Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
It’s amazing, but the legal rakes are still dragging the depths of the muck — ordinary bribery and slush — and dredging up more wallowers in the City’s construction permitting process.
So what? Municipal bribery, blah blah The reason it’s in View at all, is that my brother Chris used to live at that address, when it was a fantastic, unique, funky (affordable) old light-industrial mixed-use loft. It is important to remember that even when the building was torn down for spec luxury condos six or more years ago, the avalanche of homelessness, the displacement and diaspora to the East Bay of maybe 100,000 dyed-in-indigo San Franciscans, the loss of civic identity, dying local businesses, and collapse of affordable livability, were already in full swing and much discussed. Yet this project and thousands like it, were then and are still being, built. And sitting empty. Where once lived thousands of folks.
It’s not “the market” that’s hollowing out America’s cities, not when greedy developers are flinging their phony money around to undermine or skirt regulations and approvals. The market MEANS, that there are rules and regulations and truth and clarity in the transaction, so that when something is valued, it is actually valuable. There is nothing healthy or natural about turning cities into grids of dead empty boxes on spec.
From 1883 to 1998, Capitol Milling ground away. In 1939, Chinatown was moved up to the bluffs around the mill.
THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./ THE DOWNTOWN BEAT
RIDE A PAINTED PONY, LET THE SPINNING WHEEL SPIN
El Pueblo. The strip of light green bluffs northeast of town is today’s Chinatown and Elysian Park and Dodgers’ Stadium (the white road curving up the high hill is Chavez Ravine). LA was founded there, when those bluffs cradled a slow bend of the LA River. A high-water event soon afterwards cut away the bluffs and ate a piece of the Plaza; they abandoned the bluffs and moved to this present site, closer to the ford at Yangna, in the late 18th century.
The pobladores, I’ve read, awoke at dawn’s first light singing the Alabado: the first riser, singing out to the sky, would wake the others who joined in. The whole pueblo was up and singing by the end, praising God for the day just beginning. Then, a shot of aguardiente for the short walk from their casa to their allotments across the river. These were happy farmers; and at least one of their fields was put into wheat or barley. Patient Reader, close your eyes and hear the Alabado, courtesy of the monks of St. Anthony’s Seminary.
In 1825 an earthquake shifted the course of the LA River south, away from the cradle of the bluffs. It was a gift from San Gabriel of the Temblors to the Queen of Angels. LA was safer from flooding and had all this fat wet arable bottomland with southern exposure a sombrero’s toss away from the farmers’ corredores. With the river gone south, the Zanja Madre was re-engineered. The exposed wetlands were ditched and dredged and channeled, and by the 1830s the citizen-farmers filled this bottomland with vineyards, fruit orchards, the staple grains, and corn and bean and squash fields. The zanja had a big wheel upstream, relentlessly hauling the water up to the high point of the bluff. From there, it flowed downhill along the line of bluffs to the Plaza.
(The Ord Survey realigned and renamed streets)
Farms and vineyards fill the former riverbed, 1850. Stearns’s Mill middle right,
Looking north from Capitol Milling. Alameda Street now runs over the old watercourse, along the curve of bluffs. Chavez Ravine begins its climb uphill, left.
The first commercial grist mill in the Pueblo de Los Angeles was set up on North Spring Street sometime in the 1830s; it was traditionally known as “Stearns’ Mill.” Its power came from the flowing water of the Zanja Madre, and its name came from the power and wealth of Don Abel Stearns. Long tradition holds the mill was one of his ventures. He had arrived from Boston in 1831, with excellent credit connections in Monterey, to start a career as a mercantile tycoon, land baron, and Anglo-Mexican powerbroker. Eventually in 1839 he became a naturalized Mexican citizen, no longer just a resident foreign concessionaire. Which meant he could own land and businesses, and be eligible for land grants if they came up (they did). AND, he could marry 14-year-old Arcadia Bandini, the most vivacious and brilliant of the hijas del pais, who had huge…tracts of land. They became the richest folks in town; their adobe casa was dubbed “El Palacio;” it had a hundred-foot ballroom! The “de Stearnses” were social doyennes the city long remembered.
Don Abel Stearns
Dona Arcadia Bandini de Stearns (Baker)
But Abel Stearns was not a miller, or a hydro-engineer. On the other hand, there WAS a local who knew all of this, so today historians believe the millwright was the famous…
Don Jose Juan Chapman, with his beautiful Dona Guadelupe. They gave many generations of progeny to California.
Don Jose must actually have been the one who built and ran the mill, and probably owned half of it. He was California’s most famous millwright, well-married, resident in LA for a few years already, Mexican by naturalization, well connected and trusted. In the 1830s, Chapman is growing Mission grapes right down in the river bed there already. Almost certainly, he dressed his vines while figuring in his head how the Zanja, if they put it up there on those bluffs, could be harnessed for irrigation and power. It could have been only he, who could have engineered the mill run from the Zanja, and set up the machinery. “Chapman’s Mill” — as we might call it — was an entrepreneurial idea he probably nursed for years. But it remained “a project” while there was no capital in Los Angeles, only cow-hides. Capital and international credit only arrived in LA with Horse-Face (as the Californios dubbed Stearns, Cara de Caballo.)
The Zanja Madre in Los Angeles in 1868 (Moore’s survey map). Stearns’ mill buildings are well marked; there are a couple of other mills by now.
Records are scanty, but it seems likely that Stearns must have been the backer of the mill, and Chapman probably the owner; it was a year before Stearns would even have the legal right, yet, to undertake a civic venture. I haven’t yet found any record that Stearns and Chapman were associated in business, but they were both successful Angelenos transplanted from Boston and married into important Californio families. It seems likely in fact, that a friendship with Chapman must have eased Stearns’s introductions to, and success with, the Californians from his first arrival in 1831. Dona Guadelupe was charming and popular and social; she would have been quick to host a newly-arrived fellow Bostonian.
The dam was about where the bridge is; the water wheel was about where that ugly apartment building sits. The train tracks mark the Zanja. From here water flowed back down the bluffs, and Dodgers’ Stadium (woo hoo! Go Dodger Blue!!), past Chinatown…
past Elysian Park
…and Chavez Ravine
(The open zanjas were covered with brick vaulting in the 1890s to keep the water clean.)
past Chinatown…
…and down into the Pueblo…but first, it got a dog-leg to turn the mill.
Chinatown station now sits next to the mill
In 1835 under Gov. Pio Pico, Los Angeles emerged as the provincial capital, and officially La Ciudad de Los Angeles, the City of the Angels. It was a power shift away from Monterey; political activities and commercial prospects were enhanced in LA. Pico was intent on breaking the economic power of the Missions and secularizing their assets. It was the new civic regime, I hazard, that gave Stearns and Chapman the approvals to re-jigger the zanja and set up the mill in town. We know it was finished and operating in 1838. By then, San Gabriel Mission was already in serious decline anyway, and a new mill in town must have been a huge capital improvement. It seems like a tiny step, but it firmly and, forever, sealed LA’s role as the economic and industrial and distributional center of Southern California.
LA in 1850, looking northeast. The two buildings of Stearns’s Mill — having just been renamed “Eagle Mills” — marked in gold. This shot isn’t from a balloon, as it is sometimes described; it’s of a scale model made of the city as it was at Statehood, based on the Col. Ed. Ord Survey of 1849-50. The diagonal road to the lower right corner is Alameda, leading to San Pedro.=Today the strip of bottomland under the bluffs is Los Angeles State Historic Park, which preserved as open space the Chinatown Rail Yards, aka “the Cornfield.” The mill, among other industries, brought the railroads to crowd into the strip north of Alameda Street. Here Collis Huntington built the Southern Pacific’s River Station and Depot, and behind it, right on top of the Zanja, the River Station Hotel.
To ease shipping of goods, including flour from the mill, Stearns invested capital in building a road to the port at San Pedro. This is today the Alameda Corridor — and Alameda Street just happens to run right next to the mill. Stearns established stores — shops — LA’s first — one in town and one at the port, with a horse-drawn wagon haulage service in between to meet the Boston ships. (No more sluggish ox-drawn caretas.) Don Abel thus established LA’s future policy of exploiting San Pedro as the only deep-water port it had access to.
Chapman died in 1848, soon after the U.S. conquest. I conjecture here that Stearns, surviving partner, or possibly acting on behalf of Guadelupe, arranged, In 1850, the sale of the mill on the Zanja to Americans who named it “Eagle Mills.” During the half-century the mill ground flour under the Eagle emblem, Los Angeles blossomed as America’s most productive, most industrially advanced, farm town, with among other crops, a massive wheat industry. The mill was sold again in 1883 to Jacob Loew, who re-launched the complex as “Capitol Milling.” This is when most of the complex was built, surrounding, absorbing, and superseding the structures built in the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s and 1860s.
During this time, the railroads moved into the old river bed to get access to LA’s produce at the source. This was a cash cow for the lucky mill owners, but it became a grim example of the Machine In The Garden, a cautionary tale about extracting so much “value” from productive land, that we destroy it. More on the railroads, in the next and last part; but here’s what that gentle bend of bluffs and wet bottomland looked like by the dawn of the 20th Century:
The Loew family ran and grew the business for 110 years, only finally closing it in 1998 when the Southern Pacific closed the adjacent railyards that were, partly, built to serve it. It sat derelict while the Cornfield site was developed into the park and the re-development of the area began.
The View heartily endorses the Riboli family’s efforts downtown.
The derelict mill-site was bought by the Riboli family, the good people of San Antonio Winery, founded in 1917. They are the last vintner left in the once-vineyard-laced, then once-railroad-laced, bottomland where Jose Chapman founded the wine industry, and set up LA’s first mill.
The site, still in renovation
It’s amazing and heartening that a family food business is investing in a sensitive and imaginative downtown historical redevelopment in downtown LA. This series on milling came about because I was so delighted by the way the architects, Workshop Design Collective out of So. Pasadena, handled the renovations of this complex and I wanted to know more about the old building.
It
The main feature is supposed to be a great food hall, with mixed office and retail and dining. Unfortunately, of course, the building was to have opened in the spring this year, but that was just when Covid-19 was rearing its coughing head. For now, the building sits in suspended animation, beautiful and empty and waiting, like all of us, for its next phase of life.
NEXT PART: “The Los Angeles Farming and Milling Co.”
View on the City of Utrecht by Joost Corneliuszoon Droochsloot. His name means “Dryditch.” Mijnheer Droochsloot. Well I think it’s funny.
JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT. DUTCH STUDIES DIV.
1984, just before I started my year in Edinburgh, I had a summer course in Dutch culture at the Nijenrode Institute, a converted medieval castle in the dorp of Breukelen, the original Brooklyn. To get a borreltje, a brewski, the best bet was to head upriver (which is the dreamy Vecht, a branch of the Old Rijn) to spend a few hours in Utrecht.
The moment you step out of the vast modern, Tannoy-blaring ding-dong- Central Station, the largest and loudest in the Netherlands, you are under the elms in one of the finest living, working, pedestrian cities in the world.
As with Edinburgh (or Philadelphia for that matter), a walk around town can be a master class in urban studies. What Jane Jacobs said about Lower New York, the very greatest of all the old Dutch cities, applies a priori to Utrecht, the very oldest of all the great Dutch cities:
“Wherever lively and popular parts of cities are found, the small much outnumber the large…[small shops], small manufacturers…small enterprises would not exist somewhere else, in the absence of cities. Without cities, they would not exist. The diversity…generated by cities rests on the fact that in cities so many people are so close together, and among them contain so many different tastes, skills, needs, supplies, and bees in their bonnets. Even small operations like proprietor-and-one- clerk hardware stores, drug stores, candy stores and bars can and do flourish in extraordinary numbers in lively districts of cities because there are enough people to support them at short, convenient intervals, and in turn this convenience, and neighborhood-personal quality, are their stock in trade. Once they are unable to be supported at close, convenient intervals, they lose this advantage. In a given geographical territory, half as many people will not support half as many such enterprises spaced at twice the distance. When distance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various, and the personal wither away.”
Jane Jacobs, the Life and Death of Great American Cities.
Jan Hendrik Verheye, View of the Choir and Tower of Utrecht Cathedral
“To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: 1. The district must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common. 2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent. 3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained. 4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are living there for residence. The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make.”
Jane Jacobs, op. cit.
St. Maarten’s Dom, built 1381-1382; the tallest church tower in the Netherlands. It gives an unforgettable, life-changing View.
Utrecht University
“Historically treated, architecture has seemed too long but a description of buildings, like fossil shells and corals, past and dead. Yet as an evolutionary science it begins anew with the living and growing city reefs, as we have seen them in their growth overflowing whole plains, ascending innumerable valleys. In this synoptic vision we have as yet had too little touch with the actual living polyps…”
Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution
The above photos were not great pictures; but in b/w they seemed more interesting, and I now realize why. There are, combined. about 600 years worth of architectural styles for townhouses in these two street corner views, from High Gothic to to trap-gabled Renaissance, to 18th Century, to creamy white Art Nouveau, each distinctly a Dutch house.
The sea is of course an intermittent threat, but it was the alternately roaring and slackening Rijn channels that had to be tamed.
“I have often amused myself,’ wrote James Boswell in 1791, “with thinking how different a place London is to different people. They, whose narrow minds are contracted to the consideration of some one particular pursuit, view it only through that medium…but the intellectual man is struck with it, as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.” Boswell not only gave a good definition of cities, he put his finger on one of the chief troubles in dealing with them. it is so easy to fall into the trap of contemplating a city’s uses one at a time, by categories. Indeed, just this — analysis of cities, use by use — has become a customary planning tactic…to understand cities, we have to deal outright with combinations or mixtures of uses, not separate uses, as the essential phenomena.”
Jane Jacobs, op. cit.
Click below for a brilliant urban studies blog which explains in a few simple maps the ever-changing channels of the Rijn-Maas-Waal delta. Every river in Europe, practically, runs within a few miles. The Utrecht achievement was turning silted-up old channels into the unique sunken canal system that winds through town, allowing downstairs private wharf tie-ups to almost every house in town. This determined Utrecht’s growth, trade, and evolution. It started as a Roman fort, Ultra Trajectum, (the further ford), the ruins of which were taken over by St. Willibord as a missionary outpost to convert the Frisians. Thus it also became the center of Netherlandish Christianity, and an ecclesiastical state, the Prince-Bishopric of Utrecht, one of the intellectual and artistic centers of Europe.
I got another amazing chance to visit in 1997, when Sam Elias took me to Amsterdam (blessings!) and I took him to see Utrecht. He loves cities and architecture as much as I do. I took him to Het Kasteel de Haar; then he educated me, by taking me out to see Het Rietveld Huis, one of the landmarks of De Stijl in the leafy rich suburbs: another distinctly Dutch house, and it fits right in.
The Stadsbuitensingel, the old moat, was overdecked to lure car traffic into town in the 1980s.
…but in the last twenty years they realized their mistake and started putting the canal back.
The canal in-filling began as a redevelopment scheme that put one of the largest malls in the Netherlands, Hoog Catharijne, next to the train station, along the Catharijnesingel, the long straight stretch of the moat. The re-designed mall is an even glitzier behemoth in the town center, but the parking lots are gone, and now you can once again sail your jacht down the ancient, restored bed of the Rijn, as it flows right under the mall, and tie up right there, to buy your Coach bags and Hermes scarves.
“In our present phase, town-planning schemes are apt to be one-sided, at any rate too few-sided. One is all for communications, another for industrial developments. Others are (more healthily) domestic in character, with provisions for parks and gardens; even by rare hap, for playgrounds, that prime necessity of civic survival. But too many [developments] reiterate that pompous imperial art, which has changed so little from the taste of the decadent Caesars of the past or present. In their too exclusive devotion to material interests they present the converse of those old Spanish and Spanish-American cities which seem almost composed of churches and monasteries. What is the remedy? For each and every city we need a systematic survey, of its development and origins, its history and its present. This survey is required not merely for material buildings, but also for the city’s life and its institutions, for of these the builded city is but the external shell.”
LACMA is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a public institution since 1961, when the art collection was moved out of the stairwells of the Science Museum in Expo Park. Like the Science Museum, and like baseball and soccer fields, libraries, parks, nature paths, water fountains, public emergency rooms, safe beaches, and family-friendly picnic tables, the County’s mission for the art collection as it grew was to keep it available free or pull-ticket-cheap to anybody, any day of the week. My God does that sound bloody noble today.
Q: How do you turn a dusty public art collection into a prohibitively expensive elite commodity only the rich get to enjoy? A: Build an expensive new museum, and lock it up inside!
The latest breathless projection into the Orwellian future of a plan that was already out of date and controversial before Coronavirus. The push to replace LACMA has had a bloated design process, going through many, many starchitects in the past few years, with costs getting ever more gigantic. Plus the HUGE carbon footprint attached. At least the design, at last, is pretty. But why build it at all?
LACMA has been under constant construction ever since I arrived in LA, and access to the collection has been woefully limited, mostly because “these old galleries are too small for the collection.” So they’d build a new building with much closure and re-opening fanfare. Each new pavilion or plaza, while individually okay, was seemingly selected to be totally at war with what came before it. Then two years later you’d start reading again about a major re-fit. Now, they aren’t even bothering to keep the art accessible at all, the collection has been crated up in storage for a few years now. It’s being held essentially for ransom; we’ll have to see that the new building gets its financing and permits, because they’ve already torn down the old ones. [Peremptory tear-downs being the old Trump Management trick, by the way.]
See, it sprawls across Wilshire Blvd., both sides of the street! What an important expensive building.
They released some new sketches to get us all excited. But after Coronavirus, this seems like a parody ad from the fifties of a gleaming future where art is important because it’s expensive, and it’s expensive because it’s important. It’s being built at tremendous cost even though right now, it’s unclear anybody may ever willingly visit a dead-air public space again. And even if there’s a vaccine, with the economic disaster, Americans, will find it tough for years to afford hundred-dollar admission prices. So it seems they’re building this sexy new building specifically to have a reason to justify luring tourists in numbers large enough to justify charging them a hundred bucks to visit this really sexy building. It might as well be the concourse of an airport, to process timed trips to Venus, to see the 2.4 trillion-dollar Van Gogh that’s already on your coffee mug.
The trend of huge echoey ware-house spaces for everything is not good for art. The idea being sold is, the curators will be constantly shifting art around the deliberately amorphous galleries, to make fabulous ever-changing moments in the fabulous ever-changing space they’re building. So who knows what we’ll get to see? The public — returning visitors — local citizens — us — have lost forever the chance to view, and get to know, our art collection, over long years, even generations, during many delightful visits. That is one of the best services any art museum can perform. Otherwise, the public is removed from feelings of connection and ownership. Individuals, particularly the poor, lose interest and inspiration. We lose the casual habit of art, of having day-to-day relationship with certain works, which is indispensable for civilization. We lose the tickle of coming back to get lost in a loved painting or artist, just because you had a free afternoon. Now the managing curatorial experts own the art, and will dangle bits of it temporarily before you, then snatch it away somewhere. If you assume your passive position in a long queue hours before the showtime, you’ll eventually get in and get a whole three-minute pass; if during that pass you are jostled from behind by a stroller, or don’t look up from your cell-phone, you’ll miss it forever, whatever it was. Next.
Hmmm…looks like the Getty…and everything else. Where’d they put all the art again?
The way to save the future of Nature and our connection to it, and art and our connection to it, is to NOT build museums as “tourist events” — de-natured, multi-purpose, ever-changing, where-has-that-painting-gone, but-look-there’s-a-yoghurt stand, white-Star-Wars-plastic, airport-anomic crowd-processors. Can’t you just hear the squeals of children racing around? The piercing squeak! of sneakers on marble floors, the coughs and sneezes, the grunts and protestations of a thousand cell-phone conversations twittering all around you in a Babel of languages? You will. Not a breath of fresh air that doesn’t come already stale from the ducts. Not a window that could ever be opened. In LA.
Paintings, recall, are best seen indoors, in controlled light, well spaced but in curatorial communication with each other, and kept shaded and at constant temperature, where silence or hush is preserved, so that an individual or a class of students can find their own (collective) privacy to contemplate individual art objects. Exactly like the 1960s ’70’s and ’80’s galleries they’ve torn down. Indeed, Zumthor’s big design concept is: We wanted glass windows facing south so the sun bakes the canyon-sized concourse, requiring constant air conditioning….so the art goes in the usual small, boring, dark galleries at the back. What a design innovation!
Injury: this isn’t being financed cost-free through the public bank. Nope, it’s Wall Street. Kids of kids yet unborn will be floating this debt, a large multiple of the $750 million. For a County art collection donated in 1910.
Insult to injury: In the article above, read how the spokesperson coyly admits when this fantasy crowd-processor is built, it will be mostly empty because its capacity dwarfs the current art collection. Chuckle, “I guess we’ll have to go on a big art-buying spree to fill the barn!”
The Valley Village View 