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• 1 2018-07-19T22:08:44-07:00 Cold War Consumer Landscapes: Of Suburbs, Grocery Stores and Shopping Malls, 1930s-1950s 1 plain 2018-07-19T22:08:44-07:00

  During the 1930s, despite the hardships endured by many in the Great Depression, Los Angeles was also, for many, “in the money,” expanding constantly throughout the worst decade in U.S. economic history, before or since.  New arrivals of settlers continued to pour in and developers continued to plot and sell subdivisions, greatly empowered by the Federal Housing Authority’s loan guarantees. A most revealing indicator of the actual health of the Los Angeles economy during the Great Depression is the massive supermarket construction campaign mounted by Ralph's Grocery Company, beginning as early as 1929 in Westwood, but accelerating in 1935. Investing millions of dollars in giant retail stores between 1935 and 1941, Ralph's set new standards for food retailing. Mostly sited in both established and newly developing areas, the streamline moderne supermarkets were designed by Stiles Clements to present visually striking profiles for passing motorists, who also found ample parking. “But most of the new supermarkets were sited in isolation on the urban periphery, staking claim to a trade area that was often still coalescing.” The new store built in 1936 at 4641 Santa Monica Boulevard was intended to draw customers away from existing competitors, while the location at 3635 Crenshaw Boulevard was built among vacant fields, anticipating residential growth. Walter Ralph, who began the company decades earlier downtown, claimed that he studied the residential development of areas for years before building a new store. Conversely, the appearance of a new Ralphs became a major asset for developers, stimulating home sales.[1]
  
  The massive wartime buildup generated not only an acute demand for housing, but also, a technological aesthetic valorizing movement, flight, and streamlines. Both the New Deal and the war also generated a will and a bureaucratic capacity for planning: moving millions of persons and millions of dollars worth of goods to and through specific sites created a Mandarin class of “planners” who thought on a large scale of social planning. The modernist architectural movement led by John Entenza, Richard Neutra, and visually publicized by Julius Shulman set the design standard for the entire era, but the contradictions of that movement arose most powerfully in the rise of postwar “suburbia.”
  
  The architectural path taken by Schindler and Neutra from Vienna to Los Angeles was by no means the only one. Victor Gruenbaum also studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He settled into an apparently comfortable career designing retail storefronts, but the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 forced Gruenbaum to flee to the United States, where lucky connections landed him a job on a design team for the City of Tomorrow exhibit for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, as well as commissions with major department store companies, which during the war were beginning to plan branch stores.
  
  In 1943 Gruenbaum became Gruen, dropping the “baum” in response to American anti-semitism.  He was commissioned that year by Architectural Forum to conceive of an ideal “center” in an experimental re-planning of Syracuse New York called “194X”—the “X” denoting that the end of the war was as yet unknown. In these projects, Gruen began to promote the idea of shopping centers that preserved the urban life of his beloved Vienna, while serving a much lower­density and decentralized social geography in the New World. Gruen’s plans for Syracuse were, significantly, inspired by his new surroundings in Los Angeles, which he thought foretold “an automotive-rich postwar America.”[2]
  
  Gruen thought it important to attract business away from “overcrowded downtown sections,” and designed, in effect, artificial downtowns that motorists could enter and exit with minimum difficulty. Gruen’s first showcase for his theories, Milliron’s Department Store, opened in Westchester, just north of the Los Angeles Municipal Airport, at 8739 Sepulveda Blvd, in 1949. As if to symbolize the domination of the supremacy of the automobile, Gruen put the parking lot on the roof, treating the ramps themselves as ”futuristic sculptural elements to entice shoppers.”[3] Indeed, the thrill of ascending and descending these ramps imitated the take-off and landing of aircraft. Gruen’s Milliron design signaled to passing motorists with other, equally bold exterior design elements, such as plate-windowed free-standing display structures interrupting the sidewalk.[4] On the strength of his growing reputation as a design apostle of the new geography of consumerism, Gruen’s first big “shopping center” commission was the Northland Center in suburban Detroit. Built at a cost of $25 million from 1952 to 1954, Northland was the largest shopping center ever built: comprising one million square feet of retail space, anchored with a large J.L. Hudson department store (which had commissioned the entire development).[5] Gruen was not the first architect to promote shopping centers as a fundamental reconfiguration of retail space, but he is widely credited as the most influential.[6]
  
  Massive suburban shopping centers presupposed, of course, a massive clientele of shoppers for whom “downtown” was somehow too far to travel. Promoters of shopping center developments produced studies to back their desires. One planning text estimated that in 1929, Angelenos had conducted one­ third of their retail transactions in the downtown central business district, but that by 1949 only twelve percent of their transactions were made there.[7] To a very large extent, the projections of a postwar suburban movement were the spurious artifact of a regional geography already long established. Multiple, competing centers surrounding downtown Los Angeles has already been established, in Pasadena, the San Gabriel Valley, Long Beach, and Santa Monica. The automobile made it easier to include these centers in one’s shopping territory.
  
  The Broadway department store had already established a branch in Hollywood as early as 1931, another in Pasadena in 1940, and was researching intensely on the best location for another as early as 1938. Using the 1940 U.S. Census, they determined that the corner of Crenshaw and Santa Barbara held the greatest promise. Fifteen percent of the County—567,000 people--lived within a 20-minute drive from this corner. They had a combined income of $200 million and the highest rates of homeownership in the county: 40.5 percent.[8] Construction crews broke ground for the Broadway-Crenshaw Center in 1945 and when it opened in 1947, it was the most ambitious shopping center yet built in the United States, attempting a complete “functional equivalence” with downtown, rather than offering only a smaller, suburban version of the anchoring downtown department store, and rather than offering upscale alternatives to downtown. The point was to obviate downtown altogether, with variety stores, drug stores, banks, and automobile repair shops.[9] The Broadway-Crenshaw Center was such an ideal place in 1945-7 for a “Main Street” development simply because of the massive military production that had grown up around the Douglas, Northrup, and North American plants in the previous five years.
  
  By the time Gruen had established his Beverly Hills headquarters in the early 1940s, Fritz Burns was already furiously building the social landscapes that would make Gruen’s visionary prescriptions profitable. Burns was the residential developer we last observed at work building tract developments such as Playa del Rey, until the Crash in 1929 temporarily put a wet blanket on his enterprises. Burns, who would become an indefatigable foe of government involvement in the real estate market, quickly figured out how to leverage the New Deal’s housing policies to rebuild his tract-development business. The Federal Housing Authority’s guaranteed mortgage loan program, combined with the upturn in military aircraft orders in 1938-9, enabled Burns to develop and sell tracts even during the depression. His “Westside Village,” centered at National and Overland, sold 788 units by the end of 1939. Implementing industrial methods by setting­ up a factory-like “staging area” nearby, Burns ruthlessly standardized his designs to conform with FHA guidelines: a “design of 885 square feet, with two bedrooms, one bath, and a two-car garage.” With a total price less than $3,000 and (subsidized) mortgage payments of just $30 a month, Burns had a formula that made money and served the mass end of the market. Burns next built and sold 400 units in his “Toluca Woods,” development near the Cahuenga Pass in the southeast San Fernando Valley: “Minutes away were Lockheed and Vega Aircraft, Warner Brothers, Disney, Universal, and Columbia Studios...”[10]
  
  It was the 1940 Lanham Act, combined with the massive war orders, that defined Burns’s career, however, both profiting from and denouncing government interference with the housing market. That act authorized the construction of 700,000 units of public housing, but also pledged Congressional support for private homebuilders “in areas with acute shortages of affordable housing for war workers.” Burns inserted his profits from Westside Village and Toluca Woods in Westchester, a 1,000-acre tract adjacent to the North American Aviation plant just north of the Municipal Airport (later LAX). The Westchester development, begun in 1941, included a master plan for shopping and recreational facilities, making Gruen’s Milliron store possible in 1949.[11]
  
  While Burns was making a killing from the expanding warfare state, he organized vehemently against government interference in the housing market. He was elected president of the Home Builders Association of Los Angeles in 1942, as ground was broken for the Westchester Business District. In that same year the National Association of Home Builders formed, spurred by concern about the threat posed by the 1940 Lanham Act to private housing markets. Burns used his official position as leader of the Los Angeles home building industry to canvass the nation, speaking tirelessly to mobilize the nation’s private home builders against the “socialization” of the housing market. By 1943 he was elected president of the NAHB itself, and warned FDR against “public housers” in his administration. Burns would emerge in the immediate postwar years as a major and very effective opponent of public housing in Los Angeles.[12]
  
  In the meantime, Burns had his own vision of the future. As if to answer Entenza’s 1943 Case Study House challenge for modernist, socially progressive housing, Burns established his own “Fritz B. Burns Research Division,” and teamed up with architect Welton Beckett in 1943 to design and build a prototype, called simply the “Post-War House.” Later renamed “The House of Tomorrow,” the Postwar House stood at 4950 Wilshire Blvd, near the very busy corner of Wilshire and Highland. The profits Burns had realized to date were peanuts compared with the postwar market he sought to shape: “We must ... be fully prepared to fight for private builders’ just share of this postwar market which, it is estimated, will require the building of 10,000,000 units annually.”[13]
  
  To anchor this dream, Burns poured an astronomical $175,000 into the Postwar House, which became a cornucopia of consumer luxuries, including “the first electric garbage disposal in Los Angeles, the first residential large-screen television, and automatic climate control system, and two­-way intercoms between all rooms of the house.”[14]  Burns made a lot of money on the Postwar House, but oddly, by treating it as an attraction.  He charged $1 for entry, and reportedly totaled 1,000,000 visitors by 1949, at which point he closed it, remodeled it, and re-opened it as an attraction under the new name "House of Tomorrow."   When attendance fell off, it became a real estate office, and served as a business address for decades.  By the 21st century, it no longer looked futuristic at all.  Dilapidated and under foreclosure in 2009, it looked like the "House of the Past."  Despite the involvement of the architects Wurdeman and Becket, who would later design the daring Capitol Records building, Burns was opposed to modernist design principles of the Case Study House program. “I feel, and so do my associates--that people today and in the near future­-prefer the ‘home-like’ type of house,” Burns explained: “In the mass, they like an exterior design which is reasonably familiar to them. That’s why we offer familiar styles of American home architecture...the ‘revolutionary,’ the strange and bizarre is, I believe, disconcerting.”[1]  Revealingly, the 1946 "Souvenir Booklet" that visitors could purchase for an additional 25 cents, presents the home within an overtly traditional aesthetic, sporting a 19th-century font, an old-fashioned picture frame, and rural draperies festooned with frisky horses. 
  
  The Republican restoration of 1946-7 on an anti-communist platform gave an enormous boost to Burns’s campaign against “public housers” and secured widespread support for massive residential developments in the 1950s. The Cold War buildup and conversion to aerospace fueled this market as missile and electronics contractors metastacized across the metropolis. During the 1950s thirteen major regional shopping centers (each with a large anchoring department store) had been constructed in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside Counties: Lakewood (1952); Anaheim Plaza (Anaheim, 1954-7); Buena Park Mall (Buena Park, 1956); Conejo Village (Thousand Oaks, 1959-60); Del Amo Center (Torrance, 1958-61); Eastland (West Covina, 1955-57); Honer Plaza (Santa Ana, 1957-59); Indian Hill Village (Pomona, 1954-56); Los Altos Shopping Center (Long Beach, 1953-56); Riverside Plaza (Riverside, 1955-56); Santa Ana Fashion Square (Santa Ana, 1957-58); South Bay Center (Redondo Beach, 1956-58); Stonewood Center (Downey, 1957-58); and Whittwood Center (Whittier, 1956).[16]
  
  The proliferation of shopping mall landscapes in the dispersion of suburban landscapes inscribed both a topography and aesthetics of power in Cold War Los Angeles.  Under the mayoralty of Norris Poulson, an ally Vice President Richard Nixon, the left wing of architectural modernism was sidelined.  Most significant was the fate of a progressive Elisian Park Heights public housing project designed by Richard Neutra, to replace the shanty-town landscape of Chavez Ravine.  Poulson's government, responding to Fritz Burns and his attack on socialist ideas in residential home-building, cancelled Neutra plan, bought the land back from the Federal Housing Authority, and sold it instead to Brooklyn Dodgers team president Walter O'Malley who  built Dodger Stadium (1962) atop of former Mexican-American village, requiring numerous forced evictions before the construction began.
  
  The Mating Dance between artists and the political economy of Los Angeles had by the 1950s fixed in concrete the social shapes of the Cold War state.  New-York based Abstract Expressionism, was safe art: seemingly apolitical because utterly unrepresentational.  But the 1950s was also a time of rebellion, the rise of a counterculture, and the Civil Rights movement. A new round of the Mating Dance was about to begin, as the midcentury radical avant garde attacked censorship, racism, and the National Security State in the 1950s and 1960s.

  
  ENDNOTES
  
  [1] Longstreth (1999): 116-120. Quotation at 119.  'Post War House' to Display Use of New-Era Innovations." LA Times. March 3 1946; "Home of Tomorrow's Premiere Announced" LA Times March 9, 1951; "Throngs Continue to Visit Home of Tomorrow Exhibit" LA Times April 15, 1951; "LAistory: The Post-War House & The Home of Tomorrow" LAist, http://laist.com/2009/02/07/laistory_the_post-war_house.php#photo-1.  Accessed 6 Feb 2015.
  
  [2] Quoted in Hardwick (2004): 82, 95.
  
  [3] Longstreth (1997): 241-245. Quotation at 243.
  
  [4] Hardwick (2004): 93-103.
  
  [5] Longstreth (1997): 330.
  
  [6] Longstreth (1997): 323-335.
  
  [7] Baker and Funaro (1951): 6, cited in Hardwick (2004): 94, 249n6.
  
  [8] Longstreth (1997): 227.
  
  [9] Longstreth (1997): 231.
  
  [10] Keane (2001): 74, 76.
  
  [11] Keane (2001): 79-80, 82-4; Longstreth (1997): 238-245; Hise (1997): 143-4.
  
  [12] Keane (2001): 92-4.
  
  [13] Quoted in Keane (2001): 103.
  
  [14] Keane (2001): 106-7.
  
  [15] Paid advertisement in The Saturday Evening Post in 22 January 1944 [22 Jan 1944], quoted in Keane, Fritz B. Burns, p. 107.
  
  [16] On Lakewood Mall, Waldie (1996): 77-84; All other malls listed in this paragraph are covered in Longstreth, (1997): 341, 463n53.