it. The product of a hasty deal between the city
engineering office and the state highway department, it was a political compromise that
caused the ill-considered redrawing of planned routes through the east side of the city and
established the precedent of slicing through neighborhoods on newly acquired rights-of-
way, rather than enlarging existing corridors to make freeways. When the state engineers
attempted to transfer that method of routing from the multiethnic, workingclass east side
to the more prosperous neighborhoods between downtown and Hollywood, they
provoked a decades worth of lawsuits, legislative investigations, and the delays in
completing the freeways that connected to the Four-Level. Aliso Interchange was also a
rambling structure with no apparent logic to its maze of roadways that wrapped over and
under each other. To see it today, it is best to bring a helicopter, because there is no
earth-bound vantage point that offers a view of the whole thing.

5
For another famous location, the state highway department could have offered
Newsweek a photograph of the Hollywood Freeway as it entered the Los Angeles Basin at
the south end of Cahuenga Pass, crossing Franklin Avenue on a massive viaduct just a
block north of the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard. But that too was a site where
the echoes of recent litigation still resonated, and where an intrusive footprint had
irrevocably transformed a fashionable street into a shadowy grey zone, a place of dark
corners and bleak concrete retaining walls. In this setting of contested infrastructure
development, the Four-Level was the product of a unique convergence of political,
cultural and spatial circumstances. It served as a means to promote consensus in favor of
freeway construction.
The built environment of transportation in Los Angeles has largely been
interpreted as the product of consensus even for the period before the freeway era.
Wilshire Boulevard stands as the universally welcomed alternative to the congested
downtown of the early 20th century, the site of a happily mobile citizenry exercising free
choice in both shopping and transportation. Mulholland Highway and the Pacific Coast
Highway, also products of the 1920s, signify the technological sublime of 20th-century
urbanism, the incorporation of nature into the everyday life of city-dwellers. But all were
rooted in conflict. The appearance of Wilshire Boulevard was the product of a bitter
political struggle between visionaries of the automotive metropolis and investors seeking
to maximize the profit potential of their Wilshire frontage. Mulholland Highway was
worthless as a transportation artery, but a favorable convergence of bureaucratic ambition
and real estate investment allowed the city engineers a temporary respite from the

6
ubiquitous protests that stopped most of their road schemes. Pacific Coast Highway was
stalled for more than a decade, and when the state highway engineers were finally able to
complete it, they invoked the views it afforded of ocean and coast as a retroactive
justification for the effort. The Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924 is widely hailed by
scholars as the climax of Los Angeles turn toward the automobile, but the largest project
in it, the improvement of Tenth Street (Olympic Boulevard) into a high-speed cross-town
thoroughfare, was defeated in court in 1926 and again by citizen protest in 1932.
With consensus so elusive, the familiar narrative of Los Angeles transportation
history must be wrong. That narrative has been repeated so often in scholarship and
popular culture that many assume it has been proven long ago. It goes like this: A
distinctive car culture arose in southern California in the early 20
th
century. Adoration
of the automobile fueled its widespread adoption, which, coupled with the rapid growth
of Los Angeles, produced horrible traffic congestion starting in the years leading up to
World War I. Undertaking a rational response to this obvious problem, municipal
engineers strived to build larger and larger highways to combat the congestion.
Eventually, in the late 1930s, they enlisted the participation of the state highway
department, which controlled the expenditure of state gasoline-tax revenues, and this
alliance embarked on the construction of the first freeways. The pace of construction
gathered speed when the state increased the gas tax after World War II, and then federal
funding under the 1956 Interstate Act unleashed a frenzy of freeway building. Around
1970, new environmental regulations and newly empowered urban communities brought
a halt to the freeway era, which was followed by a revival of mass-transit construction.

7
My critique of this narrative began with direct observation of the structures and
landscapes of transportation in Los Angeles. Those abandoned ramps at Barham
Boulevard did not seem consistent with a smoothly functioning effort to provide facilities
for mass automobility. At First Street and Glendale Boulevard, an isolated viaduct, 900
feet long, separates the grades of those major streets but does not connect to anything.
What was missing? Olympic Boulevard takes a sharp turn to the south at Lucerne
Avenue, and there is no mountain or river or any other obvious obstacle. What made that
kink? Understanding those places took me to the records of the public agencies
responsible for building them -- construction contracts, proposals to the city council,
contracts with the state Division of Highways, legislative hearings, letters from irate
citizens, and the reports of city agencies, board and commissions. After absorbing the
ebb and flow of public business concerned with transportation, the inescapable
conclusion was that it was very difficult to build a road in Los Angeles. For the city
engineers, overcoming opposition was their most formidable challenge and their main
preoccupation as they tried to address the infrastructure issues caused by rapid adoption
of the automobile. Every completed project was a close call, and the constraints under
which the city engineers operated were reflected in the structures that they built.
The first purpose of this work is to reconstruct the specific actions and arguments
that produced many significant pieces of the street and highway networks of Los
Angeles: How did the city get the roads and freeways it has? The period of study is
1910 to 1950, from the origins of roadbuilding politics as part of Progressive spatial
reform to the completion of the nodal structures in the freeway network, the ones that

8
determined where subsequent construction would occur. The second contribution of this
new narrative of Los Angeles and the automobile is the observation that the automotive
infrastructure was conceived in conflict. Detailed examination of the roads and freeways
of Los Angeles as they were built demonstrates that major construction projects usually
resulted from site-specific technical opportunities, financial arrangements, and political
alliances. They did not follow previously established priorities, they generally did not
accord with comprehensive plans for transportation in the city, and they portray a
sequence and a context of development that is omitted in the cultural representations of
the citys automotive infrastructure. To a considerable degree, the citys roads and
freeways were improvised -- not spontaneous, but certainly not the orderly fulfillment of
rational plans. This opportunistic process of road and highway development proceeded
by negotiation and compromise, and often entailed the hasty redrawing of plans right up
to the moment of construction, and often into the actual building of thoroughfares. The
exploitation of narrow and ephemeral niches of approval, and the in-process alteration of
specifications, meant that major highway projects rarely performed as expected. The
inadequacy of existing roads and freeways became a justification for further construction
aimed at correcting their deficiencies.
The third main goal of this work is to assess the political settings in which those
negotiations took place and those opportunities were grasped. Numerous municipal
departments as well as agencies of state, county and federal government and various
private interests contended to define the character and extent of transportation
infrastructure. Site-specific analysis reveals that each major road and highway project

9
resulted from a temporary accommodation among diverse public and private interests.
The common element in all of these arrangements was the city engineering bureau, which
leveraged sponsors for ambitious construction projects on a case-by-case basis. The city
engineers constructed a roadbuilding regime based on their role as brokers among other
city agencies and the city council, railroads and street railways, homeowners and real
estate investors, and the nations capital markets. The city engineers made routing
decisions and designed roads and bridges according to their own aesthetic and
professional values, and discerning their basis for producing the citys infrastructure is a
necessary part of understanding the tangible effects of this roadbuilding regime.
The final strand of this narrative is the effort to recontextualize the metaphors of
metropolitan automobility, which do not describe nor even suggest the historical reality
of widespread resistance to the construction of streets and highways in Los Angeles.
Battles over the approval of highways produced lasting images of the city as being
particularly suited for the automobile, which continued to influence opinions about Los
Angeles long after the original issues were settled. Rooting the origin and elaboration of
those images within the political and spatial contexts of their creation helps to
demonstrate that the reputation of Los Angeles as the city built for the automobile
originated as a promotional mechanism to abet road and freeway construction. The
image of Los Angeles as the quintessential automotive metropolis is more false than true,
if seemingly irreversible in popular culture.
This is a story of politics, culture and urban space that builds upon and argues
with many branches of historical scholarship. Interrogating the physical reality of the

10
automotive infrastructure provides the critical perspective for this work. The site-specific
approach cuts across the conventional boundaries of academic enterprise, and I consider
specific works and bodies of literature in relation to the places that are most suited to
those discussions. Thus the story of Wilshire Boulevard in the 1920s offers an
opportunity to consider the decline of Progressive spatial reform and the implications of
that decline within the historiography of Progressivism. For another example, Whittier
Boulevard in the 1920s and 1930s makes an appropriate case study to reconsider how the
history of planning has interpreted the multi-jurisdictional relations of infrastructure
policy. The story of Aliso Viaduct and Interchange and its relationship to the Four-level
Interchange is used to critique the assertions of consensus in favor of the automobile.
The rest of this introduction is devoted to a survey of the many strands of literature
traversed in the main narrative.

Roadbuilding Regimes
The onset of mass automobility around 1910 meant that Progressive reformers
prescribed some of the earliest responses to the spatial implications of cars in cities.
Dedicated arteries have long been recognized as a distinctive element in the city plans of
the early 20th century, and the origin of parkways has correctly been placed within the
City Beautiful movement.
2
A second facet of Progressivism that influenced opinion and
policy regarding automobiles is connected to the origins of the planning profession in the
early 20th century, which owed much to reform impulses aimed at relieving the evils of
congestion, usually conceived as crowded tenements and the consequences of

11
inadequate sewage disposal in densely packed neighborhoods. Planners enlisted the
automobile as a device to aid dispersion from the congested core, which necessarily
involved those planners in consideration of how to move those cars in, out, through and
around the city.
3
Third, Progressivism was fundamentally a gendered experience. Male
reformers used the business enterprise as the model of efficiency and instrumentality that
could be applied to the state, while female reformers based their vision of a just society
on the concerns of the family household. Though incorrectly consigned previously to
parks and playgrounds under the condescending rubric of municipal housekeeping, the
contributions of organized womanhood extended to transportation and streets.
4
The
fourth and last strain of Progressivism that shaped the Los Angeles response to
automobility was the anti-railroad political program that brought the Progressives to
power in city (1909) and state (1910) elections.
5
Because both rail companies and city
governments sought to coordinate the construction of streets with the construction of the
railways that ran on them, the regulatory framework governing rail operations had the
additional effect of constraining roadbuilding.
Before moving on to the comprehensive reconsideration of these various
incarnations of Progressivism, it is worth dwelling for a moment on the anti-railroad
argument because it has been a powerful interpretation in the effort to understand the
automobile in Los Angeles. Anti-railroad progressivism is one of the main pillars of
Scott Bottles assertion of consensus in favor of the automobile, but I differ substantially
with that view.
6
It is logical to assume that if people bought and used cars in great
numbers, they would also approve the construction of roads and freeways to

12
accommodate those cars. Logic departs from fact in this case because it overlooks the
controversies that always attended roadbuilding in Los Angeles. To infer a consensus for
roadbuilding from widespread car ownership may only replicate the arguments of
roadbuilding engineers who used traffic statistics to justify their plans, providing scant
perspective outside the viewpoints of the participants.
7
Bottles further inference, that
citizens viewed the automobile as a democratic alternative to the robber-barons of rail,
distorts the history of urban transportation by squeezing it into the liberal-consensualist
interpretation of Progressivism exemplified by Richard Hofstadter and Robert Wiebe.
8

This tale of modal conflict makes good drama only by omitting the fact that the public
officials who worked to accommodate the automobile were the same people who, at the
same time, also worked to assure the viability of the street railways. It also omits the
evidence of active participation by railroad and street-railway companies to enable
construction of the citys first arterial thoroughfares and the critical first links in the Los
Angeles freeway system. Furthermore, the early freeway plans assumed that transit
ridership would continue at then-current levels. The smooth operation of freeways
depended on a well-functioning transit system, and the plans associated with the origins
of freeway construction in the late 1930s had ample accommodation for that.
9
Anti-
railroad Progressivism was primarily a style of campaign rhetoric, and to associate it with
consensus in favor of the automobile is an after-the-fact construction that elides more
evidence than it incorporates. (While on the topic of road-versus-rail in Los Angeles, it
should be pointed out that the noir fantasy of a conspiracy that killed the street railways

13
has been thoroughly refuted in serious scholarship and that Bottles made a significant
contribution to that refutation.
10
)
Taking a more inclusive view of Progressivism and the automobile, the various
strains of spatial reform served different if overlapping constituencies, and they each
sought to institutionalize their views in the structure of local government.
11
By spatial
reform I refer to the effort to ameliorate social conditions through physical alteration of
the urban environment. Though it was not the main purpose of most Progressives, many
reform programs incorporated policies or specific programs to change the physical
character of the city. The Board of Public Utilities, established in 1909, the City
Planning Committee (1910), and the City Planning Commission that succeeded the City
Planning Committee in 1920 all pursued spatial reform initiatives that included street
plans. Adding to the institutional complexity, the Board of Public Utilities spawned the
Traffic Commission in 1922; the city council never ceded its plenary authority to any of
the new institutions of local government; and the city engineering bureau enjoyed de
facto control of street development through its role as the agency charged with
certification of special-assessment districts that were the main source of funding for street
improvements. Considerable confusion ensued as to which agency had authority over
comprehensive plans and specific projects, and there were also rivalries for control
among the different groups, all of which contributed to inability of city government to
build streets. Progressive spatial reform initiatives thus tended to cancel each other out,
or at least to foment institutional dissonance that crippled efforts to provide streets and
highways.

14
All reformers agreed, to greater or lesser extent, on the efficacy of government
intervention and the application of professional expertise to solve social problems, but the
obstacles to orderly provision of infrastructure were deeper than the ability of local
agencies to overcome.
12
The original sin of public space in Los Angeles was the city
council decision, in 1853, to cede all land in the municipality to private ownership,
without reserving easements or rights-of-way for any purpose. Every infrastructure
project thereafter was a real estate transaction too, as local government had to acquire the
land on which to build. Moreover, following the wishes of the San Francisco delegation,
which desired above all to keep taxes low, the state legislature in the 19th century enacted
arduous procedures to regulate the ability of local jurisdictions to build sewers, sidewalks
and streets. Thus the scholarship on San Francisco politics contributes to an
understanding of roads in Los Angeles.
13
An excessively privatized landscape and a
deeply ingrained tradition of a tax avoidance on the part of Californians configured the
difficult setting for infrastructure initiatives in Los Angeles.
Moving out of the Progressive period, historians have applied the concept of
highway federalism to interpret the construction of ever-larger roads in the cities of the
United States.
14
In this view, freeways resulted from a planning vision and an agenda of
professional aggrandizement that flowed from federal agencies into state agencies.
Though deftly analyzing the role of federal officials, these works cannot do justice to the
municipally employed engineers whose work was shaped by a different set of concerns.
In Los Angeles at least, city engineers played a determining role in the location, design,
structure of authority, and funding strategies for the formative stage of freeway

15
development. Mark Rose described the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 as federal
funding for localistic and largely impermeable commercial and professional
subcultures.
15
But those subcultures are not impermeable to site-specific analysis.
Locally based studies can enlarge the idea of highway federalism by including the other
end of the federalist relationship, the places outside the Beltway, in keeping with the
original meaning of federalism as the sharing of power among the national government,
the states, and local jurisdictions. Only half the story of highway federalism has been
told. The other half must proceed from the ground up.
Planning scholars concerned with transportation tend to emphasize the economics
of highway federalism.
16
Based on the generally productive tactic of following the
money, this interpretation portrays freeways primarily as an example of burden-
shifting, from local to state to federal outlays. There is a basic truth to that sequence,
but looking only at the source of the money obscures the extensive struggles over who
would control how the money was spent. Again, in Los Angeles at least, municipal
employees and the city council held firmly to that authority for as long as they could and,
as it turned out, that was long enough to set the basic pattern for the freeways in the city.
Moreover, viewed in the fine grain, the sequence takes on a more complex texture,
especially in the 1930s, when municipal engineers had far more direct access to funding
for urban transportation from New Deal programs than did state or even federal
engineers. Los Angeles city engineers capitalized on this access to build the key projects
that established the freeway system.

16
Until recently, the historiography of the New Deal has exhibited substantial
continuity on the subject of public works, from the consensualist school of the post-
World War II period through the influential interpretations of William Leuchtenberg in
the 1960s, the New Left critiques that followed Leuchtenberg, and many monographs and
survey texts that treat the period. All have pointed out the conservatism of the Roosevelt
approach to unemployment during the Depression, the circumscribed goals of the federal
public works agencies, and the rapid abandonment of the public works strategy of
unemployment relief when economic conditions shifted and then war engulfed the nation.
While all acknowledge the enormous tangible accomplishments of the New Deal public
works agencies, they also move quickly past the potential implications of a vast
nationwide construction project in order to return to a more conventional focus on
electoral politics and the meaning of liberalism.
17

In contrast, Jordan Schwarz viewed the New Deal public works agencies as the
embodiment of a philosophy of political economy that sought to create long-term
markets by building an infrastructure in undeveloped regions.
18
Los Angeles was hardly
an undeveloped region in the 1930s, but it was a young city for its size, and there is little
doubt that the infrastructure bequeathed by the New Deal laid the foundation for its
further spectacular growth during and after World War II. Similarly, Jason Scott Smith
sees the public works programs of the 1930s as not simply employment measures that
failed due to insufficient state capacities, but as an extraordinarily successful method of
state-sponsored economic development over a longer term than is defined by the
lifespan of the New Deal.
19
The experience of Los Angeles during the New Deal

17
provides ample data to support these views and complements Schwarz and Smith by
allowing us to witness these development strategies in action and to assess their effects.
This approach to the New Deal fits the Los Angeles experience because growth
and its promotion have been the civic religion of city for much of its history. But that
still leaves an interpretive void for the period before the New Deal, when growth was no
less promoted, yet the barriers to the growth-friendly activity of roadbuilding consistently
prevailed. Harry Chandler and Henry OMelveny, two of the leading apostles of growth,
were on the losing side in the battle over enlarging Wilshire Boulevard. Without
overlooking the fact that they were also two of the most powerful men in Los Angeles,
their defeat can only be accounted for by the highly localized circumstances that shaped
the Wilshire struggle. The same was true for the defeat or abandonment that ended the
majority of road proposals: the opponents of road and highway construction rarely based
their arguments on theoretical propositions, but rather on place-specific considerations
such as the character of the street that would result, or the cost, or because they thought
that others would benefit more. Thus the minority of proposals that were brought to
completion benefited from the highly localized convergence of political, economic and
topographic circumstances.
It was the city engineers who discerned those opportunities of overlapping
interests and cemented them into contracts. They tended to articulate the justification for
improved roads in terms of congestion, but they actually confronted the more
fundamental matters of the near-total privatization of real estate in the city and the
piecemeal authority over road construction among various city agencies and interests.
20

18
The acquisition of the right-of-way for a major highway from private landowners could
only be justified by a claim of broad public benefit, but there was no single or unified
means to define that public benefit. Highway politics in Los Angeles thus consisted of
negotiating this boundary between public responsibility and private property. This
"contradiction between private accumulation and collective action," as Peter Hall put it,
was the central issue in the planning profession during its formative period.
21
Yet those
scholars of planning, such as Christine Boyer, who view city planning as a means of
disciplining citizens and the public sector to the pre-eminence of capital, overlook the
fact that many of the arguments that crippled road planning were between different
capital interests. Boyer views capital as monolithic, but in the arena of road policy it was
pluralistic, or, in capitals own terms, competitive.
22
For that matter, the public sector
was pluralistic and competitive too, with different agencies serving different
constituencies and agendas.
Urban regime theory offers a means to transcend the false dualisms between elite
dominance and pluralist interest group politics and between structural determinants and
local (or social) construction. While defining the regime as an alliance between capital
and the public sector, this approach does not view either side of that alliance, nor indeed
the alliance itself, as monolithic or static. Instead it asks how different types of
governing coalitions emerge and then solidify, dissolve, or transform.
23
On a project-by-
project basis, the Los Angeles city engineers carved out a niche as the brokers among
diverse public and private interests concerned with roadbuilding. Every completed
project translated into political capital for its builders and altered both the physical setting

19
and the political setting to make similar projects more likely to succeed in the future. The
roads and freeways do not simply reflect the values and the authority of their builders, but
provide glimpses into the formation of those values and the establishment of that
authority. Completed projects were the means by which the city engineers extended their
power and promulgated their ideas. The process of building streets and highways in Los
Angeles produced the structure of public authority under which more highways would be
built -- the roadbuilding regime.

The Cultures of Concrete
This study engages with two separate meanings of culture. One use of the term is
based on the anthropological field of material culture studies, or the interpretation of
objects according to the values and ideology of those who produced the objects. The
objects are roads and freeways; the producers are the Los Angeles city engineers, and to a
lesser extent for the period of this study, the California state highway engineers. These
engineers have eluded scrutiny until now, except in the blithe assumption that they
uniformly served the interests of the Los Angeles growth machine. The other use of the
term applies to the numerous cultural representations of automotive infrastructure in Los
Angeles, such as the 1956 cover of Newsweek. For the most part, these depictions and
assertions have not been assessed in terms of the actual places they purport to portray or
the political context for the production of those places.
Material culture analysis is a necessary tool because the city engineers did not
reflect on their ideology or their views toward their work. Though they left a massive

20
documentary record, virtually all of it is written in the studied blandness of bureaucratic
communication, and many of the most significant decisions are mentioned only in
passing. Literary analysis cannot unlock the meaning embedded in these documents. But
the engineers also left behind a concrete record in the structures they built, an
exceedingly eloquent body of information when interrogated within appropriate contexts.
The historiography of engineering has taken up the subject of urban roadbuilding
but offers scant guidance as to the values of the Los Angeles city engineers. Thomas P.
Hughes places the systems consciousness of engineers at the center of the story, asserting
that the tendency among engineers to produce and manage integrated technological
systems explains their design choices. Politics, particularly the politics of protest, enter
the picture as an externality forced upon the engineers after a period in which the exercise
of technical decision-making reigned not only supreme but unchallenged.
Environmentalism and concern for the impact of freeways upon urban non-elites define
postmodern highway engineering, in contrast to a prior condition that is imputed more
than defined.
24
These representations might accord with the way that engineers saw
themselves, but they fail to encompass the historical reality of Los Angeles, where
opposition to broad-scaled road schemes always existed and usually prevailed. City
engineers in Los Angeles believed that overcoming such opposition was their most
important task. Politics contestation over the allocation of power and resources -- was
not something imposed after the fact, but their central and motivating concern.
Elevating systems-consciousness to a paradigm for behavior also requires us to
discount entirely the abundant evidence of incremental rather than systemic thinking (and

21
action) among those charged with accommodating urban traffic. To be sure, they made
comprehensive plans, and frequently touted them, but they also built projects that did not
appear in those comprehensive plans, advocated the utility of individual projects on their
own merits, and comfortably, even avidly, moved ahead without approval for the
comprehensive plans.
25
The plans were an idealized rhetorical device deployed most
significantly in political and public relations. Their most critical influence came not as a
grand shaping force, but as a means to negate other proposals that the engineers did not
favor. If systems-based thinking was consequential, it was as a means to preserve
resources for the engineers preferred projects rather than for its generative role in
reshaping the urban environment.
Histories of engineering that are not concerned specifically with urban practice do
offer useful armatures for interpreting the material culture of roadbuilding in Los
Angeles. Engineers had an aesthetic sense based on dynamism, which landscape
historian J. B. Jackson described as engineers deep appreciation of their own skill in
conveying energy and material from one place to another.
26
This reverence for flow was
satisfied in spatial terms by a line across the map, or across the land itself. It contrasted
with the planners ideal of balance, which was graphically represented by the grid, a
pattern of many intersecting lines. The aesthetics of engineering also included a visual
quality described by historian David Nye as the technological sublime. Large-scale
civil engineering involved the fundamental transformation of nature, not necessarily its
subjugation, but setting nature off with the "dramatic contrast" of human achievement,
and the urbanizing environment of Los Angeles offered numerous opportunities to

22
domesticate the landscape.
27
The technological sublime could also derive from the
intrinsic qualities of the structure itself, as seen in the city engineers praise for the
bridges over the Los Angeles River, based on their visual impact: The character of these
structures will be such as to excite comment from visitors who enter and leave Los
Angeles by the railways.
28
The river bridges, based on the Classical form of the arch, fit
neatly into the traditional conception of aesthetic intent, but the engineering eye also
found beauty in the most utilitarian, unadorned structures, especially those made of
concrete. Historian Amy Slaton has demonstrated how the purveyors of concrete
structures wove a functionalist aesthetic around the realism of economical construction
methods. Pouring concrete was a cultural project, and the engineers could derive
satisfaction from the results apart from, and even at odds with, the sorts of claims that
dominated public pronouncements about highway construction, such as the efficient
reduction of traffic congestion.
29
All of these aesthetic values the dynamism of linear-
flow systems, the technological transformation of nature, and the particular kind of
beauty perceived in concrete structures resided in a road or a bridge as a stand-alone
artifact, whether or not it fit into comprehensive plans for congestion relief. They
dovetailed perfectly with the engineers incrementalist approach to the politics of right-
of-way approval, and the goal of building one road at a time became the central mission
of the citys highway builders.
The city engineers also acted out of a concern for recognition and apprehension
over their status in society. Amid the clamor of boosterism and the awe-inspiring growth
of the city, they engineers sought appropriate acknowledgment for their indispensable

23
role. They basked in the reflected glory of William Mulholland, the aqueduct builder,
and sought to emphasize their connection with him. They also built memorials to
themselves into the decorative treatments of bridges, tunnels, and, incongruously, into the
arched openings of sewer outlets. The engineers fondness for concrete also expressed a
concern over the social position of engineering at a time when standardization and
professionalization based on college training began to supplant the practical engineering
of those who came up from the ranks, like Mulholland. As Slaton has shown, the
promulgation of technical standards and testing procedures was not simply a scientific
program, but a social program that put the control of concrete construction in the hands of
a small number of highly trained individuals. Quality control in concrete construction
fell short of scientific objectivity because testing procedures were based on assumptions
about the identity of the practitioners. Their successful application was confined to those
who already possessed familiarity with the work, or to those who were admitted into the
coterie of experts. Those lines were drawn significantly according to gender. It is
possible that the city engineers institutional rivalry with the City Planning Commission
expressed gender anxiety provoked by the prominence of women reformers in the
formation of the commission. Even absent such direct confrontation, a concern for their
own occupational status shaped the engineers sense of their role and their mission. As
Slaton put it, Technologies . . . do not incidentally encourage a particular social order as
they pursue a material end, but rather bring into being a technical order as they pursue a
social end.
30
Seeking to reinforce their own status by staking out a determining role in
the production of streets and highways, the city engineers of Los Angeles enacted a

24
technical order that could proceed whether it resolved traffic congestion or not. This
factor in engineering practice also helps to explain the extraordinarily successful
relationship between the Los Angeles city engineers and the New Deal public works
agencies, which by focusing on large-scale civil engineering projects forged an
association with the construction trades in which membership qualifications enforced
gender exclusivity.
31

The dominant representations of automobility and the automotive infrastructure in
Los Angeles trace a narrative that seems all but totally disconnected from the politics and
engineering that are my central concern. Indeed, one reason I undertook this study was
my discontent with the narratives of automobility that did not accord with my direct
observation of the built environment of the city. But a relationship between the material
reality of roads and freeways and the representations of that reality became clear after I
established the timelines of actual construction. The thickest effusions of imagery about
the automotive infrastructure appeared precisely during the most difficult battles to
produce that infrastructure. Social and political friction was the stimulus for assertions
intended to influence the outcomes of specific struggles.
A primary example of this phenomenon is the Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924,
along with the publicity campaign that was mounted to win its approval as a ballot
initiative. The myth of the Los Angeles car culture originated as a by-product of this
avidly promoted attempt at establishing the political authority and dedicated funding
mechanisms to overcome the formidable barriers to street construction in the city. The
sponsors of the Major Traffic Street Plan issued alarmist but not fanciful messages about

25
the congestion choking the city, with statistical documentation of the total area of
pavement, of time lost in traffic, and of the money that lost time represented. These
claims fed into the growing stream of booster literature substantially based on the claim
that Los Angeles was a unique kind of city. The notion of a distinctive relationship
between Angelenos and their automobiles was a mutated form of boosterism, a hybrid of
the sober reckoning produced in support of the street plan and the feverish promotion of
Loa Angeles exceptionalism.
The elevation of the Four-level Interchange as a synecdoche for the city and its
approach to transportation illustrates a similar relationship between representations and
reality. The elegance of the structure made it unique rather than typical in a setting where
virtually all major highway projects reflected compromises and half-measures, and the
only other interchange was the awkward and operationally compromised junction built as
part of the Aliso Viaduct project. The Four-level also signified the ascendance of the
state highway establishment and the diminution of the roadbuilding regime erected by the
city engineers who designed the Aliso structure. The swooping, symmetrical ramps of
the Four-level interchange braid together the triumph of can-do rationalism with the
aesthetics of architectural modernism, and appropriately occupy center stage in the
narratives of Los Angeles as the quintessential automotive metropolis and the harbinger
of 20
th
-century urban experience.
32
But they only accomplish that by omitting most of
the story of the origins of freeways in Los Angeles. The reality was far messier.
Perhaps the most significant omission from the popular culture of automobility
during the period of this study is the development of major thoroughfares in east Los

26
Angeles. The first encounter between the city and state roadbuilding engineers took
place during the creation of Whittier Boulevard in the 1920s. The state Division of
Highways improved Whittier Boulevard to a multilane highway outside of the city limits,
which produced enormous traffic problems inside the city until the boulevard could be
widened to the same dimensions. The city engineers achieved that difficult objective
only by minimizing the cost of acquiring the right-of-way by taking land from parks and
schoolyards. The east side was in the process of rapid development as the multiethnic,
workingclass neighborhood occupied by the families of workers employed in the
industrial corridor along the Los Angeles River. It was not subject to the restrictive
covenants that prevented Mexicans, Jews, and other undesirables from living in many
other areas of Los Angeles. The placement of a high-traffic artery through the east side
and the reduction of play areas helped to define that neighborhood as a place where the
residency of undesirables would be tolerated. Subsequently, the east side bore the
effects of the arbitrary realignment of the planned route for the Santa Ana Freeway as
part of the negotiations between city and state engineers, the first instance of a freeway
cutting through the middle of blocks. Aliso Interchange and the through highways that
sliced through the east side were left out of the images produced to promote freeways, but
they would later enter the representations of the city in the works of Chicano artists and
activists. To them, the built environment of transportation stood for invasion, dislocation,
and the dismemberment of community.
33

27
Overview of the Narrative
Chapter One lays out the limitations to roadbuilding embodied in the legal and
institutional structures of state and local government through the early 1920s. It provides
a detailed account of the varieties of Progressive spatial reform in Los Angeles, including
the founding of the Public Utilities Commission and the City Planning Commission, the
role of organized clubwomen, the constant involvement of the City Council, and the
origins of the citys highway grid in the work of the Office of the City Engineer.
Chapter Two uses a case study of Wilshire Boulevard to explore the conflicts
among the various interests and agencies seeking to influence roadbuilding and highway
policy in the city. It provides historical context for the manufactured reputation of
Wilshire, and for the stalemates and confusion that the city engineers sought to address
by securing a larger role in road construction. In tis episode, professional planners as
well as middleclass and elite clubwomen lost their formal role in the institutional
structure of municipal place production as it pertained to highways.
Chapter Three interprets the Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924 as a struggle
between public and private authority rather than as the triumph of automotive ideology
that characterizes its previous portrayals. It shows how the Plan was a landmark in the
citys reputation but not in its infrastructure, and how that gap between perception and
reality is crucial in any effort to comprehend the subsequent development of
transportation in Los Angeles.
Chapter Four shows the city engineers at work in the 1920s and early 1930s as
they attempt to piece together a highway network based on case-by-case political and

28
financial arrangements. Case studies include Olympic Boulevard, Mulholland Highway
and the bridges over the Los Angeles River. Incrementalist, opportunistic, and at times
overtly irrational, the efforts of the city engineers were nonetheless shaped by the broad
objectives of establishing an east-west route through the city and providing highway
crossings over the Los Angeles River.
Chapter Five brings the state highway department into the picture. In the Pacific
Coast Highway, the state engineers addressed on a larger scale many of the same legal
and financial obstacles that frustrated their counterparts in city government. In pushing
the work to completion over two decades, the state highway department developed its
own institutional culture of massive landscape transformation and expanded the legal
definition of driving in the United States. Another case study, Whittier Boulevard, opens
the story of the often troubled relationship between city and state roadbuilders, follows
the evolution of the efforts to extend major highways across the Los Angeles River, and
explains the transportation patterns on which the first freeways were inscribed.
Chapter Six focuses on the city engineers during the New Deal, when agency
chief Lloyd Aldrich orchestrated the citys access to direct funding under various federal
programs to assert a central role in infrastructure development. Under Aldrich the
department completed long-deferred initiatives such as Olympic Boulevard and expanded
the departments technical expertise and planning authority in constructing the first
limited-access highway in Los Angeles, Ramona Boulevard through the east side. In
leveraging New Deal funding to put in place the first segments of the freeway network,
Aldrich pulled the state highway department into participating in the program. State and

29
city collaborated on the Aliso Viaduct and Interchange, which was the first structure to
join together freeways in Los Angeles and the first freeway crossing of the Los Angeles
River. It was thus the nodal point of the network, the component that determined where
subsequent construction would have to occur. Aliso required the rerouting of the Santa
Ana Parkway through the middle of city blocks on the east side, establishing the
precedent of invasive route determination and exacerbating the friction between local
interests and state engineers.

In choosing the title Concrete Utopia for this study, I mean to imply much more
than the ubiquity of that most modern material in the landscape of metropolitan Los
Angeles. I hope also to convey the irony that the roads and freeways of Los Angeles
rarely fulfilled the widely proclaimed hopes for a wholesome and elegant city, that all the
concrete did not help to construct an urban utopia but rather diminished that vision. The
roads and freeways of Los Angeles were, at times, proposed in utopian terms, but they
resulted from specific processes that answered utopian visions with all the blunt realities
that the term concrete connotes. Cupidity, incrementalism and professional
aggrandizement shaped the work of the city engineers and other decisionmakers as they
confronted obstacles to roadbuilding that were among the most difficult in any American
city. In different circumstances and through different processes, public works did, and
do, have the potential to express the highest ideals of democracy. Public works can
embody social justice, they can ease the lives of every member of a diverse society, and
they can inspire people with their beauty and their power. It did not work out that way

30
for the roads and freeways of Los Angeles, yet I do not intend to characterize all public
works as the feckless exercise of unchecked authority in service to capital. Nor do I
abandon the conviction that informed and responsive public action can construct a public
sphere that strengthens community, invites communication across the barriers that would
otherwise divide us, and encourages our hopes for the future.

31
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1
Newsweek, May 14, 1956, 103-105, plus cover.

2
Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994); Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of
City Planning in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); William H. Wilson, The
City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

3
Mark Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American Planners and Urban Transportation
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); Asha Elizabeth Weinstein, "The Congestion Evil:
Perceptions of Traffic Congestion in Boston in the 1890s and 1920s," Ph.D. dissertation, University of
California Berkeley, 2002.

4
Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's
Movement, 1880-1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City:
Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Peter C.
Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850-1930 (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1999); Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the
Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Chafe, "Women's
History and Political History," in Nancy Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock, eds., Visible Women: New Essays
on American Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

5
William F. Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994).

6
This claim is most fully developed in Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, esp. 15, 22-51, 56-57,
88; also see Foster, Streetcar to Superhighway; and David Brodsley, LA Freeway: An Appreciative Essay.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

7
Paul Barrett and Mark H. Rose, Street Smarts: The Politics of Transportation Statistics in the American
City, 1900-1990, Journal of Urban History 25 (March 1999); Rose, Interstate, 9; Seely, American
Highway System, 180-85.

8
Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, 56-57; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to
FDR (New York: Vintage, 1955); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877-1920 (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1967). For the antithesis to Hofstadter, Wiebe, and those who followed them, see Peter J. Ling,
America and the Automobile: Technology, Reform and Social Change (Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 1990), which uncouples automobility from Progressive reform.

9
Los Angeles Transportation Engineering Board, A Transit Program for the Los Angeles Metropolitan
Area (Los Angeles: by the board, 1939); Milton Breivogel and Stuart Bate, Mass Transit Facilities and
Master Plan of Parkways (Los Angeles: City Planning Commission, 1942); Regional Planning
Commission, County of Los Angeles, Freeways for the Region (Los Angeles: by the commission, 1943).

10
Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, 2-6, 236-48; Robert C. Post, "Images of the Pacific Electric:
Why Memories Matter," Railroad History 179 (Autumn 1998): 31-68; Sy Adler, "The Transformation of
the Pacific Electric Railway: Bradford Snell, Roger Rabbit and the Politics of Transportation in Los
Angeles," Urban Affairs Quarterly 27 (September 1991): 51-87; Jonathan Richmond, "Transport of

32

Delight: The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles," Ph.D. diss., Urban Planning, M.I.T.,
1991.

11
William F. Deverell and Tom Sitton, eds., California Progressivism Revisited ( Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), though not devoted specifically to spatial issues, establishes the considerable
diversity in the ideas and participants of Porgressive reform.

12
Richard McCormick, The Discovery That Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of
Progressivism, in McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986), and Daniel T. Rodgers, In Search of Progressivism, Reviews in American History 10 (December
1982): 113-32, both see these beliefs as central to all strains of Progressive thought.

13
Terrence MacDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political
Culture in San Francisco, 1860-1906 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Philip J. Ethington,
The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).

14
Bruce Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1987); Owen D. Gutfreund, Twentieth Century Sprawl: Highways and the
Reshaping of the American Landscape (NY: Oxford University Press, 2004).

15
Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1941-1956 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of
Kansas, 1979).

16
Brian D. Taylor, When Finance Leads Planning: The Influence of Public Finance on Transportation
Policy and Planning in California, Ph.D. diss., Urban Planning, UCLA, 1992; Jeffrey Brown, "Statewide
Transportation Planning: Lessons from California," Transportation Quarterly 56 (Spring 2002): 51-62;
Martin Wachs, "The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles: Images of Past Policies and
Future Prospects," in Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, eds., The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at
the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 106-59.

17
The consensualist school is exemplified by Hofstadter, The Age of Reform; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The
Coming of the New Deal, vol. 2 of The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958); and James
McGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956). Among many
studies of the period by William E. Leuchtenberg, the fundamental approach is exemplified in Franklin D.
Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). Influential New Left
interpretations include Howard Zinn, The Limits of the New Deal, in Zinn, The Politics of History (2nd.
edition; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 118-36; Barton J. Bernstein, The New Deal: The
Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform, in Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays
in American History (New York: Vintage, 1967), 258-281; and Ronald Radosh, The Myth of the New
Deal, in Radosh and Murray N. Rothman, eds., A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the
American Corporate State (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 146-87. For an overview of this literature, see
James T. Patterson, Americans and the Writing of Twentieth-Century United States History, in Anthony
Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 185-205.

18
Jordan A Schwarz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Knopf,
1993, xi.

19
Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 13-14.

33

20
I do not mean to imply thant congestion was merely an argument deployed in the effort to build more
roads. It was a genuine problem, and it had particular salience in the Los Angeles area because of the
pattern of dispersed, multi-centered development put in place in the interwar period; see Greg Hise,
Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997).

21
Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth
Century (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988), 337.

22
M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1983); also see Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway.

23
Stephen L. Elkin, City and Regime in the American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987; Susan S. Fainstein, The City Builders: Property, Politics and Planning in London and New York
(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994); Mickey Lauria, ed., Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory:
Regulating Urban Politics in the Global Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997).

24
Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern
World (New York: Vintage, 1998), esp. 197-254, 305.

25
Matthew W. Roth, Mulholland Highway and the Engineering Culture of Los Angeles in the 1920s,
Technology and Culture 40 (July 1999): 545-75.

26
Jackson, "A Puritan Looks at Scenery," in J. B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 57-64.
27
David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 76, 126.

28
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1922-23, 30.

29
Amy E. Slaton, Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900-1930
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 187.

30
Amy E. Slaton, As Near as Practicable: Precision, Ambiguity, and Industrial Quality Control,
Technology and Culture 42 (January 2001): 51-80.

31
Michael Kazin, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the
Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) documents the exclusion of women form the
construction trades.

32
For an overview and interpretation of this role of Los Angeles in the discourse of urban modernism, see
Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture: a Biography and History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

33
Raul Homero Villa, Barrio Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2000), 111-55.

34
CHAPTER ONE
STRAINS OF PROGRESSIVISM: ROADS AND POLITICS THROUGH THE EARLY
1920S

Los Angeles had traffic problems and traffic politics before it had to contend with
automobiles. In 1889, when the only automobiles in the world were a few prototypes in
Germany, the superintendent of streets in Los Angeles pronounced that the city's public
rights-of way were in a perfect chaotic state. The proliferation of horse-drawn street
railways had followed no pattern beyond the competition among rail entrepreneurs for the
busiest routes and the efforts by land speculators to provide transportation to their
subdivisions. Parallel and overlapping street railways caused congestion in the business
district and around the railroad depots, while in newly developed residential areas the
hastily drawn streets bore no logical relationship to the adjacent through highways or to
the streets in neighboring subdivisions. Moreover, reported the superintendent,
developers and property owners built new streets without any review by city officials,
and even when applications were submitted, there was no reliable process for the city to
evaluate the plans or to monitor whether the construction followed the proposals.
1
The
chaos was aggravated over the next two decades by the spread of cable and electric street
railways and the continuing lack of any meaningful oversight of transportation. In 1911,
the first traffic study of Los Angeles (a genre of planning document that would eventually
fill several library shelves) was focused primarily on the congestion problems afflicting
the operation of trolleys, not automobiles.
2

35
That would soon change, and the automobile would become part of the citys
traffic problems. In 1913, the moving assembly line at Ford Motor Co. launched the era
of automotive mass consumption. Los Angeles would become the first metropolis to
experience a majority of its growth after low-cost, mass-produced automobiles became
available. The rapid increase in population and the equally rapid adoption of automobiles
by Angelenos compounded the city's existing predicament. In the summers of 1914 and
1915, traffic regularly ground to a halt on downtown streets, where streetcars and
automobiles competed for space, as well as in several outlying areas of relatively sparse
development, such as Western Avenue, where automobiles alone accounted for the
crowding on the streets. By 1915, the car was no longer the exclusive province of the
wealthy who drove them on pleasure outings, but had become a daily accessory of
middle-class commuting and shopping. Automobile ownership soared as registrations
approached 120,000 vehicles in Los Angeles County by 1920.
3
It is important to bear in
mind, however, that inadequate and poorly coordinated public rights-of-way and
fragmentary, ineffective administration of transportation by city government existed
before the advent of routine automobile use in Los Angeles. The car came onto streets
that were already congested and ill-governed.
The car also entered into existing ideological discourses and political programs
associated with Progressive reform efforts that addressed the character and use of public
places. In Los Angeles, the crucial matter of street construction did not become a
prominent public issue in its own right until 1924, when a series of highway-related
ballot measures came before the city's voters, accompanied by extensive and occasionally

36
sensationalistic publicity efforts on both sides of the propositions. Up to that time,
policies regarding streets were subsumed within other aspects of urban spatial reform.
Street construction emerged as a hotly contested issue in part because of empirical
circumstances: the unabated growth of Los Angeles and its traffic problems in the early
1920s. But its emergence as a primary concern among residents and public officials and
its establishment as a primary function of municipal government also corresponded with
the collapse of Progressive spatial reform in Los Angeles. Looking closely into street
construction in Los Angeles offers the opportunity to comprehend Progressivism from
the inside out, to discern in action some of the contradictions embedded in Progressive
ideology, and to provide further dimension to the persistent issue of why Progressivism
lost its momentum.
The drama of Progressivism turns on the insuperable fact that the Progressive
promise of expanded democracy and humanitarian government went substantially
unfulfilled during the period defined by this reform impulse, from the early 1890s to
around 1920.
4
To historians in the 1950s, this lack of efficacy was connected with the
identity of the reformers themselves. According to George Mowry, they were uniformly
drawn from the "solid middle class" of white, male professionals. Richard Hofstadter
dismissed them as "pathetically respectable" do-gooders whose isolation from the most
exploited members of society fatally compromised their high-minded activism. In these
views, Progessives were all of one stripe, and then Robert Wiebe's influential
interpretation characterized their ideology in a similarly monolithic fashion, as a search
for order."
5
In the 1960s, historians from the academic left began to treat Progressivism

37
in similarly sweeping fashion, rebuking the reform impulse because its potential for
meaningful political change withered in the face of corporate power and the embrace of
consumerism. Even suffragists underwent retroactive critique because some of the elite
and middleclass women who led the charge for voting rights also engaged in, or tolerated,
racist and anti-immigrant programs.
6

In the early 1980s, influential review essays by Richard McCormick and Daniel
Rodgers inaugurated a different approach to the history of the Progressive period.
7

Rather than lumping all Progressives together as either ineffectual elitists or apologists
for corporate tyranny, they instead tried to untangle the ideas and events previously
bundled together as Progressivism, and then derive broad commonalities among the
myriad goals and tactics of reformers. Central to this rehabilitation of Progressivism was
the ability to perceive reformers in their own terms, to recognize their egalitarian motives
while also acknowledging that they operated within circumstances they could not control.
James Kloppenberg, in his comparative study of American Progressive thought and
European social democracy, accorded full credit to the sincerity of Progressive
intellectuals, and sharply criticized the attempts to dismiss them as the slick
condescension accompanying hindsight and a failure of historical imagination.
8

The parsing out of Progressive ideology also involved the revised understanding
of who the Progressives were. John Buenker signaled this direction in historiography by
showing the linkages between Progressivism and urban, ethnic political machines, a topic
that was later explored in further depth by James Connolly.
9
By the 1990s, historical
scholarship had introduced an entirely new cast into the study of Progressivism: Tejanos

38
and Chicanos, African Americans, and, most significantly, women.
10
Women
Progessives had not been invisible in the literature previously, but historians gained a
deeper understanding of the distinctiveness and the importance of womens participation.
When Theda Skocpol demonstrated how voluntary womens associations had led the
efforts to win legislation to protect working women, pensions for single mothers, and
subsidized health care for children, these achievements were presented not merely as a
collection of incremental successes for an ultimately failed movement, but the
manifestation of a new vision of society, the maternalist welfare state.
11

Progressivism came to be understood as a fundamentally gendered experience.
In emphasis and values, according to William Chafe, women and men reformers were
dramatically different.
12
For men, as Paula Baker put it, "The business corporation
provided the model for the new liberalism," while women "took the family and small
community as an ideal."
13
Long described by the somewhat patronizing rubric of
"municipal housekeeping," feminist municipal reform in the early 20th century has more
recently been recognized not as an adjunct to the ostensibly mainstream Progressivism
practiced by men, but as a fully realized (if not fully implemented) ideology in its own
right, "rooted in social justice, social welfare, and responsiveness to the everyday needs
of all the city's residents," to quote from Maureen Flanagan's study of Progressive-era
Chicago.
14
To Philip Ethington, the efforts of women Progressives were not only
distinctive for the concrete programs they put in place, but also "portended the utter
dissolution of the patriarchal public-private boundaries that had restricted the citizenship
of women and sustained liberal political thought, law, and practice since John Locke.
15

39
The revised understanding of Progressivism as diverse in its motives, its
participants, and its results provides a useful foundation for considering the varieties of
reform that grappled with street construction in Los Angeles. At least four distinct sets
of ideas influenced public discourse about urban spatial reform in the city during the
Progressive period: combating urban congestion; advancing the City Beautiful
Movement and establishing the profession of city planning; feminism and the assertion of
women's citizenship; and the anti-railroad doctrine that propelled California Progressives
to their most significant electoral victories. Despite their differences, most Progressive
reformers shared a readiness for government to intervene in social problems and a faith in
rational solutions devised by experts, two of the broad commonalities in Progressive
thought identified by McCormick and Rodgers. Progressives were "scientific centralizers
at heart," in the words of Robert Johnston.
16

In Progressive-era Los Angeles, different approaches to urban spatial reform took
on equally diverse institutional forms. City government established new agencies,
amended the statutory basis of existing ones, and undertook new initiatives with purview
over aspects of transportation in the city. These innovations tended to cancel each other
out, undermine one another, or suffer from a critical lack of resources or authority to
carry out their programs that concerned transportation. Contributing further to the
institutional complexity were the efforts of private organizations, which formed various
alliances with public agencies, supported or opposed various public initiatives, and
undertook their own programs independent of public authority, and at times in conflict
with it. Institutional confusion bred delays and the jockeying for political advantage, and

40
the bruising highway politics of the 1920s sorted out the reform efforts put in place
during the prior two decades. Before considering in detail how these reform efforts
played out in the street politics of Los Angeles, it is useful to survey briefly the origins
and constituencies of the local agencies that embodied the different aspects of
Progressive spatial reform.

The Evil of Congestion
The fight against congestion had its roots in the efforts to ameliorate crowded and
unsanitary conditions in workingclass neighborhoods, beginning in London in the 1860s.
One approach pioneered by English philanthropist-reformers was to enact structural
requirements for tenement buildings, such as minimum standards for light, ventilation
and plumbing, a strand of reform that American Progressives pursued with some success,
as in the New York City Tenement Law of 1901.
17
The Garden City Movement also
originated in England, with the writings of Ebenezer Howard, who advocated the
dispersion of dense urban settlement into a pattern of detached centers, each surrounded
by belts of agriculture.
18
Historian Mark Foster traced how planners in the United States
fastened onto the automobile as the means to link these dispersed garden cities.
According to Foster, planners viewed the car as a beneficial ally in their attempts to
deconcentrate urban settlement, based primarily on an analysis of planners speeches and
publications in professional journals. More recently, an examination of efforts to combat
"the congestion evil" in a single city, by planning scholar Asha Weinstein, provided a

41
more nuanced picture that showed a range of opinions on the part of planners, as well as a
mixed record of success in the adoption of their plans.
19

In southern California, boosters recast anti-congestion rhetoric as a way to
contrast the region with the crowded cities of the Great Lakes and the Atlantic seaboard.
As Los Angeles real estate impressario Harry Culver told his sales force: "Whenever you
can take a family out of an apartment house, out of the dust, dirt and smoke of a crowded
city . . . and place that family in a fresh, pure, health-giving district in a home of its own,
I want to say to you that you are not only starting that family out on the road to success,
but you are rendering a service to the community and a service to humanity."
20

Arguments against congestion lost their connection with Progressive reform and became
another way to promote Los Angeles at the expense of earlier-developed cities. To
Culver and his ilk, street and highway construction primarily represented a means to
increase the marketability of lots and houses, as well as the region as a whole, essentially
the same motivation that produced the chaos decried by the city's streets superintendent
in 1889. Subdividers and developers provided the support for private organizations that
promoted road construction, including the Community Development Association and the
Automobile Club of Southern California.
Their main ally in the public sector was the agency responsible for designing and
building roads, the Engineering Bureau of the city's Department of Public Works. The
city engineers did not view themselves as captive to the real estate industry, nor were
they, but they valued support from the real estate sector when it helped secure approval
for insfrastructure projects that the engineers proposed. The engineers were "scientific

42
centralizers" with a vengeance, predisposed to the conception of urban infrastructure as
integrated systems, and they produced as many comprehensive street plans as their more
celebrated counterparts from the nascent field of city planning.
21
The Los Angeles
engineers, however, diverged from the Progressive planning approach in two significant
ways. They created broad-scaled plans by the assemblage of individual, localized
projects that reflected topography, existing traffic patterns, and a sense of the political
feasibility of specific roads, rather than imposing an idealized view of the city on the
complex urban fabric. Nor were the engineers thwarted when the comprehensive
schemes failed to win approval or adequate resources. They would build one road at a
time, whether or not the project fit into a master plan, and even when an individual
projects completion would undermine the intent of a master plan. Their strength in the
arena of street construction was based not on the ability to project a unified vision of the
city, but on their mastery of the technical and bureaucratic processes of gaining approval
for specific construction projects, a capability that was thoroughly appreciated by the real
estate industry.

The City Beautiful, the City Planned
The City Beautiful Movement also had its origins in the perception of misery and
vice among the urban poor. Rather than improving the lot of tenement dwellers by direct
action to improve their residences and neighborhoods, the architects and planners who
articulated the City Beautiful Movement believed, according to Paul Boyer, that city
dwellers "must somehow be brought to perceive themselves as members of cohesive

43
communities knit together by shared moral and social values."
22
By creating a beautiful
urban landscape, they would inspire civic virtue among its residents, and reformers
previously concerned with corruption in government, exploitation of labor, and other
social causes "quickly embraced the concept of the city beautiful as an American goal,"
as John Reps put it.
23
Beautification would not only inspire moral rectitude among the
poor, but also make the city more inviting to the middle and upper classes, and stake a
claim for cultural equivalence between the United States and Europe (a claim that, in
retrospect, seems mortally undermined by the seemingly rote adherence to the Beaux
Arts and Neoclassical architectural styles then current in Europe). The 1893 Columbian
Exposition in Chicago and the 1901 Plan for the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C. were
the first attempts to reflect all these ideas in tangible designs for actual places, and much
of what followed under the banner of the City Beautiful was based on the creation of
similarly concentrated cores of institutional, cultural and ceremonial use. "The civic
center's beauty would reflect the souls of the city's inhabitants, inducing order, calm and
propriety," as William Wilson described the reform objective embedded in such plans.
24

In the iconic City Beautiful proposals, such as Daniel Burnhams 1909s plan for
Chicago, development of the civic center was closely connected with the rationalization
of traffic circulation to access the institutional core of the city and to abet the
movement of vehicles throughout the residential and commercial districts.
25
Circulation
plans typically took the form of dedicated arteries inserted into the urban fabric, often in
the form of diagonal boulevards that sliced through previously built-up areas. This
ideology of circulation also featured the establishment of preemptive street patterns to

44
guide subsequent development and the rationalization of existing facilities, including the
consolidation of rail networks and the widening of streets.
26

In Los Angeles, civic-minded architects and planners devoted enormous energy
and expense to proposals for the coordinated design of the government and institutional
buildings clustered in the north end of downtown.
27
They also participated in the related
efforts to establish planning principles to shape development throughout the city, starting
with the formation of the Municipal Arts Commission in 1903, followed by the City
Planning Committee in 1910, and its successor, the City Planning Commission, in 1920.
All of these agencies commissioned plans that included new street layouts, and the
planning commission attempted to coordinate the opening of new streets and the
widening of existing ones on a citywide basis.

Organized Womanhood
Middleclass and elite clubwomen lent their efforts to the City Beautiful
Movement as part of their broader participation in municipal reform and urban spatial
reform. In Los Angeles, the largest and most active women's organizations were the
Friday Morning Club and the Ebell Club. These clubs were the incubators for a
"reformist political culture" in which women agitated for a host of reforms, notably
suffrage, but also including such social hygiene issues as milk inspection and the
regulation of tenement construction in Los Angeles. Through a combination of volunteer
participation and political pressure, the citys clubwomen also established kindergartens
in the city's schools and English classes for immigrant women.
28
"Organized

45
womanhood," as the clubwomen called themselves, asserted a distinctive kind of
citizenship that sought to reconcile moral womanhood with the active, public, political
sphere previously reserved to men. For women carving out a public role for themselves
-- moving across the boundary from the private to the public sphere, as Ethington put it --
the appearance and uses of public space were of paramount significance. Public places
were not only the setting for political action, but their improvement and beautification
also tied women's identity as public actors to civic progress in the most tangible way. By
creating civic beauty the clubwomen would also transform social and political life, and
transform themselves as well into civic persons, citizens who had the power of social
progress in their hands, according to Gayle Gullett.
29

Spatial reform on the part of organized womanhood initially involved the
promotion of playgrounds for poor and workingclass youth. Like social hygiene
programs such as kindergartens and school lunches, making fresh air and wholesome
exercise available was another way to "mitigat[e] the harsher aspects of urban life for
children."
30
In eastern and midwestern cities, putting that goal into practice brought
women reformers into confrontation with the city master plans that tended to follow the
vision of the commercial elite by emphasizing large, expensive, centralized facilities,
rather than providing convenient access to recreation for all residents.
31
Such gendered
conflicts did not erupt into public disputation in Los Angeles, in large part because the
clubwomen won recognition as a constituency to be heeded in planning issues; they could
hardly rail against established authority once they had become a part of it. In 1904 they
persuaded the city council to establish the Playground Commission, and the initial board

46
of five members included two woman appointees, one from the Friday Morning Club and
one from the Ebell Club. Even the Los Angeles Times, no friend of reformers,
acknowledged the effectiveness of the commission, though in giving credit to the
commission the anonymous reporter could not resist an offhand slur against other
reformers viewed as more talk than action. According to the Times, the commissions
first annual report Reads more like a Hull House suggestion of things to be done than an
official record of work actually accomplished."
32
Further evidence of the inclusion of
women in planning issues can be found in the city charter-reform language that in 1903
established the Municipal Arts Commission to review public construction proposals.
Appointments to the commission would be made regardless of sex, the only such
provision governing any of the sixteen commissions in city government.
33

The appointment of clubwomen to agency boards offered a partial solution to the
awkward fact of women's exclusion from the political process. They could not vote or
hold elective office, but they could accept appointments to public commissions, and that
became the means by which Progressive politicians rewarded their women supporters, as
well as the means by which women reformers could serve a formal role in the institutions
of government.
34
Clubwomen held leadership roles in city planning bodies until the mid-
1920s, when they abruptly disappeared from any formal role in infrastructure policy and
urban spatial reform. Their withdrawal resulted partly from choice, as the clubwomen
reoriented their civic reform agenda away from public action; partly from the
streamlining of city government, in which diverse interests were subsumed within the
stated goal of more efficient government; and partly from the ascendance of engineers in

47
road policy at a time when the definition of the engineering profession was being drawn
explicitly to exclude women. While it is impossible to point out specific policy
objectives in infrastructure and transportation that reflected feminist reform ideas, as
Maureen Flanagan has done for Chicago, this disjunction in the mid-1920s serves to
emphasize the extent to which road and freeway construction in the city became an
exclusively male domain. The influence of women reformers in street and highway
policy is most firmly grasped as a matter of unfulfilled potential, in the proposals that
went forward after the mid-1920s that might have turned out differently if they had been
subject to review by clubwomen, such as taking land from schoolyards and playgrounds
for the creation of Whittier Boulevard.

Curbing the Railroad
In his study of railroad opposition in California, William Deverell exposed the
Progressives anti-railroad ideology as a mostly empty rhetorical device that was honed
to perfection by the coalition of reformers united in the gubernatorial candidacy of Hiram
Johnson in 1910. The Southern Pacific Railroad made an ideal enemy because it already
had a perfidious reputation, most recently thanks to the sensational corruption trials
prosecuted by Johnson himself in 1907. The anti-railroad campaign also made good
politics because it promised something that already existed: the Southern Pacific had
been substantially defanged by the regulatory authority granted the state in the
constitution of 1879 and the subsequent establishment of the Railroad Commission.
Though Johnson relentlessly hammered the railroad during the campaign, once he

48
became governor he did not unleash the dogs of anti-trust, anti-railroad legislation,
wrote Deverell, He did not have any to turn loose.
35

Anti-railroad politics worked at the municipal level too, but with different
enemies and different goals on the part of the reformers. Los Angeles Progressives such
as Meyer Lissner and John Randolph Haynes hoped ultimately to establish municipal
ownership of utilities; bending the operation and expansion of the locally based street
railway companies to municipal control was part of that agenda. The reformers gained
crucial support from the genuine grievances that the riding public brought against the
street railways, such as crowded and dirty streetcars, a limited selection of routes, and too
few streetcars plying those routes. A ballot proposition to create the citys Public Utility
Commission won overwhelming approval in 1909.
36

The concurrence of rising automobile use, urban spatial reform, and anti-railroad
Progressivism has produced the interpretation that automobiles were the favored means
of urban transportation among Progressives. Scott Bottles portrayed automobiles as a
progressive piece of urban technology and a democratic alternative to the inadequacy
of public transportation, wielded by Progressives against the street railway companies
that dominated mechanized urban transportation in the early 20
th
century.
37
While not
denying the valid criticisms of trolley service in Los Angeles, the more encompassing
view of Progressive spatial reform presented here suggests that the automobile was not
viewed as a panacea for urban problems and was not invested with democratic political
implications, even by those who fought the hardest to limit the power of the rail
companies. The inability of city government to put in place an adequate infrastructure to

49
accommodate rising automobile use is one sign that the automobile did not benefit from
any privileged status in the public policy of transportation. Another is that the people
who ran the Public Utilities Commission did not attempt to eliminate the trolleys but
worked consistently to improve their performance. The city engineers also counted the
railroad and trolley companies as valuable allies in some of their most ambitious highway
schemes, from the creation of Venice Boulevard to the construction of the Los Angeles
River bridges. Public policy and public opinion did not take a crucial turn away from the
street railway and toward the automobile in Progressive-era Los Angeles. The opposition
of road versus rail is an after-the-fact construction that simplifies a complex reality into a
plot for historical melodrama.
38

Anti-railroad politics did have a profound impact on street and highway
construction in Los Angeles, but primarily to hinder rather than to encourage it. The
Vrooman Act, an 1885 state statute, gave property owners the right to approve or reject
municipal infrastructure improvements, primarily as a device to keep taxes low. It was
not only a formidable obstacle to the expansion of sewer and street systems, but
constrained rail construction too, because rail improvements usually involved street work
that could be blocked by the adjacent property owners. The rail companies had to
navigate a series of neighborhood-level referenda in order to undertake any expansion
plans in urban areas, which was why they lobbied to overturn the statute. They won its
repeal in 1909, just before Hiram Johnsons election as governor. In one of its only
meaningful acts of railroad regulation, the Johnson administration reinstated the
substance of the Vrooman Act in the Improvement Act of 1911.
39
Despite the fact that

50
the act was targeted against rail companies, not City Beautiful planners, the property-
owner autonomy of the 1911 act made it very difficult for municipal agencies to obtain
approval for comprehensive street plans, no matter how rational they might have been.
In one of the most stark contradictions within Progressivism, anti-railroad politics
trumped City Beautiful planning initiatives, and one of the few concrete actions by the
California Progressives to regulate the rail companies also stymied the efforts to build
streets and highways for the automobile.

Considering the full range of Progressive reform initiatives that shaped the
municipal response to rising automobile use, the picture that emerges is unavoidably one
of inconsistency in law and confusion in institutional authority. Between 1903 and 1920,
ordinances and charter amendments created no fewer than four new arms of city
government with some purview over street and highway policy the Municipal Arts
Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the City Planning Committee, and the City
Planning Commission. Far from the consensus in favor of the automobile asserted by
Mark Foster and Scott Bottles and other scholars, the ideological and institutional
dissonance reflected a fundamental ambivalence over increasing the area devoted to
public rights-of-way in order to create dedicated arteries for cars and trucks.
The one place where such ambivalalence did not exist was the Engineering
Bureau of the citys Public Works Department. Not that the city engineers particularly
favored one means of transportation over another, but they were less preoccupied with
broad policy issues than with the practical politics of building one road at a time. The

51
engineers had pursued this incrementalist agenda since automobiles had first appeared on
the city streets, and continued it through, and beyond, the period of Progressive reform
attempts. This continuity on the part of those who were directly concerned with the
construction of streets and highways helps resolve the conundrum that historians confront
in trying to explain how the highway programs beloved by high-minded Progressives
devolved into brutal intrusions in the landscape. The ascendance of automobiles in
infrastructure policy was not a matter of Progressivism gone sour, but the work of city
engineers who pieced together the approval for individual projects on a case-by-case
basis, without anyone ever deciding in a public or a broadly participatory process that
cars would be the favored means of transportation. The tactics of the engineers were
shaped most significantly by the stubborn opposition that generally prevailed against
extensive highway proposals. As the city engineers contended with a broad scope of
competing viewpoints and strategies of resistance, they developed and later articulated
the political, financial and technical strategies that would enable further construction of
major thoroughfares. The detailed examination of street construction in Los Angeles thus
begins with a look at those obstacles confronted by the city engineers and the Progressive
reformers of the early 20
th
century: the anti-urban and anti-development legacy of 19
th
-
century infrastructure policy, and the culture of extreme economic individualism that
configured the politics of space in Los Angeles.

The Nineteenth-Century Background and the Origins of Urban Spatial Reform

52
In 1850, after the annexation of California from Mexico, the state legislature
granted a city charter that would configure local government in Los Angeles from that
time forward, despite the brief survival of some practices from the period of Mexican rule
and the continued participation in local government by some individuals from the prior
period. The main feature of the charter was that the Common Council (later City
Council) exercised fundamental authority over all municipal functions, a feature that
would remain unchanged in the Home Rule Charter granted in 1889. Roads and bridges
did not much occupy the council or the skeletal administrative offices of the city, but the
nascent government nonetheless rendered several key decisions that would reverberate
for generations with regard to how people moved around Los Angeles.
40

Most significantly, in 1854 the council ceded all rights to the lands of the city to
the residents, without reserving municipal property or easements for any purpose. That
meant that every decision to open a new road or widen an existing one would also
constitute a real estate decision, as the land or the right to use it would have to be
acquired from private property owners. The council also retained to itself the authority to
determine the alignment, width and grade (elevation) of all streets, even after establishing
the Board of Public Works (1872), and the offices of the city engineer (1872) and the
superintendent of streets (1873). In setting these specifications, the council delineated the
basic characteristics of numerous streets that would survive down to the present day.
41

The great majority of street construction came at the behest of landowners, who
would then pay for the work through special assessments on their property. The Board of
Public Works was a standing committee of five council members, not a true

53
administrative body. It reviewed street petitions and made recommendations to the full
council but did not see every proposal. Individuals and groups of citizens organized as
improvement districts sent proposals, and protests against others' proposals, directly to
the council, which could act without any participation by the Board of Public Works.
The city engineer was an elected officer who was charged with the survey of all public
improvements and keeping the records to document the specifications for construction.
The superintendent of streets, appointed by the council, served as a quality-control
inspector to assure that construction followed the plans approved by the council. The
engineer and street superintendent worked together to determine the boundaries of
special-assessment districts set up to pay for street improvements, to secure warrants
from property owners for the special tax increments to pay for the work, and to release
those warrants to pay the contractors when the work was completed. Though a great deal
of money tens of thousands of dollars a year in the 1880s -- passed through city
accounts in this process, none of it ever appeared on the city's books because city
officials in effect acted as agents for the property owners. The city's street network
reflected this lack of coordinated planning and the priority accorded to taxpayers' wishes
rather than a comprehensive view of transportation. The "chaotic state" of the city's
streets reported by the street superintendent in 1889 had resulted from the speculative
excesses of the mid-1880s real estate bubble, when competing proposals had been
approved for the same streets and city government lacked any comprehensive mechanism
to track the progress of various construction projects.
42

54
The city's imperfect administration of street construction was not merely a local
matter, but also reflected state policies that constrained the ability of municipal
government to initiate and fund infrastructure. In urban construction issues, the state
legislature generally followed the wishes of the San Francisco delegation, for whom the
dominant consideration was to keep taxes low. As historian Terrence McDonald
observed, the result was a "poisonous anti-state atmosphere," in which the legislature
made it extremely difficult for local governments to build public improvements. The
main statute that embodied these principles was the Vrooman Act of 1885, which
required a series of petitions, public notices, hearings, ordinances, judicial findings, and
contract proceedings to regulate any street-construction project that included the
acquisition of land for opening a new right-of-way or widening an existing one. In order
for a project to reach fruition, the frontage owners had to proceed resolutely through a
process that could take as many as 15 steps to complete if there were objection from any
property owners, and consumed a minimum of two years even without any protest.
43

The city government's role in transportation also included various types of
agreements with railroads and street railways, especially the latter. The primary
municipal function was to award franchises allowing rail operations on city streets, a
responsibility that was also shaped by state statutes and regulations and the need to
coordinate with the state Railroad Commission. The citys first horse-drawn street
railway opened in 1874. For the next twenty-five years, the proliferation of horse lines,
cable railways and, starting in the 1890s, electric trolleys, shaped the direction and extent
of the city's physical development as much as any other factor. By erecting the first

55
durable bridges over the Los Angeles River, rail entrepreneurs opened the east-side
neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights and Boyle Heights for real estate development and
fixed the locations of the river crossings. Railway promotion also tended to stimulate the
improvement of major streets, because railcars performed better on level grades, and the
rail companies sought to avoid having to tear up tracks to accommodate road construction
that came after rail installation. Thus a mid-1880s scheme to develop Belmont Heights
(northwest of downtown) by means of a cable railway also entailed substantial street
construction. The franchise had been awarded for a line along Second Street, but Second
Street was "strictly imaginary," a barely discernible path through the chaparral, and the
company had to create more than a mile of improved highway according to the city's
specifications in order to fulfill the franchise terms. Because the Vrooman Act required
that street railways pay one-third the cost of improving any street on which their lines
ran, property owners who desired grading or paving often welcomed the chance to
economize on the construction by cooperating with the railways. The opening, widening,
and surfacing of Sunset Boulevard in 1894 benefited from just this kind of coordination.
44

The integration of street and railway construction that accounted for some of the
city's largest infrastructure projects did not always manifest cooperation between the
parties, but had an element of coercion to it. Property owners could band together to
initiate street improvements beyond those sought by rail companies. When the rail
operators attempted to avoid what they viewed as excessive payments for street
construction, the city council was consistently able to prevail because of the state statutes
governing street assessments. Property owners could also prevent the construction of

56
new track routes or the upgrade of existing ones by protesting against the accompanying
street improvements. That was the background for the railroad-led repeal of the
Vrooman Act in 1909 and its reinstatement in 1911 by the Hiram Johnson administration.
The Improvement Act of 1911 constrained the rail companies even more strictly than did
the previous statute by designating the city engineer to serve as agent for any rail operator
in street improvement proceedings, a statutory privilege that Los Angeles city engineers
learned to wield adroitly in later decades. For the anti-railroad Progressives united under
Governor Johnson, the principles behind the Vrooman Act and its successors represented
an effective way to restrain the actions of the rail companies that played the role of villain
in the political drama the Progressives sought to enact.
45

The ability of property owners to thwart rail expansion fit perfectly into this larger
picture of infrastructure development. Despite the completion of such major projects as
Second Street, Sunset Boulevard, and the first generation of river bridges, the structure of
authority for street construction still privileged opposition over approval. That suited a
citizenry disposed toward lower rather than higher taxes and toward the careful
expenditure of public funds. Citizens could protest on any basis from the width of the
road, to the extent of damages awarded, to the composition of the pavement.
Abandonment of road proposals was more likely than completion. The council, the
Board of Public Works, the street superintendent, and the city engineer all operated in a
reactive mode, without the explicit authority and apparently without any inclination to
consider the broader implications of a network of infrastructure that took its shape
according to the profit opportunities of real estate investors and railway entrepreneurs, as

57
modified by pockets of resistance. While a resident could obtain quick action from the
street superintendent to force a railway company to fill a pothole between its tracks, there
was no mechanism to force reconsideration of subdivision plans that produced offset
intersections and thus looming traffic problems along major thoroughfares, even when
citizens alerted officials to the matter. Along Central Avenue, for instance, local
residents in 1899 asked the city council to withhold approval of a new subdivision that
would cause the misalignment of corners at 41
st
, 42
nd
and 43
rd
streets, to no avail.
46

Not that Los Angeles was unique in this regard: the emergence of the city
planning profession and the City Beautiful movement in the early years of the 20th
century were national trends that responded to heightened concern over unregulated
growth and the resulting form of cities, the spatial proximity of diverse people and land
uses, and the aesthetics of public places. At the same time, the availability of low-cost,
mass-produced automobiles would alter how people traveled in Los Angeles and raise
new technical, administrative and financial issues that city government would need to
address.

The Los Angeles City Engineers
The Engineering Bureau of the Department of Public Works grew faster than the
city it helped to build. Partly from an amalgamation of construction, inspection and
maintenance functions that were previously dispersed among a host of administrative
bodies and council committees, and partly to cope with the explosive demand for its
services, the department staff increased sixfold between 1900 and 1920, from 200 to

58
1,200. Besides streets, the city engineer had responsibility for sewers, sidewalks, street
lighting, city buildings, and the approval of subdivision maps. The bulk of the
departments staff were the laborers who maintained streets, sewers and storm drains, but
the department could nonetheless claim to employ the largest number of professional
engineers of any municipal government on the west coast, and the Streets Division alone
consisted of 30 engineers and draftsmen in 1922.
47

The largest source of new engineering staff was the city water department, which
had charge of the construction of the Owens Valley Aqueduct when that project began in
1907. In 1909 the city council moved jurisdiction over aqueduct construction to the
Board of Public Works and the city engineer, though the chief of the aqueduct project,
William Mulholland, continued to act with near-total autonomy in the prosecution of the
work. The water department assumed operating control of the aqueduct upon its
completion in 1913, but most of the professional staff from the construction project
remained with the engineering agency. They were an influential group in the agency due
to their numbers, the importance of the aqueduct in the fortunes of the city, and their
association with Mulholland, who was perhaps the most illustrious man in Los Angeles at
the time. Homer Hamlin, who served as city engineer from 1906 to 1917, also held an
appointment as consulting engineer to the aqueduct project during its construction. Two
of his successors as city engineer during the 1920s had risen to prominence by designing
and constructing parts of the aqueduct, and aqueduct veterans also supervised many of
the functions within the engineering agency.
48

59
The aqueduct project also embodied the two approaches to municipal engineering
that co-existed in the agency. Aqueduct veterans carried the traditions of wilderness
engineering into the work culture of the engineering department, such as their relish for
massive landscape transformation, a preference for action over negotiation, and an
impatience with the coalition-building and compromise that proved necessary in the
urban setting. At the same time, Mulholland ran the aqueduct project as a self-
consciously modern, bureaucratic enterprise directed toward administrative efficiency.
He set up a structure for managing the vast undertaking that served as its own
government, with internal departments for accounting, supply, engineering, legal affairs
and construction.
49
Rarely did the two approaches devolve into a stereotypical conflict
between paper-pushing, dissembling bureaucrats versus muddy-booted, action-oriented
engineers. They often complemented each other, notably in the person of Mulholland
himself. William Mulholland clearly relished the transformative impact of his work, and
he displayed legendary impatience with administrative concerns beyond his immediate
purview. But if he savored his reputation as a man of action, he was also a skilled
bureaucrat who deftly managed the boards to whom he reported and delegated
responsibility through a hierarchical organizational structure.
50

A series of charter amendments between 1905 and 1911 structured the
roadbuilding regime that remained in place until the early 1930s. Largely the work of
good-government reformers led by Meyer Lissner and John Randolph Haynes, the
amendments were intended to remove politics from public works by changing the key
positions from elected to appointed posts. The Board of Public Works Commissioners

60
would no longer be a committee of city councilmen, but an appointed body that was
expected to work fulltime at the job. The city engineer also became an appointed
position, to be designated by the public works commissioners. The reformers attempted
to preclude cronyism and assure appropriate expertise by the requirement that the
appointee be a university-trained civil engineer with at least five years experience.
51

The city engineer presided over a professional staff with diverse experience in
design and construction. Railroad engineering was the most common background. Most
of the supervisory staff of the department through the 1920s had worked in the survey of
railroad routes, the building of railroad trackbeds, bridges and tunnels, or the construction
of cable and electric street railways. Hydrological survey and water supply engineering
for the United States Reclamation Service or city governments also appeared on the
resumes of the engineering staff, as well as harbor improvements and wharf construction,
mining, and the design and fabrication of structural steel. The top officials all had
extensive administrative credentials, and as the 1920s progressed the influence of the
aqueduct veterans waned as the Board of Public Works and the city council began to
value prior managerial experience more highly than loyalty to the aqueduct builders.
Hamlins immediate successor, Andrew Hansen (served 1917-1920), was one of the
aqueduct engineers who had gained his supervisory experience as a division chief during
its construction. After Hansen the board and council turned to a veteran of the Army
Corps of Engineers, John Griffin (served 1920-1924). An old hand from the aqueduct
project, Harvey Van Norman, came over from the water department to head the agency
for a brief interregnum before the appointment of another Army engineer, John Shaw

61
(served 1925-1930). Shaws successor, John Jessup (served 1930-1933), was an
experienced administrator who had been city engineer of Berkeley for 12 years and
president of a small college before heading the Los Angeles engineering agency.
52

Henry Z. Osborne, Jr. and the Streets of Los Angeles
In the early 20
th
century, Henry Z. Osborne, Jr., was by far the most important
member of the citys engineering establishment concerned with streets and the policies
that governed their construction. He specialized in street work from the time he joined
the department in 1900 until he left in 1919, and he was the first head of the Streets
Division when it was established as an operating unit in 1913. After receiving his degree
in civil engineering from Stanford, Osborne studied law at the University of Southern
California before going to work for the city. Distinctive among his peers as the only one
with legal training, he also brought unusual political connections to the job. His father
was a Republican party stalwart who edited the Los Angeles Evening Express from 1884
to 1897 before devoting himself fulltime to politics (Republican state central committee)
and the largesse available to the politically connected (collector of customs at the port
and United States marshal for Los Angeles). Osborne, Sr., was a founder of the Los
Angeles Chamber of Commerce and he served on its board between 1910 and 1920,
when his son was pioneering an alliance between the chamber and the city engineer. The
elder Osborne was elected U. S. representative from Californias tenth congressional
district in 1914, but far more important to his son was his appointment to the citys Board
of Public Works in that same year.
53

62
Osbornes access through his father to the Chamber of Commerce and the board
overseeing the engineering department gave him a platform for policy recommendations,
but did not alter the fundamental structure of authority in which he operated. The city
council stood preeminent in all matters of city policy and solidified its role between 1911
and 1915 with new regulations to tighten council control over the growing bureaucracy.
In 1913 the council started meeting daily instead of weekly, which was in part a response
to the increasing pace of public business, but which also reflected the councils intention
to manage closely the affairs of the city instead of delegating them to civil service
employees like the engineering staff. The council chipped away at the civil-service
protection recently established for the city engineer by reserving to itself the authority to
set the engineer's salary, and stipulating that the council could issue orders directly to the
city engineer without having to go through the Board of Public Works.
54
The city
engineering department thus operated in an environment of built-in tension between
expertise and politics, and between whatever clout the engineers could muster versus the
plenary authority of the city council.
That tension tended to intensify another contradiction that frustrated the engineers
their attempts to keep up with the relentlessly increasing pace of everyday duties
concerned with building and maintaining streets versus their desire to anticipate growth
and to shape infrastructure accordingly. Adapting road technology to the new demands
of the automobile by itself challenged the resources of the city and its engineering
establishment. Before the advent of internal combustion engines and rubber-tired
vehicles, the optimum road surface was the packed gravel known as macadam.

63
Consisting of layers of freshly crushed stone, macadam would solidify under the slow,
steady pressure of the steel-rimmed wheels used on horse-drawn vehicles that traveled at
no more than seven or eight miles per hour. The sharp edges of the rock would break off
and be pulverized into dust, which would pack the interstices between the stones to create
a durable, water-resistant surface. Rubber tires traversing these roads at speeds of 20 and
30 miles per hour produced suction that pulled the binding dust out of macadam road
surfaces. The gravel would loosen, traffic would create ruts, and the penetration of water
into the subsurface would aggravate the deterioration.
55

Oiling the gravel served adequately to preserve the surface in less-traveled rural
areas, but city traffic required hard pavements, as Osborne observed in 1913:
Rutted or ragged oiled or macadam roads furnish an increasingly serious problem
of maintenance and convey to the eye of our thousands of prospective inhabitants
as well as to resident property owners an impression of inefficient construction
and poor practice which is by no means to the advantage of the municipality.

The following year Osborne and Hamlin adopted new specifications for street work,
proscribing the use of oiled gravel and requiring all pavement to consist of asphalt
surface on a concrete base. The department managed to pave between 50 and 80 miles of
road per year, an achievement which was nonetheless accompanied by an ever-increasing
backlog of pavement orders. By 1919, a little over 500 miles of the citys 2,700 miles of
public streets met the new paving standards. By driving up the cost of improvements,
hard pavements also increased the already difficult process of gaining approval for street
construction.
56

64

Figure 2: Major Roads in Los Angeles, 1914. Henry Osborne, Jr., recommended in 1915 a grid of boulevards that would
supersede the spotty development of streets. Source: Automobile Boulevards from Los Angeles to Venice and Santa Monica
(Los Angeles: Automobile Club of Southern California, 1914). Used with permission; all rights reserved.

65
Californias intricate street laws, as Osborne described them in 1913, afforded
three ways to pay for street improvements: direct appropriation from the citys general
operating fund, municipal bonds, or special assessments on the property owners who
would benefit from the work. The citys general fund came mostly from property taxes,
which the charter capped at a maximum rate of $1.25 per $100 of assessed value. Six
cents of that was set aside for public improvements, including not just streets but all
general-fund infrastructure expenditures, such as sewers, storm drains, bridges, and the
salaries of those charged with their design and construction oversight. It was an
inadequate amount to fund any but the most rudimentary street program. The charter also
placed a ceiling on the citys capacity to defray the cost of public works through the sale
of bonds. The overall debt limit was 15 percent of the assessed value of all real property
in Los Angeles, but four-fifths of that, or 12 percent of assessed value, was set aside for
revenue-producing projects, such as harbor improvements or hydroelectric generating
plants. Los Angeles could only issue debt up to three percent of the total assessed value
in the city for general government operations, which included street construction.
57

Political scientist Stephen Erie has observed that the local state served as a key
instrument of economic development in early 20th-century Los Angeles because city
voters overwhelmingly approved bond-issue referenda to pay for infrastructure.
58
Eries
case studies, however, all came from those revenue-producing functions that benefited
from the 12 percent debt limit rather than the three percent for general government that
included streets. Voters and public officials indeed borrowed eagerly against future
operating revenues in the form of wharfage fees and electric bills, but displayed extreme

66
reluctance to borrow against future property-tax revenues. Road projects therefore
differed significantly from the kinds of infrastructure in Eries analysis. Roads were the
orphans among public improvements and the exception to Eries argument that the local
state proved an effective instrument of development. Road construction would have to
find its financial support from the special assessment process as defined under the
Vrooman Act and its successors, which, as Osborne reported in 1913, Although having
its disadvantages, is in fact the only feasible and on the whole the best way to prosecute
the work.
59

Early in his career Osborne had published a critique of the Vrooman Act that
predicted with some accuracy how it would play out in a setting of urban growth, with
localized interests defeating comprehensive plans, and delays in approval inviting
unhealthy speculation.
60
The Improvement Act of 1911 did include a provision to
overcome property-owner protest by a four-fifths vote of the city council, but only for
right-of-way acquisition and not for construction costs. Its benefit was more symbolic
than tangible to those like Osborne, who wanted to hire labor and buy equipment and
materials to build roads. The 1911 act also allowed the city to pay for a project by selling
longterm bonds secured by future property taxes levied against all the real estate in the
city rather than only taxing within tightly drawn special-assessment districts. This
attempt to increase the chances of approval at the polls by minimizing the bite on
individual taxpayers did not succeed in Los Angeles, and every attempt to win approval
of the voters by using that provision failed.
61

67
As the widths of proposed streets grew larger in response to increasing
automobile use, another type of cost became common damage claims for properties
along the right-of-way. Widening often meant cutting back hills, which made gently
sloping front yards into precipitous rock faces or unstable embankments of soil.
Landowners won suits against the city for harm to the appearance of their property, for
loss of access to their property, and to recover the costs of regrading slopes or building
retaining walls. When the city lost such suits it had to pay the damages from the general
fund. The state legislature addressed this issue with the Improvement Act of 1913, which
allowed the city to include such damages in the special assessment for the project. In
effect, the property owners paid themselves for the damages, though in deferred
increments over the term of the bonds. While the 1913 act protected the city treasury
from unanticipated damage expenses for street construction, it did little to make property
owners more willing to support ambitious through-highway proposals.
62
This concern
over slopes and yards also demonstrates that authority and budgets for road construction
were not merely abstract considerations based on theories of the proper role of
government or the rights of citizens, but connected directly with such everyday matters as
where a homeowner could plant some flowers. Roadbuilding necessarily involved major
landscape transformation, and the residents of the city decided on a virtually block-by-
block basis how much of that transformation they were willing to abide.
The improvement acts of 1911 and 1913 updated the Vrooman Act and defined
the difficult regulatory setting for road construction that remained in place through the
mid-1920s, and with small changes until the late 1930s. Deciding which roads to pave or

68
where new roads should be opened or existing ones widened was thus a political process
that primarily involved property owners and the city council. For opening and widening
projects the city engineer's office had to certify the boundaries of the assessment districts
and provide specifications on roadway width, grading and pavement surface, but the
property owners usually contracted directly with construction companies to perform the
work. Once the city engineering office approved the results, the contractor could collect
payment from the property owners. It was a highly decentralized process in which
private citizens controlled the location and timing of street proposals and the city
engineering department provided the staff work to make the proposals technically
adequate. When Hamlin and the Board of Public Works appointed Osborne to head the
newly created Streets Division, for the first time Los Angeles had a single official with
purview over the roads and highways of the entire city. A disappointing picture awaited
him.

Boulevarding the City
In the spring of 1913, Osbornes first summary of pending road projects in Los
Angeles found that There are at present about 100 different proceedings for opening and
widening of streets, most of which are in the courts. The three largest projects were all
north-south arteries: widening and paving Silver Lake Parkway, between Griffith Park
and the Wilshire District; opening Arroyo Seco Parkway, along the streambed running
from the northeastern part of Los Angeles toward Pasadena; and widening Vermont
Boulevard, from Griffith Park to just south of Wilshire. The first two had originated with

69
the Parks Commissions plans to create a network of scenic parkways, and the Vermont
widening was promoted by the Chamber of Commerce and the Auto Club as a means to
create a north-south highway between the city and the harbor that did not terminate in
downtown. Osborne appreciated the arterial potential of all the projects and encouraged
them in the only way he could, by making them priorities for staff assignments. In that
first summary of pending projects, Osborne had to inform the board and council that
Silver Lake Parkway was held up in court, that Arroyo Seco Parkway was in abeyance
because of disagreements about how far the assessment district should extend, and that
the only reason there were no protests against the Vermont proposal was that the
assessment district had not been drawn up yet. The only major success in that first report
was the opening and widening of Santa Barbara Avenue (later Martin Luther King, Jr.
Boulevard), an east-west street south of the citys densely settled area. That only
happened because Los Angeles Railway Co., the intraurban street railway, had donated
the land for the highway, reserving a center strip for its tracks. Osborne also initiated
another through-highway project by canvassing property owners to extend Broadway
south from Tenth Street to provide another means to access the central business district.
63

Defeated projects continued to outnumber completed ones over the next four
years. The city eventually won its appeal to the state Supreme Court to set aside an
injunction against extending Broadway, and was able to open Central Avenue south of
Slauson because the industrial property owners in the area welcomed improved access for
motor trucks to their properties. Osborne obtained agreement from the Pacific Electric
Railway, the interurban carrier, to run an east-west highway on either side of its Venice

70
line and create another new arterial called Venice Boulevard, but objection from abutting
property owners stilled the idea in 1917. The Vermont widening was abandoned due to
protest, Silver Lake Parkway was abandoned when the opponents won their lawsuit
against the city, Arroyo Seco Parkway was in seemingly permanent limbo, and Osbornes
new plans to widen First and Temple streets west of downtown were defeated in court.
The protests against various projects included financial reasons, such as the extent of the
assessment district, the amount of damages awarded, and the rate of the assessment;
objections about the design and its impact on the surrounding area; preference for one
contractor over another; and simple resistance to change. As Osborne summarized: It
frequently takes an exasperatingly long time to overcome the obstacles in the way of
street improvements and as frequently the obstacles are beyond the citys control.
64
The
publics lack of appetite for major road construction offered a stunning contrast to the
promotional rhetoric on the part of the Chamber of Commerce and other visionaries of
growth, which asserted that Los Angeles was on the move, was forward-looking, was
building for a future of unbridled prosperity. In the coming years, the promoters of
growth would combat that broad opposition with an evolved set of specialized metaphors
that would recast the image of the city as an automotive metropolis.
Osborne started in 1914 to design a comprehensive network of arterial highways
and to work out legal and political tactics to overcome the resistance built into the
governance of street improvements. He envisioned a vast grid of thoroughfares covering
the Los Angeles basin, building on the few projects already in place, such as Santa
Barbara and Central avenues, and the cooperation of some (if not yet a majority) of the

71
property owners interested in the improvement of such routes as Vermont Avenue. The
Venice Boulevard proposal was part of this plan, as were an upgrade of Hoover Street
paralleling Vermont, Vernon Avenue paralleling Santa Barbara, and a plan to bypass the
downtown district with through highways at its edges. Temple, First and Second streets
would run northwest toward Hollywood. Mission Road, on the east bank of the Los
Angeles River, would provide the main outlet to the east and northeast for the industrial
and warehousing facilities along the railroads on either side of the river. High Line
Boulevard would run east-west at the harbor, to allow trucks to access that critical node
without adding to the traffic of the built-up parts of the city to the north. And when they
needed to get to or from downtown, they could use the new truck boulevard that
Osborne would create out of Alameda Street. Slauson and Florence avenues would carry
east-west industrial traffic to and from the growing industrial district in southeast Los
Angeles, in the vicinity of the newly opened Goodyear tire plant. These east-west
highways went all the way to the coast so that city residents could travel easily to the
beaches, and the alignments of proposed arteries were adjusted to provide ready access to
major inland recreational areas such as Exposition Park and Griffith Park. Osborne's
automotive transportation vision thus encompassed commerce, industry, recreation and
housing. It was based on the integration of highways and street railways, because rail
service determined the distribution of settlement density and traffic volume, and because
the rail companies already controlled linear rights-of-way in these crucial corridors and
had demonstrated their willingness to cooperate with highway development. Osborne
also saw the central business district as one center among many. It did not need to serve

72
as a transportation hub, and it would neither rise nor fall precipitously according only to
travel patterns.
65

Among Osborne's objections to the Vrooman Act and its successors, he
particularly lamented the lack of any method to construct a road that passed through more
than one jurisdiction, which particularly affected his later plans for Mission Road. He
also believed that the long interval for project approval would allow opportunities for
unproductive real estate speculation. A year into his duties overseeing street
construction, Osborne quixotically recommended charter amendments to the city council
in order to ease the process of highway approval, probably understanding that the council
was powerless to change a process established in state law. Nor could Osborne easily
come to terms with the paradox between his belief that engineering expertise offered the
best basis for planning infrastructure, and the political reality that made the engineers
subordinate to all the other participants in the process. Neither the city charter, the extant
orders of the city council, nor the direction provided by of the Board of Public Works
empowered him to make comprehensive recommendations such as the grid plan.
Osborne therefore worked the political channels outside of city government by soliciting
the Chamber of Commerce to petition the city council to undertake a plan for
boulevarding the entire city. Far from secretive or conspiratorial, he reported these
contacts to his superiors and to the city council by way of buttressing the support for his
program.
66

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the Chamber of Commerce in
the promotion of industrial development and urban growth in Los Angeles, especially in

73
securing public-sector support toward the provision of infrastructure. The Chambers
entry into Osbornes grid strategy in 1916 came during the height of its influence, in the
middle of the period framed by the Chamber-led efforts to capture federal resources for
the harbor in the 1890s and Boulder Dam in the 1930s, and immediately after the opening
of the Owens Valley Aqueduct, which the Chamber had also avidly promoted. The
Chamber played a pivotal role, but not a solitary one, as other organizations also
supported transportation development, notably the Automobile Club of Southern
California and the Community Development Association.
67

The Auto Club had been founded in 1900 as a group of well-to-do hobbyists and
incrementally moved toward a policy agenda that combined advocacy for regional
growth with a watchdog role over public expenditures on highways. Its directors had
lobbied for the charter amendment that changed the Board of Public Works from an
elected to an appointed body in the belief that the appointed board would be less
influenced by politics. In 1906, when it began to place the first directional signs for
motorists on the roads of southern California, the Auto Club adopted a de facto role in
highway planning, as it had to determine which routes constituted the principal
thoroughfares between Los Angeles and other communities throughout the region.
Though it campaigned for Los Angeles Countys first highway-bond referendum in 1908,
the Auto Club opposed a similar state measure in 1909 in the belief that the amount ($18
million) was not adequate for the stated purpose of creating a statewide highway network.
(That turned out to be correct, and two more statewide highway measures appeared on
the ballot, in 1915 for $25 million, and 1919, $40 million). Ernest East entered the

74
employ of the Auto Club in 1921 as its first staff engineer, establishing a fulltime
highway-policy oversight role for the organization (much later, East would produce his
own comprehensive plans for motorways). During the attempts to garner support for
boulevarding the city, the Auto Club represented potential political support rather a
source of technical advice, and in 1916 Osborne presented his plans to its board of
directors as part of his effort to bring more outside influence to bear on the city councils
deliberations.
68

A third private group that took an interest in highways, the Community
Development Association, was smaller and more exclusive than the Chamber or the Auto
Club. It was far less interested in policy prescription than in individual projects, such as a
proposal to rebuild Wilshire Boulevard that came to the ballot in 1924. These three
organizations differed in their administration: the Chamber had an extensive committee
structure that developed public-policy positions, and the Auto Club board was
responsible to a dues-paying membership that expected services such as maps and
insurance more than policy advocacy, while the CDA members acted with a much freer
hand than the other two. Membership overlapped among all of them, and such figures as
Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times and real estate developers Henry Keller and
William May Garland served on the boards of all three, at times simultaneously. The
three groups did not represent different interests but rather different facets of the citys
growth-oriented business sector that pursued a civic agenda inseparable from the pursuit
of profit. Despite their numerous successes and expanding influence, highway
construction remained a conspicuous disappointment. The combined efforts of the

75
Chamber and the Auto Club had been unable to salvage the aforementioned widening of
Vermont Boulevard from defeat at the hands of the abutting property owners, and
Osbornes grid proposal never even moved onto the docket of the city council.
69

Osbornes grid strategy had barely begun to unfold before the nations entry into
World War I interrupted all such schemes for domestic development. Military service
and the abrupt end of immigration from Europe diminished the availability of laborers to
take on construction work. Critical materials such as steel were commandeered for
weapons production and other war-related applications. The nations credit markets
tightened and municipal bonds secured by special assessments found a greatly reduced
pool of buyers. Street construction slowed down considerably, even the routine repaving
of existing rights-of-way, and grand schemes had to be postponed. The economic
dislocations following the war further delayed infrastructure development, but as the
1920s opened Los Angeles entered the period of its greatest rate of growth. The city
engineering office saw early signs of it as petitions for new roads and sewers more than
doubled between 1920 and 1921, and then increased again by more than 25 percent in
1922. Osborne had departed the engineering department in 1919 to become chief
engineer of the citys Public Utilities Commission, where he would continue to work
toward a master-planned approach to transportation in Los Angeles, including the
formation of the Traffic Commission. His successor as chief of street engineering, John
R. Prince, pursued a project-oriented rather than a comprehensive approach to highway
development. That was in part because of the many urgent duties that confronted him
during the citys headlong expansion, but also because the formulation of transportation

76
policy nominally belonged to the two new agencies that grew out of Progressive reform
efforts of the previous two decades, the Planning Commission and the Public Utilities
Commission.
70

The Strains of Progressivism
The Public Utilities Commission (PUC) was the governmental innovation that
most fully embodied the anti-railroad ideology of the Progressive coalition that propelled
Hiram Johnsons 1910 gubernatorial campaign. In Los Angeles, the primary advocates
for the creation of the PUC were the same group that organized support for Johnsons
coalition, the good-government reformers headed by Meyer Lissner. In 1907, they began
to press for an oversight agency that would set utility rates and investigate the operations
of utility companies. City voters approved a ballot proposition to establish the PUC in
1909, when Progressive candidates and platforms swept the city elections. Lissner served
as president of the new public utilities board. Its charge extended to all utilities that
operated in the city: telephone, telegraph, gas, electricity, street railways, and, after a few
years, the jitneys and buses that began to ply the streets.
71

The PUC was no panacea for what the reformers saw as the disorderly process of
railway development and the exploitative conduct of the railway firms. For one thing, the
state Railroad Commission already had jurisdiction over the operations and finances of
the street railways. After a flurry of court tests and legislative hearings, the priority of the
state agency was unequivocally established in 1914. For another, by the time the PUC
was established, the interurban Pacific Electric (PE) and the intracity Los Angeles

77
Railway (LARY) had already been built out close to their fullest extent, and the debt for
all that track construction and rolling stock severely constrained their finances. There
was no question as to the boards authority over the franchises granted by the city, but the
threat of revocation and the introduction of open bidding for franchises lacked genuine
sanction in comparison to the fait accompli of the existing rail infrastructure controlled
by the PE and the LARY. In 1919, the PUC advertised for bids when the PEs franchise
to operate on Sunset Boulevard came up for renewal. It turned out to be an empty
exercise, because any bidder other than the PE would have to purchase the existing
physical plant that the PE already had in place. The PE submitted the only bid, in the
nominal amount of $100, which the PUC correctly perceived as an affront to its authority.
Because the PUC lacked any meaningful regulatory bite, the city council balked at
keeping an investigative engineer on the PUC payroll, while Lissner and his cohorts
fought to maintain the independence of their hard-won oversight function. This contest
over the institutional character of the PUC was finally settled in 1919 by the appointment
of the most politically savvy and best-connected engineer in the city, Henry Osborne, Jr.,
who was well-known among the politicians on both sides of the issue because of his
family ties and his prior lobbying on behalf of boulevarding the city.
72

Osborne viewed regulation of automobile traffic as part of his charge at the PUC,
at least insofar as automobiles caused difficulties for streetcars trying to use the same
public rights-of-way. Sharing streets with automobiles had been one of the main
operational problems for streetcars after 1910, but there was no clear mandate for any
agency to address the issue. The City Planning Committee and the Streets Division of the

78
city engineering office represented attempts at least to study the infrastructure
implications of automobile use, but nobody believed that either was adequate to the task,
least of all the city council. The council appointed its own members to conduct
investigations and even to administer projects that arose from committee reports, such as
the Special Committee on Street Congestion (1912), which had mandated the relocation
of a PE line that ran through the crowded industrial corridor along the Los Angeles River.
Soon after joining the PUC in 1919, Osborne moved to rectify both the administrative
vacuum of street regulation and the practical problem of chronically jammed
thoroughfares by recommending a parking ban on downtown streets. The city council
enacted the ban but immediately watered it down after impassioned protests.
73

This failed attempt to enact a strict parking ban in downtown Los Angeles played
a central role in Scott Bottles portrayal of Progressive-era city-planning efforts as the
response to a broad consensus among citizens favoring one form of transportation over
another the automobile over the street railway. In order to make that case it has been
necessary to describe the automobile as a democratic piece of industrial technology that
offered a means to challenge the autocratic reign of the rail barons.
74
There are many
problems with this interpretation, starting with William Deverells observation that the
Progressives pledge to rein in the rail companies was mostly an empty promise
calculated to win votes and not a genuine program for reform.
75
Moreover, the author of
the parking ban, Henry Z. Osborne, Jr., did not frame it as a choice between modes of
transportation, but hoped to improve the circulation of both trolleys and automobiles by
removing parked cars from the roadways.
76
Osborne had a more encompassing view of

79
urban transportation than road versus rail: he had argued for a comprehensive road
system before proposing the parking ban, and he would be a principal architect of the
Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924. He did not have a sudden conversion against the
automobile in arguing for the parking ban in 1920 and then reconvert back again a short
time later, but saw both trolleys and automobiles as necessary components of
transportation in Los Angeles.
Most tellingly, the opponents of the ban did not express their objections in terms
of technological choice in transportation or curbing the power of the rail companies, but
in terms of access to shopping. Merchants decried the ban because it would discourage
shoppers who came downtown by automobile, and the shoppers who objected were
advancing their desires as consumers rather than their ideas as reformers.
77
To
comprehend the automobile, in Bottles terms, as a democratic alternative to mass
transit is to submit to the exhortations of advertising copywriters of the 1920s, who
sought to conflate consumption and democracy as a means of selling goods.
78
This
approach to marketing encouraged the notion that freedom of choice should be
perceived as an act more significantly exercised in the marketplace than in the political
arena, as Roland Marchand has put it.
79
But as we have seen, when given the choice to
spend their tax dollars for road networks to accommodate the automobile, citizens
consistently declined. People bought automobiles for many reasons, and we need not
interpret that purchase as a proxy vote for the tax-funded provision of highways or an act
of anti-railroad political import.

80
Urban spatial reform in Progressive-era Los Angeles proceeded from a set of
considerations rooted in the specific physical and political circumstances that the
reformers confronted rather than abstractions about democracy and its imputed
association with the automobile. As has been shown with respect to the Vrooman Act
and the statutes that succeeded it, anti-railroad politics did not necessarily translate into
pro-automobile infrastructure policy. The other main forum for Progressives with an
interest in the physical character of the city, the Planning Commission, was not motivated
by the animus toward rail corporations that resonated so powerfully in state politics and
the local agenda of the PUC, but rather by a broader collection of urban-reform
initiatives. The conflicts over transportation infrastructure that embroiled the Planning
Commission would not concern the relative merits of road versus rail, but institutional
competition between the planning and engineering agencies over who would determine
the location, the design, and the sequence of construction for major highways.
The earliest antecedent of the Planning Commission was the Municipal Art
Commission, which the city council created by ordinance in 1903. The commission
consisted of the mayor, the city engineer, the building inspector, and five unpaid citizen
appointees. The Municipal Art Commission was the only one among the sixteen civic
commissions in Los Angeles for which the enabling language specified that appointments
would be made regardless of sex, an unmistakable signal that the city council found it
impossible to ignore those women activists who had asserted a role for themselves in the
creation of urban space and the conditions governing its occupancy.
80

81
The members of the Municipal Art Commission were instrumental in arranging
for a consultation by Charles Mulford Robinson, the nationally prominent City Beautiful
planner. In 1907 he produced a cut-and-paste program that grafted onto Los Angeles
ideas drawn from Chicago architect and planner Daniel Burnham and the historicism of
Beaux-Arts Neoclassicism. Besides the obligatory clusters of civic and cultural
institutions, Robinson called for radial boulevards that emulated Baron Haussmanns
thoroughfares in Paris. These boulevards followed the traditional definition of broad
roadways with a center strip for plantings, all intended to convey a sense of elegance and
monumentality; he singled out Wilshire Boulevard as a candidate for this treatment. The
inspirational quality of Robinsons proposals was not diminished for their having been
recycled, and if political circumstances had permitted their implementation they indeed
would have produced a very different Los Angeles than the one that resulted. The
Municipal Art Commission was sufficiently inspired to include an abstract of Robinsons
work in its 1909 report that was printed for public distribution, along with Homer
Hamlins paean to the Neoclassically ornamented concrete bridge under construction to
carry North Broadway over the Los Angeles River, a call for more permanent highways,
and a correct prediction about the growth that would result from completion of the Owens
Valley Aqueduct. The commission was clearly aware of the obstacles to public
construction, and perhaps its most significant legacy was the call for a means to
coordinate the many private and public bodies concerned with the physical character of
the city.
81

82
The city council obliged with the formation of the City Planning Committee in
1910. This group brought together the many city boards and departments with
responsibility for public buildings and municipal facilities, as well as private groups with
an interest in the development of the city. The boards of public works, utilities, the
harbor, parks, and playgrounds were all represented, as well as the city council, the
library, and the art and housing commissions. The Federation of Improvement
Associations represented special assessment districts. Two organizations of Progressive
reformers each had a seat the Civic Association and the Municipal League. The two
leading womens clubs, the Friday Morning Club and the Ebell Club, were also invited to
place a representative on the committee. The strong connection between the Planning
Committee and Progressive reform was exemplified by the selection of Rev. Dana
Bartlett as the chair. The minister of Bethlehem Institutional Church, Bartlett had co-
founded the first settlement house in Los Angeles and enlisted in such diverse causes as
the establishment of an employment bureau and municipal baths. Undaunted by its
complete lack of staff, quarters or budget, the committee mapped out an imposing agenda
in its early meetings, as reported to the city council in January 1911:
Much thought is being given to parks, parkways, boulevards, street platting,
transportation, union station, subways and tunnels, civic center and beautifying of
public buildings and grounds, bridges and approaches, harbor with warehouses
and docks, municipal railway, river bed treatment, fountain and lighting systems,
industrial districts and model villages.

It was an impressive, even prescient, catalog of the planning and infrastructure issues that
the city would face in the coming years, and they asked for what they deemed an
adequate period to consider them fully: Your committee asks to be continued for a

83
sufficient length of time to be able to create a practical plan for the city at the least
possible expense. It may take one or two years.
82

The committee would have little to report in the next few years. In 1911 the
clubwomen poured their energy and resources into mobilization for the California
suffrage amendment. During the war, their reform impulses turned toward
Americanization programs that sought to impose their version of citizenship on
immigrant families and to argue for more stringent immigration restrictions.
83
After the
war, as the city government regrouped to contend with the onset of spectacular growth,
the city council reconsidered the voluntary basis of the planning function and the
planning committee was succeeded by the City Planning Commission in 1920. Its board
of commissioners was drawn from the same agencies and constituencies as before,
including eight clubwomen among the 51 commissioners. A professional planner, G.
Gordon Whitnall, was appointed chief of staff for the new agency, and the board was
divided into committees reflecting the principal issues as defined by Whitnall: zoning,
subdivisions, streets, railroads, buildings, parks, and law. In its first month of operation,
July 1920, the commission considered ways to produce a comprehensive plan for major
highways.
84

As the residue of Progressive reform initiatives concerned with public space in
Los Angeles, the Planning Commission represented an institutional mechanism for
comprehensive consideration of streets and highways for the city. The organized women
of the Ebell Club and the Friday Morning Club still had their places at that table, but their
role would be reduced and then eliminated during the highway battles that shortly

84
erupted, which would overwhelm the commissions attempts to plan transportation
infrastructure through the exercise of logic and principle. The commission viewed the
city engineers as subordinate to the big-picture planning agency, as specialists in paving
rather than policy, but it was the engineers who would wrest the largest role in shaping
the automotive infrastructure. Knowledge of how to build roads was surely an asset to
the engineers, as was their close familiarity with the approval processes that governed
highway construction. The professional staff of the engineering agency also
outnumbered that of the planning commission by more than a hundred to one, and the
engineering leadership would set their own priorities for the work of the agency.
The highway politics of the 1920s would play out around multiple lines of
conflict, including land use and the citys zoning authority, public versus private
determination of infrastructure policy, tax avoidance and place competition on the part of
property owners, interagency squabbles among the various components of city
government, and reconsideration by the clubwomen as to the most appropriate means to
pursue their social mission. These struggles enacted some of the latent conflicts that
existed among the people, ideas, and political strategies that have been bundled together
under the label of Progressivism. They took place within the setting of explosive growth
that multiplied the citys land area and population in the 1920s, and which imparted a
sense of emergency to the proceedings. The participants frequently displayed
considerable confusion as to the meanings of the onrushing events in which they were
taking part, or seeking to take part. Their stridency suggests that they all believed the
stakes were high, that in arguments over the function and appearance of its public

85
highways they were contending for the future of Los Angeles, and they were right about
that.

86

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1
Report of the Street Superintendent to City Council, 9 December 1889, Box B-1062, City Archives.

2
The report was conducted by Bion J. Arnold, a Chicago-based consultant who performed similar studies
for Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, San Francisco, Providence and other cities. Arnold summarized the
study in his article, The Transportation Problem in Los Angeles, California Outlook 11 (November 4,
1911): 9-13. On Arnold's career see Mark Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American Planners
and Urban Transportation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 37-41.

3
On traffic jams, Los Angeles Board of Public Utilities, 9th Annual Report, 1917-18, 54; on registrations,
Ashleigh Brilliant, The Great Car Craze (Santa Barbara: Woodbridge Press, 1989), 202; on the growing
use of cars for commuting rather than pleasure outings, see Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The
Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 190-92, and Scott
Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987), 55-56.

4
For a recent historiographical essay see Robert D. Johnston, "Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era:
The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1
(January 2002): 1-15.

5
George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 92-
104, and Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America, 1900-1912 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1958), 86-88 (quoted words); Richard Hofstader, The Age of Reform: from Bryan to
F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955), quoted words on 131; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-
1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).

6
Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916
(New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963); James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State,
1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement,
1890-1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965).

7
Richard McCormick, The Discovery That Business Corrupts Politics: A Reapproaisal of the Origins of
Progressivism, was originally published in 1981and reprinted in a collection of McCormick's essays, The
Party Period and Public Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Daniel T. Rodgers, In
Search of Progressivism, Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 113-32. Both find that the
concept of Progressivism is worth retaining to characterize the era of reform between 1890 and 1920, while
seeking greater precision in the motivations of reformers, the range of participants, and the effects of their
actions.

8
James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and
American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), quoted words on 415.

9
John D. Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York: Scribner, 1973); James J.
Connolly, The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900-1925
(Cambvridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

87

10
Overviews of this new Progressive historiography can be found in Johnston, "Re-Democratizing the
Progressive Era;" Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race and Reform in the
Progressive Era (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1991); and Eileen L. McDonagh, "Race,
Class and Gender in the Progressive Era," in Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur, eds., Progressivism
and the New Democracy (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). Recent syntheses,
primarily intended for the textbook market, that take into account the gender, ethnic, racial and class
dimensions of Progressivism include Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive
Era (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998) and John Whiteclay Chambers, II, The Tyranny of Change:
America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (2nd edition, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2000). On Tejano Progressives, see Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten
Rebellion and its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2003). On Chicano Progressives, see George J. Sanchez, "The 'New Nationalism' Mexican Style:
Race and Progressivism in Chicano Political Development during the 1920s," in William Deverell and Tom
Sitton, California Progressivism Revisited (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 229-44. On
African Americans, see Douglas Flamming, "African Americans and the Politics of race in Progressive-Era
Los Angeles," in Deverell and Sitton, California Progressivism Revisited, 203-28.

11
Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United
States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 524.

12
William Chafe, "Women's History and Political History," in Nancy Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock, eds.,
Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 105.

13
Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,"
American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 641.

14
Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City,
1871-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 5.

15
Philip J. Ethington, "Recasting Urban Political History: Gender, the Public, the Household, and Political
Participation in Boston and San Francisco during the Progressive Era," Social Science History 16 (Summer
1992): 301-33.

16
McCormick, Progressivism: A Contemporary Reassessment, and Rodgers, In Search of
Progressivism; Johnston, "Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era," 3.

17
Lawrence Veiller, "The Tenement-House Exhibition of 1899," Charities Review 10 (1900-1901): 19-
25.

18
Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow (London, 1902; reprint, London: Faber and Faber,
[1946]).

19
Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway; Asha Elizabeth Weinstein, "The Congestion Evil: Perceptions
of Traffic Congestion in Boston in the 1890s and 1920s," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California
Berkeley, 2002.

20
Quoted in Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 74.

21
Engineers in the Progressive period viewed their work as thoroughly compatible with city planning
principles. See Jeffrey K. Stine, Nelson P. Lewis and the City Efficient: The Municipal Engineer in City

88

Planning During the Progressive Era, Essays in Public Works History, No. 11 (Chicago: Public Works
Historical Society, 1981).

22
Paul S. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1978), vii.

23
John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 195.

24
William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989),
92.

25
Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, Plan of Chicago (1909; reprint, New York: Da Capo Pres,
1970).

26
Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 206-13.

27
Some of these plans were performed under contract to the Civic Center Commission, while others were
submitted by architects who objected to aspects of the official plans; see "Los Angeles City-County Civic
Center," s.v., in Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

28
Judith Raftery, "Los Angeles Clubwomen and Progressive Reform," in Deverell and Sitton, California
Progressivism Revisited, 144-74, quoted words on 144; Clark Davis, "An Era and Generation of Civic
Engagement: The Friday Morning Club in Los Angeles, 1891-1931," Southern California Quarterly 84
(Summer 2002): 135-68; Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the
California Women's Movement, 1880-1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

29
Gayle Gullett, Constructing the Woman Citizen and Struggling for the Vote in California, 1896-1911,
Pacific Historical Review 69 (November 2000): 573-93, quoted words on 584. For recent works on other
cities that also emphasize the importance of spatial reform and the City Beautiful movement within the
efforts of organized womanhood in the early 20
th
century but are not specific to California, see Sarah
Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000) and Peter C. Baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in
Hartford, 1850-1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999).

30
Raftery, "Los Angeles Clubwomen," 148.

31
Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts, 103-109; Baldwin, Domesticating the Street, pp TK.

32
Gullett, Constructing the Woman Citizen," 580, Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1907.

33
Municipal Art Commission, Report for the year 1904; Burton L. Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal
Organization and Municipal Practice in the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Parker, Stone & Baird,
1933), 123-24.

34
Raftery, "Los Angeles Clubwomen," 146, 148, identifies such participation on appointed commissions
as one of the signs of the clubwomens influence.

89

35
William F. Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 149-77, quoted words 170-71.

36
Tom Sitton, John Randolph Haynes: California Progressive (Stanford University Press, 1992), 106-08;
Deverell, Railroad Crossing, 170; and Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles,
1850-1930 (1967; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 164-71. The best firsthand
account of the early history of the Public Utilities Commission is Section 1, "Organization, Etc." of the
Board of Public Utilities and Transportation, "Seventeenth and Eighteenth Annual Reports," 1926-28,
typescript, n.p., City Archives, Box B-1054; the board had just been reorganized under the new city charter
of 1925 (including the name change to add "Transportation") and this first chapter of the first report after
the reorganization was a poignant attempt to maintain a strong connection to the reformist origins of the
agency.

37
Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, 57, 88.

38
Peter J. Ling, America and the Automobile: Technology, Reform, and Social Change (Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press, 1990), also uncouples Progressivism from technological choice in
transportation, counter to Bottles and Foster.

39
Statutes of California and Amendments to the Codes, 39
th
Session (San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney
Co., 1911), 618, 626-35.

40
Hunter, Municipal Organization, 16, 20-21.

41
Hunter, Municipal Organization, 38-39; Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853-
1913, 3
rd
edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930), 23-25, 34, 83-85, 275-76, 286, 417; Los Angeles
City Council Minutes, volume 9, pages 416-19, 1875, City Archives; hereinafter cited as Council Minutes,
volume:page (year).

42
Hunter, Municipal Organization, 38-39; Report of the Street Superintendent to City Council, 9
December 1889, Box B-1062, City Archives.

43
Robin Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), esp. 14-19, has shown how the assessment district process became institutionalized
in American urban governance as a means to pay for improvements without any redistributive economic
impact. Terrence MacDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and
Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860-1906 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), quotation
on 281; on the significance of low-tax policies with respect to infrastructure in San Francisco, also see
Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-
1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 364-8. Description and analysis of the statutes in
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1913-14, 16-20; Frederick Law Olmsted [Jr.], Harland Batholomew,
and Charles Henry Cheney, A Major Traffic Street Plan for Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Traffic
Commission of the City and County of Los Angeles, 1924), 56-66.

44
Council Minutes, 9:415 (1875); Robert C. Post, Street Railways and the Growth of Los Angeles (San
Marino, CA: Golden West Books, 1989), 17-21, 31-84, quotation on 51; Commissioners Report to the
City Council on Sunset Boulevard, October 6, 1894, Box B-108, City Archives; on the interdependence of
street railways and street construction, see Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and
the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 60-67.

90

45
The ability of property owners to influence substantially the capital expenditures of rail operators arose
repeatedly in analyses of the financial and regulatory aspects of trolley operations in connection with
proposed fare increases. See California Railroad Commission, Engineering Department, Application 4238:
Operating and Financial Condition of the Los Angeles Railway Corporation (Los Angeles: by the
commission, 1919), 22-25; Robert C. Post, "The Fair Fare Fight," Southern California Quarterly 52
(September 1970): 279. On the repeal, reinstatement and amendment of the Vrooman Act, see Statutes of
California and Amendments to the Codes, 39
th
Session (San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney Co., 1911), 618,
626-35.

46
Letters to City Council from Special Committee re widening Hoover Street, August 15, 1898, Box C-1;
from Street Superintendent re abandoned projects, April 17, 1899, from Street Superintendent re tax
refunds for abandoned projects, August 4, 1899, from Vernon Improvement Association re offset
intersections along Central Avenue at 41st, 42nd and 43rd streets, May 9, 1905, and from Inspector of
Public Works re pothole, December 17, 1908, all Box C-3.

47
Hunter, Municipal Organization, 111-13, 120, 132; Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1912-13, 21;
1919-20, 1; and 1921-22, 9.

48
Hunter, Municipal Organization, 113. Biographical data on Hamlin and other engineering staff from
Whos Who on the Pacific Coast (Los Angeles: Hayden Publishing Co., 1913), 246; John S. McGroarty,
Los Angeles: From the Mountains to the Sea (3 volumes, Chicago: American Historical Society, 1921),
2:378; Whos Who in Los Angeles, 1928-1929 (Los Angeles: C. J. Lang, 1930), 114; and the data sheets
for city officials compiled by the Works Progress Administration, Municipal Reference Collection, Los
Angeles Public Library.

49
Board of Water Commissioners, s.v., in Hunter, Municipal Organization.

50
Abraham Hoffman, Vision or Villainy: The Origins of the Owens Valley- Los Angeles Water
Controversy (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1981), 35-46, 146-47.

51
Hunter, Municipal Organization, 111-13, 120, 132; Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1912-13, 21;
1919-20, 1; and 1921-22, 9; on the good government reformers and the civil-service system, see Tom
Sitton, John Randolph Haynes: California Progressive (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 107-
15; Mowry, The California Progressives, 38-48; and Albert H. Clodius, The Quest for Good Government
in Los Angeles, 1890-1910, Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1953.

52
Biographical data in note 4, plus: Whos Who in Los Angeles,1926-1927 (Los Angeles: C. J. Lang,
1928), 57; Men of California (San Francisco: Pacific Art Co., 1901), 323, 422; Whos Who in Los Angeles,
1928-1929 (Los Angeles: C. J. Lang, 1930), 96; and William A. Spalding, History of Los Angeles City and
County (3 volumes, Los Angeles: J. R. Finnell and Sons, 1931), 311-12.

53
Spalding, History of Los Angeles City and County, 3:113-16; Henry Z. Osborne, Jr., s.v. in Municipal
Reference Department, Los Angeles Public Library, Chronological Record of Los Angeles City Officials,
volume 3, March 1938.

54
Hunter, Municipal Organization, 132, 139-40.

55
Logan W. Page, Effects of Motors on Macadam Roads Engineering Record 58 (September 26, 1908):
53; Page, The Motor Car and the Road: Destructive Effect of High Speed, Scientific American 102
(January 15, 1910): 46-47.

91

56
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1912-13, 39-41, quotation on 39; 1913-14, 7-8; 1917-18, 16; and
1918-19, 2. Asphalt was a tar-based substance the use of which was pioneered in the third quarter of the
19
th
century, when it was primarily an imported product often known as Trinidad asphalt. By the time
Los Angeles adopted asphalt surfacing, local sources were available; see Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt
Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 60-1, 73-4.

57
Hunter, Municipal Organization, 164.

58
Stephen P. Erie, How the Urban West Was Won, Urban Affairs Quarterly 27 (June 1992): 519-54.
59
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1912-13, 18.

60
H. Z. Osborne, Jr., Good Roads and the Vrooman Act, The Architect and Engineer of California 12
(February 1908): 59.

61
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1912-13, 20-21; and 1915-16.

62
Osborne, Good Roads and the Vrooman Act; Olmsted et al., Major Traffic Street Plan, 56-66; State
of California, Statutes and Amendments to the Codes, 53
rd
Session (Sacramento, 1939), 2203-4.

63
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1912-13, 19-20; 1913-14, 57-59. On the parkway plans, see Greg
Hise and William Deverell, Eden by Design (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 25-29.

64
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1914-15, 39; 1915-16, 34; 1916-17, 61-62, 110; 1917-18, 75-76.

65
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1915-16, 35-37; 1919-20, 81-85.

66
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1914-15, 39; 1915-16, 36-37.

67
Greg Hise, Natures Workshop: Industry and Urban Expansion in Southern California, 1900-1950,
Journal of Historical Geography 27 (January 2000): 79-92, offers a thorough summary of the Chambers
role in infrastructure and planning issues. Also see Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California
through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 120-28; idem., Watering the Land: The
Colorado River Project, Southern California Quarterly 75 (Fall-Winter 1993): 303-30.

68
J. Allen Davis, The Friend to All Motorists: The Story of the Automobile Club of Southern California
Through 65 Years, 1900-1965 (Los Angeles: The Auto Club, 1967); Auto Club Board of Directors, Digest
of Minutes, 31 January 1906, 25 October 1906; letter from Charles Hopper to Los Angeles Board of Public
Works, reprinted in Touring Topics, November 1909, 14; Good Roads Bond Issue, Touring Topics,
November 1909, 8; Must Defeat Bond Issues, Touring Topics, November 1910, 5-10; California Road
Needs Demand New Bond Issue, Touring Topics, July 1916, 24-5. On support for changing the Board of
Public Works, see Los Angeles Herald, 14 October 1904 and Los Angeles Express, 11 November 1904, 30
November 1904, 3 December 1904, 6 December 1904; thanks to Jonathan Spaulding for directing me to
these articles.

69
Davis, Friend to All Motorists, 16-19, 50, 57, 68, 76-78, 96, 99, 101, 125; Vermont Avenue May Be
Made Worlds Greatest Boulevard, Touring Topics, March 1911, 18;

70
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1919-20, 86; 1921-22, 1-6.

71
The best firsthand account of the early history of the Board of Public Utilities is Section 1,
"Organization, Etc." of the Board of Public Utilities and Transportation, "Seventeenth and Eighteenth

92

Annual Reports," 1926-28, typescript, n.p., City Archives, Box B-1054; the board had just been
reorganized under the new city charter of 1925 (including the name change to add "Transportation") and
this first chapter of the first report after the reorganization was a poignant attempt to maintain a strong
connection to the reformist origins of the agency. Also see Hunter, Municipal Organization, 111-13, 120,
132; Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1912-13, 21; 1919-20, 1; and 1921-22, 9; Sitton, John Randolph
Haynes, 107-15; and Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 164-71.

72
Board of Public Utilities and Transportation, "Seventeenth and Eighteenth Annual Reports," 1926-28,
typescript, n.p., City Archives; Report to the City Council of the Special Committee on the City Railway
Engineer, 28 September 1914, City Archives, Box C-1; CM, 113:680 (1919) and 114:207 (1919).

73
Report of the Special Committee on Traffic Congestion, July 30, 1912, and Report of the Special
Committee on Tunnels, March 13, 1915, both in City Archives, Box C. On the parking ban, see Scott
Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 64-88.

74
Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, 59 (quotation), 64-89.

75
Deverell, Railroad Crossing, 149-77.

76
Board of Public Utilities, Annual Report, 1919-20, 48-99.

77
Bottles own evidence documents the concerns of downtown merchants who were primarily concerned
with a falloff in business rather than any broader policy implications; Los Angeles and the Automobile, 84.
On the importance of parking to department-store shoppers see, Richard Longstreth, City Center to
Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950 (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1997), 43-55.

78
Quoted words from Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, 121.

79
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 222.

80
Municipal Art Commission, Report for the year 1904; Hunter, Municipal Organization, 123-24;
membership of the Municipal Art Commission in Los Angeles Public Library, Chronological Record of
Los Angeles City Officials, 1850-1938. Besides the members named, the commission also included the
head of any city department whose work was under consideration by the commission.

81
Report of the Municipal Art Commission for the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: W. J. Porter, 1909).

82
Letter from Dana Bartlett to City Council, 3 January 1911, Los Angeles City Archives, Box C-2, City
Planning Committee folder. Transcript of interview with Dana Bartlett, 27 April 1936, in Municipal
Reference Department, Los Angeles Public Library, Chronological Record of Los Angeles City Officials.

83
Gayle Gullet, Women Progressives and the Politics of Americanization in California, 1915-1920,
Pacific Historical Review 64 (February 1995): 71-94.

84
City Planning Commission, Minutes, volume 1, 1, 16 June 1920; volume 1, 18, 22 July 1920; volume 1,
279, 8 March 1921.

93
CHAPTER TWO
THE MERCANTILE PROCESSION: WILSHIRE BOULEVARD

Wilshire Boulevard became the most publicized street in Los Angeles in the early
1920s, when competition over plans for its reconstruction erupted into a bitter political
struggle between elite metropolitan growth advocates and the property owners who
controlled the frontage along Wilshire. Largely absent from the many previous analyses
of Wilshire, the early battle over the character of this most celebrated street offers a
striking demonstration of the opposition that attended all major highway projects in Los
Angeles.
1
Architectural historian Reyner Banhams description of Wilshire as the first
linear downtown captures the sense of innovation in urban form that has attached to
Wilshire since the 1920s, but it fails to address the arguments that produced the actual
street its physical dimensions and its functional characteristics -- and thus omits the
more difficult and contested aspects of the transformation in which Wilshire played such
a prominent role.
2
Usually portrayed as an example of the citys leadership in
automobile-based urbanization, the Wilshire story also reveals that deep-seated
opposition to dedicated rights-of-way was endemic in Los Angeles. It compels the
recognition that once roads reached a certain size and capacity, even the most blessed of
them had to be built in the face of opposition.
Alone among the scholars who have considered Wilshire Boulevard, urban
historian Robert Fogelson has considered the disputes of the early 1920s, but Fogelson
interpreted them as a conflict over idealized metropolitan form between decentralized

94
versus concentric metropolis -- an interpretation that does not take fully into account the
arguments propounded by the participants in the events.
3
To them, it was a contest over
which people, which agencies, and which combination of public and private authority
would have the ability to determine the size, the appearance, and the function of streets.
In that confrontation, the significant result was that the city council removed the City
Planning Commission from any basic responsibility in transportation policy.
With the eclipse of the Planning Commission, architects, planners, and elite
clubwomen lost their voice in highway matters. The Planning Commissions approach to
highway development foundered for reasons that were not necessarily connected to the
merits of the commissions arguments. The magnitude and complexity of the
development issues in the rapidly growing metropolis, combined with the commissions
unwieldy board structure, produced confusion and technical errors on the part of the
commission, which found itself in the awkward and untenable position of endorsing
competing proposals. Gordon Whitnall, the commissions chief of staff, disliked the
messy process of gaining citizen approval for planning issues, which was unavoidable in
the contentious arena of highway development, and he appears to have welcomed rather
than opposed the elimination of his agencys responsibility in that area. The clubwomen
who had played an instrumental role in the formation of the commission also turned away
from participation in the formal apparatus of spatial reform during the 1920s. Instead of
asserting their role as citizen-reformers in the political arena, they embraced the role of
citizen-consumers who would assert their opinions through their purchasing decisions.
Neither the clubwomen, nor Whitnall, nor any of the other reformers who had helped

95
establish the Planning Commission objected to its radical reorganization under the new
city charter of 1925, which focused the commission on its role as a device to facilitate
real estate development rather than as an agent of Progressive reform. The scuttling of
any role for the Planning Commission in highway affairs contributed to the dominance of
the city engineering office. The ascendance of the engineers was not completed until
later in the decade, when the other Progressive spatial reform impulse, descended from
the Public Utilities Commission, also came to grief. The Wilshire episode helped to clear
the way for the engineers by removing one set of participants from the fray.
Most of this chapter is devoted to the political struggle between 1921 and 1924
that established the basic character of the fabulous boulevard. The story of Wilshire is
also carried forward beyond that time in order to recontextualize later, more familiar
events in terms of the spatial origins of the street. The many representations of Wilshire
Boulevard are also reinterpreted in light of the early 1920s political struggles. The
portrayals of Wilshire offer a seminal instance of the sunshine and noir dichotomy that
can inhibit clear understanding of Los Angeles history unless it is rooted in the material
events that gave rise to the promotional efforts and their antitheses in the visual and
literary arts.

The Archway Affair
In the early 1920s, Wilshire Boulevard retained much of its original character as
the main thoroughfare along the north side of a high-toned residential subdivision laid out
in 1895. At the eastern side of the plat, the residences of Los Angeles Times founder

96
Harrison Gray Otis and other wealthy families nestled up against Westlake Park (later
MacArthur Park). Wilshire ran west from the park. Orange Street ran east from the park
to downtown, more or less in line with Wilshire. Orange Street was a busy retail
corridor, and the park served as a buffer between that commercial use and the exclusive
residences to the west. As Wilshire proceeded west from the park, expensive houses,
apartment blocks and hotels gave way to a spotty pattern of business uses such as shoe
stores, dry goods stores, drug stores, medical offices, banks, automobile dealers and gas
stations.
4
Such commercial operations increased in density in the vicinity of Western
Avenue, a little under two miles west of the park. Frontage on Western had undergone
rapid commercial development since the end of World War I, and the intersection of
Wilshire and Western formed a crossroads business district that was already becoming
known for its traffic congestion in the early 1920s.
5

Gordon Whitnall of the City Planning Commission saw this intersection as an
appropriate site to experiment with one of the new forms of traffic channeling that he had
first witnessed at an east coast planning conference the rotary. It would eliminate left
turns by forcing motorists counterclockwise upon entering the intersection; they would
then veer off to the right when they reached their turn, in what Whitnall effusively
described as a perpetual whirlpool of traffic in which there is no confusion or conflict.
In 1922 he persuaded the city engineer, John Griffin, to install a center island at Wilshire
and Western. Griffin first insisted on a new name instead of the straightforward rotary,
and called it the Magic Circle, an innocuous, even whimsical act considered by itself,
but one that demonstrated Griffins understanding of the importance of naming when it

97
came to road policy in Los Angeles. As it turned out, the rotary was neither magical nor
circular, and it lasted only five months before the city had to tear it out in November
1922. Rationalizing the failure to resolve the congestion at Wilshire and Western,
Whitnall pointed out that a center island by itself could not do the job, that the four
surrounding corners had to be cut out to create the multi-lane circle for cars in the
intersection. Without that added area, eight lanes of incoming traffic contended for space
in the width of a single lane surrounding the island.
6

Meanwhile, some of the most powerful men in the city hatched a bolder, more
majestic plan to rebuild Wilshire Boulevard as a high-volume multi-lane thoroughfare.
The principal sponsor was the Community Development Association (CDA) and the
project's ultimate failure is all the more remarkable considering the people behind it.
This was the group that was then building the Coliseum (completed in 1923) and that
served as the organizing committee for the 1932 Olympics. The chief standard-bearer for
the Wilshire project was the attorney and "establishment pillar" Henry O'Melveny. There
were few significant issues in Los Angeles in which O'Melveny did not play a part, and
in civic improvement and construction issues, his side usually won.
7
Harry Chandler,
Otiss son-in-law and heir to the Los Angeles Times, was the other chief promoter. His
newspaper gave generous play to the plan, printing the handsome drawings and running
the full text of O'Melveny's petitions to the City Council.
8
Chandler and OMelveny
obtained the assistance of the Automobile Club of Southern California by enlisting one of
its board members, Henry Keller. With some reluctance, Kellers fellow board members
sanctioned the commitment he had made without first consulting them. The Auto Club

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would help pay the fees of Aurele Vermeulen, whom the CDA had engaged to redesign
Wilshire Boulevard.
9

Vermeulen was a landscape architect, the discipline most linked with the drawing,
if not the building, of far-reaching highway schemes in the early 1920s. He practiced
comprehensive planning on the expansive scale possible in a rapidly urbanizing region.
Vermeulen provided the plans for the elite subdivision of Bel-Air, the layout of Los
Angeles Country Club, and the Homewood tract that later became Brentwood.
Admiringly described by the Los Angeles Times for his Parisian training, Vermeulen
also served as a landscape critic for the newspaper. He advocated the razing of Bunker
Hill to provide a civic center and the demolition of the shabbiest and most squalid
quarters of Los Angeles the workingclass residences on the east side of the river, along
the Pacific Electrics West Covina line, where they despoiled the first impressions of the
city for passengers approaching by rail.
10

Vermeulen started work in June 1922 and completed the basic outline of the plan
in July. The Times announced it with great fanfare, on the front page of the Sunday real
estate section, under the headline: Plan for Conversion of Wilshire Boulevard into
Magnificent Thoroughfare Approved.
11
The text of the article revealed that the approval
had been rendered by the CDA, not by the city council, Board of Public Works, city
engineer, or Planning Commission, the four components of government that had any
authority to accept such a proposal. No doubt the announcement surprised the city
engineers who had just installed the Magic Circle, and who had begun work on their own
candidate for an east-west through artery Tenth Street (later Olympic Boulevard). A

99
month after announcing the plan in the Times, OMelveny appeared before the Planning
Commission to seek its endorsement. The commission had considered Wilshire among
the many candidates for east-west arteries when it first began to study the matter the year
before, but it too had rejected Wilshire in favor of Whitnalls recommendations of
Beverly Boulevard and Melrose Avenue. Nonetheless, gratified that energetic civic
leaders were taking an interest in the commonplace matter of traffic arteries, and perhaps
cowed by those eminent sponsors, the Planning Commission did endorse O'Melvenys
Wilshire plan in late 1922.
12

Though the details were sketchy at that juncture, Vermeulen had already
determined the principal characteristics of the roadway. It would follow Wilshire
westward from Westlake Park to the vicinity of the Soldiers Home (present grounds of
the Veterans Administration Hospital on Sawtelle), where it would join San Vicente
Boulevard and proceed through Santa Monica Canyon to the coast. He projected an
average width of 240 feet, at least four times larger than the most spacious
thoroughfares then in place or under construction. Perhaps expecting the opposition that
would soon surface, he reassured the owners of property at the eastern end of the route
that The more thickly settled portion of Wilshire Boulevard will not be widened to any
great extent, a promise he did not keep in subsequent detailed designs. Aiming for a
prevailing speed of 25 miles per hour, the principal feature of the plan would be the
concentration of automobile traffic in one main central driveway. Vermeulen had
considered and rejected a divided road with a planted median because it was less
efficient than using the entire width for traffic. He justified the decision on the basis of

100
appearance: trees and shrubs, by interrupting the expansive views afforded by the wide
roadway, offered less perspective beauty. This claim might be the first use of the trope
that would later become common in Los Angeles freeway promotion the imputation of
beauty in large swaths of concrete. It was a claim that required the listener to transfer the
claim of easy movement to the realm of visual appeal, to perceive as attractive a
landscape that would seem to offer a prospect of inexorable starkness if rendered in literal
rather than symbolic terms: an unbroken band of concrete, 80 yards wide, stretching as
far as the eye could see. That same association between movement and beauty would be
expressed a decade later in the design trend of streamlining, which would round off the
corners and add curved moldings to buildings, bridges, and industrial products from
typewriters to locomotives. Like the Streamline Moderne styling of the 1930s,
Vermeulens design for Wilshire also asserted progress, a sense of being up-to-date or
even ahead of one's time, of stepping briskly into the future. In early 1920s Los Angeles,
that notion of progress found expression in imperial gestures rather than the stylized
aesthetics of the Depression decade. It was classical Rome, where conquering armies
marched home through triumphal arches, that inspired the roadway's decorative
treatment, an influence also seen in the design of the Los Angeles Coliseum, which was
under construction in the early 1920s. (No matter that the neo-Roman Coliseums main
tenants were named Trojans the builders of the new imperial city of the Pacific
employed a catch-all classicism that reveled in such historical anachronism.) The
predominant design feature would be a series of 11 ornamental arches over the roadway,
strategically placed where major north-south roads intercepted Wilshire. The arches

101
would house police stations and, as the plans evolved in the coming months, they would
also mark grade separations with the intersecting streets. Vermeulen would rename this
new thoroughfare The Archway, which, he noted, Avoids the use of the terms avenue
or boulevard, terms which have no standard usage and which have been much used.
This ruse of nomenclature would distance the Archway from the prior failed attempts to
widen Los Feliz and Griffith Park boulevards and from Osbornes notion of
"boulevarding" the city.
The presentation of the detailed plans, unveiled in an even gaudier spread in the
Times in January 1923, was a similar tissue of grandiose claims, half-truths, and attempts
to foreclose opposition by downplaying the impact on adjacent properties, a difficult trick
to accomplish while also extolling the traffic-carrying benefits of the Archways large
scale . The plans were attributed to Vermeulen and a large staff of engineers recruited
from the Automobile Club, which at the time employed exactly one engineer, Ernest
East. Authorship was also attributed to the city engineers, who could not have worked on
it without orders from the council or Board of Public Works, and who would deny any
such participation in their next annual report.
13
The alignment west of the park had not
changed, though Vermeulen had also considered how to link the Archway with
downtown, to the east. Sixth Street ran along the northern edge of the park, Seventh
Street along the southern edge of the park, and Orange Street was more or less in line
with Wilshire. Vermeulen would have them all converge in the park to feed westbound
traffic onto the Archway and distribute eastbound traffic back into the conventional road
network. West of the park, almost to Western Avenue (a little under two miles), the

102
existing width of right-of-way for travel would be more than doubled, from 56 to 130
feet. For the next mile going west, to Crenshaw, it would widen out to 172 feet, and from
there would run at 230 feet the rest of the way. Seven or eight lanes would be provided.
The allusion to conquest would be carried through by naming the arches for explorers and
founders of California Cabrillo, Serra, Balboa, Fremont, Sutter. The arches acquired a
fuller functional role, marking the subways for traffic crossing the Archway on foot, in
automobiles, and in streetcars. A series of fountains also punctuated the route, each one
celebrating values that the CDA held dear: the fountain of western spirit, the fountain of
progress, the fountain of work and play, and the fountain of youth. A national educators'
monument, a national artists' monument, a national poets' monument, and a hall of the
U.S. presidents completed the civic uplift agenda. Triumphalism reached a crescendo in
stucco at the eastern and western portals at the park and the edge of the sea where
huge arches would rise ten stories into the sky, adorned with Neoclassical cornices and
Spanish Colonial Revival balconies. Envisioned as primarily a great scenic
thoroughfare for automobiles, the grade-separated roadway of enormous width would
create a new linear environment, cut off from the adjacent communities. To mitigate that
severing, Vermeulen called for local block drives on either side of the main roadway
frontage roads for local traffic and parking cars. OMelveny offered no definite ideas as
to financing except that several methods were under consideration. He did recognize the
steep challenge of winning approval for the Archway, especially because it crossed
Beverly Hills and Santa Monica as well as Los Angeles, and he proposed to obtain
special legislation in Sacramento if necessary.
14

103
OMelveny and his cohorts did not anticipate the depth of resistance that their
plan engendered, or the resourcefulness of their opponents. The opponents were peers of
the promoters real estate investors and developers who had acquired frontage along
Wilshire for a very different purpose. Real estate professionals understood that the real
issue behind the objection to the downtown parking ban had been access to shopping.
Combined with the spread of subdivisions to the west, that understanding supported their
prediction that convenience for store customers was a sufficiently powerful consideration
to alter the economic geography of retail business. By 1922, journalists attentive to
development trends had forecast the growth of new commercial districts along various
thoroughfares west of downtown.
15
That was the calculus heeded by investors who
began acquiring tracts or adding to their existing holdings along Wilshire between
Westlake Park and Western Avenue. Far from shoestring operators, the Wilshire
investors included some of the citys most successful real estate players, such as Henry
de Roulet, Walter Fisher, and the banker Marco Hellman. They saw no benefit in a high-
volume thoroughfare that would take away their valuable Wilshire frontage and limit the
access to their remaining property. They also persuaded the smaller landowners and
existing businesses that the Archway posed a threat to their prospects.
16

Publication of Vermeulens plans stimulated opposition to the Archway in the
summer of 1923, and other events to the west on Wilshire inspired the specific tactics of
resistance adopted by de Roulet and the other landowners. Between 1922 and 1924, six
different annexations added more than eight square miles to Los Angeles along the
Wilshire corridor between Western and Fairfax avenues.
17
Annexation might have

104
helped the Archway promoters by bringing more territory under the citys jurisdiction,
but a critical problem arose when the Planning Commission imposed its newly
promulgated zoning and setback regulations on the recently incorporated lands.
Developers A. W. Ross and Hector Zahn had purchased Wilshire frontage in the newly
annexed areas and applied for a permit to build a modest retail building on one of the lots.
When the city denied the permit because the Planning Commission had zoned the entire
area for residential use, Ross and Zahn appealed to the city council, which turned them
down. The denial argued that Wilshire Boulevard is destined to become a show street,
and further noted the kind of show contemplated by the council: The encroachment of
business upon this boulevard is at this time unnecessary and would be a great detriment
to the future residence development of this thoroughfare.
18
The developers then sued
the city to rezone their property from residential to business use. They would win at the
district appellate level in the summer of 1924, but the state Supreme Court reversed that
decision and upheld the citys zoning authority in April 1925.
19
Ross would later pioneer
the tactic of spot zoning as the legal basis for the series of spectacular retail
developments that became the Miracle Mile (between LaBrea and Fairfax), but long
before those celebrated events, his neighbors to the east put a different twist on the
zoning appeal in order to kill the Archway. Without their success, Wilshire could have
been a dedicated traffic artery, it is doubtful that Ross or anyone else would have
bothered with spot zoning, and the subsequent development of Wilshire would have
followed a different course entirely. This episode surely ranks as one of the most
trenchant ironies in the irony-laden history of Los Angeles: it was opposition to a road

105
project that shaped the Wilshire Boulevard that would come to symbolize the new
automotive metropolis.
Henry de Roulet and his allies fastened on rezoning from residential to business
use, but unlike Ross and Zahn, they enlisted a far broader base of support and a more
diverse and sophisticated array of tactics. With more than 120 other property owners,
who represented the great majority of frontage between Western and the park, he formed
the Wilshire Development Association (WDA) after Vermeulens detailed plans became
public in the summer of 1923. Rather than basing the rezoning request on the use of one
lot, the WDA submitted a petition in January 1924 to zone the entire stretch for
business.
20
Faced with the overwhelming consent of the effected property owners, the
city council approved the business zoning in February. The zone change would have
been necessary for retail development, but it had a more immediate and alarming
implication for the Archway plan that had stimulated the move in the first place.
Rezoning by itself would cause an increase in valuation that would multiply the
acquisition cost for the Archways broad right-of-way. Experienced in real estate
stratagems himself, OMelveny understood the threat and moved to eliminate it by
suggesting an unconventional financing plan. He proposed an ordinance that carefully
avoided the mention of eminent domain by the paradoxical technique of a required
donation: the landowners would deed the Wilshire frontage to the city for the Archway,
and in return the city would not charge them for the cost of constructing it. The city
attorney found the plan to be technically legal, but when the Finance Committee reported
that the cost of the land would exceed the cost of construction by more than four hundred

106
percent, the council chose not to invite a few score damage suits and filed the plan with
no action.
21

OMelvenys attempt to dictate to the council did not surprise the WDA, which
had also collected signatures on another petition in case the rezoning failed. A clever use
of the laws governing street construction, this tactic had emerged during a stormy
meeting of property owners opposed to the Archway. Henry de Roulet persuaded them
to pledge their money by use of the assessment-district process to rebuild Wilshire for
their own purposes of retail development. Their petition requested widening Wilshire
between Western Avenue and Westlake Park to 70 feet of paved roadway, which would
enlarge the existing street but fall far short of the Archway dimensions. For that petition
the WDA expanded its constituency to include the storeowners on Orange Street, east of
the park, by pointing out that the Archway would likely diminish the value of their
properties too. They expressed their common interest by proposing to create a street
through the park to unite Orange and Wilshire, connecting them by means of a bridge
over the lake in the middle of Westlake Park. This majority petition for street
improvement would erect a legal barrier to the Archway by binding the city to a prior
commitment for street construction in the exact same location covered by the Archway
plan. The Planning Commission not only endorsed this plan, but enlarged it by
suggesting that the Orange widening extend all the way to Figueroa in downtown, some
two miles east of Westlake Park.
22

The Planning Commission apparently did not realize that the Orange-Wilshire
widening proposal could mortally impair the Archway plan that the commission had

107
already endorsed. When that realization dawned, the commission found itself squeezed
uncomfortably between two groups of wealthy citizens the WDA, which had the law on
its side, and the CDA, which was allied with the Los Angeles Times and one of the
leading attorneys in Los Angeles. Gordon Whitnall of the Planning Commission asked
the city engineering office for help in resolving the conflicting proposals but the city
engineer was an unlikely source for help. The two agencies had earlier sparred over the
engineers' plans to rebuild Tenth Street as the major east-west thoroughfare through the
city, and the disagreement had boiled over into recrimination. In 1922, when the city
council asked the Planning Commission to explain its lack of progress in producing a
comprehensive plan for arterial streets, the commission had taken the unusual step of
publicly chastising the city engineering department for not providing the necessary maps.
When asked to comment on the Archway controversy in the summer of 1924, city
engineer John Griffin only prolonged the humiliation of the Planning Commission by
adopting a neutral stance, while also taking the opportunity to lecture the commission on
the practical politics of street construction, which depended on consensus among property
owners: There is considerable chaos among the property owners. . . . No one knows
what to build or where. Such passivity was not typical of the engineering office, which
was forcefully pursuing other highway initiatives at the same time, such as their
controversial Tenth Street scheme, Mulholland Highway, and the river bridges (all
discussed in a subsequent chapter). Griffins rebuke called attention to the confusion
among the various agencies concerned with highways. The embarrassment of the
Planning Commission endorsing two competing proposals in such a high-profile location

108
would soon move the city council to eliminate some of the institutional confusion. In
February 1925, a few months after the denouement of the Archway struggle, the council
removed the Planning Commission from any jurisdiction over the opening and widening
of streets; the Planning Commission could offer recommendations, but no longer had the
authority to approve such proposals.
23

OMelveny meanwhile attacked the rezoning ploy by circulating yet another
petition, this one calling for a citywide referendum on the rezoning between the park and
Western Avenue. It was a haughty move, paternalistic in its assertion that he and his
cohorts on the CDA could best determine the needs of the city as a whole, and confident
in its assumption that they could swing public opinion to defeat the opponents of the
Archway. The WDA sued to invalidate the petition, but the Superior Court allowed it to
stand, and the rezoning of Wilshire became Proposition C on the November 1924 ballot,
which also included the Major Traffic Street Plan that Henry Osborne had commissioned
in his role as engineer for the Public Utilities Commission.
24

While the legal arguments ensued, OMelveny marshaled the support of his
formidable array of institutional allies. The Municipal League, the Civic Association,
churches, synagogues, and the Ebell Club wrote to the council, urged their members to
support the Archway, or took out advertisements to defeat the rezoning. The CDA
exhausted its treasury and went to the board of the Auto Club to ask for another $3,000,
which was granted. The WDA and de Roulet did not raise the integrity of the debate but
skillfully distorted the issues, much as OMelvenys side had attempted to manipulate
public perception with its promotional claims for the Archway. The WDA wanted to

109
defeat the Archway in order to preserve their opportunities for retail development, and to
do so they claimed the issue of traffic relief for themselves by pointing to their
companion proposal for widening Wilshire to 70 feet. In the parlance of our day, that
might be described as excellent spin: seeking to defeat a larger road, the people
proposing the smaller one portrayed theirs as the solution to traffic problems. The WDA
also invoked the cherished principle of essential rights in the ownership of private
property, and it raised the specter of an arrogant elite swooping down to destroy the
interests of other property owners throughout the city if they were not stopped.
25

It is impossible to determine the extent to which the WDAs various arguments
swayed the electorate to support their side, but it was the issue of street policy that
confounded their opponents, especially the Planning Commission. The Planning
Commission acutely sought to protect its authority over land use rather than see property
owners rezone large areas through political action. Conflicted and isolated on the subject
of highway policy, and defensive about zoning, the commission issued a harsh Open
Letter addressing the ballot proposition. It offered a closely argued refutation of the
WDAs pronouncements and accused the WDA of libel, duplicity, and falsehood.
Seeking to distance the ballot measure from the perplexing arena of road policy, it
declared: Proposition C on the November ballot is a zoning issue and nothing else.
That was literally true, because the language of the referendum referred only to the
business zoning between Westlake Park and Western Avenue. The statement was lethal
to their cause, however, because it forced a clarification from the Auto Club, which had a
bylaw forbidding it from taking sides on any matters pertaining to zoning. The Auto

110
Club could support the CDA and its Archway plan as long as it was a matter of highway
policy, but when the Planning Commission framed the issue starkly as zoning, the Auto
Club had to distance itself from any position on the referendum. Mired in confusion and
retraction, and painted as the enemies to private property rights and jobs, the CDA and its
allies went down to defeat, 61 to 39 percent. The Archway was dead after nearly two
years of effort and considerable expense. OMelvenys followers and associates
continued to pepper the city council with letters of support for a few months, until finally
in April 1925 he conceded that the CDA had permanently abandoned the Archway.
26

The familiar history of Wilshire Boulevards spectacular growth began at that
point, but the many analyses of that phenomenon have not recognized its origins in the
opposition to the plan to create a high-volume, limited-access highway out of Wilshire in
the early 1920s, and the role of that struggle in establishing the physical template on
which the subsequent development would occur. The most authoritative account of
Wilshires significance as an automobile-based retail corridor, Longstreths City Center
to Regional Mall, noted that the WDA lobbied to have the street widened -- another
victim of the WDAs skillful electioneering, overlooking that the nominal widening was
actually a purposeful and hard-won narrowing down from the Archway plan.
27
Thomas
Hines based his understanding of Wilshire as a functional thoroughfare on the intellectual
pedigree of the linear city, passing from Robinsons sketchy mention of Wilshire in
1907 to the Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924, and vaulting past the interval of
tumultuous highway politics that established the character of the street.
28
Robert
Fogelson concluded that the Archway was based on the efforts of downtown businesses

111
and their ostensible ally, the Planning Commission, to foil the growth of retail
competition along Wilshire by making it a high-traffic artery that would preclude
commercial use on the Wilshire frontage.
29
But zoning alone would have accomplished
that without any need for the expensive plans that OMelvenys group commissioned for
the rebuilding of Wilshire. And as Longstreth has shown, the owners of downtown
emporiums took part in the geographical redistribution of retailing in Los Angeles, rather
than hunkering into a defensive stance based on single-minded protection of the
downtown core.
30
The Planning Commissions own pronouncements refute Fogelsons
downtown-protection argument, because Whitnall sought to provide alternatives to
downtown shopping in order to reduce congestion: This can be done by increasing the
number and distribution of well-balanced, self-contained, commercial sub-centers. . . .
All roads should not lead to Rome.
31
Fogelson did perceive in the Planning
Commissions strident statements about Wilshire a concern that the commissions
position would be undermined. He misjudged its significance, however, by discounting
the real institutional considerations of the commission and inserting a gospel of city form
that reveals more about the limited set of conceptual tools available to urban scholars
when Fogelson was writing in the 1960s than it does about the actions of the Planning
Commission in the 1920s.
32

The Gendered Landscape of Consumption
In December 1924, barely a month after the election, the WDA left behind its
resistance to the Archway scheme and assumed a wholly positive role as the principal

112
booster of Wilshires retail development. The frontage owners pledged special
assessments for new decorative light poles, an eclectic design of fluted columns in the
Neoclassical mode topped by lamps dripping with floral motifs (Spanish Colonial
Gothic). The property owners would also fund the planting of "ornamental trees and
shrubbery" along the curb line, and agreed to submit all building plans to a review
committee set up by the WDA to approve the designs of new structures. In promoting
the Archway, O'Melveny and his allies had proposed to make Wilshire into a "Champs
Elysees." As the WDAs own plans matured, their promotion crystallized into the claim
that Wilshire would be the Fifth Avenue of the West. When the new lights were turned
on, the WDA proclaimed it to be the "Great White Way" of Los Angeles, borrowing a
phrase used to describe Broadway in Manhattan. A few months later, when the WDA
unveiled a new advertising campaign, the theme reverted back to Wilshire Boulevard:
Fifth Avenue of the West.
33
These comparisons did not refer to any actual similarities
between Wilshire and those other celebrated streets, except that those streets were, in
fact, celebrated. The Wilshire boosters knew they needed to publicize the place, but they
had not yet fixed on a durable narrative and groped through this sequence of comparisons
in the effort to find one that worked. Promotion of Wilshire Boulevard was eased
considerably by the fact that it already enjoyed more press coverage than any other street
in Los Angeles. The acrimony surrounding its planning had been a magnet for reporters
and editors since the Archway plan of the early 1920s. The arrival of department stores,
starting with Bullocks in 1929, was the final element in solidifying the constructed fame
of Wilshire Boulevard.

113

Figure 3: In 1930, Wilshire Boulevard appeared as a thick line west of Westlake Park, but it had not yet been improved east
of the park to downtown, nor did Wilshire yet extend through the park. Source: Street Map of the City of Los Angeles (Los
Angeles: Automobile Club of Southern California, 1930). Used with permission; all rights reserved.

114
Department stores were not only the largest buyers of advertising in metropolitan
newspapers, but the Wilshire stores and property owners also invested in creating a
special character for the street and projecting it to their target audience of women
shoppers.
34
Gender-specific and class-specific design had been part of late-19
th
century
park planning, which created leisure settings identified with the domestic realm
prescribed for middle-class and elite women. Part of what made such landscapes
acceptable for white women was the implication of safety, accomplished not only by laws
and social practices that enforced racial segregation, but also by functionally
differentiated park designs that isolated promenades and other forms of contemplative
leisure from the more active and noisy pursuits associated with workingclass park users.
A sense of refinement communicated by a cultivated, contained nature further signaled
that certain parts of parks were appropriate public places for middleclass women.
35

The step taken in the creation of Wilshire was to make a newly specified
definition of women in public, from women as occupants of refined urban landscapes to
women as consumers of refined goods and services, when the concept of women
consumers necessarily included women as drivers. By the 1920s, women had to drive in
order to shop because of the elimination of delivery service that accompanied the rise of
mass marketing, as Ruth Schwartz Cowan has shown in her study of technology and
domesticity. Virginia Scharff considered whether driving was more liberating or
oppressing for women by examining the link between automobility and feminism in the
1920s. For white women of middleclass means, Scharff found that the automobile
altered the texture of their travel if not the larger setting of their lives. With cars they

115
made more frequent trips, visited places where they had not previously ventured, and
traveled with one or two companions rather than in larger group outings. Automobility
did not unfetter these women from their domestic roles and did not undermine the
practices that subordinated women in the family, in the economy, and in politics, but for
certain women, automobility did distort and at times widen their sphere.
36

In its appearance and function, Wilshire Boulevard was the apotheosis of that
widened sphere. It was created by an extractive process, taking parts of cities as
previously conceived and relocating them spatially. The trees and the stylish light
standards along Wilshire were borrowed from gender-specific park designs that signaled
safety and refined comfort for middleclass women. Seized from their parks context, the
landscape elements of the boulevard deployed an image of contained nature as the
directly experienced visual counterpart to the advertising campaigns launched in print
and later broadcast media.
37
The landscaped boulevard did not only provide the visual
setting for the department stores, but also the means to get to them. As Longstreth and
others have pointed out, the Wilshire department stores were themselves the product of a
distinctive approach to retail architecture: the parking lots were behind the stores, and
the design emphasis of the buildings also migrated from front to back, as the entry from
the parking lot became more formal and ornamented than the vestigial front entry that
faced the street. Elaborate porte-cocheres and driveways lined by planters and pillars
were meant to ease the transition from driver to pedestrian, to welcome the shopper from
parking lot to store.
38
The road on which they approached the store was conceived as one
orbit of movement beyond the parking lot, and the road itself could shape the experience

116
of those who came: Was it pleasant? Was it easy to negotiate? Would I go back? To
borrow landscape historian Dell Uptons phrase, the boulevard was a processional
landscape, meant to be experienced by people on the move and coordinated visually and
functionally with its landmark stores. It was not based on a triumphal procession, like the
failed Archway idea. It was a mercantile procession.
39

In 1927 the Ebell Club moved its headquarters from near downtown to the corner
of Wilshire and Lucerne, along the processional landscape of consumption that Wilshire
was just then in the process of becoming. It was a location entirely consistent with the
club's new understanding of civic activism as something for women to exercise through
their power as consumers. An editorial titled Women as Buyers in the Ebell member
magazine claimed that women made 82 percent of all department-store purchases, 78
percent of drug-store purchases, and 81 percent of grocery purchases, and called on
women to exercise the influence they held as the purchasing agents for every family.
Instead of taking visible stands on public issues or serving formally constituted
policymaking roles on the boards of public agencies, the clubwomens approach to civic
duty took on a personalistic and private character, not only in choices about shopping, but
also through a scholarship program for young women, who were evaluated according to
appearance and manners as well as academic achievement.
40

Re-crossing the boundary from the public back to the private sphere, the
clubwomen abetted their own exclusion from any opportunity to influence highway
policy and the production of public space in the city. At the exact same time that the
Ebell Club contemplated its move to Wilshire, the restructuring of the Planning

117
Commission brought an end to the commissions role as the clearinghouse for
Progressive spatial reform and transformed it into a mechansim to assure the orderly
development of real estate. The new city charter that took effect in 1925 reduced the
planning board from its unwieldy 51 members to a pared-down body of five
commissioners, thus reducing the chances of the board endorsing conflicting proposals.
The long list of constituent groups that made up the commission in its first five years lost
their seats on the board, and the extensive committee structure gave way to direct
administration of various functions by the commissioners themselves. The first five-
member board included two clubwomen who had served since the days of the Planning
Committee, but after a brief transition one of them resigned and the other was not
reappointed. In 1927 the Planning Commission was a male-only board drawn from the
real estate and planning professions, and it would remain so for more than 30 years.
41

The elegantly landscaped Wilshire Boulevard headquarters of the Ebell Club aptly
symbolizes the decline of public activism on the part of organized womanhood.
Historians have offered several explanations for the waning of womens activism in the
1920s. The success of the national suffrage amendment removed the strongest and most
unifying motivation among women for political reform, and the new priority accorded by
clubwomen to Americanization programs for immigrant families tended to separate the
interests of women according to class, rather than reinforcing the gender-based, cross-
class alliances evident in the suffrage struggle. The increasing bureaucratization of the
state minimized the ability of citizen activists to shape government action, and the
reorganization of the Planning Commission certainly fits the picture of a professional

118
bureaucracy internalizing the public's business at the cost of clubwomen's participation in
debates about public space in Los Angeles.
42
The embrace of consumption as ideology
surely softened any disappointment over the loss of a more visible public role, at least for
those women with the means to consume. But withdrawal from any chance to affect the
policies governing streets might have had deeper implications than understood at the
time. Street construction would transform the city in terms of the connections between
different neighborhoods and between residential and commercial districts, would devour
a rising share of municipal expenditures, and would help determine the pattern of
subsequent development. Without a voice in the approval and funding of street plans,
clubwomen lost connection with the processes that significantly shaped their city. The
withdrawal of organized womanhood from urban spatial reform weakened their ability to
act effectively in the public sphere for a generation to come.
Womens participation might have produced a different transportation network in
Los Angeles, besides the aforementioned taking of playgrounds to assemble the right-of-
way for Whittier Boulevard. In the 1930s, the improvement of Ramona Boulevard on the
east side into a limited-access through highway (the predecessor to the San Bernardino
Freeway) separated workingclass women who lived north of the highway from the
grocery stores south of the highway, to which they traveled on foot. If any clubwomen
had been in a position to review the project, would they have dismissed the resulting
protests with no action, as did the city engineer and the state highway department? Might
they have raised the issue of convenient access to groceries to feed children, rather than
confining the deliberations to assessment of the new roadways traffic capacity?

119
Similarly, the promotion of freeways during their formative period in the late 1930s and
1940s frequently used female models to adorn advertisements and public presentations.
Would that tactic have been effective if authority over the plans had included the
participation of clubwomen? We will never know, because in their retreat to the cozy
embrace of Wilshire Boulevard, organized womanhood left those decisions to others.

Boulevards Not Taken: Progressivism and Highway Politics
The Archway episode did help to resolve some of the institutional confusion
regarding road policy. Most significantly, the Planning Commission and the interests that
had brought it into being would no longer play a formative role in transportation
development. The city council had foreshadowed that outcome in February 1925, when
it stripped the Planning Commission of authority over the opening and widening of new
highways. The city charter of 1925 completed the job.
43

G. Gordon Whitnall survived the Planning Commissions transition, and for a
time the reorganized agency with its refocused mission made a congenial setting for his
efforts to establish scientific zoning. He continued to decry the structural defects of
city government in Los Angeles, which endowed localized interests with the means to
undermine comprehensive planning. The theory of Majority Rule is in fact Minority
Rule, wrote Whitnall, and it produced unwarranted improvements. He extolled the
county Regional Planning Commissions forceful exercise of zoning authority to reserve
land for arterial highways, in comparison with the more diverse and interest-laden
process within the city. Both ideology and authority put Whitnall at odds with the city

120
engineers. The engineers built things, and in so doing they transformed the environment
on a piecemeal basis and froze the allocation of resources. The Planning Commission
could recommend but not initiate. Its power was in denial, in recommending against the
approval of projects that did not fit a comprehensive plan for the city, and each time the
city council or a group of property owners overrode one of his recommendations,
Whitnall suffered another blow to his beliefs in the proper way to build a city. Weary of
land-use politics, he asked the commissioners to excuse him from appearing at public
meetings to explain the commissions policies, but the board insisted that such duties
were a necessary part of his job.
44

After the Archway, visionaries of growth such as OMelveny retreated from the
development of specific highway projects in favor of a more abstract and policy-oriented
role in the provision of transportation infrastructure, represented primarily by the Major
Traffic Street Plan of 1924. OMelveny himself overcame any feelings of resentment he
might have harbored over defeat of the Archway and participated in the lucrative arena of
Wilshire real estate by serving as a broker for land sales to department stores.
45
The city
council, prodded by Osborne, took a lesson from the Planning Commissions early
missteps in highway policy and set up the Traffic Commission, which would produce the
Major Traffic Street Plan (detailed below). The Traffic Commission featured some of
the breadth of representation of the original planning commission, but focused
exclusively on streets and highways rather than the extensive range of issues pursued by
the planning commission between 1920 and 1925. Most significantly, the city council

121
bestowed on the Traffic Commission the authority over opening and widening of streets
that had been taken away from the Planning Commission.
46

The exercise of that authority by the Traffic Commission necessarily involved the
city engineers. While public contention did not arise from this relationship, there is
considerable evidence that the engineers continued to follow their own priorities. The
city engineers contributed to broad-scale highway efforts like the Major Traffic Street
Plan, and were attentive to their results, but placed the highest priority for their own
efforts on projects that they could actually build, not just discuss. They found those
opportunities where they had particular regulatory advantage, such as their dealings with
railroads in the river corridor, or where organized property owners could produce
political assent and money to build with, such as Mulholland Highway.

Wilshire at Risk
The processional landscape of consumption finally provided the narrative line that
the Wilshire Development Association had sought for the promotion of their fabulous
boulevard -- the Miracle Mile tag first suggested by an associate of A. W. Ross.
47

For the storeowners and real estate developers who understood the street's role in that
way, and who put up their money to make it happen, the strategy worked spectacularly
well. Wilshire was the most expensive street in Los Angeles. The light poles alone cost
more than $300,000, and the landholders readily committed further tax increments to pay
for the installation of the new red-green-amber traffic signals and experiments in the
progressive operation of those signals. City government and the property owners

122
justified the new signals on the basis of the enormous traffic volume, measured at over
4,300 vehicles per hour in 1931 at Wilshire and Western, which was said to be the busiest
corner in the nation at that time, surpassing Park and 57
th
in Manhattan and Broad and
Glenwood in Philadelphia. The landowners could easily afford the cost. By then, the
WDAs advertisements could point to property values that had appreciated up to 1,300
percent in a few short years, and which continued to climb through the worst years of the
Depression. Rising property values made Wilshire a safe choice for investors who
purchased bonds secured by special assessments. Even in such desperate times as
December 1930, bonds to pay for building Wilshire through downtown sold quickly with
no discounting. This ability to attract capital from a national pool of investors (the bonds
were underwritten in New York) is another potent reason why Wilshire Boulevard
endures so firmly within attempts to assess the character of Los Angeles -- not just to
build during the general misery of the Hoover years, but to build large and profitably with
money brought into Los Angeles from outside. To those who owned the land, it was a
miracle indeed.
48

The sunny expostulations of boosters invited negation from writers, artists and
filmmakers, and Wilshire was a perfect foil for those who wanted to expose the cynicism,
cupidity and exploitation of metropolitan life. As the depictions of Wilshire Boulevard
continued to accumulate, they would provide a counter-narrative to the promotional
efforts connected with the material and political origins of the place. In the seminal noir
fiction of Raymond Chandler, Wilshire stands for a luminous yet disappointed promise of
what might have been: I used to like this town [when] there were trees along Wilshire

123
Boulevard. . . . Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens
of America. It wasnt that, but it wasnt a neon-lighted slum either. Chandlers
Wilshire later becomes the normative habitat of sleaze, of pathetic stucco shacks
pretending to be Moorish palaces, where the inhabitants are ugly and grasping. David
Hockneys 1964 painting, Wilshire Boulevard, portrays two featureless people against a
flattened landscape with a generic building and wretched, stringy palm trees -- the picture
of rootless anomie, a city of sunstruck strangers among featureless walls.
49
Still later, the
post-nuclear fantasy film, Miracle Mile (1988), took place along that most publicized
stretch of the boulevard, and Volcano (1997) treated filmgoers to lava flows destroying
the Wilshire streetscape.
As art and fiction repudiate the many images produced by the Wilshire boosters,
they convey a critique of the advertising and publicity that are based on the deletion of
the unpleasant and the soothing of anger and worry. The creative portrayals of a seamier
Wilshire, a Wilshire at risk, allude however inchoately to the conflicts fought over the
production of this place. Understanding the physical construction of Wilshire Boulevard
should deepen our appreciation for its use in metropolitan mythology, and for the ability
of mythology to sense reality, if not to analyze it. Nor can the enlistment of Wilshire in
metaphorical endeavors be dismissed as something disconnected from the creation of its
physical reality. The construction was a discursive process too, a series of arguments
waged in the public prints, in neighborhood meetings, in the boardrooms and public
forums of civic clubs, at city council hearings, and at the polls. How fitting that such a

124
monument to car culture should have a lively and material conflict like the Archway
embedded in its origins.

125
NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

1
For overviews of Wilshire Boulevards history see Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall:
Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997),
103-42; Thomas S. Hines, Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California, in Jan Cigliano and Sarah
Bradford Landau, eds., The Grand American Avenue, 1850-1920 (San Francisco: Museum of the
American Architectural Foundation/Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994), 307-37; Ralph Hancock, Fabulous
Boulevard (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1949); and Douglas R. Suisman, Los Angeles Boulevard:
Eight X-Rays of the Body Politic, Forum Publication Number Five (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Forum for
Architecture and Urban Design, 1989), 23-30. All of these accounts provide valuable interpretation of the
boulevards commercial development but either omit or elide the early 1920s battle over the design of the
roadway that is detailed below in the text.

2
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971; reprint, London: Penguin
Books, 1990), 87.

3
Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (1967; reprint, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 261.

4
Description of commercial uses along Wilshire in letter accompanying rezoning petition, 24 January
1924, Council File (1924); Council Files will hereinafter be cited as CF. Also see Types of Architecture
Representing Stately Homes of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1920; Bank to Have Ten
Branches by Years End, Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1920.

5
Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall, 67-71.

6
Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1922 and November 12, 1922.

7
Starr, Material Dreams, 122 (quoted words), 130, 161; W. W. Robinson, Lawyers of Los Angeles (LA: Los
Angeles Bar Association, 1959), 53, 64, 71, 84, 125, 229, 314. Besides presiding over a thriving corporate law
practice, O'Melveny helped to found the Title Insurance Trust Co., which became the largest title insurer in the
country; was the president of the Los Angeles Bar Association; and was a founder of institutions such as the
Southwest Museum and the California Club.

8
Los Angeles Times, 23 July 1922, 12 November 1922, 23 January 1923, 28 March 28 1924.
9
Automobile Club of Southern California, Digest of Minutes, Board of Directors, vol. 4, 101, 15 June
1922.

10
Los Angeles Times, 20 October 1912, 25 January 1913, 27 April 1913 (quotation), 19 February 1922.

11
Los Angeles Times, 7 June 1922, 8 June 1922, and 23 July 1922. All quoted words in this paragraph
and the following paragraph are from this last article.

12
City Planning Commission, Minutes, 1:213, 8 January 1921; 1:290, 15 March 1921; 2:227, 10 January
1922; 2:388-89, 27 April 1922; 3:66, 22 August 1922; 3:312, 20 December 1922.

13
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1923-24, 52.

126

14
Los Angeles Times, 23 January 1923. The detailed plan was also presented in a promotional pamphlet:
Sherley Hunter, Why Los Angeles Will Become the World's Greatest City (Los Angeles: H. J. Mallen and Co.,
1923), pp. 19-20.

15
Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall, 57.

16
Names of property owners from petition of Wilshire Development Association, 24 January 1924, Council
File 497, Box A196, oversize.

17
Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 226-27.

18
Letter from Ross and Zahn to City Council, 18 July 1923, CM, 18 July 1923; denial in letter from City
Clerk to Ross and Zahn, 19 July 1923, CF 4037. The letter from Ross and Zahn must have been received at
least several weeks prior to its appearing in the minutes of the council, because it was referred to committee
before the full council voted on the request.

19
Frank B. Williams, "Zoning Notes," American City 31 (July 1924): 63; idem., Zoning Notes,
American City 32 (April 1925): 465.

20
Petition cited in note 41 above.

21
CM, 142:546, 5 February 1924; 142:715, 14 February 1924; 144:58, 27 March 1924.

22
Alyce de Roulet Williamson, "Reminiscences of Henry de Roulet," typescript, 1983, Pellissier Family
File, History Department, Los Angeles Public Library, 12-13; Los Angeles Times, 28 March 1924; CM,
144:626, 21 April 1924; City Planning Commission, Minutes, 4:262, 11 October 1923; 4:769, 20 March
1924.

23
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1923-24, 52; City Planning Commission, Minutes, 2:454-55, 6
June 1922; 5:84-85, 5 August 1924 (quotation); 5:548-50, 24 February 1925.

24
CM, 144:293-97, 7 April 1924; 149:407-08, 3 October 1924; 149:656, 672, 16 October 1924. City
Planning Commission, Minutes, 2:454-55, 6 June 1922.

25
CM, 144:593, 18 April 1924; 149:656, 16 October 1924.

26
City Planning Commission, Minutes, 5:268-71, 27 October 1924 (quoted words from Open Letter);
Automobile Club of Southern California, Digest of Board Minutes, 4:163, 22 May 1924; Los Angeles
Times, 1 November 1924 (Auto Club quotation), 4 November 1924, 5 November 1924; CM, 151:267-68, 5
December 1924; 153:426, 6 February 1925; 153:472, 9 February 1925; 153:498, 10 February 1925;
155:591, 20 April 1925 (O'Melveny quotation).

27
Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall, 105.

28
Hines, Wilshire Boulevard, 321.

29
Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 261.

30
Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall, 88-9, 112-18. Fogelsons analysis also reverses the
sequence of events: the rezoning proposal was a reaction to the Archway plan, not the other way around.

127

31
City Planning Commission, Minutes, 2:223, 10 January 1922.

32
Rigid formulation of U. S. urban spatial history based on an essentialized relationship between core and
periphery originated with the Chicago School of sociologists, who ordered class, culture, and indeed all of
urban life, according to an ecological model that produced a picture of discrete and monolithic rings and
sectors; for a foundational statement of this literature, see Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess and Roderick
McKenzie, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925). In the 1960s, Sam Bass Warners influential book applied
this method to interpret the "streetcar suburbs" south of Boston. Over the next 30 years, city-specific case
studies and syntheses of the suburban phenomenon undermined the Chicago model by observing the
operation of cultural factors (the pastoral ideal, neighborhood diversity) and structural factors (geographic
distribution of industrial employment) in the creation of differentiated urban places. By 1994, Nicholas
von Hoffman could assemble these strands of critique of the core-periphery analysis into a re-examination
of one of Warner's streetcar suburbs, where he found a highly diverse picture of spatially diffuse industrial
development and a variety of commuting and travel patterns within the metropolis, which disrupted rigid
formulations of core and periphery. See Sam Bass Warner, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Urban
Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); Joel A. Tarr, Transportation
Innovation and Changing Spatial Dynamics in Pittsburgh, 1850-1934 (Chicago: Public Works Historical
Society, 1978); Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Kenneth T.Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The
Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Cohen,
Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990); Nicholas von Hoffman, Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood,
1850 to 1920 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

33
Los Angeles Times, 7 December 1924; Williamson, "Reminiscences," 12; Los Angeles Evening Express,
4 February 1928.

34
On the central role of department stores in the advertising market for metropolitan newspapers, and in
their formulation and projection of gender-specific constructions of urban life, see Susan Porter Benson,
Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 17-18, 102-06; and Gunther Barth, City People, 140-44, 230-
31.

35
On the gender-specific aspects of park design, see Baldwin, Domesticating the Street, esp. chap. 5,
Segregating the Parks, and Bluestone, Constructing Chicago, 35.

36
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open
Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women
and the Coming of the Motor Age (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 135-41.

37
This idea of the mediated landscape, the place that is conceived in conjunction with its promotional
portrayals, and where the distribution of those portrayals is so widespread as to influence the expectations
of most people who end up coming to the place, is frequently presented as one of the characteristics of the
so-called postmodern condition. By pushing this practice back into the 1920s I do not mean to support
assertions of LA's pathbreaker status among US cities by simply showing that one of its supposedly
distinctive contributions is actually earlier than believed, but rather to break down the assertions of LA's
uniqueness by situating the city within the many streams of both material and representational development
that have shaped our urban places.

128

38
Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall, 112-41; Hines, Wilshire Boulevard, 329-32.

39
An early statement of Uptons approach to analyzing landscapes in terms of the experience of passing
through them is found in White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth Century Virginia, Places 2 (1984):
59-72; also see Upton, The City as Material Culture, in Anne Yentsch and Mary Beaudry, eds., The Art
and Mystery of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of James Deetz (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press,
1992), 51-74.

40
Ebell, October 1927, 5-10, 14, 27; The Ebell of Los Angeles, 1894-1994 Larchmont Chronicle,
Special Centennial Edition, June 1994; Benson, Counter Cultures, 79.

41
Hunter, Municipal Organization, 218; Board of City Planning Commissioners, Annual Report, 1928-29,
3-4; Los Angeles Public Library, Chronological Record of Los Angeles City Officials, 1850-1938.

42
On the decline of womens activism, see Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish
Sklar, "Introduction," in Kerber, Kessler-Harrs, and Sklar, eds., U. S. History as Women's History: New
Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 1-14, and in the same volume,
Estelle Freedman, ""Separatism Revisited: Women's Institutions, Social Reform, and the Career of Miriam
Van Waters," 170-88. Also see Gayle Gullet, Women Progressives and the Politics of Americanization in
California, 1915-1920, Pacific Historical Review 64 (February 1995): 71-94.

43
Hunter, Municipal Organization, 218; Board of City Planning Commissioners, Annual Report, 1928-29,
3-4.

44
Appeal for scientific zoning by Whitnall in Public Welfare Committee Report, CM, 157:279-81, 5
June 1925; G. Gordon Whitnall, Saving Money in Street Widening, American City 40 (February 1929):
122-23; Board of Planning Commissioners, Annual Report, 1927-28, 15 (Majority Rule); Board of City
Planning Commissioners, Minutes, 5:831-32, 9 June 1925.

45
Los Angeles Evening Herald, 25 February 1928.

46
Board of Planning Commissioners, Minutes, 5:548-50, 24 February 1925.

47
Hancock, Fabulous Boulevard, 154. Neither Bullocks nor de Roulets Pellissier Building (Wiltern
Theater), which went up in 1931, were on the stretch that would be labeled Miracle Mile, with La Brea at
its eastern end and Fairfax to the west. Pellissier was at the corner of Western, almost two miles east of La
Brea, and Bullocks at the corner of Westmoreland, another mile east of Western. These buildings set the
economic and legal precedents, and pointed the way toward the designs, for the Miracle Mile projects for
which Ross would employ the spot-zoning strategy.

48
Los Angeles Evening Herald, 18 February 1928, 25 February 1928, 19 October 1929, 4 December 1930,
21 December 1931.

49
Hines, Wilshire Boulevard, 307-08; Elizabeth Word and Alan Silver, eds., Raymond Chandlers Los
Angeles (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1987).

129
CHAPTER THREE
THE PUBLIC RELATIONS OF URBAN FORM: THE LOS ANGELES TRAFFIC
COMMISSION AND THE MAJOR TRAFFIC STREET PLAN OF 1924

The Major Traffic Street Plan of 1924 is one of the most misunderstood episodes
in the history of Los Angeles. Produced by a team of three prominent planning
consultants under contract to the Los Angeles Traffic Commission, the Plan compiled
existing data and proposed networks of main arteries, feeder streets, and specialized roads
such as parkways. Historians and planning scholars describe it as a pivotal moment in
the transportation history of Los Angeles, a point that divides everything that came before
from everything that came after.
1
That is only true in a narrow sense: the Plan was
undoubtedly the cause of an enormous increase in the amount of words printed about
streets in Los Angeles, especially in publications that had not cared to mention the
subject much before, such as newspapers, popular magazines, and travel books. The
Traffic Commission made sure of that with a well-oiled publicity campaign that was part
of its strategy to win the referendum held on the Plan, in November 1924, the same
election in which the Archway was defeated.
Publicity concerning the Plan was magnified because everything about Los
Angeles became more prominent in popular literature during the 1920s, not just its
streets. The Chamber of Commerce, the All-Year Club, the Auto Club, the Santa Fe and
Union Pacific railroads, local governments, and private real estate entrepreneurs

130
produced a torrent of press releases, broadsides, commissioned articles, and
advertisements aimed at encouraging not just tourism, but relocation to "America's
Mediterranean shore."
2
One of the main strategies in this outpouring of promotion was to
portray Los Angeles as different from other American cities. Claims of novelty threaded
through all the topics emphasized in the booster literature: the climate, the
preponderance of single-family dwellings rather than apartment houses, the recreational
opportunities, the thwarting of unions under the citys open-shop law, the dominance of a
white Anglo elite, the Spanish-themed architecture. Into this setting, the Traffic
Commission issued its urgent call for action, based on the assertion that the traffic
emergency confronting the city demanded special arrangements. The commission argued
that Los Angeles was unusual in the number of cars on its roads, that the city needed to
rebuild to correct its horrific traffic problems, in effect that Los Angeles, with its
inadequate patchwork of narrow streets, was not very well-suited to the use of
automobiles.
3
By the end of the 1920s, the images of Angeleno automobility had broken
free from the reality, or at least from the reality of the citys poor and poorly coordinated
street networks. The sheer number of cars became the dominant image. Refracted
through the claims of metropolitan exceptionalism, that image mutated into the new and
widely repeated assertion that Los Angeles was the quintessential automotive metropolis.
This subtle change of emphasis helped to produce the new, hybrid narrative of a
distinctive local car culture, based on the contention that cars meant more to people in
Los Angeles than they did elsewhere. This aspect of the citys reputation was the most
significant and lasting contribution of the Major Traffic Street Plan.

131
To Henry Z. Osborne, Jr., who brought the Traffic Commission into being and
served as its chief of staff, the publicity campaign on behalf of the Plan, and indeed the
Plan itself, had other, more down-to-earth, purposes, and it failed on all counts. Later
commentators overestimated its impact because they relied on sources that all lead back
to the promotional campaign, in which the Plans sponsors repeatedly and forcefully
insisted that their work was important. An entirely different picture emerges in the
minutiae of public business, such as reports to the city council, and in the private
deliberations of the organizations that sponsored the Traffic Commission. Claimed as an
innovative approach to right-of-way selection in the city, in fact the Plan repackaged
Osbornes decade-old grid proposal along with other prior attempts to impose a
purportedly rational geometry on the messy and contested process of laying out streets.
The voters did approve the plan, along with a bond issue to implement it, but the $5
million in bonds could not have built even five percent of the Plan, and only then if all
the money went into construction, which it did not. Thus it is hardly surprising that the
recommendations in the Plan were substantially not built, that the Plan had limited effect
on the fabric of the city. Osbornes goal of superseding the difficult politics of major
highway construction with an independent authority also suffered ignominious defeat,
and the demise of the Traffic Commission in 1928 because of ineffectiveness and
embezzlement undermined for a decade the credibility of citizens' committees
participating in transportation policy.
Futile as a political strategy, negligible as a construction program, and notable in
the long-term primarily for the effects of its public relations campaign on the image of

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Los Angeles, the Major Traffic Street Plan nonetheless attempted to address real
conditions that limited the ability of residents to move about the city. As development in
the early 1920s spread to the areas between the spokes of settlement established by the
street railways, residents in those newly opened subdivisions had little alternative but to
travel in automobiles because there was no nearby trolley service. The citys streetcar
companies had been chronically short of capital since the 1911 merger that created the
Pacific Electric and the Los Angeles Railway. Their inability to build additional lines to
serve newly developed residential areas between existing trolley corridors was the root
cause of many of the complaints about rail service in the city.
4
Buses were not a realistic
option for most trips, even though more than 200 of them carried passengers on regular
routes by 1925, because the bus routes precisely mirrored the trolley system, serving an
arterial function as replacements for streetcar lines that had been abandoned.
5
The
increase in automobile usage as a percentage of trips during the 1920s did not reflect "the
power of consensus," as Scott Bottles interpreted the politics surrounding the Major
Traffic Street Plan, but rather the absence of alternatives.
6
Even then, the balance was
only beginning to shift, as people entering downtown on trolleys continued to outnumber
those arriving in automobiles.
7
At the time of the Major Traffic Street Plan, Los Angeles
was not the city built for the car, as it became known in the literature of metropolitan
exceptionalism, but the city that would attempt to rebuild around automobile
transportation in order to sustain the rapid expansion of settled territory.
While traffic and infrastructure arguments were waged in terms of congestion,
they concerned more fundamental matters: the near-total privatization of real estate in

133
the city and the piecemeal authority over road construction among various city agencies
and interests. The acquisition of the right-of-way for a major highway from private
landowners could only be justified by a claim of broad public benefit, but there was no
single or unified means to define that public benefit. Highway politics in 1920s Los
Angeles thus consisted of negotiating this boundary between public responsibility and
private property.
8
The formation of the Traffic Commission and its hiring of
distinguished planning consultants was a strategy to readjust that relationship, to establish
centralized authority for route determination and a means of funding that did not depend
on property-owner approval. The images of Los Angeles created to sell the Plan were
formulated to transcend disagreements among property owners and public officials, to
provide a rallying point for highway construction in the face of some of the most
formidable obstacles faced by roadbuilders in any American city.

Formation of the Traffic Commission
After moving from the city engineering office to the Public Utilities Commission
in 1919, it must have seemed to Henry Osborne that there were too many plans rather
than not enough of them. The Traffic Commission and the Major Traffic Street Plan did
not fill a vacuum in transportation planning, but responded to the institutional confusion
he confronted. Between the summer of 1920 and the summer of 1921, the Community
Development Association began the Archway plan, the city engineers started working on
Tenth Street/Olympic Boulevard, the City Planning Commission began to recommend
routes for arterial highways, and the Auto Club commissioned consulting engineer J. B.

134
Lippincott to conduct the first citywide, empirical traffic study. Besides producing new
data on vehicle movements, the Lippincott study also reintroduced the use of prominent
consultants into the arena of city transportation policy for the first time since Charles
Robinsons City Beautiful pastiche of more than a decade earlier.
J. B. Lippincott is an infamous figure in Los Angeles history because of his role
in securing the water rights for the Owens Valley Aqueduct. He had been employed by
the U. S. Reclamation Service while he was also secretly representing Los Angeles, a
conflict of interest that transgressed even the lax definitions of corruption prevailing at
the time. Dismissed from the Reclamation Service, Lippincott devoted himself fulltime
to a Los Angeles-based consulting practice that specialized in water projects and enjoyed
steady work from government clients and land developers throughout the west.
Lippincott represented the Auto Club on a host of highway issues -- urging the city to
complete the Arroyo Seco Parkway, lobbying the county to allocate money for the
Angeles Crest Highway, and criticizing the excessive cost of the San Gabriel Canyon
road planned by the U. S. Forest Service.
9

Lippincott approached traffic like the hydraulic engineer that he was, in terms of
flow. He stationed traffic checkers along main thoroughfares and at intersections to
count passing vehicles and to record the timing and duration of tie-ups that brought traffic
to a halt. No statistics were required to grasp that traffic slowed frequently in the
congested district of downtown. The report did not recommend substantial
construction there, but rather a series of incremental measures, such as turn prohibitions,
leveling storm-drain catch basins so they did not create barriers to movement, and

135
realigning offset intersections. The survey also attempted to view traffic on a regional
basis, with a study area of 75-miles diameter centered on downtown. The traffic counts
revealed three patterns of regular congestion in this larger area: the routes between Los
Angeles and Pasadena (20
th
Street and Pasadena Avenue, which was later rebuilt as North
Figueroa); between downtown and the San Fernando Valley (Cahuenga Pass and San
Fernando Road); and between the L. A. basin and points southeast and south (Stephenson
Avenue, later renamed Whittier Boulevard). The surveyors tracked cars along these
routes to determine if they were bound for Los Angeles or just passing through and found
that only three percent of the cars entering the city represented through traffic. (At the
same time, the state Division of Highways began to plan major arteries to serve that
through traffic, and lack of coordination between city and state engineers would soon
create enormous and intractable problems, especially east of the Los Angeles River.)
Most of Lippincotts recommendations for the areas outside of downtown consisted of
upgrades to existing streets, such as Pasadena (Figueroa), Macy and Boyle, though he
also called for new diagonal arteries dedicated only to traffic, which would slice through
the existing street grid. The report identified a connector running northwest from
downtown to Hollywood as the most crucial route for this treatment. Except for the
diagonal arteries, the report resembled Osbornes boulevard plan, augmented by traffic
data to help identify which segments to build first. It emphasized the need to envision all
these arteries as an integrated network, and used the phrase major traffic street plan to
describe that process. Lippincott completed the study in late 1920 but the Auto Club did

136
not publish it until mid-1922, when it joined the growing stream of road plans that
included Osbornes latest effort to promote his grid idea.
10

After the imbroglio over the downtown parking ban died down in the spring of
1920, Osborne began to assemble a comprehensive survey and report on the subject of
traffic congestion and detailed methods of relief.
11
It took more than a year to complete,
in part because Osborne and his staff conducted a series driving tests to record the time
it took for an automobile to travel along Broadway, Hill Street, and other arteries.
12

Osborne also had to rewrite the report every time a city agency or private organization
issued a new plan, and resolving that cacophony became Osbornes main focus. The
Board of Public Works, the Bureau of Engineering, the Planning Commission, and his
own Public Utilities Commission all had some oversight of transportation but none
focused on it exclusively. Private efforts such as Lippincotts plan, the Archway, and the
activities of various improvement districts pushing for major arteries had the additional
disadvantage of proceeding without being required to notify all of the public authorities
seeking to derive comprehensive solutions. Osborne proposed that the representatives
of the various civic and industrial organizations working on this problem should be called
into a conference to secure the benefit of the work of each, and at the same time, to avoid
duplication of the work and to adjust conflicting recommendations.
13
After his board
and the city council concurred, Osborne set out to assemble his coalition to solve the
grave traffic problems confronting the city.
14

In January 1922 Osborne convened a meeting of city, county and state officials as
well as some 60 private organizations, including all the rail and utility companies, trade

137
associations (automobile dealers, retail merchants, truckers, wholesale grocers),
professional associations (architects, civil engineers, teachers), all the leading women's
clubs, all six newspapers, the Board of Trade, the Merchants and Manufacturers
Association, the Realty Board, the Chamber of Commerce and the Auto Club. The
participants resolved to form a new organization, the Traffic Commission of the City and
County of Los Angeles. The city council and the county board of supervisors both
approved the formation of the Traffic Commission and allowed city and county engineers
to participate in its work.
15
Osborne served as chief engineer and president of the board,
while continuing his duties at the Public Utilities Commission.
16
By October, the
Chamber of Commerce, the Auto Club, and other private sponsors had pledged sufficient
funds to pay operating expenses.
17
The commission issued its first recommendations just
two months later, a sure sign that it was dedicated not to the creation of new plans, but to
the repackaging and promotion of those that already existed.
18

The main goal of the commission was to serve as the central transportation
planning agency for the city and the surrounding area. Its private rather than
governmental status did not represent a contradiction to the leadership because they
identified democratic governance as the core of the problem. According to The Los
Angeles Plan, the report issued in December 1922: "Public officials are, by the very
nature of their office, prohibited from being participants. They must act in a judicial [sic]
capacity and it is not appropriate for them to take sides for or against public
improvements where there are conflicting interests and divided public opinion." The
commission could serve as a "buffer between the public and the authorities," by

138
negotiating with property owners for easements, circulating street-improvement petitions,
and advocating in the press on behalf of their projects. The Los Angeles Plan presented a
list of 53 proposals to the city council, from the improvement of specific routes such as
Venice and Beverly boulevards and the Cahuenga Pass road, to broad policies such as
establishing pre-emptive setback lines for future highways.
19
In total, this plan looked
very much like Osborne's decade-old grid of boulevards, and it suffered much the same
fate, never transcending the specialized discourse of experts to capture the attention and
support of a broader, taxpaying public. The city council referred the list of urgent
projects to its finance committee for a cost survey but the committee never reported
back.
20

Osborne and the Traffic Commission then adjusted their tactics to emphasize not
the technical matters of what to build and where to build it, but rather the creation and
projection of a new image of the city, and the establishment of the political authority to
supersede the legacy of the Vrooman Act. The commission hired a News Director,
Clarence Snethen, who signaled his methods by proclaiming that We are dealing with a
novel and highly complicated problem. In the curious alchemy of public relations,
Snethen understood that the manufactured visibility would be more effective if the
commission denied that it sought any, thus producing this paradoxical claim from the
News Director: It is not the policy of the Traffic Commission to seek publicity for the
work it does.
21
Such protests notwithstanding, the next step taken by the Traffic
Commission was to provide Snethen with something to publicize.

139
The Dream Team: Olmsted, Bartholomew and Cheney
Rapidly growing Los Angeles was a cornucopia for planners and engineers who
operated consulting practices. They benefited from alarmist descriptions of congestion,
from the pleas that strong action must be taken, and from the ill-defined boundary
between public and private responsibility for planning and building highways. Like
much else in the city at that time, the institutional setting for the engineering and planning
professions was more flexible than entrenched. Consultants moved between public and
private-sector clients, and public agencies employed a mix of civil-service staff and
outside consultants, often on the same job. The engineering or planning staff attached to
a project was a source of political capital that could be helpful in gaining the necessary
approvals, and, for consultants, the ability to attract clients was based on reputation and
connections. Henry Osborne was as keenly attuned to the politics of engineering as
anyone, familiar as he was with the chambers of the city council and the boardrooms of
the Chamber of Commerce and the Auto Club. A year after winning the referendum for
the Major Traffic Street Plan, Osborne would work the connection in the other direction,
leaving public employ to open his own engineering practice, with clients that included his
former employers in city government as well as the improvement associations attempting
to widen and pave Venice Boulevard and Beverly Boulevard.
22

After the Los Angeles Plan died in committee, Osborne persuaded the board of
the Traffic Commission to assemble a prestigious planning team to burnish their efforts
with the highest degree of professional luster. The experts would have to be paid of
course, and the commissions intentions first surfaced in the summer of 1923, when

140
Osborne asked the city council for $10,000 to fund a "basic survey to determine which
streets and traffic arteries shall be improved." The Finance Committee reported
favorably this time, perhaps because the $10,000 was only a fraction what it would have
cost to build the Los Angeles Plan. It might also have been politically necessary for the
council to display some positive action, given the luminaries that Osborne paraded before
them on behalf of the appropriation, including the heads of the Realty Board, the
Chamber of Commerce, and the Community Development Association.
23
In any case,
the council approved the money, and Osborne set out to put his team in place.
He did not have to look very far. The three authors of the Major Traffic Street
Plan -- Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., of Brookline, Massachusetts, Harland Bartholomew
of St. Louis, and Charles Cheney of Portland, Oregon -- had all been pitching their
services in Los Angeles for years. Olmsted, one of the most celebrated landscape
architects and planners of the day, continued the practice of his father, the designer of
New Yorks Central Park. The firm operated on a national basis, and its previous
California projects included the master plans for the campus of Stanford University,
Balboa Park in San Diego, the city of Torrance, and, in the years leading up to the Major
Traffic Street Plan, the city of Palos Verdes Estates, on a broad peninsula at the
southwest edge of the Los Angeles basin, between Redondo Beach and Los Angeles
harbor.
24
Bartholomew entered the nascent field of city planning in 1911 as a student
worker on the plan for Newark, New Jersey. In 1919 he moved to St. Louis to serve as
its director of planning, while also running a busy nationwide consulting practice and
teaching planning at the university level. Bartholomew was one of the most influential

141
planners of the 20
th
century, head of a firm that produced over 500 city plans.
25
Cheney
had trained as an architect at Berkeley and conducted city plans for Sacramento,
Berkeley, Alameda, Fresno, Spokane and Portland before his work in Los Angeles. In
1922 he too was working on Palos Verdes Estates, conducting surveys for the road
network in the ocean suburb.
26

Cheney and Bartholomew had both offered their expertise to the Los Angeles City
Planning Commission soon after it was established in 1920. Cheney secured an audience
with the commission during its first months of operation, when he proposed to provide all
the professional services the commission would require: zoning plans and subdivision
maps, traffic studies and railway regulation, park and recreation plans, legislation, and
intelligent and constructive guidance of these plans to completion. The proposal was
too comprehensive; it offered to take on virtually the entire mission of the commission,
which voted against hiring Cheney.
27
Bartholomews pitch came soon after, in early
1921. He presented an incisive analysis of the problems faced by city planners in Los
Angeles, especially the deficiencies of the assessment-district process. The commission
did not see how professional expertise could by itself overcome what was essentially a
political conundrum, and Bartholomew too left empty-handed.
28

The Olmsted firm had been approached as early as 1895 to prepare park plans for
Los Angeles, and Olmsted, Jr., had corresponded with members of the City Planning
Committee from 1911 through 1914 regarding cost estimates and the scope of services
involved in conducting a comprehensive city plan, which came to naught at that time.
29

Olmsted, Jr., was treated as a celebrity during a visit to Los Angeles in 1912, when the

142
Civic Association invited him to give a speech and the Times recorded the proceedings
with a mixture of tongue-in-cheek admiration for the esteemed visitor and self-
consciousness over the citys raw appearance. My goodness! reported the Times,
Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous landscape gardener, city beautifier, park inspector,
and all-around municipal housekeeper expert, took a walk around the southwest part of
our city. The visit came during the January rains, and on his stroll along Adams
Boulevard and Grand Avenue, Olmsted got his feet wet and found the streets afloat.
He refrained from calling Los Angeles a hick town, to the somewhat sarcastic gratitude
of the reporter: [Olmsted] was distinctly mild and extremely polite about it, but he just
mentioned the fact that we do need storm water sewers rather badly. As the head of a
firm that reaped consulting contracts far and wide, Olmsted could deftly avoid insulting
potential clients while also opening the door for a discussion about his services:
Whatever I say may be taken merely as the chance observations of a traveler and not as
the result of a thorough investigation.
30
By 1916, Olmsteds visits became more
frequent because his firm was at work on the plans for Palos Verdes Estates. The local
press accorded enthusiastic coverage to Palos Verdes, further solidifying Olmsteds
iconic status.
31

Cheney, the only one of the three authors of the Plan who lived in the area,
probably took the lead in securing the contract. Bartholomew had his city and faculty
jobs in St. Louis, and Olmsted supervised the work on Palos Verdes from afar, with the
periodic visit of several weeks.
32
Cheney lived in Redondo Beach during his work on
the road surveys for Palos Verdes and took an active role in local organizations, serving

143
on the boards of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce and the Southern California
chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
33
Once he secured Olmsteds
participation, it was a short step to bring in Bartholomew; their two firms frequently
operated jointly, made referrals back and forth, and maintained what a longtime
Bartholomew employee called an old boy network to help in securing consulting
commissions.
34
The temporary partnership met the promotional needs of the Traffic
Commission and leveraged Cheneys local presence by putting him in charge of day-to-
day supervision of the work. Cheney also served as the most frequent spokesperson for
the Plan, delivering speeches to clubs and business groups.
35

The Traffic Commissions publicity campaign began before the consulting team
was in place and achieved a crescendo on the eve of the referendum in early November
1924. The work of Clarence Snethen, the News Director, was aided considerably by the
willingness of the commissions constituent organizations to push the program in their
member magazines. The Chamber of Commerce, the Auto Club, and the trade magazine
for the regions construction industry all featured articles on the citys traffic problems
and the work of the commission to alleviate them.
36
It would be difficult to exaggerate
the role of the Los Angeles Times in the promotion of the Major Traffic Street Plan. In
December 1923, six months prior to the publication of the Plan, the Times softened the
ground for its reception by printing Snethens statement of the problem, The Why of
Congestion. He warned that no one knows how the citys streets would handle the
increased traffic caused by the continued construction of new buildings, but that It is a
question which must be answered in the near future.
37
When Olmsted came to Los

144
Angeles in April 1924, the Times devoted a column and a half to its favorite planner,
noting that he has given much consideration to the park and highway problems of Los
Angeles.
38
The Plan was announced to the public at a gala banquet in the Biltmore
Hotel. The mayor and city council were on hand to pass a mock resolution of adoption,
simulating the consensus that the Traffic Commission sought to elicit from the voters.
The Times front-page coverage of the event ran under the headline Experts Offer
Traffic Plans. Here was a winning public-relations strategy, a gradual build-up of
information culminating in a smoothly orchestrated event that proclaimed the citys
deliverance at the hands of widely known city planners.
39

There was more work to be done on both the political and the promotional fronts.
Notwithstanding the political theater at the Biltmore, the city council still had to approve
placing the Plan and its $5 million bond issue on the November ballot. The Plan itself
incited little controversy, but the bond authorization passed less than a month before the
election.
40
With that technicality out of the way, the Times printed a large map of the
Plan, complete with heroic vignettes of bulldozers, steam shovels, and cement mixers,
and a headline describing it as Commission Experts Practical Solution of Street
Congestion Problem.
41

In the climax of publicity during the two days prior to the election, the Times
continued to stress that the plan was prepared by expert engineers. The truth was
stretched, if not shattered, with the statements that the experts had conducted an
exhaustive study and offered the first practical solution of our congestion problem,
because the contract had only lasted five months and was more a compilation of the work

145
that Osborne and others had been conducting for over a decade than an original work (a
fact that the consultants themselves did not disguise).
42
This was the kind of exposure
that validated the hiring of celebrity consultants.
The day before the election, the Times unfurled a visceral, and visual, appeal on
behalf of the Plan, in the form of a front-page cartoon labeled Heres Our Chance to
Wallop Him! The villain to be walloped was a masked robber labeled Our Tough
Traffic Congestion Problem. With one hand, Traffic holds a gun to the chest of Los
Angeles Business, embodied as a sober, portly man, attired in three-piece suit and
homburg. The thugs other hand smashes into the face of the wide-eyed Miss L.A.,
whose crown is askew.
43

The commissions two-pronged approach of hiring illustrious consultants and
aggressively promoting their work paid off when the voters approved both measures in
November 1924.
44
That was the same election in which the Archway plan was defeated,
and the opposite results owed much to the differences in the communications about them.
The proponents of the Archway issued fumbling, vitriolic, and contradictory statements,
while the Traffic Commission conducted a consistent and coordinated campaign, bathed
in the ethos of apolitical expertise (and the occasional brash cartoon).

Mapping Highway Politics
The Plan had value beyond the imprimatur of Olmsted, Bartholomew and
Cheney. Their expertise was genuine, not just a means of mobilizing support, and their
outsiders view of the streets and congestion of Los Angeles shrewdly illuminated the

146
problems, even if the proposed solutions failed of implementation. The consultants
themselves downplayed the utility of the Plan because it isolated traffic as an object of
study, thus violating a basic principle that Olmsted, Bartholomew and Cheney all insisted
upon: plans must be comprehensive to be effective, involving not just transportation but
also land use, parks, zoning and all the other issues concerned with the physical character
of a city.
45
They took the job nonetheless, perhaps out of the realization that the Traffic
Commission could only engage them in the arena of transportation, or through the
remunerative expedience of acquiescing to the wishes of an impatient client with money
to spend, or in hope that the plan would lead to opportunities to provide a fuller range of
services to Los Angeles (which turned out to be true for Olmsted and Bartholomew).
They might also have sincerely believed that a street plan could determine subsequent
development, and was therefore a logical, productive first step toward broader efforts.
46

In any case, they delivered what was requested, an analysis of the many plans afoot, and
an attempt to create a broad, practical, well-balanced scheme for handling traffic.
47

A second principle evident in their work is that the consultants believed that
infrastructure for automobiles and for mass transit should be planned together. The
Major Traffic Street Plan was neither a paean to the automobile nor a tool to diminish the
operational efficacy or political standing of the street railways, despite the claims of later
commentators that the Plan expressed an ideology of automotive dominance.
48
Where
trolleys and automobiles competed for space, primarily in the central business district, the
Plan unambiguously favored trolleys: The street car, owing to its economy of space and

147
low cost of operation per passenger, must take precedence over other forms of vehicles in
the congested area whenever the traffic capacity of the arteries approaches its limit.
49

The emphasis on balance was cast as scientific, but producing balanced plans
was more a matter of creative intuition on the part of planners, as Peter Hall put it.
50

Balance was an aesthetic preference, and achieving it was guided by implicit values,
ranging from the Classical ideals of harmonious design to the City Beautiful mission of
imposing order on chaos. Cloaking the work of planners in the mantle of science was a
metaphor that supported the planners assertion of apolitical expertise.
51
As a rhetorical
exercise, it corresponded perfectly with the use of expertise as a promotional device
wielded by clients like the Traffic Commission. For planners themselves, the aura of
science also helped to reconcile the uncomfortable fact that their efforts produced little in
the way of tangible results. They reified the plan itself as the desirable goal and cast
political considerations as enlightened or benighted, depending on whether the plans were
used or not. Olmsted carefully distinguished the work of the planner from the art
political, while using the distinction to argue for bigger, more encompassing plans as a
means to transcend politics.
52

Such exercises in professional self-justification aside, a keen adherence to the
contours of Los Angeles highway politics was one of the primary factors that shaped the
Major Traffic Street Plan. The consultants were accomplished political actors who
necessarily grew adept at navigating the corridors of power. Establishing the right
connections and assembling the proper project team helped them win the job in the first
place. These were negotiating skills, not technical skills, based on frequent contact with

148
potential client groups and sensitivity to the array of political goals that entered into the
letting of a substantial planning contract. Olmsted, Bartholomew and Cheney adroitly
incorporated their perceptions of Los Angeles highway politics into the drawing of the
Plan and thereby distorted the balance they claimed to be striving for, as plainly
exemplified in their treatment of Wilshire Boulevard.
Olmsted, Bartholomew and Cheney prepared the plan during the winter and
spring of 1924, near the height of the controversies surrounding the Archway. Their
client, the Traffic Commission, included groups and individuals on both sides of the
Wilshire argument.
53
Rather than seeking to distill any balanced design solution to
satisfy that jumble of interests, the consulting group instead tried to smooth over the
acrimony by aggregating all the prior proposals, which only frustrated the planners and
diminished the usefulness of the plan. They first noted that Wilshire was a splendid
radial of metropolitan characteristics, that is, one suited for the location of businesses.
54

Then, in the discussion of parkways and boulevards, the plan recommended that to the
west of the area contested in the Archway plan, Wilshire should be transformed into a
landscaped parkway limited to passenger automobiles, thereby salvaging for a part of the
corridor the functional attributes if not the specific design program of the Archway
plan.
55
That was a reasonable spatial compromise: it gave the angry property owners
their commercial frontage between Western Avenue and the park, and gave the
influential Archway promoters their dedicated artery in the area where there was no
organized resistance. It did nothing to move the future of Wilshire Boulevard out of the
realm of political contestation and into the realm of rational planning discourse. It was an

149
unbalanced design that did not transcend politics, but instead mapped the politics directly
onto the street plan.
If the overall shape of Wilshire could not be influenced by expertise, the
consultants were nonetheless able to refine the details, and they were critical of both sides
in doing so. They leveled a sarcastic critique at the real estate stratagems that warped the
planning of Wilshire and decried the subordination of rational policy to the goal of
pulling local chestnuts out of the fire.
56
Both Whitnalls rotaries and Vermeulens
fountains and monuments seem to have appalled the authors of the plan, but they retained
both, presumably in deference to the powerful interests behind those ideas. If they could
not eliminate rotaries or fountains, they could limit the damage they would cause by
combining the two bad ideas at the same locations, as they reported, with faint praise, that
the roadway could be interrupted at important intersections or other focal points by large
islands around which the one-way gyratory system of traffic control is used and within
which sites are available for more or less monumental decorative treatments.
57

Though resigned to compromise, the Major Traffic Street Plan nonetheless did try
to present a more far-reaching vision of Wilshire, beyond the localized interests and
imperious vision of the two groups struggling over the boulevard at that moment. If it
ran east all the way through downtown and bridged the river at Sixth Street, Wilshire was
the best candidate for the cross-town artery that would resolve traffic congestion at Boyle
Heights on the east side, provide an outlet for downtown, and serve as the main access to
the west side and the coast. The planners did not even try to estimate the daunting cost of
such an enterprise. They realized that the irreconcilable differences about the character

150
of the street must be resolved first: it could be a business street like the Champs Elysees,
or it could be a dedicated traffic artery with pleasant views, like Ocean Parkway in
Brooklyn, NY (a product of Olmsteds father), but not both: There is no artistically
satisfactory compromise between these two types.
58
They could not plan around that
irreducible conflict.
The Plan was thus more of a summary than a strategy. It approached major
highway development in the city as a whole, by including all the current proposals and
pointing out where fundamental divergences must be resolved. All the familiar
recommendations appeared: Osbornes grid of major traffic streets, Lippincotts radial
arteries and interdistrict thoroughfares, the parkways called for by the Parks Commission,
and the elimination of offset intersections in the business district.
The report discussed one novel technique Elimination of Traffic Congestion by
Means of Street Grade Separation but counseled against its use, once again because of
political considerations.
59
This part of the plan was prepared by William Hudson, an
engineer who specialized in highway structures and was associated with Bartholomews
firm.
60
Grade separation meant installing bridges at intersections so that cars passed
over or under crossing traffic instead of having to wait for a change of signal or a break in
the line of cars. Hudson did not view it as a panacea. Where through highways crossed
slower-moving local traffic, a single bridge could be effective, without having to build an
entire grade-separated roadway. In dense urban areas, where traffic on crossing streets
was roughly equal, a single grade separation would not help much, just as enlarging a
short section of pipe will not measurably add to the flow. In this most acute situation,

151
with high traffic volume on crossing streets, the continuous elevated highway with
approach ramps offered a hypothetical solution. This was a dedicated artery, with no
crossing traffic and no right of access from adjacent properties. It bore basic similarities
to what would later be built as freeways, though at smaller scale.
61
Its utility was only
hypothetical because of the objections that Hudson anticipated to the obtrusiveness and
darkening effect of the elevated roadway, which he quantified by the length of shadow it
would cast at different times of day. Hudson coyly noted that No immediate increase in
the value of adjacent property can be expected. If these semi-psychological
objections were not enough to eliminate the option, the cost would do the trick: between
one and two million dollars per mile, depending on the number of entrance and exit
ramps and whether the grade separations were above ground or below. Hudson was
aware that any advantages would be widely distributed, and the main outcome would be
better development and higher values of suburban sections.
Because of the aesthetic effects, the cost, and the malaportioned benefit, Hudson
concluded that the continuous elevated roadway must be classed as a heroic measure, to
be adopted only when an impasse has been reached and the other usual means of relief
prove inadequate. No one in Los Angeles argued otherwise at that time, although the
city engineering office would scatter isolated examples of proto-freeway technology
across the landscape over the next ten years by erecting grade separations at particularly
troublesome intersections. The engineers would later revive the idea of the continuous
elevated roadway, in the 1930s. In the meantime, Hudson contributed a term to Los

152
Angeles traffic lexicon that would survive down to the present: the use of surface
street to distinguish conventional roadways from the elevated highway.
Though there was little that was new in the Plan, the compilation was valuable
and the reputations of its authors helped the Traffic Commission attract attention and win
a measure of political acceptance. The Major Traffic Street Plan illuminated the citys
highway politics with strobe-like clarity, but it did little to reorient highway politics onto
a new track. Those battles would continue to be fought, and while the Major Traffic
Street Plan would have a role in how they turned out, it was not the role that was claimed
by the Plans sponsors and by subsequent commentators who relied on those claims.

The Major Traffic Street Plan and Los Angeles Exceptionalism
The national experience of the planning team enabled them to undertake
comparisons between traffic congestion in Los Angeles and in other cities. For the most
part, the reasons given for congestion were not exclusive to any one city, but the Traffic
Commissions publicity on behalf of the plan fused with other promotional efforts based
on establishing an image of Los Angeles as distinct from other places. The result was a
lasting reputation for Los Angeles as a city with a unique culture of automobility.
Of the eight reasons given in the Major Traffic Street Plan for the citys
congestion problems, six were also present in eastern and midwestern cities, and can be
summarized as the vilification of disorderly growth: unscientific width and arrangement
of streets, improper use of streets for parking and loading, promiscuous mixing of
different types of traffic, narrow intersections, obstructions such as rivers and railroads,

153
and the concentration of business in a small area. While these conditions were common
to many cities as they grappled with the spatial implications of the automobile revolution,
local variations did exist. The most significant part of this litany that was peculiar to Los
Angeles was the legacy of the councils action in 1854, when it ceded all land to private
property owners without reserving any municipal rights-of-way. Combined with the
difficulty of obtaining rights-of-way under California law, that provision left Los Angeles
with very little land area devoted to roadways in the central business district: 21 percent,
compared to 29 percent in Detroit, 39 percent in Cleveland, and 44 percent in
Washington, D.C. Los Angeles suffered even in comparison to San Diego (41 percent)
and San Francisco (34 percent), which in their formative years had not privatized real
estate as thoroughly as did Los Angeles.
62
If anything, this condition made Los Angeles
particularly unsuited to the car.
The Plan claimed that two other causes for congestion distinguished Los Angeles
among American cities: the climate and the rapidity of growth. Surely the climate no
snow, minimal rain, high average temperatures -- made motoring easier in Los Angeles,
but there is little evidence to support the implied argument that climate deterred
automobility in other North American cities. For one thing, by the time of the Major
Traffic Street Plan, closed vehicles accounted for the majority of cars manufactured in
the United States. Inclement weather no longer prevented year-round driving, in any
latitude.
63
And snow did not cause people to stop driving their cars in colder cities, but
rather to insist that their local governments remove the snow from the streets so they
could keep driving.
64

154
The fast growth of the 1920s legitimately set Los Angeles apart from other
metropolitan centers, especially because it was the first city to undergo such growth after
low-cost, mass-produced automobiles became available.
65
As new subdivisions and
commercial development spread beyond the reach of trolleys and buses, and into the
interstitial areas between transit routes, commuters and shoppers had little alternative but
to pilot their tin lizzies along unpaved and narrow thoroughfares, or to crowd onto those
few arteries that offered smooth pavement and multiple lanes.
66
That particular
circumstance was an appropriate and reasonable basis for the Traffic Commissions
advocacy on behalf of more extensive highways. The commissions own
pronouncements tended to conduct the argument in the empirical terms of traffic counts
and square feet of pavement, but that dispassionate approach would be subsumed within
the boosterism and regional exceptionalism that dominated media representations of the
city. Osborne based his highway program on calculations of time lost in traffic: If
500,000 passengers lose even an average of 7 minutes a day it means that 3,500,00
minutes in the aggregate are lost daily. The president of the Traffic Commission, Paul
Hoffman, posed the question as one of reason rather than enthusiasm for automobiles:
The voters are asked to decide whether the city desires its street development to be
carried out in an orderly manner, using the Major Traffic Street Plan of the Traffic
Commission as a basis, or the same haphazard manner as in the past.
67
And while it
singled out the automobile for special attention, the Major Traffic Street Plan nonetheless
espoused the necessity of improving both automotive and street railway infrastructure.
But such sober assessments fueled more grandiloquent and less data-dependent claims:

155
From whatever angle you may view Southern Californias striking progress, you will be
compelled to acknowledge that the automobile is responsible more than any other half
dozen factors for its phenomenal advancement, wrote one of the writers frequently
employed in the citys booster campaign.
68
Statements about the automobile in the
popular press soon became completely uncoupled from the logic of planners and the
accumulation of statistics: How can one pursue happiness by any swifter or surer means
available to the mass of mankind than by the use of the automobile? asked the Los
Angeles Times in 1926.
69
From the Traffic Commissions concern about the approval
process for new streets and highways, discourse about the automobile moved into claims
of regional distinctiveness, then to blithe falsehoods about the automobiles place in the
regions development, and then to an abstract association between the automobile and
human contentment.
70

There was nothing new about the automobile serving as a powerful trope in the
elevation of consumption to an inalienable right, as suggested by the parking ban and the
creation of Wilshire Boulevard.
71
The publicity surrounding the Major Traffic Street
Plan served to intensify the rhetoric, and it provided the data that others would call upon
in making claims about the unique character of Los Angeles. It would be difficult to
separate automobile-related consumption from the hyperventilated culture of 1920s Los
Angeles, which Carey McWilliams famously described as one long drunken orgy, one
protracted debauch.
72
The citys most visible industry the movies helped to cement
the perception of an essential relationship between Los Angeles and the automobile.
From the early years of moviemaking, cars served as plot devices, production tools, and

156
the basis of spectacular stunts. They also ornamented the energetically promoted
lifestyles of moguls and stars, who did not buy mass-produced vehicles but
commissioned custom bodies from independent designers. In 1926 General Motors
recruited Harley Earl, who made cars for the Hollywood set, to head its new styling
division. Thus was consummated the relationship between movies and cars, at the corner
of Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Street, where Earl had his custom shop before
moving to Detroit.
73

Boosterism by definition sought national audiences, and when writers, editors
and media outlets from beyond the city began to proclaim a particular affinity between
Los Angeles and the car, they reinforced through repetition a set of impressions that were
not necessarily connected with the everyday reality of residents and public officials.
These depictions followed a familiar trajectory, first picking up on the well-documented
yet alarmist messages of the Traffic Commission, and then, after the inflammatory
campaigns surrounding the 1924 election, moving on to the indisputable truth that cars
meant something different or more significant in Los Angeles than they did elsewhere.
Six months before the election, the New York-based Literary Digest paraphrased the
Traffic Commissions press releases in the article, Los Angeles and Its Motor-Jam,
which drily reported facts such as time lost in congestion on downtown streets.
74
After
the election, automobility merged with boosterism and the car took its place in the
feverish litany of regional distinctiveness:
People! Automobiles! Buildings! Orchards! Farms! Oil! Ships! Factories!
Climate! Vast stretches of undeveloped land! Mountains! Resorts! The Ocean!
Ah! Los Angeles!
75

157

Visitors and travel writers reified the transformation of necessity into choice. Why not
go to Los Angeles for pins? asked a visiting New Yorker in 1928. Its only a motor
spin of eleven miles.
76
The writer neglected to mention that the friend who took her car
on that minor errand lived in the Hollywood Hills, where no trolleys were available to
those in need of pins. By the end of the decade, the relationship was portrayed as fixed
and essential: The significance of the automobile in California to all the inhabitants
thereof really needs no discussion. It is too obvious.
77

These representations of the car in Los Angeles contrasted with the fundamental
reality that the under-built road system did not make the city particularly suited to the use
of automobiles. The publicity surrounding the Major Traffic Street Plan was initially
intended to reform the local politics of infrastructure development, but it fueled the
claims of boosters and the assertions in the national media that cars held a special place in
the culture of Los Angeles, and even in the personality of its inhabitants. The regions
famous car culture began as a mutated strain of boosterism, a hybrid that appropriated
the measured arguments of the Traffic Commission into the efforts to project regional
attributes that were claimed to be distinctive. The city was said to represent a novel form
of urbanism, and the use of the car was incorporated into these claims of novelty: if Los
Angeles was different, then its congestion must have been of a different order, and thus
its relationship with the car was too. By the 1930s, these representations regarding the
transportation proclivities of Angelenos took on a self-fulfilling quality by shaping the
expectations of people who moved to Los Angeles from other regions.
78
The most

158
significant legacy of the Major Traffic Street Plan was the role of its promotional
campaign in the construction of an enduring mythology of Los Angeles car culture.
79

The Legal and Regulatory Legacy of the Traffic Commission
The Traffic Commission did have some practical effects on the city, beyond the
unbuilt street plan it left behind. The appendix of the Major Traffic Street Plan, written
by David Faries, general counsel of the Auto Club, offered the first thorough analysis of
the statutes governing street improvement and special assessments since Osbornes report
of 1913. Faries paid mandatory obeisance to the property-owner autonomy enshrined in
state law and did not suggest eliminating the right of abutters to protest against proposed
improvements. But he also decried the over-generous opportunities for procedural
opposition, and the speculation that took place during the long process of approval. The
report suggested amendments to state law that would streamline the process by allowing
the city to declare an assessment district and establish the tax increments on each
property in advance of final approval.
80

Everett Mattoon of the city attorneys office drafted the proposed amendment and
helped to secure its passage in Sacramento. The Mattoon Act featured a particularly
onerous provision that was not mentioned in the Major Traffic Street Plan: delinquent
taxes on one property in a district would be apportioned to all the other properties. With
interest and penalties, this assessment method had the potential to drive up property taxes
beyond the ability of individual homeowners to pay. In the smaller cities and towns of
California, the abusive application of the Mattoon Act caused thousands of families to

159
lose their property. Los Angeles saw some of this problem, notably in a subdivision in
the Normandie area where pyramiding assessments for streets and sewers caused
abandonment of homes. Overall, however, Los Angeles experienced far less tax blight
than other communities, in part because the office of the city engineer was remarkably
conservative in its use of the act. The Mattoon Act only covered the costs of right-of-
way acquisition, not construction, and the head of the Streets Division in the Bureau of
Engineering was reluctant to invoke it until construction funds were also secured. Also,
many of the properties in the city that were subject to foreclosure under Mattoon Act tax
liens had not yet passed into individual ownership. They were still owned by
subdividers, developers and builders, who had not protested against the assessments in
the first place because they expected to pass on the obligations when they sold the homes
or the vacant lots. Mattoon Act bankruptcies in Los Angeles afflicted real estate
speculators more than individual homeowners. They scarcely interrupted the pace of the
citys growth because the bankrupt subdivisions were acquired by other developers
willing to try their hand where others had come up short.
81

The Traffic Commission viewed traffic operations as equal in importance to the
construction of major traffic streets, and in 1925 it commissioned another consulting
study, by Miller McClintock, one of the founders of the profession of traffic engineering
in the United States. In comprehensively redrafting the citys traffic regulations,
McClintock introduced left-turn prohibitions, pedestrian rules, and a host of specialized
signs and signals. His report was the basis for the citys oversight of street operations for
a generation to come, as much due to the lack of ambiguity over the citys role in traffic

160
regulation than to the efficacy of the report. Though provided by the Traffic
Commission, the McClintock study required no special funding and no novel institutional
configuration to blend public and private functions. Traffic regulation was assigned to
the Police Department, the most venerable municipal service and the one least subject to
arguments over its legitimacy as a part of city government. A few years later, in 1930, the
city council established the Bureau of Traffic Engineering as a civilian agency under the
Police Commission. Its longtime head, Ralph Dorsey, pioneered many practices that are
still used on the streets of Los Angeles, such as painted curbs and synchronized traffic
signals.
82

The Traffic Commission also took the lead in efforts to rationalize the street
railways. Its Rapid Transit Committee persuaded the city council to commission a study
on rail operations from R. F. Kelker and Charles DeLeuw, authors of the Chicago Rapid
Transit Plan and as prominent in their field as Olmsted and Bartholomew were in theirs.
The report, submitted in April 1925, outlined a four-tiered strategy, retaining the
interurban Pacific Electric Railway and the intracity Los Angeles Railway, and adding
high-speed trains with limited stops for longer trips, and more bus routes to serve as
feeder lines in newly developed areas. It also called for segregating the promiscuously
mixed modes of traffic, as the Major Traffic Street Plan described the situation, by
building grade separations where rail and road traffic crossed. Before the Kelker-
DeLeuw plan came to the ballot in 1926, it became embroiled in a related controversy
over the location of a new central depot for all the citys rail lines. Kelker and DeLeuw
had also recommended elevated tracks for the high-speed trains, because the alternative

161
method, underground subways, would cost more than twice as much. Property owners
across the city objected to the elevateds on aesthetic grounds, much as Hudson had
predicted that elevated highways would encounter semi-psychological objections. The
Kelker-DeLeuew plan was also debated on the issue of cost. The trolley and railroad
companies would have to bear the majority of the expense for all the new rail
construction, but the city would have to contribute to the grade separations as well as the
street construction associated with the elevateds, a tab estimated at $130 million.
83
All
these issues contributed to the transit plans failure at the polls, a result that could have
represented antipathy toward the massive expenditure as much as resentment toward the
rail companies.
In contrast, the Traffic Commission managed to avoid discussing the total costs of
the work proposed in the Major Traffic Street Plan before the voters approved the $5
million in bonds for it. Did the voters favor cars over trains, or were they simply more
comfortable approving $5 million than $130 million in expenditures? While that must
remain a matter of speculation, it is certain that the $5 million was not enough to
construct the street network proposed by Olmsted, Bartholomew and Cheney. As it
turned out, the eventual cost of building just a portion of the Major Traffic Street Plan
was later estimated to be around $107 million, but that figure only came out after the city
engineers had spent two years preparing detailed plans.
84

162
Implementation of the Major Traffic Street Plan
John Prince took over the Streets Division of the city engineering bureau after
Osborne left for the Public Utilities Commission. Prince and his staff did not bicker with
the Traffic Commission as they did with the Planning Commission. The plans main
sponsor, Osborne, was one of their own, and Osbornes consultants agreed that the city
engineers should be responsible for putting the plan into place. The plans call for a
quasi-independent agency that would not require referenda or council approval for
specific actions also had appeal for Prince, who experimented on his own with project-
specific public authorities to build Mulholland Highway and other thoroughfares. Nor
could the recommendation of staff and budget increases for their agency have displeased
the city engineers.
85
Prince put the bond proceeds to use as soon as they became
available in early 1925, not by pouring the money into street construction, but by setting
up another operating unit within the Streets Division. He rented space, assigned staff,
and hired more engineers and surveyors to get the plan underway. By the summer of
1925, the Major Traffic Street Plan employed 17 people in the office plus four field
crews.
86

This Major Highways unit broke down the consultants' plan into separate projects
totaling some 800 miles of new streets, then in consultation with the Traffic Commission
selected 24 of them as priorities. Of the nine located in downtown, most called for
eliminating offset intersections or cutting back projecting corners. The rest were
scattered throughout the city and included a total of some 36 miles of streets, half
representing the opening of wholly new alignments, and the other half the widening or

163
realignment of existing rights-of-way. By the summer of 1926, the city engineers had
completed maps of the new highways and assessment districts, and began issuing public
notices and fielding protests. Not one shovel of dirt had been turned to build any of the
arteries called for in the Major Traffic Street Plan. Defending his record, Prince recited
record numbers of maps drawn, and noted that the Streets Division still had to work on
petitioned projects that did not fall under the comprehensive plan.
87
The Traffic
Commission bragged that more new assessment districts had been approved than ever
before, but failed to distinguish between those established to fund major highway projects
and the ones that paid for the routine, uncontroversial work of paving existing rights-of-
way or installing sidewalks and curbs.
88
As for the major highways, Tenth Street and
Broadway had both been defeated in court, and Prince did not paint a hopeful picture for
the rest of them. Far from basking in the consensus asserted by the Traffic Commission,
the proposed new highways encountered more opposition than other work, as Prince
reported: "A great deal more difficulty is experienced in getting the major traffic projects
past the protest stage.
89

A year later, the offset intersections had been corrected but still no construction
had occurred on any of the major traffic streets.
90
Prince noted that he could not proceed
without an order from the council or a majority petition from the property owners
affected by a project. The two procedures were essentially the same, because the council
would not act without strong consent from their constituents. On that score, little had
changed, according to Prince: There has been considerable delay in many of these
Major Traffic projects owing, in some instances, to differences of opinion on the part of

164
the property owners, and in other cases in [property owners] attempting to secure better
and more economical lines therefore and in modifying the same.
91
The plan had neither
resolved the real-estate-driven politics of major highways nor diminished the willingness
of citizens to defy the recommendations of the experts.
Among themselves, the members of the Traffic Commission grew distressed at
the lack of progress, even while their public statements pointed proudly to the
reconstruction of downtown intersections and continued to proclaim the transformation
wrought by the plan and the referenda of 1924. Ernest East, the engineer for the Auto
Club, represented his employer on the Traffic Commission and reported back negatively
to his board: From a desire to gain favorable publicity, the Traffic Commission is
depending upon accomplishments of minor importance to justify its existence. East was
referring to the commissions practice of trumpeting the news every time a proposed
street moved through one phase of approval, and his skepticism was based on the
understanding that opposition grew stronger as the process moved forward. The
commissions emphasis on proclaiming good news might also have revealed the priorities
of its new general secretary, Clarence Snethen, who took over the operations of the
commission after Osborne left to open his consulting practice. Just as the details of the
Plan reflected the politics of highway construction, the Traffic Commission
institutionalized those same disagreements. In dealing with the many problems which
will develop in the carrying out of the Major Traffic Street Plan, noted East, The
Traffic Commission itself will find serious conflict among its members. Far from a
mechanism to supersede stalemates, the commission was crippled by the same situation it

165
was intended to correct: This inability to secure harmonious action on the part of the
Traffic Commission on the major problems will result in the Traffic Commission
avoiding these larger and complicated problems.
92

Meanwhile, the payroll for the Major Highways unit consumed some $70,000 per
year, paid from the bond funds. Prince also had to hire consultants, to the tune of
$110,000 in annual fees, because his own staff could not keep up the required progress on
maps and appraisals. The opportunity to leverage cooperation from property-owners by
using the bond funds to acquire right-of-way and pay for construction diminished with
every expenditure. To replenish its steadily declining pool of capital, the Traffic
Commission appealed to the council for a special highway tax of nine mils on every
parcel in the city for a period of five years, which the council placed on the 1926 ballot
(the nine-cent tax). The Traffic Commissions publicity effort succeeded again when
the voters approved the tax, but did nothing to change the underlying problems of
excessively privatized real estate and purposeful segmentation of the citys infrastructure
authority.
93

Starting in late 1927, Prince and his staff were finally able to begin construction
of selected projects under the Major Traffic Street Plan. By 1932 they had built 78 miles
of improved highways out of the 800 miles called for in the plan, though little of that
occurred in the most developed areas of the city. Virtually all of those improvements
were part of the 90-mile peripheral loop laid out in 1927 by Ernest East and the county
highway engineer as a means for traffic to bypass the congested parts of Los Angeles.
Long stretches of that loop fell within the city boundaries San Fernando Road,

166
Sepulveda Boulevard, Alameda Street, and Figueroa Street north of downtown.
Opposition was slightest where development was thinnest, and this work benefited as
well from the ability to secure county funds to augment the citys share of the cost.
94
The
city engineers did eventually manage to spend all the money from the bonds and the nine-
cent tax, but most of it was used to help fund projects that the engineers pursued
independently of the Major Traffic Street Plan, such as the approaches to the bridges
over the Los Angeles River and the street network in Hollywood just south of Cahuenga
Pass.
95
Even when a stretch of new or wider right-of-way on a major boulevard fulfilled
a recommendation in the Major Traffic Street Plan, the overall intention of the Plan was
not met, and the citys congestion was not reduced, unless the entire artery was built out
to the larger specifications. As Hudson had noted with reference to grade separations,
improving the flow in part of a highway, but ot along its entire length, only moved the
bottlenecks to new locations.
96
Fragmentary implementation destroyed any chance for
the Plan to achieve its material goal of smooth-flowing traffic, as Olmsted, Bartholomew
and Cheney had warned: To give adequate relief the plan must be carried out as a
whole.
97

Ernest East became completely disenchanted with the Traffic Commission. He
argued with increasing force that it was ineffectual and recommended that the Auto Club
cease financial support of the commission. If only out of loyalty, the Auto Club board
continued the payments, as did the Chamber of Commerce, several oil and construction
companies, automobile dealers, and trade associations.
98
Then, in late 1928, Snethen left
town with all the funds on hand, leaving behind thousands of dollars of unpaid bills. The

167
sponsors paid off the debts and the Traffic Commission perished quietly, without any
press releases, although Snethens eventual arrest, in Louisiana, did make the news.
99

The principals in the creation of the Major Traffic Street Plan continued to peddle
their wares in Los Angeles and beyond. Cheney went on produce plans for other west
coast cities, and to advise California state government on highway policies.
100
Olmsted
and Bartholomew continued their lucrative consulting practices and in 1930 they
produced a genuinely comprehensive plan for the region that was commissioned by a
committee of the Chamber of Commerce. The plan was suppressed by the Chamber and
never submitted for citizen approval, which might have disappointed the authors of the
ill-fated Major Traffic Street Plan, but could not have surprised them.
101
Henry Osborne
continued his consulting practice but had to scrape for work during the early years of the
Depression. In 1932 he arbitrated a condemnation proceeding for a boulevard project on
the east side. Had he known, Osborne could not have appreciated that the city paid him
from the Major Traffic Street Plan account, which by then had been reduced to a
contingency fund for minor, unbudgeted expenditures on streets and highways.
102

The Traffic Commission in the History of Los Angeles
The corruption that ended the tenure of the Traffic Commission was not
extraordinary in 1920s Los Angeles, where stock and oil-leasing swindles and the fast
money of the real estate business and the movie industry all contributed to the protracted
debauch reported by Carey McWilliams, and later studied by Jules Tygiel.
103
The only
remarkable aspect of the short life of the commission and the circumstances of its demise

168
is the absence of this part of the story in the scholarship that addresses the Major Traffic
Street Plan and the organization behind it. I mean no criticism of prior interpretations for
omitting the embezzlement: the other members of the commission, who were victimized
by the crime, were not interested in publicizing the sordid episode, and its discovery in
the research for this work owed as much to luck as to diligence. No one has asked,
however, why the commission was not missed after its abrupt disappearance from the
scene, especially if it was so important to begin with. One likely reason is that the city
engineers made more tangible progress constructing the Major Traffic Street Plan after
the commission folded than during its brief life. Another is that the commission had
already achieved its other goal of establishing public perceptions about roads and traffic
in terms of the city as a whole. Before the commissions barrage of press releases,
discourse about traffic had been dominated by localized arguments over specific projects
or policy discussions conducted among small groups of experts. Once the commissions
totalizing approach to automobility was ingrained within the portrayals of Los Angeles, it
mattered little whether the commission survived or not. The images and their
permutations outlived the original authors.
Despite voting for the Major Traffic Street Plan, the citizens of Los Angeles
expressed no clear consensus in favor of massive reconstruction of the city for easier and
less-congested automotive transportation. Or at least no consensus in favor of raising and
spending enough tax revenues to build ambitious highway schemes, or on where the
roads should be built. The public relations campaign surrounding the Major Traffic
Street Plan was intended to create such a consensus by claiming that it already existed,

169
which produced the further claim that Los Angeles was uniquely constituted to make
automobiles the favored means of travel. That was not true, because in the mid-1920s the
existing patterns of settlement and infrastructure primarily bore the influence of street
railways. Moreover, the popularity of the automobile was a national phenomenon, not a
local one, albeit with local variations. But those claims of consensus and novelty account
for the prominence accorded to the Major Traffic Street Plan in the historiography of Los
Angeles. They also account for the tendency of later commentators to conflate the
representations and the reality, or at least to compress the timing of the much longer
transformation in which the Major Traffic Street Plan played a small, if highly visible,
part. As the commissions descriptions of the city as an automotive metropolis merged
with the rhetoric of growth, progress, and regional exceptionalism, Los Angeles came to
symbolize something new on the urban scene the city built for the car. The image was
more prescriptive than descriptive: there were plenty of cars, but not much in the way of
infrastructure built to accommodate them, and the disparity between vehicles and
infrastructure would survive down to the present time. The depictions declaring an
automotive metropolis were a collection of assertions intended to mobilize opinion in
favor of a goal that would remain tantalizingly out of reach.
104

170

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

1
Scott Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 101-20;
Martin Wachs, "The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles: Images of Past Policies and
Future Prospects," in Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, eds., The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at
the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 119-20; Robert
Fishman, Re-Imagining Los Angeles, in Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman and Greg Hise, eds.,
Rethinking Los Angeles (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 254; Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 251;
Greg Hise and William Deverell, Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los
Angeles Region (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 6. An exception to the assertion of the
plans significance is found in Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, Los Angeles from A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the
City and County (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 366, which says: Despite sound
concepts of regional planning, nothing came of the specific proposals contained in the report.

2
Clark Davis, From Oasis to Metropolis, Pacific Historical Review 61 (August 1992): 357-86; Kevin
Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford, 1990), 90-119;
quotation from brochure for La Venta, 1925, the country club built atop the palisades in Palos Verdes
Estates, courtesy Jim Heimann Collection.

3
Quotation from Los Angeles Times, October 19, 1924.

4
On interstitial development and the financial straits of the street railways in the 1920s, see Board of
Public Utilities and Transportation, Annual Report, 1928-29, 48-54; idem., 24th-27th Annual Reports,
1932-36, 1-6, 2029; Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 172-185.

5
Robert C. Post, "The Fair Fare Fight," Southern California Quarterly 52 (September 1970): 254-81.

6
Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, 92.

7
November 1923 traffic counts revealed about 650,000 people per day entering the central business
district by car and some 750,000 by street railway; Howard Nelson, The Los Angeles Metropolis (Dubuque:
Kendall-Hunt, 1983), 277-78.

8
This "contradiction between private accumulation and collective action," as Peter Hall put it, was the
central issue in the planning profession during its formative period; see Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An
Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, UK: Blackwell,
1988), 319-41, quotation on 337. Also see Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, eds., The City Reader
(2
nd
edition, London: Routledge, 2000), 359-445. Planning history does not offer a wealth of specific
guidance in interpreting the Major Traffic Street Plan in terms of this contradiction. Mark Foster tends to
credit the planners own claims that they were able to don the mantle of ideological purity by holding
themselves above politics, which fails to encompass the abundant evidence of extensive political
engagement on the part of planners. Christine Boyer views city planning in the 1920s as a means of
disciplining citizens and the public sector to the pre-eminence of capital, which misses the fact that many of
the arguments that crippled road planning were between different capital interests. Boyer views capital as
monolithic, but in the arena of road policy it was pluralistic, or, in capitals own terms, competitive. For
that matter, the public sector was pluralistic and competitive too, with different agencies serving different
constituencies and agendas. Mark Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and
Urban Transportation, 1900-1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 5-36, and M. Christine

171

Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Press, 1983), 61-89, 116-35.

9
Automobile Club of Southern California, Digest of Board Minutes, volume 4, page 3 (hereinafter
volume:page), 5 February 1920; 4:12 (20 May 1920; 4:16, 3 June 1920; 4:23 (5 August 1920); 4:35-6, 20
December 1920; 4:42, 3 February 1921. On Lippincotts career and his role in the aqueduct controversy,
see Norris Hundley, Jr., The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992) 146-48, 161-64, 171; William L. Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict over Los
Angeles Water Supply in the Owens Valley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 300-323;
Abraham Hoffman, Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Water Controversy
(College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1981), 57-79, 68-70, 103-06, 115-24, 165-66, 227-241, 273-74;
Whos Who in California (San Francisco: Whos Who Publishing Co., 1929), s.v.; Gerald J. Giefer and
Anelle M. Kloski, Introduction, in Water Resources Reports and Papers in the J. B. Lippincott
Collection, Archives Series Report No. 21 (Berkeley: Water Resources Center Archives, University of
California, 1970), vi-ix.

10
J. B. Lippincott and C. H. Richards, The Los Angeles Traffic Problem: A Detailed Engineering Report
(Los Angeles: Automobile Club of Southern California, 1922), major traffic street plan on 22; Probing
Deeply into Our Traffic Congestion, Touring Topics, November 1920, 18-9; Automobile Club of Southern
California, Digest of Board Minutes, 4:91, 2 August 1922.

11
Los Angeles Traffic Commission, in Board of Public Utilities, Thirteenth Annual Report, 1921-22,
typescript, n.p.

12
Henry Z. Osborne, Jr., Traffic Congestion and Business, Southern California Business 1 (June 1922):
21, 27-7; this was the monthly magazine of the Chamber of Commerce.

13
Los Angeles Traffic Commission, in Board of Public Utilities, Thirteenth Annual Report, 1921-22,
typescript, n.p.

14
Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1921.

15
Los Angeles Traffic Commission, in Board of Public Utilities, Thirteenth Annual Report, 1921-22,
typescript, n.p.

16
Personal Experience Record of Henry Z. Osborne, Osborne Papers, File H-20, Box 17, Special
Collections, University of Southern California Libraries.

17
Automobile Club of Southern California, Digest of Board Minutes, 4:107, 31 August 1922; 4:110, 9
October 19 1922.

18
Traffic Commission of the City and County of Los Angeles, The Los Angeles Plan: A Selected Traffic
Program (Los Angeles: by the commission, 1922).

19
Traffic Commission, The Los Angeles Plan, quotations on 3, 24-25.

20
Clarence R. Snethen, Tackling a Metropolitan Traffic Jam, Southern California Business 2 (October
1923): 17, 38, 48.

21
Snethen, Tackling a Metropolitan Traffic Jam, 48;

172

22
Personal Experience Record of Henry Z. Osborne, Osborne Papers, file H-20, Box 17; letter from
Osborne to W. S. Weed, July 2, 1928, Box 8, Osborne Papers. In his private practice, Osborne also worked
on openings and widenings for Jefferson, Adams, La Cienega and Manchester boulevards.

23
Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1923.

24
Pitt and Pitt, Los Angeles A to Z, 380.

25
Eldridge Lovelace, Harland Bartholomew: His Contributions to American Planning (Urbana:
University of Illinois Printing Services, 1993), 6-16; ; Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway, 34-36, 39,
71, 94, 133, 147-48.

26
Minutes of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, 1:30 (July 1920); Los Angeles Times, June 11,
1922 (quotation).

27
Minutes of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, 1:18-29 (July 1920)

28
Minutes of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, 1:256-57 (February 1921); Harland
Bartholomew, Street Widening Methods with Particular Reference to Distributing the Cost, Proceedings
of the National Conference on City Planning 16 (1924): 166-87.

29
Hise and Deverell, Eden by Design, 18-22.

30
Los Angeles Times, January 3, 1912.

31
Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1916; August 30, 1919; December 31, 1919; September 14, 1921.

32
Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1922.

33
Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1922; Southwest Builder and Contractor, December 12, 1919 (AIA).

34
Lovelace, Harland Bartholomew, 17-21. In the historiography of planning, Lovelaces memoir of the
Bartholomew firm is a salient exception to the curious silence on the crucial matter of client acquisition.

35
Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1924; October 4, 1924; Charles H. Cheney, Palos Verdes Estates: A
Model Residential Suburb, Pacific Coast Architect 31 (April 1927): 21; Fogelson, Fragmented
Metropolis, 157.

36
"Untangling Our Traffic, Touring Topics 15 (October 1924): 23; Wider Streets and Better Streets,
Southern California Business 3 (November 1924): 13, 50; Suggested Solution for Los Angeles Traffic
Problem, The Architect and Engineer 78 (August 1924): 125-26.

37
Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1923.

38
Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1924.

39
Los Angeles Times, July 25, 1914.

40
Council Minutes, 149:673-74, October 10, 1924.

173

41
Los Angeles Times, October 19, 1924.

42
Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1924.

43
Los Angeles Times, November 3, 1924.

44
Council Minutes, 151:267-8 (1924).

45
Major Traffic Street Plan, 7. Cheney statement in Minutes of the Los Angeles City Planning
Commission, 1:18-29 (July 1920); for Bartholomew see Lovelace, Harland Bartholomew, 54-56 and
Harland Bartholomew, The Principles of City Planning, American City 26 (May 1922): 457-61;
Olmsteds view in Hise and Deverell, Eden by Design, 21, and Boyer, Rational City, 69.

46
Planners in the 1920s argued both sides of the question of whether streets should be designed first, in
isolation from other urban functions, or whether they should be part of a more comprehensive approach.
See Foster, Streetcar to Superhighway, 36, and Boyer, Rational City, 89.

47
Major Traffic Street Plan, 7.

48
The ideology of automotive dominance as framed by Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, is
critiqued in Chapter One above, with reference to the downtown parking ban, and is also evident in the
characterization of the Major Traffic Street Plan as proceeding from the power of consensus; see Bottles,
chapter 4, esp. 92-95. Foster, Streetcar to Superhighway, 39-45, generally paints a picture of
dissatisfaction with transit on the part of planners in the 1920s.

49
Major Traffic Street Plan, 16.

50
Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, quoted words on 323.

51
Boyer, Rational City, 61-63; Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 322-24.

52
Hise and Deverell, Eden by Design, 21.

53
Major Traffic Street Plan, 5.

54
Major Traffic Street Plan, 28.

55
Major Traffic Street Plan, 31.

56
Major Traffic Street Plan, 40.

57
Major Traffic Street Plan, 48.

58
Major Traffic Street Plan, 28, 48.

59
Major Traffic Street Plan, 50-53 for all quotations in this and the following paragraph.

60
Hudson prepared similar studies of limited-access highways for at least one other plan undertaken by
Bartholomew at the same time as the Los Angeles contract; see Harland Bartholomew, Earl Mills, L. D.
Tilton, and William D. Hudson, A Comprehensive Plan for Memphis, Tennessee (Memphis: City Plan
Commission, 1924).

174

61
Hudsons continuous elevated highway was much smaller than the freeways eventually built in Los
Angeles. It had only four lanes, two in each direction, and lane width was only ten feet.

62
Major Traffic Street Plan, 11-16.

63
The first mass-produced closed vehicle was made in 1919, the first inexpensive one in 1921, and in
1925 even the venerable Model T came in closed models. By 1927, 82 percent of the cars built in the
United States had closed bodies and hardtop roofs. See James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1988), 162, 213-14.

64
Blake McKelvey, Snow in the Cities: A History of Americas Urban Response (Rochester: University
of Rochester Press, 1995), 79-84.

65
Besides the longtime presence of the movie industry, this accident of timing -- the era of Los Angeless
greatest growth came when the diffusion of automobiles throughout American society was substantially
accomplished -- looms as the attribute that most distinguished Los Angeles from other cities. One of the
earliest commentators to note that simple congruence was the architect Richard Neutra, a European-trained
architect who came to the city with an educated outsiders view; see Oliver Carlson, A Mirror for
Californians (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), 138.

66
See notes 4 through 7, above.

67
Henry Z. Osborne, Jr., Traffic Congestion and Business, Southern California Business 1 (June 1922):
21, 26-27; Paul G. Hoffman, Wider Streets and Better Streets, Southern California Business 3
(November 1924): 13, 50.

68
Ernest McGaffey, The Automobile Transforms Business, Southern California Business 2 (August
1923): 17, 40.

69
Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1926.

70
For an extensive recitation of the media depictions of the relationship between the car and the region,
see Ashleigh Brilliant, The Great Car Craze: How Southern California Collided with the Automobile in
the 1920s (Santa Barbara, CA: Woodbridge Press, 1989), esp. 28-31.

71
As noted in Flink, Automobile Age, 189: During the 1920s automobility became the backbone of a
new consumer-goods-oriented society and economy that has persisted into the present.

72
Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan and
Pierce, 1946), 136.

73
The art historian Edson Armi has produced the most astute discussion of the visual and functional
relationships between cars and movies, which were both new technologies in the early 20
th
century, both
based on movement. The car served as a plot device in several ways, from the enactment of freedom or
escape to the embodiment of status or wealth. As a production tool, the car-mounted camera was
instrumental whenever filming had to follow the action, such as in chase scenes; Armi, The Art of American
Car Design (University Park, PA:Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 13-29. Also see Kathleen
McHugh, Stopping Traffic: Women, Cars and the Cinema, in Kevin Jon Boyle, ed., Rear View Mirror:
Automobile Images and American Identities (Riverside, CA: University of California Riverside and
California Museum of Photography, 2000), 43-66, and Brilliant, Car Craze, 99-103. Comedians from

175

Chaplin to the Keystone Kops all featured car stunts; my personal favorite is the utterly gratuitous collision
between a Model T and a Los Angeles Railway Co. yellow car in the Laurel and Hardy talkie, Hog Wild
(1930). On the recruitment of Earl by General Motors, the best source is Alfred P. Sloan, My Years with
General Motors (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 124-28. Earl ran the body shop at the Don Lee Cadillac
dealership in Hollywood, at the corner of Hollywood and Orange, just west of Graumanns Chinese
Theater. The dealership building is still there, adaptively reused as a T-shirt and souvenir shop.

74
Los Angeles and Its Motor-Jam, Literary Digest, 81 (26 April 1924): 68-71.

75
Marshall Breeden, California All of It (Los Angeles: Kenmore Publishing Co., 1925), 189.

76
Alice M. Williamson, Alice in Movieland (New York: Appleton Publishing, 1928), 16.

77
Rockwell Hunt and William S. Ament, Oxcart to Airplane (Los Angeles: Powell Publishing Co.,
1929), 213.

78
This dynamic is most insightfully discussed in David Gephard, Introduction, in Jim Heimann and Rip
Georges, California Crazy: Roadside Vernacular Architecture (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1980),
11-25.

79
In highly specialized forms of automobility, there is evidence for distinctive practices specific to
southern California. Racing was a year-round activity in the salubrious climate, and local race-car builders
as well as numerous hobbyists established a substantial presence by the late 1920s. Harold L. Osmers
M.A. thesis (Geography, California State University Northridge) on the cultural geography of Los Angeles
racing, is available as Osmer, Where They Raced: Racing Venues in Los Angeles, 1900-1990 (Chatsworth,
CA: by the author, 1996), PO Box 4741, Chatsworth, CA 91313; for a masterful rendering that picks up
the story in the 1940s, see Robert C. Post, High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag
Racing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

Los Angeles was also a center of production for automotive magazines, starting with the tabloids produced
by auto dealer Earle Anthony in the 1920s and continuing through the establishment of such organs as Hot
Rod Magazine in the 1940s; Anthonys publications are found in the Trade Catalog Collection, University
of California Santa Barbara, Special Collections and Archives, and a full run of Hot Rod Magazine can be
perused at the archives of the National Hot Rod Association, Glendora, CA. These automobile-related
businesses benefited from the assertion of regional distinctiveness in automobility, i.e., they packaged local
car culture for a national audience. Such publications, as well as LA-based advertising agencies and movie
and TV production, have continued to issue depictions that assert a unique car culture in greater Los
Angeles. To counter those self-interested claims, and to demonstrate that such a culture exists more fully in
the depictions than in lived experience, see the list of best-selling cars in Los Angeles County in Los
Angeles Business Journal, August 23, 2004, in which the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla top the charts.
Or walk through any large parking lot in the region to see that the Civics, Corollas and Ford Tauruses far
outnumber the hot rods, custom cars, and high-end production models, except, perhaps, in certain boutique
zip codes. In LA car culture, there is far more culture than car.

80
Major Traffic Street Plan, 56-66.

81
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1924-25, 81; Boyle Workman, Abusing the Street Work Petition,
Southern California Business 5 (April 1926): 9-11, 54; Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, August
1, 1932. Becky M. Nicolaides, Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 143-56 describes the highly deleterious effects of over-

176

eager application of the Mattoon Act in South Gate, one of the southeastern suburbs, which had a
population around 20,000 in the 1920s, or less than 5 percent the size of Los Angeles.

82
Traffic Commission, Annual Report, 1925, 3-4; Burton L. Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal
Organization and Municipal Practice in the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Parker, Stone & Baird,
1933), 238; John E. Fisher, Vintage Traffic Control in Southern California, The Westernite: Bulletin of
District 6, Institute of Transportation Engineers 55 (January-February 2001): 1-4. Ralph T. Dorsey,
Traffic Control Automatically, The Municipal Employee 2 (December 1925): 3-5; on McClintocks
career, see Daniel Marc Albert, Order Out of Chaos: Automobile Safety, Technology and Society, 1925 to
1965, Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1997, chapter 2; on the role of police in municipal government
see Eric Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1981).

83
Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, 126-57; Traffic Commission, Annual Report, 1925, 16-17.

84
Los Angeles Times, November 15, 1926.

85
Major Traffic Street Plan, 63-64.

86
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1924-25, 85-86.

87
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1925-26, 71-83,

88
Traffic Commission, Annual Report, 1927, 19-35.

89
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1925-26, 75.

90
Los Angeles Times, January 4, 1927.

91
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1926-27, 96-98.

92
Letter from Ernest East to Henry Keller, October 26, 1925, East Papers, Auto Club Archives.

93
Council Minutes, 171:647 (August 19, 1926); City Engineer, Annual Report, 1925-26, 71; Traffic
Commission, Annual Report, 1926, 15-17; Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, 114-15. Bottles
interpreted the nine-cent tax the same way it was presented by the Traffic Commission, as a powerful sign
of consensus, rather than a desperate measure on the part of the Traffic Commission to stave off the
complete failure of the Major Traffic Street Plan.

94
Los Angeles Evening Express, 12 May 1927, 23 May 1927; Los Angeles Times, 12 May 1927, 22 May
1927; Pasadena News, 26 May 1927; Ernest East, Ways and Means of Improving Entrances to
Metropolitan Los Angeles, speech delivered to the City Club, 11 May 1927, East Papers, Auto Club
Archives; City Engineer, Annual Report, 1927-28, 83; City Engineer, Annual Report, 1928-29, 10-13; City
Engineer, Annual Report, 1932-33, 7.

95
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1928-29, 5.

96
J. B. Lippincott also noted the pyrrhic nature of partial openings and widenings, in Los Angeles Times,
November 1, 1925.

97
Major Traffic Street Plan, 9.

177

98
Automobile Club of Southern California, Digest of Board Minutes, 5:128, November 1, 1928.

99
Automobile Club of Southern California, Digest of Board Minutes, 5:144, April 11, 1929; Los Angeles
Times, November 6, 1928 and December 28, 1928. The total loss from the embezzlement was about
$14,000.

100
Charles H. Cheney, Major Traffic Street Plan and Report for Riverside, California (Riverside:
Riverside City Planning Commission, 1928); To Prevent the Choking of State Highways by Rational
Design and Effective Zoning, American City 41 (July 1929): 120, describes the work of a study
commission chaired by Cheney.

101
Hise and Deverell, Eden by Design, reprints the 1930 plan and discusses how it was commissioned and
then buried.

102
Letter from City Attorney to City Council, August 15, 1932, and letter from City Clerk to City
Engineer, August 17, 1932, both in Council File 8206, City Archives.

103
Jules Tygiel, The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks and Scandal during the Roaring Twenties
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

104
This disparity between cars and the infrastructure to accommodate them would not be a uniform
condition through the rest of the 20
th
century. Near the end of the era of extensive freeway production,
which lasted from 1959 to 1971, the extent of construction might have outpaced the growth of population
and traffic for a brief time. Not coincidentally, this is the period when Reyner Banham lived in and studied
Los Angeles. Thus his generally appreciative portrayal of the freeways as not a limbo of existential angst,
but the place where [Angelenos] spend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily lives, did
not necessarily reflect an alternative means of analysis from the generally critical literature on freeways
produced by humanities scholars. He simply saw them during the ephemeral period when they worked
best. The difference between Banham and other scholars might not have been epistemological, or
teleological, but accidental, a matter of timing. See Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four
Ecologies (1971; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1990), 213-22. Similarly, David Brodsly, L.A.
Freeway: An Appreciative Essay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) dates from
approximately the same period, which helps explain why it takes the form of an appreciation rather than the
condemnation that animates most writing about freeways.

178
CHAPTER FOUR
ONE ROAD AT A TIME: THE WORK OF THE CITY ENGINEERS

The staff of the Los Angeles city engineering office were mostly an anonymous
group, whose names rarely made the newspapers. They labored in the long shadow cast
by William Mulholland, the aqueduct builder, the head of the water department, and a
prodigious figure who personified engineering in popular representations of the city.
Henry Z. Osborne, Jr., was the other main exception to the obscurity of municipal
engineers, mainly because of his deliberate strategy of mobilizing support through
publicity. The colleagues he left behind when he went to work for the Public Utilities
Commission conducted their work mostly out of the public view. The names of some of
these engineers appear on bronze plaques on the monumental bridges over the Los
Angeles River, including Merrill Butler and Herbert Cortelyou, the chief engineer and the
structural engineer for the bridges, respectively. Otherwise, their influence must be read
in the reports to the Board of Public Works and the city council, where one name, John R.
Prince, Osbornes successor as head of the Streets Division, appears on most of the
crucial documents that determined what streets the city would build in the 1920s. Prince
was neither a diarist nor much of a correspondent. Except for official documents, the
chief record of his work and that of his colleagues is the structures that they put in place,
an expressive if unarticulated statement for men who spoke, for the most part, with their
steam shovels and cement mixers.

179
Despite their nominal subordination to the Board of Public Works and the city
council, the city engineers did play a determining role in the creation of the automotive
infrastructure. Every major street project, and most small ones, required approval from
the city council, but the council tended to follow the recommendations of the engineers.
Nor did the roads and bridges constructed under the city engineers necessarily correspond
to the instructions they received, because the engineers exercised considerable latitude
during design and construction and in negotiations with organizations outside of city
government. Professional expertise the knowledge of how to design and build large
structures provided one source of the engineers authority. Their influence over the
built fabric of the city was also based on mastery of the day-to-day processes of public
administration. To build a street was extremely technical, as reported by the
engineering office in 1914, but their definition of technical included negotiation and
legal skills, not just the ability to design and build: It is necessary to establish street
lines by survey, run profiles, secure deeds for undedicated portions of streets, rights of
way for sewers, signatures for waivers of damage, establishment or modification of street
grades and curb lines, plans and specifications for improvements . . . and many other
things too numerous to mention.
1

Shepherding a project through all its phases became an end in itself, a worthy
accomplishment in the difficult setting for street improvements under California law and
the privatized landscape of Los Angeles. Keen focus on bringing individual projects to
fruition made the engineers into dedicated incrementalists. An equally keen awareness of
the obstacles made political feasibility an important consideration in evaluating a right-

180
of-way. For the engineers, a right-of-way with a chance of adoption was a good right-of-
way, regardless of whether it fit into comprehensive plans. They did not necessarily
follow the path of least resistance, but chafed at opposition and at times promoted
favored projects in the face of a hostile citizenry, notably the Tenth Street improvements.
In practical terms, feasibility often meant collaboration with the railroads and
street railways, which already owned linear rights-of-way. The city engineers were also
the public-sector agents for the more coercive provisions added to the Vrooman Act
under the state Improvement Act of 1911. As Prince reported to the city council when
one of the railroads objected to giving up land for an approach to the Macy Street bridge,
This improvement can be forced through.
2
The construction of the first concrete bridge
over the Los Angeles River, in 1911, when automobiles were just beginning to alter the
demands placed on the citys streets, served as the model for subsequent highway
projects in which the engineers took advantage of railroad property and railroad money.
Unlike the anti-railroad Progressives, the engineers did not attempt to score
political points by antagonizing the rail companies, but generally maintained cooperative
relations with them. Though the electric trolley companies, the Pacific Electric and the
Los Angeles Railway, lacked the capital for major expansion, they could still fund
selected projects, and the engineers valued the chance to tap the railways for a share of
construction costs for streets and bridges.
3
The opportunity for cost-sharing was even
greater with the steam railroads, the Union Pacific and the Santa Fe, which were
profitable enterprises. The city engineers did not deal with the rail operators solely as
regulated businesses over which the engineers held specific powers under the state

181
improvement statutes, but also as large, wealthy property owners who could help marshal
approval for an ambitious highway scheme. The Union Pacific Railroad supplied the
initial stimulus for the Tenth Street project, acting not solely in its capacity as a railroad
but also in its collateral role as a land developer. Prince and his staff cooperated similarly
with the landowners who requested the construction of Mulholland Highway and
countenanced a massive assessment district to pay for it.
On these and hundreds of other street projects, the engineers carved out a role for
themselves as brokers between public authority and private property. They built roads
and highways through a series of project-specific arrangements, based on localized
opportunities to use assessment districts, combined with the capture of funding from
other sources whenever possible, including the rail companies, the citys general fund,
and, when the city council could be persuaded to float bonds, the nations capital
markets. Historian Christine Boyers observation that planners institutionalized the gap
between private and public interests is valid within the realm of promotional strategies,
but it does not come to terms with what was actually built.
4
In the literal shaping of the
city, it was the municipal engineers who negotiated that divide.
The engineers were also determined to preserve and expand the authority of their
agency amid the institutional confusion over street construction. This competitive
attitude was usually submerged because of the engineers position as civil-service
functionaries rather than highly visible policymakers. Only on rare occasions did it break
through the studied blandness of bureaucratic communication, and usually to fend off an
attack, as when John Prince twisted the knife into the Planning Commission when called

182
to account for lack of progress on Wilshire Boulevard. This rivalry surfaced again a few
years later, when the Planning Commission and the engineering office disagreed over
improvements to the road through Cahuenga Pass, the principal route between the Los
Angeles basin and the San Fernando Valley. In a letter to the city council, Gordon
Whitnall of the Planning Commission blamed the engineers for delays and asked that
the City Engineers Office be required to make an early and definite engineering report
on the project. . . . We urge every possible speed in connection with the studies we herein
suggest.
5
City engineer John Shaws response departed from the typical report on
projects not completed, which often mentioned the need for more information but hardly
ever reproached others for its lack. On this occasion, he wrote to the council that It is
not feasible for me to make a definite report on the project from the meager information
furnished by the Planning Commission.
6

Bureaucratic sniping aside, this conflict between city planners and city engineers
expressed a substantive disagreement. Whitnall wanted the Cahuenga Pass road to be
improved as part of an extensive street network spanning the north part of Hollywood and
reaching into the foothills that separated the basin and the valley, including another main
highway to be constructed along the route of Hollywood Way. Shaw wanted to proceed
immediately with the Cahuenga Pass road using land and cost-sharing to be obtained
from the Pacific Electric, which had a trolley line through the pass, and he prevailed
when the council ruled that the report of the city engineer be adopted, and that the
Cahuenga Pass project is a distinct one unto itself.
7
The engineers had no objection to
building more roads in the vicinity. They had previously completed Mulholland

183
Highway, which opened in 1924, and they were already at work on the Five-Finger
Plan, which would widen the streets at the southern outlet of the pass.
8
Their insistence
on proceeding with the road through the pass as a distinct one unto itself manifested the
values that configured their approach to streets and highways. The city engineers shaped
the citys infrastructure not only by determining the priorities for construction in their
role as brokers, and not only through their bureaucratic competition with other agencies
that contended for control over streets, but also by the content of their work, the specific
designs that they executed or advocated. Though never reduced to a manifesto like the
Major Traffic Street Plan, these values can be inferred from the engineers conflicts with
other agencies and interests and from the material evidence of their completed projects.

The Engineering Culture of Los Angeles
William Mulholland and the Owens Valley aqueduct loomed large in shaping the
values of the engineers, and that they in turn etched onto the landscape of the city. A
linear system through rugged terrain, the aqueduct fulfilled the functionalist aesthetic that
landscape historian J. B. Jackson described as engineers deep appreciation of their own
skill in conveying energy and material from one place to another.
9
The other main
training ground for the engineers who built the first generation of Los Angeles highways
was railroad work, and a railroad, like an aqueduct, also embodied dynamism in a point-
to-point system that was complete in itself. This reverence for flow was satisfied in
spatial terms by a line across the map, or across the land itself. It contrasted with the

184
planners ideal of balance, which was graphically represented by the grid, a pattern of
many intersecting lines.
The aesthetics of engineering also included a visual quality described by historian
David Nye as the technological sublime. Large-scale civil engineering involved the
fundamental transformation of the landscape, not necessarily the subjugation of nature,
but setting nature off with the "dramatic contrast" of human achievement.
10
The Owens
Valley aqueduct impeccably illustrates this idea. One of the largest engineering projects
on Earth in its day, it also traversed the spectacular landscapes of the eastern Sierra and
the Mojave Desert. The urbanizing environment of Los Angeles did not offer the same
kind of opportunity to indulge in the visual appeal of landscape transformation, but rather
multiple opportunities at a smaller scale. The construction engineer for Mulholland
Highway expressed this aesthetic value when he extolled the vantage points that the road
would afford: "In driving over the completed portion of the highway, one is charmed and
amazed at the wonderful view of the surrounding country, which is continually changing
as the vision sweeps from one side of the summit to the other."
11

The technological sublime could also derive from the structure itself, without the
contrast between nature and technology. The city engineers praise for the bridges over
the Los Angeles River owed much to his hopes for their visual impact: The character of
these structures will be such as to excite comment from visitors who enter and leave Los
Angeles by the railways.
12
The river bridges, with their applied ornamentation derived
from various historicist architectural styles, fit neatly into the traditional conception of
aesthetic intent, but the engineering eye also found beauty in the most utilitarian,

185
unadorned structures, especially those made of concrete. Historian Amy Slaton has
demonstrated how the purveyors of concrete structures were formulating new ideas of
what was of value to American culture in the new century. They complemented
assertions of cost-efficiency by weaving a functionalist aesthetic around the realism of
economical construction methods. The use of concrete produced an architectural
language different from that of older styles but no less self-conscious.
13
Pouring
concrete was a cultural project, and the engineers could derive satisfaction from the
results apart from any claims of efficiency in the reduction of traffic congestion.
All of these aesthetic values the dynamism of linear-flow systems, the
technological transformation of nature, and the particular kind of beauty perceived in
concrete structures resided in a road or a bridge as a stand-alone artifact, whether or not
it fit into comprehensive plans for congestion relief. They dovetailed perfectly with the
engineers incrementalist approach to the politics of right-of-way approval, and the goal
of building one road at a time became the central mission of the citys highway builders.
The engineers did not immediately perceive streets in this context when automobiles
began to ply the public rights-of-way. Until 1913, the city engineers did not seek to
increase street capacity for more traffic flow, as the engineering office reported to the
council, but strongly advocated narrow roadways that left ample space for flowers and
ornamental shrubbery next to the roads.
14
The creation of the Streets Division with
Henry Osborne as its chief succeeded in bringing new prominence to street construction,
but his approach to boulevarding the city would play out after he left the engineeering
office for the more hospitable setting of the Public Utilities Commission and the Traffic

186
Commission. The functionalist cultural values of linear-flow systems, landscape
transformation, and utilitarian aesthetics could reign supreme in the agency that Osborne
left behind, especially because the increase in staff to meet the demand for street
construction was accomplished by the transfer of engineers from the aqueduct project,
which was completed in 1913.
15
Building one road at a time was not just an expedient
political strategy, and not just a tactic of bureaucratic rivalry, but also a source of
professional fulfillment to the city engineers.
A final set of considerations in understanding how the city engineers approached
their work involves the concern for recognition and the apprehension over their status in
society. Amid the clamor of boosterism and the awe-inspiring growth of the city, the
engineers sought appropriate acknowledgment for their indispensable role. They basked
in the reflected glory of William Mulholland and sought to emphasize their connection
with him, and they built memorials to themselves into the decorative treatments of
bridges, tunnels, and, incongruously, into the arched openings of sewer outlets.
Their fondness for concrete also expressed a concern over the social position of
engineering at a time when school-trained engineers began to supplant practical
engineers like Mulholland, who began his career with a shovel in his hands before
ascending through the ranks. Amy Slaton has shown how the adoption of concrete as a
building material involved extensive negotiation over the definition of expertise, as
engineers sought to translate knowledge into occupational . . . advantage.
16
The
promulgation of technical standards and testing procedures was not simply a scientific
program, but a social program that put the control of concrete construction in the hands of

187
a small number of highly trained individuals. Quality control in concrete construction
fell short of scientific objectivity because testing procedures included such instructions as
applying moderate pressure or measuring the volume of sand by packing it in the
usual way.
17
Such directions could only make sense within assumptions about the
identity of the practitioners. Standards and specifications were not regularized to the
extent that the results could be replicated by any reasonably attentive person, or in any
social context. Their successful application was confined to those who already possessed
familiarity with the work, or, as formal education replaced practical experience as the
entry to the engineering profession, to those who were admitted into the coterie of
experts.
Those lines were drawn significantly according to gender, evident in one
educators pamphlet on the Fundamental Manhood Qualifications of Engineers, or
another professors list of desirable character traits for engineers as Specifications for a
Man.
18
It is possible that the city engineers antagonism toward the City Planning
Commission expressed gender anxiety provoked by the prominence of women reformers
in the formation of the commission. Even absent such direct and conscious
confrontation, a concern for their own occupational status shaped the engineers sense of
their role and their mission. As Slaton put it, Technologies . . . do not incidentally
encourage a particular social order as they pursue a material end, but rather bring into
being a technical order as they pursue a social end.
19
Seeking to reinforce their own
status by staking out a determining role in the production of streets and highways, the city

188
engineers of Los Angeles enacted a technical order that could proceed whether it resolved
traffic congestion or not.

Roads and Plans
John Prince and his staff did not explicitly disdain comprehensive planning. They
cooperated with the Major Traffic Street Plan after it was approved by the voters because
it increased the staff and budget for their agency, but they did not view highway planning
as synonymous with the Plan. They understood the Plan for the political and
promotional device that it was and supported those efforts to overcome the difficulties of
street approval.
Even while the engineers were mainly concerned with building individual
projects, they had their own inexplicit version of a citywide street network, which
sometimes agreed with the Major Traffic Street Plan and sometimes did not. The
tremendous increase in subdivisions west of downtown made obvious the need for more
east-west arteries in the Los Angeles basin. Princes main solution involved the
expansion of Tenth Street into the principal thoroughfare to serve this traffic. When the
authors of the Plan dutifully included it, they provided Prince with one more argument in
favor of a road that he had already resolved to build. Osbornes grid of boulevards,
which had originated in the Streets Division before its incorporation into the Plan, also
seemed a perfectly suitable blueprint to the engineers. They made steady progress on
securing rights-of-way for it as opportunities arose during the departments review of
subdivision applications, when the engineers could ask developers to set aside highway

189
easements. The engineers could not force the easement donations, but they did hold a
persuasive position with respect to developers who sought to get their subdivisions
approved, and who expected to pass on the tax increments to homeowners in any case.
The template for the major east-west boulevards in the Los Angeles basin, which have
been credited to Olmsted, Bartholomew and Cheney, was actually put in place by this
method before Osborne hired the consulting team.
20
Similarly, congestion along both
banks of the Los Angeles River, where the traffic included steam railroads and electric
trolleys as well as trucks and cars, had been a priority for everyone concerned with traffic
since the Bion Arnold report of 1911. The bridges over the river, with their grade-
separated approaches, addressed this complex issue, and the city engineers embraced the
massive bridge program with exceptional zeal. Some of the bridges they built accorded
with the Major Traffic Street Plan, but others, notably Sixth Street Bridge, made it
impossible to follow the recommendations of the Traffic Commissions consultants.
Prince and the city engineers also undertook individual projects that were not
even mentioned in the Plan. Mulholland Highway was illogical as a traffic artery but it
did not directly contravene the premises of the Plan. It did undermine the spirit of the
Plan by enabling the engineers to inscribe onto the landscape the values of the
engineering department at the precise time when the Traffic Commission was trying to
establish a framework for adminstering transportation infrastructure that would diminish
the hands-on approach of the engineers. East of the Los Angeles River, the work of the
city engineers diverged thoroughly from the comprehensive recommendations. The Plan
called for the upgrade of Valley Boulevard to serve as the main artery leading northeast

190
out of the city.
21
Starting in the late 1920s, the city engineers instead began to develop
Ramona Boulevard, three-quarters of a mile south of Valley, as the principal corridor
serving traffic to the northeast, creating a path dependency in concrete that would be
littered with legal and technical difficulties for generations to come.
When a constructed project departed from comprehensive plans, it subverted the
plans by changing the conditions on which they were based. A nonconforming highway
project could cause the wholesale scrapping of superceded possibilities, change the
priorities among different options for subsequent work, and present new options
inconceivable under prior conditions. Each construction episode was embedded in its
own contingencies, the product of site-specific political feasibility and property-owners'
intentions, as mediated by the city engineers. These processes produced results that were
a mix of the expected and the unanticipated. Some cases were marked by confusion,
many by improvisation, and virtually all major completed projects caused changes in the
plans and policies that would encompass roadbuilding as a public function. As Prince
refined and extended the project-specific approach to providing infrastructure, his agency
would effectively, if not intentionally, undermine Osbornes pursuit of comprehensive
solutions to the citys traffic problems.
This chapter follows the work of the city engineers in their role as engineers
rather than as participants in policy debates. They had their own notions about what
should be built, and they were able to act on those preferences outside the broad policy
considerations that have occupied the existing interpretations of transportation in Los
Angeles. They were also able to proceed without necessarily fulfilling the intentions of

191
those who funded the work, by negotiating on a case-by-case basis the boundary between
private economic interests and the political authority of the city council. To grasp the
ability of these engineers to conceive and, more importantly, to construct large
portions of the city outside of the systemic policy considerations that dominate the
existing interpretations is a necessary step in comprehending the cultural landscape of
transportation in Los Angeles.
22

Pontifex Maximus: The Los Angeles River Bridges
Between 1925 and 1932, the city engineering department completed ten
spectacular bridges over the Los Angeles River. Taken together, the bridges created a
thoroughly engineered corridor, between Fletcher Drive at the north end and Washington
Boulevard to the south, and established the spatial relationships that survive to the present
day among the railroads, the street railways (or their former locations), the streets, and
the river.
23
The smallest of them is almost a thousand feet long, a massive scale that
allowed the bridges also to span the railroad tracks running along both banks of the river.
The predominant structural material is reinforced concrete and the predominant structural
form is the arch. The plainest of the bridges feature ornamental railings and light
standards, but most of them have more extensive decorative treatments in a range of
architectural styles, from Neoclassical to Spanish Colonial Revival. A recent study by
Historic American Engineering Record, the federal agency charged with documenting the
nations technological heritage, concluded that these structures comprise one of the finest
urban bridge ensembles in the United States.
24

192
The river bridges have been the subject of a substantial body of scholarship that
has emphasized their significance as examples of the City Beautiful movement, as
illustrations of the development of reinforced-concrete technology, and as nodal
structures in the development of the region.
25
These works have provided authoritative
accounts of the bridges design and construction, which I do not intend to replicate. My
interest lies in how the funding methods for the bridges fit into the broader story of the
city engineers efforts to establish their agencys role in the planning and construction of
the automotive infrastructure of Los Angeles.
The city raised its share of the construction budgets from four bond issues
approved by the voters between 1923 and 1926, but the bonds paid for less than a quarter
of total project cost. The county matched the citys share, and the city engineers obtained
the balance from the railroads and street railways in a series of site-specific transactions.
The agreements varied according to the amount of rail property taken for each structure
and the configuration of nearby streets, which determined the number and the scale of
grade separations to isolate rail traffic from street traffic. To build First Street Viaduct,
for instance, the city and county each put in 23.5 percent, the Los Angeles Railway 18
percent, the Santa Fe Railroad 25 percent, and the Union Pacific, 10 percent. For the new
bridge at Seventh Street, the city and county paid 18 percent each, the Union Pacific and
Santa Fe 25 percent each, and the Los Angeles Railway, 14 percent.
26
These agreements
served as a laboratory for the expansion and refinement of the engineers brokering skills
as they pieced together the construction budgets. The bonds for the citys share
represented the crucial portion because they paid for street improvements sought by

193
public authorities but resisted by the railroads. On that score the engineers might have
learned their lesson too well. After the first bond referendum for the river bridges, they
obtained funding for other highway projects through the same means for three more
years, until the city council put a stop to it.
Before 1910, the river bridges in the central part of Los Angeles were the timber
or iron structures erected by the rail companies. They were all multiple-span trusses of
timber or iron, with their decks and approaches at the level of the surface streets. Rotting
timber and rusting metal imposed constant maintenance demands. The rivers periodic
floods occasioned more serious repairs when water-borne debris crashed into the bridge
piers or the rushing water undermined foundations. The bridges also accommodated
pedestrians and, starting in the early 1900s, automobiles, which brought them under the
purview of the city engineers. Every year the engineers requested funds to repair or
rebuild parts of the bridges, especially the ones closest to downtown, at First and Macy
streets. The council occasionally complied with the more urgent requests, but there was
scant prospect of replacing the bridges or building new ones at additional crossing
locations until a group of developers on the east side took matters into their own hands.
27

Property owners in Lincoln Heights, organized as the East Side Improvement
Association, sought to replace the rickety viaduct at Buena Vista Street (later North
Broadway) with a new viaduct. In 1905, they negotiated with the Union Pacific Railroad
and the Los Angeles Railway Co. to obtain half the anticipated construction cost.
28
They
also arranged to obtain space for an elevated approach to the bridge on the east side by
bartering city land along Downey Road for a piece of railroad property adjacent to the

194
bridge site, a deal that subsequently received the blessing of the city council.
29
The plan
dragged on for years despite such promising steps, because the city council declined to
commit public funds for the other half of the construction cost. The booster-friendly Los
Angeles Times urged the council to act, pointing out the new trolley bridges planned for
Main and Seventh streets, and gushing that Los Angeles is the Pontifex Maximus of the
day, after the bridge-builder of ancient Rome. The Times argued that the cost share by
the rail companies offered a timely opportunity, and urged expenditure from the general
fund to avoid the necessity of selling bonds.
30
The council held firm until the East Side
Improvement Association successfully ran one of their own, Reuben W. Dromgold, for a
seat on the city council, with the purpose of winning approval for the Buena Vista bridge.
Dromgold secured appointments to the Bridge Committee and the Finance Committee,
pushed through the citys 58-percent share of the construction budget from the general
fund, enlisted the participation of the Los Angeles Railway, and even arranged for the
city to sell a portion of Elysian Park to the Union Pacific for additional track facilities on
the west side of the river.
31

City engineer Homer Hamlin did not squander the chance to display the prowess
of his agency. His staff designed the citys first concrete-arch bridge, which was also the
largest of its type in California at the time, and one of the largest in the nation. For the
decorative treatment Hamlin enlisted architect A. F. Rosenheim, a member of the
Municipal Arts Commission, who framed the bridges portals with imposing pylons and
accented the mid-river pier locations with miniature Roman temples. Buena Vista
Viaduct won praise as an ornament to the city from reformers and boosters alike. Before

195
it was completed, the Municipal Arts Commission published Hamlins paean to its
Neoclassical form and ornament as an appendix to Charles Mulford Robinsons report,
Los Angeles: The City Beautiful. When the viaduct opened in 1911, the Times
pronounced it a majestic addition to the city.
32

Buena Vista Viaduct has been described as the paradigm of the bridge building
process in Los Angeles, but it was only partially so.
33
It lacked the key ingredient of
bond funding that propelled subsequent construction in the river corridor. The city
engineers pioneered that strategy in their efforts to build a tunnel to conduct Second
Street under Bunker Hill, in downtown. Henry Osborne administered the project as head
of the Streets Division, but encountered a familiar problem, as he reported in 1914: The
process of harmonizing the large number of conflicting property interests and finally
determining the matter of damages is a problem which is necessarily slow of solution.
34

He could, however, get the property owners to agree on getting others to pay, and they
helped him persuade the city council to place a citywide bond referendum on the ballot in
1916.
35
After it was defeated in a close election, Osborne enlisted the city council and
the state Railroad Commission to order the Los Angeles Railway to reroute its tracks
from First to Second Street. That would place the tracks in the tunnel and win a cost
share from the railway, and the recommendation cited the precedent of the railways
contribution to Buena Vista Viaduct.
36
To the engineers who constantly encountered the
impediments to large road projects, any method that succeeded in prying open a niche of
approval was memorable, and worth trying again. The track- relocation ploy worked and
construction began in 1921, after Osborne had left the engineering office to join the

196
Public Utilities Commission.
37
The 1916 bond issue, despite its failure at the polls, had
established an important precedent: it was the first time the council allowed onto the
ballot a citywide bond referendum for a highway project.
The engineers continued to call attention to the deteriorating condition of the river
bridges, but the long-sought remedy would only come when the state Railroad
Commission ordered the rail companies to build grade separations to rectify the
congestion of rail and street traffic in the vicinity.
38
A Railroad Commission survey
found that railroads and trolleys accounted for more than 3,300 daily train movements
in the river corridor, where they were crossed by almost 200,000 automobiles per day.
39

Trains and trolleys crossed each other too, and a horrifying collision in 1916 between a
Santa Fe train and a Pacific Electric trolley set the reconstruction program in motion.
40

After the collision, the Municipal League, a Progressive organization devoted to political
reform, filed a complaint with the Railroad Commission requesting action to ameliorate
the grade crossing situation within the city limits as well as the consolidation of all the
tracks in the city and construction of a new union station and freight facilities.
41
The
Chamber of Commerce and the Community Development Association wrote letters of
support, as did the cities of Pasadena and South Pasadena. Conspicuously absent was the
city of Los Angeles, but that was no oversight. Separating the rail and street grades at the
river bridges would entail considerable expense for the city, not just the railroads. To
ward off the drain on its budget, Los Angeles filed a counterclaim protesting that the
Railroad Commission did not have jurisdiction to force the grade separations.
42
The state
Supreme Court upheld the commissions authority, and in 1921 it ordered the railroads,

197
street railways, city and county to separate the grades where tracks intersected city streets
along the river. Marshall Stimson, an attorney and Progressive reformer who took part in
these events, would later claim that the commissions order was the proximate source
of the river bridge program, but it was only a start, because there was still no funding for
the city to pay its share.
43

Two days after the Railroad Commissions decision, the city council resurrected
the idea of a citywide bond issue. It came at the suggestion of the Public Utilities
Commission, which probably means that it originated with Henry Osborne, who was
familiar with the case through his participation in the Railroad Commissions study of
train and vehicle movements in the river corridor.
44
The referendum for $1 million in
bonds to pay the citys share of grade separations came to the ballot two months later.
After it was defeated, the Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles Times applauded
the result. They maintained that the more basic issue concerned a new union station, and
that the voters declined the bait held out to them to begin eliminating grade crossings
piecemeal, determined to wait until they can be entirely abolished as part of the union
terminal project.
45
That convoluted claim omitted the fact that the Railroad Commission
had not ordered a far-reaching overhaul of the citys track facilities nor the construction
of a union depot. In hindsight, a simpler explanation helps account for the defeat of the
bonds, as it was consistent with the propensity of Angelenos to decline raising their taxes
for projects that did not directly benefit their own individual properties or neighborhoods.
The city engineering staff had prepared preliminary designs for new bridges at all
the major bridge locations before the Railroad Commissions mandate to eliminate the

198
grade crossings. They identified the important intersections between road and rail and
penciled in the new street alignments and grade separations. Mindful of the positive
reception for Buena Vista Viaduct, they sketched the elevations of all the river spans as
clones of the 1911 bridge. The failure of the 1921 bond referendum gave the engineers
some breathing space to survey the bridge locations, complete the construction drawings,
and negotiate the cost-sharing arrangements with the various rail companies.
46
Cost
estimates based on the finished plans put the citys share for the first five bridges closer
to $2 million than $1 million, and the city council authorized a bond referendum at the
higher amount for the election in early June 1923.
47

The campaign on behalf of the bonds emphasized the perils of the existing
situation, the economic benefit that new viaducts would bring to the city by improving
the efficiency of the steam railroads, and the relief of automobile congestion in the river
corridor. The supporters also pointed out that it was a good deal for the city, based on the
fact the citys $2 million share for the five viaducts would be exceeded by the rail
companies total contribution of $7.2 million. The familiar roster of organizations urged
passage: the Chamber of Commerce, the Community Development Association, the
Auto Club, the City Planning Commission, the Traffic Commission. The Chamber sent
speakers to improvement associations and civic groups throughout the city. They found
particularly receptive audiences on the east side. At a mass meeting in Boyle Heights,
the president of the Hollenbeck Heights Improvement Association appealed to the
financial interest of the property owners: The proposed viaducts would increase
property values . . . to such an extent as to more than justify the necessary expenditure of

199
funds for their completion. At the same meeting, the president of the city council
insisted that the council only followed the wishes of the voters, and placed the citys
reluctance to approve highway bonds squarely on their shoulders: Dont prod the
council. Prod yourselves. No one mentioned the appearance of the bridges.
48

The passage of the bonds launched the city engineering office on its most
extensive program of transportation development to date. Bridge engineer Merrill Butler,
who was hired to oversee viaduct construction, conferred with the Municipal Arts
Commission on the decorative treatments, which were selected according to site-specific
themes. Because the Macy St. viaduct is on the El Camino Real, reported the Arts
Commission, Spanish colonial architecture was adapted for the design.
49
Butler gave a
streamlined, modernistic look to the Glendale-Hyperion Bridge by carrying up the lines
of the abutments through and above the handrails, terminating them in four large
pylons.
50
Before the passage of the bonds, city engineer John Shaw had praised the
character of these structures and their ability to excite comment from visitors who
enter and leave Los Angeles by the railways.
51

But the comments never came, until recent times, when the appreciation for the
appearance of the bridges became linked with their historical significance. The viaducts
surely incited eager comment, but more for their impact on the real estate market than for
their ornamentality. Los Angeles is today spending millions on great steel and concrete
VIADUCTS spanning the Los Angeles River to meet tremendously increasing traffic
conditions to and from the east side, ran a typical advertisement, which contined, Drive

200
out today over the new 7
th
or 9
th
St. Viaducts. . . . Big sales campaing now under way.
All lots priced for the average investor.
52

A walk or a drive along the river to view the bridges makes evident why they did
not excite comment for their appearance, why they were only identified with the City
Beautiful movement by the Municipal Arts Commission that was brought into being in
service of that reform program.
53
The river corridor is, and was, a gritty, utilitarian
landscape of railyards, warehouses and factories strung out along the river, not the type of
cohesive civic or institutional center that was the paradigmatic site for City Beautiful
planning. Perhaps Shaws visitors entering and leaving the city by train could catch a
sidelong glance at the viaducts, but only for a few seconds as the train rolled past. The
bridges are undoubtedly impressive, even majestic, and if the residents of the city cared
more about their economic impact than their appearance, that did not trouble the the
engineers, who did not mind presenting such grand gestures to a limited audience
consisting significantly of themselves. They did crave recognition, however, and on one
of the last river bridges, at Washington Boulevard, they indulged in a wistful exercise of
self-memorialization. Around the tops of the pylons are bands of panels containing terra
cotta relief sculptures that depict the stages of designing and building a bridge.
54

The engineers also appreciated the implications of a highway bond issue financed
by tax increments on all the real estate in the city. Soon after the 1923 election, they
prepared specifications and negotiated cost shares from the railroads for another river
bridge at North Spring Street. In the final bonding package presented to the council, they
also included bridges that did not cross any rail lines and thus had no claim on the rail

201
companies for a share of the construction (Avenue 26 across the Arroyo Seco and San
Fernando Road over Pacoima Wash). The council placed it on the ballot in 1924 and the
voters came through. Besides using the money for the bridges named in the referendum,
the engineers spent some of the proceeds on other favored projects that had no previous
source of funding, such as a small bridge on Malibu Road over Santa Ynez Creek.
55
The
formula worked again in 1925, with a bond issue for two river bridges (Glendale-
Hyperion and Fletcher) and the rest of the proceeds for bridges throughout the city. And
once more, in 1926, when the river bridges at Sixth Street and Washington Boulevard
headlined the referendum but the engineers also spent the money on six smaller bridges
in various parts of the city.
56
The engineers assured their own ability to allocate
construction funds as they saw fit by inserting vague language into the text of the
referenda. The 1926 bond, for example, began with a detailed description of the Sixth
Street and Washington Boulevard projects, then stated that the proceeds would also be
used for the completion, construction, reconstruction, replacing, repair and alteration of
various bridges and viaducts.
57
The city council might have become alarmed over the
balance of bonded debt, or might have realized that the engineers had seized for
themselves the ability to apportion municipal resources. In any case, the council brought
an unambiguous end to the practice when assembling the election ballot for 1927: The
Council has decided to place no bond issue on said ballot.
58

At a total cost of $17 million, the ten Los Angeles River bridges designed by the
municipal engineers represented the largest and most expensive transportation
improvements undertaken by the city up to that time. They corrected an egregious safety

202
Figure 4: The Los Angeles River Corridor, 1930. Most of the river viaducts were completed or under
construction, with the notable exception of Sixth Street Bridge. The areas adjacent to the river that do not
have dense street grids were either railyards or complexes of factories and warehouses. (North is to the
right.) Source: Street Map of the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Automobile Club of Southern
California, 1930). Used with permission; all rights reserved.

203
and congestion problem, propelled the local economy by improving access to the
industrial districts and subdivisions on the east side, and won the support of voters
throughout the city. The engineering staff provided innovative technology on a
staggering scale and a tight schedule.
59
They dutifully served the directives of elected
officials and the citizens who gave with their ballots and with their wallets, but the
engineers also maneuvered within the interstices of a complex legal and political process
to establish pockets of administrative autonomy that they used for their own ends. They
spent money earmarked for the most densely built-up part of the city to build a bridge on
the remote and undeveloped Malibu Road, colonizing with concrete the splendid coastal
landscape. They were pleased to have their work on the river bridges applauded as
architecture, even if they were the only ones clapping. And when they coveted
recognition, they molded their narrative into the Washington Boulevard Bridge. Subtly
interwoven into the highly visible viaduct program, the agendas of the city engineers
would emerge more starkly in projects that they initiated or controlled themselves.

The Tenth Street Improvements
In early 1922, while Henry O'Melveny and his cohorts were hatching the
Archway scheme, Gordon Whitnall and the City Planning Commission were advocating
the upgrade of Beverly Boulevard, and Henry Osborne was forming the Traffic
Commission to oversee the creation of major streets, John Prince and the Streets Division
began to push their own idea for the primary east-west crosstown artery in Los Angeles:
the opening and widening of Tenth Street. The idea began as part of an industrial

204
development strategy undertaken by the Chicago-based Union Pacific Railroad and a
group of investors associated with the Union Pacific who proposed to build the Los
Angeles Central Manufacturing District. Union Pacific owned some 1,000 acres along
the east bank of the Los Angeles River between Fourth and Tenth streets. The Central
Manufacturing District owned another 300 acres south of Tenth. Seeking to transform
this undeveloped property into a vast landscape of production, the plan called for
providing road, rail, water and sewer service, then subdividing the property and leasing or
selling it to manufacturing and warehouse operations. Public-sector participation in
infrastructure development was a critical part of the plan, and the landowners petitioned
the city to upgrade Tenth Street into an arterial thoroughfare.
60

The industrial developers were primarily concerned with the traffic congestion in
the river corridor, where the viaduct and grade-separation construction had not yet begun.
To the city engineers, a larger scope of improvements to Tenth Street could allow traffic
to skirt the southern edge of downtown, provide access to the western subdivisions, and
replace busy Whittier Boulevard as the outlet to the east and southeast. By emphasizing
the claim that a new 100-feet-wide right-of-way would become a "great cross-town
boulevard," Prince also promoted Tenth Street as a project of obvious benefit to the entire
city, and therefore a means to avoid the usual stalemates over highway approval and
funding. The claim of broad public benefit emboldened Prince and his chief, city
engineer John Griffen, to ask the city council for construction money from the citys
general fund. Any contribution from the city would reduce the assessments on abutting
properties, and thereby minimize opposition too.
61

205
The industrial promoters obligingly expanded their petition to take in the larger
goals of the city engineers, and spearheaded the formation of the Tenth Street
Improvement Association to lobby for its approval. The amended petition might have
been drafted by Prince himself. It echoed his phrasing (e.g., "great cross-town
thoroughfare" instead of "great cross-town boulvard") and included goals that fell far
outside the concerns connected with building an industrial district next to the river:
accommodating traffic to and from "the beach cities to the west," as well as to the
Imperial Valley and San Diego. Based on the engineers' claims of citywide benefit, and
attentive to powerful interests like the Union Pacific and the Central Manufacturing
District, the city council took the unprecedented step of appropriating $1.5 million from
the city general fund. That would pay one quarter of the $6 million estimated by the
engineers for acquiring the right-of-way and opening or widening Tenth Street across the
entire city, from the eastern to the western boundary of Los Angeles.
62

The rest of the cost would have to come from special assessments, and protests
began trickling in from individual homeowners before the engineers even starting laying
out the boundaries for the assessment district. When the shape of the district boundaries
began to emerge, the objections grew far more vociferous. To raise the $4.5 million
beyond the direct funding provided by the council, Prince had to widen the assessment
district three blocks north and three blocks south of Tenth Street, thus taking in properties
fronting on other streets that were subject to pending assessments, including, at various
locations, Eighth, Pico, Wilshire and Whittier. Soon the opponents began to collect
signatures on petitions and coordinate postcard campaigns. One petition represented all

206
the property owners on three blocks of the proposed right-of-way. Another had
signatures from at least one property owner on every block in the assessment district, 460
people in all. Small retailers in the residential neighborhoods on both the east and west
sides also joined the opposition.
63

The supporters of the project portrayed the protestors as selfish money-grubbers,
interested only in avoiding taxes, and that was certainly one of the frequently mentioned
objections. For the most part, however, the protests did not focus directly on taxes, but
rather on fairness and on competing visions of the public good. The most common
objection resonated with the engineers' claim of citywide benefit, but turned it around to
oppose tax increments charged to the frontage owners: "The proposition is so expansive
that it may rightfully be considered a public improvement and should therefore be borne
by the public as a whole."
64
The question of who would benefit produced a crossfire of
claims and counterclaims. Small business owners on the east side thought the project
would primarily benefit downtown, and west side business owners thought it would
further the interests of those developing suburban property outside the city limits.
Storeowners on Pico, two blocks south of Tenth, observed that they would be paying for
the improvement of a competing street. Contrary to the imagery of Los Angeles car
culture, there was no consensus as to the desirability of automobiles among the citizenry:
"I have no automobile," wrote one resident, "so the widening of Tenth Street is no more
benefit to me than to a man that lives in Alaska or China." There were objections based
on safety: "It [will be] a nuisance and dangerous to the people that live near and have to
cross Tenth Street."
65
Others complained on aesthetic grounds: "The elimination of the

207
graceful bend in the street at Wilton [Place] will not enhance the beauty of the street but
on the contrary detract from it." Given the origins of the project, the opponents had
reason to resurrect the Progressive tactic of demonizing the railroads: "[Tenth Street] is
intended to benefit special interests such as the Union Pacific Railroad.
66
Far from
expressing widespread accord on rebuilding the city to accommodate the automobile,
Angelenos instead proved adept at identifying reasons why that should not be done.
Though widespread, the resistance did not coalesce around a a single issue or
leader, which made the protest difficult to sustain. In June 1923, when the city council
convened a public hearing prior to voting on the assessment district, over 1,800 valid
objections had been received. That was the largest road protest the city had ever seen,
but only about 17 percent of the 11,000 properties within the assessment-district
boundaries, far short of the majority that was needed to stop the project.
67
The council
voted to proceed with the final design of the alignment, and Olmsted, Bartholomew and
Cheney subsequently incorporated the improved Tenth Street into the recommendations
of the Major Traffic Street Plan. The expansive configuration of the district would soon
prove to be its undoing. A group of property owners sued the city because the required
legal notices were all titled "Tenth Street," but properties that did not front directly on
Tenth would also be assessed for the cost of the improvements. Owners of some of those
properties charged the city with "knowingly proceeding under a misleading ordinance of
intention and notice of public work with the intent to deceive and defraud plaintiffs."
The city lost in Superior Court and, in March 1926, lost its appeal in state Supreme
Court. The largest highway project in the city was stopped.
68

208
An extensive debate ensued in the city council concerning the future of the
project. One side favored the aggressive action proposed by the city engineers: fix the
technical deficiency of the project name and proceed as before, "with such speed that no
time might be allowed for any opposition to develop." Those who wanted to move more
slowly pointed out a potential inequity: the Tenth Street improvements had been
approved before the adoption of the Major Traffic Street Plan, and the network of arteries
in the Plan had created the possibility of assessments on the same property for many
different streets.
69
Caution prevailed and the council instructed the engineering office to
map out three different alignments with corresponding assessment districts. Over the
next two years, the engineers tinkered extensively with the route and the boundary to
avoid the pockets of most obdurate resistance.
70

Those who opposed the Tenth Street improvements did not speak with a unified
voice or a common set of arguments, but if their reasons for opposition were different,
they all proceeded from the same impulse to stop the expansion of Tenth Street into a
through artery. Even though their reasons cannot be aggregated, their voices should not
be lost to us. When people across the entire path of the project found reason to oppose it,
their resistance cannot be dismissed merely as shortsighted and selfish. It was a different
vision of the city. It was as yet an inchoate vision, but there was one common theme:
none of the dissenters wanted to have a 100-feet-wide right-of-way with multiple lanes of
high speed traffic. That impulse toward opposition would be mobilized in formally
organized citizens groups as the revised Tenth Street moved through the susbesequent
steps of design and approval, in the process of becoming Olympic Boulevard. The next

209

Figure 5: In the mid-city area, around Crenshaw Boulevard, the Tenth Street/Olympic Boulevard improvements
encountered determined resistance from homeowners. The right-of-way was interrupted just west of Crenshaw, where
Tenth Street stands to the north of the alignment for Olympic. Source: Street Map of the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles:
Automobile Club of Southern California, 1930). Used with permission; all rights reserved.

210
decisive conflict came in the early years of the Depression, when public works became
entwined with the politics of unemployment relief, and that struggle is considered in
Chapter Six.
In the viaduct project, the city engineers threaded their own preferences and
priorities through a large and complex undertaking. In Tenth Street, the engineers drew a
line on the map but the property owners of the city quickly erased it by capitalizing on
one of the many opportunities for procedural opposition provided by the state
improvement statutes. As streets and highways became increasingly prominent in the
politics, the economy, and the culture of Los Angeles, the engineers who cast themselves
in a central role in roadway development had their views either submerged or defeated.
Overlapping in time with their work on the viaducts and Tenth Street, Mulholland
Highway would provide the sought-after chance for the engineers to express their vision
of road construction in Los Angeles.

Mulholland Highway
Mulholland Highway, a 22-mile, twisting roadway completed in 1924 along the
ridgetops of the Hollywood Hills, meant different things to the real estate investors who
first promoted it and to the engineers who designed it and supervised its construction.
71

"The property in the district is owned by a small group of capitalists who expect to be
rewarded fortheir enterprise by the subdivision of the frontage on the highway into
building sites," wrote the trade journal for the region's construction industry.
72
But
Mulholland Highway did not raise property values and development opportunities in the

211
hills and the adjacent San Fernando Valley until a generation later than anticipated, when
its original advocates were no longer in a position to benefit. The reasons are apparent in
retrospect: the highway created a cul-de-sac rather than a connection with the principal
roads of the growing city, and the threat of fire and landslide in the chaparral
environment of the hills discouraged development and settlement. Despite the known
fire threat and the city's established practice of integrating the construction of highways
and underground utilities, the roadbuilding project did not incorporate provision for water
mains. The fire hazard only surfaced in the proceedings when the city engineering staff
sought a pretext for accelerated administrative procedures, and it still did not cause
modification of the design or construction.
The disjunction between the expectations of its promoters and what the engineers
produced was so extreme that the promoters petitioned to close the road barely five years
after raising a million dollars to complete it.
73
This disparity cannot be explained away as
unanticipated consequences because, for one thing, the engineers knew the consequences
while they conducted the work. For another, they pursued the project with uncommon
fervor, including successful requests for dispensation from standard administrative
practices. If the engineers were not simply compliant technicians leashed to the aims of
business and political elites, how did they decide what to build? During the approval
process and the construction itself, the city engineers left a record of their aspirations in
testimony to the city council, in departmental reports, and in naming the highway after
William Mulholland. As city engineer John Griffin wrote: "It is named as a tribute and
to be built as a monument to 'Our Bill,' Bill Mulholland, the builder of the Los Angeles

212
Aqueduct and the one man among all others who put our beloved City of Los Angeles on
the map."
74

To the city engineering department, Mulholland Highway was a massive
reordering of the natural environment that followed in several ways the pattern of their
greatest triumph, the aqueduct that which opened in 1913 and carried water to the city
across 233 miles from the Owens Valley. The highway accorded with the engineers'
sense of beauty in the landscape, the aspect of engineering that David Nye described as
the "technological sublime."
75
Its construction engineer, Dewitt Reaburn, described one
aspect of this aesthetic when he extolled the vantage points that the road would afford:
"In driving over the completed portion of the highway, one is charmed and amazed at the
wonderful view of the surrounding country, which is contiunually changing as the vision
sweeps from one side of the summit to the other. The Mulholland Highway is destined to
be the heaviest traveled and one of the best known scenic roads in the United States."
76

Creating vistas for scenic motoring was a conscious goal in much of the parkway
construction throughout the nation in the 1920s and 1930s. As their name implied,
however, parkways also were thorough, polished designs in their own right, with
picturesque light fixtures and railings as well as fully thought-out landscaping along the
roadside.
77
Mulholland Highway lacked all such amenities. It was a simple graded cut
through the hills that afforded pleasant views but was not part of them. The road itself
and the act of building it through mountainous terrain satisfied the engineers esteem for
linear-flow systems.

213
William Mulholland had nothing to do with the planning or construction of
Mulholland Highway, but the engineers' symbolic association between him and this road
indicates the importance of the aqueduct in shaping their sense of mission and their desire
for an autonomous administrative structure. The significance of the naming cut both
ways: they chose this particular construction project to venerate the aqueduct builder.
The highway through the hills was a most appropriate memorial because it enabled the
engineers to act on their vision of beauty as transformed landscapes of movement and
flow, and because it was an opportunity to transfer crucial aspects of their aqueduct
achievement to the arena of their greatest disappointment through highways. They
consciously sought to reproduce the aqueduct experience, even hiring aqueduct veterans
when they could. Mulholland Highway offered a chance to build without opposition and
to devise a model for project administration that could ease subsequent undertakings. It
also demonstrates how the municipal engineers carved out a role as brokers between
private economic interests and the political authority of the city council, enabling them to
hijack an effort like Mulholland Highway for their own ends. To them, the road was its
own justification -- the technological transformation of nature to a sublime engineered
landscape, and a memorial to the revered forefather. When venturesome real estate
promoters concocted the plan to open a vast new territory for development by running a
highway atop the Hollywood Hills, the engineers saw an opportunity to build an
uninterrupted corridor, to honor their own work and those associated with it, and to frame
nature with artifice. The ideal of transportation efficiency, which dominated the

214
contemporary policy debates as well as many later interpretations of the city's
transportation history, had little effect on Mulholland Highway.

A Small Group of Capitalists
The subdivision and development that transformed the landscape of the Los
Angeles basin in the 1920s also created an imbalance that threatened to end the prospects
for further profitable speculation. The basin was completely subdivided by 1924, even
though much of the property stood vacant as subdivisions that existed only in legal, rather
than physical, form.
78
To the north, in the San Fernando Valley, a different kind of
problem disrupted the plans of subdividers. Almost two decades earlier, Harry Chandler,
H. J. Whitley, Moses Sherman and other real estate moguls had projected the San
Fernando Valley as the ultimate suburban frontier. In the transactions central to that
stratagem, they optioned almost 50,000 acres of valley land and profited handsomely by
reselling after the aqueduct brought water to the valley. The lucrative proceeds from this
scheme were the gains of the speculator who sold to other investors, not of the subdivider
who bought land by the acre at wholesale and sold it by the lot, at retail, to homeowners.
These machinations pushed up the price of the land, which made development more
difficult by increasing the price of entry for those who would attempt it. William
Mulholland complained in 1912 that "The capitalists have stolen the unearned increment
for the next 20 years."
79
In the early 1920s, much of the Valley land just north of the hills
was still identified by section nomenclature rather than lot numbers or street addresses, a
sure sign of stalled development.
80

215
Constrained by thorough exploitation in the basin and an oversupply of valley
land that was overpriced and still distant from the built-up part of the city, real-estate
investors in the 1920s turned their attention to the Hollywood Hills that stood between
the basin and the valley.
81
The imposingly steep topography had delayed the advance of
development into the hills and left them relatively undisturbed in comparison to the
feverish speculation on either side. Reporting in 1924 on residential development in the
hills, John Prince commented that "a tract located in the hills implies irregular lots and
curved streets, wherein the grades afford many problems."
82
Prince agreed to relax the
street-width requirements to enable development in the hills. "Subdivision streets," he
had reported a year earlier, "may be [as little as] 50 feet in width, and in rare instances 40
feet will be allowed. Hillside streets, 26 to 30 feet."
83

Winning cooperation from the city engineers posed less of an obstacle than
overcoming the reluctance of home-buyers to consider dwellings on precarious sites
subject to brush fires. Hillside charm was not yet a saleable commodity, especially when
so many other home sites were available in the flats. Extravagant advertising and
promotion accompanied most subdivisions in this period, but those in the hill sections set
new standards for flamboyance and creativity. W. H. Woodruff's daring lunge into the
hills, with his Beachwood Canyon development of 1922-23, occasioned the construction
of an enormous sign atop Mount Lee, proclaiming the new subdivision's name of
Hollywoodland.
84
Alphonzo Bell's scheme for Bel-Air, hatched in 1923, differed in two
significant ways from the hundreds of subdivision applications filed for flat land in the
Basin that year. The hilly, rugged land was expensive to build on; and Bell sought to

216
overcome this limitation by establishing an aura of elegance and exclusivity, including
imposing, but non-functional, gates. Bell also donated prime property for the creation of
the Bel-Air Country Club and his landscape architect laid out bridle trails for the
residents.
85

The difficulties of developing the hills were already evident to some 400 property
owners who convened at the Hollywood Country Club in December 1922. Their goal
was to promote construction of a road traversing the top of the hills, running west for
some 22 miles from Cahuenga Pass to Calabasas, in the Valley. They formed two
organizations that day, the Hollywood Foothills Improvement Association, which was the
umbrella group for promotion, and Municipal Improvement District Number 22, which
was the legal entity for the payment of property-tax increments to finance the project.
86

There was more to their vision than building homes in the hills. The members of
the Municipal Improvement District controlled virtually all the land between Sunset
Boulevard and the Valley's Ventura Boulevard, more than 50,000 acres in all.
87
Besides
advancing development in the hills, these promoters wanted to start the process of
connecting the Basin and the Valley in order to bring the Valley more fully into the
profitable orbit of the city's real estate market. "The proposed route," reported Prince,
"will intersect many beautiful canyons, among which are mentioned Laurel, Benedict,
Sepulveda, Franklin, Coldwater and Mandeville, through which roads will eventually be
opened from the San Fernando Valley to Los Angeles."
88

Harry H. Merrick, a partner in the real estate firm of Merrick and Ruddick, served
as president of the Hollywood Hills Improvement Association. He represented more

217
substantial stakeholders: real estate speculators such as Victor Girard, W. F. Holt, the
Whitley family, Thomas C. Bundy, Alvaro Pratt and Louis Evans; movie moguls Sid
Graumann, Thomas Ince and Edgar Rice Burroughs; bankers Marco Hellman and Willis
Longyear; and representatives from the powerful Title Insurance and Trust Co. The
roster was also sprinkled with city officials who owned land in the hills or the Valley,
including those connected with the city's work on the project, such as John Shaw, who
worked in the engineering office and would soon become the city engineer, and Clarence
Dykstra, who served on the Board of Public Works that oversaw the city engineer.
89

The formation of Municipal Improvement District Number 22 only started the
process of securing funding for the project. It took Merrick eight months to collect
signatures on a petition from the landholders in the District.
90
Merrick's group also
retained engineer Dewitt Reaburn, an Aqueduct veteran with a close relationship to
Prince and his colleagues, to survey the assessment-district boundaries. With the
boundary certified, the city clerk needed only a week to check the names on the petition
against the voter rolls, an uncommonly short interval for that process.
91
Then the City
Council scheduled the minimum public-notice period and set the bond-issue referendum
for October 9, 1923. The property-owners approved the bond issue by a 2-1 margin.
92

The petition and the referendum gave the city council the assurances it needed to
allow the project to proceed. The council acted much in the way that Robin Einhorn has
described the elected officials in nineteenth-century Chicago: if property owners wanted
to pledge property-tax increments to pay for the work, the council would not stand in the
way.
93
Certainly the scheme also fit the picture of booster-led development of Los

218
Angeles in the 1920s, but the congenial setting afforded by the council depended
fundamentally on the lack of expenditure from public funds. None of the members
offered opinions on the Mulholland proceedings, but merely voted the necessary
authorizations to proceed. During construction they would also approve the municipal
engineers' requests for accelerated operating procedures. All the votes on Mulholland
Highway carried unanimously.
After the referendum passed, the City Attorney advertised for bids to underwrite
$1 million in bonds and received a single submission, from a consortium of seven banks
and securities brokers.
94
The Council voted to accept the bid, then on advice of the City
Attorney contracted for outside counsel to review the procedures. Henry O'Melveny's
firm got the job for a fee of $2,000 "in the event [the opinion] is favorable and $1,200 in
case said attorneys are unable to give an approving opinion."
95
There was no delay. The
bonds went on sale in January 1924 and yielded a million dollars to build Mulholland
Highway. For the next forty years, until 1963, land owners in the Improvement District
would carry a special increment on their property taxes to reimburse the city for the
principal and interest that the city paid to the bondholders.
96

Merrick and his colleagues eagerly consented to higher taxes because they
expected to pass them on to the people who bought houselots in the hills and in the
adjacent section of the San Fernando Valley. Their fondest dreams, however, were not
fulfilled in their lifetimes. The hilltop highway did not become the spine for main roads
linking the Basin and the Valley. Even while Prince dutifully reported the intention that
Mulholland Highway would serve as a meaningful link in the surface transportation

219
system, he and Reaburn knew that it would not make the crucial connection with
Cahuenga Pass. It would indeed be an uninterrupted artery for twenty-two miles through
the hills, but an isolated one leading nowhere.
Not until the real estate boom of the 1950s would dense settlement extend
throughout the San Fernando Valley. Before World War II, despite the completion of
tract homes in the southern sections of Van Nuys and Lankershim/North Hollywood,
much of the subdivided land on the Valley side of Improvement District Number 22
remained unimproved. During the Depression, the City Planning Commission noted that
to avoid taxes that would be higher on houselots than on undivided parcels, subdividers
filed to have their holdings "reverted to acreage." The planners envisioned a landscape of
small farms in the San Fernando Valley, as previously approved subdivisions were
consolidated back into larger tracts. The largest landholder in the Improvement District,
Girard's Boulevard Land Co., went bankrupt without selling its Valley acreage as
houselots.
97
In the Hollywood Hills, development was similarly spotty. The success of
Hollywoodland was more exception than rule. In Bel Air, sales were only modest during
the 1920s and fell off sharply in the 1930s. By 1947, when Alphonzo Bell died, the
disappointing results had contributed to Bell's insuperable financial predicament.
Similarly, H. J. Whitley's opening of Whitley Terrace, and the completion of several
prototype hillside houses, did not prevent the financial debacle that marked the end of his
long, successful career as a developer. Only after World War II was the attraction of a
house in the hills finally marketed more broadly to a well-to-do clientele.
98

220
The term of the bonds for Mulholland Highway turned out to be prophetic: it
took most of those forty years to fulfill the pecuniary ambitions of the people who first
proposed building it and many of them missed out on the payoff. However, the money
they devoted and the political influence they applied had another, more immediate
impact, by enabling the city engineers to create one of the transformed landscapes that
they relished so deeply.

A Monument to "Our Bill"
The overt association with William Mulholland only came after Merrick's group
formulated its proposal for the highway. A year and a half after the establishment of the
Improvement District, Dewitt Reaburn put forward his version of an appropriate history:
"The idea of constructing a scenic highway along the crest of the Santa Monica
Mountains westward from Cahuenga Pass [sic] originated some ten or fifteen years ago
with Chief Engineer William Mulholland of the City Water Department."
99
Whether that
was true or not, it was certainly not part of Merrick's petition. The only change between
the petition language and the text of the referendum was the insertion of the phrase
"commonly known as Mulholland Highway."
100

The city engineers' verbal identification of the road with the leader of the
Aqueduct project corresponded to the characteristics of the work that they most fervently
wished to reinforce. Both projects had proponents from among the same civic leaders
and real estate speculators; both projects followed a vision of metropolitan growth
stimulated by constructing extensive works of civil engineering; both received

221
overwhelming endorsement in bond-issue referenda that allowed the engineers to
prosecute the work without further concern over funding; and both entailed the
construction of linear-flow systems through inhospitable terrain.
101

In contrast to the contested character of most large road projects, William
Mulholland had acted with extraordinary independence in building the aqueduct. He set
up a structure for administering the project that served as its own government, with
internal departments for accounting, supply, engineering, legal affairs and
construction.
102
Mulholland and his staff also derived satisfaction from the character of
the work. Rearranging the hydrology of California was no small task, but beyond the
enormity of the construction work, living in wilderness camps and withstanding harsh
conditions contributed to the conscious sense of re-engineering nature. Civil engineering
of that magnitude commonly took its practitioners to environments that contrasted with
any notion of urban civility and the aqueduct was a radical example, spanning both the
eastern Sierra and the Mojave Desert. Exhilaration from outdoor life was not diminished
by altering nature with dynamite and caterpillar tractors, as the "natural sublime
intertwined with technological conquest," in David Nyes words.
103

The work was an adventure in the landscape, a camping expedition with a
purpose. The Aqueduct project employed as many as 4,000 workers at a time along the
route, and living in construction camps fostered a hard-edged male comraderie that was
often expressed in terms of drinking and gambling. Many years later, a surveyor
recalled: "Bill Mulholland, the aqueduct's chief engineer, used to say that it was whiskey
that built the aqueduct. Pressed for an enlightening word, Mulholland declared that no

222
man would do the hard, hazard-filled work of driving tunnels or skinning mules through
the canyons, while putting up with blistering heat, biting cold, dust storms and indifferent
food, if whiskey didn't keep him broke."
104
Perhaps Mulholland appreciated the harsh
ethos of the construction camp because he associated it with boldness in the face of
dangerous working conditions, or because the control he could exercise in the camps was
far greater than could be applied over a commuting work force. It is certain that the
veterans of the Aqueduct included construction camps in their conception of subsequent
landscape-altering engineering projects.
105

Completion of the aqueduct was barely a decade in the past when Merrick began
circulating the petition for a roadway in the Santa Monica Mountains. Veterans of the
aqueduct worked throughout the ranks of the city engineers, including two men, A. C.
Hansen and Homer Hamlin, who would go on to lead the department.
106
The engineers
understood what the bond issue represented and set to work to reproduce their aqueduct
experience, free from the irksome necessities of public hearings, court cases, and
appropriation requests to the city council. In February 1923, six months before Merrick
filed the petition and almost a year before the sale of the bonds, surveys and exploratory
excavation had already begun. The Hollywood Foothills Improvement Association hired
on its own account engineer Dewitt Reaburn, who was well known to the city staff from
his service on the Aqueduct. The city would later reimburse the Improvement
Association out of the bond proceeds for the fees paid to Reaburn and the crews he
hired.
107

223
With the active cooperation of city street engineer John Prince, Reaburn
established the basic design of the roadway: maximum grade of six percent, minimum
curve radius of 100 feet, and width of 30 feet.
108
Driving there today, it is hard to
imagine that the engineers worried about the difficulties of negotiating some of the
narrow, steep, and sharply curved sections of the road in an automobile. It seems more
like a pipeline or electrical transmission line right-of-way, fit for the movement of liquids
or current, but perversely troublesome for a human in an automobile. The project's
ironies go beyond the tortuous roadbed. Development in the area indeed required water
mains and providing a pipeline right-of-way might have been an appropriate criterion in
setting the course and shape of the road, but water service had no place in the original
design. Reaburn and Prince did not perform the center-line survey that would have
provided the fundamental data necessary to integrate the road with below-grade utilities.
That survey was underway two years after highway construction was completed.
109
Not
convenient to drive, and not based on utility service, the design of Mulholland Highway
reflected aesthetic and political considerations more than anything else. Insofar as the
pragmatic concerns associated with engineering practice entered the project, they were
directed toward resource utilization: finish as fast as possible.
During this preliminary stage of the work, in 1923, the engineers began
articulating the association with William Mulholland and pressed the city to name the
road in his honor. The scenic character of the new highway also entered the discourse, at
the same time that the engineers specifically ruled out the immediate possibility that the
road would fill any role in the larger transportation network. Prince and Reaburn noted

224
that Mulholland Highway would not connect with anything at its eastern terminus near
Cahuenga Pass. It ended at an elevation high above the pass, requiring a bridge or
causeway to bring it to level grade, which the bond issue could not pay for. (This bridge
for Mulholland Highway was tacked onto the 1925 viaduct bond issue, but the engineers
spent the money on other projects.)
110
Scenic enjoyment was also construed quite
narrowly. When the Bridle Path Association asked that the design allow for horseback
riding along the side of the road, the City Council filed the request with no action, on the
advice of the engineering department.
111
Mulholland Highway was not to be a
transportation link but neither was it to be a sylvan setting for active recreation. Its
beauty would be appreciated in the making of it, or perhaps through a windshield, or not
at all.
Reaburn and Prince applied the Aqueduct model in highly practical terms when
they recommended that the city set up the Mulholland Highway Department as part of the
city engineering office. Reaburn would supervise the work for an annual salary of
$10,000 from the city. When the engineers presented this plan to the City Council in
December 1923, they justified the extraordinary set-up with a line of reasoning not
previously applied toward the project: "Owing to the fact that the supply of water from
the Municipal System to a large section of the territory in the western part of the city,
particularly that part known as Laurel Canyon Section, is dependent on the construction
of said highway; and, having in view the necessity of such a supply of water, both for
domestic purposes and for the purpose of protection from fire, it appears to this Board
that the earliest possible construction of said highway is of great public importance."
112

225
The city engineering establishment yearned to build the road but could not claim any
transportation necessity and could not justify a special operating department on the basis
of providing a scenic amenity or the desire to enrich some subdividers. They understood
the volatility of the chaparral environment, however, and, presciently, fastened on that as
the rationale for extraordinary operating procedures.
113

The council not only consented to set up the department under Reaburn, but also
agreed to lend it $25,000 from reserve funds in order to start heavy construction before
the city received the bond proceeds. Two days later Reaburn submitted his staffing plan,
a total of 411 people. Besides 200 laborers and fifty skilled workers of unspecified
trades, he asked for a full complement of steam-shovel operators, mechanics,
blacksmiths, drivers, teamsters, surveying crews, clerks, and a supervisory staff of
assistant engineers, foremen, and shift bosses. Lest heroic engineering plans chafe under
the reins of bureaucracy, Reaburn made a further request: "In order to get this work
started at the earliest possible date, and to push it through to completion within the
prescribed period of one year, it is very important that all of these employees be exempt
from Civil Service rules." The council approved unanimously.
114

Completing the picture of a small-scale revival of the aqueduct project, over the
next month Reaburn and the city engineering staff submitted plans for a series of
construction camps. It was true that the project area was generally inaccessible to
vehicles, and that getting crews to and from the work sites would consume time and
resources better spent on blasting rock and bulldozing soil. However, one of the camps
stood on the grounds of the Hollywood Country Club, a genteel and easily accessible

226
location. The engineers' idea of heroic engineering included construction camps, whether
or not they were required by the conditions of the work.
115

Reaburn did not hesitate to ask, nor the council to grant, exemption from civil
service rules for the frequent adjustments in staffing.
116
The project routinely benefited
as well from waiver of the bidding provisions that governed city purchases, by claiming
that the project fell "under the emergency provisions of the city charter". The project
staff negotiated with vendors then received ratification from the council for rental of
construction equipment and purchase of explosives and vehicles. These were no small
expenditures; the blasting-powder order filled five rail cars.
117

Most of the massive earth-moving was completed by April 1924, when monthly
expenditures peaked at $149,000. For every square foot of roadway, the crews had to
scrape away or otherwise reconfigure some nine cubic feet of soil. By July much of the
skilled work was in place, notably a concrete retaining wall along a curving section of
road near the eastern terminus. After that, the outlays ran between $50,000 and $70,000
per month, until December. With the opening ceremonies just two weeks away,
completion of the gravel surface required an extra fifty dump trucks working around the
clock.
118

They did finish on time, and for the first three months of 1925 the city assigned
traffic checkers to measure the use of the new highway. They counted 750 cars a day,
less than the streets in the built-up areas saw in an hour, and about five percent of the
traffic that plied an outlying highway such as Long Beach Boulevard.
119
The sparse use
did not disappoint the city engineers, who never intended Mulholland Highway to carry

227

Figure 6: Map showing the route of the parade marking the opening of Mulholland Highway, 1924. Note that the parade
stopped at Laurel Canyon, rather than having the cars approach too close to Cahuenga Pass, where the new highway ended
abruptly at a cliff. Source: Mulholland Highway Celebration, 1924 (Los Angeles: Automobile Club of Southern
California, 1924). Used with permission; all rights reserved.

228
traffic in any great capacity. After all, its eastern terminus dead-ended on a cliff. Its
importance to them sprang from the chance to indulge their passion for complementing
nature with construction. Generations of motorists who have enjoyed the view from
Mulholland would testify to the engineers' success, although the turnouts that enable safe
contemplation of the vistas were not part of the original design of the road.
120

The engineers also viewed the project as an opportunity to install a construction
regime that could approximate the autonomy of the Aqueduct enterprise. It succeeded in
that goal too, at least when designated tax increments provided a modicum of funding.
Six months after the project ended, Reaburn and the Mulholland Highway Department
were still in business, building Beverly Boulevard.
121
The Mulholland Highway
Department later worked on the Cahuenga Pass road, and several smaller projects, until
the city auditors caught on to the arrangement. In August 1928, the staff of the council's
Personnel and Efficiency Committee called for disbanding the Mulholland Highway
Department, and the council had no choice but to accede.
122

At that particular moment, association with William Mulholland had turned into a
liability, which might also have been connected with the department's termination. In
March 1928, a dam of his design in Ventura County had failed, causing hundreds of
deaths and irrevocably staining his reputation. No longer could the aura of the Aqueduct
builder contribute to the administrative objectives of the city engineers.
123

229
Fire in the Hills
The connection between roadbuilding and the provision of water mains for fire
suppression had been commonplace in municipal engineering since the 1880s, and the
Los Angeles city engineering office had a special committee to coordinate road
construction with installation of sewer and water service.
124
Reaburn clearly understood
the environmental implications of planting settlement in the hills and, when submitting
his construction plan in late 1923, seized the fire hazard as a means of winning
emergency status that would loosen the administrative requirements for the project. He
did not mention then that the water mains would come later, and at considerable
additional cost.
The real estate speculators who petitioned for the highway must have been aware
of the fires that periodically consumed the brush in the hill sections. As suggested above,
this condition might have accounted in part for the delay in exploiting the hills, and for
the particular attention given to promotion and image-building to counter that negative
reputation by establishing fashionable cachet for the area. If such observations are
necessarily speculative, it is nonetheless certain that the developers, like Reaburn,
expressed abundant awareness and concern once construction was underway.
In July 1924, when the last rain had fallen months earlier and the summer sun
parched the chaparral into so much dry kindling, Merrick alerted the City Council to the
urgent matter of "prevention of fires in the hills during this most hazardous season." The
project itself had elevated the problem by depositing "cut brush along the Mulholland
Highway." Merrick did not confine his apprehension to the vicinity of the road

230
construction but also asked for help in "cutting new fire breaks in the hills." He
recommended assigning convicts from the city jail, which the council agreed to do.
125

The fire breaks did not help at all when fire raged through the mountains in
September. On October 2 the Board of Public Works reported that "A very serious fire
has just been extinguished after the most strenuous efforts on the part of the fire
department and the employees of the Board in the Mulholland Highway [Department]."
The Fire Department asked the council for $20,000 to establish two new fire companies
along Mulholland Highway and an additional $31,000 for surveys and construction to lay
temporary water mains, install communication lines, and cut more fire breaks. "I believe
that the late experience with fire in these mountains," wrote the Fire Department's chief
engineer, "will be sufficient argument for the establishment of these companies without
any further statement from me."
126

The Fire Department's urgent request reflected the recognition of a new situation.
Brush fires in the hills did not concern them when the area was uninhabited, but the
highway was intended to stimulate development. The fires also had the paradoxical
effect of accelerating the urbanization of the region. Before the embers had cooled, the
investors who owned the land in Benedict Canyon donated a right-of-way through their
property: "In order to provide that the City of Los Angeles may lay a water pipeline from
Mulholland [Highway] to the territory within Benedict Canyon and south of same, [we]
have provided for a road which will extend from the end of the present road in Benedict
Canyon to Mulholland." They had not intended to open the road for "some years," but
desired the "benefit of protection," and even offered to pay half the cost.
127

231
Mudslides also afflicted the hill regions, particularly after fires had cleared the
slopes of the vegetation that helped to retain the soil. Two years after the highway
opened, in December 1926, a flood obliterated seventeen of its twenty-two miles. Part of
the problem was that Reaburn had stinted on drains to conduct runoff under the roadway.
Silt had clogged the minimal drains that did exist, forcing mud and debris to cascade over
the road, where much of it remained when an inspection team from the city engineering
department was finally able to survey the damage. On the City Engineer's
recommendation, the council appropriated money for repair from the city's share of
motor-vehicle registration fees. The remaining money from the bond funds was
earmarked for the center-line survey so that water mains could be installed along the
route.
128

The city and the landowners struggled with the issues of fire and mudslides
through the rest of the 1920s. The engineering department estimated the water-main
installation at $2.5 million and wanted to assess the property owners for the cost.
129

Opposing the assessment, the Mulholland Highway Committee of the Ventura Boulevard
Chamber of Commerce (which had Merrick on its board) proposed instead "that the
closing of the Highway will minimize the fire hazard in this hill area. This is the attitude
of the Los Angeles Fire Department." They asked the city to gate the highway and
supply keys to those "certain property owners who find it necessary to use the highway
occasionally."
130
John Shaw, who had become the head of the city engineering
department, countered that the entire project would be lost if it were not maintained as a
public right-of-way: Whenever heavy rainfalls occur it is necessary to spend several

232
thousand dollars to make it passable, and I do not believe that the city would be justified
in closing the road and still keep it in passable repair. If this road is not kept in a certain
degree of repair, much of it will be lost, and I do not think that it would be a good thing
to close Mulholland Highway.
131
In this beguiling statement Shaw proposed to save the
property owners "several thousand dollars" in repairs by keeping the road open as a city-
owned right-of-way. The property owners sought to avoid a $2.5 million assessment by
closing the road. Despite the apparent mismatch in the arguments, Shaw's
recommendation prevailed and the highway remained open.
While the different agendas of the property owners and the city engineers had
reinforced each other during the initial construction, they did not provide the basis for
any long-term alliance. In 1929, the Board of Public Works proposed paving Mulholland
Highway with concrete in order to facilitate the bulldozing of debris off the road after
mudslides. The property owners saw the need for the work but balked at pledging more
tax increments to be spent at the discretion of the city engineers. They mustered the
votes to defeat the ordinance and decided to contract for the paving themselves.
132

Mulholland Highway and the events surrounding it demonstrate that the provision
of automotive infrastructure in Los Angeles always grappled with a range of views
contingent on localized and temporal circumstances, and could reflect aesthetic,
emotional, or political considerations that had nothing to do with the nominal purpose of
building a road. It was possible, even probable, that people could like their automobiles
but not approve the allocation of resources to build highways. It was possible, too, that

233
major road projects could go forward without any basis in transportation efficiency and
without widespread public support.
In Mulholland Highway, the engineers exploited the possibilities for action that
resided in these tensions. They built a road that connected to nothing, that was not part of
the comprehensive strategy of the Major Traffic Street Plan, and that spent an amount
equal to twenty percent of the bond funding for that much-heralded plan. It did not
enrich the promoters who funded it, nor did it fulfill the engineer's hope for a long-term
method to circumvent citizens' ability to impede ambitious road projects. Mulholland
Highway did not result from rational, comprehensive planning, but from a fragmentary
process, a collection of goals representing a wider array of interests than have been
recognized. Chief among these unacknowledged interests are the city engineers, whose
goals were clearly separate from the speculators' even though at times congruent with
them. The case of Mulholland Highway and the events surrounding it suggest that the
city's transportation system resulted not from conspiracy and not from consensus, but
from temporary convergences of diverse and sometimes impractical agendas.

Engineers in the City
In their quest for administrative autonomy and control over the construction of
roads and highways, the city engineers competed with other agencies and well-organized
private interests such as the Traffic Commission. After those other efforts collapsed or
withdrew from the arena of street construction, the engineers still had to grapple with
individuals and groups of citizens privileged by the property-owner autonomy

234
institutionalized in California law. The engineers honed their ability to overcome
procedural opposition, established a role as brokers between public authority and private
interests, and became skilled at capturing or diverting resources from every possible
source of public and private financing.
The office of the city engineer became a formidable agency based on technical
prowess and mastery of the laws and regulations governing public improvements. In
1927, when the California legislature made a portion of the proceeds from the state
gasoline tax available to municipal governments, the city engineers immediately
incorporated the new funding source into their brokers role and expanded their ability to
construct broad-scaled highway schemes, such as North Figueroa Street and Ramona
Boulevard. The gas tax also launched the state Division of Highways into prominence as
an agent of landscape transformation. Just when the city engineers emerged from the
institutional confusion spawned by Progressive reform to become the citys strongest
voice in street and highway construction, the state highway department began to impinge
on their hard-won prerogatives. That encounter would provide the contours of the next
era of transportation policy, and of the streets and highways in Los Angeles.

235
NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1913-14, 17-18.

2
CM, 115:746-47, November 5, 1919.

3
In 1927, for instance, the Pacific Electric contributed part of the construction cost for street
improvements associated with new grade separations on Downey Road, Pico Boulevard, and San Vicente
Boulevard; City Engineer, Annual Report, 1926-27, 81.

4
M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1983), 118.

5
Letter from Gordon Whitnall to City Council, June 26, 1928, Council File #6017, City Archives.

6
Letter from John Shaw, City Engineer, to City Council, City Planning Committee, September 20, 1928,
Council File #6017, City Archives.

7
Letter from City Clerk to City Engineer and City Planning Commission, October 10, 1928, Council File
#6017, City Archives.

8
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1925-26, 1-2; Edwin O. Palmer, History of Hollywood, vol. 1
(Hollywood: Cawston, 1937), 224; Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1925.

9.
John Brinckerhoff Jackson described this functionalist aesthetic on the part of engineers in "A Puritan
Looks at Scenery," in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984),
57-64. In an assessment of engineering similar to Jackson's, Eugene S. Ferguson agreed with a statement
made in 1828 by a British engineer, who emphasized that a fundamental sense of dynamism ("directing the
great sources of power in nature") characterized engineering practice more fundamentally than any
association with certain types of objects or structures; see Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind's Eye
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 1.
10
David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 76, 86-87, 126.

11
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1923-24, 23.

12
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1922-23, 30.

13
Amy E. Slaton, Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900-1930
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 187.

14
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1912-13, 29.

15
Burton L. Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal Organization and Municipal Practice in the City of Los
Angeles (Los Angeles: Parker, Stone & Baird, 1933), 111-13, 120, 132; Annual Report of the City
Engineer, 1912-13, 21; 1919-20, 1; and 1921-22, 9.

16
Slaton, Reinforced Concrete, 4.

17
Amy Slaton, As Near as Practicable: Precision, Ambiguity, and Industrial Quality Control,
Technology and Culture 42 (January 2001): 51-80, quoted words on 72, 78.

236

18
Slaton, Reinforced Concrete, 56-57.

19
Slaton, As Near as Practicable, 80.

20
By mid-1923, virtually no construction had occurred, but the easements had been put in place by this
method for extensive stretches of the east-west arteries between central Los Angeles and the ocean,
including Santa Monica, Beverly, Pico, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, National, and Exposition
boulevards, as well as the western extension of Wilshire Boulevard, beyond the contested terrain of the
Archway proposal; see City Engineer, Annual Report, 1922-23, 48.

21
Major Traffic Street Plan, 28, 43.

22
This effort to illuminate the work of the city engineers complements prior efforts to interpret the role of
engineering in urban society. Bruce Seely's research on the Bureau of Public Roads has shown how federal
engineers established expertise as a political value and formulated transportation policy out of the public
view. This study extends those observations to the municipal setting, where the bulk of highway
construction occurred, and expands the view of engineers as political actors. Jameson Doig and Daivid
Billington explained how engineers concerned with a single transportation project could mediate among
political and economic interests to serve their own ends; by examining place-construction episodes that
proceeded simultaneously, I mean to demonstrate not only the resourcefulness of these technical
professionals juggling multiple responsibilities, but also the cumulative effects of their site-specific tactics.
Doig and Billington probe deeply within tight geographical limits, thus converging with Bruce Sinclair's
call for the exploration of localism as a factor in twentieth-century engineering. This chapter takes up that
challenge, as well as Sinclair's proposition that emotionalism demands further inquiry as a factor in
engineering practice. Bruce Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Jameson W. Doig and David P. Billington, "Amman's First
Bridge: A Study in Engineering, Politics and Entrepreneurial Behavior," Technology and Culture 35
(1994): 537-70; Bruce Sinclair, "Local History and National Culture: Notions on Eningeering
Professionalism in America," in The Engineer in America: A Historical Anthology from Technology and
Culture, ed. Terry S. Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicsago Press, 1991), 249-59.

23
From north to south, the bridges are: Fletcher Drive (1927), Glendale/Hyperion (1929), North Spring
Street (1929), Macy Street (1926, now Cesar Chavez Boulevard); First Street (1929), Fourth Street (1930),
Sixth Street (1932), Seventh Street (1927), Ninth Street (1925, now Olympic Boulevard), and Washington
Boulevard (1931). The full roster of Los Angeles River bridges also includes the North Broadway Bridge,
erected by the city in 1911, and the Main Street Bridge, erected by the Pacific Electric in 1910. The trolley
company also built a bridge at Seventh Street in 1910, which serves as the substructure for the 1927 bridge
at that location.

24
Portia Lee, Andrew Johnston, and Elizabeth Watson, Los Angeles River Bridges Recording Project,
Historic American Engineering Record Recording Project No. CA-271, 2000, U. S. National Park Service,
copy courtesy of Eric Delony and Portia Lee.

25
Lee at al., Los Angeles River Bridges; Stephen D. Mikesell, Historic Highway Bridges of California
(Sacramento: California Department of Transportation, 1990), 98-108; Stephen D. Mikesell, The Los
Angeles River Bridges: A Study in the Bridge as a Civic Monument, Southern California Quarterly 68
(Winter 1986): 365-86.

26
Board of Public Utilities and Transportation, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Annual Reports, 1926-1928,
typescript, n.p.

237

27
Letter from Harry Stafford, City Engineer, to City Council, July 7, 1901, Box 304-C, City Archives;
CM, 93:123-24, July 28, 1913 (summary of repairs to Macy Street Bridge) and 93:169, August 5, 1913
(summary of repairs to First Street Bridge).

28
Los Angeles Times, November 7, 1905. This article actually named the Southern Pacific as the railroad
that the developers negotiated with, but that was not technically correct. There is an immense amount of
confusion over the correct names for the railroad companies that operated on the east bank of the river in
early 20
th
-century Los Angeles. I doubt that I will sort it all out, but I will use consistent nomenclature that
is only a little bit arbitrary. The Southern Pacific, the first of the intercontinental railroads in Los Angeles,
had its tracks and many of its yard facilities on the east side of the river, especially in the vicinity of
downtown. The Union Pacific Railroad, which ran between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, had a track-
sharing agreement with the Southern Pacific. The Union Pacific acquired the Southern Pacific in 1901, but
divested it in 1913 following an anti-trust case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court; see United States of
America v. Union Pacific Railroad, 226 U.S. 61 (1912). The Union Pacific retained much of the track
facilities and real estate on the east side of the river. For that reason, I will use the Union Pacific in
referring to railroad property in this vicinity, regardless of the uage in the contemporary sources, which
seem to be wrong as least as often as they are right, notably in connection with the acquisition and
divestiture. I will use Southern Pacific only in reference to specific legal agreements that use that name in
the determination of cost shares by rail operating companies. Fortunately, the situation on the west bank is
more straightforward, with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe constituting the railroad presence (except
north of downtown, but that is another story).

29
Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1906.

30
Los Angeles Times, August 17, 1908.

31
Lee at al., Los Angeles River Bridges, 14; Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1911.

32
Los Angeles Times, September 11, 1911; Report of the Municipal Art Commission for the City of Los
Angeles (Los Angeles: W. J. Porter, 1909).

33
Lee at al., Los Angeles River Bridges, 14-15 (quotation); Mikesell, Los Angeles River Bridges, 375-
76.

34
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1913-14, 8.

35
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1916-17, 10.

36
CM, 113:707, April 14, 1919. Also see CM, 118:210-11, May 28, 1920, in which the engineers cited
the same precedent in an unsuccessful attempt to win council authorization to put together a deal to replace
the bridge at First Street.

37
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1921-22, 25-27.

38
After the flood of 1914, the city engineer warned the council that the main structural connections on the
First Street Bridge were in danger of imminent failure and requested money for major reconstruction, but
the council only provided $2,000 for patching; CM, 101:363, July 30, 1915.

39
Richard Sachse, Proposed Railroad Grade Crossings Elimination and New Passenger and Freight
Terminals for Los Angeles, The Architect and Engineer of California 62 (September 1920): 46-54, quoted

238

words on 51. Sachse was the cheif engineer of the Railroad Commission. The data on vehicle movements
were collected in 1918.

40
Marshall Stimson, The Battle for a Union Station at Los Angeles, Southern California Quarterly 21
(June-September 1939): 37-44. The wreck killed five people and injured dozens.

41
Sachse, Grade Crossings Elimination, 47. On the Municipal League, see Tom Sitton, John Randolph
Haynes: California Progressive (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 23.

42
Mikesell, Los Angeles River Bridges, 370.

43
Stimson, Union Station, 41; Mikesell, Los Angeles River Bridges, 371.

44
CM, 122:458, April 28, 1921; the Railroad Commissions order was issued on April 26. Also see Los
Angeles Times, April 23, 1921 and May 21, 1921; Board of Public Utilities, Annual Report, 1919-20, 46.

45
Los Angeles Times, June 23, 1921.

46
Mikesell, Los Angeles River Bridges, 376-78.

47
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1923-24, 33; Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1923. The six bridges in the
1923 bond were at Macy, First, Fourth, Seventh and Ninth streets.

48
Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1923; May 11, 1923 (quotations); June 3, 1923; Automobile Club of
Southern California, Digest of Board Minutes, 4:132, May 17, 1923.

49
Southwest Builder and Contractor 63 (September 19, 1924): 46.

50
Merrill Butler, The City of Los Angeles Buildng Million Dollar Bridges, Pacific Municipalities 43
(June 1929): 256-57; Mikesell, Los Angeles River Bridges, 380-81.

51
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1922-23, 30.

52
J. D. Ransom Corporation advertisement in Los Angeles Herald, February 11, 1928.

53
Municipal Art Commission, Annual Reports [for the years] 1921-1929, 54-67.

54
Mikesell, Los Angeles River Bridges, 383-84, also notes that the decoration at Washington Boulevard
paid homage to the [viaduct] program.

55
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1924-25, 22.

56
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1926-27, 78.

57
Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1926.

58
CM, 180:658, May 19, 1927.

59
In the river bridges, Merrill Butler and his staff pioneered the application of the three-hinged arch in
reinforced concrete. Intended to allow the bridge to withstand shrinkage and settlement, they have since

239

been recognized as weak spots in the event of an earthquake. Lee at al., Los Angeles River Bridges,
Appendix (measured drawings), n.p.

60
Greg Hise, "'Nature's Workshop': Industry and Urban Expansion in Southern California, 1900-1950,"
Journal of Historical Geography 24 (January 2001): 74-92, esp. 82-84; City Engineer, Annual Report,
1921-22, 39.

61
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1922-23, 47-48.

62
Report of Public Works Committee of the City Council, Council Minutes, 130:69-70, July 28, 1922;
letter from Union Pacific Improvement Club to City Council, Council Minutes, 130:225-26, August 7,
1922.

63
Council Minutes, 130:78, July 21, 1922; 130:179-80, August 2, 1922; 130:222, August 7, 1922;
130:294 (August 10, 1922); 130:350-52 (August 14, 1922); 134:564-67 (March 12, 1923); 134:590-95
(March 14, 1923); 689 (March 16, 1923); 734 (March 19, 1923); 137:78-87 (June 15, 1923); 137:90-159
(June 15, 1923); 137:179-210 (June 18, 1923).

64
Council Minutes, 137:78, June 15, 1923.

65
Council Minutes, 137:85, June 15, 1923.

66
Council Minutes, 137:111, June 15, 1923.

67
Council Minutes, 130:207-09, June 18, 1923.

68
Quotation from "Viola Bogue et al. v. the City of Los Angeles," in Report of Cases Determined by the
Supreme Court of the State of California, vol. 198 (San Francisco: Bancroft-Whiting Co., 1926), 327-28;
also see City Engineer, Annual Report, 1924-25, 82; 1925-26, 74.

69
Council Minutes, 167:549-52, April 23, 1926, and 167:804-06, May 4, 1926 (quotation).

70
Report of city engineer to city council, May 20, 1929, Council File #4434, City Archives; City
Engineer, Annual Report, 1926-27, 95-96.

71
The name of the road was changed from Mulholland Highway to Mulholland Drive in 1939; CM,
286:21 (1939) and 286:600 (1939).
72
"Progress of Work on Mulholland Highway Reviewed in Report of City Engineer," Southwest Builder
and Contractor, August 1, 1924, 7.

73
Joseph Tanner, managing director, Ventura Boulevard Chamber of Commerce, to Los Angeles City
Council, May 18, 1927, CF #3776, City Archives.

74
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1922-23, 49.

75
Nye, American Technological Sublime, n. 10 above.
76
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1923-24, 23.

240

77
Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 21-40; Bruce Radde, The Merritt Parkway (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993).
78
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1923-24, 58.
79
Abraham Hoffman, Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Water Controversy
(College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1981), 157-170, quotation on 161; Catherine
Mulholland, The Owensmouth Baby: The Making of a San Fernando Valley Town (Northridge, CA: Santa
Susana Press, 1987), 73, 81, 89, 96, 104, 132; W. W. Robinson, History of the San Fernando Valley (Los
Angeles, 1961), 37-40.
80
See petition for Municipal Improvement District No. 22, Council File 4536 (1923). Section
nomenclature described multi-acre parcels whereas a street address or lot number usually identified a
property of 5,000 square feet, the most common lot size in Los Angeles. "R 16 W Sec 25," meaning Range
16 West Section 25, is a typical section designation from this petition. The range designation itself dates
from the initial Public Land Survey of California under United States jurisdiction, which was mandated by
Congress in 1853. For southern California, the surveyor general for the state laid out a grid of squares, six
miles on a side, from the datum of Mount San Bernardino. East-west divisions were called "ranges" and
north-south divisions "townships." Each square was in turn divided into 36 sections. Thus at the time of
the Mulholland petition, the legal description for much of the San Fernando Valley still reflected the Public
Land Survey undertaken in the 1850s; the petition lacked "township" designation because the entire area
fell into one north-south unit but extended across three east-west "range" units. See W. W. Robinson, Land
in California: The Story of Mission Lands, Ranchos, Squatters, Mining Claims, Railroad Grants, Land
Scrip, Homesteads (1948; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), esp. 208-11.
81
The contemporary documents use Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains more or less
interchangeably to describe this feature that divides the Basin from the Valley. In current usage, the
Sepulveda Pass generally separates the Hollywood Hills to the east and the Santa Monica Mountains to the
west.
82
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1923-24, 58.
83
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1922-23, 53.
84
Edwin O. Palmer, History of Hollywood, vol. 1 (Hollywood: Cawston, 1937), 223.
85
John O. Pohlmann, "Alphonzo E. Bell: A Biography, Part II," Southern California Quarterly 46
(December 1964): 325-26; Joseph K. Horton, A Brief History of Bel Air (Los Angeles: The Bel-Air
Association, 1982).
86
Improvement District No. 22 petition; City Engineer, Annual Report, 1923-24, 20.
87
Letter from City Engineer to City Council, January 23, 1928, Council File 3776 (1927); Improvement
District No. 22 petition.
88
Improvement District No. 22 petition; City Engineer, Annual Report, 1922-23, 48.
89
Except for the communications with the City Council, the records of the Hollywood Foothills
Improvement Association were privately held, probably by Merrick, and have not been found to survive in
any repository. The membership of the group has been reconstructed to the extent possible from various

241

correspondence and transactions in the city records: Easement deeds transmitted to city, 18 March 1924, in
Council Minutes, 143:597-98 (1924); petition re Benedict Canyon, Council Minutes, 149:444 (1924) and
Council File #6378 (1924); petition re fire breaks, 26 July 1924, in Council Minutes, 47:463 (1924) and
Council File, 4908 (1924); petition to reduce right-of-way, December 11, 1929, in Council Minutes,
212:510 (1929). The Improvement District No. 22 petition gives the names of 431 property owners, but the
Improvement Association was a smaller, more select group. Occupations and affiliations of participants
from Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles, 1920-30).
90
Council Minutes, 138:602 (1923).
91
Council Minutes, 138:647 (1923). The petition was filed on August 17 and the City Clerk validated it
on August 22.
92
Council Minutes, 139:449 (1923), 139:647-48 (1923). Only property owners in the Improvement
District voted in the referendum.
93
Robin Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), 14-19.

94
Council Minutes, 140:310-11 (1923), 140:404-05 (1923), 140:507-08 (1923), 140:548 (1923), and City
Clerk report in Council File 6096 (1923).
95
Council Minutes, 140:242-43 (1923), 140:559 (1923).
96
Ordinance for bond issue in Report of City Attorney, Council File #218 (1924) and Council Minutes,
142:13 (1924).
97
City Planning Commissioners, Annual Report, 1932-33, 18; interview with Milton Breivogel, principal
planner for City of Los Angeles (retired), transcript in Department of Special Collections, UCLA, interview
#339, 88.
98
Pohlmann, "Alphonzo E. Bell," (n. 40 above); Mulholland, Owensmouth Baby (n. 34 above), 94-100;
Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1928; "Ecology II: Foothills," in Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The
Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1990), 95-109.
99
Dewitt L. Reaburn, "Report on Mulholland Highway," in City Engineer, Annual Report, 1923-24, 20.
100
Council Minutes, 138:647 (1923).
101
The Owens Valley Aqueduct was certainly not without controversies, but those centered on the
contention between the region from which the water came and the one that appropriated it, and on the
question of unethical behavior on the part of J. B. Lippincott during the securing of the Owens Valley water
rights. Among the citizens who approved the Aqueduct bond issues by more than 10-1 margins, and the
city employees and elected officials responsible for the work, the Aqueduct benefited from overwhelming
support. See Hoffman, Vision or Villainy, 91-99, 141-45.
102
"Board of Water Commissioners," and "Board of Water and Power Commissioners," s.v., in Burton L.
Hunter, Evolution of Municipal Organization and Administrative Practice in the City of Los Angeles (Los
Angeles: Parker, Stone and Baird, 1933); Hoffman, Vision or Villainy, 35-46, 146-47.

242

103
Nye, Technological Sublime, 76.
104
Frederick C. Cross, "My Days on the Jawbone," Westways, May 1968, 3-8, quotation on 6-7. The
Jawbone was one of the most onerous stretches of the work, in Kern County north of the town of Mojave.
105
Hoffman, Vision or Villainy, 150-51; Los Angeles Board of Public Service Commissioners, Complete
Report on Construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct (Los Angeles: by the commission, 1916), 256; Remi
Nadeau, The Water Seekers (New York: Doubleday, 1950), 41-43.
106
Hoffman, Vision or Villainy, 250.
107
Letter from Hollywood Foothills Improvement Association to City Council, in Council File, 4908
(1924); the Improvement Association also gave Reaburn a seat on its board. Reaburn described his
Aqueduct experience in testimony to the City Council, December 20, 1923, Council Minutes, 141:408-09
(1923). Reaburn was a principal in the consulting engineering firm of Reaburn and Bowen; Los Angeles
City Directory (Los Angeles, 1924), 1868. Reimbursement to Improvement Association in Council
Minutes, 147:252 and 147:356-57 (1924); the amount of reimbursement was $17,596.
108
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1922-23, 48; 1923-24, 20-21.
109
Council Minutes, 175:387-88 (1926).
110
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1923-24, 20-21; Council Minutes, 164:214-16 (1926).
111
Council Minutes, 141:167 (1923). The minutes do not record any reason for rejecting the request, but I
infer that it was related to cost because the bridle path would have required widening the roadbed.
112
Report of Board of Public Works, December 5, 1923, in Council Minutes, 141:55-56 (1923).
113
In the annual reports of the City Engineer from 1913 through 1934, Mulholland Highway is the only
case in which a project-specific operating department was set up within the engineering office.
114
Report of Board of Public Works, December 5, 1923, in Council Minutes, 141:55-56 (1923); Report of
Dewitt Reaburn to the Board of Public Works (quotation), submitted to City Council on December 7, 1923,
Council Minutes, 141:141-42 (1923).
115
Council Minutes, 141:408-09 (1923), quotation; and 142:311 (1924); Hollywood Country Club in City
Engineer, Annual Report, 1923-24, 21.
116
Council Minutes, 141:681, 142:5, 143:193-94, 143:323, 144:150, 144:584, 144:783, 146:226, 146:353,
146:506 (1924).
117
Quotation in Council Minutes, 141:157-58 (1923); equipment rental in Council Minutes, 149:521
(1924); vehicle purchase in Council Minutes, 141:586 (1923); blasting powder in Council Minutes, 147:54-
55 (1924).
118
Monthly expenditures in Council Minutes, 144:260 (1924), 149:522 (1924), 150:543 (1924), 151:326
(1924); retaining wall in Council Minutes, 147:741 (1924); dump trucks in Council Minutes, 151:610
(1924). Excavation statistics in Dewitt Reaburn, Report to the Board of Public Works on the Mulholland

243

Highway Department, 24 June 1925, Council File 4003 (1925). Reaburn reported an aggregate excavation
figure of 70,000 cubic yards per mile; unit calculations by the author.
119
Traffic-count comparisons from Major Traffic Street Plan, 19.
120
Council Minutes, 286:21 (1939) and 286:600 (1939).
121
Dewitt Reaburn, Report to the Board of Public Works on the Mulholland Highway Department, June
24, 1925, Council File #4003 (1925).
122
Council Minutes, 209:256 (1928).
123
Doyce B. Nunis, ed., The St. Francis Dam Disaster Revisited (Ventura, CA: Ventura County Museum,
1995); Charles F. Outland, Man-made Disaster: The Story of St. Francis Dam (Glendale, CA: A. H.
Clark, 1977).
124
Improved roads were a prerequisite for the installation of underground systems because the level
pavement provided the necessary baseline for setting vertical placement. See McShane, Asphalt Path, 31,
66-67; City Engineer, Annual Report, 1925-26, 7.
125
Letter from Harry Merrick to City Council, July 26, 1924, and instruction to City Attorney to draft
ordinance for convict labor, July 30, 1924, both in Council File #4908 (1924); Council Minutes, 147:463
(1924), 147:553 (1924). Fire breaks are swaths cleared of all brush and vegetation that, in theory, arrest the
spread of fire.
126
Report of Board of Public Works (first quotation) and letter from R. J. Scott, Chief Engineer, LAFD
(second quotation), both to City Council on 2 October 1924, Council File #6302 (1924); Council Minutes,
149:368 (1924), 149:370 (1924), 149:583 (1924).
127
Letter from Thomas Ince, Sid Graumann and Joseph Schenck to City Council, 6 October 1924, Council
File #6378 (1924); Council Minutes, 149:444 (1924). Mike Davis, "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn," in
Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books,
1998), 93-147, uses the city's history of fire suppression as an incisive case study to analyze the capture of
public resources for the benefit of elite residential districts.
128
Council Minutes, 175:360 (1926), quotation; and 175:387-88 (1926).
129
Letter from the Mulholland Highway Committee of the Ventura Boulevard and Hollywood Chambers
of Commerce, reported to City Council on November 3, 1926, in Council Minutes, 174:201 (1926). This
organization succeeded the Hollywood Foothills Improvement Association.
130
Letter, May 18, 1927, Council File #3776 (1927).
131
Report of Shaw to City Council, January 23, 1928, Council File #3776 (1927).
132
Council Minutes, 212:543 (1929), 218:584 (1930), 224:6 (1931); Los Angeles Examiner, December 2,
1930.

244
CHAPTER FIVE

TRUNK LINES: THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA AND ROADBUILDING IN LOS
ANGELES

Major highways are by definition multi-jurisdictional: they traverse municipal
and state boundaries. Even while the city engineers in Los Angeles labored to build
roads within the municipal boundaries, they were keenly aware of the need to connect
with larger road networks and to enlist the support of neighboring cities and the county
government for such projects as Wilshire and Olympic boulevards and Figueroa Street.
1

Because the freeways loom so significantly in any discussion of transportation in Los
Angeles, these discussions tend to point toward the role of state highway builders and
federal funding under the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, as will this one. However, I
also mean to demonstrate how the earliest encounters between local and state highway
builders, in the 1920s, played a determining if underappreciated role in those subsequent
events.
Historians and planning scholars have tended to characterize the multi-
jurisdictional nature of road construction according to the concepts of highway
federalism and burden-shifting. Highway federalism informs Owen Gutfreunds work
on roadbuilding and urban decentralization and Bruce Seelys study of the federal Bureau
of Public Roads.
2
They see the freeways as the result of a planning vision and a certain
kind of professionalism that flowed from federal agencies into state agencies. Though
deftly analyzing the role of federal officials, these works cannot do justice to the

245
municipally employed engineers whose work was shaped by a different set of concerns.
In Los Angeles at least, city engineers played a determining role in the location, design,
structure of authority, and funding strategies for the formative stage of freeway
development. In the definitive study of the federal Interstate Highway Act of 1956, Mark
Rose described the Act as federal funding for localistic and largely impermeable
commercial and professional subcultures.
3
But those subcultures are not impermeable to
site-specific analysis. Locally based studies can enlarge the idea of highway federalism
by including the other end of the federalist relationship, the places outside the Beltway, in
keeping with the original meaning of federalism as the sharing of power among the
national government, the states, and local jurisdictions. Only half the story of highway
federalism has been told. The other half must proceed from the ground up.
Planning scholars concerned with transportation tend to emphasize the economics
of highway federalism.
4
Based on the generally productive tactic of following the
money, this interpretation portrays freeways primarily as an example of burden-
shifting, from local to state to federal outlays. There is a basic truth to that sequence,
but looking only at the source of the money obscures the extensive struggles over who
would control how the money was spent. Again, in Los Angeles at least, municipal
employees and the city council held firmly to that authority for as long as they could and,
as it turned out, that was long enough to set the basic pattern for the freeways in the city.
Moreover, viewed in the fine grain, the sequence takes on a more complex texture,
especially in the 1930s, when municipal engineers had far more direct access to funding
for urban transportation from New Deal programs than did state or even federal

246
engineers. Los Angeles city engineers capitalized on this access to build the key projects
that established the freeway system.
The encounter between city and state highway engineers in Los Angeles began in
the 1920s and unfolded over the next three decades. Sweeping explanations such as
highway federalism and burden-shifting cannot encompass the variety and complexity of
the project-specific negotiations that took place and the diverse results of the many joint
efforts between city and state roadbuilders. At times an easy cooperation prevailed, when
each side could serve its own distinctive goals on a project, such as the completion of
Olympic Boulevard or the upgrade of North Figueroa Street into a through highway
between Pasadena and Los Angeles. The projects that proceeded on an amicable basis
usually were initiated by the city engineers, who adjusted their plans to justify cost-
sharing by the state Division of Highways, which was concerned with inter-regional
traffic. When tensions arose, it was generally because inter-regional arteries planned by
state engineers did not fully consider the political and technological setting of the city.
The city and state highway engineers had a great deal in common, starting with
their profession and the distinctive values it fostered. Both groups had been trained
primarily in railroad and water-supply engineering and carried the values and practices
associated with these linear-flow systems into their highway work. Both embodied the
ideology of the technological sublime the transformation of nature by setting it off with
the works of engineering, and the assertion of aesthetic value in a functional object or
structure that could be starkly expressed in concrete. Both were servants of empire, who
cultivated constituencies among the capitalists who profited from land development.

247
Both operated within the tight strictures that made roadbuilding so difficult in California:
the structure of political authority for infrastructure that priveleged opposition over
approval, and the general stinginess of California taxpayers that made it very difficult to
fund ambitious infrastructure projects that did not promise any operating revenue. And
both groups had to serve as brokers among diverse and competing interests to gain
approval for ambitious highway projects and to assemble the financing for these most
expensive public endeavors.
There were also important differences between the city and state engineers. By
virtue of their mandate that covered a vast state with most of its acreage as yet
undeveloped during the formative years of the agency, the state engineers had a rural
focus and a rural constituency that had no place in the work of the city engineers. And
the goal of building inter-regional highways often impelled the state engineers to discount
the concerns of city-dwellers. The muddy-booted tradition of the intrepid engineer
modernizing the wilderness was part of the origins of both the city and state agencies
charged with highway building, but the city engineers had to adapt more quickly to the
urban setting, with conflicting interests arrayed around virtually every major project and
the corresponding premium those conditions placed on negotiating and political skills on
the part of engineers. By the late 1920s, the leaders of the city engineering function in
Los Angeles were accomplished colaition-builders, while the state engineers clung more
tenaciously to their sense of themselves as pioneers charged with civilizing an
inhospitable natural landscape.

248
To illuminate the encounter between city and state engineers on the streets of Los
Angeles, this chapter first fills in the background of the state highway agency and state
highway financing in California. A case study of the Pacific Coast Highway offers a
chance to discern how the values and operating principles of the state highway engineers
were forged in the difficult process of completing a distinctive inter-regional highway,
and how that highway came to occupy a central place in the image and reputaiton of
southern California. Another extensive case study, the construction of Whittier
Boulevard, shows the collison between the mandates of the city and state engineers and
the beginnings of the exploitation of the east side of Los Angeles for highway purposes.

Highway Bureaucracy and Highway Funding
The state roadbuilding function in California had its origins in the Good Roads
Movement of the 1890s, which was initially spearheaded by bicycle enthusiasts
organized as the League of American Wheelmen and bankrolled by the bicycle
manufacturers. Throughout the United States, the Wheelmen lobbied for the formation of
state highway departments; the first was formed in New Jersey in 1891.
5
Though the
Wheelmen were the first organization to campaign for road reform, in California and
other western states the adoption of roadbuilding as a function of state government
fundamentally depended on the economic development agendas of rural communities and
agricultural interests, who sought to bring the standards of highway transportation up to
the level enjoyed by communities served by the railroads. These were the constituencies
that enlisted the support of Governor Henry Markham, sponsored a Good Roads

249
Convention in Sacramento in 1893, and were rewarded in 1895 when the state legislature
created the State Bureau of Highways.
6
This Bureau had no professional staff and scant
budget beyond the reimbursement of expenses for the three appointed state highway
commissioners to traverse the state and conduct a preliminary study of the states roads.
In its first report, the Bureau justified itself and the need for good roads in California by
cataloguing the costs and limitations to growth imposed on farmers, miners, merchants,
and manufacturers: Every industry of the State finds its heaviest burdens incident to bad
roads. . . . The industrial development of our State has nearly reached the limit possible
with bad roads.
7

The commissioners of the fledgling bureau realized that they could do little to
address highway development over the vast territory of California without professional
staff and money for construction. The legislature complied with the first request by
creating the position of state highway engineer and changing the Bureau to the
Department of Highways, but the pleas for reform in funding methods went unheeded.
Just as in cities, the state depended on property taxes for any infrastructure
improvements, though the legal structure was slightly different outside of incorporated
cities. The state could assess counties for a share of property taxes collected in
unincorporated areas, and that money was used to pay the salary of the state highway
engineer and to hire more engineers to assist with the tasks of surveying for state
highways and imploring the counties to contribute more money to actually build some
roads, either by special assessments or the sale of bonds. But the low-tax mentality that
prevailed in the state legislature trumped any efforts to raise further money for highways,

250
even after a 1906 study on California fiscal policy called out the problems of relying on
property taxes for road funding: it was a school for perjury that imposed a handicap
on the growth of the State.
8

The rapid adoption of automobiles in California brought new urgency to the issue
of highway construction and political support for increasing the engineering staff and
reorganizing the department. In 1907 the legislature created the Department of
Engineering as the umbrella agency for all state infrastructure responsibilities.
Roadbuilding was lodged within this department as the Division of Highways; the other
main function of the agency was water supply and flood control. The Division of
Highways operated under the oversight of the California Highway Commission,
consisting of three appointees and the state highway engineer.
9
In 1912 the Division
divided up the state into highway districts; District 7 included Los Angeles, Ventura,
Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, San Diego and Imperial counties. One of the first
employees of District 7, Spencer V. Cortelyou, would be appointed the chief of the Los
Angeles-based district in 1924 and would continue in that position until his retirement in
1949. He was the most influential state official in southern California highway matters
for a generation, and he played a crucial role in the creation of the freeway network.
Cortelyou arrived in Los Angeles after graduating from the University of Nebraska in
1902 with a degree in engineering. He worked as a location engineer for the Los Angeles
and Salt Lake (later Union Pacific) Railroad, then spent five years in the Phillipines with
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before returning to Los Angeles as a road surveyor for

251
the county. His brother, Herbert Cortelyou, was engineer of structures for the Los
Angeles city engineering office.
10

In 1909, during the first attempts to address the infrastructure demands of
automobility, the legislature authorized a state referendum to let the voters decide
whether the state should issue bonds to pay for highways.
11
Bonding proved to be an
imperfect method of road financing, particlarly at the parsimonious levels set by tax-
averse officeholders in the Assembly, a story that is detailed below in the discussion of
the Pacific Coast Highway. To help service the state share of the bond debt, in 1913 the
state legislature enacted the first user-fee charged to motorists -- the registration, or
vehicle-license, fee. Though bonding raised over $70 million for road construction
between 1910 and 1919, the state Division of Highways still could not acquire right-of-
way or design and build bridges, roadways and other structures without substantial
contributions from county governments. This conundrum was resolved with the
enactment of the state tax on gasoline in 1923.
The gasoline tax -- not an ad valorem sales tax but a levy assessed per gallon of
motor fuel -- has been described somewhat over-effusively as evidence that Americans
were willing to pay for the almost infinite expansion of their automobility.
12
It is true
that there has been little resistance to the gas tax on the part of citizens and elected
officials since it was first enacted in Oregon, Colorado and New Mexico in 1919.
13
The
reasons for the lack of protest, however, can be accounted for in other ways than as a
positive statement in favor of infinite automobility. To legislators, it had the advantage
of being a new source of revenue that did not disrupt existing fiscal policies or take

252
money away from other public functions. The initial passage of gas-tax statutes in state
legislatures thus did not arouse opposition from competing interests that would lose
financing as a result of the gas tax. The amounts were also small at the start, two cents
per gallon in Oregon and the same in California, though the California tax was increased
to three cents a few years after intitial passage. It was cheap to collect and administer,
because the gasoline wholesalers were responsible for reporting sales and remitting the
appropriate tax to the state. And vehicle-registration fees had paved the way for the
concept of assessing motorists for the costs related to driving. The idea of taxing
gasoline to build roads spread rapidly among state highway engineers, and legislatures in
all 48 states (as well as Canada and Mexico) enacted the tax by 1930.
14

As the gas-tax bill proceeded through the California Assembly in 1923, some
objection arose from large growers and utility companies, but they were mollified by
exemptions and credits for large consumers and enterprises deemed to perform necessary
service to the public.
15
To blunt resistance from local governments, the California bill
allocated a third of the revenues directly to county governments. Los Angeles County
agreed to earmark at least half of its share to the city of Los Angeles, which yielded
$400,000 for city streets in 1924, the first year of the tax.
16
The state legislature later
made the municipal share a permanent part of the gas-tax program. The gas tax
accounted for than half the money spent on highway construction over the next
generation and launched the state Division of Highways into a formidable agent of
landscape transformation across the state.
17
The control of gas-tax proceeds by the state
engineer and Highway Commission constitutes the main support for interpreting highway

253
policy as a matter of burden-shifting from local to state jurisdiction. But the local share
and the ability of city engineers in Los Angeles to win a substantial portion of the county
share as well as the funds allocated directly by the state engineers complicates the
burden-shifting argument. Nor does the economic scenario account for how the
engineers decided what to build, how they responded to the political and operational
obstacles they encountered, and the irrational outcomes of much of their work. Seen
from a birds-eye level concerned with policy, the growth of the state highway
bureacracy and the move toward user-based taxes could seem a logical response to an
obvious need. But from the ground, the actions of the state engineers take on a far less
predictable and reasonable cast. The difficult politics of road construction in California
endowed the state engineers with illogical and at times unreasonable goals, and, at crucial
junctures, the engineers were motivated by professional aggrandizement and the
arrogation of technical and financial prerogatives to their agency as much as by service to
the motoring (and taxpaying) public. In-process adjustments to salvage projects,
improvisation in design, and roads that did not fulfill their stated purposes (or at least the
original purposes) characterized the work of the Division of Highways in its formative
years. The roads that they did manage to complete would bestow on generations to come
an imperfect template for subsequent highway development.

Pacific Coast Highway and the Cultural Construction of Southern California
Pacific Coast Highway ranks alongside Wilshire Boulevard and Mulholland
Highway as one of the iconic roads of southern California. The coast highway has it all:

254
sunshine, tourism, movie stars, cars, incomparable views of the seascape, and a host of
recreational opportunities associated with salt water and sand. Is there any other road
that is both so celebrated and so representative of its region?
18
The tightly intertwined
relationships between the coastal highway and the coastal landscape are certainly
necessary in any attempt to come to grips with the significance of southern California in
20
th
-century urbanism and culture, but they have nothing to do with the initial impetus to
build the road. The scenic and recreational qualities of the coast highway only emerged
during its construction, when state engineers fastened onto its beauty as the justification
for a project that was poised at the brink of failure and that had previously enjoyed scant
justification for the enormous public expenditure it required, beyond the institutional
objectives of the state highway agency. The state highway engineers and their allies in
local government sought to solidify their authority over route selection and road
construction, and in the process they generated a durable image of the region and won
from the highest court in the United States a new legal status for pleasure driving.
Providing visual and physical access to the coastal landscape was not an initial objective
of constructing the coast highway, but it became a crucial element in shaping the values
and practices of the California roadbuilding regime, and a central part of the image and
culture of southern California.
The coast highway was not descended from Olmstedian urban doctrine, like Rock
Creek Parkway in Washington or Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn.
19
It was not intended to
provide access to scenic or recreational landscapes, like Robert Mosess Southern
Parkway or the roads into Yosemite.
20
Nor was it a strategy for congestion relief that was

255
then enhanced by landscape design, like Merritt Parkway in Connecticut.
21
It was
mandated vaguely, even inchoately, in the dreary legalism of the 1909 State Highways
Act, which authorized the 1910 bond referendum for building the first state highways.
The bill and the ballot measure specified the creation of two highways that would run
north and south through the state, traversing the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys
and along the Pacific coast by the most direct and practicable routes.
22
The first was the
inland route that later became I-5 and the second would become the Pacific Coast
Highway.
The reasons for specifying a coastal route were not based on any reasonable
assessment of the demand for such a road. Not that the beauties of the states coastline
had been unrecognized, but the shoreline was a remote place, valued for its isolation, the
domain of the recluse and the eccentric. Traveling the length of the California coast was
only possible on horseback.
23
After the Southern Pacific Railroad completed its Coast
Line route in 1907, the railroad modestly promoted its scenic attributes, and accepted
passenger fares, but the route was primarily intended as an outlet for agricultural produce
from the coastal counties and it cut far inland in Los Angeles County, to serve the freight
depots in the city of Los Angeles.
24
The infirm and the moneyed who were attracted to
the Mediterranean climate of southern California avoided the coast, which was seen as
foggy, damp and cold. In the early 20th century, the railroad resorts of Santa Monica and
Redondo Beach were seasonal attractions, not nodes of development.
25

Including the coast route in the 1909 highway act and 1910 ballot measure only
made sense within the the pork-barrel calculus of the state Assembly and the referendum

256
campaign. Governor James Gillet was the chief architect of the bill, and the main
opposition came from the San Francisco delegation, which generally opposed taxation for
infrastructure and which energetically opposed it when most of the money would be
spent elsewhere. Gillet assured neutrality from San Francisco legislators by exempting
San Francisco from having to contribute any money toward serving the bond debt. J. M.
Eddy, the president of the California Good Roads Association, denounced the exemption
as an act of extreme cunning that vitiated any claim of equity among the states
taxpayers, and his group opposed the bill and the referendum on that basis.
26
Another
predictable ally for road funding, the Automobile Club of Southern California, also
opposed the measure, not only because of the imbalanced tax burden but also out of the
belief that the $18 million designated for state highways was inadequate for the task and
would raise expectations only to frustrate them (which turned out to be correct). The
opponents pointed out that the language calling for a coastal highway was only a tactic to
attract the support of legislators and citizens from coastal counties.
27
That was probably
true, and in any case it worked; the bill squeaked through the Assembly and the voters
approved the referendum.
28

The mandate to build a coastal route certainly mystified the engineering staff of
the state highway commission. The statute also specified that the state highways should
connect all the county seats; to combine that goal with a road down the coast would have
created a zigzag path that would almost double the necessary mileage. Another clause in
the act obliged the state highways to link the centers of population, which conflicted
with idea of a road along the coast. The California shoreline was thinly populated except

257
for San Francisco and San Diego, and entirely unpopulated for long stretches of rugged
terrain where the transverse ridges of the coastal range ended abruptly at the edge of the
sea. The engineers appealed to the state attorney general for clarification of these
divergent and irreconcilable policies, and won relief from the most onerous conflicts
embodied in a statute that made political sense but topographical nonsense. The attorney
general declared that specific route selection would be vested in the state engineers, and
that county seats could be connected to the north-south trunk lines by a system of
laterals built with money obtained from the respective counties. There was no room
for maneuver, however, in the obligation to build a coast highway: that language was
simple, clear, and binding.
29

That obligation was also impossible to fulfill under the terms of the act. Governor
Hiram Johnson, who succeeded Gillet, told the state Highway Commission: You face a
tough job. You are expected to build for eighteen million dollars a highway system
which the best engineers of the country have estimated will cost thirty-five to fifty
million. In order to stretch the $18 million, the highway commission devoted its initial
efforts to devolving cost and responsibility onto local jurisdictions. The state highway
bonds carried a low interest rate and a 50-year term, which made them unattractive to
investors.
30
The commission prevailed on county governments to buy the bonds, with the
understanding that the money would be allocated in proportion to the financial
participation of the respective counties. That only guaranteed that the coast highway
would be a series of isolated sections that did not necessarily connect with each other.
San Diego County, in a frenzy of boosterism fueled by apprehension over being

258
surpassed by Los Angeles, exceeded even the bond request and pledged over a million
dollars of credit guarantees to complete the highway along its entire coast.
31

The coast highway crossed dozens of river and hundreds of small streams and
drainages, all requiring bridges that would consume many times over the entire state
budget available for state-highway construction. The county governments agreed to
construct the bridges and culverts for the coast road, but the purchase of state highway
bonds exhausted the money that most of the counties could devote to the project. In the
mid-1920s the state was still waiting for many of these bridges to begin construction.
Even when the counties did provide the bridges, the results could be disastrous. San
Diego Countys hasty efforts to complete the coast road in 1912 and 1913 included a
600-foot long bridge over the estuary of the San Luis River in the northern part of the
county. It was an impressive structure, a multiple-span concrete arch design that to all
appearances utilized the most up-to-date materials and technology of the day. In their
haste, however, the county highway officials stinted on the substructure, and the bridge
washed out to sea in 1918.
32
The state engineers understood that the unstable subsurface
conditions of the shoreline environment contributed to the disaster and believed that the
county highway departments did not employ sufficient expertise to cope with the unusual
demands of large structures in those conditions. As the state engineer reported to the
Highway Commission, in tortuous and indirect language calculated not to offend anyone
in San Diego: Time has demonstrated in many instances the absence of ultimate
economy in permitting local influence. The commission resolved that it would
thereafter reserve to itself the responsibility for designing structures along the coast.
33

259
This consolidation of technical functions ran counter to the decentralized financial
strategy that was necessitated by the lack of sufficient funding under the state bond issue.
In this tension between state and local responsibility for the coast road, the state highway
department began to forge its institutional identity as the pre-eminent engineering
authority, as the disinterested experts who would transcend local concerns for a broader
common good.
That tension was even more acute in the crucial task of securing rights-of-way.
Both county and state officials emphasized the importance of acquiring these easements
through donation, because of the low budget provided by the bonds. The chief attorney
for the highway commission asserted early in the process that peer pressure and public-
spiritedness would win the day: A belligerent or unreasonable land owner soon
discovers himself very unpopular in his own community.
34
Even if that were the case
for most of the route, it only took a small minority of recalcitrant property owners to
compromise the entire project, and by 1915 the rosy predictions of cooperation had given
way to a catalog of the difficulties attending right-of-way acquisition, including the
implication that local officials could not move forcefully against prominent citizens in
their own communities without fear of reprisal. The commissioners and their attorneys
insisted that only the state agency could surmount all these obstacles. The highway
commissions own reputation and its ability to justify further expenditures for the state
highway program rested significantly on the vital matter of right-of-way acquisition, and
the state agency could not countenance any hindrance to that effort: It usually happens
that pugnacious land owners demand some exorbitant sum. . . . Such a system is

260
absolutely hostile to progress. . . . If the deeds cannot be acquired by diplomatic methods,
war must be declared in the courts.
35
The state highway establishment could not
survive without the funding commitments from the counties, but the commissioners and
their staff would determine the routing, the technical characteristics and the methods of
obtaining the rights of way.
The highway commission soon found itself in the awkward position of asking for
another bond issue to complete the two state highways while also claiming exemplary
performance and remarkable progress in utilizing the money that had already been made
available. In 1914, the chairman of the Highway Commission, Charles Blaney, described
the roads as city streets in country places, which allowed drivers to traverse the state
without having shifted gears once from Oregon to Mexico. He declared that the coast
road would be an exhibit of the Worlds Expositions of 1915, since it stretched from the
doors of the Panama-Pacific Exposition at San Francisco to the Panama-California
Exposition at San Diego.
36
The illuminating omission in these assertions is the lack of
any praise for the scenery those drivers would encounter: the road itself would be the
exhibit. The landscape it traversed would only enter the discourse concerning the coast
highway in the coming years, as a means to overcome the resistance to its completion.
The engineers description was also more hopeful than descriptive. At numerous
locations along the route of the coast highway, the right-of-way was tied up in litigation
and no construction had occurred. Construction had yet to begin on most of the bridges.
At many points, the only work consisted of minor regrading without any surface
treatment. Lack of drainage facilities made the road impassable during the rainy season.

261
Grades as high as nine percent, such as Ortega Hill just south of Santa Barbara, required
that motorists travel with a sense of adventure and some stout rope.
37
Staking its
reputation for administrative efficiency and technical mastery on such a highly
compromised undertaking was a huge risk for the state highway bureaucracy in its
formative period. The commissioners and the engineers and attorneys who staffed the
agency understood the risk, and it only increased their desperation to complete the job
that they already claimed to have finished. At the most critical juncture in those
subsequent efforts, when the feasibility of completing the coast highway was most
threatened, the value of scenic landscapes would play a critical role in salvaging the
project and solidifying the standing of the highway commission.
The contradictions embedded in the legal origins of the coast highway would
reach a crescendo in the northern stretch of Los Angeles County, where some 22 miles of
coastline lay within the expansive landholding known as Malibu Ranch. Frederick
Rindge, the scion of a wealthy Massachusetts family, had purchased the ranch in 1891.
In between managing his extensive investments, Rindge dabbled in agriculture and led an
idyllic existence on the ranch with his wife, May, and their three children.
38
Rindge
waged a resolute struggle against the Southern Pacifics plans to build its coastline
railroad through Malibu Ranch, and May Rindge then continued that effort after his death
in 1905. Their main tactic was to incorporate their own railroad and then donate to it the
right-of-way through the ranch, thereby precluding the Southern Pacifics plan. May
Rindge undertook the minimum amount of construction necessary under state regulations
to retain the legal priority of her railroad against the continued attempts by the Southern

262
Pacific to overturn it. She also periodically incorporated successor firms to receive the
right-of-way easement, thereby restarting the compliance period. In 1908 the Southern
Pacific abandoned its attempt to build through Malibu Ranch. Rindges construction
slowed to a halt and by 1916 her rail companys filings with the state railroad
commission consisted only of Rindges forwarding address.
39
In the meantime, Rindge
extended her defense of the ranch against the new transportation technology of
automobiles by stationing armed guards at the boundaries to turn away tourists, and by
dynamiting sections of the rudimentary road that passed along the shore of the ranch.
40

In 1903, Rindge sued the county in federal court to prevent condemnation of her land for
road purposes. The case dragged on for ten years, but she ultimately prevailed in a
judges ruling.
41

The state Division of Highways had no objection to routing the coastal highway
inland from the Rindge property, across the base of the broad peninsula occupied by
Malibu Ranch, to approach the city of Los Angeles through the San Fernando Valley. In
1913, the same year that Rindge won her federal case, the state highway engineer, Austin
Fletcher, issued the operating principles that his staff would use in fulfilling the terms of
the 1909 State Highway Act. The routes chosen must be direct and not meandering. . . .
The saving of mileage is the essence of the act. Bypassing the ranch would save some
12 miles according to Division of Highway estimates. It took some verbal gymnastics to
apply that standard under the language of the Highway Act: The expression along the
Pacific coast does not mean a literal shore line but is used in a most general sense. . . .
The words along the Pacific coast are used with the meaning of traversing the Pacific

263
coast, but in order to make the phrase somewhat clearer, the term along was used in a
most general sense, namely, in line with the length of, and not in the sense of
immediately by the side of the shore.
42
A wealthy landowner, the state highway
agency, and the U. S. Court of Appeals all agreed that the coastal route did not have to
traverse Malibu Ranch, and the matter might have rested there if another set of
landowners and the Los Angeles County board of supervisors had not proposed an
alternate plan.
The county board of supervisors, though hardly the mindless puppets portrayed in
the noir historiography of Los Angeles, were indeed attentive to the wishes of the real
estate industry, and among their more ambitious clients were the developers and
subdividers mapping out communities along the southern reaches of Santa Monica Bay,
between Venice and San Pedro. The most formidable of this group was Frank Vanderlip,
often referred to as an eastern capitalist in the more ardent newspaper accounts, who
headed the syndicate that had purchased Palos Verdes Ranch and planned to develop it as
a seaside suburb. Born in 1864, Vanderlip had an eclectic early career including stints as
a machinist and a newspaper reporter in Chicago, before becoming secretary to bank
president Lyman Gage, who was appointed Secretary of the Treasury in 1897 by
President McKinley. Serving as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Vanderlip won
distinction among financiers for his handling of the loans to finance the Spanish-
American War. He joined National City Bank in 1903, became its president six years
later, and in 1913 he purchased the Palos Verdes Ranch with an eye toward investment
and development.
43

264

Figure 7: The coast of Los Angeles County, c.1920. North of Santa Monica, the coastal route ended at
Topanga Canyon. South of Santa Monica, there was no continuous route of travel between the growing
beach cities. Source: Touring Routes in the Vicinity of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Automobile Club of
Southern California, [c.1920]). Used with permission; all rights reserved.

265
Landowners and speculators in San Pedro and the South Bay, disappointed that
they would be bypassed if the coast highway did not hug the shoreline, placed their hopes
on the possibility of Vanderlips intervention. After May Rindge won her federal case in
1913, realtor Carl Schader mourned the all-but-abandoned scheme to extend the coast
branch of the State highway around the shore line of the Malibu ranch . . . the highway
which he and others of the Santa Monica Bay and South Coast districts have been
laboring for years. At this key moment, the south coast real estate interests represented
by Schader inserted the shoreline scenery into the discourse about the highway: Such a
highway would traverse a winding course, commanding from almost every point an
outlook upon some one or more picturesque natural features . . . beaches, grottoes and
rugged palisades in an endless panorama would unfold before the eyes of the traveler
over the road. It was a regional vision of continuous beach development from the
Santa Monica Mountains to the limits of the developed South Coast district. It would be
the connecting link in the the projected coast highway to San Diego. Schader closed his
public plea for reconsideration of the routing decision by invoking the influence of
Vanderlip: Before definite plans are adopted that might eliminate all possibility of
securing the coveted right of way, it strikes me that the state Highway Commission
would do well to consult with Mr. Vanderlip and his associates with reference to the
highway plan.
44

Vanderlip surely grasped the importance of improved roads to a massive
development such as planned for Palos Verdes. He even agreed to serve as a one-person
assessment district to fund the southern extension of Western Avenue so it reached his

266
planned community.
45
Chambers of commerce from Santa Monica to San Pedro
provided political cover to the board of supervisors by forming committees to promote
the coast route, hosting dinners to drum up support, and sending delegations to
Sacramento.
46
Running the coast road through the beach communities of the South Bay
required it to pass through Rindges property to the north, and in early 1916 the county
accordingly filed suit to obtain the right-of-way through Malibu Ranch. Rindge prevailed
on procedural matters, but the case also provided the opportunity for her attorneys to
dissect the justification for routing through the ranch. Except as a scenic trip for
automobilists, who can find ample gratification in that line elsewhere, they argued,
there is not now, and has never been, any public or other necessity for any such road.
47

When the county corrected the technical deficiencies in its suit and again moved
to condemn a right-of-way through the ranch, in December 1917, Rindge and her
attorneys used the language of the 1909 highway act and the routing policies adopted by
the Division of Highways to refute the countys claim of public benefit. The road
through the ranch could not be considered part of any state highway system because no
improved roads connected to it at either end. Moreover, a few miles north of the ranch,
on the coast in Ventura County, the route would encounter the formidable obstruction of
Sycamore Canyon, and the highway commission had not even begun to contemplate how
to cross that barrier at the time of the suit. The route through the ranch would not
connect county seats, and would even cause the highway to bypass the county seat of Los
Angeles. There were no centers of population anywhere along the alignment through the
ranch, and again, the coastal right-of-way would cause the road to detour away from the

267
largest city in the vicinity. The road would offer no advantages for hauling freight
because it was a roundabout route between existing destinations. And, drawing directly
from the Division of Highways analysis of the routing options, Rindge pointed out that
the coastal route would be 12 miles longer than the inland route. Unable to oppose any of
those points with facts, the county attorneys argued on the basis of the law: California
statutes invested in the board of supervisors the authority to determine the nature of
improvements undertaken for public benefit.
48

That won the day in Superior Court, but Rindge appealed. When the state
Supreme Court considered the case in 1918, the county buttressed its position by
claiming that the specific public good at issue was the right to drive through scenic
landscapes. The county won again, and Rindge appealed again in the federal courts. The
U. S. Supreme Court ultimately decided against Rindge, in 1923. The decision hinged on
a new definition of the public good. It first noted that numerous precedents had
established parks and recreation as valid public benefits:
Public uses are not limited, in the modern view, to matters of mere business
necessity and ordinary convenience, but may extend to matters of public health,
recreation and enjoyment. Thus, the condemnation of lands for public parks is
now universally recognized as a taking for public use.
The court then applied those precedents to the new conditions of transportation:
A road need not be for a purpose of business to create a public exigency; air,
exercise and recreation are important to the general health and welfare; pleasure
travel may be accommodated as well as business travel; and highways may be

268
condemned to places of pleasing natural scenery. . . . Manifestly, in these days of
general public travel in motor cars for health and recreation, such a highway as
this, extending for more than 20 miles along the shores of the Pacific at the base
of a range of mountains, must be regarded as a public use. For these reasons we
conclude that this highway and the taking of land for it is a public use authorized
by the laws of California.
Providing access to scenic landscapes was not part of the original purpose of the coast
highway. It only entered the discussions about the roads when South Coast real estate
speculators invoked scenic driving as a justification for a public highway to access their
property, and it only entered the legal proceedings as a supplementary argument to
overturn the resourceful efforts of the stubborn May Rindge. Yet the fundamental
significance of the Pacific Coast Highway rests on this decision: in order to build it, the
county first had to establish a new right under the Constitution of the United States, the
right of driving for pleasure.
49

The state Division of Highways remained silent on this conflict until its final
resolution by the U.S. Supreme Court, and it is easy to see why, beyond the routine
disclaimers of public officials when asked to comment on legal proceedings. The state
engineers were torn between their political alliance with county government and the fact
that their own substantive analysis of routing principles for the coast road constituted the
arguments used by the countys most vociferous antagonist. The booster-driven politics
of Los Angeles made the county government one of the Division of Highways most
valued clients. In 1913, when the first highway-bond issue failed to attract investors

269
because of its disadvantageous terms and the state prevailed on county governments to
purchase the bonds, Los Angeles bought $1 million of them, more than any other county,
and did not even require that the money be spent in the county where the money
originated.
50
Moreover, in the midst of the Rindge appeals, in 1919, Californias third
highway-bond issue came on the market, and the state engineers apparently took the
South Coast realtors advice to consult with Mr. Vanderlip, who satisfied the boosters
expectations by buying $4 million of the bonds -- some ten percent of the entire issue.
Before Vanderlips purchase, reported the Los Angeles Times, there was no sale for the
bonds because of the low interest rate they carried. Vanderlip made arrangements with
the State Highway Commission that the proceeds of the bonds are to be used in the
construction of the scenic coast boulevard from Oxnard to San Juan Capistrano. . . . Mr.
Vanderlip agreed to buy the bonds on condition that the proposed road be built at once.
51

If the state engineers were willing to compromise their principles and adopt the goal of
scenic motoring even if it required circuitous routing through Malibu Ranch, at least they
exacted a steep price. In any case, $4 million did not buy a lot of highway, even in 1919,
and there was little the state could do before the enactment of the gas tax in 1923, which
fortuitously coincided with the Supreme Court decision in favor of pleasure driving.
The engineers of the state highway department eagerly adopted the scenic and
recreational value of the coast highway. Few could have appreciated the landscapes
more, in part because they were among the only people who could see them before the
road was completed. Rindges lawyers and armed guards had prevented anyone except
her own family and employees from appreciating the shoreline of Malibu Ranch. Up the

270
coast in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, the spotty progress of
construction had done little to alter the generally inaccessible condition of the coastal
region. Those with the most direct experience of the sublime vistas were the survey
parties of the state highway department. The newly validated legal standing of pleasure
driving, and the newly established pool of funding to pursue their work, merged with the
state engineers assertion of pre-eminent technical expertise, their relish for
accomplishing the most difficult construction tasks, and the deep satisfaction they found
in transforming nature by human actions. The coast highway shortly became the
signature project for the department. With the zeal of the converted, and with
appreciation for the victory the scenery had won in Californias most hotly contested
right-of-way case, state highway engineers adopted scenic values as one of their central
goals. They rewrote the history of the state highway system to profess that opening
picturesque vistas to the motoring public had been their objective all along. They
carefully distinguished their work from the parkways of the eastern states, where
landscaping and refined roadway accoutrements such as fences and light standards
contributed to the carefully planned views. To the staff of the California highway
department, enhancing the scenic value of highways was a task for the engineer, not the
landscape architect or the urban planner, and it would be accomplished by the location
and design of the highway itself, not by augmenting the highway with unnecessary
flourishes. In 1928, the restated goal of the coast road in southern California was to
provide a view of the ocean in every mile of the 235-mile stretch between Santa Barbara
and the Mexican border.
52

271
The state highway engineers expressed their new landscape ethic most
spectacularly in the vicinity of Sycamore Canyon, in a monumental construction episode
that penetrated deeply into the culture and identity of the agency. They relished the
difficulty of their work and boasted of their prowess in rappelling down cliffs to mark the
highway alignments that would have to be blasted out of the jagged western edge of the
coastal range. Climbing perpendicular cliffs and dangling from ropes above the waves
is all part of a days work, recounted the resident engineer in a display of macho
understatement.
53
The new highway had to be carved as a shelf into the sides of the cliffs
that lined the waters edge, a process known as benching down, which required at one
location near Point Mugu, perseverance and the judicious use of 18 tons of 60 percent
hand grenade powder.
54
The construction crews drilled down from the tops of the cliffs,
placed blasting powder in the holes, and exploded the cliff face. A single blast could
extend as far as two thousand feet, and the largest charges consumed 40 tons of
explosive. To haul away the loosened rock, the department built a temporary railroad; as
many as 100 hopper cars a day carried debris to Santa Monica during the height of the
project. This was landscaping with a vengeance, and the most expensive construction
contract ever let by the state of California up to that time. The new roadbed between
Santa Monica and Oxnard was completed in 1925, but it proved to be exceptionally
unstable, and frequent slides repeatedly caused the opening of the road to be postponed.
Much of the rock that had been hauled away was brought back and used to support the
water side of the roadbed, until finally the surface could be paved in 1928.
55

272
Even where the construction was less spectacular, the coast highway served as a
laboratory for the departments methods. The hurriedly built section through San Diego
County bedeviled the state highway department for more than a decade because of its
inferior specifications. The 15-foot wide roadway barely allowed two cars to pass each
other and produced high rates of head-on collisions. As tragic as that was, it could be
solved by the simple means of adding another lane. Far more troubling to the state
engineers was the concrete itself, which was only four inches thick and did not have any
steel reinforcing. The roadway crumbled to pieces in less than five years and devoured
the departments maintenance budget in constant reconstruction to remain passable. In
that process, state engineers tested different compositions of concrete and different
methods of building forms, pouring the mixture, and curing it. The coast highway
through San Diego County was entirely rebuilt by 1926, when it served as a showpiece
for the state highway department. The tile-lined drains, the ample width, and the robust
subsurface all came in for their share of praise, but the highest plaudits were reserved for
the concrete itself nine inches thick and, according to the division engineer, the
smoothest concrete surface to be found in the world.
56

Though intensely focused on the construction itself, on burnishing their reputation
for technical acuity, and on reinforcing the political, legal and financial position of their
agency, the state highway engineers were also attentive to the transition that occurred
when they finished building a piece of the coast highway and it passed into public use.
The landscape ethic served them well in those moments too. The conflicting mandates,
the lawsuits, the long years of meager budgets, the washed-out roadways, and the

273
precarious balancing act of claiming progress while requesting more appropriations were
all passed over, and the public benefit was framed in terms of visual enrichment and
tributes to the dramatic vistas their work had created. When Governor C. C. Young
presided over the opening of the road through Malibu, the state highway department
reported: The magnificent new highway, its scenic setting along the sea, and the
beaches and the cliffs that adorn it won the commendation of all for the vision of those
who had planned the highway and the genius of those who had built it. To state
highway officials who hungered for recognition and relied on visually constructed ideals
to attain it, only a short step separated the idea of a photogenic highway, built for the
views it afforded, from the ritual of the celebrity photo opportunity. To celebrate the
final section of the coast highway in Orange County, the highway department enlisted the
participation of Americas Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, who posed as The Spirit of
Progress, and Douglas Fairbanks, who played Vulcan the blacksmith, forging the last
link. Thus began the coast highways role in media production, a role it would continue
to play in succeeding generations, even while Americas Sweetheart changed from Mary
Pickford to Sandra Dees Gidget, and Fairbankss Vulcan gave way to James Darrens
Moondoggie.
57

May Rindge remained steadfast in her opposition to the highway and fought the
project at every opportunity. She sued the highway department for scaring livestock, for
taking down trees, and for excessive noise. She obtained an injunction to prevent the use
of any water from her property, which forced the state to build a 21-mile long pipeline to
supply the construction work. Rindge had another use for the water by then: she had

274
given the water rights to Marblehead Land Co., the corporate entity under which she
developed the ranch. In 1929, when the coast road was opened, Marblehead issued a
leather-bound brochure offering land from houselots up to 640-acre estates. Among the
selling points were the oceanfront highway, which brought Hollywood within a 30-
minute drive, and, of course, the unmatched scenic splendor [of] natures masterpiece
framed by a towering background of majestic mountains. The compelling visual
experience of the coastal landscape had finally supplied a point of common interest
between Rindge and the highway builders she had fought for so long.
58

The coast road certainly served the goals of Vanderlip and the South Coast
developers, and it provided a riveting visual script to accompany the rise of the state
highway agency. The gas tax produced more than $18 million in construction funds in its
first year and the Division of Highways employed 900 people by the end of 1924.
59
The
drive along the Malibu coast has certainly entertained millions of motorists over the
years, but the instability of the terrain has exacted enormous continuing costs in
rebuilding the roadway after portions slide into the sea, and in buttressing or removing
the looming cliffs that periodically threaten to destroy the highway.
60
Pacific Coast
Highway contributed to the residential development of the canyons and hills above
Malibu, a perilous environment subject to brush fire and mudslide, which requires
substantial public expenditure for fire suppression and the construction of drains and
debris channels.
61
Any celebration of the highway requires that the costs and perils it has
incurred be ignored or discounted. If it can only be deemed a success in the most
narrowly construed terms, at least those who bear (much of) the cost and face the peril do

275
so at their own choosing. The irrational results of the state highway engineers efforts in
the more urbanized areas of Los Angeles were borne by residents who had little say in the
matter. To trace the effects of state highway construction on that much larger proportion
of the population requires turning our attention to the workingclass neighborhoods of
East Los Angeles.

Whittier Boulevard and the Origins of Transportation Exploitation in East Los Angeles
The other trunk line mandated by the 1909 State Highways Act, the inland
route, generated much less controversy for the Division of Highways than the road
through Malibu Ranch. Except for one dispute in Tulare County, north of Bakersfield,
where the growers and dairy farmers at the east and west extremities of the county both
sought to pull the highway closer to themselves, the highway surveyors encountered little
resistance. The inland route, San Francisco to San Diego via Los Angeles, was 592
miles long, and it was no difficult trick to map out the most direct and practicable route
through the centers of population and commerce and the county seats.
62
There was a
predominance of argument one way or the other, the Highway Commission could report
in 1913, and an intelligent decision could be reached. There were local
disappointments, but no sense of irreconcilable injustice.
63
Building the road was
another matter. When Spencer Cortelyou took over State Highway District 7 in 1924, the
entire route between San Diego and Los Angeles had been graded to the minimal width
of 15 feet and was unpaved except for a 6-mile stretch in southeastern Los Angeles
County.
64

276
There was never any doubt that the highway would go through the city of Los
Angeles. It was the heaviest traveled of all state highway routes, according to
Cortelyou, where great volumes of food stuffs are trucked into Los Angeles by means
of a large number of commercial vehicles.
65
The highway was also a priority for Los
Angeles County, which was responsible for the right-of-way outside of incorporated
cities. The most important stretch was some eight miles of highway east of the Los
Angeles city boundary (Indiana Street) and west of the city of Whittier. Within county
territory, where the highway was known as Whittier Boulevard, it passed through fruit
orchards and nut groves, but by the time Cortelyou contemplated the reconstruction of
Whittier Boulevard, his agency noted that Whittier boulevard passes through a territory
undergoing transition from country to city. Orchards are being subdivided for residential,
business, and industrial purposes and problems of both a rural highway and a city street
[have] to be met.
66
Cortelyou and the Division of Highways went to extraordinary
lengths to accommodate the county, especially in designing a new highway that exceeded
the states standard specifications. Thus it is all the more remarkable that the Division of
Highways pointedly ignored the effects of the Whittier Boulevard project on the city of
Los Angeles. In this first significant encounter between state and city engineers, the state
bestowed an enormous problem on the city, which struggled for nearly a decade to cope
with the westbound traffic on Whittier Boulevard, and only accomplished a stopgap
solution that degraded the quality of life on the eastside for generations to come.
Cortelyou and his staff avoided the most controversial highway politics by
leaving the city out of their plans, but the route just east of the city, through rapidly

277
urbanizing county territory, gave them a taste of the what city engineers contended with
on a daily basis. Though spared any arguments with the county about the location, the
Division of Highways still had to negotiate with the county planners over the
specifications for the roadway. The county planning commission, which was established
in 1923, sought to create a high-traffic artery out of Whittier Boulevard by laying out an
easement 80 feet in width.
67
Before the gas tax, the county could not raise the money to
construct such a road except by assessment district, and it did not even attempt to force
through such a plan. The planning commission could, however, require that all
subdivisions along Whittier Boulevard set aside an easement sufficient for the expansive
roadway as a condition of approving the subdivision applications.
68
That was just the
kind of cooperative local condition envisioned by the Division of Highways legal staff
when it based the state-highway program on the assumption of donated rights-of-way.
The state and county disagreed, however, over the roadway plans. To stretch the
gas tax revenues as far as possible, the state engineers declared that We hesitate to
commit the state to a policy of construction . . . of pavements in excess of 30 feet in
width.
69
Even when they compromised on a width of 56 feet four lanes of traffic with
gutters and curbs Cortelyou could not win a commitment from the Highway
Commission to exceed its guidelines for the extra expenditure. Cortelyou then undertook
the irksome process to which his local counterparts had become accustomed, and
assigned the project engineer, A. N. George, to solicit frontage owners to form a special-
assessment district to pay for building a wider highway. George reported that numerous
petty disputes required months of patient negotiation and adjustment. Where

278
agricultural use still prevailed, he had to obtain agreements with growers to move
irrigation lines back from the planned roadway alignment. Subdivisions and individual
homeowners had to relocate fences or have the cost of moving them tacked onto the
construction budget. One farmer extracted the promise that the contractor muzzle his
mules while grading operations were underway to prevent the animals from browsing on
the overhanging limbs of the . . . walnut trees. Not that George encountered opposition
at every turn. Two east side groups, the Belvedere Gardens Chamber of Commerce and
the East Side Association (the same group that put the deal together for North Broadway
bridge) promoted the plan and even helped to collect signatures.
70

The financial structure of the project manifested all the complications that went
into its design and approval. The state could only pay for half of the work. The other
half consisted of the countys share of gas-tax proceeds plus the money raised from the
assessment district. Because state law prohibited the commingling of property-tax funds,
the attorneys at the Division of Highways devised a pair of legally and physically parallel
contracts. The highway was divided along its length and one contract was let for the
northern lanes, paid for directly by the state, while another was let for the southern lanes,
paid for by the county expenditures and the special assessment. The same contractor won
both jobs, the specifications were identical, and the work proceeded as if it were a single
job.
71

Whittier Boulevard served an exemplary role within the state Highway
Commissions mandate to connect the far-flung communities of California with a
network of modern roads. The width and the drainage facilities exceeded the standards

279
that the state was struggling to put in place. The bridge over the San Gabriel River
carried the full four lanes of the improved boulevard, the widest roadway of any bridge in
the state, at 52 feet. The reinforced-concrete beam structure replaced an 18-feet-wide
wooden truss erected by the county at the turn of the century. In contrast to the truss,
which had bracing over the roadway, the new bridge was supported entiurely from below,
providing unlimited vertical clearance for trucks, another aspect of the project that the
state engineers intended as a model for subsequent projects.
72

The new state highway served another purpose too, the one pursued by the
chambers of commerce and the property owners who agreed to help pay for it. The broad
boulevard accelerated the transformation of of orchards into commercial strips and
residential subdivisions. Between 1925 and 1927, the 435-acre Babbitt Ranch was
developed as the community of Montebello Park.
73
Such real estate windfalls assured the
cooperation of county officials and their business-sector clients, a neccesary alliance for
Cortelyou because this stretch of Whittier Boulevard was the most expensive state
highway built up to that time, both in total cost and in cost per mile. The project
benefited from comfortable coexistence between the goals of building a through highway
and enhancing local real estate opportunities.
That congenial setting ended at the city boundary of Los Angeles, and the
construction project did too. Cortelyou was certainly aware of the competing interests
arrayed around the improvement of Whittier Boulevard within the city, as well as the
highly charged setting for road policy in city government, where approval consumed
years rather than months, and where a majority of proposals reach fulfillment. Not only

280
did Cortelyou have more than a decade's experience in the regional highway
establishment, but his brother, Herbert, had worked in the city engineering department
since 1911, and starting in 1924 Herbert served as principal construction engineer for the
river bridges.
74
Cortelyou simply ignored the concerns of Los Angeles property owners
and city officials and presented them with the fait accompli of an improved highway
pouring traffic into the east side. He either did not consider the effects within the city
boundary of the improved Whittier Boulevard or he understood the effects and ignored
them. Either way, he initiated the practice of blanking out the east side on the state
highway map, while at the same time establishing long-term traffic problems for the area
so pointedly missing from the plans. He need only have consulted the citys Major
Traffic Street Plan, which was issued the same year he initiated negotiations for Whittier
Boulevard, and which correctly predicted that westbound traffic on an upgraded Whittier
Boulevard would have to travel north on Boyle Avenue in order to continue through the
city.
75
This unwieldy configuration of movement would persist through the following
decades and eventually require extreme measures to resolve (including, ultimately, the
East Los Angeles Interchange).
Within the city, the Whittier Boulevard right-of-way was 35-feet wide and
unpaved for most of its length. It dead-ended on a high bluff overlooking the Los
Angeles River hardly the appropriate setting for a bridge that would allow inter-
regional traffic to continue through Los Angeles. If the alignment were projected across
the river, it would have lined up with Sixth Street, but there was no bridge at Sixth, and
no plans for one. The bond-issue for the river bridges, approved by city voters in 1923,

281
did not include a bridge at Sixth, but one to the north, at Fourth Street, and another to the
south, at Seventh. The low-lying land along the river, below the bluff, was all owned by
the Union Pacific Railroad, which had initiated the plans to upgrade Tenth Street as part
of the scheme to transform that vast acreage into the Central Manufacturing District.
Any major artery north of Tenth would bisect the railroad property, taking land that could
otherwise be profitably developed.
76

On the east side, along Whittier Boulevard, a different kind of growth interest and
a different kind of transportation vision prevailed. The members of the Whittier
Boulevard Chamber of Commerce were proprietary manufacturers and retailers who
sought improved transportation access for their businesses, and small-scale property
owners seeking to increase the development potential of their land. In 1925 the Chamber
president, realtor W. F. Ault, acknowledged that his members already enjoyed the
advantages of proximity to the busy street, which, he noted, Has helped more than any
other Boulevard to build up the East Side of Los Angeles. They wanted to expand that
advantage by enlarging Whittier from its 35-foot width, and by extending it from Boyle
Street to the river. Ault and the small businesspeople of the east side did not subscribe to
the same goals as the Union Pacific. On the contrary, Ault viewed the Union Pacific plan
for the Central Manufacturiing District as a direct threat to the upgrade of Whittier
Boulevard: Property in the route required for this opening is fast developing into an
industrial district and delays will add unnecessary expense. The added expense would
come from the higher cost of acquiring land for the road after factories and warehouses
were constructed, rather than buying undeveloped land. Ault frankly admitted the

282
competition: The Union Pacific industrial promoters will resent cutting across their
tract. He did not shy away from it, but asked the city to take the property by eminent
domain for a route through the railroad tract.
77

Highway-planning on the east side was stalemated by the conflicting prerogatives
of two powerful interests, the Union Pacific on one side and Aults chamber of commerce
on the other. John R. Prince, the head of the city engineering department's Streets
Division, gave the city council a discouraging report on Ault's request in December 1925.
Under the 1923 bond issue, the bridge at Fourth Street would be replaced and the one at
Seventh Street upgraded for heavier traffic. It made no sense, he argued, to enlarge an
east-west artery that fell between those two possible crossing locations. He admitted that
Whittier could not handle its current level of use, particularly the cars heading west into
the city. Diverting the Whittier traffic south to Seventh Street bridge offered only a
partial solution because it was a narrow crossing, barely affording one lane in each
direction when the streetcar line was also taken into account. Routing the Whittier traffic
north to the new bridge planned at Fourth would require a diagonal connector running
northwest from the corner of Whittier and Boyle, which would have to cross the railroad
property. It was a prohibitively expensive option because of the length of the connector
and the likelihood that the Union Pacific would oppose it in court. Sixth Street seemed
the proper location for Whittier Boulevard traffic to cross the river, but there were no
bond funds or any other source of money for a bridge there. Even if there were, the
property owners west of the river had expressed no desire for a new bridge and highway,
and the city would need their participation in order to complete Whittier across the river.

283
Prince concluded that any plans for the city to improve Whittier Boulevard were
premature.
78
This was the intractable issue that Spencer Cortelyou wrote out of the
states plans for the boulevard when he declined to take into account what would happen
to wetbound traffic on the new state highway when it crossed the municipal boundary.
John Prince, however, could not ignore that traffic. Buoyed by the success of the
1923 bond referendum and the progress on the river bridges, in early 1926 the council
was considering another bridge-bond referendum for the April election. Alarmed about
the predicament that would ensue when Cortelyous highway opened, Prince inserted
$500,000 into the referendum for a bridge over the Los Angeles River at Sixth Street and
to widen Whittier Boulevard between the bridge and the east city boundary in order to
accommodate the new levels of traffic coming from that direction. To connect the west
end of Whittier Boulevard with the bridge over the river, a long approach span was
required to cross the Union Pacific property in the floodplain. The railroad agreed to
donate an easement over its property after Prince pointed out that an elevated roadway
would interfere less with the development of the industrial district than would a highway
that ran through at grade. Spanning the railroad property meant carrying the road above
grade all the way from Boyle Avenue to the river, more than doubling the length of the
structure and adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to its estimated cost.
79

Another factor that increased the estimates was the continued development of
property along Whittier Boulevard. As raw land filled up with buildings, the citys
damage payments for acquiring the frontage needed to widen the right-of-way rose
accordingly. The price of vacant land also escalated in the frenetic economy of growth.

284
According to one admiring report in the Los Angeles Times, land in the Ransom Tract, on
the south side of Whittier Boulevard just east of the Union Pacific property, had risen in
value from $700 to $5,000 an acre between 1922 and 1925. Prince, the city council, and
the chamber of commerce understood from the start that the bond issue would have to be
augmented by tax increments, especially for the boulevard portion of the work. As the
project cost and the anticipated tax increments kept climbing, the frontage owners began
to balk. Local support was further eroded by the city engineers roadway design, which
called for straightening out the Whittier alignment at several locations through the east
side. That meant taking land and buildings at strategic corners. The chamber of
commerce still supported the improvements, but petitioned for changing the routing at
those corners so that existing buildings would not have to be removed. The east-side
property owners also asked the city to economize by narrowing down the right-of-way so
that less land would be taken. In 1927, Princes staff complied with all these requests by
redesigning the road twice, but the goal of economy was defeated by the continued
increase in real estate values. Each time, the width of the right-of-way shrank, but the
cost of acquiring it grew.
80

The project cost also kept spiraling upward because of further industrial
development in the congested river corridor. On the west side, in 1927, a six-story
warehouse went up right at the curb line on the south side of Sixth Street, just two blocks
in from the river. The warehouse extended about 12 feet into the roadway that the
engineers had planned to build for the western approach to the bridge. Damage payments
to remove that one building were estimated to be $100,000. The west side property-

285
owners had already ruled out a high-level approach span above their properties, so the
city council ordered the engineers simply to jog the right-of-way to the north to avoid the
warehouse. That produced a sharp skew on the bridge itself and a further cost increase
for the complex fabrication of the river spans. At that crucial juncture, the city council
approved the most extreme cost-saving measure that the engineers had been able to
devise. The council endorsed a design option that would route the Whittier
improvements as much as possible onto property already owned by the city. The final
alignment through the east side took land from five schoolyards, eliminated a city
playground, and clipped off what was then the southern end of Hollenbeck Park.
81

The final design of Whittier Boulevard called for a width of 56 feet, the bare
minimum needed to provide the four lanes that would correspond to the state highway
that ended at the city border. The jogs in the existing street would be preserved rather
than eliminated, and public recreational spaces would be shrunk all along the route. It
was a design based on political feasibility as much as a response to the traffic emergency
created by the state Division of Highways. Whittier Boulevard would reflect the
lobbying of diverse property holders with no unity of interest or opinion. The residents
who used the park, playground and schoolyards were not heard in the deliberations, nor
were they asked whether an improved highway was worth the sacrifice of their
recreational areas.
Sixth Street Bridge finally opened in 1931, but not before recurring shortfalls
forced Prince to take money from six other projects to complete the budget for it.
82
The
bridge received the usual plaudits from its builders and the organs of civic progress. The

286

Figure 8: East Los Angeles and surrounding area, 1935. Whittier Boulevard is shown as a bold line.
Number 1, Sixth Street Bridge; Number 2, Los Angeles City boundary. Source: Road Map of
Metropolitan Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Automobile Club of Southern California, 1935). Used with
permission; all rights reserved.

287
fitness of its structure, the restrained stylishness of its design, and the panoramic views
from the span all came in for their share of praise, but the remarks seem like half-hearted
groping for some positive statement when all attempts to find one rang hollow. The best
that the chief engineer could say for the asymmetrical, through-arch river spans was that
they were an unusual design, based on the high clearance necessitated by crossing over
the railroad property on the east side, combined with the bend in its middle that was
necessitated by avoiding the warehouse to the west. With little money for non-structural
features, the architect for the bridge concentrated on the design of the light standards and
the pylons, which read like isolated flourishes, in keeping with the afterthought that they
were. The architect could not even fall back convincingly on the rhetoric of harmonious
line and proportion, because the bridge was too narrow for its height, followed a
deformed alignment, and was completely out of balance, with a long eastern approach
and barely any approach at all to the west. The creators of the bridge strived for
elegance, but they realized that their accomplishment was more novel than graceful.
Their most unabashed comments were reserved for the view of the city afforded from the
bridge.
83

All the distortions that made the bridge an unwieldy structure and Whittier
Boulevard a narrow and tortuous thoroughfare had their origins in the contested politics
of transportation development in Los Angeles during the 1920s and 1930s. Caught
between the conflicting demands of two influential business interests and constrained
from exploring alternative routes by the pre-emptive actions of the state Division of
Highways, the Los Angeles city engineers found an economical way to thread the route

288
through the east side by imposing the social cost of transportation onto the workingclass
residents who were flooding into the area during the negotiations over this project. There
is no smoking gun in the archives, no statement by any of the principals in these events
that they could capitalize on the social submission of east side residents in order to bring
the project to fruition at a price that was acceptable to the more influential stakeholders.
There is, however, the evidence of the structures themselves, and the neighborhood onto
which they were imposed.
The east side grew rapidly after World War I as a a workingclass community of
Mexicans, Jews, Japanese, and other people who had little choice in where they lived.
These people were part of the labor force for the industrial growth of Los Angeles, which
accelerated in the 1920s with branch plants of companies based in the east and midwest
as well as large-scale development plans such as the Central Manufacturing District.
Another factor in the transformation of the east side was the relocation of tens of
thousands of Mexicans, both new immigrants from Mexico and people who had
previously lived in Sonoratown, around the old plaza on the west side of the river. At
the same time that the expansion of downtown Los Angeles pushed out the residents of
Sonoratown, realtors and developers adopted the use of racially restrictive covenants to
prohibit undesirables from buying homes in much of the newly developing area of the
city. Undesirable groups included Japanese, Jews and African Americans, as well as
Mexicans. These covenants shaped the racial geography of Los Angeles not only by
where they where used, but equally by where they were not used. The combination of
population growth and exclusionary real estate practices helped to make the east side into

289
a multi-ethnic community of working people who were prevented from living in most
other parts of the city. By the end of the 1920s, the east side was home to about fifteen
percent of the citys population, which during that decade had surged from a little under
600,000 to over 1.2 million. More than a third of the eastsiders were Mexican. A like
number of eastside residents were Jews, either newly arrived from Europe or, especially
after 1924, relocated from cities in the eastern United States.
84

Also embodied in the choices of the engineers and the city council is the pattern
of what they chose not to do: they chose not to refrain from exploiting the residents of
Boyle Heights and the east side when that possibility arose as the resolution to a stubborn
problem. Just as the real estate covenants established the citys ethnic and racial
distribution according to where they were not used, the transportation choices that were
not taken helped to shape the everyday lives of the people of Boyle Heights. Another
choice not taken during the same years that the Whittier alignment was under negotiation
involved the use of pedestrian tunnels to ameliorate some of the dangers posed by traffic.
Between 1925 and 1928, the city built 40 pedestrian tunnels under busy thoroughfares
adjacent to schools. Though Whittier Boulevard not only ran alongside five schools, but
had actually taken land from the schoolyards, just one of the new tunnels was on
Whittier.
85
The placement of a high-traffic artery through the center of Boyle Heights,
the diminution of play areas, and the minimal pedestrian amenities helped to define that
neighborhood as a place where the residency of undesirables would be tolerated. The
creation of Whittier Boulevard was part of a progression of actions that caused the
identification of certain people with certain places in Los Angeles, a process that

290
unfolded over decades and that reflected the accumulation of many decisions and their
results. This embedded quality of socio-spatial identification helps explain how prejudice
can be literally built into the fabric of the city, and suggests as well why it can be so
difficult to overcome.
Spencer Cortelyou and the state Division of Highways forced the timing and
shaped the spatial conditions in which the city engineers designed Sixth Street Bridge and
their portion of Whittier Boulevard, but the municipal construction project did not fulfill
the states goal of creating an efficient inter-regional highway through Los Angeles.
Because west-bank property owners prevented the improvement of the route beyond the
river corridor, Sixth Street petered out into a narrow thoroughfare immediately west of
the river, suited only for local traffic. While the city struggled with its plans, Cortelyou
and the state could only tinker around with their route designations in the attempt to
establish a highway for inter-regional traffic. They followed the lead of all the cars that
turned north onto Boyle Avenue before Whittier and the bridge were completed, and
christened that as the state highway route for through travel. As predicted in the Major
Traffic Street Plan, that traffic then crossed the river to the north, at the First and Macy
street bridges.
86
The problem of accommodating regional rather than local traffic was
postponed until the freeway plans that began to take legal shape in the early 1940s. The
most difficult problem for the state highway engineers at that remained how to get traffic
across the Los Angeles River. Spencer Cortelyou still headed State Highway District 7
during those negotiations, and once again he readily sacrificed the quality of life on the

291
east side to capitalize on a narrow window of opportunity to build a highway of
unprecedented scale.

City, County and State
After completing the states portion of Whittier Boulevard in 1926, Cortelyou and
the District 7 staff devoted the bulk of their efforts to highways in far less developed
areas of the region. The coast highway occupied much of their attention, and in the late
1920s the state engineers relish for massive landscape transformation found an outlet in
the reconstruction of the Ridge Route through the Tehachapi Mountains. The built-up
areas of metropolitan Los Angeles could not be ignored; except for mountain ranges the
dense traffic of the city represented the foremost obstacle to inter-regional traffic. But
Cortelyous role was largely to evaluate proposals from city and county engineers for the
allocation of state funding to projects designed and initiated locally.
The county hired a professional engineer, George T. Jones, as its highway
commissioner. Starting in 1927, Jones laid out the peripheral loop of highways around
the city with help from Ernest East, the Auto Club engineer, and the city engineers used
the nine-cent funds from the second Major Traffic Street Plan referendum to build
those portions of the loop within their boundaries, including North Figueroa Street and
San Fernando Road. Never again did the county partake in highway construction that
effected city traffic without consulting with John Prince and the city engineers. In 1928,
Jones approached the city with a plan to build a regional artery running northeast from
Los Angeles, along the line of the Pacific Electrics Covina Line. Later known as

292
Ramona Boulevard, this project would make use of the recently completed bridges that
carried the street-railway tracks over city streets, to make a grade-separated roadway
through east Los Angeles.
87
The city managed to complete the section east of Soto
Street, but further west, where the right-of-way approached Mission Road and the
industrial district along the river, the project foundered. Its completion would only occur
under a new public-works regime in the city, which was a response to the economic crisis
of the Great Depression.

293
NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

1
Osborne from 1913-14 report.

2
Owen D. Gutfreund, Twenthieth Centry Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American
Landscape (NY: Oxford University Press, 2004); Bruce Seely, Building the American Highway System:
Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

3
Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1941-1956 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of
Kansas, 1979), 98.

4
Brian D. Taylor, When Finance Leads Planning: The Influence of Public Finance on Transportation
Policy and Planning in California, Ph.D. diss., Urban Planning, UCLA, 1992; Jeffrey R. Brown, Trapped
in the Past: The Gas Tax and Highway Finance, M.A. thesis, Urban Planning, UCLA, 1998; Clifford
Ellis, Visions of Urban Freeways, 1930-1970, Ph.D. diss., City and Regional Planning, University of
California, Berkeley, 1990; Mark Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and
Urban Transportation, 1900-1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); Jeffrey R. Brown,
"Statewide Transportation Planning: Lessons from California," Transportation Quarterly 56 (Spring
2002): 51-62; Martin Wachs, "The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles: Images of Past
Policies and Future Prospects," in Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, eds., The City: Los Angeles and
Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 106-
59.

5
Seely, Gutfreund [page #s]; Frederic L. Paxson, The American Highway Movement, American
Historical Review 51 (January 1946): 236-53; Wayne E. Fuller, Good Roads and the Rural Free Delivery
of Mail, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42 (June 1955): 67-83.

6
Richard M. Zettel, An Analysis of Taxation for Highway Purposes in California, 1895-1946, Submitted
tothe Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Highways, Streets and Bridges, California Legislature
(Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1946), 6-7.

7
California Bureau of Highways, Biennial Report, 1896, 8.

8
Commission on Revenue and Taxation in the State of California, Report to the Legislature (Sacramento:
State Printing Office, 1906), 9-109.

9
Zettel, An Analysis of Taxation, 16.

10
"Cortelyou New Head of Los Angeles Division," California Highways and Public Works 1 (April
1924): 15; "Au Revoir: Spencer Cortelyou Concludes 38 Years of Loyal State Service," California
Highways and Public Works 28 (September-October 1949): 19-23, 59.

11
State Highways Act of 1909, March 22, 1909, in California Statutes, 1909, Chapter 383: 647.

12
John C. Burnham, The Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution, Mississippi Valley Historical
Review 48 (December 1961): 435-59, quotation on 435.

13
Thomas H. McDonald, How Highway Financing Has Evolved, Engineering News-Record 104
(January 2, 1930): 4-7; McDonald was the head of the federal Bureau of Public Roads.

294

14
Burnham, The Gasoline Tax; clippings from Oregon Voter, January 11, 1919 and March 8, 1919,
courtesy of Robert Hadley, Oregon Department of Transportation; Los Angeles Times, September 28, 1923,
December 28, 1923.

15
Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1923.

16
Los Angeles Times, October 24, 1923.

17
Zettel, An Analysis of Taxation, 48-53.

18
The central role of the coast highway in the popular representation of southern California can be
observed across all media. Since the 1930s, newspaper and magazine articles have continually asserted that
role, e.g., A Fortnight among Pacific Wonders: A Short Guide to the Coasts Scenic Attractions, Touring
Topics, July 1932, 28-38, and more recently, John Odell, The Soul of a State: The Coast Route, Los
Angeles Times, 27 May 1999. The numerous guidebooks and photo books include Stephen Wilkes,
California One: The Pacific Coast Highway (New York: Friendly Press, 1987); Kenn Oberrecht, Driving
the Pacific Coast: Scenic Driving Tours along the Pacific Coast Highway (Chester, CT: Pequot Press,
1991); Stephen L. Smoke, Pacific Coast Highway (London: Headline, 1994); Tom Snyder, Pacific Coast
Highway Travelers Guide (New York: St. Martins, 2000). Among the many movies that depict the coast
highway, the recreational resources strung along it, and the imputations of a distinctive regional culture
centered on those locations, see Beach Blanket Bingo, directed by William Asher, American International
Pictures, 1965; How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, directed by William Asher, Warner Brothers, 1965; and Its a
Bikini World, directed by Stephanie Rothman, United Artists, 1967. The main songwriter for the Beach
Boys, Brian Wilson, described his syncretic creative process in formulating the image of the group as the
conscious attempt to graft the extant reputation of the highway and its beaches onto the rhythm and blues
forms that emerged from African American culture, in Brian Wilson with Todd Gold, Wouldnt It Be Nice:
My Own Story (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 19-21.

19
Timothy Davis, Rock Creek Park and Potomac Parkway, Washington, D. C.: The Evolution of a
Contested Urban Landscape, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 19 (Summer
1999): 192-209; Ocean Parkway, in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., Encyclopedia of New York City (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), s.v.; on the origins of scenic roadways for automobiles in urban
parks practice see Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 21-40.

20
Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf,
1974); Improved Tioga Road Opened to Motorists by Government, Touring Topics, May 1919, 14; All
California Backs New Yosemite Road Project, Touring Topics, May 1919. Touring Topics was the
monthly member magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern California.

21
Bruce Radde, The Merritt Parkway (New Haven: Yale University Pres, 1993).

22
State Highways Act of 1909, March 22, 1909, in California Statutes, 1909, Chapter 383: 647.

23
Margot Patterson Doss, Walking the Historical Dimension: Odd and Literary Trekkers on the
California Coast, California Waterfront Age 4 (Winter 1988): 28-35; William Everson, Archetype West:
The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region (Berkeley: Oyez Press, 1976); Charles J. Smeaton, California
Coast Trails: A Horseback Ride from Mexico to Oregon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913).

24
Nan Lawler, Closing the Gap: The Coast Line and its Bridges in Ventura and Santa Barbara
Counties, Railroad History 145 (Autumn 1981): 87-105; The Coast Country of California between San

295

Francisco and Santa Barbara, Prepared from Data Furnished by Agents of the Company (San Francisco:
Southern Pacific [Railroad] Company, 1907).

25
John E. Baur, The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870-1900 (San Marino, CA: Huntington
Library, 1959); W. M. Chamberlain, Notes on the Sanitary and Climatic Conditions of Southern California
(New York: Trows Printing, 1886).

26
Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1910 (quotation) and October 30, 1910.

27
Good Roads Bond Issue, Touring Topics, November 1909, 8; Must Defeat Bond Issues, Touring
Topics, November 1910, 5-10.

28
J. Allen Davis, The Friend to All Motorists: The Story of the Automobile Club of Southern California
(Los Angeles: Automobile Club of Southern California, 1967), 33-34.

29
Routing the California State Highway: Attorney General Confirms the Commissions Position,
California Highway Bulletin 1 (October 1912): 4-7; First Biennial Report of the California Highway
Commission, a Subdivision of the Department of Engineering of the State of California, to Accompany the
Sixth Biennial Report of That Department (Sacramento, 1919): 25-27.

30
Charles D. Blaney, Building the State Highway, California Highway Bulletin 2 (July 1914): 3-5.

31
County Highway Work, California Highway Bulletin 1 (October 1912): 2; on San Diegos
competition with Los Angeles, see Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-
1930 (1967; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 43-62.

32
Counties Provide Rights of Way and Bridges, California Highway Bulletin 1 (October 1912): 8-9;
Historic Highway Bridges of California, 73-75, 92-93.

33
Fourth Biennial Report of the California Highway Commission (Sacramento, 1924), 23-24; Historic
Highway Bridges of California, 6-7.

34
Charles C. Carleton, Securing Rights of Way for the State Roads, California Highway Bulletin 1
(May 1913): 23.

35
Austin B. Fletcher, Rights of Way, California Highway Bulletin 3 (January 1915): 7-8, 15.

36
Blaney, Building the State Highway, 2.

37
The condition of the coast highway in 1914 and 1915 can be inferred from progress reports on its
construction from more than a decade later, when litigation, bridges, drainage, and gradient issues were all
consuming the state highway district engineers; see, for instance, California Highways and Public Works,
December 1924, 4; January 1925, 3; April 1925, 7-8; April 1926, 3.

38
Rindges memoir is a classic portrayal southern Californias late-19
th
-century Yankee émigrés;
Frederick H. Rindge, Happy Days in Southern California (1898; reprint, Anaheim, CA: KNI, Inc., 1984).

39
David F. Myrick, The Determined Mrs. Rindge and her Legendary Railroad, Ventura County
Historical Society Quarterly 41 (1996): 9-35; Ventura Free Press, 8 September 1905, 20 October 1905, 13
April 1906; 7 February 1908; 15 April 1910; Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the
Imagination of Disaster (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 99-104.

296

40
Transcript of interview with James Deeson, UCLA Special Collections, 1961, 11-14; Map of
Automobile Routes from Los Angeles to Topango Canyon and Return, 1912, Automobile Club of
Southern California Archives; Los Angeles Times, September 13 1917.

41
Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1907; November 3, 1910; October 28, 1913.

42
Controversies over Highway Routes Reviewed, California Highway Bulletin 1 (May 1913): 7-11.

43
Frank A. Vanderlip, in National Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. 15, (New York: James T.
White & Co., 1916), s.v.; Robert Stanley Meyer, The Influence of Frank Vanderlip and the National City
Bank on American Commerce and Foreigh Policy, Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1968.

44
Los Angeles Times, December 3, 1913.

45
Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1916.

46
Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1914, February 6, 1914, February 22, 1914, January 23, 1918.

47
Los Angeles Times, February 1, 1916; May 14, 1916 (quotation); April 10, 1917.

48
The People v. May K. Rindge et al., 174 Cal. 743, Docket # LA 3752, 1917, in California Supreme
Court Records and Briefs, volume 2107; Los Angeles Times, January 23, 1918.

49
Rindge Co. et al. v. Los Angeles County, 262 U.S. 700, 701, 11 June 1923, available at
www.supremecourtus.gov/casefinder (keyword = Rindge) and at www.caselaw.findlaw.com/cgi-
bin/getcase (court = US, vol = 262, invol = 700). Also see Charles C. Carleton, Legal Department, in
California Highway Commission, Biennial Report, 1922, Part II of the First Annual Report of the
Department of Public Works (Sacramento, 1922), 84-89; Spencer V. Cortelyou, Division 7 Report,
California Highways and Public Works, March 1924, 14-15.

50
Administering the State Highway Trust, California Highway Bulletin 1 (May 1913): 4-6.

51
Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1919.

52
Report of Commissioners, in Fourth Biennial Report of the California Highway Commission, 1924
(Sacramento, 1924), 15-25; C. P. Montgomery, Highway Construction through Famous Rancho Malibu,
California Highways and Public Works, January 1927, 6; Newport-Laguna Beach Coast Highway Views,
California Highways and Public Works, March 1927, 4; Report of the State Highway Engineer, in Sixth
Biennial Report of the Division of Highways to the Director of the Department of Public Works,
Constituting the Biennial Report of the California Highway Commission, 1928 (Sacramento, 1929), 17-18;
Fred J. Grumm, Surveys and Plans, in Sixth Biennial Report, 1928, 29-32 (quotation); on the relationship
between nature and technology among engineering professionals, see David Nye, American Technological
Sublime (Cambridge, PA: MIT Press, 1994).

53
A. D. Griffin, The Spectacular Hauser Contract, California Highways and Public Works, October
1924, 10.

54
Building the Highway around Point Mugu, California Highways and Public Works, October 1924, 5.

297

55
Spectacular Hauser Grading Contract Is Accepted, California Highways and Public Works, August
1925, 12; Spencer V. Cortelyou, Division 7 Report, California Highways and Public Works, September
1925, 4; Spencer V. Cortelyou, Division 7 Report, California Highways and Public Works, April 1926,
12; Division 7 Reports Experience in Placing Riprap, California Highways and Public Works, October
1926, 11; Spencer V. Cortelyou, Division 7 Report, California Highways and Public Works, January
1927, 15; List of Contracts in Force, California Highways and Public Works, September-October 1928, 25.

56
A. N. George, Line and Grade Changes Important Factors in Reconstruction of Southern Highway,
California Highways and Public Works, January 1925, 3-5; Spencer V. Cortelyou, Division 7 Report,
California Highways and Public Works, August 1926, 12; Safety Is Built into Monumental Southern
Project, California Highways and Public Works, October 1926, 3-5.

57
Magnificent Highway Is Formally Opened, California Highways and Public Works, July-August
1929, 6-9; Pickford and Fairbanks Help Dedicate Highway, California Highways and Public Works,
November 1926, 4-5; Gidget, directed by Paul Wendkos, Columbia Pictures, 1959.

58
List of Contracts in Force, California Highways and Public Works, March 1927, 37; Rindge Ranch
Conference, California Highways and Public Works, May 1927, 4; Rancho Malibu: An Historic Real
Estate Offering (Los Angeles: Marblehead Land Co., 1929).

59
California Highway Commission, Biennial Report, 1924, 15.

60
Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1963; May 2, 1979.

61
Mike Davis, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, in Ecology of Fear, 93-147.

62
One Thousand Miles of Highway Surveyed, California Highway Bulletin 1 (October 1912): 11.

63
Controversies over Highway Routes Reviewed, California Highway Bulletin 1 (May 1913): 7-11,
quotations on 8.

64
Whittier Paving Rushed, California Highways and Public Works, September 1924, 12.

65
"California's Most Costly State Highway," California Highways and Public Works 1 (November 1924):
4; "New Bridge Completed on Historic Whittier Boulevard," California Highways and Public Works 3
(March 1926): 5.

66
Cooperative Project Completes New Whittier Boulevard, California Highways and Public Works 3
(May 1926): 5-6.

67
Los Angeles Times, June 27, 1923.

68
Los Angeles City Engineer, Annual Report, 1922-23, 46; Frank D. Fargo, Local Level Planning in
California, Traffic Quarterly 3 (July 1949): 259-67.

69
Standards of Construction, in California Highway Commission, Biennial Report, 1924, 21.

70
Cooperative Project Completes New Whittier Boulevard; Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1924.

71
Ibid.

298

72
New Bridge Completed on Historic Whittier Boulevard, California Highways and Public Works 3
(March 1926): 5; Los Angeles Times, September 27, 1925.

73
Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1925.

74
Herbert Cortelyou obituary in Los Angeles Evening Herald, October 30, 1947.

75
Frederick Law Olmsted [Jr.], Harland Bartholomew, and Charles Henry Cheney, A Major Traffic Street
Plan for Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Traffic Commission of the City and County of Los Angeles, 1924),
36.

76
On Tenth Street and the river bridges, see Chapter Four.

77
Letters from W. F. Ault, president, Whittier Boulevard Chamber of Commerce, to Los Angeles City
Council, 21 September 1925 (first quotation) and 23 September 1925 (second and third quotations),
Council File # 5814, City Archives.

78
Report of John R. Prince to City Council, 17 December 1925, Council File #5814, City Archives.

79
Reports of J. R. Prince to City Council, 6 July 1926, 11 August 1926, Council File #5814, City
Archives; Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1926. The Sixth Street bridge is 3,546 feet long from its western
terminus to the east bank of the river; the approach causeway spanning the Union Pacific property on the
east side, which begins at Boyle Avenue and blends into the bridge at the east bank of the river, is 4,275
feet long. Thus, more of the structure passes over land on the east side than over the river channel and the
west side combined. See Merrill Butler, Sixth Street Viaduct, Los Angeles," Western Construction News
and Highway Builder, 10 July 1932, 385-91; Butler was engineer in charge of bridges and structures for the
city of Los Angeles.

80
Letter from Ninth District Chamber of Commerce (successor to the Whittier Boulevard Chamber of
Commerce) to City Council, 12 April 1927, Council File #2693. Letter from City Clerk to City Engineer, 5
August 1927; letter from John Prince and John Shaw to City Council, 3 October 1927; both in Council File
#5814; Ransom Tract in Los Angeles Times, February 27, 1925.

81
Report of Merrill Butler, Engineer of Bridges and Structures, to City Council, 20 May 1927, Council
File #2693. Whittier Boulevard did not run directly through what had been Hollenbeck Park, but because
of the traffic problems where Whittier met Boyle Avenue, the city engineers also included in the project the
improvement of the streets north of this intersection, and that required taking land from Hollenbeck Park.
The warehouse put up at the curb line in 1927 is still there today, at the southeast corner of Sixth and Mateo
streets.

82
Annual Report of the City Engineer, 1927-28, chap. 6, p. 82; 1928-29, chap. 6, p. 3, 12-13; 1930-31,
chap. 7, p. 7; 1931-32, chap. 6, p. 2; Report of Board of Public Works to City Council, 31 October 1931,
Council File #8320; Merrill Butler, Sixth Street Viaduct, Los Angeles," Western Construction News and
Highway Builder, 10 July 1932, 385-91.

83
Butler, Sixth Street Viaduct; Louis L. Huot, "Lighting the New Sixth Street Viaduct," Western City
(July 1933), 19-20, and Louis L. Huot, "Modern Lines Are Reflected in New Los Angeles Viaduct,"
Architect and Engineer (October 1933), 25-30; Huot was the project architect.

299

84
George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los
Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 73-80, 259; Albert Camarillo, Chicanos
in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern
California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 35-38; 35-38; Ricardo Romo,
East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 61-80; Edward J.
Escobar, Race, Police and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles
Police Department, 1900-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 166-67. Escobar notes
that people of Mexican heritage were undercounted in the censuses before World War II, which makes it
difficult to derive precise population figures.

85
The city engineers, the traffic commission, and the city council all made recommendations on where to
build the tunnels, and the final roster of sites (1928) reflected a combination of statistically demonstrated
necessity and the political exigencies of council members needing to win expenditures for their own
districts. It is possible as well to detect another, inexplicit transcript in the decisions over tunnel locations,
as certain parts of the city were singled out for these new refinements in pedestrian safety and others were
consigned to the more perilous condition of autos and pedestrians having to share the same street space. In
the formula for allocating the tunnel bonds, no council district would receive fewer than two tunnels, and it
was that minimum that was built in the district containing Whittier Boulevard. The Whittier tunnel was at
the corner of Euclid and the other tunnel in the district was at the corner of Brooklyn Avenue and Breed
Street. See memo from Ivan Kelso, General Counsel, to E. E. East, Chief Engineer, Automobile Club of
Southern California, 23 October 1925, and H. H. Holley, Assistant Chief Engineer, table of locations,
Pedestrian Subways, 1925 Bond Issue, 4 September 1928, both in Box 38, Folder 427, Ernest E. East
Collection, Auto Club of Southern California Archives; Miller McClintock, Pedestrian Tunnels for School
Children, American City 34 (January 1926): 81-2.
86
Traffic on Whittier Boulevard at the eastern city boundary was counted at about 26,500 vehicles per day
in January 1929; though no count was taken for Sixth Street just west of the river at the same time, that
count was taken eight years later, and was about 10,000 vehicles fewer than the traffic at the eastern city
boundary. The difference must have been even greater in 1929, before completion of the Sixth Street
bridge. Some of the difference can be accounted for by local traffic, i.e., vehicles bound for local
destinations on the east side that turned off Whittier before reaching the river, but the bulk of the difference
was the through traffic that turned north on Boyle or Soto to continue on through the city; see Los Angeles
Herald, 2 March 1929, and County of Los Angeles, Regional Planning Commission, Report of a Highway
Traffic Survey in the County of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Regional Planning Commission, 1937), 54, 61.
87
Letter from George T. Jones to Los Angeles City Council, November 16, 1928, and Report of John C.
Shaw, City Engineer, to City Council, December 18, 1928, both in Council File #10357, City Archives; Los
Angeles Times, September 6, 1931.

300
CHAPTER 6

NEW DEALS: LLOYD ALDRICH AND THE IMPROVISED ORIGINS OF THE LA
FREEWAYS

During his lengthy tenure as city engineer, from 1933 to 1955, Lloyd Aldrich
refined the dealmaking culture of public engineering in Los Angeles to its highest stage
of development, abetted crucially by his complementary role as the citys coordinator for
all federal relief programs during the Depression. His acuity in piecing together
construction-funding agreements brought Aldrich to the attention of Harry Hopkins,
Franklin Roosevelts key lieutenant, when Hopkins was setting up the Works Progress
Administration (WPA), and Aldrichs role in devising the guidelines for WPA projects
further enhanced his efforts to capture federal money for Los Angeles. By 1936, three
years into the New Deal, the Federal Coordinating Division in Aldrichs engineering
bureau had been the conduit for just under $100 million for public improvements of all
kinds in this city.
1
Not all the money was spent yet, because extensive storm drain
systems, highways, and harbor facilities took years to build, but the figure was
nonetheless staggering: at that time, the value of all the citys infrastructure built since
1915 -- sewers, storm drains, streets, sidewalks, lighting, parks, government buildings,
schools -- was valued at only about twice that amount.
2

Such largesse could only cause massive transformation of the metropolitan
landscape, and, more than anyone else, Lloyd Aldrich determined how and where it

301
would be spent. He was no Robert Moses, whose authority derived directly from the
New York State constitution and who had his own dedicated funding mechanism from
toll revenues.
3
Aldrich nominally reported to the Board of Public Works, and even if he
managed the board more than the board managed him, Aldrich was genuinely
subordinate to the city council, which had to approve every contract. Aldrich had to
cajole rather than dictate, to capitalize on transient opportunities to align otherwise
competing interests. That was how he put in place the defining characteristics of the Los
Angeles freeway network
Aldrichs funding-based power and his operational methods could not help but to
stimulate controversy. Nor did Aldrich shy away from it. He never disavowed his
loyalty to the mayor who appointed him city engineer, the notoriously corrupt Frank
Shaw, who was driven from office in a 1938 recall election. Shaws successor, the
reformist Fletcher Bowron, who had a prominent role in the crusade against Shaw, tried
to dismiss Aldrich, but Aldrich survived every attempt. Aldrich also fought Bowron to a
stalemate in Bowrons attempts to diminish the power of the city engineer. And he struck
back at his antagonist, mounting three futile campaigns to challenge Bowron for the
mayoralty and deploying the initiative process to build more autonomy into the
engineering function.
4

To trace the impact of Aldrichs career and its implications for transportation in
Los Angeles, this chapter first provides a brief biography of Aldrich and an assessment of
his rivalry with Fletcher Bowron. While the blare and glare of electoral politics provide
trenchant anecdotes and neatly encapsulated narratives of triumph and defeat, the more

302
mundane work that Aldrich conducted out of the spotlight had far greater and more long-
lasting effect on the lives of Angelenos than his well-publicized forays into the political
arena. That story begins by examining the politics of relief and infrastructure in the
continuing story of the Tenth Street improvements (Olympic Boulevard) during the early
years of the Depression, before Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933. The rest of the
chapter dwells on Aldrichs work as the city engineer, especially his role as relief
coordinator and his often uncanny ability to leverage sponsors and funding sources in the
effort to build infrastructure for his adopted city. The origins of the freeway network are
covered in the stories of the Ramona, Arroyo Seco, and Cahuenga parkways,
predecessors to the San Bernardino, Pasadena, and Hollywood freeways. A brief
interlude considers the many highway plans afoot from 1937 to 1946 and the
disconnection between these comprehensive plans and the built landscape that is
seemingly associated with them. The climax of this story is a case study of the Aliso
Viaduct, which was built between 1939 and 1944 and is still in use today, conveying the
Hollywood/Santa Ana (101) Freeway across the Los Angeles River. Because Aliso
Viaduct was the first freeway crossing of the river, it exerted gravitational force on the
layout of subsequent construction. The creation of Aliso Viaduct also established the
imperious practices of route selection that would shape the postwar freeway program,
both in its planning and in the opposition it engendered. The conclusion of the chapter
considers how that program played out.

ALDRICH AND BOWRON

303
There are few pictures of the city engineers before Aldrich (with the exception of
Mulholland), but his face was a common sight in the press during his 22 years in the post.
Of angular mien when he became city engineer in 1933, at age 47, he grew jowlier as he
advanced through middle age, while still projecting an intense focus in his portraits and
candid photos. Aldrich had the appearance of Midwestern rectitude affected among the
citys white, male, Anglo elite during the middle third of the 20th century: hair slicked
back on top and cropped high and tight on the sides, wire-rimmed glasses, and grey or
dark-hued suits worn with a starched collar and a tie knotted high at the throat. His one
concession to the splashy reputation of Los Angeles was the occasional garish tie. If
Aldrich had a style, its exemplar was Harry Truman.
5

Lloyd Aldrich was born in Marion, Kansas, in 1886.
6
Orphaned at age 12, he
went to live with his older sister in Galesburg, Illinois, and spent summers with his
brother in Grand Junction, Colorado, where, according to his 1949 campaign biography,
he encountered Theodore Roosevelt when Roosevelt came to Colorado on a hunting trip.
Aldrich would later cite the counsel that Roosevelt bestowed: the West was the place for
an ambitious young man, and the engineering profession was the backbone of progress.
7

At first Aldrich followed only half of the advice, staying in Illinois to attend the state
university, where he studied engineering for two years before going to work as a railroad
surveyor. He moved to Colorado in 1908 to survey the 175-mile fence line that separated
the grazing areas set aside for sheep and cattle, later serving as a crew chief for the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation in the construction of Palisades Dam on the Colorado River. In
1910 Aldrich moved to Los Angeles, a fruitful place to find work for someone skilled at

304
domesticating the western landscape. He ran pipe-laying crews for the gas company and
laid out subdivisions for the Janss Investment Co., developers of Beverly Hills and
Westwood, among other communities. After four years he moved north to serve as
irrigation engineer for the San Joaquin Valley Land Company, then laid out the highways
for Stanislaus County, and in 1920 took on a novel project for the Columbia Steel
Company, heading up a pavement-research facility in Pittsburgh, California. The state
Division of Highways was just then struggling to correct the deficient pavements
installed by county governments under the state highway bonds, and found the research
facility so useful that the state took it over. Aldrich set up as a consulting engineer in the
Bay Area, where his accomplishments included building China Basin in San Francisco
Bay and the Posey tunnel under the estuary between Oakland and Alameda. He moved
his practice to Los Angeles in 1930 and spent three years designing roads and water
systems for private developers and under contract to the city. He apparently caught the
eye of Frank Shaw, who took office as mayor in the spring of 1933. The incumbent
engineer, J. J. Jessup, stayed on until August to let Aldrich conclude the business of his
consulting firm.
8

Aldrich was highly qualified for the position, with experience in private business
and government service as well as technical expertise in every type of municipal
engineering including ports, sewers, highways, water supply and utilities. He had
administered large construction projects, presided over bureaucratic organizations, and
gained familiarity with the statutes governing infrastructure in California. He was also
loyal to Shaw, which was probably a main source of the subsequent antipathy between

305
Aldrich and Bowron. Long after Shaws recall, Aldrich would continue to declare his
admiration for the disgraced former mayor.
9

The charges that brought down Shaw centered on payoffs to police in return for
protection of gambling and prostitution rackets, not public works.
10
The millions flowing
through Aldrichs office certainly represented an opportunity for wholesale graft, but
despite numerous investigations, no charges were ever brought. In 1938, soon after he
wrested the mayors office from Shaw, Bowron appointed an auditor to examine the
accounts of the engineering bureau, which resulted in the resignation of Shaws
appointees to the Board of Public Works and the firing of the head of the street
maintenance division, amid charges of favoritism in the awarding of city contracts and
the bureaus insistence on the use of a patented paving method that was more expensive
but not superior than conventional paving methods.
11
Aldrich nonetheless remained in
office, despite being targeted by his political enemy, which suggests that Aldrichs hands
could not be found in the till.
But he was no choir boy. Aldrichs record of securing approval and funding for
infrastructure owed much to his canny political sense, which he also applied to the matter
of his own survival in office. In 1937, likely out of awareness of the growing reaction to
Shaws criminal regime, Aldrich enlisted his allies in the construction industry and
organized labor to sponsor a successful charter-amendment initiative to change the city
engineer from an appointed office to one with civil-service protection, clearly a strategy
to allow Aldrich to retain his position if his sponsor lost the mayoralty.
12
In the course of
Bowrons 1938 investigation, four former construction-crew supervisors for the

306
engineering bureau helped explain the success of this ballot measure: they and their
workers had been ordered to canvass on behalf of the proposition. Their testimony also
revealed the source of Aldrichs consistent support among city councilmembers: the
department staff had passed out leaflets and collected money from their employees to
support friendly city council candidates.
13
As Bowrons biographer, Tom Sitton, pointed
out, Aldrich could count on support from the city council because he always helped to
find jobs in his department for the political workers of cooperative council members.
14

Throughout Bowrons tenure (1938 to 1953), the reform-minded mayor, whose
chief political asset was his reputation for honesty, confronted the resourceful city
engineer, who deployed the substantial assets of his agency to shore up his political
support. Though Bowron prevailed against Aldrich in three mayoral contests -- the 1949
general election, the 1950 recall against Bowron, and the 1953 primary -- Aldrichs
supporters on the city council blocked every attempt to remove him as head of the
engineering agency. Bowron also tried to limit the authority of Aldrichs office, which
Aldrich fought to a stalemate. The mayor did succeed in moving the engineering
bureaus accounting division from Aldrichs control to the Board of Public Works, once
the board was filled with Bowrons appointees, and he vetoed staff and budget increases
for the agency. But Aldrich beat back several attempts to eliminate his role as liaison
with funding authorities in city and state government, and the city council declined to
authorize two investigations of the city engineer requested by Bowron.
15
In their
electoral campaigns, the two lobbed charges back and forth that invoked many of the
salient political issues of the day. They red-baited each other and accused each other of

307
corruption and inefficiency. Bowron claimed that Aldrich was supported by the gangster
Mickey Cohen, and Aldrich criticized Bowron for tolerating police brutality against
people of color. The claims and counterclaims amounted to smear tactics or transparent
appeals to certain voting blocs and constituencies. Overall, their rivalry was based less
on ideas than on personal enmity and the pursuit of power. As one knowledgeable
political figure said during the 1949 mayoral campaign, it was a conflict of ambitious
personalities, nothing else.
16

Aldrich and Bowron did not fight over the plans, priorities or accomplishments of
the engineering office, and Bowron did not shy from presiding over the ribbon-cutting
ceremonies for bridges and other structures completed under Aldrich. Apart from the
charges of corruption that never stuck, and his desire to move some of the engineers
programmatic authority to the mayors office, Bowrons major complaint against Aldrich
was that construction was not moving fast enough. When Aldrich, at age 70, was finally
forced to retire by Bowrons successor, Norris Poulson, it was precisely for that reason:
slow progress on the sewage treatment plant.
17
For the most part, Aldrich and Bowron
both wanted the same thing -- more storm drains and parkways to abet the citys
continued growth.
How, then, to assess Aldrichs place in the history of Los Angeles? Based on the
more visible aspects of his career, the political campaigns and the rivalry with Bowron
that played out in the newspapers, we are left with a choice between Aldrich as the
bagman for Frank Shaw and a series of venal city councilmembers, or as a dedicated
public servant who put the unemployed to work during the Depression and created the

308
vast infrastructure befitting the size and significance of Los Angeles. As usual, the
sunshine-and-noir dichotomy obscures as much as it reveals about the city. It was
unfortunate for Aldrichs reputation to oppose Bowron, a politician without an
organization or party, whose primary resource in governing was his personal integrity
according to Sitton.
18
Contesting an opponent who claimed to be honest did not make
Aldrich dishonest, but in the reductive arenas of campaign rhetoric and Los Angeles
journalism in the 1930s and 1940s, and in light of Aldrichs association with the
discredited Frank Shaw, it is easy to grasp how that impression could result. Aldrich,
however, is best understood in the context of the agency he led for so long, the city
engineering bureau, which through administrative and technical expertise had emerged
from the institutional confusion of the Progressive period as a potent force in shaping the
fundamental physical characteristics of the city. In the field of transportation, the city
engineers accomplished that by assembling site-specific coalitions in support of the
projects they wished to build. Aldrich represented the apotheosis of these practices, not
only through his skills as an engineer and an administrator, but also as the public official
responsible for implementing Franklin Roosevelts New Deal in Los Angeles. He
dispensed patronage as part of his coalition building, accepted and probably solicited help
in his electoral campaigns from construction companies under contract to the city,
rewarded his friends and tried to punish his rivals. Rather than enriching himself, he
engaged in these practices as part of the incrementalist approach that already
characterized the agency he led. A completed project was a good project to Aldrich. If
his record is problematic, it is not because of his procedural excesses and contingent

309
ethics, nor because his career can be crudely conceptualized within the mythology of Los
Angeles noir, but because of what he built, and because of the options foreclosed by the
structures that constitute his main legacy to the city.

ROADS, RELIEF, AND THE CONTINUING SAGA OF TENTH STREET
When Aldrich took office in 1933, the city engineering bureau could boast of such
accomplishments as the river bridges and portions of major arteries including Wilshire
Boulevard, the truck highway to the harbor (later Alameda Street), Sunset Boulevard, and
the citys pieces of the county peripheral road network. Yet it would nonetheless be
accurate to characterize the citys roadbuilding function as beleaguered. Whittier
Boulevard and Sixth Street Bridge had only been completed by pulling in bits of money
appropriated for other purposes, which compromised those projects that had been the
source of the critical funds. The enlargement of Tenth Street into the citys principal
east-west thoroughfare had been the favored highway project of John Prince and the
Streets Division since they first proposed it in 1921. After their plans were repudiated in
a 1926 court decision, they kept tinkering with the proposed alignment to avoid pockets
of the more bitterly opposed residents, notably in the mid-city district, between Crenshaw
and Rimpau. The engineers did not submit the plans for council approval until 1928 and
did not conclude the extensive procedures to set up the assessment district before the
onset of the Depression in late 1929. By then, property owners were even more wary
about special assessments for road construction, and more vigilant in resisting their

310
imposition. In November 1932, just a few days after Roosevelts election, the
enlargement of Tenth Street into a principal thoroughfare was roundly defeated by a
mobilized citizenry that laid siege to city hall.
Its defeat illustrates the troubles that Aldrich inherited and provides a coda to the
era of stalemated projects, while its prompt resurrection, thanks to statutory and
procedural adjustments that allowed gasoline-tax proceeds to be spent in the city, was the
overture to the coming era of mass employment and massive investment in public works.
The political alignments and realignments arrayed around the Tenth Street proceedings
allow a glimpse into the localized practices that shaped the implementation of the New
Deals public works policies, a microcosmic version of the discourse about the
appropriate means for government to relieve poverty and unemployment. Tenth Street
allows us to witness the demise of Herbert Hoover's "collective individualism" as it was
undermined by the inability of private-sector efforts to alleviate the misery of millions.
Abhorrence of the "dole," not only by Hoover but also by the Roosevelt administration in
its first term, elevated work relief into a favored option.
19
Work relief enabled public
officials and private citizens to preserve the moral distinction drawn between the worthy
and the unworthy poor, which had suffused welfare policy in the United States since the
first asylum statutes of the early national period.
20
The early years of the Depression
were a time of groping and adjustment in the attempts to fit highways into this new
political context. Locally, advocates of expanded public works programs had to contend
with the orphan status of road funding in relation to other forms of infrastructure. During
the Hoover years they could not overcome the continued reliance on special assessments

311
to pay part of the cost for highway construction, even when they justified the levies as
providing construction jobs to feed hungry families, because the homeowners who were
called upon to help those less well-off than themselves by accepting higher property taxes
also felt the squeeze of the deflated economy. At this crucial juncture, middleclass
homeowners began to frame their opposition to roadbuilding more fully than before in
terms of anti-tax rhetoric.
21

The people and organizations involved in the next phase of the Tenth Street
improvements took part in this debate about the role of public works according to their
place-specific interests, not their political affiliations or apparent ideological positions.
Men like the real estate developer William May Garland, founder of the Community
Development Association, chair of the organizing committee for the 1932 Olympics,
relentlessly dedicated to free-market dogma and the profits he hoped to secure from its
exercise, invoked the plight of the unemployed to promote government spending on new
highways as long as the highways ran alongside property he owned. Much of the direct
political action in opposition to Tenth Street was organized by attorney Marshall
Stimson, one of the architects of the Progressive victories in 1909 and 1910, who was
hired by the Tenth Street dissidents. The spectacle of Stimson fighting on behalf of
middleclass homeowners -- the haves in this clash -- while Garland championed the
needy whose plight would be alleviated through highway-construction jobs, illuminates
not only the site-specific character of highway disputes, but also the fault lines within
free-market liberalism during the early years of the Depression. Another factor that
shaped the arguments over Tenth Street in the Hoover years was the growing frequency

312
of marches and mass demonstrations, which the highway opponents adapted to their
cause.
22

Place-specific issues like the disputes over Tenth Street offer a distinctive
perspective on the response to the Depression, a perspective dependent less on ideology
than on such prosaic matters as the appearance and function of streets. If the New Deal
represented the rebirth of Progressive ideas about the efficacy of state intervention and
the role of experts, it might also be seen as a reaction to the kind of Progressivism
practiced by Marshall Stimson. Stimson always saw himself as a reformer crusading for
justice, even when his clients interests caused him to argue against relief for those in far
more dire need.
23
The liberal historians of the 1950s and 1960s, who interpreted the New
Deal as an emerging consensus in favor of a more fully institutionalized welfare state,
underestimated the conservatism of reformers while also overestimating the realignments
of traditional interests. New Left historians of the 1960s and 1970s characterized the
New Deal as a series of palliatives intended primarily to prevent class-based
revolutionary change. Such issues as Tenth Street suggest that these revisionists were
correct to question the consensus behind the New Deal, but they did not need to construct
the new premise of a revolution snuffed out by a marginal approach to reform and relief.
The contradictions of early 20
th
-century Progressivism were resurrected along with the
reformist ideas that propelled the New Deal.
24

Between 1926 and 1928, while the city engineers worked on redesigning the
proposed improvements to Tenth Street, the sponsorship of the project also changed.
Tenth Street was no longer a priority for the Union Pacific Railroad and its Central

313
Manufacturing District. Their initial goal of upgrading the infrastructure in the river
corridor proceeded on a separate track as part of the bond-funded viaduct projects. The
new leaders of the Tenth Street Improvement Association were west-side real estate
investors, notably William May Garland and Edward Doheny, Jr., son of the oil tycoon.
By the time the city filed the condemnation suit to acquire the redrawn right-of-way, in
late 1928, the estimated project cost had grown from $6 million to $16 million, primarily
because of the rising value of property that would be condemned to create the 100-feet-
wide alignment, but also because the new plans pushed the project further west, beyond
the city boundary. The ultimate cost was expected to reach $20 million once
negotiations were completed with Santa Monica to extend the project all the way to the
ocean.
25

The number of individual properties in the assessment district had nearly doubled,
from 11,000 to almost 22,000, not only because of the westward extension of the
alignment, but also the continued subdivision of real estate in the city, as large tracts were
cut into individual parcels. The opponents still objected to the conception of public
benefit espoused by the city engineers. East-side business owners saw the advantages of
the project accruing to the west side, and all along the alignment people decried the
sacrifice of local interests on the altar of purported citywide advantage. Mid-city
property owners, in the vicinity of Lucerne Avenue and Country Club Drive, were
particularly implacable in their resistance. In mid-1930, when the council approved
paving plans for a few short stretches of widened right-of-way, the dissident homeowners
appealed to Mayor John C. Porter to veto the ordinance. Porter had already established

314
tax relief for homeowners as his signature issue during his campaign for office earlier that
year. He had also clashed with the Board of Public Works over the authority to decide
which infrastructure projects to build. Opposing Tenth Street was a perfect issue for him
because of the anti-tax argument and the chance to erode the autonomy of the city
engineering department. Porter duly cast his veto, only to see it overridden after furious
lobbying by Garland and the Tenth Street Improvement Association.
26

The city council seems to have supported Garland because of the strong support
he organized in the form of letters, hearing testimony, and personal visits to council
members, not because the council necessarily agreed with the claim of public benefit the
proponents had adopted from the city engineers.
27
Even the Automobile Club of
Southern California could offer only a lukewarm response to the merits of Garlands
case. The Auto Club naturally supported improved highways, and Garland had served a
term on its board. He did get quick action, as the Auto Club board dispatched Ernest East
to look into the matter. But Easts substantive critique trumped any inclination toward
support of Garland. East found no reason to question the project's "desirability . . . from a
traffic-carrying standpoint." But he also described the destruction to yards and
landscaping that would be caused by cutting back slopes to widen the thoroughfare. He
noted that the underlying premise of the assessment-district statutes was to obtain
payment from those who benefited from the work and found it perverse to tax those who
were instead most damaged by it. East concluded that the city Board of Public Works
should ensure a more "equitable distribution" of the cost before the Auto Club could
support the Tenth Street improvements.
28
It was the issue of scale that came between

315
Garland, the elite booster and developer, and his traditional ally, the motor club that
lobbied for improved highways. The unprecedented width of the new roadway would
create ugly scars on the landscape, making it difficult to sustain an argument of broad
public benefit.
The scale of the project had also bedeviled the city attorneys, whose
condemnation suit, covering thousands of properties, consumed 375 linear feet of paper.
That was too many for the court to consider all at once and the case proceeded in small
batches. Through 1929 and 1930, the city obtained final judgments on some 600 parcels
and secured agreement on damage payments for another 500 by means of arbitration.
These were a small percentage of the parcels affected by the project, but they were
concentrated in a few tightly confined portions of the corridor, so that in 1931 the city
could let construction contracts for short stretches of the right-of-way. Bits of newly
widened Tenth Street took shape near its intersections with Robertson, Fairfax, Ogden,
Genesee, and Spaulding. The city engineers pointed proudly to these signs of progress,
but they understood as well that the completed sections represented a meager portion of
the proposed improvement, and that the traffic-carrying capacity of the artery was not
expanded at all by the completion of isolated sections.
29

On the tenth anniversary of the project, in the summer of 1931, the city council
finally considered the comprehensive reauthorization of the Tenth Street improvements.
This "ordinance of intention" was a prerequisite for establishing the boundary of the
assessment district and the drawing of the final alignment by the engineers. Pressed by
Garland and the improvement association, and encouraged by the completion of those

316
isolated segments of the work and the progress in litigation and arbitration to secure the
right-of-way, the council once again approved the opening and widening of Tenth Street.
Garland's wide-ranging promotional tactics utilized any available argument to urge the
council's endorsement of the project, and during this phase of the process he began to
embrace the notion that Tenth Street construction would alleviate unemployment. He
also parlayed his role on the Olympic organizing committee into a ploy of nomenclature.
There was no particular association between the highway location and the Olympic
venues, but, seeking to wrap the controversial project in the useful aura of civic pride, in
1931 Garland began referring to Tenth Street as Olympic Boulevard. Four years later the
council made the name change official.
30

Two property owners between Lucerne and Crenshaw, unmoved by the council's
approval or Garland's influence, hired Marshall Stimson to carry their objection to the
courts. A seasoned activist, Stimson would orchestrate a combination of legal and
political action in opposition to the Tenth Street expansion. In framing the issue
primarily as resistance to monied interests who would build their infrastructure by
extracting payment from small property holders, Stimson dusted off the old Progressive
anti-railroad tactics for one last round. He even singled out the Union Pacific as a
principal exploiter in the proceedings, long after the railroad had ceased any active role in
the promotion of Tenth Street.
31
Stimson's efforts on behalf of middleclass homeowners
made taxes the foremost issue. Homeowners did face the real prospect of losing their
homes during the early years of the Depression, and burdensome taxes could push them
into insolvency. But the anti-tax campaign also showed the limits of the middleclass

317
Progressivism practiced by men like Stimson, and its similarity to Hoover's collective
individualism.
In April 1932, after filing for a restraining order against the project, Stimson took
the battle directly to the citizenry by organizing the Tenth Street Defense League
(pointedly ignoring Garland's appropriation of Olympic symbolism). The Defense
League heralded its own formation with a "mass meeting" at Los Angeles High School.
Mayor Porter showed up to declaim against the project, as did Roy Donley, the city
councilman whose district included the most hotly contested area, around Lucerne,
Crenshaw and Country Club Drive. Some 1,200 property owners attended to hear
Donley complain that the city had already spent a million dollars in legal and consulting
fees for Tenth Street, and to demand that the $1.5 million appropriated by the council ten
years earlier be reallocated to more worthy projects. These first steps in the elevation of
Tenth Street into an explosive public issue took place against a background of
deteriorating municipal finances. The collapse of real estate values in the city had caused
sharp reductions in property tax proceeds, and the city's declining bond rating made it
difficult to sell bonds for general revenue purposes. Donley and the council slashed the
city budget by layoffs, salary reductions, and shorter hours. To appease those citizens
more concerned with their tax bills than with the plight of the unemployed, Porter and
Donley portrayed Olympic Boulevard as a luxury that the city could not afford.
32

Attentive to a conflict that could turn out over a thousand constituents, Donley
filed a city council motion to abandon the project. Similarly attentive, his colleagues did
not oppose the motion but referred it to the council's Streets Opening and Widening

318
Committee, where it languished despite Donley's continued diatribes aimed at the
committee chair. Garland and Stimson prevailed upon their respective supporters to
write letters to the council, which was deluged with the correspondence. Stimson held
further public meetings in May and July. He painted the homeowner as victim to the
large property interests in the city, who would receive inflated prices for their holdings in
the assessment district. When the city clerk issued the final boundaries of the assessment
district, along with the list of 21,918 property owners who would be taxed for the project,
Stimson had a clear-cut procedural method to kill the Tenth Street improvement: collect
the signatures of a simple majority -- 10,960 of those property owners -- on a petition to
abandon the project.
33

The council scheduled the vote on the final assessment district ordinance for
November 15, 1932, one week after Roosevelt won his first term as president, and the
dramatic political temper seems to have carried over. Garland and Simpson issued
frequent statements and enjoyed extensive coverage from reporters and editors who
delighted in a bitter struggle personified by such well-known figures. Three weeks
before the vote, Stimson asked that the city council have loudspeakers mounted outside
of City Hall on the day of the hearing because he expected overflow crowds who would
have to follow the proceedings from the sidewalks. The loudspeakers turned out to be
necessary, as 6,000 people showed up in opposition to the project on the day of the vote.
They shouted down the representatives of the improvement association and cheered
wildly when Stimson described the plan as "so much gravy for the owners getting big
[damage] awards." The city clerk announced that 14,090 (64 percent) of the property

319
owners in the district had signed petitions opposing the improvement. Under state law,
the council had no choice but to move for abandonment. As the Evening Herald
described the scene: "Slowly, each councilman droned 'Aye,' and the project, begun ten
years ago, was doomed. . . . Abruptly, one of the most ambitious street improvement
projects ever attempted in Los Angeles was hurled into the discard."
34

Even as the Tenth Street improvement died its second death, the seeds of its next
rebirth had been planted in Sacramento. Driven by the crisis of urban unemployment, in
1931 the state legislature had expanded the definition of state highways to include those
portions of through routes within the boundaries of incorporated cities. Previously, state
highway money could only be spent in unincorporated territory. (If this law had been
changed earlier, the state could have paid for the citys portion of Whittier Boulevard.)
Garland and his supporters had tried without success to delay the council vote in order to
buy time for Olympic Boulevard to be declared a state highway and thus allow it to
qualify for the gas tax funding and obviate the need for special assessments.
35

Stimson's tactic of channeling all the objections into the narrow cause of tax relief
would, in the end, work against his clients who opposed the project. By framing the issue
in purely economic terms, Stimson submerged the other reasons for protesting against the
road. Boosters like Garland had already begun to recast highways as laudable public
works that provided thousands of jobs in Los Angeles. Along with changes in their legal
status and new sources of funding, this new social role for highways in urban society
would overcome most of the economic objections to their construction. Highway
opponents would have far more limited means to force consideration of the aesthetic and

320
functional problems they had identified. Even with New Deal funding and the
subsequent changes in public authority over infrastructure, however, Olympic Boulevard
would never be completed as a 100-feet-wide right-of-way through the entire city. A
paved width of 50 feet is still found at numerous locations, notably south of downtown,
east of Los Angeles Street. Even with the subsequent gas-tax funding, the city could not
overcome the objections of the dissident homeowners around Lucerne Street and Country
Club Drive in the mid-city neighborhood. Present-day Olympic Boulevard takes a sharp
jog to the south at that location, marking in concrete the limits of public enthusiasm for
the entwined principles of modern infrastructure and unemployment relief.
The lawsuits, rallies, hearing testimony, correspondence, and petition drives by
which the opponents of Tenth Street defeated its comprehensive improvement are not
visible in the narratives of metropolitan automobility, from the Major Traffic Street Plan
of 1924 to the scholarship of Scott Bottles. The scene of 6,000 Angelenos crowding the
sidewalks outside of City Hall to protest a road project should decisively undermine any
claim of consensus in favor of the automobile and the infrastructure to accommodate it.
Any interpretation of automobility in Los Angeles that fails to account for such deep-
seated opposition to improved highways is bound to be incomplete, and to provide an
insufficient basis to comprehend what happened later, starting in the late 1930s, when the
potent opposition to highways was temporarily overcome but not eliminated. The
many varieties of highway opposition never disappeared, least of all from the thinking of
the engineers and their allies who tried to build more, larger highways in Los Angeles.
The difficulty of securing approval and funding for major road projects helps account for

321
the urgency with which Aldrich approached highway development, the eagerness to
charge ahead when a niche of opportunity opened, even if the implications of the work
were not fully understood, or even considered.

THE NEW DEAL AND PUBLIC WORKS IN LOS ANGELES
Aldrich was appointed city engineer in August 1933, just five months after
Franklin Roosevelts inauguration, and he immediately reorganized the department to
take advantage of the newly advantageous setting for financing public works. First he
secured from Mayor Shaw, with city council approval, the appointment as Coordinator
for the City of Los Angeles of Relief and Emergency Activities, the sole point of contact
for the city with all state and federal relief programs. Then he started sending proposals
to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the successor to President
Hoovers Emergency Relief Administration. Hoover had finally moderated his
opposition to relief programs when he signed legislation in 1932 to establish the agency,
with the primary goal of stabilizing the financial system through loans to local banks.
Upon taking office Roosevelt retained the administrative framework of the agency,
renamed it, and expanded its mission to include grants to state and local governments for
public works projects that would put the unemployed to work. Aldrich cherry-picked the
citys lengthy backlog of proposed infrastructure in this first request for federal money
and secured some $4.5 million. The projects included nine miles of sewers and storm
drains and the grading of 15 miles of road.
36

322
Aldrich also set up the Division of Special Cooperative Projects, which, though
not apparent in its Orwellian, name, was charged with improvement of the main
highways within the city which have been added to the State Highway System. This
was the mechanism for funding roads from state gasoline-tax revenues. The new division
was a direct response to a California statute signed into law in June 1933, which allocated
one-twelfth of the gas-tax proceeds directly to cities (one-quarter cent from the total tax
of three cents per gallon, usually referred to as the quarter-cent funds.). Before the end
of 1933, Aldrichs new division obtained gas-tax funding for 106 miles of road
construction in Los Angeles, including parts of Olympic Boulevard, Santa Barbara
Avenue, Manchester Avenue, and Ramona Boulevard, the artery that ran northeast from
the Los Angeles River, across from the site selected for the new Union Passenger
Terminal.
37
By February 1934, the city received $675,000 for the purchase of properties
along the Olympic Boulevard right-of-way and broke ground on the portion through the
troublesome mid-city district. William May Garland was so pleased that he threw an
opulent luncheon at the Ambassador Hotel for the governor, the state highway
commissioners, the mayor, and Aldrich.
38

The Roosevelt administration meanwhile formulated more far-reaching strategies
for public works. The National Industrial Recovery Act was presented to Congress in
June 1933 as part of the legendary Hundred Days, the first three months of FDRs
term, when he fulfilled his promise to seek swift economic recovery. This legislation
established the Public Works Administration (PWA), under Secretary of the Interior
Harold Ickes. Its $3.3 billion budget would subsidize the construction of public works as

323
a means of providing employment, enabling Americans to resume the habits of
consumption that had proved such a boon to industry in the 1920s. Roosevelt had scaled
back the initial proposals out of concern over accusations of fraud and waste, and an
innate conservatism would continue to characterize the operation of the PWA. Under
regulations formulated by Ickes, the PWA would generally sponsor only 45 percent of a
projects cost, requiring local participation to demonstrate that the projects were indeed
desirable. It only paid the money directly to private contractors to assure that the funds
were not used for administrative costs or less savory disbursements to public officials and
their friends. The PWA also had a staff of engineers to scrutinize its projects and
imposed rigorous technical standards on the specifications. Because the concern for
efficiency was paramount in the operation of the PWA, it embraced mechanized
construction methods and did not assess applications on the basis of how many
unemployed people would be put to work; contractors were encouraged but not required
to hire the jobless. The PWA was responsible for many of the monumental structures of
the 1930s, such as Triborough Bridge and Grand Coulee Dam, but most of its work was
less spectacular. Between 1933 and 1939 the PWA built over 11,000 highway projects (a
third of all PWA projects) and just under 7,500 schools.
39

Aldrich took office two months after Congress authorized the PWA, and he
immediately assigned the Streets Division to work on a proposal to address one of the
citys more intricate roadway issues. The mainline railroads, the street railways, the state
railroad commission, and several city agencies had recently completed negotiations to
establish the location of the new Union Passenger Terminal, along with the necessary

324
adjustments to track routings.
40
Commonly known as Union Station, it would be built on
Alameda Street, north of Aliso Street, three blocks west of the Los Angeles River.
Aldrichs surveyors determined that some 200 trains per day would cross traffic at grade
along the river adjacent to Aliso Street, and estimated that automobile, truck, and trolley
movements around the station would cause traffic as dense as anywhere in the city. The
remedies included grade-separated intersections along Macy Street, just north of the
station, and the widening and realignment of a half dozen other streets. The PWA
rejected the initial proposal on technical grounds: the slopes of the streets that would
pass under Macy were too steep and lacked sufficient drainage. Aldrich expressed
indignation at this intrusion on local authority, but he made the required adjustments
and obtained one of the citys first PWA funding agreements in early 1934.
41
He also
assigned the Bridges and Structures Division to begin design of a new bridge to replace
the 1905 structure that carried Aliso Street across the Los Angeles River. The Pacific
Electrics Covina line crossed the river on Aliso bridge, as would the westbound traffic
coming into the city from the planned artery of Ramona Boulevard, which would end
about 1,600 feet east of the river. The Aliso bridge had been scheduled for replacement
with the 1923 bridge bonds, but that money had been reallocated to other work (notably
Sixth Street Bridge), leaving the narrow width and inadequate load capacity to bear
traffic that was expected to be the heaviest in the city.
42

Rebuilding Macy and the other streets around Union Station was based on
anticipating future needs, but there were also hundreds of deferred or incomplete projects
throughout the city, and most of the relief projects pursued under Aldrich were based on

325
reducing this backlog. It took Aldrich only a year after the PWA was established to
resolve the decade-long effort to rebuild the intersection of Sunset and Glendale
boulevards, in the Echo Park neighborhood. Situated immediately northwest of Echo
Park Lake, the location was regularly flooded. It was already a grade-separated
intersection, with Sunset crossing over Glendale on a narrow timber trestle erected by the
Pacific Electric in 1908, when the railway company extended the Glendale line. There
were double tracks on both streets, and two lanes for automobiles, but the trolley traffic
frequently made it impossible for more than one automobile at a time to pass over or
under the bridge. The city engineers surveyed the drainage problem in 1923 after local
residents complained, but once the cost for a drain was established the locals swallowed
their grievance rather than pay for the work.
43
This troublesome situation was
compounded when construction began on the Hyperion Aqueduct, one of the Los
Angeles River bridge bond projects, which would allow traffic heading into the city from
the northeast to bypass downtown on Glendale Boulevard. Concerned about the
bottleneck at Sunset, the city engineering office put $45,000 in the 1926 bridge-bond
referendum for a new crossing. Replacing the bridge and widening the Glendale right-of-
way to the north and south of the bridge would require tax increments from the nearby
propertyowners, whose protests delayed the matter until it was finally abandoned in 1928.
Three years later the engineers took the Sunset-Glendale bond money to complete Sixth
Street Bridge.
44

The prediction of deteriorating conditions came true when Hyperion Viaduct
opened in 1929, and when Aldrich took office he found a pile of letters and petitions

326
from local residents and the Northside Chamber of Commerce urging immediate action
to eliminate the dangerous condition . . . The present structure on Sunset Boulevard
creates a bottleneck that is a great hazard both to pedestrians and automobiles.
45
In
heeding the request, Aldrich started to work out the process of leveraging relief programs
against each other to build structures that would otherwise be impossible to contemplate.
The Glendale-Sunset bridge was part of the citys first package of funding proposals
submitted to the PWA, which also included Ramona Boulevard, San Fernando Road, and
several streets in the harbor district.
46
These proposals represent a refinement of the
departments prior methods rather than an abrupt departure, resembling the arrangements
that produced the river bridges, and in one respect the Sunset-Glendale project was a
direct continuation: Merrill Butler, chief designer of the river bridges, served the same
role for the Glendale-Sunset span. Like the river bridges, the Glendale project also
involved the Pacific Electric, which was in no position to share the cost but instead was
asked to assign its easements back to the city and to suspend service or reroute its trolleys
during construction.
47

The most significant alteration in the departments practices was the newly
amicable relationship with Spencer Cortelyou and the state Division of Highways, which
for its own part sought to avoid debacles of local-state relations such as Whittier
Boulevard. As Fred Grumm, the states director of surveys and plans put it: Sections of
unpaved or deteriorated pavement through communities who were financially unable to
improve their streets brought this question more forcibly to attention. Regional directors
like Cortelyou were charged with a more intelligent correlation of local and state

327
highways, the fostering of a spirit of active cooperation.
48
Aldrich too was motivated to
repair relations, because the quarter-cent funds allocated to cities from the state gas tax
were released on a project-by-project basis at the authority of Cortelyous boss, the
director of the state Department of Public Works. Aldrich wanted to apply for the 45
percent cost share from the PWA and to furnish the local contribution from the quarter-
cent funds. Cortelyou obliged with an enthusiastic recommendation, and in November
1933 also helped press the case for urgent action before the city council: It is imperative
that the project . . . be underway before the first of the coming year or the city may be in
danger of losing the [state] money.
49
Aldrich also requested help from Cortelyou in
supervising the construction. It was an odd request, because the Division of Highways
had none of its own money in the project and no oversight authority because neither
Glendale nor Sunset had been designated as state highways. The city staff was certainly
capable of handling the work, as the proposed structure was smaller and less complex
than the river bridges. Not that it was a simple job: in order to provide an unobstructed
roadway for Glendale, Merrrill Butler designed a reinforced-concrete arch without any
intermediate piers. At a span of 240 feet and a stringent height limit determined by the
existing grade of Sunset, the arch had to be very flat, which required specially fabricated
girders for reinforcing (the Melan Arch system). The project certainly satisfied the
goals of Ickes and the PWA in deploying innovative technology and alleviating a
dangerous problem that had frustrated all attempts to fix it with local resources. And
while the PWA did not mandate minimum employment levels, Aldrich wanted to
demonstrate the social efficacy of public works and the contractor was required to make

328
use largely of hand labor methods.
50
Combining up-to-date technology with crude
construction methods, the Glendale-Sunset bridge was a transitional project that served
several goals. Besides resolving the bottleneck at a significant intersection, it validated
Aldrichs approach of stacking relief entitlements together, helped establish a cooperative
relationship with his counterparts at the state Division of Highways, and provided
valuable experience to his staff in coordinating the different program-review and
technical requirements of various funding sources. All these capabilities would come
into play as the federal government continued to experiment with work relief as a
response to the Depression.
The measured approach adopted by Ickes and the PWA did not satisfy Harry
Hopkins and other advisors to FDR, who continued to insist on direct public employment
of the jobless, particularly as summer turned to fall and forecasts of a particularly harsh
winter raised the spectre of even more misery and anguish. In November 1933,
Roosevelt announced the establishment of the Civil Works Administration (CWA), with
Hopkins in charge, and endowed it with a budget of $1 billion for grants directly to state
and local governments to pay workers on public construction projects. Ickes harshly
criticized the CWA as wasteful because of its high wage levels, perfunctory vetting of
designs and specifications, and inefficient use of resources because its guidelines
encouraged applicants to pad the estimated labor requirements. He was hardly alone in
his censure, and despite providing some 4 million jobs, the CWA was eliminated by act
of Congress in April 1934, after five months of operation .
51
Some 5,200 of those jobs
were in Los Angeles, where Aldrich did not mind the inefficiency of sending out hordes

329
of laborers with buckets and shovels to excavate storm drains and grade roadbeds, even if
skilled operatives with steam shovels could have accomplished more in less time for less
money. Mindful of the accusations leveled at the CWA, Aldrich mitigated any charges of
boondoggling by limiting those paid with CWA funds to 10 days of work per month.
52

That unusual limitation was probably what caught the attention of Hopkins when
he was assigned to set up the CWAs successor agency, the Works Progress
Administration (WPA), which Roosevelt established by executive order in May 1935.
By that time, Aldrich had formalized his approach to securing relief funds by setting up
the Federal Coordinating Division within the engineering bureau. Consisting of one
engineer, one accountant, one assistant, and one secretary, who all sat at a single long
table, this new division checked plans and proposals against the guidelines for the various
relief programs, prepared the applications and contracts, and assisted Aldrich during his
frequent presentations to representatives of the federal agencies. They also monitored
wage levels on relief projects, and this was another aspect of the Los Angeles program
that was incorporated into the WPA funding rules, along with the limitations on hours
worked per month.
53
Aldrichs utility to Hopkins was also based on the political setting
in which Aldrich operated: open-shop Los Angeles was a superb proving ground for
public-works policies that had to withstand reaction from free-market ideologues and red-
baiting politicians. Besides nurturing the support of such unlikely allies as William May
Garland, Aldrich also courted the conservative Los Angeles Times and won some
favorable coverage for his emphasis on relief programs for infrastructure, with such
headlines as Public Works Projects Called Good Business.
54
Hopkins, a social worker

330
by profession who was the most liberal proponent of work relief among Roosevelts
kitchen cabinet, had little in common with the pragmatic engineer who had spent much
of his career in service to business. Perhaps that was why Hopkins valued Aldrichs
counsel: it helped disarm his critics in configuring the WPA. Aldrich would later claim
that he was co-author with the late Harry Hopkins of the first WPA Act and its early
amendments.
55
In any event, they shared the goal of maximizing the social resources
expended on public works, and the relationship certainly benefited the city. During its
eight-year tenure, from 1935 to 1943, the WPA provided work for about 8.5 million
people, and 85,000 of them were in the city of Los Angeles. From 1935 to 1939, the
WPA was the citys largest employer.
56

The changes wrought by the WPA were abrupt, far-reaching, and evident to
everyone in the city. The Los Angeles program was equally important to the WPA as a
demonstration of the agencys capacity to fulfill its mission of putting people to work.
The relationship between Aldrich and Hopkins, Aldrichs intimate familiarity with the
legal and regulatory framework under which the WPA operated, and the WPAs
stationing of liaison staff in Los Angeles all made for a smooth beginning. By November
1935, work was underway on the first batch of projects in Los Angeles and by the end of
the year $30 million worth of work had been authorized. Los Angeles was the site of the
largest single project funded by the WPA up to that time (in terms of jobs), the Slauson
Storm Drain, which employed a daily average of more than 7,500 workers.
57
The drain
was first proposed in 1925 as a means to reclaim the vast area south of Santa Barbara
Avenue and west of Vermont Avenue from endemically swampy conditions. It was

331
analogous to Tenth Street (albeit a reclamation project rather than a highway): it was
expansive, it required an assessment district encompassing thousands of properties, and it
was defeated by property-owner protest (in 1928).
58
Recognizing the employment
potential of a colossal excavation job, Aldrich dusted off the plans and enlarged them in
accordance with the vision of Harry Hopkins. By January 1936, thousands of workers
equipped only with shovels and wheelbarrows had begun a 100-feet-wide, 15-feet-deep
trench along the southern flank of the Baldwin Hills, which would ultimately extend
more than three miles from the Crenshaw district to Ballona Creek. The Times struggled
for comparisons to describe such a sight as has never before been seen in Los Angeles,
first noting that it was strangely parallel to methods of the ages when the pharaohs built
their ancient cities, before settling on a reference closer to home: Like some fantastic
motion-picture scene, the sight resembles nothing so much as some huge ant hill from
which the top has just been kicked. The local WPA coordinator admitted, We could do
it with machinery with but a handful of men and do it much faster and at less expense.
But that was not the purpose: It is being done to give these men work. They were on
the dole.
59

From the Melan Arch to the pharaohs ant hill, the work-relief programs
conducted under Lloyd Aldrich encompassed an enormous range of building technology
as well as a diverse set of project-specific financial and administrative arrangements.
Aldrich and his staff were entrepreneurial bureaucrats. Their creativity was in tailoring
design specifications and construction methods according to the most likely source of
funding. Overall, between August 1933 and January 1940, the WPA paid for 51 percent

332
of public works construction in Los Angeles; the state gas tax, 23 percent; the PWA, 17
percent; and the remaining 9 percent came from various relief programs undertaken by
the state of California.
60
Conspicuously absent was any money from special-assessment
districts; Aldrich had suspended the review of tax-increment plans soon after taking
office and by the middle of 1937 all existing proceedings had been closed.
61
As the
1930s progressed, the engineering staff became adept at changing on the fly, quickly
redesigning a bridge or a highway to adapt to new guidelines when a potential sponsor
fell through. They also brokered hundreds of compromises among local, state and federal
agencies as they assembled budgets from multiple sources to fit the needs of a given
project. At times the sponsor dictated the design, especially the PWA, but Aldrich would
also shop a project among potential sponsors to obtain funding for a design he did not
want to change.
This flexibility was fully evident in the production of the viaduct that was built in
1940-41 to carry First Street and Beverly Boulevard over Second Street and Glendale
Boulevard, about three-quarters of a mile northwest of downtown. A confluence of four
major streets, it was congested with trolley traffic as well, because it was the terminus of
the Hollywood Subway (more recently known as Belmont Tunnel), opened in 1925,
which ran between the First and Beverly intersection and the Pacific Electric downtown
terminal at Sixth and Main. Four years after the tunnel opened, Aldrichs predecessor
won approval from the city council to rebuild the intersection as a multiple-span bridge
that would traverse some 450 feet.
62
Bridge engineer Merrill Butler opted for a steel truss
because, though hardly light and airy, it would be less monolithic at that length than the

333
citys favored form, the reinforced-concrete arch, and local residents had already started
to protest against the visual impact of an elevated roadway.
63
The plans languished
because, as the city attorney reported in early 1933, There is some question about
available funds for the citys share of the cost.
64
Aldrich did not attempt to revive the
project until 1938, as part of a larger scheme to rebuild First Street. Though the idea of a
continuous elevated highway with approach ramps -- something resembling a freeway -
- had been rejected for Los Angeles as far back as the Major Traffic Street Plan, the city
engineers considered a series of grade separations along an existing street as a viable
option in such locations as Ramona and Sunset boulevards. In the late 1930s, when
numerous agencies and private organizations had begun to formulate parkway plans, First
Street was the likely candidate for a principal artery between downtown and Hollywood.
The bridge had to be longer to accommodate through traffic, and the new design was 900
feet long, twice the size of the original proposal. Aldrich had submitted the earlier
proposal to the PWA, but by the time the plans for the longer truss were filed in 1939,
Ickes had begun to phase down the program. The PWA required a change of scope to
allow this work to be constructed, but the timing was off, the PWA docket was closed
before the change order was ready, and the project was denied funding.
65

Aldrich then approached the WPA, which required the total redesign of the
bridge. Only a handful of national firms were capable of providing the precise
fabrication and highly skilled installation of a truss bridge; the steel members were
manufactured in Pittsburgh or Chicago, shipped by rail, and assembled by specially
qualified crews sent by the fabricating firms. A steel truss fit comfortably into the PWA

334
guidelines, but it did not generate as many local jobs as a concrete arch, which required
laborers to hammer together forms and falsework and to mix and pour the concrete. As
Aldrich reported: When the construction of the improvement as a WPA project was
proposed, it became advantageous to revise the design to provide for a reinforced
concrete structure. While asking the city council to approve the change, he also made
the cryptic request of permitting the city attorney to file condemnation of ingress and
egress rights.
66
The adjacent homeowners would not be allowed to access their property
at the grade separation: Aldrich was contemplating parkway plans, and First Street
seemed the best bet for a limited-access route between downtown and Hollywood.
Much had changed from the days when city engineers would assemble funding
from property owners, railroads and street railways, and direct city appropriations, but the
basic approach exhibited a certain continuity: a project with a chance of approval was a
good project, all the more so if it could be justified as keeping people off the dole. The
priorities for construction proceeded from opportunity as much as rationality, even when
seizing the opportunity required the hasty redesign of sophisticated structural forms. Not
that Aldrich disdained planning. He was anticipating future needs in the upgrade of First
Street, and he would embrace (and try to lead) the attempts to conceive regional parkway
networks in the late 1930s. He was also capable, however, of ignoring existing plans and
scrapping painstakingly developed designs when convenient to do so. This highly fluid
character of public works development in Los Angeles was the crucial context in which
freeways took shape.

335

BITS AND PIECES: THE FIRST LIMITED-ACCESS HIGHWAYS
Despite the proliferation of comprehensive parkway and freeway plans after 1937,
the creation of the freeway network proceeded from the ground up, as Aldrich and the
city engineers planted pieces of limited-access and grade-separated highways at key
locations across the city. The implications of many pivotal decisions were not grasped at
the time they were being made. The engineers engaged in a process of design inflation as
they adapted to changing traffic conditions, accommodated diverse interests, approached
different sponsors for financial participation, and attempted to correct egregious blunders
committed in the hurried efforts to push ill-conceived ideas through to completion. The
new potential for mega-construction unleashed by the New Deal did not replace the
previous system of highly constrained authority for infrastructure development, but was
layered on top of it. There were fundamental similarities between the origins of the
freeway network and the accretion of functional requirements in response to demands
from businesses or opposition from residents that produced, for example, the behemoth
but thinly trafficked bridge at Sixth Street. Similar too was the lack of consideration for
the effects of major transportation arteries on the texture of life in urban neighborhoods,
at least until white, Anglo middleclass homeowners began to feel those effects. Yet the
hasty origins of this network of limited-access thoroughfares continued to influence the
subsequent elaboration of the freeways. The city engineers created the kind of path
dependencies that were virtually impossible to overcome -- thousands of tons of concrete
poured in a line.

336
As the 1930s drew to a close, three sections of proto-freeway were in place or
under construction: Ramona Parkway on the east side, Arroyo Seco Parkway north of
downtown, and Cahuenga Parkway in the pass between Los Angeles basin and the San
Fernando Valley. In both structure and function, they were practically serendipitous in
their origins, their conceptual enlargement the result of design inflation during the
compromises and negotiations among public agencies and private interests that had
different goals and different stakes in the proceedings. These fragments were not
conceived together, did not constitute an integrated whole, and did not as a group
correspond to any of the plans in place or under development at the time. First Street,
with its planned series of grade separations, or Whittier Boulevard, which was part of an
existing state highway route, were just as likely to become limited-access highways as the
corridors that eventually became freeways.
To view the coming of freeways to Los Angeles as orderly, inevitable, or the
rational response to an obvious problem is a retrospective distortion that occludes the
uncertainty and, at times, desperation on the part of Aldrich, Cortelyou, and their
colleagues, allies and opponents who were responsible for the freeways. The distortions
began with Aldrich himself, when the problems of uncoordinated development, poorly
conceived designs, burdensome effects on neighborhoods, and fierce opposition to further
construction put the emerging program at risk. It was obvious that something needed to
be done, he pronounced in 1947 to a friendly audience of engineers, eliding the conflicts
with the claims that his plan was generally accepted and that There is also substantial
agreement as to the priority of construction. The title of his speech made clear that there

337
was no other possible answer: Increasing traffic in Los Angeles Metropolitan Area
demands adequate freeway and parkway system. While Aldrich pronounced the
inevitability of freeways and the consensus that supported them, the state legislature had
just concluded hearings to investigate why so many Los Angeles constituents were
flooding the state capital with complaints of neighborhood destruction and no lessening
of congestion. The hearings resulted in some modifications to the laws governing right-
of-way acquisition and the doubling of the gas tax to drown with money the tribulations
of urban freeway construction.
67
At that time the legislators did not consider the source
of the problems, which lay in the origins of the program.

Ramona Boulevard
When the Los Angeles County surveyor first proposed improving Ramona
Boulevard, in 1928, as part of the peripheral highway network, it was all but
indistinguishable in design and function from the plans for other through arteries such as
Whittier, Olympic or Venice boulevards. The route was entirely east of the Los Angeles
River and intended to serve the rapidly developing San Gabriel Valley. Only a mile of
the 6-mile highway lay within the city of Los Angeles; the rest passed through
unincorporated land and the city of Alhambra. Within Los Angeles, the existing unpaved
roadway ran along the south side of the Pacific Electrics Covina Line, which hugged the
bottom of the low ridge known as Brooklyn Heights. The Covina Line crossed the river

338
at Aliso Bridge, but the adjacent road petered out in the vicinity of Pleasant Street, about
a third of a mile east of the river, and the proposed improvement ended there too.
68

One factor that distinguished Ramona Boulevard was the series of bridges
recently constructed by the Pacific Electric to carry Soto, Marengo, Cornwall, State and
Lorena streets across the Covina line. The bridges, or grade separations, had been
mandated by the state Railroad Commission as a safety measure because residential
development on the east side had pushed up to Brooklyn Heights. When John Prince of
the city engineering offices Streets Division recommended that the city accept the
countys offer to create a joint highway, he noted the significance of the bridges: The
further fact that a traffic separation may be effected at practically all the important
highways intersected will constitute this a high speed highway. By extending the
Pacific Electric bridges across the new roadway, Ramona Boulevard would also have the
benefit of eliminating crossing traffic at those locations. According to Prince, the main
reason for the city to cooperate with the county was to provide another outlet for the east
side and relieve traffic on Mission Road, the industrial street that ran parallel to the east
bank of the river, which was heavily over taxed.
69
At the time, the grade separations
on Ramona were not part of a vision for limited-access highways, but were instead
functionally similar to the proposals for separating grades at Macy Street, First and
Glendale, and other congested locations.
A familiar litany of obstacles and conflicts ensued. In 1929 the city council
appropriated money to buy most of the land for the citys mile-long stretch from the
Major Traffic Street Plan bond funds (for a road that was not even mentioned in the

339
Plan), but lacked any means to pay for extending the Pacific Electric bridges over the
highway.
70
Negotiations with the Pacific Electric dragged out until 1934; the railway did
not object to the city lengthening the bridges (or did not bother to object because the
Railroad Commission could have required it), but the railway balked at contributing to
the construction cost.
71
John Prince of the citys Streets Division recommended a paved
width of 46 feet, consisting of four lanes with a sidewalk on the south side (and no
sidewalk north of the roadway, next to the trolley line). His counterparts in the county
thought that an extravagance, and in any case the special assessments that the county
would use for the construction would only cover a 30-feet-wide road.
72

Many of the same difficulties encountered in merging the priorities of public
officials with the desires of private business that afflicted Whittier Boulevard also arose
in the planning for Ramona. The East Side Organization, an alliance of improvement
associations, urged that the city council do all in your power to expedite the construction
of the improvements on what will be Ramona Boulevard, but warned against assessing
nearby property owners for any costs.
73
Like the Whittier boosters, the East Side
Organization called for extending Ramona across the Los Angeles River, an ambitious
vision that the city engineers dismissed because the bridge at the projected crossing,
Aliso Street, could not handle the traffic. One of the bridge bond issues had included a
crossing at Aliso, but the engineers had plundered those bond proceeds to pay some of
the spiraling costs for Sixth Street Bridge. Nor did the engineers relish the prospect of
negotiating another costly easement with the Union Pacific, whose tracks ran along the
east bank of the river.
74
If hectoring from boosters could stir up the city council and

340
oblige Prince and his staff to write mollifying letters and redundant reports, the East Side
Organization was nonetheless driven by enthusiasm rather than criticism of the project.
An entirely different set of problems arose when individual property owners
refused to sell their land or homes for the highway right-of-way, or contested the
appraisals when the city initiated condemnation. Delays and cost increases were
compounded by design changes requested by the state Division of Highways after it
agreed to take part in the project in 1933, when the city and county requested that
Ramona Boulevard be designated a state highway and thus become eligible for direct
gas-tax subsidy. Ramona lay between two existing state routes. To the south, Route 2
followed Whittier Boulevard before turning north on Pleasant Street, then east on First to
cross the Los Angeles River. The state highway from Pomona to the Los Angeles area
followed Holt and Garvey avenues eastward to a point near Alhambra, where it turned
north to join Foothill and Colorado boulevards. In the newly instituted spirit of
cooperation with local jurisdictions, and the chance to solve some of the traffic problems
caused by the flawed planning of Whittier Boulevard, the proposal passed quickly
through the stages of approval from Cortelyou to the state director of public works to the
state Highway Commission.
75
Cortelyou could not abide the 30-feet width or even the 46
feet proposed by the city, which required the city to redraw the taking lines at
numerous locations, initiating new proceedings for the added land and throwing the
ongoing proceedings back to the beginning because the boundaries had changed.
76

When Aldrich took over the engineering bureau in August 1933, a few short
stretches of Ramona had been graded and paved to the 46-feet width, but the project as a

341
whole was in abeyance due to unresolved right-of-way issues. The impact of his bolder
approach and the New Deal was immediately evident. He revived the idea of continuing
Ramona all the way to Mission Road, on the east bank of the river, and proposed to gain
added width along the entire corridor, without condemning more homes, by moving the
Pacific Electric tracks to the north, which would require cutting back the Brooklyn
Heights ridge. He also combined the boulevard project with another long-delayed
infrastructure issue by proposing to build the Aliso storm drain alongside the roadway --
a concrete-lined channel that would be the main outlet for runoff from all of northeast
Los Angeles. The increases in scope were only feasible through the use of federal public
works assistance, and Aldrich included Ramona Boulevard in the citys first application
for PWA funds, along with Macy Street-Union Station, the Glendale-Sunset Bridge, and
the streets around the harbor.
77
The design inflation touched off a series of leapfrogging
agreements between Aldrich and the Division of Highways. The state promised to fund
the entire local share from its own highway funds plus the reallocation of quarter-cent
funds if necessary, in return for the city promising to collect all the pending right-of-way
proceedings into one Superior Court lawsuit. The state agreed to supervise the
construction in return for the city engineers providing the detailed designs and
specifications.
78

The design of the roadway continued to change even after construction began in
late 1933, and Ramona Boulevard acquired some of the characteristics of a freeway on a
piecemeal basis. No legal mechanism yet existed for the city or state to prohibit access to
the roadway from abutting properties on a comprehensive basis (which is the defining

342
legal characteristic of a freeway), nor did any of the participants express the goal of
creating a limited-access corridor for the entire length of the boulevard. The city
engineers considered access to the roadway one property at a time. Where they deemed it
necessary to prohibit driveways, the city compensated the property owners for the lack of
access through condemnation proceedings.
79
As for grade separation, one of the
functional characteristics of a freeway, despite Cortelyous claim that the entire route
through the city had no intersections, there were at least six locations in the city where a
perpendicular street opened onto the boulevard when the project began. The city closed
two of them as part of the original design, two more after construction was underway,
and two would continue to meet the boulevard at grade.
80
Another of the defining
features of a freeway -- the separation of opposing traffic -- was only retrofitted onto the
boulevard in 1938, when Aldrich announced the installation of a hub height flexible
steel dividing barrier in the middle of Ramona Boulevard.
81

The incremental scaling-up of Ramona Boulevard and the unsystematic
accumulation of structural and functional characteristics caused harmful consequences
for the roadway and the people who lived near it. The planning of the roadway did not
consider how people living south of the boulevard would be able to walk to the Pacific
Electric stations that stood at the tracks north of the boulevard, Echandia Junction at
Echandia Street and Valley Junction at Pomeroy Street. As construction made the
problem apparent in early 1935, neighborhood residents complained to the city traffic
engineer, Ralph Dorsey, whose office was lodged with the Police Commission, not the
city engineer. Only after Dorsey reported the issue to the city council did Aldrich move

343
to remedy the situation. It was not a small problem, as the city councilman for the east
side informed his colleagues: Better than 1,000 schoolchildren and passengers take the
Pacific Electric cars at Echandia Junction.
82
Dorsey reported further to Aldrich: An
even greater hazard exists at the intersection of Pomeroy Street and Ramona Boulevard,
where approximately three times as many pedestrians cross the boulevard to reach Valley
Junction of the Pacific Electric Railway as cross at Echandia Junction.
83
The boulevard
was nearing completion when this predicament came to light, and the options were
limited. Aldrich reopened negotiations with the Pacific Electric for an easement to bridge
the tracks, then prevailed on Cortelyou to pay for the pedestrian bridges with state
highway funds.
84
This technological momentum illustrates in a small way how path
dependency worked in the elaboration of the road network: once resources were
committed to a major artery like Ramona Boulevard, Aldrich and the other sponsors
absorbed unanticipated costs in order to preserve the utility of the original investment.
That process unfolded in a large way where the boulevard construction involved
cutting back Brooklyn Heights, just north of Macy Street. In October 1935, six months
after the entire boulevard opened to traffic, the Herald reported: On the brink of
destruction, a group of houses perch atop a 100 foot high cliff along Ramona Boulevard. .
. . The cliffs are man-made. They were left behind when workmen cut through the new
right-of-way for the boulevard. It is feared the winter rains will hasten the action.
85
The
homeowners appealed to the city council for aid, but a year later the danger had only
increased: Spectators now gather daily at the spot to watch the gradual carving away of
the fine sandstone formation, leaving an overhanging cliff several feet deep.
86
Aldrich

344
requested the money to purchase the homes from the Division of Highways, but another
year passed without any action, until a crisis loomed: For months a 100-foot side hill on
Ramona Boulevard just north of Macy Street has been sliding and sloughing off, sending
a shower of rocks and dirt onto the street. . . . An avalanche of several thousand tons is
liable to crash onto the highway.
87
The city council voted to buy the houses, while
Aldrich and Cortelyou conferred on grading the embankment to create a stable slope, a
task that, remarkably, had been omitted in the original design process. Out of those
discussions emerged the plan to rebuild the boulevard as a six-lane, divided express
highway, using the Pacific Electric tracks as the median divider. Constructed at a cost
of over $2 million, the boulevard had only been open to traffic for three years, and now
the engineers responsible for it wanted to scrap it and reconstruct the entire corridor.
88
If
the new freeway was not exactly accidental, neither was it planned when the development
of the Ramona corridor was put in place, and this latest instance of design inflation was
enabled, at least in part, by the bungling of the original plans.

Arroyo Seco and Cahuenga Pass Parkways
Arroyo Seco and Cahuenga Pass were both celebrated locations in the lore and
geography of Los Angeles. One was the incubator of the early 20th-century arroyo
culture, exemplified by Charles Fletcher Lummis, who built his home, El Alisal,
overlooking the dry creek bed that gave the area its name. As the route between Los
Angeles and Pasadena, the Arroyo Seco Parkway also gained fame as the pathway to
Pasadenas Tournament of Roses, the annual rite of regional promotion that projected the

345
climate and customs of southern California to an international audience. The Rose Queen
of 1938 wielded the shovel at the parkways groundbreaking, and two years later, at the
ribbon-cutting, another Rose Queen did the honors with a scissors.
89
Cahuenga Pass was
associated with the movie business, which elevated promotion and publicity to an art
form all its own, an art form that frequently used the pass to ground its stories
unmistakably in Hollywood: when Errol Flynn was absent from the set of Robin Hood, a
gossip columnist suggested that Flynn was Out with a bow and arrow, probably, sniping
at cars in Cahuenga Pass.
90
The pass was also the site of the Hollywood Bowl, the
outdoor venue that attracted up to 20,000 concertgoers and for many Angelenos
represented the distinctive attraction of their growing city -- uplifting culture in
salubrious climate. The fame of Arroyo Seco and Cahuenga Pass rubbed off on the
highways that ran through them, unlike Ramona Boulevard, which passed through
multiethnic workingclass neighborhoods and the industrial district on the east bank of the
Los Angeles River. Other than that, the two more renowned highways had much in
common with Ramona. All three were shaped by conflict despite the consensus asserted
by their builders and promoters. They all resulted from intricately brokered deals among
businesses, local residents, federal public works agencies, railroads, street railways, city
and state engineers, elected officeholders, and officials of other public agencies. All
acquired their physical form through design inflation, the in-process accretion of features
and functional capabilities. They all exhibited grave deficiencies at the moment of
completion. And all three were retroactively absorbed into the regions projected
freeway network after they were already built. The last three factors are the significant

346
ones for my purpose of capturing the improvisation that characterized the origins of the
Los Angeles freeway network.
The tortuous history of the proceedings that led to the construction of the Arroyo
Seco Parkway need not be recounted in detail because they have been expertly chronicled
by H. Marshall Goodwin, Jr., and by the directors of the Historic American Engineering
Record recording project of the parkway, Philip Gruen and Portia Lee.
91
The Arroyo
Seco represented a transition between eastern parkway practice based on scenic drives
linking recreational areas and the subsequent era of utilitarian facilities designed for
maximum traffic flow. Its hybrid design reflected the contested origins of the
thoroughfare. The right-of-way within Los Angeles and South Pasadena had originally
been acquired by the respective cities, starting in 1911, with the intention of creating a
park drive along the arroyo. In the negotiations during the 1930s that preceded the
parkways construction, homeowners in South Pasadena agitated for the retention of the
arroyos parklike character rather the big ditch and the eyesore they feared.
92
The
engineering justification for the project depended on its traffic capacity, and after
considerable debate, including several attempts to legislate the design in Sacramento, all
the parties reached a minutely worked-out agreement and in 1936 the state Highway
Commission sanctioned the route.
93

The completed highway did not resemble the agreed-upon design. The idea of
complete grade separation along the route was not part of the agreement but only
emerged during the drawing of construction specifications undertaken by the city and
state engineers under Aldrich and Cortelyou.
94
The original plans called for a landscaped

347
median dividing two lanes of traffic in either direction, but in 1939, at Aldrichs behest,
the Division of Highways enlarged the capacity, adding another lane on each side by
narrowing the divider and taking the 10-feet-wide shoulder for another traffic lane.
95
The
most momentous change during the design process was the full limitation of access from
abutting properties, so that traffic would enter and exit the roadway by means of what
Aldrich started to call on ramps and off ramps.
96
The original project ended on the
north side of the Los Angeles River, where the southbound parkway traffic would
continue onto the two-lane Figueroa Street, which had recently been extended across the
river on a concrete viaduct.
97
Amid predictions of traffic agony at that location, while
the original six-mile section was nearing completion the Division of Highways
reallocated $2 million from other projects across the state to build the 2-mile-long
Southerly Extension, which included another bridge across the river, carried the
parkway through Elysian Park, and ended at Adobe Street, a half-mile north of downtown
Los Angeles.
98

The implications of the in-process redesign unfolded after the parkway opened.
Once again the citys traffic engineer, Ralph Dorsey, had not been consulted on the plans,
but he monitored the construction and the traffic movements after the parkway opened
and provided detailed recommendations to Aldrich and the city council to correct many
traffic conflicts and inconveniences to residents. The off-ramps at Solano Avenue,
reported Dorsey, Create a very dangerous traffic condition forcing a criss-cross of cars
entering and leaving the parkway. Phoenix and Spruce streets were both terminated at
the parkway, and Dorsey proposed to connect these two streets in a loop rather than

348
dead-ending them. Another on-ramp was required at Bernard Street to prevent parkway
bound traffic from having to cross a 3-way intersection.
99
Aldrich and Cortelyou sparred
over whether to pay for the fixes from the state highway account or the citys quarter-cent
funds before reaching a compromise and completing the work in late 1945.
100

The accumulation of freeway features on the Arroyo Seco Parkway took place
during the opening years of discourse concerning a regional network of limited-access
highways. The legal mechanism for establishing a freeway -- a roadway free from
access via abutting properties -- was enacted in 1939 as the California Freeway and
Expressway Act. In 1941 the city and state executed the contract that legally declared
Arroyo Seco to be a freeway.
101
Yet it was an isolated one, carrying traffic between
Adobe Street in Los Angeles and Glenarm Street in Pasadena. At both ends, the high-
capacity roadway dumped vehicles onto city streets. Aldrich, Cortelyou and everyone
else involved understood that the realization of their networked vision required that such
roadways connect with each other, but they could not make those connections until the
rights-of-way for the entire network had been established.
The limited-access highway through Cahuenga Pass resulted from a series of
PWA-funded city projects, without any agreement between the city and the state as to the
overall character of the roadway, even one that was honored in the breach like the
painstakingly won authorization that initiated the construction of the Arroyo Seco. In
1938, Aldrich announced the widening of the Cahuenga Pass Road from Barham Avenue
in Universal City, southerly past the Hollywood Bowl, to the southern outlet of the pass,
at Highland Avenue. A year later, the limited-access quality of Aldrichs plans for the

349
thoroughfare began to emerge on a piecemeal basis, when the city let a contract for a
bridge to carry Mulholland Highway over the pass (the bridge that had been omitted from
the original Mulholland construction in 1924). Aldrich was not coy about his intentions,
stating that the bridge would be another step in the development of the Cahuenga Pass
roadways on an express highway basis.
102
At the same time, he negotiated with the
Pacific Electric to relocate the tracks through the pass, from its eastern edge to the center
of the roadway, where they would serve as a median divider between the two directions
of travel. At the complicated intersection of Highland and Cahuenga, the new highway
would enter a tunnel to pass beneath the tracks.
103
Throughout 1940 and into the middle
of 1941, a mile of limited-access highway was completed from the tunnel at Highland to
a new grade separation at Barham, with intermediate bridges at Mulholland and
Pilgrimage Road.
104

At the precise time when Aldrich was leading the efforts to develop a
comprehensive plan for a regional network of limited-access highways, he pushed ahead
with this project that might or might not be included in such a network. In early 1940,
speaking about the Cahuenga improvements at a real estate conference, he pronounced
his preference for construction of express highways and other traffic aids step by step
rather than adoption of a major plan covering an entire system.
105
The reason for this
seemingly paradoxical inclination on the part of the city official responsible for drawing
the comprehensive plans was that the state highway establishment did not want to build a
limited-access highway through Cahuenga Pass. The Division of Highways was hardly
opposed to freeways adjacent to and leading into the major metropolitan areas, as the

350
divisions director of survey of planning, Fred Grumm, reported in 1940. Cahuenga Pass
was certainly a troublesome intra-city artery, but the state engineers charged with
providing highways between centers of settlement preferred a north-south route through
Los Angeles to follow the Los Angeles River, curve around Griffith Park, and enter the
San Fernando Valley at Burbank (the eventual path of the Golden State Freeway, or
Interstate 5). The state Highway Commission had already approved this route, for
planning purposes, as the extension of the Santa Ana Freeway, the new name for the state
highway that followed Whittier Boulevard into the city. Grumm and his colleagues did
not uphold any high-minded principle against bulldozing urban fabric: the Santa Ana
would pass through east Los Angeles, and they were perfectly happy to see Arroyo Seco
Parkway further extended as a freeway into the heart of Los Angeles.
106
Cahuenga
Pass simply presented too many problems.
The problems began to surface while the Cahuenga parkway was being built.
When Ralph Dorsey asked for access across the limited-access right-of-way for students
attending Valley View School, Aldrich added a pedestrian tunnel at Barham.
107
Threats
to the cherished experience of attending the Hollywood Bowl also arose during
construction. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, aghast at the realization that
parking would not be allowed on the parkway, complained to the Police Commission in
May 1940. An ordinance to permit parking on the service roads to either side of the
parkway was rushed through the city council and enacted in July, before the concert
season was completed.
108
Concertgoers also deluged the county supervisors (the Bowl
was a county facility) with complaints that the improved roadway would depreciate the

351
present acoustical properties of the Bowl. They engaged an expert scientist from
UCLA, who provided detailed recommendations for sound barriers and plantings, which
were gradually put in place over the coming years.
109
During the summer of 1940,
homeowners near the route filed numerous claims for damages caused by heavy blasting
on Cahuenga Pass Freeway Improvement.
110
They were the lucky ones -- they still had
their homes. That was not the case for dozens of residents of Whitley Heights, near the
southern outlet of the pass, whose lawsuits and damage claims persisted for at least three
years after the opening of the mile-long route.
111
The likelihood of such costs and
obstacles in securing the right-of-way was a main reason for the state engineers
reluctance to endorse a freeway through the pass, but they could not ignore the mile-long
project once it was completed, and the Highway Commission accepted the route as a state
freeway in 1943.
112
They were right to worry. The next section of the freeway, which
the city engineers began laying out in 1941, extended about a half-mile north from
Barham to Lankershim Boulevard and required the condemnation of 71 residential and
commercial properties. Sixty-two of the owners sued to prevent the taking and the
process was not concluded until 1948.
113

To the engineers concerned with roadway construction, in the city engineering
office as well as the Division of Highways, such oppositional behavior was a wholly
common experience, as much a part of their daily routines as sharpening their drafting
pencils. It suffused their thinking about transportation development. For the most part
they refrained from expressing any frustration or indignation they might have felt, but it
can be perceived in their alacrity to capitalize on the fleeting opportunities to put in place

352
the key structures of the freeway network, without fully considering the implications of
their work. Awareness of the opposition to broad-scaled road schemes was also the
motivation behind the production of the many regional freeway plans in the late 1930s
and early 1940s. The plans and the publicity surrounding them were tools to affect public
opinion and build political support, but that was a different job than building freeways.

Plans and Parkways
Ernest East, the engineer for the Auto Club, produced the first plan of limited-
access highways for greater Los Angeles under the innocuous name, Traffic Survey: Los
Angeles Metropolitan Area. Issued in December 1937, it incorporated a year of field
research on traffic movements and a wide-ranging review of the financial, political and
technological strategies employed to address automobile congestion in the United States
and abroad. In October 1936, before embarking on the study, East met and corresponded
with the real estate writer for the Los Angeles Times to soften the ground for the
recommendations he planned to make. I expect to emphasize the inability to obtain
cooperation between the forty-five political subdivisions of the county, the need for
giving legal status to a selected group of city-county major thoroughfares, and allocating
a definite part of the motor vehicle and gasoline tax revenue to the various units of this
plan. Similar goals animated all the subsequent plans as well: meaningful political
authority over transportation, privileged legal status to ease the acquisition of highway
rights-of-way, and dedicated funding for the most important arteries.
114

353
The report documented for the first time the major patterns of traffic in the Los
Angeles basin, with detailed tables summarizing the traffic counts and distribution maps
of automobile movements at different times of day. The chief recommendation to ease
congestion was a 400-mile network of 360-feet-wide motorways featuring full grade
separation, cloverleaf interchanges, and no access except by ramps at convenient
intervals. Not surprisingly for the Auto Club, East also recommended Remov[ing] all
street railways from both commercial and residential streets and state highways, in favor
of an adequate metropolitan motor bus transportation system with off-street terminal
facilities. For the central business district, East proposed ramp buildings that would
not have looked out of place in Fritz Langs Metropolis: elevated motorways passing
through downtown office buildings at second-story level. His administrative suggestion
was a single sentence calling for a metropolitan motorway authority, and because the
financing should be agreed upon by the citizens who would be called upon to provide it,
no financing plan is included. The routes of the motorways were shown on a 10-by-13-
inch map depicting an area roughly 40 miles from north to south and 50 miles from east
to west. Each alignment was depicted by a thick line that could only suggest a general
route.
115

Enthusiastic, unanimous approval greeted the study when the Auto Club
presented it in February 1938 to a specially convened meeting of elected officeholders
and officials from the city, county and state transportation agencies. Mayor Bowron
appointed the Transportation Engineering Board (TEB) to develop the recommendations
further. Chaired by Aldrich, the TEB also included K. Charles Bean, general manager of

354
the citys Public Utilities Commission, and representatives from two of the engineering
firms that had worked for Robert Moses to design the New York parkway plan.
116
Their
plan, A Transit Program for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, came out in December
1939; it was under preparation at the same time that the city engineering bureau was
designing Ramona, Arroyo Seco, and Cahuenga Pass parkways.
Aldrichs Transit Program featured far more detailed consideration of freeway-
design characteristics, including curve elevation, lane widths, interchange design, ramp
geometry, and landscaping, with renderings furnished by the engineering consultants.
The finance plan was just as vague as the Auto Clubs, consisting of a call for a special
economic study so that unnecessary delay in financing [may be] thereby avoided.
Aldrich accorded some attention to practical politics by convening the Citizens
Transportation Survey Committee, with representatives from adjoining cities and the
downtown business community. However, the recommendations for operating control of
transportation development were limited to inviting neighboring municipalities to
conferences with a view to developing what, if any, joint or independent action should be
taken, and thereafter, the City, with such other municipalities as care to join with it,
proceed promptly to organize a negotiating committee to commence work.
117

The TEB report included genuine consideration of actual rapid transit through
undertaking of express bus service on high speed, inter-district, stop-free highways.
Unlike its facile recommendation for a highway authority, the plan carefully delineated
the structure and funding of a Coordinated Authority to govern transit operations.
While acknowledging that the high cost of most approved rail arrangements tends to

355
defer into the indefinite future the time when they can be financed, the TEB report
nonetheless recommended rail rapid transit among downtown, Hollywood, the San
Fernando Valley, and Venice.
118
Charles Bean of the Public Utilities Commission must
have contributed the bulk of these sections of the report, but Aldrich did not equate his
enthusiasm for highways with antagonism to mass transit. In 1937 he had set up the
Rapid Transit Division within the engineering bureau to assess the feasibility of
elevated structures, subways, new bridges and viaducts, and tunnels that would be
coordinated with major traffic construction.
119
Limited-access highways were not
intended by their creators to replace the street railways; both modes were intended to
work in tandem to alleviate the traffic congestion decried by all.
In the preface of A Transit Program, Aldrich divulged his conviction that the
report primarily served a public relations function, along with his preference for the
physical alteration of the city rather than abstract planning exercises: Tangible progress
toward the curing of the transportation ills of the district will best be signalized not so
much by the adoption of a master plan as by the breaking of ground for the first
construction project under the plan.
120
That signal project would be the Hollywood
Parkway. From Highland Avenue, it would cut across Hollywood Boulevard, follow
Beverly to the mid-city district, then veer south to arrive downtown at the vicinity of
Eighth and Figueroa streets. The next priority in the TEB report was a freeway between
downtown and the harbor, though the report offered far less detail on that. Other than the
plans for the Hollywood Parkway, the TEB report offered no more information on precise
routing of highways than did the Auto Club plan. The metropolitan area was depicted on

356
a similarly sized map, with the highways represented as speculative lines. The map did
not even show the Los Angeles River, though five routes would have to cross it if the
plan were to be built.
121

Everyone in Los Angeles agreed that traffic congestion had reached horrendous
proportions, and the Auto Club and TEB reports accomplished the goal of channeling
discussion toward solutions. An orgy of report publication ensued. In 1942 the City
Planning Commission weighed in with its Mass Transit Facilities and Master Plan of
Parkways, followed a year later by the county Regional Planning Commissions
Freeways for the Region. The Central Business District Association issued The Los
Angeles Parkway and Transit System in 1946. In response to demands from this same
constituency, Mayor Bowron assembled the Rapid Transit Action Group, which after two
years of studies and meetings produced its own recommendations.
122
All these reports
lacked specificity with respect to actual routing, construction authority, and funding
sources. The state Highway Commission and the Division of Highways, the only
agencies with the actual authority to build any of the roadways called for in all these
reports, did not feel compelled to produce any master plans. Spencer Cortelyou had
shepherded two limited-access routes, Arroyo Seco and Ramona, through the Highway
Commission approval process, and he thought that six more were badly needed. He
estimated the cost in the neighborhood of $800 million, the only realistic estimate
among all the discussion about freeways.
123

Historians and other transportation scholars have placed a disproportionate
emphasis on the many freeway plans of the 1930s and 1940s.
124
They have tended to

357
mistake a promotional and political agenda for a construction plan, much as the Major
Traffic Street Plan of 1924 has been interpreted as a turning point in the citys street
system, when in fact it represented a turning point only in the discussion about streets.
The difference matters. Assessing the coming of freeways merely from the documents
that were produced to facilitate them produces the false impression that this enormous
transition in the metropolitan landscape proceeded on a consensus basis. Place-specific
interests almost always opposed freeways, and the assertion of a broader public good,
which was the premise of all the reports, was a means to blunt such resistance. Aldrich
himself articulated this position in an uncharacteristically unguarded moment with a
newspaper reporter in 1940: Los Angeles will derive great benefit from the
development of a modern freeway providing a safe and fast route for travel . . . and any
slight inconvenience to the local district will be far outweighed by this citywide
benefit.
125
Discourse intended to overcome opposition can hardly be expected to have
highlighted that opposition, or even to have mentioned it, which makes the indefinite
routing plans in all the promotional documents seem less provisional than intentional.
Without the knowledge of exactly which blocks would be destroyed, there was no cause
around which opposition could coalesce.
The situation on the ground bore scant relationship to the programs promulgated
in the transportation reports. As the 1930s drew to a close, small stretches of freeway
pointed toward a convergence near downtown Los Angeles, but they remained on the
outskirts. Ramona Parkway approached from the northeast, Arroyo Seco Parkway from
the north, and, to the northwest, the Cahuenga Pass Parkway peeked out at the basin as

358
the first suggestion of the Hollywood Parkway. None came closer than a half mile from
downtown. The Division of Highways was eager to build the Santa Ana Parkway into
Los Angeles from the southeast, and Aldrich championed the freeway to run south from
downtown to the harbor. None of the existing routes could be completed or new ones
begun until difficult locational matters could be resolved within the densely built-up area
of downtown and the industrial and warehouse districts in the river corridor. No one
knew exactly if, or where, the Arroyo Seco Parkway, the Hollywood Parkway and the
harbor route would meet, or how that junction would work. Not even Aldrich dared to
predict the site for a freeway to cross the Los Angeles River, where any plan would have
to contend with the railroads whose tracks ran along both sides of the river. Though
unexpected by Aldrich, Cortelyou or any other participant in these events, it was the
consolidation of track operations that set in motion the process of bridging the Los
Angeles River with a freeway, and in turn the actual routing of the freeway network.

THE LAST NEW DEAL PROJECT: ALISO VIADUCT
Early in his tenure, as part of the reconstruction of the street network around the
site of Union Station, Aldrich applied to the PWA for assistance in replacing the Aliso
Street bridge over the Los Angeles River. The PWA rejected the proposal because of
deficiencies in the design of the eastern approach, where the roadway from the bridge
would slope down sharply and cross the Union Pacific tracks at grade. The work on
Union Station proceeded slowly and Aldrich deferred work on a new design to take up

359
more urgent tasks. His office submitted the new application in 1938, when the opening
of Union Station was a year away. The PWA had by then begun to wind down its
operations and was unable to begin a major new project, forcing Aldrich to report that
negotiations with the PWA were unsuccessful.
126
He then approached the WPA, in
September 1939, and the extraordinary relationship Aldrich had forged with the agency
produced a remarkable offer. Not only would the WPA fund the bridge based on the
existing, defective design, but he received a request from the WPA authorities to
immediately open construction. The federal agency needed help from one of its most
reliable sources of jobs: The local WPA office is urgently in need of additional projects
in the Central Zone in order to provide employment for the heavy relief load carried on
its rolls in this location. . . . A delay in starting construction will greatly hinder the WPA
efforts to provide employment in the central portion of the city. Without an approved
design, Aldrich could not inform the council how much money the city would have to
contribute as the sponsors share. He asked that he be instructed to proceed with the
construction at the Aliso Viaduct as a WPA project and to report back at a later date
regarding final specifications and budget.
127

From October 1939 through November 1940, Aldrich conducted the most
intricate negotiations of his career, with the most far-reaching consequences for the city.
The urgent re-engineering of the viaduct and associated structures was accompanied by
the equally urgent leveraging of funding sources, which produced further requests for
additional function or capacity for the viaduct, creating a spiraling effect of design
inflation and cost increases. The process began when Merrill Butler made his

360
recommendation for correcting the steeply sloped eastern approach to the bridge: instead
of returning to grade on the east bank, the approach should carry across the Union Pacific
tracks and Mission Road. The railroad would benefit from bridging its tracks because
trains would not have to cross street traffic, which allowed Aldrich to secure a cost share
from the Union Pacific for the eastern approach. The same argument won an increased
contribution from the Pacific Electric, which ran across the Aliso Bridge, and would also
gain an operational advantage if its trolleys did not have to cross the Union Pacific tracks
or Mission Road on the east bank. In designing the elevated approach span, Butler could
not find sufficient area to provide footings, because the storm drain that was built as part
of the Ramona Boulevard project emptied into the river immediately north of Aliso
Street. The storm drain, a concrete-lined channel, 12-feet-wide and 10-feet deep, would
have to be rebuilt as an enclosed culvert with sufficient structural capacity to support a
substantial roadway. The county had already pledged all of its otherwise uncommitted
money from its share of the gas tax, the citys quarter-cent funds were encumbered by
the Arroyo Seco and Cahuenga Pass contracts, and the rail companies had committed to
the maximum. The only untapped pot of money was the gas tax proceeds that Cortelyou
spent on state highways. To persuade Cortelyou to pay for the enclosed drain, Aldrich
inflated the design again by offering to extend the viaduct approach another 1,200 feet to
the east, to connect with Ramona Parkway (then under construction), if Cortelyou would
agree to make the viaduct and Aliso Street a state highway. That would allow the
limited-access Ramona Parkway to cross the Los Angeles River at Aliso, which thus
became the first freeway crossing and provided an unexpected solution to the

361
fundamental locational problem of the freeway network. Cortelyou did not spurn the
unexpected opportunity to run a freeway across the river. Moreover, unsure that any
other freeway bridge would ever be approved, he also suggested that the Santa Ana
Parkway cross the river at Aliso. That meant pulling the Santa Ana about 200 feet west
from its planned route along Pleasant Street in order to meet the viaduct approach where
it joined Ramona Parkway. The city had already begun demolishing the old Aliso bridge
and driving pilings for the new viaduct but still had no final agreement for the project.
Aldrich was compelled to support the Santa Ana Freeway using the Aliso viaduct, and
the city council approved in April 1940.
128

In a few short months, out of sight of the public and with no attention from any of
the citys newspapers, the Aliso Bridge had grown from a limited project intended to
relieve traffic in the vicinity of Union Station to more than twice its originally planned
size and almost three times its original cost. The junction connecting the Aliso approach,
Ramona Parkway, and Santa Ana Parkway was larger than the bridge across the river. It
was also the first three-way interchange for limited-access highways ever built (today it is
known as the San Bernardino Split). Aldrich consented to Cortelyous request that the
city engineering staff design the interchange and in the various funding agreements
accepted a series of requirements that proved impossible to fulfill. The Division of
Highways specified that the interchange allow transition from any one of six directions of
travel (both directions on all three roadways) to all of the other ones, and the Pacific
Electric funding agreement required a dedicated ramp to conduct the street railway across
the bridge from its right-of-way adjacent to Ramona Parkway. The city engineers

362
devised an asymmetrical tangle of ramps and tunnels that sprawled over 25 acres, but still
could not fit in a ramp to conduct westbound traffic on the Ramona onto the southbound
Santa Ana.
129

Construction of the viaduct and interchange was nine-tenths complete in January
1943 when President Roosevelt ordered all WPA projects to be suspended because of the
wartime emergency. The city continued work by borrowing from other accounts and
appealed to the White House on the basis of the sites strategic importance in the staging
efforts for the Pacific theater of operations. Thousands of troops passed through Union
Station every month, and the mainline railroads served as critical freight links in the
production and distribution of war materiel. The appeal was granted and the last of the
monumental public works to receive money from the WPA opened to traffic in August
1944.
130

The consequences of the improvised design process that produced the final
version of the project unfolded over the decade following the end of the war, as
construction proceeded on the Santa Ana Freeway and the Ramona Parkway became the
six-lane Ramona Freeway (and later the San Bernardino Freeway). The hasty
realignment of the Santa Ana through the middle of the blocks to the west of Pleasant
Street caused the extensive loss of housing and the dead-ending of the streets
perpendicular to Pleasant. Access ramps spread the impact further out from the freeway
itself, creating isolated pockets of houses surrounded by looming walls of concrete.
Aldrich requested that some of the crossing streets be bridged instead of dead-ended and
that every other ramp be eliminated, and the state complied with about half of the

363
changes.
131
Whether an enlarged Pleasant Street would have been less intrusive than
cutting through the interiors of blocks can only be a subject for speculation, but its
contemporaries that did follow existing rights-of-way, the Ramona and the Arroyo Seco,
did cause less damage to their surrounding communities. Funneling both the Ramona
and the Santa Ana across the Aliso Viaduct caused traffic to exceed the viaducts
capacity as soon as the Santa Ana opened in 1946. Cortelyous successors added more
lanes to the bridge and interchange in 1955, but still urged motorists to seek alternative
routes because of the perpetual jam at Aliso.
132

West of the river, Aldrich and Cortelyou had little choice about the route of the
Hollywood Parkway once the Aliso Viaduct set the location of the river crossing. They
could tinker here and there with the alignment connecting the viaduct with Cahuenga
Pass, but the basic route was determined once the river crossing was established. That
route was far to the north of Eighth and Figueroa, the intersection which Aldrich had
recommended for the terminus of the Hollywood Parkway in the Transportation
Engineering Board report that came out in December 1939, just weeks before the
negotiations with Cortelyou that established the actual route. In the mid-city area, the
parkway ran about a half-mile north of First Street, stranding the massive First Street-
Beverly Boulevard viaduct without its intended connections. It still stands there today,
an isolated piece of freeway technology, grotesquely out of scale with its surroundings,
awaiting the linkages that never came.
The Hollywood Parkway alignment intersected the projected route of the Arroyo
Seco Parkway at the northwest corner of downtown, and during the war years the state

364
structural engineers designed the interchange for that location. Taking advantage of
Hollywood Freeway contracts with the city that were as vague as those for the Santa Ana,
the state engineers dictated that the routes would meet at right angles, thus avoiding the
tortuous configuration of the Aliso interchange. To minimize the cost of land taking,
they stacked the transition ramps on top of each other rather than extending them outward
in cloverleaf fashion. The result was a symmetrically elegant structure, the Four-level
interchange, which the state engineers would use repeatedly as the emblem of the Los
Angeles freeways.
133

The fixing of the Hollywood Freeway alignment between Aliso and Cahuenga
helps explain the desperation evident in the work of the state highway engineers to
complete the freeway between 1945 and 1954: they had little choice but to make it work
or the entire network would be endangered. Like the Santa Ana, the route sliced through
the middle of blocks, but the residents of those neighborhoods had resources and political
connections unavailable to the residents of the east side. Many of those in the path of the
Hollywood Freeway opposed the demolition and construction with petitions, lawsuits,
and appeals to city officials. Freeway evictions on the east side produced no official
response, but when the Hollywood Freeway began displacing residents the protests
quickly reached Mayor Fletcher Bowron, who duly expressed alarm about the citys
housing shortage and appointed an investigative committee that blamed the state for
imperious behavior. Asked to report to the legislature, the Division of Highways found
its scapegoats among the city officials whose precipitous decisions regarding Cahuenga
Pass and Aliso Viaduct left few options available to the state freeway builders.
134

365
The uproar over Hollywood Freeway had a paradoxical effect in Sacramento.
The joint standing committee on transportation invoked it to substantiate the call for an
increase in the gas tax, with most of the increment reserved for urban right-of-way
acquisition. The Collier-Burns Act, signed into law in 1947, provided the resources for
the Division of Highways to wrest from Aldrich the leadership in the freeway program.
The Four-level interchange received one of the first appropriations from the new pool of
money, and Cortelyou rushed to finish it before his retirement. Completed in 1949, it
stood isolated in its geometric splendor for four years before the freeways were
connected to it. In that brief historical moment, the Four-level interchange was no
different in its (lack of) function from the stranded viaduct at First and Beverly, but the
state engineers applied their considerable resources to make sure it had a different future.
By the time of Cortelyous retirement in 1949, the cooperative spirit that had
grown between city and state engineers in the 1930s had given way to rivalry and
recrimination. Prodded by the city council and the findings of traffic engineer Ralph
Dorsey, Aldrich had reopened negotiations over the Santa Ana Freeway plans and forced
the state to eliminate half the planned exits and entrances and about half the dead-ended
streets.
135
After the war, the start of construction on the Hollywood Freeway from
Cahuenga Pass to downtown was delayed for five years, until 1950, because of a series of
protests and lawsuits over the destruction of Franklin Avenue near its intersection with
Highland. Aldrich held out for an underground solution rather than the flyover ramp that
that state pushed through, and in the process became disaffected with the states
approach. In 1952, when the state legislature was again considering raising the gas tax to

366
speed urban freeway construction, Aldrich chastised the state engineers in his testimony
before the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Highways. The Division of Highways
engineers practiced false economy in their insistence on drawing rights-of-way as the
shortest distance between two points. The state was building rural freeways . . . in Los
Angeles, said Aldrich. His willingness to offer public criticism only signified that his
ability to influence the program had waned.
136

The Collier-Burns funding offers only a partial explanation for the ability of the
state Division of Highways to wrest the direction of the freeway network from the city
engineering bureau. Starting with the passage of the California Freeway and Expressway
Act of 1939, the attorneys at the Division of Highways had carefully selected which
freeway protests to challenge in court. Their legal victories in small rural communities
such as Redding established a body of case law to support the authority of the Highway
Commission to determine freeway locations, even in the more diverse, complex, and
contested landscape of Los Angeles. By 1952, the head state highway engineer was so
confident in his legal position that he could scoff at the threat of a lawsuit over the route
of the Ramona Freeway through El Monte: Risks? Do you know how many lawsuits I
have on my hands now?
137
The Division of Highways also applied some of the newly
lavish transportation funding to expand its engineering staff and technical capabilities,
and no longer depended on city engineers for design services. In the late 1940s the state
structural engineers developed a reinforced box girder (the California Box Girder) that
introduced standard structural modules into the highly site-specific nature of freeway
engineering, thus speeding up design and construction.
138

367
Besides the Collier-Burns money, the legal framework, and its growing
technical expertise, the Division of Highways solidified its position through a public
relations offensive that touted the virtues of freeways and the heroic
accomplishments of state engineers. Division of Highways press agents made the
Four-level Interchange the centerpiece of a national news campaign, allowed film-
makers to use it as a modernistic stage set, and trotted out a model of the Four-level
when protest erupted at other locations. Following the negative publicity over the
Hollywood Freeway at Franklin Avenue, the campaign utilized imagery of
modernity, efficiency and progress to cast freeways in a more positive light. The
swooping Four-level interchange particularly appealed to the engineers sense of
beauty, with its symmetrical ramps weaving upwards around a cluster of slender
columns, and they avidly promoted it as an example of their work. The three-way
interchange east of Aliso Viaduct was a more technically challenging
accomplishment, but its ungainly tangle of transition roads reflected the
compromises and half-measures that attended its creation, it occupied far less
eminent real estate than the four-levels location at the northwest corner of
downtown, and it came off the drawing boards of the city engineering department,
not the state agency that was mounting the public relations campaign. The east-side
interchange was ignored, while the Four-level was touted in glossy photos and
paeans to engineering skill issued to the media near and far. It was featured in
National Geographic, Business Week, Fortune, and The New York Times, and in

368
1956 the Four-level made the cover of Newsweek, to proclaim once again the unique
and futuristic qualities of the southern California metropolis.
139

Conclusion
The Aliso Viaduct and Interchange did not merely establish the location of the
Four-level Interchange, but also made it necessary in the first place. Fundamentally
constitutive of the Los Angeles freeway network, its absence from the publicity mounted
in favor of freeways was a purposeful omission that aptly symbolized the last conflict in
Lloyd Aldrichs career as a highway builder. He had forged productive relationships
with the state highway establishment on a site-by-site basis, aided considerably by his
ability to win federal support for ambitious infrastructure programs. But his funding
leverage waned with the closing of the New Deal public works programs, and local
concerns lost out to the ascendant Division of Highways in the contestation over different
visions for urban freeways. A monument to expediency, the fact that it was built at all
was a tribute to Aldrichs tenacity and his negotiating skills. Intrusive to its
surroundings, gangly and awkward in appearance, and operationally problematic, the
interchange that Aldrich built as the price for constructing the viaduct also manifests the
destructive capacity of public works when feasibility is the highest virtue in their
creation.
Aliso Viaduct and Interchange is a fitting memorial to Lloyd Aldrich, John
Prince, Henry Osborne, and all the other roadbuilding engineers of the city of Los
Angeles. From the dawn of the automotive era, their work was conditioned by the

369
opposition that managed to halt a majority of the schemes to construct major road
projects in the city. On a case-by-case basis, the city engineers pried open narrow niches
for approval by creative financing and administrative arrangements. This bureaucratic
entrepreneurialism reached a new level of sophistication under Aldrich. Once Aldrich
and his colleagues managed to open one of those niches of approval, they clung
tenaciously to the opportunity, readily incorporating changes to accord with shifts in the
political or technical contexts. This process contributed to the improvisational quality of
the freeway network in its formative stages. Irrationality and uncertainty characterized
the work, and the in-process inflation of designs and costs was inherent from the first
stirrings of freeway construction in the city. Despite the looming dominance of freeways
in the urban landscape, their initial creation was shaped by contingencies that the
engineers could not control, and the contradictions they encountered were built into the
infrastructure they produced.

370

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

1
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1935-36, typescript, chapter 1, 11.

2
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1935-36, typescript, chapter 1, 2.

3
Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (NY: Knopf, 1974), esp.
chap. 2.

4
Tom Sitton, Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowrons Urban Reform Revival, 1938-53
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), covers many of the encounters between Bowron
and Aldrich; see 35-37, 48-49, 60, 72, 127-33, 139-46, 179-83.

5
Photos of Aldrich in Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, August 31, 1933; Los Angeles Times,
April 7, 1949; El Pueblo, September 1955, 7-8, 41 (city- employee newspaper); Sitton, Los Angeles
Transformed, 129.

6
Principal sources on Aldrichs life are: Lloyd Aldrich: A Biography, typescript, May 10, 1949;
Hearst Clipping Collection, University of Southern California Regional History Center, filed with Aldrich
clippings; El Pueblo, September 1955, 7-8, 41; Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1949; and his obituary in Los
Angeles Times, July 22, 1967.

7
Lloyd Aldrich: A Biography, 13.

8
Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1933.

9
Lloyd Aldrich: A Biography, 8.
10
Tom Sitton, "Another Generation of Urban Reformers: Los Angeles in the 1930s," Western Historical
Quarterly 18(3), 315-32; Fred W. Viehe, "The Recall of Mayor Frank L. Shaw: A Revision," California
History 59(4), 290-305.
11
Sitton, Los Angeles Transformed, 35.

12
Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1937.

13
Los Angeles Times, November 3, 1938.

14
Sitton, Los Angeles Transformed, 60-61.

15
Los Angeles Times, August 24, 1939, December 12, 1939, November 28, 1941, January 16, 1942,
December 4, 1945.

16
Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1949, April 8, 1949, April 27, 1949, May 5, 1949, May 13, 1949, October
24, 1950; Sitton, Los Angeles Transformed, 127-33, 139-46, 178-83, quotation on 132.

17
Los Angeles Evening Herald, September 23, 1954, September 25, 1954, September 27, 1954,
September 29, 1954.

371

18
Sitton, Los Angeles Transformed, 199.

19
Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933-1965 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 26-37, 43, 46, 65; William H. Mullins, The Depression and the
Urban West Coast, 1929-1933 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 21-23, 29-30, 120-26.

20
Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America (6th
edition, New York: Free Press, 1999) and Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social
History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986), the two comprehensive treatments of
welfare history, have a fundamental disagreement regarding the motivations of social welfare policies and
practices. Katz leans more toward the "social control" thesis, which holds that welfare consistently was
aimed at containing discontent so it would not threaten the state. Trattner finds evidence of genuine
concern for the poor in much welfare activity, not just the self-interest of the powerful. Both sides of this
argument, however, agree that welfare policy almost always involved a distinction between the deserving
and the undeserving poor.

21
Mullins, The Depression and the Urban West Coast, 55, 65, 95, traces the growing prominence of anti-
tax opinion in Los Angeles as part of the resistance to increased public works spending during the Hoover
years.

22
Marches of the unemployed occurred with growing frequency in Los Angeles between 1929 and 1933,
and the some 1,000 Angelenos joined the Bonus March on Washington, DC, in 1932. See Mullins, The
Depression and the Urban West Coast, 90-94; Municipal League of Los Angeles, Bulletin February 20,
1932; Roger Daniels, The Bonus March: An Episode of the Great Depression (Westport, CT: Greenwood,
1971), 70-72.

23
Stimsons insistence on his credentials as an irritant to the powerful and a friend to the oppressed
appears repeatedly in the correspondence from his later years. See, for example, Stimson to Freda
Kirchway, May 23, 1944, and Stimson to Eleanor Roosevelt, August 5, 1949, folder N, Stimson Papers,
Huntington Library.

24
The New Deal as updated Progressivism is best exemplified by Morton Keller, Regulating a New
Economy: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1990) and Keller, Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900-
1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). The portrayal of the New Deal as a broadly
consensualist phenomenon is evident in William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New
Deal, 1932-1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963) and Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From
Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage, 1955). For the New Left critique of the liberal historians, see Barton
J. Bernstein, "The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform," in Towards a New
Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970),
263-88, and Howard Zinn, ed., New Deal Thought (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). Lizabeth Cohen,
Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1990), portrays a series of workingclass communities in the contexts of local politics and the cultural
changes in immigrant households and communities that attended the coming of age of the second
generation of immigrant families. In its richly drawn localized interpretations, this book also provides a
ground-up view of the New Deal that emphasizes family-based and community-based motivations behind
the political support for the New Deal, and thus critiques the view of the liberal historians like
Leuchtenberg and Hofstadter.

372

25
Los Angeles Evening Herald, November 18, 1928, December 10, 1928, December 17, 1928; report of
Public Works Committee, City Council, June 6, 1929, CF #4434, City Archives.

26
Mayor's veto message, July 17, 1930 and Report of Board of Public Works, July 21, 1930, both in CF
#4434, City Archives; Los Angeles Evening Herald, July 23, 1930 and July 31, 1930; Mullins, The
Depression and the Urban West Coast, 65-66.

27
Letter from city clerk to mayor, July 30, 1930, CF #4434, City Archives.

28
Letter from Ernest East to Board of Public Works, June 16, 1930, CF #4434, City Archives.

29
Los Angeles Evening Herald, January 27, 1929, December 15, 1929, January 7, 1930, January 22, 1930,
March 4, 1930, January 14, 1931; City Engineer, Photographic Record of Construction, vol. 34, plates
3260-3289 (1930-31), City Archives; City Engineer, Annual Report, 1930-31, chapter 6, 3-4.

30
CM, 227:445 (June 17, 1931); Los Angeles Evening Herald, June 18, 1931 and June 27, 1931. On the
use of "Olympic" starting in 1931 and the eventual renaming, see City Engineer, Annual Report, 1930-31,
chapter 6, 3-4; CM, 231:80 (November 23, 1931), 231:369 (December 10, 1931), and 250:746 (February
20, 1935).

31
Los Angeles Evening Herald, April 26, 1932, May 27, 1932.

32
Los Angeles Evening Herald, April 13, 1932, April 26, 1932, April 27, 1932; Mullins, The Depression
and the Urban West Coast, 95-96.

33
CM, 234:103 (May 5, 1932), 234:634 (June 13, 1932), 235:126 (June 30, 1932), 235:260 (July 11,
1932), 235:372 (July 18, 1932); Los Angeles Evening Herald, May 5, 1932, May 13, 1932, May 27, 1932,
July 11, 1932, July 20, 1932.

34
CM, 237:119 (October 27, 1932), 237:233 (November 4, 1932), 237:340-44 (November 15, 1932); City
Engineer, Annual Report, 1932-33, 79; Los Angeles Evening Herald, August 18, 1932, September 14,
1932, October 21, 1932, October 26, 1932, October 28, 1932, November 7, 1932, November 11, 1932,
November 12, 1932, November 14, 1932, November 15, 1932, November 16, 1932 (both quotations).

35
"Governor Rolph Signs Bills Providing Orderly Additions to State Highways," California Highways
and Public Works, April 1931, 3-6, 20-24; Los Angeles Evening Herald, November 7, 1932, November 16,
1932.

36
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1933-34, typescript, chapter 1, 2; on the RFC, see James Butkiewicz,
James L. The Impact of a Lender of Last Resort during the Great Depression: The Case of the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Explorations in Economic History 32, no. 2 (1995): 197-216.

37
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1933-34, typescript, chapter 6, 2.

38
Los Angeles Evening Herald, January 23, 1934, February 1, 1934, February 11, 1934, February 16,
1934.

39
Jason Scott Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 56-119; Harold L. Ickes, Back to Work: The Story of
PWA (1935; reprint New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 21-37.

373

40
Scott Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987), 154-57.

41
Contract between City of Los Angeles and Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works (PWA),
1934, for roads in the vicinity of Union Station; report of Lloyd Aldrich to Board of Public Works,
February 16, 1934, both in City Contract #8469, City Archives.

42
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1933-34, typescript, chapter 7, 4-6.

43
City Council Minutes, 134:503 (March 19, 1923) and 134:732 (May 8, 1923).

44
City Council Minutes, 175:160 (December 1, 1926); Los Angeles Evening Herald, October 31, 1928;
Report of Board of Public Works to City Council, 31 October 1931, Council File #8320.

45
City Council Minutes, 239:613 (April 11, 1933) and 239:633 (April 13, 1933).

46
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1933-34, typescript, chapter 1, 2.

47
C. W. Jones, Building a Viaduct under Difficulties Where Teeming Traffic Lanes Cross, California
Highways and Public Works, June 1934, 14.

48
California Division of Highways, Biennial Report (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1932), 30-31, 35.

49
City Council Minutes, 213:371-73 (November 17, 1933).

50
C. W. Jones, Building a Viaduct.

51
Smith, Building New Deal Liberalism, 29-36.

52
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1933-34, typescript, chapter 1, 2.

53
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1936-37, typescript, chapter 5, 1-2; the workplace of the division is
shown in Los Angeles City Engineer, Photographic Record of Construction, vol. 48 (1935), image #4626.

54
Los Angeles Times, September 14, 1933.

55
Lloyd Aldrich: A Biography, 11.

56
Lewis Meriam, Relief and Social Security (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1946), 98,
546.

57
Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1935, December 12, 1935.

58
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1928-29, 73.

59
Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1936; Los Angeles City Engineer, Photographic Record of
Construction, vol. 52, #5034, 5035 (1935).

60
Los Angeles Times, January 1, 1940.

61
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1936-37, chapter 5, 2.

374

62
Council Minutes, 212:656 (December 18, 1929).

63
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1930-31, typescript, chapter 5, n.p.

64
Council Minutes, 238:331 (January 23, 1933).

65
Quotation in Council Minutes, 281:424 (November 10, 1939); Council Minutes, 282:128-29 (December
13, 1939); Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1939. The plans for an upgraded First Street included grade
separation at Grand Avenue and a tunnel under Bixel Street as well as widening along the entire length.

66
Council Minutes, 287:767-68 (October 10, 1940).

67
Lloyd Aldrich, Increasing Traffic in Los Angeles Metropolitan Area Demands Adequate Freeway and
Parkway System, Civil Engineering 17 (May 1947: 28-31; George T. McCoy and Ralph C. Balfour,
Report of Department of Public Works, Division of Highways, Relating to Freeway Evictions, California
Senate Document P2200, 1948, 17-30.

68
Untitled map showing alignment and assessment district of proposed Ramona Boulevard, City Council
File #10357, 1928.

69
Report of the City Engineer to the City Council, December 18, 1928, Council File #10357.

70
Report of the Street Opening and Widening Committee to the City Council, May 28, 1929, Council File
#6234.

71
Report of the City Engineer to the City Council, January 18, 1934, Council File #8454.

72
Report of the City Engineer to the Public Works Committee, October 26, 1932, Council File #4517.

73
Letter from Klyde Young, Executive Secretary, East Side Organization, to City Council, May 21, 1929,
Council File #4469; Report of John Prince to the Street Opening and Widening Committee, June 6, 1929,
Council File #4470.

74
Letter from Gordon Hubbard, Executive Secretary, East Side Organization, to City Council, January 22,
1932; Report of City Engineer to the Streets Opening and Widening Committee, February 8, 1933; both in
Council File #375.

75
Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1933; Spencer V. Cortelyou, New $2,119,000 LA-Pomona Arterial Will
Save Traffic $876,000 Annually, California Highways and Public Works, March 1934, 2-3, 16-17.

76
Council File #8206 (1931), Council File #2411 (1932) and Council File# 2345 (1933) contain the
correspondence, appraisals, condemnation notices, and other records of the extensive legal proceedings in
securing the right-of-way.

77
Report of the City Engineer to the City Council, November 7, 1933, Council File #5531.

78
Report of the City Engineer to the City Council, November 3, 1933, Council File #375.

79
Letter from City Attorney to City Council, November 17, 1938, Council File #5531.

375

80
Cortelyou claim in Cortelyou, New $2,119,000 LA-Pomona Arterial ; disposition of intersecting
streets on map accompanying Report of the City Engineer to the City Council, February 8, 1935, Council
File #304.

81
Los Angeles Evening Herald, June 11, 1938.

82
Letter from George Baker, Ninth District, to Tunnels, Bridges and Viaducts Committee, February 12,
1935, Council File #304.

83
Report of the City Engineer to the Board of Public Works, December 30, 1935, Council File #304.

84
Letter from Lloyd Aldrich to the City Council, November 4, 1937, Council File #4538.

85
Los Angeles Evening Herald, October 29, 1935.

86
Los Angeles Evening Herald, October 26, 1936.

87
Los Angeles Evening Herald, November 25, 1937.

88
Los Angeles Evening Herald, December 3, 1938; California Department of Public Works, Biennial
Report, 1938-1940 (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1940), 38, 99.

89
H. Marshall Goodwin, The Arroyo Seco: From Dry Gulch to Freeway, Southern California Quarterly
47 (1965): 73-102.

90
Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1937.

91
Goodwin, The Arroyo Seco, J. Philip Gruen and Portia Lee, Arroyo Seco Parkway, Historic
American Engineering Record, HAER No. CA-265, 1999, available at
http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist07/aboutdist7/projects/arroyo_seco/hear_doc/html/hear_doc.html.

92
Gruen and Lee, 11; Goodwin, 85 (quotations).

93
Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1936.

94
C. W. Jones, Eighteen Bridge Structures Will Span Arroyo Seco Parkway, California Highways and
Public Works 15 (December 1937): 10-11, 27; City Engineer, Annual Report, 1937-38, typescript,
chapter 7, 2-3.

95
Sam Helwer, Traffic Interchange Design, California Highways and Public Works 30 (Mar.-Apr. 1951): 53.

96
Report of the City Engineer to the City Council, March 6, 1944, Council File #7599.

97
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1936-37, typescript, chapter 8, 3.

98
A.D. Griffin, Proposed Arroyo Seco Parkway Extension to Los Angeles Business Center Through
Elysian Park, California Highways and Public Works 18 (October 1940): 6; quotation in Los Angeles
Times, December 6, 1942.

99
Report of the City Engineer to the City Council, March 6, 1944; Report of the City Engineer to the City
Council, May 2, 1944; both in Council File #7599.

376

100
Letter from City Clerk to City Engineer, January 8, 1946.

101
City of Los Angeles Contract #12397, June 24, 1941.

102
Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1939.

103
Letter from E. C. Johnson, Pacific Electric Railway Co., to Merrill Butler and Lloyd Aldrich,
November 28, 1939; report of the City Engineer to the City Council, December 7, 1939, and accompanying
map; both in Council File #4326.

104
Photographic Record of Construction, vol. 34, plates 3260-3289 (1930-31),

105
Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1940.

106
California Division of Highways, Biennial Report (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1940), 35-38.

107
Letter from Harry Thompson, Crossing Guard Supervisor, Hollywood Division, Los Angeles Police
Department, to A. H. Cantin, Traffic Safety Control Officer, LAPD, September 12, 1942, Council File
#12969.

108
Letter from Carl Bush, executive secretary, Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, to Board of Police
Commissioners, May 13, 1940; letter from City Clerk to Board of Police Commissioners, July 16, 1940;
both in Council File #2507.

109
Letter from Spencer Cortelyou to Board of Supervisors, December 18, 1945, Council File #17035.

110
Letters from City Attorney to City Council, August 19, 1940 and August 21, 1940, Council File #3332.

111
Letter from Lloyd Aldrich to City Council, June 6, 1941; letter from R. F. Witter, City Real Estate
Agent, to City Council, February 15, 1944; both in Council File #7643.

112
Freeway Agreement between State of California Department of Public Works and the City of Los
Angeles, June 15, 1943, Council File #15285.

113
Report of City Attorney to City Council, May 20, 1948, Council File #7643.

114
Engineering Department, Automobile Club of Southern California, Traffic Survey: Los Angeles
Metropolitan Area (Los Angeles: Automobile Club of Southern California, 1937); Letter from Ernest E.
East to Charles Cohan, October 1, 1936, Folder 125, Box 10, Auto Club Archives.

115
Traffic Survey, quotations on 31-32, 36; ramp building illustration on 34; route map, plate 15.

116
Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1938 (quotation), August 10, 1938, October 3, 1938.

117
Transportation Engineering Board, A Transit Program for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area (Los
Angeles: by the board, 1939), 41.

118
A Transit Program, 14, 40.

119
City Engineer, Annual Report, 1937-38, typescript, chapter 2, 1-8.

377

120
A Transit Program, vi.

121
A Transit Program, 27-34.

122
Milton Breivogel and Stuart Bate, Mass Transit Facilities and Master Plan of Parkways (Los Angeles:
City Planning Commission, 1942); Regional Planning Commission, County of Los Angeles, Freeways for
the Region (Los Angeles: by the commission, 1943); Central Business District Association, The Los
Angeles Parkway and Transit System (Los Angeles: by the association, 1946); Sitton, Los Angeles
Transformed, 115-116.

123
Spencer V. Cortelyou, Congestion of Traffic Big Problem, California Highways and Public Works,
December 1938, 1-5.

124
Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, 216-225; David W. Jones, Jr., Californias Freeway
Network in Historical Perspective, typescript, Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California,
Berkeley, 1989, 167-180; David Brodsly, LA Freeway: An Appreciative Essay (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1981), 98-109.

125
Los Angeles Evening Herald, April 3, 1940.

126
This admission came three years after the fact, when Aldrich recounted the history of the project to the
city council, in Report of the City Engineer to the State and County Affairs Committee, March 20, 1942,
Council File #899.

127
Report of the City Engineer to the City Council, October 30, 1939, Council File #3657.

128
Letter from Lloyd Aldrich to County Board of Supervisors, December 14, 1939, Council File #3657;
report of the City Engineer to the City Council, December 18, 1939, Council File #3657; report of the
Finance Committee to the City Council, January 4, 1939, Council File #3657; letter from City Clerk to
Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Co., Union Pacific Railroad Co., and Pacific Electric Railway Co.,
January 5, 1940; Council File #3657; report of the City Engineer to the Board of Public Works, March 6,
1940, Council File #899; report of the Board of Public Works to the City Council, April 2, 1940, Council
File #899; A. N. George, Easterly Gateway Structure to Los Angeles Involves Structure for Freeways,
California Highways and Public Works, February 1941, 13-16.

129
Freeway Contract between City of Los Angeles and California Department of Public Works, 1941, city
contract #12637 (Santa Ana Parkway); Contract among City of Los Angeles, the Atchison, Topeka and
Santa Fe Railroad Co., the Union Pacific Railroad Co., and the Pacific Electric Railway Co., city contract
#13020, 1942.

130
Aliso Viaduct and Ramona Parkway, dedication program, 1944; Arthur C. Verge, Paradise
Transformed: Los Angeles during the Second World War (Dubuque: Kendall-Hunt, 1993), 97-102.

131
Report of the City Engineer to the City Council, March 28, 1944, Council File #9675; Los Angeles
Evening Herald, July 26, 1942.

132
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, January 15, 1954, July 13, 1955; California Highways and
Public Works, March-April 1955, 31-36.

133
California Highways and Public Works, May-June 1944, 8-9, 17; November-December 1946, 12-17.

378

134
Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, September 12, 1947, September 13, 1947, September 19,
1947, September 24, 1947, October 17, 1947; George T. McCoy and Ralph C. Balfour, Report of
Department of Public Works, Division of Highways, Relating to Freeway Evictions, California Senate
Document P2200, 1948, 17-30; H. Marshall Goodwin, Jr., Right-of-Way Controversies in Recent
California Highway-Freeway Construction, Southern California Quarterly 51 (Spring 1974): 61-105.

135
Letter from City Clerk to Lloyd Aldrich, December 5, 1941; letter from Merrill Butler to Lloyd
Aldrich, March 28, 1944; Report of the City Engineer to the City Council, May 23, 1944; all in Council
File #9675.

136
Statement Concerning the Freeway Needs of the City of Los Angeles, in Joint Fact-Finding
Committee on Highways, Streets and Bridges, Digest of Testimony and Reports (Sacramento: by the
committee, 1953), 246-48.

137
Frank Durkee, Freeway Law, California Highways and Public Works, July-August 1950, 1, 30-33;
quotation in Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1952.

138
Stephen Mikesell, Historic Highway Bridges of California (Sacramento: California Department of
Transportation, 1990), 17.
139
Newsweek, May 14, 1956; Arthur Krim, The Four-Level Stack as Los Angeles Icon, paper
presented at Society for Commercial Archaeology, Los Angeles, 1995; Arthur Krim, Los Angeles and the
Anti-Tradition of the Suburban City, Journal of Historical Geography 18 (1992): 121-38.

379
CONCLUSION

The scale of freeways misleads about their origins. Their enormity creates
problems of perception and interpretation that can undermine efforts to understand the
institutional contexts of their production and the relationships among freeways and the
communities through which they passed. The social resources involved are vast, and the
temptation is to look for a comparably scaled alignment of political, social, economic and
cultural factors to explain how these giant structures came to be. Such giant footprints on
the landscape seem to proclaim the power of their creators, rather than the desperation
that emerges from the discussions and arguments during the process of building these
structures. In the formative period of the Los Angeles freeways, every instance of
approval was an extremely close call, and many proposals did not receive approval at all.
Even the enormity of the structures themselves was a rapidly shifting matter, a seminal
instance of the in-process design inflation that later brought an end to the era of freeway
construction. To a considerable degree, the freeways were improvised -- not
spontaneous, but certainly not the orderly fulfillment of rational plans.
The main threads of this story are the constant tension between road schemes and
their opponents, and the decisive role of the municipal engineer serving as a broker
among diverse interests in order to overcome that opposition. Freeways did create
landscapes of dominance, but their location and design also reflected the opposition they
encountered, and the agency of diverse individuals and groups. Even the lack of effective
opposition on the part of workingclass residents and racialized groups, particularly in

380
East Los Angeles, acquires fuller dimension in light of the institutional struggles between
city and state highway engineers. Since the 1920s, when the different agendas of state
and local government and the contention among powerful but diverse private interests
thwarted highway construction through the east side, East Los Angeles had been the
laboratory for the politics of route determination and the development of designs for
through highways. The state Division of Highways broke the stalemate of the 1920s by
inflicting the social cost of transportation onto the residents of the east side. Aliso
Viaduct later solidified the social construction of the east side as the place where
dangerous and intrusive public functions would be consigned, but those methods did not
move west with the freeways. The objections of middleclass homeowners against the
Hollywood Freeway precipitated a crisis in relations between city and state government,
which configured the next period of freeway development, from 1947 until the onset of
federal interstate financing in 1956.
This view of the onset of freeway construction in Los Angeles diverges
substantially from prior accounts, which have tended to emphasize policy discussions and
planning visions conducted at some considerable remove from the decisions about where
to pour concrete. But it was the making of the road network and the carry-over of that
process into freeway construction that configured the citys automotive infrastructure
more completely than any other factor. The plans for roads and freeways do not
correspond to the built environment of transportation. The plans served as promotional
mechanisms to build support for road and freeway development, and their main result

381
was the creation of lasting images of the city rather than thoroughfares on which people
traveled.
Opposition to roads and freeways during the period of this study was almost
always a local concern, specific to the impacts on particular properties, neighborhoods
and people. The many transportation plans for Los Angeles were intended to impose a
different way of thinking about the automotive infrastructure, in terms of a broader
common good rather than in terms of the interests of a few property owners. Along with
the efforts of state and federal highway officials to quantify the economic impact of
traffic, the totalization of highway needs did have a profound impact on deliberations in
the state legislature that effectively unleashed freeway construction on the city. This
mode of discourse remains current in the early 21
st
century, typically framed as
NIMBY, or not-in-my-backyard, the pejorative applied to those opponents of progress
who would halt major infrastructure development to serve their own narrow ends.
Localized highway opposition was hardly ever pre-emptive. It only surfaced in
response to specific projects and the threats they represented, which automatically created
an imbalance of small, local interests fighting against the plans of those charged with
serving the city as a whole. Those local interests never mobilized as an interest group
with its own view of the city that was as wide-ranging as the plans of their opponents.
Highway opposition was omnipresent but inchoate, and the lack of a comprehensively
articulated position has caused that opposition to fade from our historical picture of Los
Angeles. The lack of a unified, alternative vision was also what allowed opponents to be
branded with the NIMBY description. The use of the term implies a centralized

382
position on the part of those who would invoke it to describe others; to accuse others of
NIMBYism is to arrogate to oneself the responsibility of determining what is best for
all. However, the fact that anyone would object to a freeway coming through their
neighborhood indicates widespread sentiment against building freeways, even if that
agreement did not form the basis of a mobilized interest group aimed at the entire
construction program. There was no consensus regarding how people would travel
around Los Angeles, but the opposition to roads and freeways, if predictable, was also
site-specific. Only by comprehending the moments and the sites of opposition in the
aggregate do they seem to represent some counterbalance to those who would build more
and larger highways.
Perceiving this buried past of opposition also has meaning for the present. It is
difficult to find statements of praise and contentment for the highway and freeway
networks of Los Angeles. Anecdotal evidence from the newspaper and the water-cooler
has been found to represent broad public opinion in studies of commuter attitudes
undertaken by the state transportation agency.
1
If we try to follow this dissatisfaction
back toward some time when consensus might have flowered, it is conceivable that a
disjunction occurred, that recent discontent represents a swing of the pendulum from
acceptance to rejection. But the evidence of highly contested infrastructure development
and roadbuilding that did not accord with systemic planning suggests that the roads and
freeways of Los Angeles were born in contradiction. To look back from the vantage
point of the present and ask What went wrong? is to inhibit understanding of how Los
Angeles got the roads and freeways it has.

383
NOTES TO CONCLUSION

1
California Department of Transportation, Operational Systems Branch, Statewide Highway Congestion
Monitoring Program (Sacramento: by the department, 1994).

384
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