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From Footpath to Freeway: Circulation Networks

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A city is a vast field of bodies in motion. Freedom is the crossing boundaries. Boundaries are the source of power because nothing can be hoarded or exchanged for profit without boundaries that others will respect. Boundaries are akin to medieval walls because they command tribute. Freedom and power meet at the boundary, because profits are made from the circulation of people across controlled boundaries, of rent, of exchange, and taxation.

While the skeleton of a metropolis is largely the work of a handful of powerful capitalists, publishers, and politicians, its body and life are the work of the millions who chose to settle there. The essence of a city is not its fixed and frozen structures, but the circulation of life within and through them. The two dimensions of structure and circulation interact, of course, but the story of Los Angeles as lived by its millions of Angelenos greatly transcends the plans intended by the titans of industry, politics, and finance. The paradoxical interaction of power and freedom is realized most remarkably in the grid, that endless and infinitely uniform rectangle of streets that Governor Felipe de Neve brought from Mexico City in 1781, and the Anglo-Americans extended in all directions as a matter of expediency for maximum commercial development thereafter.

The grid is the circulatory system, an open network of pathways that nearly obliterate the myriad boundaries imposed by municipalities and social groups. The grid opens out into infinity: its lines continue around the globe, disregarding the crazy quilt of national borders. Some critics have tried to portray the ruthless, mathematical grid as the instrument of empire and scientific exploitation, but the grid is also uncompromisingly neutral, opening and welcoming every marginal group or underclass to join the party at the center.

Angelenos have never been very aware of the political shapes on the ground as they traversed the metropolis on foot, horse, streetcar, bus, and automobile. To a person’s daily mental life, only the destination points along paths—home, work, consumption, school, and worship—really matter, until that person encounters an obstacle. Interrupting the flow of tasks, a consciousness of boundaries—whether of class or race, gender, or language or culture—arises. In other words, it is not the grid but the boundary that inscribes injustice. Such consciousness also arises in changes along the visual landscape, as retail signs change language or architectural facades change styles—styles often intended to signal some kind of status or cultural membership.

The globalism of the metropolis has made the maintenance of boundaries ever more difficult. Places of freedom tend to defy the bounded spaces of power and confront the powerful with the principal contradiction to their goal of a segregated and privileged status. The powerful could not have it both ways: profits flowed from the masses to whom their investments catered. Selling oil, autos, groceries or movies to those workers only put these millions into greater frenzy of motion. Circulation of the circumscribed produces daily awareness of injustice, and adds to the ranks of ordinary people willing to do extraordinary things in times of civil rights and labor movements. And, some entrepreneurial percentage of the racially-excluded others will inevitably gain enough wealth to challenge the irrational injustice of the laws of segregation.

People moved through the Los Angeles metropolis in astonishing numbers from a very early date. During the year 1910, when the census population of the city was one-third of a million and that of the county was a half-million, nearly a quarter-million people (224,000) rode the Pacific Electric streetcar lines every day.[1] The standard way to depict a city’s scale, size, or volume is its “population”—the number of people sleeping there at night. But in many ways it is far more meaningful to portray a metropolis by its flow or circulation. As early as 1910, before the major oil, industrial, aircraft, and motion picture sectors were established, the Los Angeles metropolis saw an internal movement 82 million streetcar journeys each year. And that was before the full advent of the automobile. Such a staggering figure does not even begin to account for the movement of people into and out of the metropolis, both on a daily and annual basis. Even in the most established North American cities, anywhere from 30-60% of the population disappears from the census every ten years. In the young LA metropolis, a 50% turnover rate would not be surprising. A great city is always in flux.[2]

The storied Pacific Electric streetcar system is a good place to start thinking about circulation throughout the Los Angeles metropolis. Originally developed by Henry E. Huntington, the nephew of Southern Pacific “Robber Baron” Collis Huntington, the Pacific Electric system was primarily constructed as part of Huntington’s real estate speculations, for the presence of transportation endowed the lands it touched with instant increases in value (called “ground rent”). Huntington did not actually build homes. He was a latifundista, a vast landholder who both held much of the region’s territory off the market in speculation; a wholesaler who subdivided property that was consumed piecemeal; and a transportation magnate for who provided cheap, clean, electric mass transit for the sole purpose of making his holdings valuable as residential property.

Residential parcels offer enormous returns compared with the ground rent possible from grazing or agricultural acreage. But only if such lots are convenient to the working masses. Huntington’s 2,000 miles of Pacific Electric lines assured that condition. Huntington sold the system to the Southern Pacific (which he also co-owned) in 1910, which expanded it into the San Fernando Valley in 1912 and into the San Bernardino Valley in 1914. “By 1924, the company had become the nation’s largest interurban transit system, running six thousand trains each day and carrying 110 million revenue passengers annually on 144 routes over a 1,200 mile network.”[3]

The PE’s “Red Cars” had their intended effect. They greatly facilitated the great real estate and homebuilding boom of the 1920s, the establishment of cities and communities throughout the Los Angeles Basin. The network grew, logically, from the hub of Downtown Los Angeles, so it paradoxically dispersed the population of the metropolis and anchored it to a single center at the same time, reinforcing the power of those at the core. The Los Angeles Times emerged in this period as the leading metropolitan daily, with an easy distribution network. The PE lines inscribed the basic transportation arteries into the greater landscape, approximating the ultimate freeway system of the early 21st century.

[1] Davis (2000): 37.

[2] Thernstrom (1973).

[3] Davis (2000): 37.

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