January 2009 Archives

On the other hand, my house is as unarchitectural as it gets.

In deference to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and their notion of a “decorated shed” – their term for the “ugly and ordinary” in vernacular architecture – mass produced houses like mine are almost undecorated sheds, virtually free of architecture, and unencumbered by any historical memory. This, nonetheless, did not deter eager buyers from wanting one of these pragmatic solutions to the problem of shelter. Prospective buyers waited in very long lines in the early 1950s to buy one.

They are not beautiful houses. They are not sentimental. They do not appear to be consoling.

It is only their humility that makes them seem ironic.

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I had dinner the other evening at the Santa Monica home of Paddy Calistro and Scott McAuley. They’re the publishers (and everything else, nearly) of Angel City Press. I’m one of their authors. They’re one of the city’s great treasures.

Their home, Scott and Paddy told me, was built in 1933 – an extension of suburban development that parceled out blocks north of Montana Avenue. Despite the year (worst of the Great Depression), Los Angeles was doing better in 1933 than a lot of other places. The movies had found their audience again after the coming of sound. The Long Beach earthquake had paradoxically created jobs, particularly for the replacement of dangerously unsafe schools.

The house had been built at the end of the Spanish Colonial Revival period. It’s peak had been in the 1920s. By the early 1930s, the grandeur in the style had gone. It was being adapted for more modest houses. It would soon slide into a diminished afterlife as a tract house look – stucco, tile trim, a flat roof, and a cement figure of a sleeping Mexican on the porch.

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In our collective, myth drunk memory of Los Angeles, Henry Huntington is the robber baron who was better than most. Who bequeathed his library and garden to a grateful (though distracted) citizenry. And, vaguely now, he built a railroad and made it run. As the song goes, it raced against time. Until, around 1925, time ran out.

Huntington had impeccable railroad credentials, being the nephew and heir of Collis Huntington – a truly scary robber baron, one of the creators in 1869 of the transcontinental railroad, and manipulator of the Southern Pacific Railroad and much of late 19th century California. But Huntington wasn’t a railroad man. Rail was a means. Real wealth was real estate.

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Expo Line from Culver City to Santa Monica: 2015 . . . Green Line to LAX: 2016 to 2018 . . . Connector for downtown rail: 2018 . . . Subway to La Cienega: 2019 . . . Subway to Century City: 2026 . . . Crenshaw project: 2029 . . . Subway to Westwood: 2032 . . . Westside to the Valley project: 2038 . . . Subway to the Sea: Anyone’s guess.

This list is Metro’s initial estimate (based on local funding only) to build more rail-based transit. The list is a source of fury, perhaps for the wrong reason.

In fairness, it could take less than 30 years to assemble these system components, thanks to the federal funding promised today (01/08/09). Projects that have approvals and construction drawings waiting would benefit. Projects with an implementation cycle measured in more than months might not. There is no calculating what kind of system might be under construction eight or twelve or twenty years from now.

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Jane Usher wrote, “Our shared goal of growth through elegant density demands that we build vertically, but only in my view at major commercial or employment centers or within walking distance of locations where we have or will provide a substantial mass transit stop.”

Before you ride the bus, you have to learn to walk. And before you’d be willing to learn, there has to be a place to walk to – a relatively safe place, public without being exposed, at least minimally sheltered, lighted at night and in the early morning, clean. And a bus has to stop there with convincing regularity – every ten minutes, say.

Given the interlocking tiers of transit in Los Angeles – from local bus to Rapid limited service to light rail and subway – there should be a clean, well-lighted place at every transfer point. And the bus or train to has to arrive there with convincing regularity.

Of course, none of that is true of the Metro system.

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Former Planning Commission President Jane Usher lives in a nice neighborhood. It has street after street of 200-by-100-foot lots. Los Angeles overall is significantly denser than that, particularly in neighborhoods built after 1950. But Usher’s pre-1950 neighborhood is still on the same, familiar suburban grid as my 5,000-square-foot lot, which is in distant Lakewood.

Inevitably, we must fit more of us into the grid. More of us implies greater density, since there are no more greenfields in which to build. Density is a direction (higher, more compact, closer to the street) and it also can be a means – to fewer car trips, more use of transit, a better urbanity. That kind of density can even be seen as value in itself. Density as an abstract good, like the idea of home.

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