TABLE OF CONTENTS :
WAS MY LOS ANGELES NEIGHBORHOOD REDLINED? A Detailed Look at Los Angeles' 1939 HOLC Maps.6/30/2020 WAS MY LOS ANGELES NEIGHBORHOOD REDLINED? A Detailed Look at Los Angeles' 1939 HOLC Maps by Damian Gatto Always an enthusiast of United States Presidential history, I never quite understood why Franklin Roosevelt is remembered as such a progressive president. On top of his economic statism and the internment of 130,000 law-abiding citizens (127,000 Japanese and thousands of Italians and Germans) during his presidency, Roosevelt signed the National Housing Act of 1934 into law, which in-turn authorized the creation of the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA sponsored a private firm called the Homeowners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), charging them with the creation of a system that would guide the government in distributing aid to prevent foreclosures across the country. As a visual aid, the HOLC produced "residential security maps" indicating their assessment of real-estate stability in 239 U.S. cities, now referred to in the shorthand as "redlining maps" or "HOLC maps." The maps were overlaid with a four-color gradient indicating different levels of investment stability. From highest to lowest, these colors were: Green - "Best" Blue - "Desirable" Yellow - "In-Decline" Red - "Hazardous" One peculiar thing about the 1939 HOLC maps is that some of the criteria used to assess investment risks are fairly common in real estate, while other criteria are virulently racist, classist, and xenophobic. On the one hand, these color grades relied on some fairly typical real estate assessment criteria, such as: - Intrusion of industry or other noxious land uses, or proximity to those land uses - Mixed adjacent land uses, in general - Age of the community's housing stock - Rate of growth - Presence of multi-family housing of any amount, size, or kind (even a compact duplex) - Presence of nondescript architectural styles - Quality of construction - Availability and profusion of amenities (such as shops, transportation, attractions) - Availability or lack of infrastructure (such as sewers, electricity, hydrants) However, redlining maps are most discussed within modern social sciences disciplines for their use of race, class, religion, and country of origin as criteria for determining the security of real estate investments in many communities. In a country that was, at the time, largely biracial (at 89% White and 9% Black) and comprised of two or three disparate income categories, the consideration of race and class basically meant that a community's high percentages of Black and/or low-income residents were enough for the HOLC to assign a negative color grade. It is for these reasons that the HOLC are regarded as the pioneers of racial redlining. The term "redline" has also found its way into the vernacular more broadly to mean "set apart as hazardous or undesirable." In Los Angeles and other cities along the West Coast, HOLC contractors ran into a slight challenge. The HOLC contractors seemed to have only come expecting to assess "White-versus-Black" makeups of an area, being that the Area Description sheets only contained a line reading "Percentage Negro." However, cities like Los Angeles, San Fransisco, and New York were not so ethnically homogenous or dichotomous as many other places in the country. As such, the HOLC contractors wrote in many of the other ethnic and religious groups they encountered. Was MY Los Angeles Community Redlined? The short answer is, it is very likely that your Los Angeles County community was redlined (meaning that issuing loans in such a neighborhood was "hazardous") or given an assessment of yellow (meaning that the community was "definitely in decline"). The HOLC came through Los Angeles County and turned the cartography of the city into a Jackson Pollock mural. 22% of the city was redlined, 46% was yellowlined, 20% was bluelined, and 12% was greenlined. In other words, over two-thirds of the County of Los Angeles--68%, to be exact--was no bueno in the eyes of the HOLC. Redlined communities could even be found right next to greenlined ones--and in some places, the effects of these disparate assessments are still visible today. Below: Macro-level HOLC Residential Security Map of Los Angeles County, covering the Westside, Mid-City, Hollywood, South Central, East LA, Northeast LA, and some of the Gateway Cities. (Source: University of Richmond) Most academic sources reproduce the raw map itself--which is great--but I decided to generate my own renditions of the HOLC maps, overlaid with current Los Angeles neighborhood boundaries. (Although there aren't official, administrative boundaries of LA 'hoods --just "agreed-upon" boundaries-- these imagined boundaries are what many Angelenos swear by and thus act as a more useful point of reference than the much more arbitrary lines drawn by the HOLC). Many published sources also fail to go into detail about geographic boundaries like streets or hills. Many sources also fail to mention the area description sheets attached to each area, listing the HOLC surveyor's "rationale" for their grades. I thus decided generate my own maps as a means to take a detailed look into how different communities in our city have been afflicted (or unscathed) by the 1939 HOLC map grades. I generated my renditions of the HOLC maps using the QGIS platform, and shapefiles for "Los Angeles Times Neighborhood Boundaries" and "1939 HOLC Redlining Areas" as my data. These are available via geohub.lacity.org and hub.arcgis.com . CLICK "READ MORE" BELOW
to turn the page and find out why your Los Angeles neighborhood was (or was not) redlined!
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THE GREENEST BUILDING IS ONE THAT'S ALREADY THERE: The Enormous Potential For Adaptive Reuse in Los Angeles by Damian Gatto I. INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY Adaptive reuse is precisely what it sounds like: the adaptation and repurposing of a building (or other structure) for uses other than those for which it was originally designed. Adaptive reuse most commonly involves the rehabilitation of non-housing structures for use as housing, although some variation exists amongst the former and resultant uses of these structures. Los Angeles instituted its own adaptive reuse program in 1999 in the form of a zoning code amendment named the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance. The passage of the “ARO” followed a long series of events in the 20th century: the decline and destruction of neighborhoods in and around Downtown Los Angeles, the subsequent institution of eight Historic Protection Overlay Zones, and finally, very admirable early attempts by activists and investors like Ira Yellin, Tom Gilmore, Wayne Ratkovich, and others during the late 1970s to early 1990s to perform what would later be described as “adaptive reuse.”
During the late 20th century, Yellin (with the help of the Community Redevelopment Agency and the Metropolitan Transit Authority) successfully rehabilitated the Laughlin Building for residential use, as well as the Grand Central Market and Bradbury Building for commercial and governmental use. Gilmore was behind the restoration of many buildings in the Old Bank District. Ratkovich, for his part, spearheaded the beautiful restorations of the Oviatt Building, the Wiltern, and the Chapman Drive-in Market in Koreatown. In the midst of this, Los Angeles City Planner Alan Bell began writing the drafting the first versions of the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance in 1997-1998. Announcing: My 2020 Preservation Efforts! by Damian Gatto Having spent many years restoring historic homes, many more immersed in the details of eclectic Southern California architecture, as well as a summer volunteering in the Office of Historic Resources, I eventually realized my calling when I was an undergraduate to research and preserve historic properties in a city that is known for reinventing itself.
In this article, I am pleased to announce my historic preservation endeavors for the year 2020. I have listed the entries in the order by which I plan to submit them to the Office of Historic Resources. I will upload the case files of each monument as I submit them to the Historic Resources Commission. UPDATE April 2021: With the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, its effects upon (among many other things) the pace of government business, my culmination of graduate school, and my work schedule, my 2020 preservation efforts have been greatly slowed to where I have only been able to submit the nomination for the property on Boylston Street. On top of this, the Office of Historic Resources has changed their rules for nomination submittal to where it must be done in-person and through appointment. I suspect this is their way of pacing down the sheer number of nominations that they receive in a given period of time. I will keep you all updated with new developments as they occur. CLICK "READ MORE" BELOW THE PHILOSOPHER ON ALLESANDRO STREET: A Tome of Letters and Other Writings by Edendale Nature Boy Dr. Edgar Colburn Found Buried in a Santa Clarita Bookstore !!! by Damian Gatto INTRODUCTION You may have read my piece from October 2017 (originally written in 2014) entitled The Nature Boys of Edendale about the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, the Landacres, and the Colburn Biological Institute, all of whom resided on a tract located southeast of Allesandro Street in the late 19th and/or early 20th centuries. Landacre came to Southern California from his native Ohio to rehabilitate himself from a respiratory illness (as did many others at that time), and thereafter realized his passion for wood engraving and printmaking. The Spiritualists and Colburn came to the West Coast in the late-19th century and early-20th century, respectively, with their alternative philosophies about the occult, astrology, and metascience. Colburn, for his part, was the pioneer of a field called "medicology." There had been a decent amount of information on the Landacres and the Spiritualists, but the Colburns--not so much. The Colburn Institute appeared on my radar via a blog comment by a longtime resident of Elysian Heights who recalled that, adjacent to the Semi Tropic Spiritualist Tract, there once stood “a house with a koi pond and a pitched roof” that “mysteriously burned down around 1979.” As it happened, I had a photograph documenting this to be true. Above: A photo dating from the 1960s construction of the Allesandro Freeway, depicting a structure on stilts with a brown shake hipped roof, just to the right of center. This would be the hipped cottage spoken of in the aforementioned blog comment. (Source: Futterer family; the Holyland Exibition) CLICK "READ MORE" BELOW
LAST STOP:
A Genealogy of the Naud Junction Neighborhood (Now Under the Terminal Annex and CA Endowment Buildings) INSIDE: LA's Early Immigrant Entrepreneurs ...and Their Erased Enclaves by Damian Gatto Introduction A year and a half ago, I released my genealogy of the La Loma neighborhood of Chavez Ravine. My sample size was the neighborhood’s five remaining streets: Bouett, Brooks, Spruce, Aqua Pura, and Phoenix. My data sources were the United States Censuses from 1900 to 1940, historic building permits, land surveys, home titles, and grant deeds. I went lot-by-lot along the remaining La Loma streets documenting the builders and subsequent occupants of the homes until they were demolished. Media portrayals of Chavez Ravine during the era of its slow demise depicted the community as a ramshackle bunch of shanties and corrugated steel shacks. However, I knew based on my lifelong relationships with some of the uprooted (known as Los Desterados) that this was a vast misrepresentation. Indeed, I found that nearly every building in this five-street remnant of La Loma had a new construction permit attached to it. Another thing that fascinated me about communities like Chavez Ravine, Dogtown, Diamond Street (amongst many others) is how they were all selected to be razed and replaced with public (and sometimes private) improvements. In light of new documentation and testimonials, it is now no secret that these communities were perfectly healthy communities, but they simply had the misfortune of being built upon land that was too valuable for public and private use to be in the hands of working-class folk. The Naud Junction and Macy Street neighborhoods, which now lie, respectively, under the Terminal Annex and Union Station, were two of these such neighborhoods. This article focuses upon the Naud Junction Neighborhood, the Northern 8th Ward. The vast majority of homes were built before 1924 (when dozens were immolated, ostensibly to fend off the plague) or the mid-1930s (when they were eminent domained to build the the USPS Terminal Annex Building. When it comes to development and government improvement projects, it is easy to look to "blighted" areas (i.e. working class neighborhoods) and figure that they have to be improved upon.
Above: The American Foundry. (Source: USC Digital Libraries)
The Naud Junction Neighborhood
From 1889 to 1909, prior to the establishment of the modern City Council representational system consisting of council districts, Los Angeles was divided into nine wards. The northern part of the Eighth Ward, which we will be strolling through today, was also called “Naud Junction” after Frenchman Edouard Naud, who built a warehouse near the modern-day William Mead Homes in 1878.
Naud Junction was marked by a signal tower built at Alameda and Ord streets in 1898. Naud Junction was also the location of the city of Los Angeles' primary boxing pavilion. USC students exchanged jabs there, and it also hosted the likes of Tommy Burns, Marvin Hart, and Abe Attel. The 8th Ward was also the site of the city's first orphanage, Institucion Caratitiva, as well as one of its most prominent infirmaries, the Los Angeles Infirmary. My motivation to do a genealogy of the Eighth Ward neighborhood was similar to Chavez Ravine. For one, I was interested in how the community was constituted demographically. I knew that the community was one of Los Angeles’ earliest melting pots. Persons of Mexican, Indigenous, Chinese, and Italian descent resided here, unable to find housing in other areas of the city due to “deed restrictions” (i.e. racial covenants) and other forms of discrimination. I was also aware of the neighborhoods role as a launching pad for numerous immigrant entrepreneurs, such as Gladding McBean & Co., the Italian-immigrant founded American Foundry, and the German immigrant-founded Kerckhoff Lumber Co. I had also heard of community institutions like the Macy Street School, designed by the famed architect A.C. Martin (of Los Angeles City Hall fame), which lasted all of 15 years before being demolished. A further motivation for performing this and other genealogies was that I wanted to further substantiate how, historically, working class communities in Los Angeles were the go-to communities that were razed in order to construct government buildings and other forms of urban redevelopment. Finally, following the illuminating results of my Chavez Ravine genealogy, I was inspired to document the daily life in the northern Eighth Ward--the community's geography, its goings-on, and its economic activity. I wanted the displaced villagers of Naud Junction to be known to future historians and Angelenos.
CLICK "READ MORE" BELOW for A Genealogy of the Eighth Ward
The Entirely Readable City: Notes on Los Angeles Cartography and Street Grid (s) by Damian Gatto Source: Google Maps Whenever I tell people I studied urban planning and that I am passionate about effecting change in my home city, they usually politely smile and the conversation moves onward. If the conversation continues, I hear all of the (false) platitudes about LA’s urban design: how it consists of mindless, unplanned sprawl (false), or how it lacks a coherent address system (false), or how it lacks a perfect, contiguous waffle grid (okay, true), among other things. Author David C. Sloane does a great job disproving the characterization of LA’s sprawling nature as “mindless” throughout his brilliant book Planning Los Angeles. However, there remains the widespread idea that LA’s present state of design owes its design to poor planning processes. Recently, Christopher Hawthorne of the Los Angeles Times described a Los Angeles that is "hard-to-read. " While I can appreciate Hawthorne's extended anecdotes about growing up in a city he couldn't predict, and how all these other random irrelevant people have described Los Angeles' urban form as an "improvisation," I must objectively disagree with Hawthorne's interpretation of Los Angeles' urban landscape and street grid. ========================================================================== In response, this column is about the urban design of Los Angeles— specifically, the evolution of Los Angeles’ street grid and address system. ========================================================================== The fact is that Los Angeles’ street layout and address system is a product of the City’s evolution, numerous annexations, and the region's natural topography. During its first epoch--from 1781 to 1850-- Los Angeles was a humble pueblo, lacking any big plans for the future. The pueblo's boundaries and its street grid were a fraction of their current size. Beginning about two decades following California statehood, LA’s street layout was further altered as a result of various annexations, most of which occurred between the 1880s and 1930s, resulting in the distinct “clashing grid” that characterizes the City's urban design. Finally, there were erasures and re-drawings of small sections of the City throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. Furthermore, the end of this article, there will be mention of how the Los Angeles region’s natural topography shaped the city’s urban design and layout. CLICK "READ MORE" BELOW
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