City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Despite being “the world capital of an immense Culture Industry, which since the 1920s has imported myriads of the most talented writers, filmmakers, artists and visionaries” (17), Los Angeles, a city that embodies the worst excesses of capitalism, has become “the city that American intellectuals love to hate” (21). Nevertheless, critical writers are also fascinated by the metropolis’ symbolism and posit that it represents the future of capitalism. Those engaged in the noir tradition of culture, which “everywhere insinuated contempt for a depraved business culture while it simultaneously searched for a critical mode of writing or filmmaking within it,” saw Los Angeles as a nightmarish, dystopian venture (21).

Davis writes how “unlike other American cities that maximized their comparative advantages as crossroads, capitals, seaports, or manufacturing centers, Los Angeles was first and above all the creature of real-estate capitalism” (25). In the 1880s, the now famous town was a backwater compared to more established San Francisco; however, by 1915 it was “the biggest city in the West, approaching a million inhabitants, with an artificial river tapped from the Sierras, a federally subsidized harbor, an oil bonanza and block after block of skyscrapers under construction” (25). In order to “launch a reckless competition with San Francisco,” a tough new settler named Colonel Otis decided to take “command” of the city’s business organizations and make unionization of labor near impossible (25).

From a cultural standpoint, Boosters including Charles Fletcher Lummis promoted Los Angeles as a romantic land of early Spanish Missions that could present a fresh start for Aryan East-coasters and Midwesterners, who were intimidated by the masses of new Catholic and Jewish immigrants.

Lummis hosted a “full-fledged salon” in his bungalow, which was located in the Arroyo Seco (27). The group set out a unique lifestyle and architectural style that differentiated Los Angeles from the East Coast and reinforced white, Protestant supremacy.

Boosterism came under critique during the Depression through a form of literary and cinematic cultural production called noir (36). During the Depression of the 1930s, Southern Californian novelists, such as James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, “repainted the image of Los Angeles as a deracinated urban hell” and featured images of urban decay and capitalist combustion (37). Black writers, such as Langston Hughes and Chester Himes, contributed to noir by showing how Los Angeles, an apparently golden city of opportunity, was “a particularly cruel mirage for Black writers” who faced immense racism that was an obstacle to not only their career, but their personal safety (42). By the late 1960s, noir developed into “a comprehensive counter-history” of the status quo and continued to adapt at the time Davis was writing (44).

During the late 1930s and 1940s, Central European intellectuals arrived in Los Angeles to escape Nazi persecution. Figures such as Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer became “segregated from native Angelinos,” comprising “a miniature society in a self-improvised ghetto, clinging to their old-world prejudices like cultural life-preservers” (47). Such men found Southern Californian culture both inane and an interesting barometer for societal change.

Leading figures in the California Institute of Technology, which was founded in the 1920s by Nobel Laureates, including astrophysicist George Ellery Hale and leading physicist Robert A. Millikan, “shared an almost fanatical belief in the partnership of science and big business” (56). The fame of science in Southern California also led to the founding of Scientology. Lieutenant Commander L. Ron Hubbard, an author of sci-fi pulp fiction, created a lucrative pseudoscience called Dianetics, which eventually became Scientology.

There were “cultural guerrilla” figures in both art and music during the 1950s and 1960s (62). Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Red Mitchell, Billy Higgins, and Charlie Haden were jazz musicians who pursued an increasingly abstract, improvisatory style; Edward Kienholz and Walter Hopps opened the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, which patronized the modernist art of painters, including Ed Ruscha. While the goal of the groups was “critically reworking and re-presenting subcultural experience,” their efforts ended in the Watts riot of 1965 in South-Central Los Angeles where a “rage against police abuse and institutional racism” (64) created a “barricaded commune” (67).

Prominent intellectuals and artists continue to make Los Angeles their home. One prominent symbol of the 1990s was the Canadian Frank Gehry and his deconstructed Pop architecture, which according to Davis, “has the peculiar quality of transmuting noir into Pop through a recycling of the elements of a decayed and polarized landscape” (81).

Davis argues that “while the Mission Revivalism of Lummis’ generation relied upon a fictional past, the World City hoopla of today thrives upon a fictional future” (83). At the University of California, Los Angeles, researchers are examining the city as a “laboratory of the future” (84), showing both the boons and defects of unchecked capitalism. However, Davis warns that these efforts could inflate existing myths of Los Angeles, and that a truly radical examination would need to consider the experiences of the impoverished, nonwhite majority who will make up the city of the next millennium.

The question of who rules Los Angeles remains an open one. Davis explains that Los Angeles “has always had a more porous elite culture than New York, Chicago, Philadelphia or San Francisco” (102). In the words of Fredric Jaher, “each new wave of wealth has ‘imposed its ways on the community, rather than defer to older elites’” (102). Whereas the earliest wealthy and influential families were WASPs, such as the Otis-Chandler dynasty of the LA Times, in recent years Catholic and Jewish dynasties have challenged this. Davis considers that “because mass politics are so extraordinarily stunted in Los Angeles, elite interest brokerage is transacted invisibly with minimum patronage costs or ‘trickle-down’ to inner-city or labor constituencies” (104). Since the Watts riots of 1965, these central power structures have not had to share their wealth or address inequality.

In the first half of the 19th century, East-Coast Yankees superseded the Mexican elite in Los Angeles, who were cattle barons, by marrying their daughters and taking over the hacendados’ businesses. A similar son-in-law superseding father-in-law scenario occurred when Harry Chandler joined in the Times dynasty with General Otis in an ambitious, city-building program; following Otis’ death in 1917, Chandler emerged as “the generalissimo of the forces that engineered the great postwar boom” (114) in Downtown Los Angeles. Chandler mobilized the police-force to squash dissent. However, the Times hegemony was eventually defeated by the success of the automobile in the mid-1920s, which “subverted Downtown’s central-place monopoly and created windfall profit opportunities for the developers of the first suburban auto-centered shopping complexes” (118). 

Hollywood also challenged the Downtown elites’ power, as the most powerful people in it, like Louis B. Mayer, were Eastern European Jews who were excluded from the social institutions of the Chandlerian elite.

By the 1950s in the Westside of Los Angeles, real-estate speculation was a primary source of money and power amongst the city’s moneyed elite. After the Second World War, suburb development became the prerogative of Jewish builders who were the heirs to the early film moguls. WASP-dominated Downtown and the Jewish Westside set up distinct concentrations of elite power that caused Los Angeles to become “divided in direction and torn in loyalty” throughout the 1960s and 1970s (125).

By the late 1970s, the Downtown and Westside rivalry ceased to dominate narratives about Los Angeles. By the 1990s, individuals, including Donald Trump, used their wealth to influence business interests in the city. There has also been significant external input into the regional economy, especially from Manhattan and Japan, which have made Los Angeles a tributary to their financial centers. Los Angeles’ main export to Japan, as well as to other places, is empty space. As Davis writes, “an obvious result of growing financial integration is that control over the Los Angeles economy is being alienated,” and when a recession hit Japan in 1990, Los Angeles suffered as a result (138).