Los Angeles Realtor (June 1923).“Progress” portrayed as a narrative of ascension. In the foreground a padre and dons, framed by an adobe facade and a carreta, face the future city, a cluster of gleaming towers on a hill, surrounded by but seemingly unsullied as a result of proximity to smokestack industry. Settlers in wagons traverse a middle ground between an old world based in custom and a modern world of height, speed, production, and spectacle.[/caption]
Recent scholarship in cultural and literary studies has shown how narrative and the stories we tell shape knowledge and our perception of the world. This is true for understanding people, politics, cultures, and economies as well as our assessment of cities. Through story, we have come to know Pittsburgh as a city of steel. Chicago we know as hog-butcher to the world. Detroit is the motor city. We talk about Los Angeles as the city shaped by automobiles, a metropolis of sunshine, citrus, and surf viewed through a windshield or rear view mirror. Southern California has been fertile ground for such narrative invention.
However, for all the talk of futurity, modernity, and progress in the fictive geography of the “Southland,” most Los Angeles stories ignore, obscure, or misinterpret a preeminent aspect of the modern city: manufacturing and industrialism. Recovering that history is critical for understanding economies and ecologies as well as immigration and demographics in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century metropolis.
What could be more modern than manufacturing and industrial production? Modern industry transformed every aspect of American society and culture; the nature of work and social reproduction, transportation and communication, finance and the legal system, politics and institutions. Think of Ford’s assembly line; Taylor’s time-and-motion studies; the rise of corporations and the corporate skyscraper; Marx and theories of the working class; unions, strikes, the eight-hour day; workers’ compensation; leisure and mass consumption—the list goes on. It is a history so fundamental to contemporary life that we know it intellectually as a history and experientially as our lives. Where are California and Los Angeles in this history? Mostly absent, despite the fact that the state is now the world’s sixth largest economy and that it leads the nation in manufacturing jobs, with nearly twice the number of Texas, which is ranked second in terms of absolute employment. Yet histories of industrial development are centered elsewhere, in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Detroit.1
Uncovering a history of production and industry in Los Angeles requires the reconstruction of a landscape that was largely invisible to contemporaries and that has remained almost invisible up to the present. When industry has been included in the southern California scene, every decade or so, it has been presented as a revelation rather than a historical formation. For example, a 1930 Automobile Club of Southern California guidebook sent tourists on a windshield survey of the city market, refineries, packinghouses, and industrial plants stretching from its Figueroa Street headquarters east to Vernon. In 1949, a journalist for Fortune magazine described a drive east from Redondo Beach along 190th Street as passing through a “truck farm landscape with acres of new factories.” This trope played off readers’ conceptions of Los Angeles as both a place of agricultural abundance and a boom city: “In and around the city in the space of a very few years there has grown up one of the great industrial complexes in the world.”2
The historical record suggests Angelenos overlooked both the industry associated with agriculture, such as beet sugar refineries and canneries, and the factories sprouting in fields (as described in Fortune) where workers produced metal goods, glass, fertilizer, ceramics, and the like. Angelenos shared with their contemporaries across the nation and in much of the industrialized world a belief that industry meant heavy industries with smokestacks, a large number of employees, and the command and control associated with vertical and horizontal integration. Up to the 1920s, there were few firms in the region that fit this description. Local firms tended to be family-owned, to produce for a regional market, and to be responsive to changes in market demand. Note these attributes are precisely those that economists, economic geographers, and historians of business and technology associate with a putatively new paradigm, flexible specialization or flexible production. 3
Realtors, property owners, and associations such as the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce’s Industrial Department advertised nationally to entice firms either to move to southern California or to establish their West Coast branch plants in the region. The chamber and other promoters mounted industrial fairs, exhibits, and parades touting “Nature’s Workshop,” the chamber’s stock phrase intended to promote the benefits of a benign climate for production and social reproduction. At the same time, local firms such as Southern California Packing and Los Angeles Soap were constructing their plants in a mixed-use zone stretching from Elysian Park south to Ninth Street, straddling both sides of the Los Angeles River between Alameda Street on the west, extending into East Los Angeles and along the base of the bluff below Boyle Heights. For a half century or more, the manufacturing district along the river housed a diversity of activities and people similar to the central city industrial districts we associate with New York, Chicago, and other cities where specialty firms, small jobbers, mercantilists, and warehousing all contributed to regional economies.4
As in Manchester, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other production centers, Angelenos were at odds over the relative benefits and costs associated with industrial development. Boosters in favor of manufacturing extolled the benefits associated with the “golden smoke of industry.” Residents living adjacent to manufacturing plants, in districts with a mix of residences and production, or in a district zoned for industrial development such as those along the Los Angeles River and in the Eastside (a district parallel to the river and the railroad stretching to present-day Commerce) challenged elected officials to reconcile the effects industry had on the landscape and local ecologies. For example, in December 1901, property owners from the seventh ward petitioned the city council regarding smells emanating from oil refineries. Petitioners suspected there were too few “well to do” citizens living near these oil refineries to make petitioning effective. “Besides, the line of demarcation between smells in the ‘muddy eighth’ [council district],” they wrote, “is not plain enough to make out a case against any [single] law-breaker. There’s the soap factory on First; the hide warehouse on Ducommon; the gas plant on Aliso; Chinatown on Alameda; Cudahy’s meat shop on Macy; [a] bone fertilizer works on Macy; the pickle factory on First and several more establishments for curing, drying, burning, embalming and issuing vile smells. [T]he people that own these money-making plants are very careful to live on the other side of town, where their children can grow up in a healthy atmosphere.” Note that this litany of nuisance and residents’ response is akin to what we would call NIMBYism (NIMBY = Not In My Back Yard). Note too the inclusion of Chinatown in their accounting of sources for “vile smells.” A conflation of race with nuisance land uses was common in Los Angeles and other cities, as Kay Anderson has shown in her analysis of Vancouverites’ “imagined geography” of Chinatown.5
From the 1880s forward, the city council minutes record a sustained and often divisive contest over the use and regulation of land among block and neighborhood-level alliances, manufacturers and other business leaders, and elected officials. One pragmatic, functional response to these struggles was to segregate activities, and the council, following upon German precedent, enacted a series of ordinances parsing the city into two residential and seven industrial districts. Though consistent with a history of policing “nuisance” or noxious activities by restricting these to less desirable sections or forcing proprietors beyond municipal boundaries, the Los Angeles statutes of 1904, 1907, and 1910 were the first such regulations in an American city. The neglected story of industrial Los Angeles is thus also the story of the beginnings of zoning in the United States.6
- David O. Whitten, ed. Manufacturing: A Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990); James S. Olson, ed., Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002). “California is No.1 for Manufacturing Jobs, U.S. Census Figures Show,” Los Angeles Times (November 22, 2000). The relative ranking of California’s economy varies with fluctuations in currency markets and the like; the sixth place cited is from an Associated Press report “California Rises to 6th Place on List of Largest Economies,” Los Angeles Times (Oct. 5, 2000).
- Touring Bureau Automobile Club of Southern California, Metropolitan Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Auto Club, 1932); Perley Poore Sheehan, Hollywood as a World Center (Hollywood: Hollywood Citizen Press, 1924); “The Undiscovered City—To All Wonders of Southern California Add Another: Industrial Los Angeles Turns Out More Dollar Product Than Pittsburgh,” Fortune 39, 1949.
- Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
- Greg Hise, “‘Nature’s Workshop’: Industry and Urban Expansion in Southern California, 1900-1950,” Journal of Historical Geography 27/1, 2001, pp. 74-92. For practice nationally, see Mansel G. Blackford, A History of Small Business in America, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
- Petition to Council, Los Angeles City Archives (LACA), box A-11. Daniel Johnson, “Pollution and Public Policy at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds., Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). Christine Meisner Rosen, “Noisome, Noxious, and Offensive Vapors, Fumes and Stenches in American Towns and Cities,” Historical Geography 25, 1997, pp. 49-82 and Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron: University of Akron Press, 1996).Kay Anderson, “The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (Dec. 1987), 580-598. Greg Hise, “Border City: Race and Social Distance in Los Angeles,” American Quarterly 56/3 (Sept. 2004), pp. 545-558.
- Hise, “‘Nature’s Workshop.’”
Author Greg Hise is an urban historian and associate professor in the School of Policy, Planning & Development at the University of Southern California. As author or editor, he has published four books and numerous articles examining city building and social relations in Los Angeles. This article is a slightly modified excerpt from “Sixty Stories in Search of a City,” published in California History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2006, and reprinted here by permission of the author and of the California Historical Society.
Originally published 2nd quarter 2006 in arcCA 06.2, “L.A.”
