Placemaking, Preservation and Urban History

• Dolores Hayden is Professor of Urban Planning at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.
• She is the author of several books on the history of American architecture and urban planning including The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981) and Redesigning the American Dream (1972)
• She has received many awards, including a 1986 Preservation Award from the Los Angeles Conservancy
• In accordance with Kevin Lynch's proposal to choose a past to construct a future, this article explores the political, historical, and cultural past of the ethnic minorities and women in Los Angeles
• The goal was to develop a "theory of place" that would connect historical research to present issues and thereby establish a new agenda for historic preservation, public art, and urban design
• Kevin Lynch, the urban designer who converted many architects into preservationists with his influential What Time Is This Place? (1972) once remarked, "Choosing a past helps us to construct a future. The task of choosing a past for Los Angeles is a political act as well as a historical and cultural one
• No historian has yet been able to write a definitive social history of Los Angeles' multiethnic population, or a definitive economic history of the city's industries and multiethnic labor force
• By the early 1980s, however, young scholars such as Richard Grisewold del Castillo, Ricardo Romo and Noritaka Yagasaki were creating rich ethnic histories of Latinos and Japanese-Americans that suggested the outline which the larger urban story of Los Angeles might take
• Ethnic minorities are the past, present, and future majority of Los Angeles' citizens
• The pobladores who came from Mexico to found the town in 1781 included people of Spanish, Indian, Afro-American, and mestizo descent
• Like Hispanics, Afro-Americans contributed to the founding of Los Angeles
• Lawrence B. DeGraaf has noted that among the forty-four original settlers in 1781, more than half had some African ancestry
• Asians were also a visible minority in the city by 1900
• The Chinese came to California originally to mine gold, and later to build railroads and aqueducts
• The 299 Historic-Cultural Monuments currently designated in the City of Los Angeles give few hints of this diverse history
• While today the urbanized Country of Los Angeles numbers about eight million people, approximately one-third Hispanic, one-eighth Afro-American, one-tenth Asian American, and less than one-half Anglo -American, the landmark process favored the history of a small minority of white, male landholders, bankers, business leaders, and their architects
• One reason for the neglect of ethnic and women's history is that landmark nominations everywhere in the United States frequently have been the province of passionate rather than dispassionate individuals-politicians seeking fame or favor, businessmen exploiting the commercial advantages of specific locations, and architectural critics establishing their own careers by promoting specific persons or styles
• As a result few cities have chosen to celebrate the history of their citizens' most typical activities-earning a living, raising a family, carrying on local holidays, and campaigning for economic development or better municipal services
• In addition, in past decades the histories of ethnic minorities and women have been obscured by the belief that these activities are not of broad public interest and importance
• In the case of ethnic minorities, some historians and preservations have assumed that only other members of the minority group have an interest in the history
• Using urban economic and social history to guide preservation is completely in accord with national, state and local legislation
• By the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission's definition, a Historic-Cultural Monument can be "any site, building, or structure...in which the broad cultural, political, economic, or social history of the nation, state, or community is reflected or exemplified, [as well as] notable work of a master builder, designer, or architect
• Similarly, the National Register criteria begin with "districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects that possess integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association [and] that are associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of history
• When these criteria were developed, the framers may have imagined that battlefields (like Concord and Gettysburg) or Presidents' homes (like Mount Vernon and Monticello) would remain the obvious selections to represent "the broad patterns of our history".
• In the last fifteen years, however, military and political history have been less popular than American social history and urban history
• Some significant steps toward this goal have been taken by the California Heritage Task Force. This group published a report in August 1984, calling for "preservation of a heritage resource base for the good of the California citizenry, for the preservation of knowledge and objects as they hold value for long-term cultural coherence."
• The report stressed the importance of folklife, defined as "the traditional customs, art and cultural practices of a commonly united group of people:
• In California, the obstacles to multicultural preservation and to the preservation of women's history are not in the realm of legislation but in the creation and implementation of workable proposals for specific places
• The as-yet-unpublished survey by the State Department of Parks and Recreation, tentatively entitled "California's Ethnic Minorities Cultural Resources Survey: Afro-Americans, Chicanos/Latinos, Native Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans," is forthcoming in 1988
• An examination of the complete survey nominations in manuscripts suggests that each ethnic group's researcher has a slightly different idea of what a historic landmark should be
• All Americans, they want their communities to be remembered in culturally different ways
• At the same time that these proposals indicate new directions to challenge the uniformity of the Anglo-American history that has previously dominated local landmark selection, there are few proposals that recognize the shared experience of different ethnic minorities at any one building or site, and there are relatively few that recognize ethnic women's experience as part of the ethnic minority experience
• Assuming suitable structures are identified, the urban physical context is still a problem for many inventoried buildings. Some structures are located in inner-city neighborhoods plagued by vandalism, abandonment, arson, and homelessness
• If their preservation is to involve traditional techniques of renovation and reuse, these structures will not attract commercial developers because they will be so difficult to fund and manage
• With the exception of First Street in Little Tokyo, there are few historic districts where numerous adjacent buildings could contribute to a larger whole in terms of interpretation or visual impact
• To preserve effectively, we must know for what the past is being retained, and for whom," warned Lynch in 1972
• In 1982 I began work on the issue of preserving the history of ethnic minorities and women in Los Angeles by establishing a nonprofit corporation called The Power of Place, and seeking colleagues, students and donors to assist that effort
• The first step for a small, part-time, non-profit group was to define a manageable project
• The research and publication of a self-guided tour of historic places, coupled with the organization of community history workshops concerning those places, seemed to be feasible as a first step toward selecting and protecting places that both historians and citizens could agree were important to ethnic minority and women's history
• As a broad theme that would fulfill these criteria, I selected the economic development of the city
• I defined economic development in Los Angeles as a broad history of agricultural and industrial production, government and service industries, that also encompasses the reproduction of the labor force, a definition which includes both wage work and unpaid domestic labor, and captures the full range of economic activity by women as well as men
• The history of economic development explains the physical shape of the city over time
• Often the economic history of Los Angeles has been told in terms of consumption rather than production
• Tracts of bungalows and freeways crowded with cars are said to represent the sprawling boomtowns whose residents are fascinated with automobiles and home ownership. The history of consumption favors the city's outlying areas, not its core, and reinforces the stereotype of Los Angeles as "sixty suburbs in search of a city."
• Nine major sites were selected for this itinerary
• Earliest are the Vignes Vineyard and the Wolfskill Grove, where citrus and vines were cultivated beginning in the 1870s, first by Native Americans, then by Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants, and German and French immigrant entrepreneurs
• The produce markets run by Chinese-Americans beginning in the 1870s and the commercial flower fields established by Japanese-Americans in the 1890s come next
• Women's economic history is represented in many ways
• Housewives' contributions are commemorated by the Pacific Readi-Cut Homes demonstration housing site where hundreds of families purchased model dwellings equipped with labor-saving devices and built-in furniture to make the housewife's day a shorter one
• Of the nine major sites selected, two were already Historic-Cultural Monuments that needed new, multicultural interpretation: the site of the Speaker's Rostrum at El Pueblo Historic Park, and the Embassy Theatre, where the garment workers organized a 1933 strike
• The decision to include the last three major sites--which are parking lots--was not obvious, but was a response to the specific conditions in Los Angeles, and to the poor condition of many sites on the state's inventory
• Publishing the walking tour map in late 1985 established some priorities for The Power of Place, and since we have extended practical efforts to save and commemorate two sites, Fire Station 30 (a traditional preservation project) and the Biddy Mason Homestead (a new art installation)
• On the Biddy Mason site, the parking lot is about the become The Broadway-Spring Center, a ten-story garage, sponsored by the CRA and a private developer
• The Power of Place was invited to make a proposal for public art by the CRA
• Perhaps the greatest impact of the Power of Place project so far has been in education
• As a teaching framework, the project worked well for a class at UCLA in 1984 that included seventeen graduate students in architecture and in urban planning
• Several years later, some members of that class are still working on their own projects spun off from the main research--a history of Little Manila and the Filipino community, a dissertation on women's landmarks in the United States, a master's thesis on a local prefabricated housing factory and its importance to the city's residential neighborhoods in the 1920s, and a walking tour of women's history in Los Angeles, as well as several architectural design proposals
• The Power of Place walking tour, in larger part a result of the research of UCLA students, and of Gail Dubrow and Carolyn Flynn, who helped me draft it, and Sheila de Bretteville, who designed it, now carries multiethnic history into other universities and high schools, where a new generation of students are thinking about the city's potential historic resources
• Reporters from Time recently labelled Los Angeles "the New Ellis Island," and Time's cover artist showed ten foreign faces peering out of a nest of freeway ramps, a comment on current immigration without any recognition of the past
• Many new Los Angeles organizations concerned with specific ethnic minorities are now making progress with community history
• Currently Little Tokyo has a new historic district and the state has funded proposals for a neww Japanese-American museum in a former temple
• The Chinese Historical Society of Southern California has published a historical walking tour, and is developing a museum for the El Pueblo complex