Art: Dream City

“What Can We Do About This?” screamed a big placard in the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art. It meant Los Angeles’ own looks and lack of livability.

The great, sprawling town, which is fifth largest of U.S. cities, cannot stop growing, cannot be controlled. Only big city in the U.S. accessible from all sides by highway, it has 2,000 miles of streets, the highest per capita automobile registration (807,000) in the world. In 30 years it has grown four and a half times bigger, from 101 square miles to 451. In the past year it sprouted three years ahead of itself in population (normal increase: 60,000 a year).

Los Angeles’ gangling growth makes everybody happy except U.S. city planners. They point out that the city is outgrowing its communications like a baby its shoes, that its traffic problems are the worst in the U.S., that some of its wide suburban reaches are so sparsely populated that the inhabitants can’t afford to buy a sanitary sewage system. If the city planners could burn Los Angeles down they would rebuild it very differently.

So the Los Angeles Museum decided to show the public how city planners thought the ideal Los Angeles should look. With help from the County Regional Planning Commission, and a group of famous architects and designers including California’s R. J. Neutra and Cranbrook Academy’s Walter Baermann, the museum’s director, balding Roland McKinney, last fortnight opened the biggest city planning show California had ever seen. They were joined by the Los Angeles chapter of Telesis, a militant group of Pacific Coast architects who want California to look like a Lewis Mumford dreamworld.

Under the metallic rays of a huge grapefruit-yellow sun, a topographical panorama showed visitors what a beautiful place Los Angeles County had been before the Angelence had got there. Other panoramas depicted the idyllic cattle and sheep ranches of a century and more ago, the land and oil booms of the 1880s and ’90s, the leaning fences and signboards of the 19205. The 1941 display pictured children playing in congested streets, oil wells blossoming on front lawns. A weatherbeaten shack, transplanted whole from a Los Angeles slum, stood accusingly before a backdrop of Los Angeles’ skyscraping city hall.

What Los Angeles architects hoped could someday be done about all this was shown in models of compact units that included offices, homes and factories, separated by recreational greenbelts; of broad freeway highways with tunneled traffic intersections. Visitors were confronted with mural blowups of ballots, marked with an X in a space labeled “better planning.”

Skeptical gallerygoers realized that the ballots, too, were a dream, that Los Angeles was likely to remain its sprawling self for years. The city has a backlog of traffic-routing plans that have never got past the blueprint stage. Of its present city planning commission’s 100 miles of projected parkways, 15 miles have actually been completed. New congestion caused by the mushrooming of airplane, shipbuilding and other defense industries is keeping the planning commission’s hands full. The authorities are already frightfully busy now trying to keep bad from becoming worse.