Los Angeles Is Not La-la Land

EVERY GENERATION OR SO, THE REAL LOS ANGELES INtrudes itself into the palmy myth preferred by the outside world. The riot two weeks ago was such an occasion. Suddenly, La-la land — with its beaches and movie stars, Rolls- Royces and Evian, its Italian suits and car phones, its upscale shopping malls and matching, coke-sniffing boy-girl bimbos — was gone. In its place were wasted landscapes and hard people whose anger and alienation seemed for a while to know no bounds.

An immediate good that may emerge from the rioting is that the world will finally begin to lose its sense of Los Angeles as primarily a city of careless rich people. It was never that, isn’t today and, if demographic trends continue, never will be. In the past decade, the number of Hispanics and Asians in Los Angeles has nearly doubled. The new immigrants came to the largest manufacturing center in the U.S. not to sell movie “projects” but to find jobs. The truth is thus the very antithesis of the myth: at its core, Los Angeles is a blue-collar and workaday town. Its residents tend to drive pickups or subcompacts, not Beemers and Rollses. They wear jeans and baseball caps and speak in accents redolent of Oklahoma or Texas, Ohio or New York, Mexico or El Salvador, Vietnam or Korea. Few Angelenos have ever seen a movie star. Many have never even seen Rodeo Drive, much less shopped there. Black, white, brown and yellow, they have created little communities that frequently resemble the places they left behind. In the poorest of those communities, the streets may not be as mean as those in, say, the South Bronx, but they are every bit as tough.

Many of the big dealers of Bel Air and Hancock Park have good intentions where the city as a whole is concerned. They are liberals, and they want to be involved, but they — even more than their counterparts in other big cities — are an enclave of such rare privilege that it is quite possible for them to avoid contact with Angelenos of, let us say, a different stripe. Even when they venture out, with eyes straight ahead on the freeways, most of them never even see the problems they care so much about.

So what? So this: for better and worse, L.A. is the city of the future. It is the first major metropolis in history in which everyone is in a minority. A place that has no majority culture is a place, paradoxically, in which the West’s old, traditional promise — that, if you can get there, you may have a new beginning, regardless of bloodlines or station in life — is most likely to be kept. That promise, however, is not fulfilled in the “when you wish upon a star” myth; it is fulfilled by the Okie strawberry picker who survived the Depression and bought a farm, by the New Yorker who built a chain of car washes, by the Vietnamese refugee who worked his or her way through Cal State Long Beach and became a physicist. In stressing its most trivial and least typical aspects, we miss the lessons that L.A. has to teach about how modern urban societies should — and should not — be organized.

The “should” is the tarnished but still real promise (plus such unique Los Angeles contributions as multiple urban centers instead of a single downtown and, pace Woody Allen, right turn on red); the “should not” is in the promise’s failures. Cities of the future should not, for example, be without effective systems of mass transportation, as L.A. has been since the 1950s. Modern cities should not encourage the kind of uncontrolled urban sprawl that destroys a sense of unity and shared experience in its citizens. And modern cities should not stress growth over the environment as they plan for the future.

And what of race? Los Angeles is rapidly becoming a city of multiple ghettos. The blacks are in their place, the whites in theirs. The Vietnamese are here, the Koreans over there, the Japanese in the middle. The Salvadorans, Mexicans, Nicaraguans and other Latin Americans may all be Hispanic, but they too are increasingly likely to be separated along national lines. The phenomenon is not new. Watts has been a black ghetto for 60 years or so. Indeed, what was once a relatively small and discrete area around Central Avenue has grown until it is now defined more by the color of the people who live there than by actual geographic boundaries. Seen in this way, the city of the future becomes a vast continent of warring states.

Which brings us to the matter of the police. Under Daryl Gates, the Los Angeles Police Department became an army, not a police force. With its battering rams and paramilitary uniforms, its choke holds and Taser guns, it set the hard-nosed, Magnum Force, make-my-day standard for urban law enforcement through the ’70s and ’80s. In the process, it became so muscle- bound and senseless that it was unable to cope rationally with a traffic hazard named Rodney King, let alone with rioters and looters. Here too L.A. takes us into a Blade Runner future.

Usually, when the problems of U.S. cities are discussed, the focus is on older places — New York City or Detroit or Chicago. Los Angeles was always, well, Lotusville. With the Watts riots of 1965 quite forgotten by most, if L.A. had a real problem (besides freeway traffic and smog), it was how to protect pedestrians from the roller skaters at Venice Beach. Now the world knows better. L.A. is what lies in store for everyone, unless Americans stop wishing on a star.

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