Excerpt from Norman M. Klein's essay in the Helter Seklter: L.A. Art in the 1990s (MOCA, 1992) catalogue. Bit dated, but still works.
"THE INVISIBLE CITY: FREEWAYS
The freeway network in L.A. was essentially finished by the mid-sixties, and ran at high efficiency for about ten years. Architecturally speaking, it completed a process whereby the point where one entered public spaces was narrowed considerably, and the private spaces one has within the auto were enhanced. This process also fits into a broader, longstanding tradition which began in the twenties. After years of adding parks and public plazas, there came a trend toward much more privatization of landscape and public areas: instead of new parks, there were more backyards, and more boulevards shopping districts along the Miracle Mile or on Sunset Boulevard; it was the invasion of the private fantasy into a public consumer phantasmagoria set inside the shopping mall, or the theme park, not to mention being explicitly rendered in the fantasy architecture so notorious of L.A.
Other factors also contributed to this growing denial of public space on behalf of private consumer fantasy. They all related eventually to the freeway, but come historically from other sources. Well into the twenties, an extraordinary isolation existed between the three original urban circuits of the city--downtown, the West Side, and the San Fernando Valley. Each had developed very separately from the other for generations, and this left clear boundaries, despite the myth of L.A.'s sprawl and endless uniformity. If anything, white flight and real estate booms have made these distinctions even stronger, reinforced by the expanded orbit downtowns in each area. If you live on the West Side, you may never travel east of La Brea Avenue, except occasionally to go to MOCA, LACE, or the symphony. The habit is well fixed, like a freeway interchange. One literally passes through to arrive, but rarely stops.
The tourist planning of hotels and theme parks also shows this sense of removal, and quest for homogeneity. For convenience and 'safety,' they are built directly off freeways, away from mixed population centers. Even the Bonaventure Hotel, made famous as critical theory by Frederic Jameson, was built specifically in a depopulated zone where nearby residents were almost impossible to find. The entrance, in fact, was so inaccessible to anyone other than guests, that an extra entrance had to be added on the eastern side in the late eighties, simply to allow the business inside to find some street traffic (though there is virtually none except for business lunches). That is consumer-built isolation indeed. Self-alienation might be more like it.
City agencies still permit the destruction of key sites, as they have for generations. On behalf of the continuing strategy to locate historical memories where whites live, historic buildings in the 'forgotten' (non-white) side of town are still being quietly dismantled, like the site of the original Mack Sennett Studios along Glendale Boulevard in Echo Park (where Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson got their start and the Keystone comedies were filmed in the teens and twenties), destroyed in 1990, observed but never noticed by the 40,000 cars that passed by its erasure.
What then is the final effect of this architectural evasion, this introversion of public spaces evident by the late sixties? In the novel Invisible Cities (1972), Italo Calvino finds Los Angeles unapproachable by freeway, as so many visiting writers do. He cites L.A. in his discussion of the endless catalogue of forms that cities may take, saying 'When the forms of cities exhaust their variety, and come apart, the end of cities begins. In the last pages of the atlas there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end, cities in the shape of Los Angeles...without shape.' Calvino is suggesting a city incapable of holding a memory or a shape, rather like a bad batter unable to hold a charge, a city after the death of cities.
While this critique, very frequently made, has the charm of a ghost tale, it still tends to obscure vital historical evidence, much as the earlier noir literature often exoticized the chaos. L.A. has never been simply a sprawl. As mad as some of the results may look, more than fifty years of planning went into the freeway basin we see today. L.A. is not without boundary; its boundaries are clearly defined by its transportation outreach and segregated real-estate planning. L.A. is not suddenly looking like a 'real city.' There was always massive poverty here, a large pool of cheap labor, usually shut off from the tourist route, and made invisible, until occasional bursts of violence suddenly made the public notice, like a summer fire--similar to the Locust fire, but more remote. In L.A., one can easily live a lifetime as a tourist, see mostly what the smoke sends by way of promotion, never visit what is left out, except by way of crime movies. That is why L.A. begins to resemble a netherworld." (28 - 29)
Sidestreets
4th of July in East L.A. from Court of Appeal on Vimeo.
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