January 2010 Archives

Sometime in 1939 or 1940 a planner sketched out a concept for downtown. It would have assembled existing and new government buildings and oriented them toward the city plaza of the 1840s and the newly built Union Station.

Seduced by the neo-classical follies of fascist Italy, the plan put the old plaza in the clutches of a grand and brutal county administration building overlooking a Roman hippodrome. Only here, the chariots have been replaced by autos. Spring Street would have passed through portals in the encircling wings and been divided, just as in a Roman stadium, by an island. How anyone would have crossed this racetrack on foot is left unclear.

Olvera Street hangs off to one side, a block or so of “old Los Angeles” that had been recreated as a tourist attraction at the beginning of the 1930s.

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Because of the jet stream.

At about 30,000 feet (approximately where commercial jets fly), a band of fast moving, low pressure air above the northern hemisphere flows over large cells of low pressure and around high pressure cells.

Given direction by this invisible and mobile topography, the jet stream loops north and south and meanders east and west. And as the jet stream moves, low pressure systems below it – associated with disturbed air and storms – follow. In a planetary feedback loop, the faster the winds in jet stream above, the more troubled the air below.

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Bill Deverell, Daniel Lewis, and Peter Westwick, members of Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, ruminated on the end of southern California’s aerospace culture in a recent posting to LA Observed. They bookended a century of invention and innovation with the opening of the Los Angeles air show (January 10 to January 20, 1910) and the announcement in early January 2010 of the relocation of the Northrop Grumman headquarters from Los Angeles to the Washington D.C. area.

Northrop Grumman was not only the last corporate giant of the Age of Aerospace in southern California, it also was one of a dwindling number of major corporations headquartered in the Los Angeles area. According to LA Business Journal Editor Charles Crumpley, “When the Fortune 500 list came out last spring, Los Angeles County was home to 14 companies. . . . Since that list came out, DaVita Inc. announced it was moving its headquarters . . . and last week Northrop announced its departure. That brings L.A. County’s total down to 12.”

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The room you’ve just left. It remembers. It haunts itself with memories of you lest you not return. The ordinary world, at least in part. It remembers the aspirations of the builder of that half-empty office building from the 1920s near downtown. It remembers passersby in the pattern of the terrazzo entry that, carpet like, occupied the whole frontage of a movie theater that’s since become a Pentecostal temple. Even the landscape remembers, although its memories are harder to discern.

We assume, as part of the city’s dystopian mythology, that nothing remains of even the recent past in Los Angeles to draw us away from the insistent demands of the present. That’s partly true, as this posting by Curbed LA illustrates (highlighting some of the recently demolished memories of the city).

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