Ab Urbe Condita Introduction
Hic, ubi nunc Roma est, orbis capet
Arbor et herbae et paucae
Pecudes et casa vara fait
Here, where now stands Rome, capital of the world,
there were trees, and grass, a few sheep,
and an occasional cottage.
--Ovid, Fasti V.93
Strip the Los Angeles Basin of its streets and houses and factories and freeways and sewers and plumbing, and imagine a vast, fertile basin that has supported human societies for about 13,000 years. A single culture, known as the Millingstone People, thrived for about 10,000 of those years, succeeded by the Uto-Aztecans (Gabrielinos/Tongva), who ruled the Basin for another two thousand years. For more than 100 centuries, the basin was lightly settled by about 5,000 persons, scattered into dozens of villages. During only the last of these centuries—the 20th—Los Angeles became a great capital of world history. By the time it did, the great structures of life, power, purpose, and justice were already deeply shaped by the countless generations that came before.
Ghost Metropolis is a global history of Los Angeles since earliest human habitation, presented as a hybrid of textual, cartographic, and photographic representation, in print, online and public art formats. Ghost Metropolis is a 21st-century “atlas,” inspired by the Renaissance atlases of the 16th and 17th century: rich mixtures of typography, graphic arts, and cartography. Ghost Metropolis aspires to make the past visible in the limitless landscapes of present-day Metropolitan Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, California, United States of America, is the heart of the Southern California region, a global metropolis so huge and complex that its weight in world history would be impossible to calculate. This graphic history attempts to tell its story, since the beginnings of the city as a permanent settlement. There are far too many stories to tell about the past of Los Angeles for any one historian to address, so I tell as many as I can, about the features of Los Angeles that I believe the world should better understand, in order to help build a better future. Los Angeles is a beautiful gorgon. Its giant human population--16.5 million in 2000--is drawn from all continents of the Earth, drawn to Los Angeles for the riches and freedoms and pleasures that it promises, and has promised, for thousands of years. Los Angeles has been the site of joy and beauty for many, but it has also been a deadly siren, devouring its lovers in chronic and spectacular paroxysms of repression and social violence. The ghosts of the injustices of the past haunt us in the form of institutions of unequal power etched into the landscapes all around us. This hybrid graphic work of history, cartography, and photography tries to make those ghosts visible.
Ghost Metropolis is a work of multiple genres: textual narratives; photography and other graphics; and cartography. I have created a wide array of cartographic and graphic compositions to convey the vast complexity of the global metropolitan past in coherent form. All genres of my expression are presented to work as an ensemble, in both harmony and counterpoint, by indexed relationships, by analogies, and by contrasts. Threading it all together are my narratives, storytelling explications of how various landscapes of the past took shape and took place. These are organized not by “chapters,” but by many short essays, each with a footprint, each overlapping and intersecting the others in various ways. They are all written to be free-standing, as coherent as the story it tells. Readers can jump around in space and time throughout this work, learning what they will. The more one reads, the more one will understand my overall interpretation of the shape that Los Angeles took by the beginning of the 21st century.
Ghost maps are one part of my effort in Ghost Metropolis and elsewhere, to expand the range of the historian’s craft, by recounting the past through cartography and visual media alongside, and in combination with textual narrative. While verbal text is inescapably linear and narratological, cartography and photography operate by simultaneity and juxtaposition. Bringing together multiple modes of representation and interpretation is not only a new but a necessary consequence of my basic claim that the past literally takes and makes place. Knowledge and understanding about the past is inherently cartographic, grounding it in the material and the imaginary topologies of human interaction.
Ghost maps are hand-crafted composites of archival analog cartography and vector-based digital GIS layers. They are designed visually to reveal time, change, events, and motion through the symbolic languages of color, shape, iconography, and textual annotation. They are not made to be read quickly, as would be mere illustrations or diagrams. Rather, each ghost map is a free-standing document, offered for the reader to ponder and to puzzle over, to return to many times. These ghost maps are sized to spread across two facing pages of the print version of Ghost Metropolis. As a rich and complex graphical composition drawn directly from the profound complexity of past social life itself, the content of a ghost map—like the city itself—exceeds the capacity of any textual narrative to explain it.
Like the verbal text of Ghost Metropolis and the ghost maps, the photomontages, panoramas, mosaics of individual stills grouped into larger compositions, and the series of frame stills from motion pictures are free-standing documents and not mere illustrations. Both denotative—showing factually the where and the when, and connotative—implying meaningful relations among the visual components, these photographic compositions are also indexed to points and shapes in the ghost maps. Visualizations of complex historical phenomena, as they took place, these compositions draw their representational value from the indexical nature of photography—a direct record of the past.
Los Angeles has been many things and many people. In truth, there never has been one Los Angeles, so it is impossible to tell “its” story. Instead, I have elected to tell many stories that serve as case studies for an aspect or dimension of Los Angeles that I believe to be important. For example, I examine many movies, but I do not claim that the movies examined amount to a comprehensive history of the motion picture industry. Far from it. Instead, I explore how certain features of Los Angeles, especially its political culture, have been shaped in large part by motion pictures, and also that motion pictures have been shaped by the regional political culture. I do not need to cover all kinds of movies to accomplish this goal. Each of the forty-two essays that comprise Ghost Metropolis should be read as a case study of how culture, power and social interactions took place across the sweep of Los Angeles history.
Every metropolis has a signature that is perceived, felt, understood, and lived. It is sensual, visual, imaginary, and spatial. We can call it the “ambiance”— composed of human bodies, Earth, and built things. It is also known as a “milieu.” This signature ambient milieu is present in any human environment, no matter how “rural” or “urban.” How it looks, how it is imagined, how it is lived, and how it is ruled are all dimensions of the same phenomenon—the landscape. The Los Angeles metropolis is a place of a very complex kind—a vast fabric of places. All places within it are dynamic, constantly in motion. All places are also relations with other places—every person is in transit or communication with other places. Communication in and through and between global cities like Los Angeles is also polyphonic, multilingual, and therefore of plural cultural life. What holds it together in the imagination (which is always partly visual) are mental images of a whole city that leave the infinite diversity to the side. What holds it together functionally is the state, the institutions of civil society, and the infinite daily practices of its millions of residents.
History is a set of pasts, each set in specific places, or topoi. Each place is a unique configuration of power and people who share living ecologies with the natural world. In Ghost Metropolis, I narrate and explain the topoi through which we can envision the pasts of Los Angeles, pasts which are shared and related to the pasts of most of the inhabited Earth. Each place is a topos, and the topography of a region is the topology of the emplaced, place-making people, carving their own institutional nodes within the grand institutional landscape that they inhabit. Because many prior generations erected these coral-like structures of institutions (of labor, of discourse, of cultural, residential, racial, ethnic, gender, labor, and wealth segregation), all new stories to tell are built upon older stories.
The state is ever present in any landscape. The institutions of power take root in every environment inhabited by humans. Landscape is the region itself, a portion of Earth that is ruled by specific people and institutions and cultural scripts that are inscribed into the landscape with institutions that are both imagined and material, each attached to the Earth in many places. It follows that the densest, most weighty metropolises on Earth also concentrate the most social power. The fate of democracy is therefore most at stake for the human race writ large in those metropolises.
The history of Los Angeles needs to be understood in the context of the places that have had the strongest relations, in the pathways of historical change: Guatemala City, Havana, New York and Paris and Chicago and Mexico City and Saigon, Santiago, Manila, Managua, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, and 1980s when a Los Angeles-dominated U.S. regime came to shape the lives of millions of people worldwide. To say “Los Angeles” is to invoke a dense interweaving of uncountable relations among people all over the globe, woven tightly into a small patch of the Earth. Thus, like the proverbial elephant felt only by hand, it can only be perceived in parts.
How to tell the stories of the millions of people who have produced Los Angeles with their hands, heads, and hearts? Infinitely more than the leaders of governments, corporations, and churches, these millions actually produced the bulk of what we call “Los Angeles,” and all of its products in oil, aerospace, mass media, entertainment, and home building. Telling their stories is the most important, but alas, also an impossible task.
Every biography is about someone who inhabited or worked in or ruled or participated in that place in some way. Places are made by real individual people, so I sing the stories of as many people and place as I can. But no one can speak for the millions—in their own voices—from so many social and cultural and political and religious, and gendered perspectives? The full story of how Los Angeles was produced by those millions somehow demands that every one of them tell their separate story. Otherwise we begin to merge their experiences, and average them, and make claims that one or another is “typical” of their group. Once we start down that road, then we have abstracted the lived experience through which people of the past understood and propelled their metropolis into their future.
Consider the huge numbers and the vast varieties of groupings that are possible for summarizing “Angelenos:” races, ethnicities, economic classes, religions, genders, sexual orientation, age groups, generations, taste cultures, political affiliations, and so on. Now consider that each of the millions of Angelenos over the centuries belonged to each of these groupings, in different combinations. How are we to sort all of those variables and their intersections? I use all the tools at my command, from narrative storytelling to graphic summaries in maps and graphs. But I decline, in the name of humanism, to present the experience of so many millions of diverse individuals by drafting a laundry list of their group memberships. I can name the historical categories that have been used, but the reader must never think of these categories as intrinsic properties of the individuals themselves. They are conceptual boundaries that also play powerful roles shaping the experiences of the people who lived in and built Los Angeles. In a strong sense, their identities as “African Americans, “blacks,” “Latinos, “Mexican-Americans,” “Asians, Japanese, Koreans,” “Osakans,” men, women, children, teenagers, engineers, gardeners, houseless, homeless, housewives, retirees, and so on, were produced by the very dynamic interactions that I attempt to portray in Ghost Metropolis.
I tell many stories about many different types of landscape: visual, imaginary, lived, perceived, conceived, institutional, productive, and so on. A few words here about how I interpret landscapes will be helpful toward an appreciation of this hybrid work.
The visual landscape is an essential element of its regional culture. “Our commonality as citizens resides almost exclusively in the world before our eyes,” writes Dave Hickey: “The landmarks we share with others have personal importance to us as opportunities to experience the confluence of our commonality.” The visual landscape of a metropolis is reduced to iconic shorthand by movies, which use iconic markers to set the action in known places, and by the tourist industry, which needs simple, positive images for marketing. For Los Angeles, the tourist shorthand consists of sunny days, low-rise, horizontal vistas backed by either mountains or the ocean, and palm trees dotting nearly every point of view. Certain “urban icons” like the Hollywood Sign, freeways, the Hollywood Bowl, Lakers insignia, and Disneyland, are unique signifiers, understood in remote corners of the globe. People are also an important part of any urban vista; every citizen’s body is also on display for every other citizen’s gaze. Gender and race-ethnic differences have long been the primary axes of visual discrimination. What Angelenos find beautiful and ugly in bodies, clothing, and automobiles, plays a major role in texture of their social lives.
I also tell stories about the productive landscapes of Los Angles from the perspective of the major sectors that have played the most powerful roles in the development of Los Angeles: oil, aircraft/aerospace, motion pictures/television, and home-building. I narrate these stories through the places of their enactment, within the region and beyond it, to other nations and continents, whenever and wherever the “producers” of Los Angeles took their institutions. I begin with the story of laying the groundwork for a mighty industrial metropolis. I narrate the historical depth of many places on the landscape of Los Angeles. Of course, “landscape” scales from local to global, so there are many landscapes within Los Angeles, just as there are many that are connected to Los Angels, like those of Hong Kong and southeastern China; northern Mexico, South Korea, Iran, and so on. My accounts cannot cover the great majority of the metropolis, but I try to present significant cross-sections (which I call transections, because they run through the metropolis).
Los Angeles is a very old work-in-progress, retaining the shapes of power inscribed by many generations since the first human settlements of late Pleistocene Era. I begin with the first Angelenos to identify those features of rulership that can be recognized in later epochs, charting the durability of those features through later generations. My goal is not merely to explain why Los Angeles became a massive global city, but to identify the political-cultural forms of its rulership: its footprints, and fingerprints. Those are traced as they spread through time and space, outward beyond Los Angeles during the 20th century. This method results in my division of this region’s history into nine “regional regimes”:
[Insert table here]
The location “Los Angeles, California” (centered at 34° 3’ N. Latitude, 118° 14’ W. Longitude) can be variously defined. As terrestrial topography, the Los Angeles Basin is the best definition. Bounded by the San Gabriel Mountains to the north and the Santa Ana Mountains to the southeast, interrupted by the Santa Monica and Puente ranges, the basin proper is centered on the Los Angeles River. It communicates naturally with the San Fernando, San Gabriel, and San Bernardino Valleys. These valleys are ancient alluvial plains, the sedimentary deposits from millions of years of mountain erosion. The principal rivers carrying that runoff during the rainy season of this “Mediterranean” climate, have been the Los Angeles, San Gabriel, Rio Hondo, and Santa Ana.
Across an immense antiquity, huge and fearsome creatures inhabited these plains, cañons, and mountains. The arrival of Homo sapiens marked the end of the Pleistocene, a continuous period of floral and faunal families that had endured for 1.8 million years. Megafauna, or “giant animals” thrive only in resource-rich ecoregions. For hundreds of thousands of years, mammoths, mastodonts, saber-toothed cats, giant lions, glyptodons, ground sloths, and short-faced bears, to name only the major genera, thrived here. Many smaller genera and species, such as American camels, American horses, dire wolves, also thrived and evolved in this rich ecosystem. All these perished at the end of the Clovis period.
The Los Angeles Basin has proven remarkably rich as an exploitable ecosystem. Such fecund abundance evidently characterized the landscape for millions of years, since the late Terciary Period (Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene). On the surface, jungles and forests and countless generations of creatures thrived and perished. Dead, corrupt, crushed beneath later sediments, forest and animal biomass accumulated into vast subterranean lakes of crude petroleum oil. Petroleum is the corruption of life, and also the corruptor. For countless millennia, oil lay deep in the Earth like a curse of great richness: call it “manna from hell.” This seductive manna, foul and sweet, fuelled the fortunes of a few; the transportation revolution; the industrial productivity and warfare of the 20th century; and turned nation-states against one another. Los Angeles has been a mighty metropolis in this era of petroleum. This very same abundance attracted the predatory and nomadic Clovis hunters (circa 13,200 years BP), who cleared the landscape of its giant animals and thereby opened the land to permanent human settlement. The Clovis era (about 1,000 years) was followed by a long, 10,000-year settlement by the sedentary Millingstone People. The Millingstone people were finally pushed aside by the Uto-Aztecans during the time of the Han Dynasty and the Roman Empire. With their arrival, the now-legible inscription of social institutions into the landscape began.
This long regional past produced many stories (most lost forever), and many stories have been told about it. My story is a narrative of inscription and mentorship; of the durable attachment of human institutions to the terrestrial landscape; of generations that entered this institutional landscape; of how they shaped it, and how they were in turn shaped by it. Every new ruling cadre assumed command, not merely of people and location, but of the pre-existing rules of production and exchange; of the norms of command and obedience; of standards of justice, and many other human bonds. The thickness and endurance of these institutional ways of life is precisely what I mean by “region” and “place.” To enter the Los Angeles Basin in any given calendar year was to enter a fully-developed network of power relations. Every person and material object was already spoken for.
The first set of essays about the regimes of Los Angeles emphasizes the transmission of political-economic culture from earlier to later regional regimes, through a process of mentorship that linked many generations of Los Angeles leaders: gabrielino, hispano, mexicano, californio, and estadounidense. The abiding influence of the Uto-Aztecan, Spanish and Mexican periods on the U.S. regimes has been significantly underestimated by most scholars, who have likewise underestimated the shaping influence of the larger-scale regional context: the Spanish Borderland location of Los Angeles. During the seventh (1881-1940) and eighth (1941-1992) regional regimes, Los Angeles became a global metropolis, and it did so by carrying forward the deeply inscribed social institutions of previous regional regimes. The sections of this essay narrating those more recent developments chart the rise and gradual decline of a remarkably durable ruling oligarchy, the Otis-Chandler dynasty. The global growth ambitions of that dynasty were astonishingly successful, but also fraught with grave injustices that remained deeply inscribed, haunting the landscape, exploding periodically in social conflict. Ultimately, the 1965 and 1992 urban rebellions brought the Otis-Chandler oligarchy to a close, and the final regional regime, the 9th, is still underway as a reconstruction.
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- Narrative Essays Phil Ethington