Cover: Matthew Porter Gold Hill, 2015 archival pigment print © Matthew Porter, Courtesy M+B Gallery, Los Angeles Table of Contents
Alex Espinoza: Introduction
Ben Ehrenreich: Strange Behavior
Bonnie Johnson: Magritte in Koreatown
Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre: An Urban History: The Influence of Street Gangs on Contemporary Art
Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn interviews Ron Finley: #PlantSomeShit
Molly Strauss: The Fight for Frogtown
Rex Weiner: How John DeLorean Took Us Back to the Future — Introduction —
Once, while at a writers’ conference in San Antonio, Texas, I happened to meet a local artist who had some very strong opinions about Los Angeles. He complained about the traffic and the weather. (Yes, the weather.) “Plus,” he said, “everyone there is, like, so fake.” After some time, when I realized he was not going to waver from his opinion, I simply walked away and left him standing there, in mid-sentence.
San Antonio artists might not fully appreciate these pieces, I thought as I sat to write this intro, and I determined that this was, indeed, just fine. Each of the pieces gathered here resists an idea of a single, dominant narrative about Los Angeles. Each of the pieces reveals the ways in which contact and conflict have given rise to innovation, creativity, and resilience.
In “Magritte in Koreatown,” Bonnie Johnson explores the enduring lure of one of Hollywood’s most emblematic restaurants: The Brown Derby. In “How John DeLorean Took Us Back to the Future,” Rex Weiner’s “[t]attered, coffee-stained courtroom notes,” transport him, and us, back in time to April 18, 1984, the opening day of the trial of auto wunderkind John DeLorean, charged with trafficking cocaine. Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre charts the effects of LA street gang culture on everything from housing projects to iPhone cases.
Here we also experience the slow evolution of LA neighborhoods struggling under the influence of police brutality and gentrification. Ben Ehrenreich writes about the residents of one San Fernando neighborhood who counter a narrative that authorities are too eager to feed to the media. In “#PlantSomeShit,” Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn interviews Ron Finley, the “gangster gardener” who reclaims his South LA neighborhood and nurtures cultural pride. We meet LA-Más, an advocacy group helping the residents of Frogtown resist efforts to gentrify and displace longtime residents of the enclave in Molly Strauss’s “The Fight for Frogtown.”
Ask anyone outside of Los Angeles for the quintessential “LA story,” and they almost always have one that usually involves shallow people, plastic surgeries, and Sig Alerts. Ask anyone from Los Angeles for the quintessential “LA story,” and they’re stumped. These pieces here prove why.
— Alex Espinoza Strange Behavior
Ben Ehrenreich
If the LAPD can hold out for another few days, Miguel Angel Cano, aged 34, will retain the unwanted honor of being the second-to-last man killed by the department in 2015. They’re up to 20 for the year. Cano died early in the afternoon of November 9 on Stagg Street, in a quiet San Fernando Valley neighborhood just west of the Van Nuys airport. The first news reports were puzzling. “A man was fatally shot by Los Angeles police Monday afternoon after he was reportedly acting bizarrely and standing in traffic,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. Bizarre behavior is not usually a capital offense, so I read on. The Times quoted a police spokesman who laid out a brief official narrative. “The officers observed the man and his strange behavior,” he said, “so they deployed a Taser to de-escalate the situation.” When that weapon proved inadequate to the task, the officer went on, police fired beanbag rounds. The problem, whatever it was, was still not solved. It did not de-escalate at all. Instead, “the situation escalated,” the spokesman said. “Shots were fired and the man was killed.”
Confused, I called the LAPD media relations line. The officer who answered the phone couldn’t tell me much, only that Cano and the police “did get into a use of force before the OIS,” or officer involved shooting. In other words, “there was a struggle.” When I asked how it began, what was “strange” about Cano’s behavior, if he had been armed or in danger of harming anyone, the officer asked me to wait while he looked for the file. He couldn’t find it. “I think he reached for a weapon,” he said eventually, apologized, and then fumbled some more. In the end, all he could tell me was this: “They gave him commands. He failed to obey. A Taser was deployed and used. A beanbag shotgun was also used. It did not have any effect. An OIS occurred. There were no injuries on the officers’ side.” He wouldn’t be able to say more until the incident had been investigated. How long would that be? “About six months.”
Soon, though, the department settled on a slightly fuller story. Chief Charlie Beck told the Police Commission that Cano had been “running in and out of traffic, acting very aggressively,” and when police confronted him, he “refused to submit to arrest,” so they shot him with a beanbag round — a sort of mesh sock stuffed with metal or ceramic shot — and then a Taser, but he continued to lunge toward them. “In fact,” said Chief Beck, he was able to wrest the beanbag shotgun away from one officer and fire off a round. “They returned fire, killing the subject.”
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That Saturday, I drove out to the Valley. Just before I turned onto Stagg Street, a battered van drove by, spray-painted with the words, “LAPD killed my friend. We need justice. You could be next.” Across the back doors, beneath a window emblazoned with stickers (Dodgers, Raiders, Hello Kitty) were scrawled the words “RIP ‘Drifter.’” The van stopped a few feet past a small shrine on the curb that marked the spot where Miguel Cano, a.k.a. Michael, a.k.a. Drifter, had fallen five days earlier. There were candles, flowers, a teddy bear, a six-pack of Corona, a can of Modelo, a wooden cross. Behind it, on the picket fence of the closest house, a handmade sign spelled out the words “Stop LAPD violence” in black and red marker.
The van’s driver was a white man in his early 30s named Robert Laverdure. His arms were heavily tattooed, and more ink, on his scalp, peeked out from beneath a ball cap. He had known Cano, he told me, for 15 years. “He was my friend,” he said, then choked up and went silent. That Monday, Cano already lay dead on the asphalt when Laverdure had arrived at the scene. But Laverdure’s girlfriend, Stephanie Moreno, a young woman with a pierced lip who sat looking shell-shocked in the van’s front seat, had been with Cano just before the shooting. So had Ray Beedle. It was in front of his house that Cano was shot. Cano used to date Beedle’s niece, and hung around long after that relationship ended. “He just kind of grew on me,” Beedle said, “like a fungus.” He shook his head. “He became one of my best friends.” At the time of his death, Cano was unemployed and staying with friends in a house down the street. Beedle, a thickset man in his 50s, saw him nearly every day. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him, Beedle said. “No one disliked him.” Cano was drunk a lot and could be obnoxious, but he made up for it by clowning and making people laugh, and he had a big heart, Beedle said. “He helped everyone out.”
No one but Miguel Cano and the two police officers who shot him were there to witness the events that immediately preceded the shooting, but none of the witnesses I interviewed who were present just before and after it occurred found the LAPD’s story credible. That Monday, Moreno had been driving to Beedle’s house to help look after his elderly mother, she said, when she noticed Cano on a side street with three young white men around him. They were skaters, and Cano’s head was bleeding. She thought that they had jumped him. She stopped the car and called out. The skaters told her that Cano had fallen and they were trying to help him up. He was cursing. “I was like, ‘Oh, he’s drunk,’” she said. A police helicopter was already circling the block. She assumed it was for Cano, that someone had called 911. She tried to convince him to get into the car. He refused. “He could hardly walk,” she said. “He was barely making it.”
She parked and managed to get Cano into the Beedles’ backyard. Ray Beedle met her there. Cano, he remembered, kicked at a piece of wood as he walked into the yard and was so drunk that “he spun around completely and fell down.” The helicopter was still circling. They tried to convince him to stay, but he refused. He pushed past them through the gate and stumbled back out to the street. Beedle and Moreno stepped into the garage and were debating whether or not they should go after him when they heard the shots. “It was seconds” after Cano walked off, Moreno said. “Not minutes, seconds,” and not nearly enough time, she said, for the sequence of events described by the LAPD to have occurred.
The shots, Beedle said, were all the same: the sharp, quick pops of handgun rounds, not the distinctive echoing bark of a shotgun. (LAPD’s beanbag rounds are fired through an ordinary pump-action Remington with a slightly modified barrel and a neon green stock.) His sister, Kim Romo, was inside the house at the time. “I heard six shots at least,” she told me. “There was no time lapse between them: it was BAMBAMBAM.” Beedle ran out first and saw Cano lying bleeding on the ground, two officers standing over him, their guns still aimed at his body. “I said, ‘Why did you kill my friend?’” They said he had rushed them, and ordered Beedle away from the body.
In separate interviews, Beedle, Moreno, and Romo all told me that there was no shotgun in the street or anywhere near Cano’s body, no beanbag, and no Taser. Both his hands were empty. He was wearing skinny jeans and a tank top, Moreno said, and was clearly not hiding a weapon. When Laverdure arrived a few minutes later, police had just begun taping off the scene. He too said he saw no weapon anywhere near his friend’s body. Only later, after more police came and pushed back the neighbors and the onlookers and family members who had gathered, did anyone notice a Taser lying on the asphalt not far from Cano’s corpse, like a space-age plastic pistol. “It was bright green,” Laverdure said — there was no way he could have missed it. Beedle, Romo, and Moreno concurred: the Taser appeared later, after the two officers who shot Cano had been ushered away, and driven off.
“Nobody’s perfect,” Laverdure told me before I left. Cano had had scrapes with the law before, he acknowledged. “Everybody has their demons. His demon was alcohol. That’s no reason to kill a man. There’s police that are alcoholics. There’s judges that are alcoholics. There’s all kinds of people in high society who are alcoholics. Do they get shot?”
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The funeral was held on a Wednesday at a mortuary in a largely treeless sweep of San Fernando where the boulevards reach long and straight toward the mountains. The pews in the brick-walled chapel were nearly full. Many of the mourners wore black T-shirts printed with Miguel Angel Cano’s image. His mother sat in the first row, wearing a striped sweater, her hair cut short. Her son lay a few feet away in an open casket. Two giant flat-screen monitors were affixed to the wall to his left and his right. They showed images of him as a boy and later as a young man, on the beach, in the dunes, at Disneyland, clowning and posing with his friends, sometimes with his head shaved to the scalp, later with long curly dark locks and a mustache, with his own son, with his daughter as an infant in his lap and as a girl at school receiving a certificate, Cano grinning proudly beside her. He was smiling in almost every photo, usually goofing for the camera. In one image that flashed on the screens as the priest doled out communion wafers to the mourners, Cano wore a giant, rainbow-colored Afro wig, and his friends and his relatives laughed in the pews. In another he lay on his back on a green lawn with one of his children in each of his arms, smiling. ¤
Ben Ehrenreich’s next book, The Way to the Spring, which is based on his reporting from the West Bank, will be published in June by Penguin Press. Magritte in Koreatown
Bonnie Johnson
Ceci n’est pas un chapeau. In fact, it’s a shell of a restaurant in the shape of a bowler, plunked atop one of many nondescript shopping centers in Los Angeles’s densest district. Its sign and the brim are both gone. But in its bones, it’s still the Brown Derby, with a series of lives and deaths all its own. In my mind, the Derby always belonged to another Los Angeles, not mine, different enough that I rarely think to graft it onto the present-day city. But recently, revisiting Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, the place jumped out at me from her know-it-when-I-see-it list of examples. When she described the aesthetic in the 1960s, the other landmarks she named weren’t dead and gone (nor are they now): Paris’s Metro entrances, Barcelona’s Gaudi projects, Munich’s rococo churches. They have remained where they always were, while the Brown Derby has taken an unpredictable course.
Once, there were multiple Derbies floating about the city. The original was the one on Wilshire Boulevard, which opened a block from its current mini-mall location, across from what was then the Ambassador Hotel. Like the Brown Derby, the hotel and its Cocoanut Grove club dated to the 1920s. The Grove hosted early Academy Awards ceremonies and, memorably to me, the first musical number of Singin’ in the Rain. But after Bobby Kennedy’s killing in its kitchen in 1968, the Ambassador began a descent. Around the time of Sontag’s essay, Sammy Davis Jr. tried to restore the Grove and brought in new acts like Richard Pryor, but the neighborhood was succumbing to crime and had yet to experience renewal by arriving Koreans. Going the way of other historic Los Angeles properties, by the 1990s the hotel had closed to public business and become a film stand- in for itself — in Pretty Woman, LA Story, True Romance, and more. When it met the wrecking ball 10 years ago, it had already outlasted the ground-level huge hat. There is now a school on the site.
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Early on the first Derby migrated from the corner of Kenmore Avenue to Alexandria, but in the perilous 1970s it closed for good. As a concession to preservationists, the dome has enjoyed its third-floor perch these past 35 years, which in Los Angeles is a feat in itself. The otherwise unremarkable semi-spherical structure housed a Korean bar for a while, but lately it’s been vacant. It was part of a “programmatic” design trend of novelty creations to catch the eye of passing drivers, perfect for Southern California, sharing an objective with John Lautner’s later Googies coffee shop. The Brown Derby came at a time when fewer restrictions governed the planning process. Similar mimetic buildings still exist around Los Angeles — the Donut Hole in La Puente (still in original use), the Shutter Shak in Westminster (preserved within a park), the Tamale in East Los Angeles (repurposed as a beauty salon), the Koffee Pot in Long Beach (currently being restored) — but why a hat for a restaurant? The name originated from a Vaudeville hangout on Long Island, which was shaped conventionally but named for the Laurel and Hardy–style topper of choice — not such a strange ancestry here, since beside the Chinese Theater we have a mall designed to look like a film set designed to look like ancient Babylon. The Derby’s convex ceiling presaged the curves of treasured local landmarks to follow: Griffith Observatory in the 1930s, the Cinerama Dome of the 1960s.
Los Angeles’s first Derby had been a venture of wise guy Wilson Mizner (companion of leading screenwriter Anita Loos), Herbert Somborn (sometime husband of Gloria Swanson), and Jack Warner (the founding Warner Brother). The owner of the second, at Hollywood and Vine, was Robert Cobb, who supposedly invented his eponymous salad from leftovers one late night for a tooth-achy Sid Grauman. Other original recipes, now available in a Cobb family cookbook, included chiffon pie and a cream cheese–iced grapefruit cake. True to its entertainment heritage and location, the slightly newer Brown Derby became an integral part of the show business scene. Rendered in the more common Mission style, it kept some of the kitsch: Jack Lane’s celebrity caricatures covered a wall. Maître d’s wore tuxedos, diners sat at rounded brown leather banquettes. Hit songwriters competed to be the patron in highest demand on the tableside phone. The spot became the favorite of radio actors and then of superstars like Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, the informal office of both pioneering movie columnist Louella Parsons and vicious rival Hedda Hopper, and the site of many wrap parties. The guest list included Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Barbara Stanwyck, and Rita Hayworth. Joan Crawford tended bar there in Mildred Pierce, William Holden got a pie in the face on I Love Lucy, and Groucho Marx made a spontaneous cameo appearance on This Is Your Life. Mickey Mouse even considered the hat as a hiding place in his cartoon. This may have been the Derby iteration Sontag had in mind. She placed it on Sunset, but there doesn’t seem to have been a franchise there.
The Hollywood Brown Derby went up in smoke in a 1980s fire. The neighborhood was also struggling then, but new owners rebuilt the location into Premieres of Hollywood, trying to bring back some Golden Age glamour. Alas, the revival was short-lived; the new place fell to the riots of 1992. Now, like much of redeveloped Hollywood, the address holds a tall but indistinguishable mixed-use complex, partly vacant, partly occupied by chain stores. Another, very similar Derby at Wilshire and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills lasted for nearly the same 50 years before demolition.
A fourth Brown Derby stood at the corner of Hillhurst and Los Feliz Boulevard. The space had opened in the 1920s as Willard’s Chicken Inn; Cecil B. DeMille turned it into a Derby in 1940. Besides the usual fine dining, this one had a drive-in carhop service area created by architect Wayne McAllister. Raised in San Diego, McAllister had gone from building bungalows to designing the first Las Vegas resorts, the original Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank, and a number of long-gone Southwestern institutions (he later retired to farm ostriches). In the days before air conditioning, a system would pump water out of the Los Feliz Brown Derby’s domed roof so that it ran down the restaurant’s exterior and cooled the inside.
In 1960, former actor Michael St. Angel bought the site and converted it into Michael’s of Los Feliz, an incarnation that lasted until the early 1990s. The Michael’s stage was the initial home of the beloved lounge musicians Marty and Elayne, talent poached by a Dresden Room manager in 1982 and iconic fixtures on Vermont Avenue ever since. Back around the corner, the former Michael’s morphed into The Derby, a club that housed the 1990s swing craze and other throwbacks. One former manager rhapsodically remembers hearing Roger Daltrey play “Baba O’Riley” at a private party there. In June 2004 an LLC took over with plans to erect five floors of condominiums, but neighbors and their supporters campaigned to rescue the building. In 2006 the City Council named it an official cultural monument. One of the developers later expressed relief that the deal hadn’t gone through, since many condo projects of the time quickly met with foreclosure. By the end of 2008, though, the venue had switched to a month-to-month rental agreement — and in the early hours of a hip-hop night booked by outside promoters, an attendee pulled a gun and shot two people. The landlords decided not to renew the lease, and the club closed that winter. A bank branch moved in and split the space with an outpost of Louise’s Trattoria, based in West Los Angeles. In 2012, local investors bought the site for over $9 million, intending to keep it the same.
But the owners of Louise’s closed it and reopened as the current Messhall Kitchen: a “modernized version of an Army mess hall.” The faux-utilitarian interior features communal tables; the staff are called “Troops,” the booze menu “Survival.” Lunch options include an “SOS” shrimp salad, and a “C-3 Bomber” is an $8 glass of juice. MHK counts as a fan the self-unmasked food critic Jonathan Gold, next to whom Brown Derby regular John Barrymore would have appeared a picture of moderation. (Real-life mess halls lack such well-heeled charm; their SOS is creamed chipped beef. Of the US military dining facilities in Kabul, one Special Operations service member has said, “I’d rather eat shell casings.”)
After Hollywood’s Derby owner Bob Cobb died in the 1970s, his wife sold the assets to SoCal businessman Walter Scharfe. In the 1980s Scharfe made a licensing deal with Disney-MGM, and the latter opened a themed restaurant at Walt Disney World in Florida. Not far from the better- known Magic Kingdom there, past branded hotels and golf courses, between a water park and a grandiose zoo, the Hollywood Studios area models California-style low stuccoed slabs with tiled roofs among identical palms. Surreally, visitors can stop by the Fairfax Farmers Market, pass the programmatic Darkroom on the Miracle Mile, and dodge street performers outside of Grauman’s. While designed for maximum occupancy, the Hollywood Brown Derby® maintains tablecloths, wine flights, and a book of reservations. It would be a peculiar place to take kids, and an even more peculiar trip to take without them, but the facility has lasted almost 30 years.
Disney struck up several more agreements in the 1990s, opening short-lived restaurants at the MGM-Grand casinos in Las Vegas and Detroit, and allowing use of the concept at other Disney amusement parks. But Tokyo seems never to have made use of the license, and at Disneyland in Anaheim, the Brown Derby is only a dessert. The struggling Euro-Disney in France has a more compact version of Orlando’s reimagined Hollywood, in this case a short pseudo-street with old- time facades — including the Derby’s — hiding a functioning French restaurant on one side and a gift shop on the other.
A handful of unrelated Brown Derby restaurants, bars, and liquor stores have come and gone around the US, and the Long Island namesake closed several years ago. While the dome in Los Feliz survived respectably for a long time, the displaced one on Wilshire may triumph yet. Los Angeles’s 1933 Group — of Thirsty Crow and Bigfoot bars fame — have brought back North Hollywood’s barrel-shaped Idle Hour. A smaller reproduction of the Bulldog Café, formerly residing at the Petersen Automotive Museum, sits on the leafy patio out back. If the Koreatown hat is fortunate, it will find a steward like the Idle Hour’s reverent Bobby Green, rather than Messhall’s enterprising Bill Chait.
Since the Brown Derby’s whole lineage is one of replicas and revivals, we can likely look forward to the past. Yet while the space stands empty, it brims with possibilities: for film shoots or gunshots, rock shows or riots, like the prop cakes that could hold either mobsters or chorus girls. Might a giant apple pop out, the way it does at a Mets game? Perhaps the hat could land on the head of fellow camp designee King Kong. Think of LACMA’s massive rock — things appear in the strangest of places.
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Bonnie Johnson studied modern thought and politics at Stanford and the LSE. In her previous life she was a labor and community organizer. Her recent work also appears in The Rumpus. An Urban History: The Influence of Street Gangs on Contemporary Art
Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre
THE INFLUENCE OF STREET GANG CULTURE on art in Los Angeles has been systematically underrepresented by academia and art history. Although scholarly research has traced the origin of gang graffiti from the 1930s on, this aesthetic has been largely absent from the dialogue about the shaping of modern art. Since the Art in the Streets exhibition at MOCA in 2011, renowned museums and galleries all over the world have become more accepting of street art, graffiti, tagging, and other such nontraditional multidisciplinary mediums. In Vitality and Verve: Transforming the Urban Landscape at the Long Beach Museum of Art, for instance, on view from June 27 through October 25, 2015, Chicano artists are featured, as is a piece by graffiti artist Saber that boldly confronts the issue of officer-involved shootings. In Los Angeles, this type of art is directly related to a complex interrelationship of the histories of street gang organizations, architecture, urban planning, and the built environment.
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In the Roaring Twenties, cultural anthropologists Manuel Gamio and Emory Bogardus discovered a youth phenomenon that they referred to as “boy gangs,” young male cohorts that congregated on the streets without parental supervision. Because of the decade’s emphasis on wealth and consumerism, and the rise of Hollywood, little attention has been paid to the mixed-race, low- income neighborhoods that included Irish, Italian, Slavic, Mexican, Armenian, and Russian- Jewish residents. These neighborhoods were more vulnerable to the small gangs — Alpine Street, Frogtown, 38th Street, Clanton Street, Loma Street, White Fence, and Dogtown in East Los Angeles and 17th Street in Santa Monica, among others — that appeared throughout the metropolis. Many immigrant neighborhoods developed shantytowns around railroad maintenance yards where these boy gangs formed. Sometimes called “tomato gangs,” their conflicts often involved food fights, using produce picked from train cars. Researchers began to see these boy gangs as a threat to the social order.
The Crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression shifted civic attention to economic recovery. During the Depression, government agencies emphasized funding public works projects to keep people employed while simultaneously developing a stronger infrastructure in what turned out to be imperial nation-building. Artists of the era were employed for public works, giving them, for first time for many, a sense that their role in society was necessary. Millard Sheets, a renowned artist of the “California School” and Watercolor Movement (Sheets among other things designed the Los Angeles County seal), said that artistic expression during the New Deal felt politically and socially relevant, like it could affect change.
During the same time period, gang graffiti began to appear in the form of commemorative plaques — or placas — on walls, on school desks, and as cement carvings in the sidewalks in working- class neighborhoods. These images were symbols of rebellion mixed with a warped sense of patriotism. Even though mainstream society considered gang members to be second-class citizens or foreigners, gang members embraced their neighborhoods with civic pride as they fought to simply exist. The writing on the wall was a reflection of a hard-boiled collective identity, formed against a world that saw them as invisible and unwelcome.
For young Mexican-American men, street gangs and graffiti represented paths to reclaiming public space and forging a relationship with their neighborhoods. Like traditional commemorative plaques that bore names, years, locations, and brief explanations, gang plaques incorporated the same, including the year, names of individuals or roll calls, the name of the gang or location, and street colloquialisms. The typography tended to be block letters learned in elementary school, similar to Bauhaus typeface, rendered monochromatically. This was relatively simple to create with limited technique and tools.
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During the Depression, large-scale public works projects such as the Arroyo Seco Parkway (which became the 110), hydroelectric plants, and bridges; the paving of roads, tunnels, and aqueducts; the draining, exhumation, and concreting of the Los Angeles River; and housing projects in mostly Mexican-American neighborhoods all contributed to a new psycho-geographic experience in the built environment. The vast physical space and openness of the Los Angeles metropolis was transformed into a large urban laboratory and became the testing ground for ideas, theories, and styles, with “housing garden-complex” public housing projects taking center stage. World-renowned architects like Rudolph Schindler, Ralph Flewelling, Frank Wright, Gordon B. Kaufmann, Richard Neutra, and others were contracted as consultants and designers.
After the Depression, city leaders, civic boosters, and other influential residents sought scapegoats for unemployment, lack of affordable housing, and other social ills. Mexicans and Mexican Americans, already targeted by law enforcement for social deviancy, were under the microscope. Earlier Americanization campaigns, sponsored by the progressive movement, had tried to assimilate this demographic into the status quo by providing English-speaking classes and manual vocation training, while encouraging pastoral folk arts like basket-weaving, but many refused the assimilation attempts, knowing that citizenship didn’t bring equality. The Alien Labor Act, passed by the California State Legislature in 1931, prohibited any business contracted with the federal, state, and local government for public works projects to hire or employ non-Anglo persons, resulting in hundreds of Mexican Americans being fired simply for their ethnicity. When these workers did what other Americans would do after losing their job and sought public assistance, they were accused of seeking handouts and denounced as socialist agitators. Racist propaganda agitated for repatriation for immigrants and even thousands who were born in the United States. The result of all of this was distrust of government, law enforcement, and authority, and a democratic process that seemed a facade. The uprooting of the Mexican and Mexican-American community, along with harsh discrimination and other forms of social disorganization, encouraged the growth of gangs.
The first housing project to be erected was in the suburban community of Maravilla in East Los Angeles, a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American neighborhood. According to Stephanie Lewthwaite in Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles (University of Arizona Press, 2009), Neutra was quoted as saying, “Maravilla’s flimsy, one-story, semi-rural buildings inspire and justify a definite slum clearance campaign, and was indeed well chosen for such a colony aiming at the Americanization of still unassimilated aliens of rural backgrounds.” The village-like living conditions and the effective quarantine produced by the projects increased street gang recruitment and violence and created a dystopian nightmare. In all housing projects developed thereafter, such as Ramona Gardens, Aliso Village, Estrada Courts, Mar Vista Gardens, and many others, street gangs and graffiti multiplied exponentially. William Dunn’s The Gangs of Los Angeles (2007) argues that the simplest explanation is that a Lord of the Flies mentality developed, where unmonitored cohorts of already rebellious individuals, ostracized from contemporary society, succumbed to an innate wickedness. In Urban Politics: The Political Culture of Sur 13 Gangs (2013), I researched this phenomenon as well, and see it as a social contract of lawlessness and licentiousness, where a communal agreement is created with its own set of principles and norms. Since these young men were marginalized from the status quo and the dominant social contract, a new one developed in the underground, in the form of a sovereign street gang organization.
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By the late 1930s, several violent incidents including the Happy Valley rumbles of 1939, White Fence assaults on Whittier Boulevard in 1940, the death of two Echo Park gang members by members of Boyle Heights in a drag racing event in Montecito Heights, and the murder of a Clanton Street member who was shot in the head at the Memorial Coliseum by a group from Primera Flats in 1942, brought infamy to Mexican-American street gangs. Law enforcement responded by instituting a “Dragnet” in certain communities, where hundreds of Mexican-American youth were rounded up, interrogated, and jailed for social deviancy. In the media, these boy gangs were referred to as “Mexican juvenile gangs” or “Mexican street gangs,” in an ongoing war on juvenile delinquency.
In 1942, this social phenomenon made it to the front page of the Los Angeles Times in what is now remembered as the “Sleepy Lagoon Murder,” in which members of 38th Street gang beat, stabbed, and killed a partygoer; however, the scandalous way in which the criminal justice apparatus handled the case demonstrated clear violation of the civil rights of the Mexican American, Armenian, and other youth involved. Twenty-four individuals were arrested and charged with murder, attempted murder, and countless other charges, and the prosecution sought the gas chamber for all suspects. They were all convicted on some charge. The incident and its aftermath caused a public outrage, in particular with progressives and local celebrities in the film industry, including Orson Welles, Anthony Quinn, Rita Hayworth.
The complete disregard for human rights and absurd way in which the case was handled influenced hundreds of individuals to join street gang organizations and caused the larger community to put pressure on the system to overturn the case. Soon, gang graffiti appeared everywhere, from beach communities to freeways, routine streets to concrete riverbeds. Over time it became more stylized, utilizing tropes and devices borrowed from Old English, Gothic/Blackletter, California Modern, and Bauhaus, and the streets of Los Angeles filled with aggressive, in-your-face calligraphy. The illegal graffiti reflected the bleak social conditions of the day, yet its aggressive vernacular was highly stylistic and progressive. The city’s failure to find the means to support and respond to the poverty, discrimination, and other issues Mexican Americans and others faced resulted in a direct attack on public infrastructure in the form of criminal activity and vandalism. No art form in the world has been as directly related to criminal activity as this, the propagandist graffiti of Mexican- American street gangs.
In the early 1940s, many second generation Mexican Americans were transformed from docile rural peasants to urban hipster rebels. Rejecting both Americanization and the kinds of Mexicanization campaigns launched by the Mexican Consulate — such as Spanish speaking classes, books in Spanish, and encouraging a return to Mexico — they sought to carve out their own identity by adopting folk culture from their parents, urban progress from their American contemporaries, and pop culture from the world around them. For countless rebellious youth, the zoot suit was key, borrowed from black American jazz musicians. Many Mexican Americans who felt marginalized adopted what they saw as a cultural tradition — including music and dress, jive talk, petty criminal activity, drug use, and rebellious angst — that went against the status quo. This new ideology and lifestyle became both signs and agents of change for the Mexican-American gang member.
Soon the Mexican-American gang member had a uniform, although not all zoot suitors were gang members. Since the United States was preparing to enter the military campaign via World War II in Europe, patriotism was at an all-time high and any radical behavior or style that wasn’t part of the status quo was considered subversive. Some city journalists even considered Mexican American zoot suitors as fifth column Nazis or soviet agitators and sensationalized them in local articles, which influenced hundreds of youth to be drawn to this mysterious underworld.
When the city built the Naval Reserve Armory in Elysian Park for Anglo sailors in training and displaced numerous working-class Mexican and Mexican-American families, it caused a further polarization for Mexican-American youth and authority. Rebellious youth reacted to white assumptions of superiority by engaging them in battle in individual conflicts that culminated in the “Zoot Suit Riots” in 1943. Immediately afterward, Mexican-American street gangs became identified by local residents as “defenders of the barrio,” similar to vigilance committees that existed up and down the state during the California Gold Rush. The “neighborhood” or the “barrio” became an extension of camaraderie, family, and loyalty, and defending it was of utmost importance.
As a result, gang graffiti became more prevalent in many neighborhoods, especially where there were no graffiti removal programs. Additionally, memorials began to appear for fallen comrades murdered by gang violence. Lettering styles used for signatures and neighborhood representation became a propagandist method to instill fear, define territory, and discourage passersby from walking or driving down neighborhood streets. Although considered simple territorial tags, the styles were often shaded with tri-dimensional fill-ins and cursive calligraphy, which produced hybrid hand-style variations.
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In the postwar era, mid-century modernism was at its height across California, influencing designers to make products that would encourage consumption while gang typographers created hand-styles and images on streets and bodies that would soon influence countless disenfranchised youth in the metropolis to communicate fear and respect. To have your neighborhood tattooed across your chest in Old English or to tag your placaso on the streets came to symbolize, for youth engaged in gang culture, the highest form of rebellion, existentialism, pride, and even immortality.
By the 1950s, the Mexican-American community began to be more integrated into popular culture. For example, the “greaser” culture, custom car pin-striping and low-riding, and the postwar “cholo” look became part of the American aesthetic, and they slowly worked their way into the mainstream. It started with Kustom Kulture, soul music, weirdo style, and tattoo art, and ended up in films like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause. In the 1950s on the streets of Los Angeles, the cholo was the ultimate rebel without a cause, portrayed as a criminal psychopath — not the bourgeois James Dean–type in cookie-cutter suburban communities that co-opted the lifestyle and look as a form of being cool, rebellious, and suggestive. While Abstract Expressionism, Assemblage, Pop Art, and Conceptualism, which contributed to the Light and Space and LA Cool School, flourished in the established world of contemporary art, approaches once considered to be lowbrow began to gain popularity in the Los Angeles underground and set the tone for the local avant-garde.
After decades of imitation, Los Angeles was finally giving birth to its own styles, in part influenced by street art and the California cool that arguably grew as much out of beaches and barbeques as low-riders and zoot-suiters. In 1959, the renowned painter from East Los Angeles Roberto Chavez ruptured the art trends of the day with a bold blend of figurative, surrealist, and expressionist approaches. His painting El Tamalito del Hoyo, 1959, depicts a homeboy from the neighborhood standing in a cool gangster pose with feet pointed outward like a penguin, slicked-back hair, hand in pocket, head tilted back, broad shoulders, with street gang graffiti on a background wall that reads El Hoyo −M− Rifa, which is an East LA street gang, and stands for El Hoyo Maravilla Rifa or El Hoyo Maravilla “rules.” By incorporating the street vernacular, Chavez defied expectations of acceptable art. Up until then, street gang graffiti had never been seen in contemporary art.
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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it became commonplace for the typographic styles of graffiti to be transferred directly to skin via amateur tattoos in prison. At the same time, artists like Willie Herrón, Chaz Bojorquez, Lucila Villaseñor Grijalva, and others began to incorporate gang- style graffiti lettering and imagery into their artwork, which fluidly appeared on business cards, periodicals, gallery exhibitions, public walls, and other nontraditional sites. The mural painting that began in public housing projects as a form of social transformation and neighborhood solidarity grew into a significant way to reclaim public space. All community members took part in the mural process. Often, rival gang members worked on murals together, depicting a cyclical process of gang violence and life in public housing via symbolism, and an emerging social consciousness encouraged a peace accord for the duration of the mural process. The success of the murals in the projects influenced citywide murals and, by the 1980s, Los Angeles was hailed as the mural capital of the world.
In 1976, tattoo artists Charlie Cartwright and Jack Rudy opened a tattoo parlor on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles and created single-needle, black and gray, fine-line tattoo art. Until that point, this tattoo aesthetic was primarily only rendered illegally by Mexican-American inmates in the prison system. When the Dogtown skateboarding phenomenon appeared in the Venice/Santa Monica area in the late 1970s, the punk/cholo aesthetic of the region resonated with disillusioned youth across the nation. A few years later, New York–style graffiti took Los Angeles by storm and once again an underground social movement transformed local youth. By the end of the decade, street gang and New York-influenced graffiti, Dogtown style, prison-style tattoo art, and public murals transformed the built environment and contemporary art. Today, approaches that started in the streets and jails of Los Angeles have influenced artists in Tokyo, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Barcelona, Sydney, Amsterdam, Berlin, and beyond. For more than 80 years, Mexican-American street gang culture has impacted contemporary art via a “dark progressivist” vernacular and today it can be seen as a cultural commodity experienced anywhere from iPhone cases to commercial airlines.
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Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre is the author of Urban Politics: The Political Culture of Sur 13 Gangs, The NAFTA Blueprint, and A Grave Situation. #PlantSomeShit
Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn interviews Ron Finley
Outside, in Ron Finley’s garden, adjacent to the Metro Expo line, the sounds of the city come and go from somewhere behind a banana tree. Easily visible coming down Exposition, the garden is a virtual Eden of vegetables, fruits, and flowers along an urban concrete wasteland —the centerpiece of director Delila Vallot’s revealing documentary film, Can You Dig This, about the urban gardening movement in South Los Angeles, and the power of change through planting seeds.
Vallot first learned about Finley after the Los Angeles Times reported on his fight with the city, when officials sought to tear down the sidewalk garden he’d created in front of his house, on city property (a fight he eventually won: the laws have now been changed because of Finley’s action.)
“If you put beauty into a place that normally doesn’t have it,” Finley said in the film, “that’s a game changer.”
According to Josh Kun, author of To Live and Dine in LA, Finley’s work is part of a larger movement in South LA as African Americans begin to reclaim their food, and their cultural heritage, through gardening.
“I think that’s it’s been in the last 10 years or maybe more, but certainly in the last 10 years, there’s been this really valuable movement to reclaim black southern food places to back before the industrialization of food, before African American diets became intrinsically linked to fast food,” he said recently at a book signing at Leimert Park’s Eso Won Bookstore. “That organic, home- grown vegetables, greens, slow-cooked meats — we gotta bring this back. Bring planting seeds back; food as families, as generations. That’s been a movement people in LA are certainly aware of, and that bleeds over into the activist realm where you have people like Ron Finley, probably the most famous of the food activists right now, where he has taken that idea into transforming public spaces and putting community gardens in the middle of traffic islands. He’s now fighting with the city to turn his empty swimming pool into a garden.”
Finley, dubbed the “gangsta gardener,” is, by his own account, an unlikely activist and the reluctant star among the film’s urban gardeners: 23-year-old former gang member, Mychael “Spicey” Evans, and 21-year-old orphan Kenya Johnson who find hope at the Compton Community Garden; former inmate Hosea Smith whose garden feeds his fellow residents at a halfway house; and eight-year- old Quimonie Lewis who oversees a garden at her home in the Avalon Gardens housing project — and this kid is totally gangsta about her garden.
Can You Dig This premiered last June at the Los Angeles Film Festival where it won the LA Muse Award; smaller cities screened the film through Gathr, a community-based distribution platform, with a national VOD release in December. Since then, Finley’s rally via the hashtag #PlantSomeShit has carried on from the film, and his TEDTalks have connected with neighborhood gardeners globally.
The film returns to theaters Sunday Feb. 7 at 3:15 p.m. and Monday Feb. 8 at 4 p.m. for a limited engagement during the Pan African Film Festival at the Rave Cinemas in Baldwin Hills, not far from Finley’s garden oasis.
Touring the 150-foot space, where he grows beets, carrots, artichokes, sweet potatoes; blackberries, rasberries, and fava beans below apple, fig, pear, and a variety of citrus trees, he stops on occasion to pick a leaf — Italian parsley, purple broccoli, nasturtiums, purple mustard greens — for me to sample.
“You could really come out here and nibble on stuff all day long,” I say.
“Yeah, that’s what I want to happen.” He pulls a couple of clovers from beneath a tree. “Try this.”
“Oooh, it’s sour!”
“You don’t taste the lemon.”
“I do. It tastes like a sour lemon?”
“You can even eat the stem. It grows everywhere, but we throw it away. I’d put it on a salad or something like that,” he says.
“Like any other herb.” “Totally. And the flowers are really beautiful. And they’re everywhere. It’s a weed.”
“Oh, the stuff I pull out of my planters and discard.”
“Exactly.”
There are not so subtle reminders that the ills beyond the garden remain as cars careen around the corner; teens loud-talk as they make their way from school; a plane overhead spews burst of white chemtrails overhead.
“That’s what we really need to be worrying about,” Finley says, looking skyward.
Occasionally, a neighbor hollers over to greet Finley; he hollers back. “What this has brought me are conversations that I would never have had before in my life if it wasn’t here, and it’s beautiful. It’s not only changed my life, but a lot of other people’s lives, and changed people’s focus. Prostitutes. Drug addicts. Alcoholics. They’ll walk by here and they’ll express how this makes them feel.”
As if on cue, a man walks by and stops to chat a bit. His speech is slurry, but quick. His eyes bloodshot; inebriated. It’s just past noon. “Ron has a beautiful garden. A beautiful garden. I love his oranges.”
Then he yells, “I can’t find no tomatoes.”
“They not here yet,” Finley replies, as the man briskly makes his way down the street. Then, almost as quickly as he left, he returns handing Finley two crisp one dollar bills. “That’s for the oranges.”
Finley puts the money in his pocket. “Gratitude,” he says with a smile. “Some people put a couple of dollars in the mailbox. Then some people just come and destroy. Is it frustrating? Yeah it is! But you can’t let a couple of people ruin it for everybody. But it’s hard. You wait 75 days for a sunflower to grow and somebody comes by and breaks it just to break it. Just to destroy it.
“But you just saw an encounter,” he continues. “I wouldn’t have that encounter across the street,” where the browning grass sits pitifully along the barren sidewalk in the wake of Finley’s grand garden. “Ain’t gon’ happen.”
We take a seat on two stumps near the center of Finley’s garden. He hands me a Valencia orange, having managed to pull two from high atop the large leafy tree. It’s nearly picked clean of fruit.
Cutting through the skin, the fragrance releases; juice sprays through the air toward a large handmade web in the tree nearby. String connected by branches, and shaped almost like a heart, it’s decorated with old car keys, a toy dinosaur, a peace symbol, a sea shell, and a pod, among other kitschy things. It’s all part of the mission.
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JANICE RHOSHALLE LITTLEJOHN: Is that a dream catcher on that tree?
RON FINLEY: Yeah.
It’s huge.
I tell kids, if you got big ass dreams, you need a big ass dream catcher. But they say they don’t dream.
Kids are telling you they don’t dream?
Yeah, they don’t. They ain’t got nothin’ to dream for. Ain’t got nothin’ to dream about. And I’m like this shit’s free, dude. They just feel that fucked up. It’s like that old Richard Pryor joke about his wife taking him to court, and the judge tells him, “We want everything! Do you have any dreams? We want them, too.”
Do the trinkets represent your dreams?
What it represents here is everything; what you’re sitting on. It represents opportunity, not no fuckin’ hope. It’s like I tell people, “Keep your hope. You can’t do anything with hope.”
You can’t do anything with hope?
What can you do with hope? Hope isn’t tangible. I mean, you can do shit with opportunity. You can’t do nothin’ with hope but hope some shit happens. But opportunity, as you know, being a journalist, you’ve seen people make some shit happen. These kids, these people, they don’t have opportunity. Everybody got hope. But hope that: Damn, I hope they don’t foreclose on me; I hope I wake up. No, I’ve got the opportunity to change my damn life, and that’s what these represent to me.
I mean, this started for me as my meditation. So I’d come out here and play with these sticks. I don’t know if you ever did the Popsicle sticks in school where you would make’em into dreamcatchers, but this took me back to that. So I got to playing with these trees, and I didn’t want nothin’ tied. I just tried to do it with tension, and it looked nice and then one thing would move and it would go [makes an exploding noise] and it would just fly across the parkway. And then I’d start over. Tedious things like, just puzzles, that’s how it started with me, like a meditation, or a relaxation to get away from the bullshit that you deal with every day.
And the garden, did that begin as a meditation? I got tired of driving to the Wilshire district, to Culver City to get food, and you realize that you’re on this track, and you’re like: Wow! What do I need to do to get what I need? And you’re not really thinking about it, you just do it. Once you stop and think: Why do I have to leave my neighborhood to do something that is a basic need that other people have? And then you go to the store in your neighborhood and you see tomatoes coated with shellac to preserve the freshness. That ain’t cool. I don’t want nothin’ that doesn’t mold, you know. [Laughs.] If it doesn’t mold then we got a problem.
When did it become activism?
I guess when I started it. The fact that I did it and got a warrant. That’s when it turned into activism. Oh, I get it, you give zero shits about somebody that left this toilet in front of my house but this tomato plant you’ve got a problem with. That’s somethin’ huh? That’s when it became one. But I guess quietly I’ve always been one. I just never called myself one.
You were described in the movie as a reluctant activist.
You’ve seen it?
I saw the movie in November prior to the VOD release.
Oh yeah, what did you think of it?
I planted some shit afterwards.
[Laughs.] Really?
Yeah. I’d bought a package of live herbs during the holidays, and had some left over. So I cut some holes into a plastic cup, put that into a little flower pot, and sat it out on my balcony. Now I have fresh oregano whenever I want it.
Yes! My job is done. It’s that simple. Just imagine if everybody did that. A lot of people’ll see it and expand on it, like, “If I can grow that, I can grow this.”
Now I have to figure out what to do with this oregano that’s growing like crazy.
Is it? That’s beautiful. I love hearing that. Even with onions, you can start an onion like that. Or garlic. Garlic we’ve been taught has gone bad when the green’s coming out of it. That’s a whole ‘nother bulb of garlic. But we don’t see that, we see, “Ugh, that’s bad.” And I’m like, put that in the soil.
When Delila came to you, and asked you to be in the documentary, why did you want to do it?
I didn’t want to get involved. No. Leave me alone. I didn’t want this. I didn’t — what’s the word — I didn’t want to be bothered.
Too much attention?
Yeah. I mean, I like being stealth. I like doing my stuff behind closed doors, kinda like The Spook Who Sat by the Door [a 1973 film based on a book about the semi-autobiographical satirical story of a black man’s reaction to white ruling-class duplicity]. That poster’s hanging up in my house in several different places for a reason. I’ve had my own business, and had people thinking I’m the janitor. I’d be outside sweeping when I know I’m going to have an appointment, ‘cause I want to see what kind of reception I’d get: Am I talked down to? All kinds of stuff you can learn by clothes. I’m a fashion designer, so it’s all costumes. Everything we wear. It’s just costumes to make people think you’re legit. If you want to rob a place, the best way to go into the building is to wear a suit. It’s still the same person under the suit. But a lot of people will think they’re respectable because they’re in the suit. No, you’re still a dick.
What finally convinced you that you wanted to get involved with the film?
‘Cause they nagged the hell out of me. They got on my nerves.
How long did they pursue you?
It was a while. They came up with three or four different iterations of the plot they wanted to do, and the last one, they had put something together and said, “Ron, we put something together that we think you’ll really love,” and I did. They had put together a piece where, the stuff I talk about in my TED Talk, they had found people that fit that scenario. So they would have this piece from my TED, and then they would have this person, and I thought: “That was kind of brilliant.” And at first I was like, “How the hell’d you find these people?” So that’s when I got it. I was like, “Okay, you got me.” People think it’s about money. It wasn’t about no money. It ain’t no major money in the documentary business. [Casting agent] Reuben Cannon taught me that lesson.
But they wanted to tell the story, and it should be told and it has gone around the world, and because of my TED Talk, I get to speak around the world so I thought this would be just another platform to continue the message around the world.
What exactly has the response to the film been like?
Just like you. You saw it, and said, “Oh, I can go plant this.” Imagine people seeing it in Atlanta and seeing it in Boston — seeing it in all kinds of different cities and having the same kind of effect. In Atlanta, they started their own #PlantSomeShit Day. I think they saw it on December 4th or 5th, and by the 15th they were out planting stuff on parkways and in gardens and they sent us pictures. So it’s having that kind of effect. What more could somebody ask for than to inspire people to change their lives like that? So I’m pretty honored, and pretty — I can’t say saddened — but the fact that we’re so far gone that what I do is special. What I do should not be special. We feed ourselves, and that’s what people have done since the dawn of our existence was grow food. The fact that growing your own food is this, “Wow! That’s special.” Sometimes that bothers me.
It’s odd when you think LA was once the hub for small farms before the industrial food revolution.
The industrial everything. The industrial complex. The industrial prison complex, the industrial military complex — industrial everything that takes you away from yourself. It’s convenient. Yeah, it’s convenient, but that food is conveniently killin’ yo’ ass. It’s slow, but think about it. It would be a win-win if the stuff didn’t kill you. You go to a drive-through, talk into a box: “Can I have a super mac cheesy burrito sausage?” You drive 15 feet, and somebody hands you a box or a bag of stuff that’s supposed to be food. I don’t have to wash dishes. I don’t have to heat up no pots. I don’t have to do nothin’. And I can eat. But that’s what’s killin’ us. We’ve got to change that.
People ask me what I do. Because some people can’t figure out what exactly it is that I do.
What do you mean?
Well some people are like, “We haven’t figured out exactly what it is that you do.” I change culture. That’s what I do. You’ve seen all this stuff about me, read all these articles, and you can’t figure out what I do? I said inspiring people to change their lives and to design their own lives, you don’t get that? That doesn’t have any value? And I get that a lot from rich people who could help the cause, but they don’t quite understand and are looking for me to say some magic word so they can. But if you don’t understand, then it’s not for ya. ‘Cause people think it’s just this. That it’s just food. It’s about food. Food is down the line. I don’t grow food. I grow people, and hopefully they’ll grow food and that’s the catalyst to change.
I mean it is about healthy food and organic food, but to me it’s not the first thing. The thing is about people, and showing people that you can change your life, you can change your ecosystem, and you can draw them in with the beauty. What draws a humming bird to the pineapple sage or to the sunflower? It’s the beauty of it.
The terrible thing about a seed is that it never gets to see the beauty that it produces. The seed literally destroys itself to produce this beauty. It’s in the ground, and the beauty comes above the ground. So the seeds are sacrificing themselves for beauty, and so we can feed ourselves.
You’ve dubbed your home “HQ,” so it’s essentially now headquarters for the Ron Finley Project?
This is the epicenter. It’s where it all went down, and I want this to be a place for engagement, where people can learn; learn about soil, learn about our culture, learn about nature; but the first thing I teach people about nature is that we’re nature. We’re no different than the bumble bees, the birds, the bats. We’re nature. We decompose like a leaf does. That’s the beauty of compost, because it taught me that nothing ever dies. Think about it. If I take this [brown twigs and leaves] and I take this [green sprouts]. So I have brown, which is carbon, and I have green, which is nitrogen. Now I put these things together in a pile and they heat up. So how’s this dead? [He pulls away the leaves to expose a moist, rich soil.] If this is dead, how am I having all this life under here, less than two inches down? Look at what we have.
And there’s a worm.
Yeah, there’s everything down there. Even right here, there’s a multitude of organisms we can’t see. And there’s the ants. So how does this heat up to 150 degrees if it were dead. It’s energy. It doesn’t die. So what happens to us? That’s one of the first lessons. It’s funny the things that we are not taught. When I used to do personal training, I would ask: “What’s the most important thing to you? How would you answer that?”
The most important thing?
What is the most important thing to your life? Period.
[Pause]
See, it takes too long to answer, and it’s only one thing.
Water.
Now see that’s wrong. Because if you’ve seen people in disasters, they can live for days and days without water. Some people wind up drinking their urine, which is sterile so that’s cool you can do that.
Which is why water is so important.
But it’s not the single most important. Maybe to you.
Then what is?
Can I show you something?
Sure.
[Finley leans over and grabs me around the neck, squeezing lightly.]
Air! [He laughs.]
[I cough.]
You’ll answer that right the next time. So, Janice, what is the single most important thing to your life?
Air!
Nobody ever says that. Don’t ever think about it. Why? Because you can’t see it. You can do without water. You can do without food. Some people can do without sex.
Well, now you’re just talking crazy, Mr. Finley.
Some! [Laughs.] But you cannot do without air. It’s not gonna happen. And it’s terrible that air doesn’t get the due that should be put on it. It doesn’t get its honor. We don’t give it the respect it should have.
Which is why the chemtrails in the sky concerns you.
Look at it! It’s still there. And look what’s happening. I’m not gon’ be no conspiracy theorist, but look it up. Why is it just sitting up there, and why is it spreading? You see how it’s spreading now? It looks like clouds now. It’ll change in a minute.
You have a sign telling people not to pick the flowers. Do you not want people to come and harvest the vegetables and fruit?
I want people to come and take the stuff, but leave my flowers alone, especially with sunflowers because I save them for so many purposes. First of all, it remediates the soil; takes all the bad stuff out. If you look at a place like Fukushima, they have millions and millions of sunflowers planted because it heals the soul and takes all the bullshit out. Plus, with the sunflower, it grows and it’s beautiful. So you have that, you have the beauty, and you have people stopping that are in a neighborhood where you usually don’t see beauty like that, and they don’t think it’s real. Then you have the pollinators: the bees and the butterflies. The hummingbirds. And then you have the sunflower seeds — if the birds don’t eat’em all. [Laughs] And these are seeds you can eat, or you can plant.
I was reading an article recently in which it likened healthy eating and urban planting in the same context with civil action. Is it?
Yeah, and that’s sad. It should not be a big deal. What we do should be, “Eh! Your tomato ain’t shit, look at mine! You grow tomatoes. So. Look at mine!” It shouldn’t be that important. It shouldn’t be civil disobedience to grow food, to feed yourself, to break out of the system. It’s all about control. I tell people, I don’t care how rich you are, if you don’t have a hand in none of your food, you’re a slave. Period. And what we have as black people, we have a disdain for the soil because of our lineage back to slavery. This is beneath us. My thing is that this is where the gold is. The wealth of this country isn’t because of you, it’s because of the land you happened to work. My thing is to change culture. Just imagine for one second we owned the soil, and look at what you can do. You can have that big white house on the hill, too. That’s what I’m trying to do: change people’s perspective.
What it sounds like you’re talking about is economic development?
This is economic development. This is civil disobedience. This is gangsta. This is sustainable. This is life. Soil, to me, represents life. This is art. There’s a metaphor for everything in life in this soil.
What’s gangsta about planting seeds?
Well because my thing is, especially with kids and the media and these rap artists, a bunch of them ain’t gangsta, but they have kids thinking that’s the way to get through; to rob from people, to steal, to be misogynistic; to do the drugs and the alcohol, and to promote drugs and alcohol. To me that’s prison. What’s that gonna lead to. All that activity they talk about is gonna lead to confinement of some kind. In your brain. So you’re a kid and that’s all the messages you get about what’s gangsta. No, the soil is gansta. The shovel is gangsta. Building up your community is gangsta. Being educated — that shit’s gangsta. Changin’ a system is gangsta. You almost have to be an anarchist.
I’ll go back to The Spook Who Sat by the Door. I’m sitting here by the door, but I’m taking in all of these lessons that y’all have given me that you don’t even know you’ve given me ‘cause you think I’m the janitor. It speaks volumes of what they think your capacity is. That’s what I mean by stealth mode. Don’t let’em know what your capacity is. Ever. That’s gangsta.
Mother Theresa. That’s gangsta. That’s what should be gangsta. Not this system where they’re promoting these lyrics with these stories — half of ’em are fables anyway. We need to change that. We terrorize our own communities. We trash our own communities. You have people just throw trash out the window like it’s normal.
Like those cans and stuff tossed across the street.
Yeah, exactly. We live here. You live here. Why do I need to see that? Why would you come into your own community and trash it? People from Beverly Hills and other places aren’t coming into our communities and throwing trash in the street. We do that. You wanna live in a cesspool or you want to design it where it can be beautiful? These kids grow up thinking that’s the norm. I don’t get to see beautiful things. I don’t get to see beautiful flowers. I don’t get beautiful smells. So you grow up, and what are you going to think. Beauty is now foreign to you. So kids come by and tear down the sunflowers, and I’m like, “Is beauty so disturbing to you that you have to destroy it?” This is a social experiment right here, in all kinds of life: from art, from growing food, from interaction, from storytelling when you get people who can appreciate it.
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Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn is a Los Angeles–based journalist, author, and filmmaker. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @JaniceRhoshalle. The Fight for Frogtown
Molly Strauss
When David de la Torre opens his mailbox these days, he typically finds an offer to buy his home. Once, it was hand-written. Speculators canvasing the neighborhood are apparently a common sight — BMWs inching down residential streets, past modest single-family homes on small lots with low fences. Just a few blocks over, shrubbery leads up the hill to gridlocked freeway lanes. It’s comfortable here. Not quaint, manicured, or fussy. Quiet, but lived-in.
Elysian Valley — also called “Frogtown” — is sandwiched between the Los Angeles River to the east and the I-5 freeway to the west. Traditionally working class with a large immigrant population and, historically, a mix of residential and industrial uses, the 0.79-square-mile area has seen properties flip since the Army Corps of Engineers announced a year ago a $1-billion plan to revitalize the Los Angeles River. The investment would focus on an 11-mile stretch of the waterway, part of which passes beside Elysian Valley. With the city repositioning its river as an amenity rather than a flood control channel, the neighborhoods along its banks are receiving unprecedented attention. Property values are rising.
Factors like these leave certain Frogtown residents on edge. They’re worried about displacement. They’re worried about commercial activity coming in that won’t serve the community. (When De La Torre welcomed a new salon to Riverside Drive, he discovered that it charged $75 for a haircut.) They’re worried about density and height — developers building as big as they can legally go and dwarfing the one-story houses; about naked bike rides and eminent domain. Some of these fears are well founded (that naked bike ride really did happen — “a 200-nudist cycle parade down Blake Avenue,” said De La Torre). Others, less so. Regardless, there’s a sense in the community of losing control — that outsiders serving private interests will transform this neighborhood of about 8,900 into a place residents will no longer be able to recognize, or afford. Certain property owners and developers in Elysian Valley — some long-standing, many newer — are eager to take advantage of the new market. Elysian Valley is just minutes from downtown Los Angeles, where revitalization has taken root after decades of failed efforts to bring economic activity back to a long-abandoned historic core. Mark Pisano, former executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments, has called the land along the river among the most undervalued in the county. He likens it to waterfront real estate.
Enter LA-Más. The non-profit organization, co-founded by Elizabeth Timme and Mia Lehrer, launched the Futuro de Frogtown project in September to bring stakeholders into a strategic planning dialogue with one another. Through a “co-visioning” process, Más, as it’s called, sought “to redefine the existing paradigm of real estate developers versus community members” in a way that would “direct market forces to incorporate social and community goals into the development process.” Building on past participation in the 2013-2014 Northeast LA Riverfront District Vision Plan, Más held six interactive workshops intended to get beyond the kind of rote debate into which conflicts like these typically devolve.
Futuro de Frogtown encountered multiple and complex perspectives, including a group of community members opposed to change of any kind. This is nothing new: in Los Angeles County, neighborhoods have gained reputations for waging all-out wars to stop development, from Hollywood to Santa Monica. These narratives, whether in Southern California or in other regions nationally, often present community members as underdog heroes — struggling to preserve their way of life as 20-story condos rise up next to mom-and-pop grocers — or else selfish villains — NIMBYs standing in the way of collective progress because it blocks their canyon views. It’s not always so simple.
There are understandable, historical reasons why Frogtown residents might believe the only power available to them comes from impasse. For decades, the City of Los Angeles has had a less-than- exemplary relationship with communities like Elysian Valley. But the fight over Frogtown is more than an example of local power struggles taking place around the country. It also reveals the shortcomings a “no change” strategy can pose for residents seeking to protect their neighborhood. When calling for a standstill in the face of a shifting market, a community can miss the opportunity to offer alternatives that proactively meet its needs, ultimately leaving outside forces to determine the area’s outcome.
Given these dynamics, what would it take for traditionally disenfranchised populations to become real partners in guiding neighborhood change?
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Más held its third session last October at Framatic, in Frogtown. Folding chairs had been set up in the factory’s only clear area. Everywhere else, there were picture frames: piled high on shelves, leaning against each other, hanging off of racks, divided neatly into black frames and white frames, protected by cardboard and foam dividers. The owners, David and Edwina Dedlow, purchased the property in 1997 but had been in the neighborhood since the early 1980s
Helen Leung, Más’s director of social impact and a co-leader on the project (along with María Lamadrid, design researcher for Más) explained why Más chose to hold the meetings at sites in the community rather than, say, in an auditorium at a school: “In addition to working with developers and property owners — in the sense that we’re using their space as an example and a microcosm of a larger issue — we’re inviting them to join throughout the process.”
About 25 attendees milled around as Más staff taped up five posters, each depicting a hypothetical future for the factory and the Dedlows. Participants used stickers to mark which scenarios they would choose, first imagining they were community members and next thinking like real-estate developers.
Timme explained the usual dynamics the project was aiming to get past: “There’s these two polarities that are both so reinforcing and validating for their own arenas: ‘Let’s keep everything just the way it is’ versus ‘I have all these rights to this parcel to make money, and if I talk to you about what I want to do, you are going to make it untenable for me to develop.’” This “completely co-dependent dance,” as Timme calls it, doesn’t result in satisfied communities, functional neighborhoods, or successful business.
Mott Smith, a developer who formed Civic Enterprise Development LLC and served as a consultant on the project, took the floor to ground each alternative in “market reality.” This meant opening up the brain of a developer and putting it on display: revealing the costs and risks someone looking to build in the area would consider.
A collection of pink and yellow stickers across the bottom of an option featuring affordable housing showed it to be a popular choice. But when Smith got into the details of what building affordable housing would look like in Elysian Valley, opinions changed.
First, in the example provided, the floor area ratio, or FAR, for the building was nearly 2, rather than the 1.5 maximum currently allowed. The FAR metric indicates density: how much total floor space can be built (including additional stories) compared to the parcel of land’s size on the ground. Smith explained why it was legal for affordable housing to exceed the limit: because of incentives provided by government to developers that build housing where rents coming in would be below market rate. This meant that affordable housing would be a denser use of a given lot than most other types of development.
Residents exchanged looks. Rick Cortez, the founder of the local architecture firm RAC Design Build, was seated in the back of the room. RAC Design Build had recently released a “smart growth” initiative that had garnered media attention, suggesting that the current density allowed along the river in Frogtown was too high and should be decreased. The Elysian Valley Riverside Neighborhood Council, along with many residents, was calling for the zoning rules to be changed in a similar manner to the initiative outlined by RAC Design Build. Here, however, they were confronted with a dilemma: looking at this example, limiting density would be at odds with promoting affordability. (Smith argues, as do many experts, that density and affordability are inherently linked in this way.)
Smith revealed another fact about affordable housing that troubled residents. Those currently living in a neighborhood are usually not the ones who will inhabit new affordable developments constructed there — first, because it would require extraordinary luck for an affordable unit to be available exactly when a local family wanted or needed it, and second, because legally, all income-qualified families have an equal right to affordable units, regardless of where they are from (affordable housing is allocated by lottery). While new affordable housing is good at preserving “census diversity” in an area, Smith explained, it wouldn’t do much to help the families currently there who wish to stay.
What had attracted participants to the affordable housing option in the first place was the hope that community members could remain in Frogtown even as land values skyrocketed. With this new information, residents largely preferred to attempt to keep the neighborhood as is rather than advocating denser, affordable developments. The top, articulated priority was preserving the physical appearance of the neighborhood — seemingly, at any cost.
“With ‘no change,’ there’s a risk of vacant businesses,” Smith warned. That prospect didn’t seem to worry the crowd.
One participant told the story of a friend whose property had been walled in by the new three-story RiverHouse development, which had created an L-shape around the home and blocked its view of the river. Residents shook their heads in concern.
Adaptive re-use, then, seemed like the order of the day: keeping the facades of the neighborhood intact. This option most closely matched participants’ stated desire to retain the built environment as is — although, were it implemented, it likely wouldn’t resolve many of the fears underlying that preference. Even if Frogtown’s skyline remains the same, its indoors and inhabitants may still change dramatically.
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David De La Torre met me at the Jardin del Rio community garden on Riverdale Avenue in a suit and tie. He had walked over from Sunday morning church services. After he unlocked the artisan- crafted gates — a metal mural of orange suns with mustachioed faces at their centers, an egret holding a fish in its mouth, dragonflies — we sat down under a gazebo. Numbered birdhouses, each a different color, marked the 28 plots tended by community members. De La Torre noted, “We have the true melting pot of America here. If you look at the sign outside this garden, it’s in four or five different languages. I have African-American, Japanese, Korean, Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese gardeners.” De La Torre started and heads the Elysian Valley Neighborhood Watch, which began out of a desire to decrease crime in the neighborhood by first reporting that crime to police. He has been an Elysian Valley resident for 35 years, has served on the neighborhood council, and attended the local elementary school as a child. “My neighbors have placed trust in me over the years. They can bring just about any issue to me — from how to deal with a water bill problem, to issues of social justice, tree removal, sidewalk repair, you name it.”
De La Torre noticed early signs of the changes to come starting in 2007-2008, when plans surfaced to pave the walkway alongside the Los Angeles River — long used by elderly Frogtown residents for constitutionals — in order to create a bicycle path. De La Torre lobbied then-City council member Eric Garcetti to maintain the walkway’s historical use.
“It did anything but that,” he told me. The city’s response was characteristic of what De La Torre terms “one of the biggest tragedies” — his perception that projects are “brought in here without true community engagement or coordinated planning.” The notion in Frogtown that elected officials aren’t operating out of respect for local wishes has been reinforced by experiences like these.
De La Torre explained the concern permeating the area as whispers of “gentrification” spread: “Here’s the fear: it is not of the people that are coming in. Elysian Valley is the most embracing of neighborhoods. The dynamics of its demographic makeup are proof of that. Dissatisfaction comes from the failure to recognize the characteristics of the neighborhood.”
He described the community as “middle income and blue collar” with “a large elderly, conservative, church-going population.” The area is also 60 percent lower-income Latino. As intensive river revitalization has become increasingly likely, De La Torre has noticed the impacts:
All of a sudden, it seemed that things were becoming hip that weren’t hip for this neighborhood. Marijuana dispensaries opening up just wasn’t hip. A nudie bar entertainment center isn’t hip to the greater population of this community, or a party element hosting weekday and weekend events. People are going to bed early to get up early for work, yet the neighboring business is holding entertainment that is noisy and inconsiderate, adds traffic, takes up parking spaces, and is a blight because you wake up the next morning not well-slept and with bottles on your front lawn.
The big question for De La Torre is whether Elysian Valley residents will benefit from the investments pouring in. The area still lacks basic infrastructure. There are no streetlights on as many as 10 blocks, and no sidewalks on some (like Blake Avenue) — fixes that he feels are urgent. Residents have also pointed to sewage issues and frequent electrical outages that need resolution.
De La Torre can see a potential upside for himself and his neighbors if the outside interest in Elysian Valley is channeled productively. He’s focused on bolstering existing businesses or supporting new enterprises using the skill sets in Frogtown: A local licensed baker has come to me and said, “David, I want to set up a bakery opportunity here in Elysian Valley that not only makes my goods accessible to all, but also affords me the opportunity to employ within.” If that baker, who resides here and whose children attend our local schools, is not made a part of this winning formula, then this grand development will have failed.
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Before LA-Más embarked on Futuro de Frogtown, they set up office space in Elysian Valley, on North Coolidge Avenue at the Los Angeles River — because they wanted to be clear that they aren’t here for the short term or for superficial answers as part of due diligence.
“We were really passionate about offering an alternative model to community engagement that was not a mea culpa or ‘I’m doing this because it’s a box I’m checking off to be able to build a project,’” said LA-Más co-founder Elizabeth Timme.
A couple that lives in the area funded Futuro de Frogtown: Julia Meltzer of the non-profit arts organization Clockshop, and David Thorne of Elysian, a restaurant. Its name is a nod to one of their previous projects.
Adding to the local ties, project co-leader Helen Leung grew up in Elysian Valley herself. In high school, she helped with the formation of the neighborhood council. Given this history, along with her training in public policy and urban planning, Leung has opinions about the changes coming to Frogtown. So does Timme — she’s an architect. But in the spirit of the project, they kept these opinions to themselves.
Futuro de Frogtown’s six sessions yielded a document that went through community review. It summarizes the views articulated by stakeholders and identifies policy changes in line with those views. LA-Más’s ultimate hope is that its outreach efforts and distillation of community preferences can help inform zoning changes currently under consideration by the City of Los Angeles.
In the time since Más began its engagement process, the city’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee approved a motion first introduced in February of 2014 by Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, who represents Elysian Valley. It instructs staff to update the “Q,” or Qualifying, Conditions governing parts of Frogtown. Q Conditions place additional requirements or restrictions on properties beyond the specifications of that area’s zoning type and are outlined within community plans. The motion calls for changes in line with “preserving and enhancing the neighborhood character” and “seeking a higher degree of compatibility of architecture and landscaping for new infill development,” as well as allowing/incentivizing live/work units, adaptive reuse, and affordable housing. The Elysian Valley Riverside Neighborhood Council had begun requesting such adjustments in 2013. The Department of City Planning has released a draft ordinance, and is scheduled to hold a June 9 public hearing on the matter. The proposed changes will pass through the Planning Commission and then on to the City Council, a process that could have new zoning regulations in place by the end of the summer.
(Los Angeles’s re:code initiative, conducted by the Department of City Planning and a zoning advisory committee, will rewrite zoning language across LA over the next four years to simplify it and eliminate complex requirements like Q Conditions. That means any adjustments made as a result of the motion would provide only a temporary “fix” for Frogtown.)
RAC Design Build’s call to decrease the building density allowed in certain parts of Frogtown (which is specified in the Q Conditions) is likely what propelled the motion forward. The architecture firm’s founder Rick Cortez garnered local media attention in October when he pointed out that Councilmember O’Farrell’s office had promised a solution faster than it was being delivered. This is an unusual circumstance. Architecture firms don’t often advocate more stringent limitations on what can be built.
Sitting in his studio’s kitchen last fall, across the street from Más’s space on North Coolidge Avenue, Cortez shared the worries that prompted RAC Design Build’s slow-growth initiative: Of the 30 or so riverfront properties in Frogtown, 15 had been bought up in the last 2.5 years, he explained. In the Commercial Manufacturing zone adjacent to the river, buildings can be about four stories high. As developers come in, the fabric of the built environment is likely to get denser and taller since current policy allows for that increased density, even though property owners historically have not taken advantage of it.
Cortez thinks that the land along the LA River should be developed solely for commercial use. Building residential towers there doesn’t make sense, he explained, because the river is really “a creek” for most of the year. Adding density along the edge of such a small body of water would be like “three photographers in the desert around a single poppy.”
Beyond the stylistic inappropriateness is a bigger question for Cortez: who feels ownership over the space? He fears that residential development there would give homeowners the sense that they had claim to the river as their backyard.
According to LA-Más’s draft project report, “developers are predicting that the market will support high-end residential use in the community.” That means intervention would be necessary to promote commercial over residential use — intervention in the form of policy.
As a player in LA’s built-environment scene, RAC Design Build can speak the language of city planning in a way that local residents can’t. To illustrate the future RAC Design Build wants to avoid, the firm created renderings using the currently allowed building density exercised to its maximum that showed a wall of four-story development along the riverfront, blocking access. Others in the field have called these renderings “misleading,” demonstrating a worst-case scenario with incorrect setbacks. This professional concern hasn’t stopped many in the community — including the area’s neighborhood council — from supporting the same decrease in allowed density that RAC Design Build proposes.
RAC Design Build seems concerned primarily with aesthetics. Cortez seeks “to make beautiful things,” he has said. If appearance is the driving concern, as it seems to be for Cortez, then changing the Q Conditions could make sense. But when non-architect residents want things to stay the same, they often mean a whole lot more than building setbacks. Since affordability is arguably at odds with keeping the built environment as it is today, community members must consider whether decreased FAR will lead to a neighborhood they can continue to inhabit.
Occidental College’s Mark Vallianatos believes that cutting the neighborhood’s allowed density in half would be a “big mistake,” because doing so would limit the amount of new housing built there. Los Angeles downzoned in the 1970s and 1980s, he explained, which helped make it one of the least affordable cities in the nation. Vallianatos points to a recent report by the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, which found that limits on housing capacity are the main cause of out-of control home costs in coastal California. He noted: “It may seem counter-intuitive, but the best chance for existing residents to retain a stake in their community is to make housing more abundant, both in Frogtown and throughout the rest of LA Unless we increase housing supply, rents will continue to rise, wealthier outsiders will outbid locals, and the children of current residents will be priced out of Frogtown.”
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The Q Conditions in question date back to the Silver Lake-Echo Park-Elysian Valley Community Plan update in 2004. Patricia Diefenderfer was the planner tasked with the area at that time. After studying Frogtown extensively, she explained, one of the plan’s main objectives was to create a neighborhood center at the site of what used to be a Bimbo Bakery and its environs. She noted that Elysian Valley lacked services and amenities — there had been only “one or two bodegas or corner stores, no retail or grocery stores,” among other problems. The Department of City Planning selected the Bimbo site to become a node for commercial use and public facilities to meet the needs of the community.
Back then, Diefenderfer recalls, residents did have concerns about density. She explained why the 1.5 floor area ratio — the current level — was eventually selected: “The community wanted to see investment, because investment would give them services and facilities. That wouldn’t happen if no one wanted to build anything. While scale is an important issue, if you limit what can be developed too much, nothing can happen. It wasn’t reasonable to constrain it beyond [1.5 FAR].”
Today, the Bimbo site is being developed as a small-lot subdivision project. The community still lacks a neighborhood gathering point. The desired commercial spaces and public facilities articulated in 2004 haven’t materialized. The neighborhood council’s list of desired additions to Elysian Valley include many of the same items Diefenderfer remembers: “library, community center, laundromat, grocery store, senior center, farmers’ market.”
An argument can be made that reducing the density permitted to developers would make those investments even more unlikely. Granted, the real estate market in the area has changed since 2004, and interest in developing there is now significantly higher. But if developers can’t build profitably due to stringent restrictions, interest could wane.
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By the final Más meeting, held at the Elysian Valley United Community Services Center in December, the conversation had become tense.
The building, a large shed-like space with a metal roof, used to be a sweatshop. It now houses a high school extension. An assortment of tables and their attendant supplies — stacks of geography and algebra textbooks, tubs of crayons, paint bottles, rulers — had been pushed back to set up the chairs and Más’s display. A TV, circa 1995, stood on a rolling stand under crests hanging on banners from the ceiling, and student art was pinned to the wall — yellow construction-paper turkeys made by tracing a hand. Weight-lifting equipment took up the front of the space on a stretch of carpet next to a mirror. Attendees ate lo mein and fried rice, courtesy of a long-time Chinese community member, as they talked among themselves.
The crowd was larger than the other meeting I’d attended — about 40 this time. Craig Weber, a senior city planner for Los Angeles, was attending in an unofficial capacity to observe, but obliged Leung’s request to offer an overview of the government process to update Elysian Valley’s Q Conditions.
When Weber was finished, a young resident standing in the corner raised his hand to ask: “How can we trust these meetings when they’re funded by developers?” From a book he was holding, he quoted some dense phrases about rights.
“I don’t know what you’re reading from,” Weber said.
The young man looked triumphant: “The State Constitution of California.”
The State Constitution doesn’t govern development, Weber tried to explain — the city’s General Plan and zoning laws do.
It was clear that the resident who had been reading was angry — but it was also clear that Weber wasn’t the cause. They were having two different conversations: the first, about a traditionally blue-collar immigrant community surrounded by “gentrified” or “gentrifying” neighborhoods, and the frustration residents experience when they see a future for their home that doesn’t include them; the second, about a technical city process for updating rules governing the built environment so that they better reflect residents’ desires. In theory, both Weber and the Constitution-reader were on the same team, but many of the participants didn’t see it that way.
It’s possible that emotions in the room were heightened because this was the final Futuro de Frogtown meeting, and some residents thought it would be their last chance to weigh in on the situation (it isn’t — as the city continues to consider revising Q Conditions, it will hold an official open house and public hearing) while others were ill-informed about eminent domain threats.
As Smith walked residents through scenarios in which different Q Conditions could promote specific types of development, many of those present resisted discussing the alternatives outlined. They instead expressed, again, that they wanted no change to how buildings look, the price of housing, the density of development, or the ease of parking. Even if improvements to infrastructure or the addition of services could come with development, these residents would prefer a standstill.
One group that has been vocal in the neighborhood does want to prioritize affordability — enough that they are willing to accept increased density (but not height) to accommodate it. When a participant spoke out on behalf of this approach, the room did stop and listen. But those who came in committed to preservation didn’t seem to budge. There’s a logic here: communities across the LA region that have taken a hardline stance against development have sometimes succeeded at slowing down particular projects, or making it untenable to increase density in a particular area through litigation.
But the problem with “no change,” and the crux of what bothered the Constitution reader, is that it isn’t actually a long-term option. A property owner could make no changes to her land, or the city could make no changes to the rules governing the area. But making no changes is not the same as stopping the area from changing. External conditions — river revitalization, rising property values, the real estate market as a whole, and the desire of millennials to live in city centers, among other factors — mean that Elysian Valley will probably change no matter how residents respond. Understandably, this reality can be difficult to accept.
In Smith’s words, the community does have the power to make certain paths of development easier or harder, like digging a ditch so that water is more likely to run down a particular path, by working in concert with city planners. Deciding which ditches to dig first requires imagining a future that’s different from today, but somehow positive or beneficial.
When zoning does not match the market, which can occur when residents want to stop realities on the ground from persisting, every development becomes an exception. It’s not that big projects don’t get built, Smith noted — it’s that they must go through long and expensive processes, but get built all the same.
“What about a community land bank?” asked Tracy Stone, a local architect who had hosted an earlier Futuro de Frogtown meeting at her live-work studio. There are tools outside the realm of zoning, Smith confirmed, that communities can use if they mobilize. Stone’s suggestion didn’t get much attention that night, but it was a fresh example of trying to envision what the community does want, rather than reiterating what it doesn’t want, and coming up with options to get there.
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Futuro de Frogtown reached 1.65 percent of Elysian Valley residents. The effort achieved participation “slightly higher than other similar initiatives in the neighborhood,” according to Más’s draft report. The long list of strategies used to connect with residents, according to the project’s final report, include: “bilingual communications,” “paid advertisements,” “community partnerships,” “project website,” “door-to-door canvassing,” “bi-weekly open houses,” and “workshop markers.” De La Torre confirms that the makeup of participants was noteworthy: “LA- Más is the single group that has most genuinely made an effort to be inclusive in their outreach.” Still, the views of such a small cross-section of the community can’t be taken as representative.
For those who did attend, Más managed to bring developers and residents together so that they could engage not through contracts and ordinances, but face-to-face in the same room. Meetings were structured in a way that made tangible conversation most likely — providing multiple scenarios, seating participants in the spaces they would be discussing, bringing in Smith to moderate. Residents were exposed to ways of thinking about their neighborhood that, while foreign and even unsettling, educated them to the realities they face. Around less contentious subject matter — like formalizing the informal businesses in the area — the community did find consensus. Más recognized the diversity of opinions they were dealing with — a range of views more complex and broad than any one process (or piece of journalism, for that matter) could encapsulate.
What Más didn’t expect to grapple with, however, was the distrust leveled at the organization, despite its best intentions. At the closing celebration for Futuro de Frogtown, project co-leader Leung acknowledged this:
If we proactively and consistently told our story, perhaps so many individuals would not have misconstrued our interests and our intent. Our favorite examples include conspiracy theories that we were supporting eminent domain, encouraging high-density projects, or working for evil developers.
That context of fear informed the recommendations the project yielded. In the end, Más did advise the Los Angeles Department of City Planning to abide by residents’ articulated wishes: to consider decreasing the allowable density of buildings by half or further limiting their height, as well as directing buildings in the area to be used for commercial rather than residential purposes (along with a number of other findings).
Más must have found itself in a bind. The organization was obligated, based on the goals of the Futuro de Frogtown project it laid out up front, to pass along resident preferences to the city. But Más subtly acknowledges in its report that the community’s baseline wish at the heart of it all — to stay in Frogtown — might be adversely affected by limiting housing supply, implicit in the very recommendations it has offered: “If the above changes are enacted, the likelihood of new affordable housing in the community is significantly reduced and the community-wide impacts of the issue remain unaddressed.”
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Academic literature treats gentrification and displacement as two separate phenomena. According to Occidental College’s Mark Vallianatos, current research suggests that gentrification does cause some displacement but is offset by most residents liking the changes and trying to stay. “Low-education, minority, low-income, long-term resident and renter households do not exit gentrifying neighborhoods at greater rates than they move from non-gentrifying neighborhoods,” he stated. The existing residents who remain, Vallianatos said, “show larger income gains than residents of non-gentrifying neighborhoods” and “show larger increases in satisfaction with their neighborhoods than renters in non-gentrifying neighborhoods.” According to the research, he said, gentrification will eventually transform a neighborhood’s demographics less by forcing residents out than by the barriers to entry that gentrification creates for low-income individuals who want to move into the area. All told, gentrification — rather than spelling the certain death of a long-standing community — might have a more complex impact than popular culture would have us think.
Still, Silver Lake and Echo Park are Elysian Valley’s neighbors. The ongoing narrative in Los Angeles and other major cities is of hipsters displacing long-time residents in urban centers. Plus, Frogtown is located close to Chavez Ravine — the site of Dodgers’ stadium and also the most infamous and dramatic example of eminent domain in Los Angeles. The displacement of Mexican-American families that occurred there in the early 1950s, in order to build public housing that never came to fruition, took place during the lifetimes of Elysian Valley’s older residents. It’s understandable that a fear of being pushed out runs deep.
But, no matter how understandable it may be, basing decisions on fear alone could prevent Frogtown inhabitants from engaging solutions that proactively steer development and investment.
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Since Más began Futuro de Frogtown, discussion of the Los Angeles River’s future has evolved — through a conversation mostly between land-use professionals, government, and academics, later picked up by the media (including some news coverage of Más’ process, spurred by its final report release).
Among the buzz is a new tool from Sacramento that is now under serious consideration for the area surrounding the LA River. Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts, as they’re called, would allow improvements along the waterway to pay for themselves up front, using bonds —based on the notion that such improvements will increase property values, and therefore ultimately increase property taxes collected by local government.
Last month, the Los Angeles Business Council reported that an EIFD focused on just the Northeast LA Riverfront — about five square miles, including Elysian Valley — could yield up to $217 million over its 45-year life (which means up to $31 million could become available in the near-term for spending, if bonds are issued). Those dollars would go toward infrastructure and redevelopment opportunities in that same area.
Such resources would provide Elysian Valley and its adjacent neighborhoods with a tremendous opportunity — for instance, a chance to realize the sewer upgrades and streetlight installations they’ve long clamored for. But an EIFD’s central mechanism relies on facilitating the rise of property values — accelerating the shifts in Frogtown that certain residents are determined to halt.
If an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District does come to pass along the river, it may be the first of its kind in the state. That means the City of Los Angeles and its partner entities could help define — through practical experience — how EIFDs are viewed and used across California. And if successful, productive community engagement came to pass in waterfront neighborhoods as part of an EIFD, it could set a significant precedent.
With enthusiasm for river revitalization brimming across the city this year, many Angelenos have heard promises of the public good to come as we renew our aqueous artery. As elected officials champion this transformation and the catalytic potential of an EIFD, it is that same leadership’s responsibility to act on behalf of citizens in close quarters with the river who stand to benefit or suffer.
Futuro de Frogtown revealed that even sensitivity, thorough research, and a deep knowledge of the issues might not be enough in the face of a community’s historical relationship with government and development. If the municipality does want residents’ trust over the course of river revitalization, what can it do to prove worthy of it? How can those in power and those who feel powerless both create the conditions where collaboration is possible?
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Molly Strauss is editor of The Planning Report and a writer in Los Angeles. How John DeLorean Took Us Back to the Future
Rex Weiner
The tall good-looking guy had it all — wealth, fame, style, success, a fashion-model wife. I was just a reporter covering his trial. Each morning, trekking downtown to the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse, I joined my colleagues of the press, confronting the awesome enigma of John DeLorean, the “maverick automaker,” in the full-blown wreck of his rags-to-riches high-rolling career, accused of trafficking 100 kilos of cocaine, a charge of which he was ultimately acquitted.
Three decades later, as the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future is marked with frequent allusions to the iconic DeLorean automobile that served as the movie’s time machine, I look back on the four-and-a-half months I spent covering John DeLorean’s trial with an uneasy feeling. By the time the story I wrote on assignment landed on my editor’s desk, the trial was over, the media had moved on, and my article never appeared. DeLorean is dead now, never recovering his loss of fame and fortune. I’m still a journalist, trying to figure things out.At least I got paid.
But still, what was the truth about all that fuss in the spring and summer of 1984? An American tragedy played out in the headlines, a 59-year-old man reaching for a dream — did he just pay the inevitable dues for challenging the existing order? Sealed in a courtroom verdict, truth often unravels in hindsight.
Tattered, coffee-stained courtroom notes — my own equivalent of the flux capacitor (the power source for the movie’s time machine) — transport me back to the morning of the trial’s opening day, April 18, 1984 … a mild 61 degrees at 9 a.m. in downtown Los Angeles. Ronald Reagan is president, a gallon of gas is $1.10, Kenny Loggins is singing “Footloose” on the radio, and a ticket to the movies is $2.50.
The man with the steel-gray hair and cosmetically shaped chin sitting beside his attorneys at the defense table is John Zachary DeLorean, former vice president of General Motors. Detroit-born son of Austro-Hungarian immigrants whose alcoholic father worked in the Ford auto factory and mother did the best she could. English sparsely spoken at home. “You don’t know what poor is until you know how poor we were,” he told biographers Ivan Fallon and James Srodes in Dreammaker: The Rise and Fall of John Z. Delorean. He grew up on the Detroit streets, studied engineering, a wunderkind going on to become General Motors’s youngest division manager, the man behind the Pontiac GTO, Firebird — muscle cars tearing up the nation’s new fabric of highways, American power roaring at its apogee.
It was partly DeLorean’s Hollywood hippie lifestyle — shaggy hair and dates with Raquel Welch and Ursula Andress — that earned him his “maverick” moniker. He was, according to one auto industry observer, “perhaps the ultimate fantasy figure for every underpaid automotive hack or working-class car nut in America.”
Where he clashed with the auto industry’s conservative corporate establishment was in his sleek, singular vision, infused with overtones of the 1960s social revolution, of sporty wheels for the masses — an “ethical” sports car, DeLorean called it: compact, efficient, safe, and affordable. It was a challenge to Detroit, which had lost leadership on all these points.
DeLorean said he was “firing” General Motors when he quit as GM’s head of North American operations in 1973, although GM insiders say he was on the verge of being fired. Striking out on his own, DeLorean reached for immortality, like Henry Ford, putting his name on a car of his own design.
First unveiled at an auto show in New Orleans in 1977, the exterior of his visionary coupé was executed by Giorgetto Giugiaro. The Italian designer was capable of producing a people’s car, such as the Volkswagen Golf, but was better known for shaping Maseratis and Lamborghinis. The stainless steel, gull-winged DMC-12 prototype was a horny spin on “ethical,” more like a Playboy centerfold for car freaks, targeting the testosterone-fueled Chevy Corvette crowd seeking street-racing perfection.
The vehicle that first rolled off the production line in 1981, however, was flawed. The brushed- steel body scratched easily, showing every oily hand and fingerprint. The rear-mounted Renault V6 engine departed from the original drive-train design by GTO engineer Billy Collins, seriously compromising the sports car’s performance. “It’s not a barn burner,” reported Road & Track. And the DMC-12 cost $10,000 more than a Corvette. The US economy was slumping, and DMC sales struggled — only 9,000 cars were made before production ended in early 1983. Now, a year later, with DMC bankrupt, the factory in Northern Ireland in receivership, and thousands laid off, DeLorean is facing more than 60 years in prison. Still, the 59-year-old defendant is a rich man, an owner of the San Diego Chargers and the New York Yankees, with friends like Sammy Davis Jr. and Johnny Carson. Ford president Lee Iacocca served as best man at his second wedding. His wife, Cristina Ferrare, the former Max Factor girl, sitting beside him each day with their young son, is a fixture in the fashion pages; his high-priced attorneys, Howard Weitzman and Donald Re, hold daily press conferences on the courthouse steps. Even as US Attorney James Walsh reads the charges against DeLorean — conspiracy, possession, distribution of cocaine, interstate travel for felonious purposes, nine counts in all — the subject in the pressroom is the designer of Ferrare’s dress.
Walsh outlines the chronology of events beginning with a June 2, 1982, phone conversation between DeLorean and a former neighbor-turned-government-informer, James Timothy Hoffman, proceeding to a series of secretly recorded phone calls between DeLorean and undercover DEA and FBI agents, and leading to surveillance video tapes that ultimately “caught John DeLorean,” Walsh says, “in the act of being himself.”
DeLorean sits quietly listening to the case being made against him. From tidbits gleaned from his legal team, we learn that on the way back from court they stop at Mo Better Burgers on the corner of Fairfax and Olympic for lunch. The man with the bankrupt car company and astronomical legal costs is on a junk food budget — and his wife says he has found Jesus and they’ve both become born again. Beyond those meager facts, he remains a mystery. And strangely, from the moment the trial begins, DeLorean seems to quietly shrink and, over the course of the trial, almost disappear.
We quickly overdosed on the plethora of transcripts and constant drone of replayed tape recordings with DeLorean’s deep, Midwestern voice talking about the imminent seizure by the British government of his failing car company. Listening to him discussing money laundering in vague language pertaining to a vague deal in which he was to put up two million dollars and some get 20 times that in return — given the massive numbers, it should be exciting, but it is like listening to paint dry.
In one recording echoing in the courtroom DeLorean tells a man named James Benedict, supposedly a crooked banker working out of Eureka Savings & Loan in San Carlos, California, that he can’t hold up his end of the deal. The two million needed to buy the cocaine belongs to the Irish Republican Army and they’ve handed the money over to the British government to help save DeLorean’s Belfast factory.
“So what do you want me to do,” says Benedict on the tape, “kill this deal?”
“I don’t see any alternative,” DeLorean replies, “unless you’ve got some other idea … all I can do is try to develop an alternative, and if I can, I’ll leave word at your office.”
The press corps is nodding off as another recorded phone conversation plays — DeLorean agreeing to put up stock and an inventory of DeLorean cars as collateral to keep the deal alive. A promissory note listing 40 vehicle ID numbers and a stock certificate for 1,000 shares of DeLorean Motor Company, FedExed to Benedict on September 29, 1982, are entered as evidence. Assistant US Attorney Robert Perry continues his direct examination of Benedict, who is actually FBI Agent Benedict Tisa.
Perry’s annoyingly nasal voice chases me and my colleagues back to the pressroom where we lounge over cigarettes and coffee, half-listening to Perry leading the FBI’s undercover agent forward on the audio feed.
Suddenly the date October 19 is mentioned and the TV monitors switched on. The press corps streams back into the courtroom. The audience is transfixed — judge, jury, clerks, reporters, lawyers, the accused and his family and the crowd in the public seats — by the infamous “Bust Tape,” excerpts from which world has seen over and over on the evening news.
Even as a rerun, the drama is still fascinating in its almost scripted quality as it plays out in its entirety …
Scene: Night — Sheraton La Reina Hotel near LAX, room 501
John DeLorean, “James Benedict,” and informant James Hoffman, a man called Vicenza, all seated on a white couch. Vicenza places a suitcase on the coffee table. He cracks it open to reveal white bags of cocaine. Hoffman hands DeLorean a kilo. DeLorean hefts the bag.
DeLorean (laughs)
It’s better than gold. Gold weighs more than that, for God’s sake.
Benedict offers a champagne toast, pouring glasses of Moët all around.
The Hitchcockian thrill in the courtroom is undeniable: knowing what the on-screen character does not know — he’s trapped! Sure enough …
Door bursts open, a man in a suit steps into the room.
Man In Suit
I’m Jerry West with the FBI. You’re under arrest.
Perry says, “No further questions, your honor.” No further questions seem possible. DeLorean is cooked.
Howard Weitzman steps up to the podium and, after a pause, shuffling some papers, looks up and says to the FBI agent on the stand, “You caught the big one, didn’tcha?” “Objection!” cries Perry.
Weitzman shoves forward, firing a quick round of questions, gaining high ground with four points: no money had ever changed hands in the alleged dope deal; the stock and collateral DeLorean signed over were not only worthless, but the government knew they were worthless; the FBI’s key informant Hoffman is an admitted perjurer; and the government’s key witness, FBI Agent Tisa, is being doggedly evasive.
“Will you please look at me and answer ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ sir!” says Weitzman again and again, making the word “sir” the equivalent of “shithead.”
Ferrare whispers audibly, “Give it to him, Howard. Give it to him,” while the jury sits straight up in their seats and reporters grin at the attorney’s taut performance. In minutes, the situation in the courtroom has flip-flopped: DeLorean is no longer the defendant. Now the government is on trial.
Three days later, toward noon on a Friday after a long week, FBI Agent Tisa is still on the stand and pissed off. He’s already made headlines by admitting he’d destroyed his original log of the investigation, earning an acid rebuke from Walsh, overheard with glee in the pressroom. Now Weitzman is pressing him on a conversation that he, posing as James Benedict, had with DeLorean concerning phony stock options, tax benefits, employment records, all to conceal the money-laundering scheme pivotal to the proposed dope deal.
“You came up with this all by yourself,” says Weitzman.
“What do you mean all by my myself?” Tisa says.
“Did John DeLorean ever suggest these things himself?”
“No.”
“You initiated the conversation about dope, not John DeLorean, didn’t you, sir?”
“I —”
“Didn’t you!”
“Yes.”
“You’re doggone right,” snaps Weitzman.
The judge calls a recess. Weitzman actually receives applause from the public seats.
“Later that afternoon,” Weitzman grills Tisa further. “Did you really believe,” says Weitzman, winking over at the press section, “that the IRA and the British government were partners on behalf of John DeLorean?”
Everyone laughs. FBI agents have already testified that they found no connection between DeLorean and the IRA, and it’s clear that the desperate carmaker had pathetically — preposterously! — invoked the militant group’s name as a bluff.
When Weitzman is finished, he has established that the US government introduced DeLorean to the notion of saving his car company through a dope deal, and that the man, essentially broke and feeling too threatened to back out, was unable to follow through with the deal — yet, they’d pursued him anyway.
Strangely, we could see US Attorney Walsh and his team begin emulating the wealth and style of the man they were pursuing. Walsh started wearing sharper suits, his gray hair styled in a hipper length, like DeLorean’s. As DeLorean’s family appeared each day, so did Walsh’s wife and children take seats on the opposite side of the courtroom. From the testimony it was clear that from the beginning of their investigation to the climactic day they stood concealed in the next room of the Sheraton La Reina Hotel, ordering lavish room service meals and telling each other, “This will get us the cover of Time!” they were seduced by the free-wheeling DeLorean. These federal employees, stuck on a treadmill of salary grades and a life in service to a pallid bureaucracy were staying in the same hotels, jet-setting around the country on expense accounts in hot pursuit, hatching massive, risky deals — to an eerie point where one had to ask: hadn’t they switched identities?
In the end, as the jury concluded, the dope dealer in question was not DeLorean. How could he be, if the money to make the dope deal was Uncle Sam’s, along with the dope?
One could say that DeLorean shared with his prosecutors and their Washington bosses a tragic trajectory of hubris. The trial marked one of the earliest tests of government guidelines issued by the attorney general in 1981 for undercover operations following the ABSCAM scandals of the late 1970s. DeLorean’s victory was the first acquittal of a defendant on the grounds of entrapment after hearings on the issue by the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, which had issued a report four months earlier in an attempt to curtail undercover police abuses. Today, government misconduct is a daily headline, from police shootings to massive invasions of privacy under the cover of the Patriot Act. With antiterrorist agencies seeking out potential jihadists by tracking pro-ISIS sympathizers on Facebook and luring them into bomb plots, the same questions of overreaching and entrapment are more urgent than ever.
On a personal level, DeLorean’s acquittal turned out to be hollow victory. Following the trial, DeLorean lost everything, including his wife. Within a year, Cristina Ferrare, daughter of an Italian butcher in Cleveland, married ABC-TV executive Tony Thomopoulos, Bronx-born son of Greek immigrants. They did all right — Ferrare as itinerant TV host, Thomopoulos as one of the industry’s ubiquitous execs, bouncing from job to job until the Hollywood trades no longer took notice. DeLorean’s tragedy was not his alone. The automobile industry in which he’d risen to such heights, and which powered the postwar US economy for so many years, lost world dominance to its own incompetence and overseas competition. His hometown, the city of Detroit, was a burnt-out shell. Deserted by the white beneficiaries of the auto industry’s economic blessings, the municipality’s tax base went to the suburbs with them, and Detroit’s first- and second-generation black migrants, who’d fled persecution elsewhere for their own piece of the American Dream, faced a broken Motor City and 25 percent unemployment. For these outcomes, there is enough blame to go around, but DeLorean did his small part by locating the factory to build his dream car in another country.
What saved the maverick automaker from utter destitution and ignominy was pure Hollywood. The licensing deal for DeLorean DMC-12 used in Back to the Future helped keep the car’s namesake afloat.
“John DeLorean wrote us a fan letter after the movie came out” the movie’s co-screenwriter Bob Gale recalls. “‘Thank you for keeping my dream alive.’”
Before his death in 2005, DeLorean was forced to sell his rolling 434-acre New Jersey estate, which today entertains wealthy duffers as the Trump (yes, that Trump) National Golf Club, “a bastion of sophistication and luxury,” according to Links Magazine.
The heroic strivings of DeLorean’s generation, sons and daughters of European immigrant waves washing ashore in the first half of the American Century, have somehow come to this: a greatly diminished Detroit and a fancy golf course owned by a man who wants to run the United States like a private golf club.
If we can learn anything by going into the past — or from movies about going into the past — a clue may be found in Doc Brown’s answer when Marty McFly asks why he chose the DeLorean — a flop automobile, a failed business venture — as his time-traveling vehicle: “The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?”
It was 100 percent all-American style, built on ephemeral good looks, swaggering engines, a headlong rush to escape honest origins at the expense of fundamental ethics, burning fossil fuels down the road, the accused and his accuser in pursuit of a dream — back to a future where truth, we always hope, will one day be faced.
¤
Rex Weiner’s articles have been published in Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Observer, LA Weekly, The Paris Review, and Rolling Stone Italia.