Boostering the Angeleno Playground

WHAT immediately struck me about David Fine's piece, "Starting Points" was his ability to balance a confidence in Los Angeles with a confession that it is a completely manufactured, man-made city. He describes the booster days as being an age of “aggressive promotion” by tycoons, a word that in and of itself evokes images of dollar signs in people’s heads. From this introduction of Los Angeles one does not start off on a romantic or even sentimental foot like the boosters were trying to push into migrant minds. Fine writes that the architecture of the city is often confused with a movie set and as a 21^st century migrant to Los Angeles, I too fell for the cinematic atmosphere of the city. I would often find myself thinking “that looks like where they shot the movie so and so” as I glued my face to the car window. In “Starting Points” Fine points out the fact that many of the city’s famous spots are engineered so as to mimic history instead of having that organic historical feeling like buildings on the east coast are fortunate enough to possess. Interestingly enough, I feel that Los Angeles could have claimed the Spanish and Mexican history if it were not for the boosters and white migrants wishes to eradicate the past from the newly acquired land looking to the future only later to be flooded with nostalgia for “romantic mission style buildings” which they themselves had torn down(Fine 18-19).

The discussion of architecture throughout the reading led me to revisit the memories of one of my first trips to Los Angeles at a friend’s home in Glendale. I got my first taste of what Fine might describe as “streamline moderne” and instead of being impressed with the sharp railings that lined the backyard overlooking the city I felt like I was looking into a museum exhibit restricted from touching anything beyond the borderline. I was relieved when my subsequent visits to the city led me to different places like Pasadena and the Westchester neighborhood where I found that the caged in feeling I experienced was not some Angelino fetish.

I love how Fine connects the cultural instability with the literal instability of the ground on which the city sits on. Interestingly enough, people spend millions of dollars to live on slanted hills that, when driving up, are splattered with warning signs reminding the driver to beware of slides or falling rocks. People often connect the greed of those who inhabit the hilltop mansions with the consequences they face when natural disasters hit. Writers too, thrive off of this material using the fires in Malibu or erosion in the Pacific Palisades as metaphors for the collapse of the Los Angeles hierarchy; I too do the same, however I admit mine stems from jealousy rather than artistic creation.

After dissecting the Fine article, I have come to a better conclusion that the boosters are a part of Los Angeles that might have steered it to its superficial reputation today but more importantly were a part of the city’s history that one cannot overlook because of the unique and persistent attitude that which has made Los Angeles the second largest city in the United States today. Tycoons though they were, they were smart enough to look past just seeing the land as an ideal place to shoot a good movie but instead combine the film industry with gold and aviation industries. Writers too, as pointed out by Fine himself, were all outsiders also, an important fact to absorb which might speak to the extreme opinions of the city we see when referring back to those writers as students today. Ultimately, Fine masters the combination of critiquing with maintaining the city’s dignity as a center of constant growth and power. The quote from Harry Chandler which concludes the article also serves to hold out hope for a city that some deem too sinful to their time in as opposed to others who spend their whole lives indulging in the rich diversity of the 500 square miles it stretches across. Whichever stance readers take, can agree it is a place “no worse than other cities.”

--Katie Mollica

caption: example of mission revival architecture
credit: via sixmarinis and the seventh art