Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
Hill,” the elite Black neighborhood in West Adams, was sacrificed to the bulldozers, while angry Black and Chicano residents of Santa Monica’s Pico neighborhood protested throughout fall 1960 against the demolition of most of their homes by a final alignment. By its opening in 1965 the Santa Monica Freeway had displaced 15,000 people; all the freeways, perhaps 150,000.39 The priorities of suburban mobility translated into housing disasters for segregated inner-city populations, whose own transport situation simultaneously deteriorated with the extinction of metropolitan rail transit. 1960 was the last full year of operation for Pacific Electric’s famous Red Cars along their remaining route from downtown L.A. to downtown Long Beach. They would trundle down the tracks for the last time in April 1961. The streetcars would disappear a few years later, and their diesel-powered replacements never fully compensated for the loss of faster electric transit routes to work and shopping.
September: Toxic Bohemia
Stinking, muck-filled canals; tired pumpjacks dribbling oil; abandoned bungalows; semi-derelict arcades; kids shooting heroin in the alleys; “hobo jungles”; beatnik coffeehouses; outlaw bikers—Mayor Norris Poulson said it was finally time to clean up Venice, L.A.’s dilapidated Coney Island. The city would begin by chasing the bums off the beach and scouring the toxic canals. The first goal dovetailed nicely with the LAPD’s war on nocturnal beach parties and nonconformists, while the second—so the street maintenance department told the mayor—would just require flushing out the canals with seawater. When the ocean gates were opened, however, the reaction of the seawater with the bacteria and organic matter in the stagnant canals produced, the Times reported, a “vile gas … peeling paint off of many homes and changing colors of others.” Within a few days, the gas had seeped through kitchen and bathroom vents and was discoloring interior walls and furniture. At least 150 homes were damaged, and stunned residents found it difficult to accept official reassurances that chemicals that dissolved paint would not harm their children and pets. They sued the city.40
The gas attack, however, was not an unmitigated disaster. Venice’s toxic pollution raised the costs and slowed the pace of redevelopment, thus keeping rents down and making it the most affordable beach community in California until the early 1970s. Lawrence Lipton’s The Holy Barbarians, published in June 1959, had advertised Venice as the counterpart of San Francisco’s North Beach or Greenwich Village, a paradise of sexual promiscuity, mind-expanding drugs, and stream-of-consciousness poetry. In fact, as John Arthur Maynard shows in his history of the Beats in Southern California, Venice bohemia in the 1950s had never involved more than thirty or forty people, most of whom had passed from the scene by 1960. But Lipton was a superb booster, and the Holy Barbarians became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.41 In the early Sixties the Venice West coffeehouse, owned by John and Anna Haag, became a hub for a growing radical community of artists, folk singers, communist carpenters, runaways, blacklisted writers, war resisters, and, of course, scribblers of all kinds. Police harassment, as we shall see, was unremitting, but so was community resistance. Venice’s new golden age was still to come.
October: The Immovable Object
This month local American Federation of Teachers leader Henry Zivitz accused the LA County Board of Education of blatant discrimination for refusing to assign or transfer Black teachers to schools in majority white areas. “Our present policy,” he asserted, “helps to perpetuate a de facto segregation of teachers to the degree that in vast areas … the number of Negro teachers may be counted on the fingers of one hand, while in other areas, the concentration of Negro teachers bears a disturbing relationship to the concentration of Negro students.” His charges echoed those made a year earlier by the Black educator Wilson Riles to the California Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights. According to Riles, in the midst of an acute teacher shortage, there were hundreds of fully credentialed Black teachers who could not find jobs. Rather than hiring experienced Blacks to teach in suburban schools, California was giving thousands of provisional credentials to unqualified whites, half of whom had not yet completed college. “Out of the 108 school districts in Los Angeles County,” Riles had reported, “only 12 employ Negroes.” (One district, Hermosa Beach, also refused to hire Jews.)42
As for school integration, the school board insisted that the racial composition of schools was strictly a reflection of housing patterns; in any event, it no longer collected data about such matters. But as UCLA history professor John Caughey would repeatedly point out: “On the residential segregation of minorities largely brought on by court-enforced restrictive covenants, the school authorities superimposed its set of enrollment regulations that implacably resulted in segregated schooling.” Although a small minority of schools would meet latter-day standards of “racial balance,” including Dorsey High School in the Crenshaw District, the overall racial isolation of students was extreme: more than 90 percent of Black students and two-thirds of Mexican students were assigned to segregated schools.43 The campaign for integrated schools in Los Angeles would not be launched until 1962, but the subsequent battle would continue for decades and precipitate an angry white backlash accompanied by flight from public education.
November: Downtown in Question
Contractors in November began pouring concrete for the 50,000-seat Dodger Stadium in what was once the Chavez Ravine barrio. In February the LA Housing Authority, which had originally cleared the area for public housing, had quit-deeded it to the city council, who in turn leased it to Dodger owner Walter O’Malley for ninety-nine years. Epic resistance by residents had ended the previous year when the Arechiga family, the last holdouts, were dragged literally kicking and screaming from their home. Meanwhile the 5,000 or so low-income residents of Bunker Hill, L.A.’s famously noir slum on a hill, awaited the final court decree that would allow the Community Redevelopment Agency to begin condemnations and evictions. Opponents of the project claimed that “the city government by one means or another—mostly illegal and arbitrary—has tried to keep Bunker Hill as a slum for the purpose of keeping prices low” for eminent domain purchases.44 Whatever the case, the hope of transforming the neighborhood and its Victorian cliff dwellings into a shining acropolis of expensive apartment buildings and modernist office towers had become a cargo cult to the old LA dynasties and institutions (including the University of Southern California), whose fortunes were sunk in declining downtown real estate. Their high command was the notorious “Committee of Twenty-Five,” headed by insurance executive Asa Call and backed to the hilt by Times publisher Norman Chandler.
But a future “downtown renaissance” anchored by Bunker Hill redevelopment seemed mortally threatened by the simultaneous ground-breaking of Century City—an immense high-rise office and residential center being constructed by Manhattan mega-developer William Zeckendorf and Aluminum giant Alcoa on the former back lot of Twentieth Century Fox, just south of Beverly Hills. Despite the LA Times–engineered conservative counterrevolution of 1953, economic and cultural power in the eyes of many observers was inexorably shifting away from the WASPish and Republican central city toward the Jewish and more liberal Westside. From the perspective of the old power structure—or at least its reactionary majority—downtown was becoming dangerously encircled by minority neighborhoods, and any weakening of the color line, whether by increased minority political clout and/or residential integration, would only hasten the decline of their power.
December: The Eastside
Among large American cities outside the South, Los Angeles until 1970 had the highest proportion of white Protestants. It was not an accident: Los Angeles industrial boosters in the 1920s did not favor a large “trouble-making” labor force of immigrant Slavs, Jews and Italians as in eastern cities. Employment preference at the new auto and rubber branch plants, as well as in the skilled trades, went to sober working-class Protestants with a mortgage. The exceptions were sweatshop industries like garment, food processing and furniture, as well as fishing and casual labor. In the first half of the twentieth century, the city’s only truly multiethnic districts were San Pedro and Boyle Heights. The latter was L.A.’s “Brooklyn” (even subsuming a neighborhood named Brooklyn Heights) and had no majority ethnicity. The biggest population groups were Jews and Mexicans, followed by Japanese, Blacks, Armenians, Yugoslavs, Italians, Molokans (a persecuted Russian religious sect), and Oakies. In contrast to other parts of L.A. and to nearby