City of Quartz Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

454 Pages·2016·5.75 MB·English

by  Mike Davis

CITY OF QUARTZ
Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
MIKE DAVIS
Photographs by
Robert Morrow
for my sweet Roísín to remember her grandmother by . . .
First published by Verso 1990
This edition published by Verso 2006
© Verso 1990
Preface © Mike Davis 2006
All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors and translators have been asserted 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Printed in the US by
Worldcolor/Fairfield
CONTENTS
PREFACE
PROLOGUE
The View from Futures Past
CHAPTER ONE
Sunshine or Noir?
CHAPTER TWO
Power Lines
CHAPTER THREE
Homegrown Revolution
CHAPTER FOUR
Fortress L.A.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Hammer and the Rock
CHAPTER SIX
New Confessions
CHAPTER SEVEN
Junkyard of Dreams
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are no research grants, sabbaticals, teaching assistants or other fancy
ingredients in this fare, just the love, patience and wit of Sophie Spalding, which
I have attempted to return in kind. Anthony Barnett was the first to encourage
me to try an L.A. recipe when I was still a homesick fugitive in England; Mike
Sprinker kept me in the kitchen cooking. David Reid supplied an aqueduct of
encouragement from Berkeley, as did Michael Sorkin from international air-
space. David Diaz and Emma Hernandez were the salsa in our lives in El Sereno.
Robert Morrow and I cruised the mean streets; his photographs speak for
themselves. Roger Keil and Susan Ruddick kept me believing in the May Pole,
as did Michael zinzun and Ntongela Masilela.
A primitive version of chapter three was read by Harvey Molotch, Eric
Monkonnen, John Horton, Stephanie Pincetl, and the Berkeley collective of
Socialist Review. I want to thank them for their invaluable advice and incisive
criticism.
Roger Keil of Frankfurt University read and translated the German references
quoted in chapter one. He also wrote the first draft of the ‘Exiles’ section and
contributed several other allusions and ideas. I am deeply grateful to him.
In the course of writing this book I have felt the loss of my cousin Jim Stone and
my mother Mary (Ryan) Davis. I want my daughter to know that their rebel
spirits move this pen.
PREFACE
Authors are strange parents. Some never wean their offspring, preferring to keep
them on their knee, forever close at hand. Others, like myself, punctually kick
their progeny out the door, with orders never to call home. Apart from
occasionally consulting a footnote or reference, I have not looked at City of
Quartz since I sent the manuscript – the last relic of stone-age composition on an
IBM typewriter – to my publisher in London in 1990.
Recently I skimmed through the bulk of this rather strange book, with its
cryptic title and relentless black-and-white photographs taken by my friend and
get-away-driver Robert Morrow. I was particularly nervous about re-
encountering a sprawling chapter called ‘Homegrown Revolutions’. This huge
expanse of crabgrass, a discursion on homeowners’ movements and the politics
of NIMBYism, took centuries to research. It required reading, late at night on
microform at the library of York University in Toronto where I was teaching
political economy at the time, the various local editions of the L.A. Times for a
thirty-year period.
As a result of these obscure labors, I became so attached to every sacred
morsel of fact about picket fences and dog doo-doos that I failed to edit the
chapter down to a reasonable length. I soon came to fear that I had made a
suicidal mistake. ‘No one,’ I told myself, ‘will ever read this.’ Yet, some people
obviously have; even a few who weren’t coerced into doing so by their
tyrannical Marxist professors.
In a meditation on the capriciousness of publishing and reputation, the
philosopher Ernst Bloch once asked: ‘Must books have fates?’ The answer, of
course, is yes, but not the ones chosen by their authors. The fate of City of
Quartz was largely determined by events that followed its publication: the
explosive notoriety of L.A.-based gangster rap, the Rodney King atrocity, and,
finally, the apocalyptic uprising that followed the acquittal of his assailants.
But the smell of smoke was already, so to speak, in the air by 1988 when I
began writing the essays that constitute City of Quartz and which spilled over
into several other, edited volumes. Although the owners of a certain graying
newspaper on Spring Street may have missed the obvious omens, every eleven-
year-old in the city knew that an explosion of some kind was coming. In a city
tragically full of armed and angry teenagers, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates’s
‘Operation Hammer’ – with its Vietnam-like neighborhood sweeps and
indiscriminate nightly harassment – was universally viewed as a deliberate
provocation to riot.
Indeed, this was the interpretation of the two rookie officers who arrested me
after the LAPD’s notorious attack on a peaceful Justice for Janitors
demonstration in Century City in June 1990. I was in every sense a captive
audience, cuffed in the back seat of their patrol car, as they launched into a
hallucinatory rant about a coming Armageddon, LAPD versus Uzi-armed Crips
and Bloods, on the streets of Southcentral. So, if there were premonitions of
1992 in City of Quartz they simply reflected anxieties visible on every graffiti-
covered wall or, for that matter, every lawn sprouting a little ‘Armed Response’
sign.
City of Quartz, to use one of those Parisian terms that I usually try to run over
with my pick-up truck, is the biography of a conjoncture: one of those moments,
ripe with paradox and non-linearity, when previously separate currents of history
suddenly converge with profoundly unpredictable results. City of Quartz – in a
nutshell – is about the contradictory impact of economic globalization upon
different segments of Los Angeles society.
In 1990, Los Angeles had been governed for almost a generation by a
nationally unique coalition of downtown business interests, Westside
entertainment-industry Democrats and Southside Black voters. After the helter-
skelter of the 1960s, when the reactionary populism of rogue mayor Sam Yorty
had come perilously close to wrecking the city, the administration of Mayor
Tom Bradley, elected in 1973, represented the first sustained experiment in
government by elite consensus. The long conflict between Westside and
Downtown elites ended in a historic compromise that included Westside support
for accelerated downtown redevelopment, and Downtown (especially Chandler-
dynasty) support for a largely Democratic City Hall. Westside/Downtown
cooperation under the honest brokerage of Tom Bradley made possible the most
ambitious expansion of municipal infrastructure since William Mulholland built
the original Aqueduct.
Indeed, the greatest single achievement of the Bradley era was the immense
program of new investment in ports and airports that allowed L.A. to become a
dominating hub of Pacific Rim commerce, and, thus, to survive the eventual
post-Cold War downsizing of its aerospace economy. Bradley, moreover, was
able to accomplish these Robert Moses-like feats despite a hostile environment
of tax revolts, government downsizing and Reaganomics. His administration
hewed to the conservative principle – pioneered by Mulholland and his fellow
Progressives in the Department of Water and Power – that utilities should be
self-financing and fiscally inviolable. In other words, any notional profits from
the operation of the Port or LAX must be reinvested in situ.
Exploiting tax-increment financing, City Hall ratified the same principle for
Downtown: fiscal windfalls from the appreciation of publicly-subsidized real-
estate were ploughed right back into further redevelopment. These fiscal closed
circuits sustained high levels of public investment in container docks, terminal
buildings, and downtown bank skyscrapers that, in turn, kept happy a huge
constituency of pro-globalization interests, including airlines, stevedoring
companies, railroads, aerospace exporters, hotels, construction unions,
downtown landowners, the Los Angeles Times, Japanese banks, Westside movie
studios, big law firms, and the politicians dependent upon the largesse of all of
the above.
But the city was subsidizing globalization without laying any claim on behalf of
groups excluded from the direct benefits of international commerce. There was
no mechanism to redistribute any share of additional city revenues to purposes
other than infrastructure or Downtown renewal. There was no ‘linkage’, in other
words, between corporate-oriented public investment and the social needs that
desperately fought for attention in the rest of the city budget. Moreover, the
dynamic leadership concentrated on improving the Harbor, LAX and Downtown
(and, later, organizing the Bradley festschriften of the 1984 Olympics) seemed
directly subtracted from attention paid to the city’s neighborhoods and their
subsistence needs.
It is astonishing, in retrospect, how little heed City Hall paid to plant closure
and redlining in the Southcentral neighborhoods that were Tom Bradley’s
original political base. Or, how little effort was made to redress the generation-
long disfranchisement of the Eastside on the city council and the exclusion of
Chicanos from significant leadership roles in the ruling coalition. Likewise, it is
difficult to explain why the city council failed, despite innumerable warnings
and protests, to downzone a city plan that was everywhere destabilizing
residential quality of life with massive and irrational densities of permissible
new development. Along Ventura Boulevard skyscrapers were literally sprouting
from the front yards of single-family homes.
By the time I sat down to write City of Quartz, on the eve of Southern
California’s greatest postwar recession, Bradley’s growth coalition was still
intact, even triumphant, but it was fast losing control of its social landscape.
From Porter Ranch to Watts, L.A.’s neighborhoods were ablaze with angry
grievances and suburban sans culottes were threatening to overthrow the city’s
ancien régime.
In the Valley, a so-called ‘slow-growth movement’ had suddenly coalesced
out of the molecular agitation of hundreds of local homeowners’ associations.
Although many of the movement’s concerns about declining environmental
quality, traffic and density were entirely legitimate, ‘slow growth’ also had ugly
racial and ethnic overtones of an Anglo gerontocracy selfishly defending its
privileges against the job and housing needs of young Latino and Asian
populations. Indeed, many of the key leaders of the homeowners’ revolt had
originally won their stripes in opposition to school integration in the early 1970s
(and they would continue in the 1990s to rail at new immigrants and unite with
business interests to unsuccessfully promote the succession of the Valley).
Meanwhile, in the neglected flat lands of Mid-City and Southcentral Los
Angeles, the invisible hand was wielding an Uzi, as crack cocaine sales – the
local form of economic globalization – gave a terrible new economic impetus to
gang warfare. The slaughter in the streets, three gang killings a day by 1990, also
emboldened the LAPD to aggressively expand its power. By 1988, Angelenos
nervously wondered who really ran their city: Mayor Bradley or the
megalomaniac Chief of Police, Daryl Gates?
Meanwhile the very success of the Bradley coalition’s program of
globalization was transforming the composition of the regional elites who
constituted its membership. Everything was up for sale and, against the
background of the ‘super-yen,’ Japanese capital (with Canadian investors in a
close second place) suddenly became the major stakeholder in both downtown
real-estate and Westside movie studios. Editorial writers waxed hyperbolically
about Downtown L.A.’s brilliant future as a command center of the Pacific Rim,
while City Hall veterans wondered whether the city’s new investors would
become ‘players’ or not. Old elites, meanwhile, were disappearing into the
darkness of their San Marino and Montecito mausoleums.
The social and politico-economic tectonic plates that underlay Los Angeles in
1989, in other words, had accumulated such impossible stress loads that you
could almost hear the Hollywood Hills groaning. In a setting of increasing
instability, only Tom Bradley seemed unchangeable, although his imposing