City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Headed by the Los Angeles mayoral hopeful of 1911 and 1913, attorney Job Harriman, the Socialist city of Llano del Rio is “Los Angeles’ utopian antipode” (13). Davis does not present Llano del Rio’s inhabitants as individuals, so much as a self-sufficient socialist, alfalfa and fruit-growing bloc with their own newspaper, shoe-repair, movie, and aviation industry. However, collectively, they are important to the narrative in showing how immigrants to Southern California conceived of a way of thriving that was different from that of the metropolis. Their spirit of innovation is shown in how they brought the first Montessori school into Southern California, and thereby introduced a more student-driven system of pedagogy while fostering provisions for adults to attend night classes. Owing to “internal feuding between the General Assembly and the so-called ‘brush gang’, the colony was assailed from the outside by creditors, draft boards, jealous neighbors and the Los Angeles Times” in 1917 (10-11). Following the socialists’ departure from the colony, the violence with which local ranges “began to demolish” its homes spoke to the local fear of the “red menace” or Communism (11). Still, Davis shows how “Llano’s towering silo, cow byre, and the cobblestone foundation and twin fireplaces of its Assembly Hall, proved indestructible” and became “romantic landmarks” (11). For Davis and Marxists like him, this colony’s existence provides an alternative vision of the future, where local people are invested in their surroundings and economy, rather than becoming the slaves of distant large corporations. 

Davis credits Massachusetts-born journalist Lummis with creating “a comprehensive fiction of Southern California as the promised land of a millenarian Anglo-Saxon racial odyssey” (20). Lummis, who was aware of WASP anxieties regarding the recent influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants to the East Coast, set up Southern California as a new frontier where WASP Americans could live out a sunlit American dream in an ethnically pure space. Part of the “Arroyo Set,” who named themselves after the Arroyo Seco mountain range between Pasadena and Los Angeles, Lummis “inserted a Mediterraneanized idea of New England life into the perfumed ruins of an innocent but ‘inferior’ Spanish culture” (20). Thus, Lummis borrowed the romanticism of the old Spanish missions, while adding what he believed to be the cultural superiority of New England and the Mediterranean cultures that had been the cradle of Western civilization. While Lummis’ vision may seem racist and out of date, Davis considers that the Arroyo set’s mythology of Southern California as a land of sunshine and white privilege was “endlessly reproduced by Hollywood” and played a significant role in creating “the giant real-estate speculations of the early twentieth century” that fostered Los Angeles’ expansion (20). Lummis’ impact can still be felt today in the Spanish mission architecture of franchises and the suppression of non-WASP identities.

Otis and his son-in-law Chandler headed the Times-Mirror Company that formed part of Los Angeles’ ruling class in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ohio-born General Otis was the chief organizer of the Free Harbor League, which was part of the mission to expand Los Angeles’ harbor to make it a competitive trade destination. His involvement in this “welded together the ‘natural” ruling class of the 1890s, while simultaneously making the Times […] the leading paper in the region” (112). This ruling class “launched the most ambitious city-building program in American history,” putting in place infrastructure such as intra-urban railroads and aqueducts (112).

Chandler took over after Otis’ death in 1917 and created what Davis considers to be “a de facto dictatorship of the Times and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, as the LAPD’s infamous ‘red squad’ kept dissent off the streets and radicals in jail” (114). He launched the All Year Club, which in the 1920s campaigned to “keep affluent immigrants and tourists coming westward,” and to create more industry to ensure the city’s continued expansion (118). Still, according to Davis, Chandler’s hegemony was challenged by the automobile age, which “subverted Downtown’s central-place monopoly and created wind-fall profits” for constructors of “auto-centered shopping complexes” (118). The rise and fall of the Otis-Chandlers, Los Angeles’ first elite, was echoed in the fortunes of successive elites. Ultimately, Davis shows that capital, not the ruling families themselves, dictates who rules Los Angeles. 

Davis credits Canadian-born architect Gehry with making high art out of Los Angeles’ preoccupations with security and surveillance. This world-famous and prize-winning architect’s buildings “ingeniously elaborated the urban security function” (236) as they solve the problem “of how to insert high property values and sumptuary spaces into decaying neighborhoods” (238). For example, his 1964 prototype, the Danziger Studio in Hollywood, is explicitly “fortress-like with the silent of a ‘dumb box’” (238). Although Gehry was championed as an “old socialist” by a former colleague, Davis finds that in reality, “Gehry makes little prettiness at architectural reformism or ‘design for democracy’” and tries “to make the best with the reality of things” (238). This latter ideal echoes capitalist urban developers’ pretenses of gentrifying and pricing up urban areas. Davis, as a Marxist, is severely critical of Gehry because his creativity is used to reinforce social divisions, rather than diffuse them and encourage the mixing of different peoples. 

The Los Angeles Police Department is the primary instrument of law and order in the metropolis and, according to Davis, an agency that serves the city’s white wealthy elite to the contempt of the disadvantaged communities it monitors. In the 1950s, the head of the LAPD, Chief Parker, claimed “the LAPD was intended to be incorruptible” (251). However, in his study, Davis shows how the police force, with its racist and classist bias, is far from incorruptible and an agent that reinforces the city’s class divisions. The police are responsible for creating the checkpoints in Los Angeles’ gang-ridden South-Central communities and effectively ghettoizing areas of the city. Moreover, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, under the leadership of Chief Gates, the LAPD became known for shooting people of color who they thought merely looked suspicious. Rather than acting to target the source of gang violence, which is poverty and discrimination, the LAPD are doing everything in their power to separate the poor and discriminated from the rest of the city, and thereby entrenching them in those conditions.

The LAPD is also a pioneer in utilizing the latest technology to monitor citizens as though they are high-grade terrorists. From the 1920s, when the LAPD were the first to replace the slower, more intimate trajectory of an officer on foot or horseback with the radio patrol car, the police have sought an increasingly efficient and objective view of crime in the city: “Ever alert to spinoffs from military technology,” the LAPD has utilized helicopters and even space satellites to survey the population (251). Davis considers that all citizens, regardless of whether they are criminals or not, are on the LAPD’s beat because through their program of surveillance, they know that law-abiders are “off the streets, enclaved in their high-security private consumption spheres,” while law-breakers are “on the streets (and therefore not engaged in legitimate business)” (253). Davis posits that while the LAPD monitor citizens’ use of space to such a degree, no one can be free.

The Crips and the Bloods are two rival African-American gangs based in South-Central Los Angeles. The Crips’ shoelaces, bandanas, and t-shirts are blue, whereas the Bloods’ are red. A local mayor refers to these violent, law-breaking, drug-dealing gangs as “the Viet Cong abroad in our society” (268) and thereby, turns them into a terrorist-like enemy of the state. Davis considers that “this very real epidemic of youth violence […] has been inflated by law enforcement agencies and the media into something quite phantasmagoric,” as legends spread of these gangs’ highly armed menace (270). He highlights that factors such as youth poverty, discrimination, and employment restrictions for working-class black youth have been overlooked, as authorities such as the LAPD have prevented gang members from telling their side of the story. This further exacerbates the myth of gang members’ horrific acts and entrenches disadvantaged communities in a position where they cannot rise.

Davis further shows how the Crips and the Bloods are essentially in tune with the supremely capitalist, internationalization of Los Angeles’ economy, as they have found ways of selling drugs to wealthy Americans and foreigners. This has enabled them to gain the trappings of wealth, as they are exemplified by expensive sneakers, gold medallions, and flashy BMW cars; the gang members themselves are as individualistic and consumer-obsessed as their white, privileged peers in wealthier parts of town (315).