Theme 2:
Los Angeles: the City Economic Development Built
Los Angeles
Los Angeles dates from the 17th century. Its 1900 its population slightly exceeded 100,000, the 36th largest city in the nation. Yet as late as 1870 fewer than 5800 lived within its borders. LA itself was a Privatist growth machine that spun off a series of interrelated, yet autonomous cities, counties and unincorporated areas–“a multi-headed beast with no center” (Fulton, 2001). Characterized by a poorly demarcated downtown, a series of waterfront centers spread the length and the breath of the city itself, and a plethora of main streets with commercial strips, behind which were sprawling residential neighborhoods. The metropolitan area stretched over several counties, a hundred miles along the coast and a hundred miles deep into California’s interior–with more autonomous jurisdictional policy systems than could ever be imagined—sprawl does not begin to describe it
The metropolitan economy became home to a host of host of emerging gazelles: technology, oil, Hollywood/entertainment, tourism, aerospace, agriculture, international trade, business services–and a robust construction-home building-finance sector that consumed ever more land to provide homes, shops and jobs for a seemingly endless stream of in-migrants and immigrants. An oil boom, a southern California affair, by 1914 moved California into first place among the oil-producing states of America. La was “cluster” heaven as well.
The result was a decentralized settlement pattern quite different from the industrial cities in the East and Midwest … metropolitan Los Angeles did not grow by radiating from a single center. It appeared when many different centers blurred together … [Huntington’s streetcar system] a backbone [that] made sprawl permanent by facilitating long-distance commuting. Soon the automobile began to fill in the gaps. (Fulton, 2001, pp. 8-9)
Fulton conceived as Los Angeles as “the anti-city“. How did this so-called “anti-city” get built? What role did economic development play?
As a starting point Los Angeles enjoyed few, if any, natural advantages. To Clark (Clark, 1983, p. 283) there was never any economic or geo-political reason for Los Angeles to exist. The geography it occupied was surrounded by desert and mountains, had no access to natural resources relevant to the industries that eventually located there, no water, and in the beginning, virtually no people. A no-man’s land between different cultures and ethnic groups, LA didn’t possess a natural harbor with access to the Pacific. “Not only is Southern California an island, it is a desert island”. “Through a combination of advertising and engineering, Los Angeles created the conditions that nature did not provide”.
Los Angeles was alleged to be new kind of city: a post-industrial city with a new economy, politics, and society whose development started when the Eastern industrial city was entering its golden years. “Los Angeles brought in the money necessary for an expanding economy, not through exporting goods but by drawing in people. The migrants did not come just for factory jobs, of which the city had few to offer, but in the pursuit of hopes and dreams”. Once there, the jobs came. “Los Angeles became the nation’s dream spinner and faith healer: the city of the Second Chance (Clark, 1983, p. 269). In some ways Los Angeles was an ED pyramid scheme based upon attracting people, which attracted money and firms. To attract migrants meant infrastructure, and hustling jobs from new industries and sectors that had never existed previously. If there is any city that “economic development built” Los Angeles was it. Los Angeles, the un-immaculate conception, created itself, as opposed to San Francisco, the offspring of location and monopolistic starting advantage.
Los Angeles had many city builders (Huntington, Wiggins, Mulholland and Harry Chandler (McWilliams, 1946)) were the tip of a small “cartel of powerful interests” that drew from the area’s distinctive political culture of Midwestern Privatist immigrants [that produced] the most effective growth machine) ever created” (Fulton, 2001, p. 7). No one city-building could ever construct this rapidly sprawling, uncontrollable physical mass, it took an oligarchy to build it, and manage its infrastructures: water, housing, transportation—and attraction. With so many city-builders simultaneously their havoc on that arid land, it was useful for this oligarchy to find a place, a structure, to come together to amass and package their individual power and resources. That structure, LA’s principal EDO in the city-building era was the chamber of commerce. In an age when chambers were full of one percenters that was not unique. What was different was that the oligopoly used the chamber not to accommodate growth—but to foster it. LA’s early chamber anticipated the Houston’s 8F elite and Dallas’s Citizen’s Council by nearly fifty years.
The City that ED built
Founded in 1781, it was an 1887 Santa Fe Railroad, speculative bubble “set[ing] a standard for flimflam” never again equaled– that launched LA into history. The LA real estate speculative boom was made possible in a city of only 6,000 by a $600,000 “subsidy” paid to attract the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876. After that “Some promoters attached oranges to Joshua trees”[i]; banks lent money, and developers laid out a half-million lots of land. A second line, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe opened in 1883 by which time population had increased to about 11,000. In 1887 it cost only $1 to travel from the Mississippi Valley to LA. “To increase traffic the railroads sought to attract settlers and mounted a national advertising campaign that pictured Southern California as the Garden of Eden. Rate wars meant that cheap overland transportation was available (Blackford, 1993, p. 18).
The advertising schemes worked—the city grew by 500 percent in less than one year—to 50,000 plus. And within months the bubble burst.
Someone had to pick up the pieces. “At a meeting of business leaders on 15 October 1888, Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the Los Angeles Times, spearheaded the creation of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which embarked on a course of continuous promotion, distributing two million pieces of literature within the next three years. From this time forward, Los Angeles advertised itself relentlessly as the golden land of promise and hope” (Clark, 1983, pp. 270-1) Population growth preceded economic expansion. People created jobs.
The ED strategy was to have an EDO that could get the collateral material out, but also imagination to do the unthinkable, the audacity to create the bizarre, and the sales/charisma to attract staff and business investment. That man was Frank Wiggins; first as promotion director than Chamber CEO. Wiggins’s believed that oranges personified sun, hope, and a land of plenty. He took a bunch California orange growers to the St Louis World Fair and set up an exhibit. He followed up with three orange exhibits at the Chicago World’s Fair (he brought with him 375,000 oranges). To grow so many oranges Wiggins organized an orange grower’s cooperative (Sunkist) and started shipping oranges across the nation with scenic covers on the crates. His tourism program was incredibly successful.
At the 1893 World’s Fair he constructed a giant elephant made of walnuts and brought it back for permanent exhibit in Los Angeles. “At the same permanent exhibit, visited by 185,000 people annually … was a giant tower of ears of corn, shaped into a giant ear [of corn presumably], and a statute of a huge bottle of wine, made up of many smaller bottles” (Mead, 2014, pp. 168-9). Diversifying his hoopla, the chamber targeted the new aircraft sector, then the automobile—Wiggins strongly pressed LA transportation officials to build more roads fast.
In 1907 a movie entrepreneur, William Selig, got a brochure in the mail from Wiggins. The brochure promised 350 days of sun in Los Angeles. At the moment Selig was mad because of recent bad weather in Chicago, so he sent a crew to LA to film. “Others quickly followed him with the chamber doing all it could to attract them. By 1915 the Chamber was bragging that 80 percent of the nation’s movies were made in LA” Hollywood, a small community in 1870, incorporated in 1903 (annexed in 1910) was the creation of “the father of Hollywood”, H. J. Whitley, president of the Los Pacific Boulevard and Development Company. Its 1910 annexation was facilitated by the odd fact that Hollywood zoning did not permit a movie theatre within city limits—LA would. D .W. Griffith was the first to produce a movie in Hollywood, a 17 minute affair called “Old California”. The first film made in Hollywood by a Hollywood studio was filmed in Whitley’s living room in 1911. By 1920 four major film companies, Paramount, RKO, Warner and Columbia had set up studios in Hollywood. The initial “Hollywood” sign on the hill went up in 1923. Whoever said collateral mailings are worthless?
When he died in 1924 Wiggins had worked for the chamber for 35 years; it had 7500 members. LA during his career grew from 50,000 to 576,000 and five years after his death, 1.2 million. Life Magazine described Wiggins as “the greatest city booster that ever lived” (Mead, 2014, pp. 169-70).
[i] Could someone explain the Joshua thing to me? I guess oranges don’t grow on Joshua trees?
Ron W. Coan 