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1. 1 2018-08-15T06:15:25-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5 1920s Phil Ethington 6 structured_gallery 2018-08-15T15:46:03-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5

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• 1 2013-07-14T16:43:06-07:00 Suburbia, Automobility, and Metropolitan Space, 1930s-1950s 31 Narrative Essay plain 2018-11-01T00:00:16-07:00 Suburbia.  The word evokes the mythical American landscape.  Removed somehow from the central cities that they serve, suburbs have been claimed by many to define the American Dream.  Los Angeles is heavily implicated in this movement.  The "suburbs" of Los Anglees, like those of all American metropolises, can be unincorporated portions of other cities, or counties, or they can be fully incorporated cities themselves.
  
  The central-city regime of Norris Paulson in the 1950s led the planning for a makeover of Downtown LA to better serve a white, suburban clientele: Making Chavez Ravine into Dodger Stadium and Bunker Hill into a performing arts center.
  
  "Westwood" has always been just a neighborhood of Los Angeles City, but it sprouted its own Central Business District ("CBD") in the 1920s and has retained that CBD as a "Village" ever since.  This is despite the extreme congestion of the place called Westwood, once peripheral and now part of the dense metropolitan fabric, with many miles of "suburbs:" stretching out beyond it to a much farther periphery.
  
  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 Gruen (he dropped the “baum” in response to American anti-semitism), commissioned 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.
  
  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]
  
  [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.
• 1 2018-10-31T21:59:41-07:00 Ralph's Groceries: Residential and Retail Expansion in the 1930s 2 plain 2018-10-31T22:01:01-07:00 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 counter-intuitive growth in 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, and accelerating in 1935.  "Westwood" has always been just a neighborhood of Los Angeles City, but it sprouted its own Central Business District ("CBD") in the 1920s and has retained that CBD as a "Village" ever since.  This is despite the extreme congestion of the place called Westwood, once peripheral and now part of the dense metropolitan fabric, with many miles of "suburbs:" stretching out beyond it to a much farther periphery.
  
  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 Ralph's became a major asset for developers, stimulating home sales.[1]