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Industrial Groundwork, 1920s

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The groundwork for Los Angeles’s massive surge in productive capacity during the first three decades of the 20th century was built in the form of “infrastructure”: water supplied by the titanic Owens Valley Aqueduct; cheap electricity supplied by the municipally-owned Department of Water and Power, and oil, pioneered as a critical ingredient of the military-industrial complex by Edward Doheny and his competitors. The transportation infrastructure by the eve of the Great War had had long ago channeled regional traffic into an axis running North from the harbor to Downtown Los Angeles, along Alameda Boulevard. This “Alameda Corridor” is the backbone of the metropolis. As development exploded during the 1920s, an excellent network of heavy- and light rail, primary and secondary roads, and even the beginnings of a highway system evolved outward from this core.

Los Angeles by the 1920s was a vast, noisy, smoky construction zone. “The air,” one observer noted about the central portion of the city in 1924, “is filled with industrial haze and queer smells, huge trucks trundle along paved thoroughfares. Here then,” he continued, “is the new city; it is not amusements or tourists, it is industrial production.”[1] Development was dispersed around a central spine running from Downtown Los Angeles to the harbor, between Alameda Boulevard and the Los Angeles River. Each productive node created a local labor market. Residential places clustering around industries such as Bell, Huntington Park, Terminal Island, were bustling working-class communities. “Residents could hear 24 hours a day oil field and industrial activity: the grind of rotary drills, the popping sounds of one- and two ­cylinder pump engines, the screams of refinery whistles, the pounding of trip­hammers in boiler works, the roar of steel plants...”[2]

With the construction of the Owens Valley aqueduct underway, investors organized by the Chamber of Commerce and led publicly by Harrison Grey Otis, imagined a grand plan for an industrial metropolis, persuading the Los Angeles City council to create industrial and residential districts in a series of ordinances passed in the years 1904 to 1910. The industrial districts were defined first, and in 1910 the remainder was declared exclusively residential—but this only covered the territory of Los Angeles City, which lay primarily west of the Los Angeles River. L.A. City’s industrial district lay along the river to the east and south of Downtown, along the rail lines that led to the harbor. This central city decision, in turn, led several contiguous municipalities along that corridor, such as Vernon, Bell, and Commerce, to specialize in manufacturing. Industrial real estate developers such as W.H. Daum sold or leased land to rubber, steel, glass and furniture manufacturers in a ­“wedge-­shaped segment of the county east of the Los Angeles River,” running between Whittier Boulevard and Gage Avenue. “Within these boundaries,” writes Greg Hise, “industrial realtors like W. H. Daum leased or sold property to B.F. Goodrich, Samson Tyre and Rubber, Union Iron Works, Truscon Steel, O’Keefe and Merritt, Illinois Glass, and Angelus Furniture.”[3]

The abundant supply of oil was the obvious attractant for the big rubber plants that located in the industrial zone in the 1920s, but they were simply typical of a larger movement of “branch plants” of the major national corporations, convinced by the Chamber of Commerce’s “crusade for industry” to join this central manufacturing district. As Mike Davis explains, the success of the crusade for industry “depended upon a dense railroad infrastructure and a central location in the metropolitan network. Institutionally, it required the complex coordination of initiatives by national manufacturers, regional business elites, railroads, utilities, industrial land developers, and residential subdividers.”[4]

The emergence of an industrial metropolis to this point was firmly descended from the 19th-century industrial society of the North American Midwest and Northeast. Four industries came to shape the distinctive development of Los Angeles and its departure from the historic path of the Euro-American industrial trajectory: oil, aircraft, motion pictures, and residential development. Oil was not a new industry, but as an extractive one dominated by tycoons with transnational ties, it left a powerful stamp on the political culture of the emerging metropolis. Extractive economies are particularly prone to political autocracy.

Homebuilding was not a new technology either, but it rapidly became one of pillars of the Los Angeles economy and expanded from a small-scale enterprise to an industrial-scale manufacturing sector in Southern California, and should clearly be understood as a core industry in its own right, in contrast to most cities, where home construction is secondary sector supporting growth industries. It makes for a tautology: hundreds of thousands of workers who pay their ground rent making and remodeling housing.

[1] Quoted in Hise (2001: 26).

[2] Quam-Wickam (2001: 132).

[3] Hise (2001: 28).

[4] Davis (2001: 100).

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