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• 1 media/Transsect_200170709_NoTitle.jpg 2013-11-10T19:09:04-08:00 Arteries of Privilege and Inequality: Pico-Whittier, Lakewood-Rosemead, Sunset, and Sepulveda 45 image_header 2017-08-06T17:27:37-07:00
  Los Angeles has always been socially segregated and yet that segregation has always been in motion.  There are many ways to be spatially separated, through a myriad of geosocial formations that have taken formal designations of: isolation, concentration, clustering, intermingled, homogeneity, diverse, heterogeneous.  
  
  But these differences are themselves always in motion.  Each neighborhood changes demographically: at different rates but unceasingly. Motion through this moving metropolis occurs at different scales of spacetime, from the everyday experience of any person, to the lifecycle scale, to intergenerational scales.  
   
  As we travel through a metropolis, depending on our speed and distance, we encounter (always changing) social differences of myriad types.  Race-ethnic and class segregation are two of the most profound, but how are these kinds of segregation experienced by Angelenos?  Metropolitans experience residential segregation by driving or riding through the metropolis.  If they stayed in one segregated place, they would not experience any difference. It is by crossing boundaries that we experience their meaning and power.
   
  We need better ways to see these boundaries in space and time at all scales, and to represent the urban transit as a meaningful unit of analysis.  People make time by moving through space, as we see in the Ethington-Flick-Isoyama videos, in which Robbert Flick's automobile video capture is overlaid with the real-time radio broadcast of KFWB, featuring grisly news of war from far-away Iraq.  So it is important to shape space and time in the graphic representation of the past, and to imagine the world of lived experience and mediated perception in which urbanites traverse their metropolis.
   
  To this end, I devised the “transection,” a cross-section of the metropolis on a single line of transit.  The transection is designed to combine rigor with common sense, and to steer the discipline of quantitative analysis away from needless abstraction and toward the path of experience.  I extracted every census tract that touches these arteries, and then reordered them to correspond to the path of the artery. I next produced standard spreadsheet graphs of median house value and percent "White Non-Hispanic," and sized those to the exact length of the artery on the transection map. Displayed in twenty-year increment series, these series of charts reveal the long-term (“long” for a rapidly-changing metropolis) patterns across that one cross-section.
   
  Arteries
  
  Los Angeles began at Yang-na/La Placita and has grown both eastward and westward ever since.  Its deepest arteries run along the footpaths of the Millingstone people and their successors, thousands of years old.
   
  Prior to the construction of the freeways, people moved on footpaths, then wagon roads, and paved roads or rails: in automobiles, in buses, or on light rail urban and intercity lines.  (Motion Cartography).  They still do (alongside their travel on freeways) and still gain their primary impression of neighborhoods from the “surface streets” as Angelenos refer to un-free ways. The greatest "surface" arteries of Los Angeles carry the greatest volume of people and because of the high concentration of people (something measurable by person-meter-seconds in a given space), ground rent is higher than surrounding areas to each side.
   
  Pico and Whittier Boulevards have cut a deep path from east to west for centuries.  Pico Blvd earned that name as the northern boundary of the rancho of Pío de Jesus Pico, the last Mexican guberdador of Alta California and later a prominent U.S. citizen.  Whittier is named for the eastern terminus of a road that served to link Yang-na, La Placita, and Downtown Los Angeles to the south-east, eventually toward San Diego.  Whittier, the U.S. city was founded as a Quaker settlement, and named for the Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier.  It was the home of future U.S. president Richard Milhaus Nixon.
  
  The freeways introduced a new scale and experience of the metropolis.  The elevated or sunken freeway typical of the Los Angeles system is devoid of pedestrians and doorways and windows, creating abstracted landscapes.  The LA Freeway system was constructed over a half century, sometimes supplanting arteries that inscribed centuries-old pathways.  The Harbor (110) Freeway, running from Downtown Los Angeles to the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach, super-inscribes the "Very Ancient Road" recorded in the *** map.
   
  A street-level transection of the metropolis captures not only the cross-metropolis impressions of commuting and shopping, but also the lived circulation between segregated areas. Mapping ethnic neighborhoods as polygons can mislead the eye and mind to see mainly insularity and division. (There is division, even hostile boundaries, but we need to "see" also the relationships, the sharpness of the transitions, and the overall patterns of interaction).
   
  The work of creating a transection begins with choosing an important path through the metropolis. There are many possibilities for each east-west and north-south transit (and of course diagonals are often appropriate). The number of arteries that cut entirely across the county is not unlimited, however, and some arteries have a longer history.  Pico and Whittier are attractive because we know that both of these have served as important ways into and out of downtown, since the 19th century. They are also reasonably distant from major freeways, which have typically had a big impact on their surrounding neighborhoods, and which do not afford, as I have said, a sense of place in any given neighborhood (except at the on- and off-ramps).
   
  The Pico-Whittier Transection
   
  In 1928, teen-ager Richard "Dickie" Nixon had an important job.  His father’s gasoline station and general store, called "The Nixon Market" on Whittier Blvd (at Leffingwell) had a produce stand, and it was 15-year-old Dickie's job to stock it every day before school. For that he rose at 4:00 every morning, drove to the produce market south of Downtown LA, and then return to wash and display the fruits and vegetables before going to school at 8:00 in the morning.  His drive took him along Whittier, Blvd north-westward through miles of citrus orchards, and, as Whittier bends due-westward, through Mexican East Los Angeles and Jewish-Mexican Boyle Heights, across the 6th Street Bridge, and down Central Avenue to the Japanese produce markets.   Like millions of other Angelenos, he would have had both an integrated and a territorially-segregated sense of the metropolis.
   
  1940  1950  1960  
   
  Much of the massive and incessant growth of the metropolis has been eastward, into the San Gabriel Valley. Maps from the 1920s show Whittier and a few other urban concentrations dotting a vast plain of farms, orchards and oil wells. By the 1950s those open spaces were rapidly filling up with residential and commercial structures. 
   
  The durable inscription of social forms is the most striking feature of the Pico-Whittier transection. From 1940 through 2000, a common contour profile is recognizable. From 1960 onward, the basic patterns simply deepen. A rapid fall-off of whites between Beverly Glen and La Cienaga and a rise again between Garfield and Rosemead, rising above the 50% mark nearest to the Orange County line, is quite consistent. Median house values are even more persistently inscribed into the Pico-Whittier path. An important feature to observe is how the median house values dip below the county median line at a point that drifts westward from east of Crenshaw to a point west of Crenshaw over the 60 years charted. There are obvious visual correlations between the two series as well: non-white areas have lower median home values, and the fall-off between La Cienaga and Crenshaw is dramatic in both the race and the house value series. However, the property values show a great deal of independence from the race series, and cannot be reduced to it. In 1940, the entire path was mostly white, and in 1960, most of the path was above the 50% mark, but the basic patterns in property values holds constant into the era when most of the path is majority nonwhite.
   
  The Lakewood-Rosemead Transection

   

  The Lakewood-Rosemead transection provides a south-to-north comparison with Pico-Whittier, taking place in the easter, mostly post-war suburban development.  These arteries are much younger than Pico or Whittier. As late as 1927 there was no Lakewood nor Rosemead boulevards, according to the USGS quadrangle series covering the entire county in that decade. By the time of Renée’s 1946 metropolitan map, however, the two arteries are shown in bold lines.

   

  1970  1980  1990  2000

  
  With few exceptions, the City of Los Angeles lies mostly to the west of the Los Angeles River.   Eastward from there, one crosses scores of municipalities in a given commute.   Lakewood begins at the south in Long Beach, running northward through Lakewood, Bellflower, Paramount, Downy, Pico Rivera, LA County, Rosemead, South El Monte, Temple City, LA County, and ends at the San Gabriel foothills in Pasadena. In 2000, Angelenos making that trip would seven freeways. Such a long commute on surface streets would be very uncommon. The transection does not assume that a commuter take the entire trip. Instead, it allows inspection of the kinds of transitions experience by the millions of travelers along any segment of it.

   

  The Lakewood-Rosemead transection is just as remarkable as a record of the deeply-rooted institutions that produce real estate values. Nearly-identical humps and troughs (albeit with different magnitudes) persist across 60 years in most segments of this transaction. Many of the Lakewood-Rosemead transitions align neatly with the municipal boundaries, as at the Lakewood-Bellflower, Bellflower-Paramount, Paramount-Downey, and Downey-Pico-Rivera boundaries. Sharp transitions resume again at the Rosemead-El Monte and Rosemead-Temple City boundaries. At the far north, the LA County-Pasadena transition is dramatic from 1960 through 2000.

  
  By contrast, the race-ethnic transitions from 1960 through 2000 seem much more gradual and less well correlated with the municipal boundaries. Of particular note, however, is the role of unincorporated County territory in providing places of freedom for people of color. Notice how the point of maximum non-white population is in the center of LA County territory Between Pico Rivera and Rosemead in 1960. The nonwhite population increases from that point, spreading north and south along the Rosemead and Lakewood until most of the path is majority nonwhite by 2000. It would be hard to deny the success of the civil rights movement along the Lakewood-Rosemead path, or the ineffectuality of municipal boundaries in maintaining segregation. Pico-Whittier displays a much more pronounced story of continuing racial segregation and a economic correlate in property values.

   

  Sepulveda Transection [explication forthcoming]