Building the Metropolis | Lost LA | Season 2, Episode 3 | KCET

Union Bank is proud to support lost La La's always evolving and as it changes what it's built from changes to made from mud and straw Adobe once formed nearly all of Southern California's buildings but as LA grew it turned in new materials like wood iron and concrete to shape the city and the way we live I'm Nathan masters and this is lost la many people see La as a city of the future a place without a past a freeway metropolis that sprang up fully formed in the 20th century but the roots of Southern California history run deep people have called this land home for thousands of years and their stories give us a richer understanding of where we are now and where we're headed in the decades to come so let's look back and uncover some of these forgotten stories in the archives Lost la explores Southern California history by bringing archival materials to life Elly's population exploded in the early 20th century what was in 1900 a large town of 100,000 group in 1930 into a metropolis of 1.2 million but where would all these new Angelenos live to house them developers exploited the natural wealth of the Golden State building countless single-family homes from a material both ancient and beautiful the California redwood today if you think of Los Angeles you think of like concrete freeways palm trees you don't think in Redwood at all what most Angelenos don't know is that a hundred years ago redwood and California with shoes for basically everything the story of the red was is not just about tree sitters and hippies and loggers and environmentalists and up there way up north and Humboldt County it's it's a California story that unites all parts of the state the question is not where Californians would encounter redwood but where would they not encounter redwood let's see if you were an Angeleno in the early 20th century and you want to go to the beach so you would write a trolley that's going on a rail that's on redwood ties you are passing thousands of oil derricks all those oil derricks are mostly made of Redwood you get to the beach the boardwalk and appear are made of Redwood if you look out at the port that was probably largely built with redwood pilings it was used as a paving material as sidewalk material it was used for telegraph and telephone poles as pencils as toys as boxes decking and citing and shingling fencing material it was basically used for all purposes Californians literally from cradle to grave could be in Redwood I mean many Californians in that Richmond essentially would have been rocked as babies and Redwood cradles and then in the mid 20th century it was very common to be buried six feet under redwood caskets that were advertised by lumber companies and funeral homes as everlasting wood right there your loved ones and everlasting wood [Music] when the earliest settlers came to California in the 1840s 1850s for the gold rush they found a forest that had been growing here for millions of years with trees that were over 2,000 years old they found the spectacular forest and thought it went on forever and they thought it would be a resource that would supply the growing communities of California and perpetuity and so a tree here and a tree there led to the dramatic clear-cutting of most of the ancient redwood forests in the early decades of Redwood logging they were just like extracting from the forest a little bit of each tree and just completely wasting the rest so it meant leaving an enormous stump and they didn't even deal with the top part with all the branches they're just interested in lower slike third of the tree that had the best wood so they would cut down the tree and then they would just burn the whole forest it was literally slash and burn the original range of the coast redwood forest was 2.2 million acres through the settlement of California building roads building farms building cities that 2.2 million acres shrunk to the point that there is only just about a hundred and twenty thousand acres of ancient redwood forest left when Los Angeles became a largely Anglo City in the late 19th century there was a decisive shift towards wood as the architectural material of choice because old-growth redwood is the perfect wood if light it's durable it's fine-grained it was this wrought redwood was thought to be fire resistant because fire is such a critical part of the ecosystem of the redwood forest they withstand fire because their bark is so thick but it was thought that the wood itself was fire resistant so they thought it was a super wood with which to build the homes of growing California so you can think of Victorian mansions made of Redwood and mahogany sort of this announcement that like I am rich I am powerful I use redwood but later on it was used in arts and crafts homes the educated middle class a place like Pasadena in the 1920s Los Angeles became the leading city of California during its great residential boom most of those middle-class homes were built with redwood I mean that is kind of the California dream right to have like their bungalow a palm tree in front citrus and back that's redwood in the home it is an interesting note that the rate of loss of the redwood forest correlated directly to the rate of growth of California the population of California throughout the 1900s as the redwoods was coming down was growing exponentially there is a way that the big trees of California you know bring out maybe the best of the worst impulses in American history because they inspired like just the most naked kind of greed of waste of violence but the big trees also inspired you know the modern preservation movement [Music] what's so unique about redwoods is how resilient they are when the early loggers cut down an old-growth tree ten new ones would sprout out of the very same stuff when you walk into a redwood grove you come out a better person when you think about the millions of individual moments of joy of transformation that have happened walking through a trail of ancient redwood forests that sense of longevity of perspectives we came within just a few hundred acres of losing the ancient redwood forest and now our generation has the opportunity to bring it back how did la get so big some think of the car as the machine that shaped our city letting us zip across long distances from ocean to suburb but decades before the first freeway Southern California already sprawled across its vast coastal plain let's explore how LA used iron a material that helped other cities touch the sky to build the largest rail transit system in the nation [Music] there were political debates and ballot measures and all kinds of civic conversation about height limits and vertical architecture in Los Angeles going back to the first decade of the 20th century so we were going to either model ourselves to be like or to be very different from crowded vertical cities Los Angeles tried to define itself as an alternative to the squalor and congestion and highly centralized structure of cities like New York and Chicago cities were very dense because we couldn't maneuver over very long distances we had to live near where we worked and walking with the principal means of transportation and Manhattan in the 1860s and 70s people lived 14 - an apartment and there were six story walk-up apartments but that didn't exist in Los Angeles because the cities was a small town if you think about men had an island and the narrowness of that piece of land or even San Francisco as a peninsula Los Angeles has those natural boundaries in the mountains and the and the ocean but the scales much much bigger Los Angeles looked to an Easterners I like these were empty lands bucolic agricultural acreage so that kind of expanse lent itself to a mythos of endless land as early as the 1860s people began to introduce public transportation and the biggest innovation was the laying of rails in the street the streetcar lines that were first horse-drawn enabled people to move to the edges of the city to get away from the pollution the density of noise of downtown and it was perceived as an investment that would support family life and good health and so we began to idealize suburban life in the early 20th century and the streetcar made that possible we start to see that outward stretch along mostly the streetcar lines what they were doing essentially was building the city out with the Interurban lines and then can we also determine how far people are willing to go from downtown so trolleys become very very important to how people move across this landscape people think that they're doing something out here that's different than elsewhere and the notion is the separation between that town and that town will be colored by nature they'd leave it alone and it would be beautiful some people saw investment in transit as a way of make money other people said now the profit to be made from transportation is in land development people like Henry Huntington were major land developers who depended upon the development of public transit Henry Huntington is the favored nephew of Collis Huntington Collis Huntington is one of the big four railroad builders of the Transcontinental Railroad senior Huntington train's nephew Huntington in the railroad business and Henry Huntington embarks on a career of remarkable entrepreneurial success those Charlie speculators the predate Huntington they build trolleys between a fixed point town a and a fixed point town B because there's a demand for what can traffic between those two towns that's logical Huntington has so much wealth he doesn't need the other town yet Huntington was very shrewd in the way that he tied real estate development to streetcar development and he would build lines to nowhere and then create a name and a sign and then followed up by building a community in these areas that had available access to public transit as Huntington is buying up land in different capacities you know he's involved in developing the rail line he's involved in developing Pacific electric The Electric Company which you know of course is part and parcel of the rail lines themselves so these things are all you know tied together in terms of Huntington's incredible prowess Pacific electric extended from Santa Monica all the way to San Bernardino all the way south to Anaheim and into the San Fernando Valley so by tying land development subdivision construction with the streetcar system Huntington was one of the early founders of sprawl in Southern California the trolley system is intricate and phenomenal so the ability to get on a trolley and travel across this Basin inexpensively and efficiently worked for decades and decades but eventually the street railways began to have enormous economic problems because people who can to expect more of the Pacific Electric than it could deliver Pacific Electric was a money-making enterprise it was built by private investment it was not a public mass transit system once that land was developed and those lines needed maintenance and they needed to be rebuilt on a regular basis the money wasn't necessarily there what was in it for private investment at that point the nickel not so much the Pacific Electric line has such a strong hold in our public imagination still today but by the 1910s that wouldn't have been the case people who were coming into downtown to go shopping or for work it's what they began to experience was a great deal of difficulty in congestion there were delays on the tracks because of the automobile interfering with their movement and people became angry the cars were dirty they were late the driver was drunk and so as the city developed further and further it was expensive it took a lot of time you had to sometimes make different connections that didn't all a lie so increasingly people choose the liberating freedom of automotive transit over the structured travel of a trolley that takes you where it goes as opposed to the automobile takes you where you take it there are all kinds of myths about the decline of the streetcar network but the heart of it is that when you have a horizontal network like the streetcar it promotes a horizontal development and that lends itself really naturally to an adoption of a kind of Auto centric urbanism that we begin to see in Los Angeles as early as the teens and really into the 20s the streetcar network continues to play a visible role in how Los Angeles develops a lot of the freeways rely on the rights of wave that are left over from the old streetcar network I think it's important to remember that in the Civic DNA of LA is really a city of iron and steel a city of the streetcar network a city that was investing in a different kind of mobility and I think that means when we look back on that period we can see a lot of associations with what we're trying to do today LA once boasted the nation's largest rail transit network today we have 527 miles of gridlocked concrete superhighway let's explore how freeways connected the metropolis but divided the city in this century America has become a nation on weeds we ride on wheels to work to shop to play to go about any place we want to go but when we depend on wheels we depend also on highways and roads and streets for the wheels to roll on these new highways will have a far-reaching economic impact on the entire nation they provide a heavy-duty link between all parts of productive America so the better safer roads of tomorrow the roads of today other cities have freeways and cars but I don't think any city is as much built around the automobile and the freeway as Los Angeles is ahead of you right now is the intersection of the Santa Monica and San Diego freeways it's reckoned by experts to be the most elegant in the world when freeways work they're brilliant stick to the lane for Santa Monica and soon you'll be making a long smooth sweep over the high curving ramp against the sky how about that isn't it the only way to go freeways have become a symbol of Los Angeles [Music] you'll find very different perspectives of freeways their history and their place in the city some of those perspectives celebrate the freeway their modernity or they celebrate their stature or their monumentality there are other perspectives of freeways that emphasize their hindrance for some communities to access other parts of the city [Music] before the freeways you would drive on boulevards where you are within proximate distance of people on the sidewalk or the unique character of particular residential communities wealthy communities poor communities white communities black communities but that disappeared with the introduction of high-speed Expressway networks my name is Harper I work in the bank but when a freeway is put through a community such as ours what factors determine the exact route I'm going to call on mr. Anderson our planning engineer to answer that question in the 1940s 1950s highway construction and design became a science the factors that determine our routes are given to us by the camera calculator the laboratory and the scientists and engineers capable of making wise and impartial selections impartial selection this reliance upon data meant a diminished reliance upon people particularly neighborhoods highway engineers presented their work as neutral as objective as empirical but if you think about where freeways were built where freeways were not built there are clear historic patterns of inequality I think of highway construction in Boyle Heights in particular as kind of an indirect expression of racism I mean if you look at the redlining documents about Boyle Heights it's clear the language characterized that neighborhood as literally honeycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements so clearly Boyle Heights was targeted because of its racial character and in that same redlining document there's also a prescription for slum clearance and highway construction for several years the residents of Boyle Heights worked tirelessly to protect their homes there's six freeways and Boyle Heights Boyle Heights was decimated by highway construction you could imagine an invasion of bulldozers clearing neighborhoods erasing schools and parks and homes to ram these freeways and these massive interchanges that appeared over the course of several years Beverly Hills was slated to have one freeway but that neighborhood was successful in its protest and that tells you something about who were the winners and who were the losers in the physical landscape of the city if you walk through Boyle Heights you'll notice that you can't walk very far without finding yourself above below or next to a freeway or a retaining wall that separates a freeway from a residential street and it's not just being in the presence of a freeway people who live within you know 500 feet of a freeway suffer much greater risk of certain diseases studies are increasingly identifying these specific risks to children and to pregnant women so this disproportionately affects poor often minority neighborhoods that more affluent neighborhoods are immune to and now at the end of your sightseeing day you are headed towards the ocean and one of the most famous and best love sites in all of Los Angeles the sunset I understand why freeways are built when you can live in a tranquil suburban community and access the benefits of a downtown core or the ocean within 25 minutes it's it's amazing to be able to access speed and motion in a way that human beings have only dreamt about in history that's almost gone there's no such thing as rush hour anymore every hour is rush hour in Los Angeles so that dream of speed and mobility and mastery over time and space is once again an illusion [Music] would iron and concrete built Los Angeles but another material came to define it celluloid as Los Angeles grew it became a site of movie magic next time on lost la will consider our city's role as The Dream Factory for the world [Music] Lost la was made possible by the Ralph M Parsons foundation the California State Library and California humanities Union Bank is proud to support lost la

Channel: PBS SoCal

Views: 187,176

Keywords: kcet, southern california, lost la, freeways

Id: gUkwI6vQxHs

Length: 25min 31sec (1531 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2017