I’d smile back, but I Wear The Mask.

The View is clear: of all the effects of coronavirus, this is the nicest.

LOS ANGELES — With so many people staying at home and off the roads, Los Angeles currently has the cleanest air in the world, according to IQ Air’s live quality city ranking. Following the issuing of the state-wide “Safe-At-Home” orders, many residents began working from home, lowering the number of commuters on the road. On March 18, L.A.’s infamous rush-hour traffic was moving 71 percent faster than it usually does on a Wednesday afternoon, The New York Times reported. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, last month L.A. experienced the longest consecutive “good” air days since at least 1980. Experts say the improvement is also due to fewer planes flying and less ground activity in general.”
— CBSLA News report from this morning.

This is quite a switcherooney. Cast your mind back over the past few decades:

“Los Angeles in 1950 was well on its way to becoming the nation’s fourth largest city, or as some insisted, the world’s biggest parking lot. Its air was foul and its traffic congested, but the county’s air pollution watchdogs were confident that by summer they would reach “the turning point in the war on smog” and the state’s freeway builders were counting on their superhighways to move Angelenos around the Basin at a merry clp. By the time the decade ended, however, the air was more noxious than ever, the freeways were clogged, and Mayor Fletcher (“Freeway”) Bowron had been swept from office… The day most likely to be fixed in middle-aged memories of the decade, is October 1, 1957 (three days before Russian scientists launched Sputnik I), when the county’s 5,500,000 inhabitants were required, under penalty of a $500 fine and a six-month prison term, to abandon their incinerators in favor of trash cans, one of which had to be set aside for non-combustible rubbish. The switch paved the way for Mayor Yorty’s desegregation of tin cans and table scraps, and although it was not visible to the naked, smog-reddened eye, it also reduced dust-fall in the city’s air to about the 1940 level. Of even more significance, it bore out scientist A. J. Haagen-Smit’s discovery that the chief offender in polluting the air, was the automobile.”
— John D. Weaver, L.A. El Pueblo Grande, 1973

Our incinerator is one of the few left in Los Angeles — in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen another in anybody’s backyard setting. It recalls how far we’ve come, in air quality.

The pollution-free air and general scrubbing LA has gotten from the rains have been a miracle for the plants in our garden. We are extremely lucky to have a space where we can relax the mask rule, getting to breathe as much as we want of the cleanest air on the planet. Imagine also, the welkin is scented this morning with perfume of lime blossom, essence of lemon blossom, and even the seductive allure of jasmine.

The Other Huntington Gardens — Brookgreen, S.C.

4 Replies

The SFV was put on the map by the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the Southern Pacific was put on the map by Collis P. Huntington.

Collis’s nephew and heir, Henry Huntington, who put the Pacific Electric on the map of Southern California, also put Southern California on the map of the art world, with his fabulous Huntington Library, Museum and Gardens in San Marino.

But Collis had another heir: his stepson, who was also his natural son, Archer. (Because Collis’s wife, Arabella, was previously his mistress). When Collis died, much of his fortune, the wealth of his exploitation of California, went to Archer, who used it to create, with his wife Anna, the world’s largest outdoor figural art gallery. (Widow Arabella, on the other hand, went as wife to Henry: in other words, he married his aunt, his dead uncle’s former mistress. Thus Henry became his cousin Archer’s step-father. Oy gevalt, the rich.)

Think of this Long View as a cultural audit of the SPRR, on behalf of the SFV.

Archer was not a railroad tycoon. He was a Spanish scholar of distinction; he translated Cervantes and el Cid and the other Iberian classics. He was a poet of somewhat lesser distinction, and he sponsored a League in the twenties which was meant to purge poetry from the Red Menace (I think he meant Modernism; but sic.)

Archer was also a lover, principally of his wife Anna Hyatt Huntington, the talented New England sculptor, but also of his dog, Hugo. The public has them to thank for turning an abandoned old South Carolina rice plantation into Brookgreen Sculpture Gardens. (They also donated fourteen museums, and deeded 800 acres in Redding to the State of Connecticut for the Collis P. Huntington State Park.)

The rice paddies were fed by the hydrostatic push of fresh water from the Waccamaw River, which also pushes against the salt water heading up Winyah Bay.

Unlike the formal grandeur of Henry’s San Marino estate, Anna’s and especially Archer’s taste was a bit more sentimental, more dramatic, more middle-brow. For instance, Archer sprinkled the grounds with poems inscribed on tablets; they don’t run much farther afield than Whitman or Kipling. Archer contributed a sweet ode of his own, to good old Hugo.

Their humanistic, traditionalist, aspirational garden aesthetic is essentially Art Deco; which also seems to be the core of their taste in sculpture. The Maxfield Parrish gardens set off, and complement, but don’t upstage, the knockout statues.