by James Frey
In 1955, the City of Los Angeles authorized the Bunker Hill Redevelopment Project. Every building on Bunker Hill was destroyed and the ground was leveled. Developers were given tax incentives to put up new buildings, and height restrictions, which had kept most buildings within the city limits at heights less than 150 feet, were lifted. For almost a decade, nothing happened. Bunker Hill just sat there, a humongous mound of brown dirt, with a couple of small trees, surrounded by highways, freeways and interstates. Then for no specific reason, other than someone decided to be the first and a number of others followed, buildings started to be built, tall buildings, really tall buildings, culminating, in 1990, with the US Bank Tower, which is the eighth-tallest building in the United States, and the tallest building west of the Mississippi. It didn’t matter that no one wanted to rent space in the buildings (vacancy rates were and are among the highest in the country), and it didn’t matter that they sat square in the middle of an active earthquake zone. Up they went, one after another, after another. In the early 1990s, after the completion of a number of major cultural projects, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art, a number of the buildings were converted from commercial to residential, and a number of new residential buildings broke ground. Coupled with the rise of the nearby Arts District, and the redevelopment of the Staples Center (home of the Los Angeles Lakers), Bunker Hill has become a desirable address again. Apartments sell for millions of dollars, and there are new markets, boutiques and spas opening in the area. People are moving from areas outside of downtown Los Angeles, back into it. And now, after waiting fifty years for gentrification, and doing everything they could to encourage it, the city is thinking about instituting measures that, via the Fair Housing Act, will slow it down, by requiring a percentage of all new housing developments to be sold at below-market prices to low-income residents of the city. If their new plan works, maybe it will slow it down enough so they’ll have to level it again.
Ohhhh the glory of the railroads, oh the glory. They came and they moved shit around and they ruled the rails and they ruled the nation and they faded away. It was glorious while it lasted, supremely glorious. But like all things and all people, their time ended. And when it did, in the late 1940s, once truck and air travel became cheap and easy, there were rail buildings, once used to store the many products that the railroads moved, that were left empty. Empty buildings all over America. Including Los Angeles.
Many of these empty buildings (once filled with railway glory) were grouped together between Alameda Street and the Los Angeles River (now a giant concrete channel used primarily for drag racing and the dumping of bodies). In the ’70s, artists, who often need large spaces in order to work, and who are almost always broke, found the buildings, which had large open loft spaces, and they moved into them. In the early ’80s, the city designated the area, and the buildings in it, an Artist-in-Residence Zone, which meant that in order to live there, you had to apply, and be certified, as a working artist of some kind. The AIR Zone became a self-sustaining community. It had a convenience store, a coffee shop, a couple of bars. The streets surrounding it were dangerous, filled with vacant lots and empty buildings used by drug dealers, drug addicts and prostitutes. It was an island of sophistication in an urban wasteland. Artists repulsed by the commercialism of the entertainment industry felt comfortable there, artists with no money were comfortable there, artists who wanted to live amongst other artists felt comfortable there. But all good things come to an end, often a sad angry miserable end. The cause for such an end can usually be whittled down to one of three things: money, sickness, love lost. Artists have always had an uncomfortable relationship with money. They need it, but are often repulsed by those who have it. For as long as there has been money, and art, and people willing to spend money on art, communities initially set up by artists have been overrun with people with money who want a taste of the artist’s lifestyle, despite the fact that the reality of the lifestyle is far harder, lonelier, and more boring than can be imagined. As the rest of Downtown became safer, and more gentrified, and more acceptable, the AIR Zone became a more attractive place for people to live. As zoning laws in the rest of Downtown were altered or lifted to promote development, so they were in the AIR. In 2001, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-arc), an avant-garde architecture school that has produced some of the prominent architects in the country, relocated to the Artists District, renovating and moving into an old warehouse. This was followed by a number of residential developments, also in old warehouse buildings. The artists, most of whom rented, found themselves unable to afford their rents, and started moving out. Galleries, which initially existed in the area for the same reasons as the artists, consolidated themselves and opened Gallery Row, which services collectors more than it does the artists themselves. The original market closed, the bars closed, they were replaced by more upscale versions or chains. Everything the artists sought to escape arrived at their doorsteps. And so they moved on, or are moving on.
The Jewelry District. Encompassing nine square blocks, it is smaller than the Toy and Fashion districts. But boy, oh boy, does it sparkle. It is the largest, by volume of sales, jewelry district in the United States, with over three billion dollars in transactions every year. There are over 3,000 wholesale jewelry dealers in the district, their primary business is diamonds, and there are enough armed guards in the area to form an army. Like the Toy District, it resembles a giant jewelry store with cars in the aisles, and the occasional vehicular police chase. Unlike the Toy District, there are no muggings. Muggers are assumed to also be jewelry thieves and they are shot on sight.
You can smell the food from a mile away: crispy Peking duck and General Tso’s chicken, BBQ spareribs, fried rice with everything. Chow mein noodles and roast pig and chopped beef congee, fried beef chow fun and moo goo gai pan and Szechuan-style bean curd. It drifts for miles from the steaming kitchens, it overwhelms everything in its path. For some, the smell is awful and sickening. For others it is a siren’s song, drawing them in to a neighborhood full of culinary delights. Indeed, it is Chinatown. Chinatown is the oldest ethnic neighborhood in the city (though it can be argued that the entire city is and always has been a series of ethnic neighborhoods connected by a government and a police force). Sometime in the late 1840s or early 1850s Chinese nationals working on the construction of railroad lines and roads started living in Los Angeles. By 1865, Chinatown had been established as a safe haven for the workers and their families. By 1870 it had several hundred residents. In 1871, a gang war between rival Chinese gangs resulted in a white male being caught in the crossfire of a gunfight and killed, his female companion injured. A mob of 500 white men came to Chinatown seeking revenge and murdered 20 Chinese men. They also destroyed the main street of Chinatown, called Calle de Los Negros (it was originally an African-American neighborhood) and burned the shops on it, and hung the bodies of three Chinese on posts in other parts of the city as warnings to other ethnic groups about the consequences of hurting white men and women. Chinatown was rebuilt and began flourishing, with several thousand new residents, and it established dominant positions in the city’s laundry and gambling industries. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented the ownership of property by foreign or American-born Chinese, was passed and the land on which Chinatown sat became the property of the city government, which sold it to developers and private landholders. Despite this, Chinatown continued to grow. Between 1885 and 1910 it boomed, fueled by both legal and illegal economies. The population rose to almost 10,000, and it became fully self-sustaining. In 1913 the leases many of the Chinese business owners held on their stores and residences expired and, when the landlords refused to renew them, they left en masse. The landowners sold the property to railroad companies (oh the glory!), who leveled most of the buildings. Those that weren’t sold to the railroads were sold to the city, who also leveled them (they love bulldozers at City Hall), and put up Union Station. Most of the
Chinese dispersed into surrounding communities such as Monterey Park and San Gabriel, or left the city entirely. Those that stayed lived in a community that was both literally and figuratively destroyed. Chinatown was reduced to a couple blocks of restaurants, a single Buddhist temple, and a store that sold kites and toy dragons.
In the 1930s, a local Chinese man named Peter SooHoo started organizing a bid and lobbying for a new Chinatown. He developed plans for a community that would be built in the style of classic Chinese architecture with modern American touches, it would include schools, markets, temples, restaurants, a huge gate welcoming visitors, all built around a central mall. In 1937, a site a few blocks from Old Chinatown was chosen and land was purchased through a fund raised entirely within the Chinese community. In 1938, a partially built New Chinatown opened. Within a year, tens of thousands of visitors were walking through the gate.
New Chinatown aged and, when it wasn’t new anymore, became Chinatown. It has remained in the same place, with more or less the same borders, for the past seventy years. A restaurant may close, but another is always opening, a shop may move, but it doesn’t move far. The gates are still there, the mall is still there, there is a memorial to the Chinese men murdered in 1871. It is a stable community, several generations old, and this time it isn’t going anywhere. And you can smell the food, the glorious food, mu shu pork, spring rolls, fish maw thick soup, snow pea tips with garlic from a mile away.
Civic Center is an area on the northern side of downtown Los Angeles where most of the governmental and administrative offices of the City of Los Angeles are located. City Hall is there, the Parker Center (LAPD headquarters) is there, city county state and federal court buildings are there, the Hall of Records is there, the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, where the nonexecutive offices of the city bureaucracy are located, is there. No one, absolutely no one, really has any idea what goes on in this neighborhood. It is always busy, and crowded, and there are people who appear to be working, but no one knows what, if anything, they actually do all day. It has been a mystery for over two hundred years.
In 1932, the City of Los Angeles hosts the Summer Olympic Games of the tenth Olympiad. Los Angeles is the only city in the world to bid for the games, and because of the collapse of the world economy and the Great Depression, many countries did not attend.
Dylan and Maddie lie in bed. Dylan is staring at the ceiling, Maddie has her head on his chest. Dylan speaks.
I’m still waiting for you to tell me you’re joking.
Not going to happen.
What are we gonna do?
Be better parents than our parents were.
We’re young. Might be too young.
My mom had me when she was sixteen.
My point exactly.
I’ll never be like her.
You’ll be a great mom. For sure. I’m just worried.
About what?
Money, the future, how we’re going to do this, money, the future.
She laughs.
We’ll be fine.
There’s not going to be another windfall.
I’ll get a job.
Who’ll take care of the baby?
We’ll figure it out.
I’d rather you be home.
Then I’ll stay home.
But we won’t be able to afford it.
So what do you want to do?
I don’t know.
I’m not getting rid of it.
I didn’t say you should.
We can handle it, Dylan.
I just want you to think about it.
I don’t want to think about it.
Please.
In 1933, a fire in Santa Monica Canyon destroys forty homes and kills sixty people, and an earthquake in San Gabriel destroys thirty homes and kills fifteen people. In 1934, a fire in Mandeville Canyon destroys twenty homes and kills ten firefighters, and an earthquake in Long Beach destroys seventy buildings and kills one hundred and fifty people. In 1935, a flood in San Fernando kills twenty people. In 1936, a mudslide in Eagle Rock kills forty people.
Amberton and Kevin on Amberton’s bed it’s the middle of the afternoon.
Amberton speaks.
Do you love me?
Are you kidding?
Do you love me?
You’re not kidding.
I want to know if you love me.
I don’t.
Do you love being with me?
No.
Do you love making love with me?
No.
Do you at least love my body?
No.
My face?
No.
My hair?
No.
Why are you here?
You gave me no choice.
There’s always a choice.
I support my girlfriend, my mother, my aunt and uncle, six cousins.
I’ll support them for you.
I don’t want you anywhere near them.
You’re hot when you’re angry.
Are you done?
No.
When will you be done?
I’m just getting started.
In 1935, the Los Angeles Police Department, via mayoral directive, sends a battalion of police officers to the Nevada border to stop hitchhikers, primarily Mexican nationals, from entering the state of California. They return after four days and report that they were unable to stem the flow of immigration.
It’s late and it’s dark Old Man Joe and Ugly Tom are crouched behind a car. Old Man Joe speaks.
There they are.
What are they doing?
What’s it look like they’re doing?
Getting high.
That’s what they’re doing.
What are we gonna do?
Watch them.
Then what?
Watch them more. Learn their habits.
Then what?
Go to war.
They’re bad dudes. You sure about this?
They’re bad dudes, but I’m Old Man fucking Joe.
My point exactly.
They’re in deep, deep trouble.
You’re fucking crazy.
Look at the girl.
She don’t look too good.
Two black eyes.
You can see from here?
I saw her earlier today.
She know what you’re doing?
No.
She might not want you to do this.
She don’t know any better.
Even if she did, she might not want you to do it.
I ain’t doing it for her.
Who you doing it for?
Me.
In 1937, land is purchased by the City of Los Angeles and construction begins on what will become Los Angeles International Airport, otherwise known as LAX.
Esperanza and Doug on the cot in the basement. Esperanza speaks.
No.
My mom isn’t coming home for three or four hours.
It doesn’t have anything to do with that.
Then what?
I’m scared.
Why?
I just am.
Why?
You won’t like me anymore.
That’s crazy.
You don’t know.
I know everything I need to know.
You don’t.
I do.
It’s happened before. Men thought they liked me. And they learned more.
I don’t think about it, I know about it.
You don’t know.
What could be so bad?
I don’t want to talk about it.
I’m not perfect either, you know. I’m sort of fat and going bald and I’m terrible at cocktail parties and I act like a twelve-year-old most of the time.
I like that about you.
And I like your imperfections. All of them.
You don’t know all of them yet.
I actually probably think what you might think are imperfections, are perfect.
; Like what?
You have a mole on your neck. I think it’s cool. Your hands are rough from working, but working women are sexy. And your thighs. You probably think they’re too big. I think they’re the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. They were the first things I noticed after your eyes and your shy little smile. They’re awesome. They totally rock.
In 1939, despite being the fourth most populous city in the United States, Los Angeles ranks eleventh among major American metropolitan areas in auto sales, and fourteenth in gasoline consumption.
Not all facts are fun. Some are, some are really fucking fun, but not all of them. Volume 1 of Facts Not So Fun Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is the most polluted city in the United States of America.
There are approximately 6,000 crimes against the elderly every year, 1,000 hate crimes every year, and 60,000 domestic disputes every year, 10,000 of which involve weapons.
Sewage and medical waste often wash up on the beaches in Venice, Santa Monica, the Pacific Palisades and Malibu.
Los Angeles County landfills receive approximately 20,000 tons of garbage every day.
There are more storage facilities in Los Angeles than in any other county in America. They offer over 40 million square feet of storage space in more than 1,500 facilities.