City of Angels
Jesus loves Los Angeles!by Paul Grant
All that Glitters ...
Los Angeles is one of the world’s great cities. It’s got spectacular color, beautiful weather, and lots of hope. Los Angeles is a city of the world. Not even New York is this diverse. Every country under the sun has citizens living here. The L.A. Unified School District is truly the United Nations of the world’s children. Thousands of star struck actors relocate to Los Angeles each year, hoping to get famous or die trying. Los Angeles is the home of show business, the business that casts visions for the entire world.
No one feels neutral about Los Angeles. Depending on whom you ask Los Angeles is a shining star or an absolute moral cesspool. (Some people agree with both opinions.) America’s dreams and failures are all incorporated here. Mike Davis is an urban theorist who has written a masterful and quirky trilogy on the history of L.A. In the second book, Ecology of Fear, Davis includes a chapter on “The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles,” a summary of fiction and film assaults on his hometown. His conclusion: Los Angeles gets destroyed by natural disasters, wars or extra-terrestrials more than any other city. More interestingly however, Davis observes that the literary destruction of London, New York or Paris usually signifies the collapse of Western civilization; Los Angeles’ demise, in contrast, usually signifies in the texts the redemption of Western civilization. In other words, the collective conscience as manifested in our cultural output suggests there is something unredeemable in the very essence of this city.
It is also in this city that InterVarsity trains students for Global Urban Trek, a summer missions program focused on the inner-city poor of the developing world, from Ethiopia to the Philippines. This is an advantageous opportunity: can there be a more appropriate location than the very epicenter of glamour and superstardom, whence to send students willing to walk alongside the poor and broken?
Contradictions
Los Angeles simultaneously represents everything which starry-eyed immigrants desire for their families, and everything that they find obscene about America.
There is no city in the world quite like Los Angeles. It’s not even the freshest or most vibrant city in the world – that would probably have to be Shanghai. It’s not the wealthiest, or the healthiest city, despite its ubiquitous health centers, healers and plastic surgeons. Los Angeles is sort of the entertainment capital of the world, but may ultimately lose that title to the decentralization of a globalized film industry. Besides, it’s merely entertainment: in the grand scheme of things, who even cares?
Los Angeles is a strange city, with no agreed-upon story of origins. Even the downtown “Old Los Angeles” is a twentieth century imagining of what a Spanish colonial town must have looked like. It doesn’t have a downtown in the standard sense – a center or focus of activity. “Downtown Los Angeles” usually means, where the skyscrapers are, and little beyond that. The arts are elsewhere, as are the universities, the financial district, the manufacturing districts and the harbor.
There are not many natural resources in Los Angeles. The big steel works in Fontana used ore mined in Utah; the mills are mainly closed these days anyway. Los Angeles, famously, doesn’t even have water: to make all those palm trees grow (which are not native), whole rivers are piped in from beyond the desert. The city is not a natural gateway to North America. Los Angeles doesn’t have a decent natural harbor like San Diego; furthermore, it’s surrounded by some of the hottest and driest deserts in the world. San Francisco, the rival city to the north, is a perfect place for a mega-city.
So how did everyone get to Los Angeles? One theory is that the unbelievably wonderful weather was the attraction. Orange groves and small-scale farms and ranches began to appear all over the valley during the last decades of the nineteenth century, and a handful of visionaries crafted a culture of marketing Los Angeles to potential migrants from the Northeast. They were pioneers of the world we now call home: They created a brand and branded it about, long before marketing theory had fully embraced such a philosophy. Painting idyllic pictures of the good life in Southern California onto orange crates, boosters created a myth of paradise they sold to people in Chicago, New York and Boston. They quite literally were imagining a utopia into existence. (Utopia of course is Latin for “Nowhere”. And they were correct. Los Angeles is built on dreams.)
Later, in the early twentieth century, real estate began to emerge as the financial giant that built the metropolis. Large tracts of land from Los Angeles to Pasadena, Orange and Riverside were parceled and sold, often sight-unseen, to people hoping to build a little home in paradise. The two primary industries were oranges and chickens. Unlike San Francisco, which grew out of the 1849 gold rush, most of the early twentieth century migrants to Southern California were not there to get rich, but to get happy.
It was white people to whom this dream was sold. Los Angeles was to be a great city one day, an example of the greatness the “Anglo-Teutonic” (a whimsical ethnicity created out of thin air) peoples could achieve without the unfortunate mingling of inferior races such as Irish, Italians or Poles who were swamping the Northeast at the time.
Los Angeles became the center of yellow scares in the twentieth century, during which mass (white) hysterias over Asian immigration much wickedness and injustice was perpetrated.
Fantasy and Paranoia
Thus two of Los Angeles’ outstanding features were already contained in this early incarnation: fantasy and paranoia. First of all, Los Angeles is built on dreams far more than on reality. Without a growth industry to attract settlers (like steel in Chicago, or computing in San Jose, or oil in Houston), Los Angeles was built on real estate, which is a bland way of saying it was a city built on nothing but sunshine.
It is a city, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor’s description of a different city, filled with good country people, who happen to live in cities. They spend much of their lives trying to convince themselves that they’re not in a city. That fantasy accounts for much of the sprawl and fragmentation of the metropolitan area. With a population of fewer than four million in a county of nearly ten million, Los Angeles has half New York’s population on twice the surface area. Urban density is a taboo; and property values a sacred cow.
The automobile made this fantasy possible. Starting in the roaring twenties and continuing to this day, millions of people streamed in, not to live in a city, but to live in the illusion of countryside. The suburbs started resisting annexation to the city, insisting that incorporation with Los Angeles would destroy their way of life. In other words, the reality of working in a factory or office in a big city was not as important to these communities as the fantasy of not living there. Today most of what should practically be considered Los Angeles is actually outside of the legal boundaries of the city in countless small cities.
The contradictions begin to multiply: The fantasy of country living drives the automobile culture, which in turn triggers America’s worst traffic jams – which are surely not contained in the good life. And the dream of the quiet life is manifest in countless subdivisions named for what the developers removed to built the homes: Bell Gardens, Inglewood, Rancho such-and-such, et cetera.
There are no more orange groves. Actually, there are a few. There are some orange groves left, in Riverside (an eastern suburb), at a place called “Citrus State Historic Park”. This is a bittersweet garden at the edge of the foothills, surrounded on three sides by subdivisions and on the fourth by semi-desert hills. Close to the erstwhile epicenter of an industry, Citrus State Park is unlike similar centers, such as lumber museums in Wisconsin, mining museums in Colorado or prairie homestead museums in Nebraska. Unlike these monuments to days past, Citrus State Park does not so much celebrate the achievements of men and women who carved homes out of a wilderness, as lament the passing of that day. Staff at the park regale visitors with tales of the olden days, usually with the opening line, “I remember back when this area was all orange groves as far as the eye could see …” which is another way of saying, before all these houses got here and we needed such an entity as a State Historical Park.
If Los Angeles was founded on dreams, many of those dreams are broken. But not for everyone: the beauty of Los Angeles today is found in its stunning diversity. This city is truly the crossroads of the earth. Enough Salvadorans live in the metropolitan area to constitute El Salvador’s second city; or Mexicans for Mexico, or Filipinos for the Philippines. Los Angeles is home to teeming masses of Armenians, Iranians, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Indians (both Asian and American), Arabs, Africans and Koreans. Where else can you flip the dial and pick up radio stations in ten languages? The European Union, recently expanded to twenty-five countries, calls its multi-lingual nature a great asset; although Los Angeles is far richer in that regard, many residents prefer to wish away such wealth. Los Angeles has the most heavily armed police department in America, yet thousands of residents still feel insecure without gated subdivisions and private security contractors.
The perfect incarnation for Los Angeles’ history in actually a suburb called Anaheim. In the early twentieth century a colony of Germans, it attracted a showbiz man named Walt Disney, who was looking for a safe, family-oriented (read: white) location to build his fantasy land. Today Anaheim most closely resembles the Brooklyn of a century ago: with 300,000 young residents from around the world, but mostly Latin America, Anaheim is either a study in the changes in America, or a symbol for those who are terrified of these changes. In fact, the suburban Orange county containing Anaheim has grown immensely since the days of Walt Disney and Richard Nixon (whose Yorba Linda estate was the 1970s equivalent of George W. Bush's Crawford, Texas ranch - "White House West"). Today Orange county is contiguous with Los Angeles. Orange County is home to nearly two and a half million souls. Long gone are the days of the "Orange Curtain": OC is America's future. Better said, Orange County began with white flight, and became the world.
Los Angeles is far more diverse than any of the Global Urban Trek cities. It is both the most American and least American city in America. It is, primarily, a city that God loves enough to die for. God loves each of the people in this great city: the lost and the found, those working for wickedness and those working for righteousness.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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