May 2009 Archives

Sam Maloof, woodworker, died the other day. He was 93. He made furniture mostly by hand. He built a sweetly eccentric house in what is now Rancho Cucamonga. It, too, was largely made by hand, shaped over many years around the shell of a commonplace frame house in the remnants of a lemon grove. Maloof’s home accreted, taking on rooms and passages as they suited his family’s needs or his desires.

Maloof, born of immigrant Lebanese parents in Chino, was a Californian, specifically a southern Californian from the hot, dry, and once rural edge of the Los Angeles basin, when Chino was only orchards, dairy farms, fields, and a cluster of store front businesses. His father ran a dry goods store. He mother sold dresses and lace. Their son had a knack for using his hands, for making things out of wood.

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It should have ended better than it has. The election of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in 2005 should have been more heroic – a reconquista of the city’s ignored mestizo soul and a declaration of the city’s greater American purpose. To be the northernmost capitol of the tropics. To be the mid-point between East and West. To be the city where California advanced the reconciliation of its vast unease with race.

Instead, days before his second term begins, after four unheroic years, the mayor (who would be governor) is being called a failure.

Ed Leibowitz, writing in the month’s edition of Los Angeles, laments, “We are bitter because you promised us so much. You were not only our first Latino mayor in 137 years but arguably the most charismatic leader in memory to step onto L.A.’s bland political stage. You had charm, poise, and vigor, and you spoke in cadences that reconciled reason and compassion.”

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From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, 1996

31. The city has a war memorial given to it by the Marine Corps in 1956, a souvenir of Korea. It is a Douglas F-3D fighter painted above and below in the gray and white of a shark.

In the mid-1950s, the Marine Corps donated gutted fighters to cities if they would haul one away to a public place and have the plane repainted at intervals.

Douglas Aircraft, the region's biggest employer, called the F-3D the Skyknight.

There is the head of an Indian painted on the side of our Skyknight. The Indian may be a Navajo. He looks like the Indian on a Navajo Freight Lines truck. Both Indians have blue eyes.

The Marines gave the city the jet fighter, lacking any operating gear, as a pure husk, as a toy.

And it was, for a time.

The city had the shell of the jet brought here from the next county, laid it belly down, with no landing gear, flat on the scraped ground in a new park. Children played on it.

For two years the F-3D lay as if its pilot had made an oddly successful, wheels-up landing between the jungle gym and the swing set.

32. Almost at once, the F-3D began to hurt children, who broke arms and legs jumping from its wings.

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It’s over. It’s over except for the exercise of trudging to the polls on Tuesday, to the inevitable. A march to scaffold, on which the voters of California will be asked – again – to ritually cut their own throat. And we will, as we have repeatedly done in the last 30 years.

So who won the May 19 special election? Surely not California’s defeated electorate. Not the state’s defeated governor. Nor the legislature, perennially defeated by its collective incompetence, its made-to-fail political culture.

The winners are those who imagine the California of the future as a kind of utopia. Only, it’s not one in which most Californians would care to live. It’s a utopia as imagined by Republican operative Grover Norquist and lesser advocates of a “final solution” for government.

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Cynicism and contempt. Isn’t there anything new? In an annual Sacramento ritual, cynical appeals to ideology substitute for real solutions to California’s increasingly desperate financial condition. And Sacramento’s contemptuous disregard for the rest of us doesn’t stay in Sacramento. What happens in Sacramento stays in your neighborhood.

When cities were obliged to backfill a large part of the state’s deficits in the 1990s, most of them cut social services and park programs and put off needed infrastructure maintenance. Not many of those programs and services were ever replaced. Streets and water systems deteriorated. Neighborhoods suffered.

Cities have now been told to be ready for more suffering.

On the likely expectation that the propositions on the May 19 ballot won’t pass, the Governor’s budget is expected to include an option for borrowing 8 percent of property tax revenues from cities to close part of the state’s deficit. The impact on local governments – and your neighborhood – is estimated at just over $2 billion.

According to the League of California Cities, Los Angeles would be forced to loan the state $67.7 million. Long Beach would give up $6.6 million. The county would be particularly hard hit, losing as much as $250 million.

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Let Us Have Faith That Right Makes Might. Motto engraved on the Los Angeles City Hall.

When the concept of neighborhood councils was made a pillar of charter reform in 1999, I imagined they would be a radical break with the city’s past. That of all the reforms in the charter, neighborhood-based councils would do the most to give Los Angeles a real civic culture. I even optimistically hoped that elected council members – once envisioned to become more than a thousand strong – would learn sufficient cunning to face up to the malignant politics of city hall.

Skepticism should have restrained my usual optimism. Not because the councils haven’t been making progress. Ten years after voters reformed the city charter, there are about 90 Neighborhood Councils. And not because the councils are ineffective. (And yes, some council members could be more disciplined and some councils could be better led.)

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The housing crisis had thousands of starting places on hundreds of streets of someone’s dreams, on some piece of unremarkable former farmland just past the edge of earlier aspirations. In a house built by the marginalized and sold to those among them who didn’t notice that they were.

I live on one of those streets. At the end of which, precisely 60 years ago almost to the day, bulldozers ripped into the lunar gray soil of former lima bean fields prone to flooding and gangs of young men assembled, waiting to begin assembly line tasks that required no more skill – in most cases – than swinging a hammer for eight hours a day.

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This is another in an occasional series about places in L.A. This place is a roadside shrine.

At the end of my block, where a crosswalk once spanned the boulevard, a community of mourners has assembled a memorial. It circles a Marbelite lamp pole a few steps from a mid-block bus stop. Some copies of photographs are duct taped to the concrete pole: a lanky white kid lolling on a couch, smiling. A girl also smiling. A crowd of kids mugging for the camera. A message in red ink in clumsy block letters attached to another copied photograph, both made unreadable from sun and the unexpectedly late spring rain.

The vigil lights at the foot of the pole have been replaced at least once that I know of. Puddles of congealed pink wax cut out with semi-circles mark where earlier glass containers stood, shattered, and spilled. The city treats these roadside shrines with forgiving indifference. Memorials in the public right of way are cleaned up over time by the city’s mowing crew, but there’s no rigor in the process and perhaps some superstition. The nine or ten new vigil lights – none of them burning now – haven’t been moved. They haven’t been tended either. Some roses in cellophane – the kind you buy from a vendor on a street median, that boyfriends buy for forgiveness – have dried to pale ochre.

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