Читать книгу Urban Tomographies - Martin H. Krieger - Страница 13

Chapter 2

Cities, Streetscapes, and the Second Industrial Revolution

The next five chapters tell the stories, historical and economic and sociological, I have learned from doing the fieldwork and making visual, aural, and video documentation. I discuss how the images display those stories, and so how urban tomography investigates and reveals city life. Urban tomography allows one to imagine more adequate identities in that manifold presentation of profiles. In the fieldwork, you discover properly commodious identities, ones that better accommodate the various aspects. The stories I am telling are just those identities, stories that accommodate the documents I have made. It will be useful to begin with some fieldwork reports.

Union Central Cold Storage, Inc. (Figure 1A and B, #11), has an icehouse that was opened in 1908 and an adjacent cold-storage warehouse that dates from the 1950s, with more recent add-ons. It sits on three acres of land on Industrial Street on the east side of downtown Los Angeles, right off South Alameda Street. The land has become so valuable that the owner might sell it, move his plant to an industrial city several miles south, and refit a warehouse there so that it becomes a modern cold-storage plant—replacing an accumulation of added-on pieces of building and equipment at his old site. And, at least initially, the new owner might just demolish the Industrial Street buildings, pave the site, and use it as a parking lot.

SAC Industries on Avalon Boulevard at East 62nd Street (Figure 1A and B, #1; Figure 1C, “d”) has slowly but surely absorbed more and more buildings going east on East 62nd as the firm has expanded. What was once their focus, on end-of-runs in metal manufacturing and less than perfect metal stock, now also includes a very substantial used-clothing sorting and resale enterprise. In each case the proprietor’s skill is being able to buy vast quantities of less than perfect goods, sort them into bundles of goods that have shared qualities, and then find markets for those bundles.

SAC is located within a large superblock of industry, the Huntington tract, from Slauson Avenue to Gage Avenue, from Avalon Boulevard to Central Avenue (Figure 1A and B, #1; Figure 1C). (There is as well an adjacent superblock south, from Gage Avenue to Florence Avenue, the Goodyear tract, referring to a large rubber tire plant that used to be there.) The Huntington tract was threaded through and delineated by railroad spurs from the Slauson Avenue line of the AT&SF (now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe). Eventually the surrounding areas were developed as residential (an aerial photograph, Figure 1C, makes this apparent). Those residents might supply a labor pool for the industries in this area. Also, the rents are comparatively low in this superblock (say $0.40/sq. ft. several years ago). It is old (for Los Angeles, having been developed in the 1920s onward), and the current firms have reoccupied buildings built for other purposes originally and subsequently. Just outside the tract, across the streets—lining Avalon Boulevard, Central Avenue, and Slauson Avenue—a large number of industrial and auto repair establishments can be found. Across Central Avenue there are some peculiar commercial establishments: the terminal for pushcart ice-cream vendors in the area; a store that sells chickens killed on-site. Several blocks north, on Central Avenue, a new school is being constructed (Figure 1C, “e”). For less than two hundred feet into the adjacent areas, on the east and west, and perhaps five hundred feet to the north there is a fully residential district, with churches, single family homes, yards, and so forth.

More generally, these industrial neighborhoods might be said to have been abandoned by first-class uses, but they are still occupied by highly productive activities. Their abandonment or depreciation or filteringdown has made them ideal locales for businesses and residents who cannot afford better or who do not need to be first-class. The fact that they are polluted areas, mixing what should not be mixed, is just what makes them successful. The system of repurposable buildings is a resource in an industrial ecology of labor, pollution, economic factors of rentals and materials costs, and other firms (nearby) from which they take materials, process them, and move them on to other businesses (eventually, not so nearby).

I kept discovering industrial areas while going around the city or looking at maps and aerial photographs (in the aerials the industrial areas appear manifestly different from the residential areas): the Eastside Industrial District, east of downtown, along the Los Angeles River; the Alameda Corridor; the Central Manufacturing District, now part of Vernon; the Metropolitan Warehouse District, along Union Pacific Avenue; the City Industrial Tract, north of Boyle Heights; and such cities as the City of Industry, Vernon, and the City of Commerce.¹ I came upon Union Pacific Avenue (Figure 1A and B, #7) in the course of the project documenting storefront houses of worship in Los Angeles. Sure enough, to the north especially, there is an adjacent residential neighborhood (and hence the churches listed in the telephone directory that led me there). However, on the Avenue, and mostly toward the south and the railroad yard, there is a rich and compact industrial neighborhood threaded through by well-used railroad tracks. In places the residential and the industrial are interdigitated, reflecting historical precedent and changing usage and zoning, creating a remarkable urban fabric.

Figure 8. Clarence Street, Pico-Aliso district, Los Angeles (Figure 1A and B, #2).

The Pico-Aliso district (Figure 1A and B, #2) is a residential and industrial area on the flats below Boyle Heights, across from downtown Los Angeles, and just on the other side of the Los Angeles River. I got off the 10 Freeway at 4th Street, went west down the hill, and made the first right. That was Clarence Street. There was a new-looking housing development on one side of the street, and sure enough there was industry on the other side, as promised by the aerials. Parking my car on Clarence, I went around the block counterclockwise, photographing continuously. I went in and out of indented dead-end streets, and eventually I came back to where I had started.

I discovered through some articles in the LA Weekly that I had been in gang country, that the Pico-Aliso name refers to two housing projects in the area, that Moon’s Market is an important landmark, and that there had been several notable homicides in the last few years. My only protection is that I am often photographing at nine o’clock in the morning on a weekday, when the only people who are out are mothers, schoolchildren, and people who work in the area.

Further study of aerial photographs revealed the housing projects, nearby single-family homes, and more industrial blocks. I found other industrial areas on the east side of the Los Angeles River and decided to visit them all. Again, characteristic of these neighborhoods are the nearby and intermixed residential areas.

So my peregrinations became thematic picaresques. What you see and photograph—on the ground, in the built environment, and in its being rebuilt—are signs of the processes of industrial revolution and repurposing.

The built environment that we now have is an artifact. For Los Angeles, it is an artifact of the Second Industrial Revolution, the successor of the Industrial Revolution of water, mechanical, and steam power. The Second Industrial Revolution was deeply influenced by thermodynamics, and here matters of conservation and flow of materials and energy play a central role. It is a story of processes rather than batches.

That built environment has by now been multiply repurposed. Whether it be water or power or society, of course we can photograph only the visible built environment and infrastructure of Los Angeles.

Industrial Revolutions

The Industrial Revolution—factories, water power, eventually steam engines, textiles, and a bit later railroads—might be said to be less scientifically based than was a subsequent industrial revolution (say 1870–1925): chemical synthesis and continuous processes (versus batch processes) and chemical engineering (circa 1900); electricity and electrochemistry; thermodynamics applied to engines and to chemistry; and the rise of the automobile.²