Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public, 25th Anniversary
By Doug Suisman
Oro Editions, $30
Doug Suisman’s Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public, remains today, as it was 25 years ago, a contrarian essay fashioned with an urbane and civilized pen. The book, originally issued as a pamphlet by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, appeared almost at the moment when the Los Angeles School, headlined by Mike Davis’s devastating City of Quartz, conquered the market on gloomy civic prognostication. Then, as now, Suisman was an optimist—not a cheerleader—who held the still-unaccepted view that Los Angeles is a city of boulevards, like any great American or European city. Freeways, he said (at a time when it seemed impossible for anyone to actually believe this), were not the true armature of Los Angeles. “The boulevards establish the city’s overall physical structure, which will come as a surprise to the millions of honest people who have been misled into thinking that Los Angeles is a city organized by its freeways; Los Angeles is a city whose freeways have been organized by its boulevards.”
Thus began an argument that Suisman has been making for two and a half decades, one that in retrospect seems as prescient as any subsequent understanding of Los Angeles. In his view, the city’s boulevards are more than just a physical strip upon which we construct buildings. They are the truly open, free spaces where the “spontaneous dramatization of who we are as a people” can occur. The word “spontaneous” is key; it harkens back to the earliest definitions of public space, from ancient Greece and Aristotle. Boulevards are the arena (the “agora”) where unfettered, uncontrolled, unlimited public debate and action take place.
Along those public thoroughfares, Los Angeles plays itself, not as an anonymous and amorphous city, but as a vibrant and engaging tapestry of life.
To see why and how this was so, Suisman did the unthinkable: He actually looked at the boulevards (and avenues). On them he found geography, history, culture, and politics. He traced the physical layout of the boulevards, discovering mestizos—hybrids that followed the old Spanish empire’s rancho boundaries, then conformed to the new empire’s more Cartesian grid, imposed after the region was absorbed into the Union in 1849.
Some boulevards acted as binding, knitting the little (and once independent) townships, like Hollywood and Colegrove that lay outside the original Spanish Pueblo, to the civic core. Other streets, like Wilshire Boulevard, were sequenced commercial centers, which, taken as a whole, constituted a “linear downtown,” in Reyner Banham’s famous coinage. These could be found throughout the region; upon them arose landmarks, like Bullocks Wilshire, an art deco master-piece, and Desmond’s, a sleek moderne tower. The city projected its ambitions onto these stretches, envisioning motorways to the sea and thoroughfares dotted with Manhattan-like skyscrapers.
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Movie studios, which might easily have erected their hangar-sized sound stages on farmland outside city limits, instead consciously plopped themselves at major intersections, imparting to their immediate surroundings “a tantalizing visual scent of the fantasy production within” and “spawning other fantastic architectural realms on the boulevards.”
Spreading out as it did, Los Angeles, nevertheless retained the contours of a typical urban city. Crowded street cars plied its boulevards, taking on and letting off passengers who filled the sidewalks and populated buildings that could have been airlifted from any mid-sized Midwestern city.
That all changed in the late 1930s. Voters turned down a massive subway building plan and, frustrated with both jammed streets and poor trolley service, the city began to build freeways. Rail, which put feet on the ground, had an affinity for architecture; cars did not. “Firmness gave way to flow,” as Suisman puts it.
The boulevards became the exclusive province of traffic engineers and their mercantile allies, concerned solely with arterial movement. The result was places like Lincoln Boulevard, a dull, elongated strip of low-lying, undistinguished commercial enterprises, dotted with surface parking lots, whose main architectural feature is the telephone polls lining the roadway. This “killing chaos,” said Suisman, was a “civic inadventure,” allowing the boulevards to suffocate beneath traffic and blight.
X-ray this surface, as Suisman suggested, and you might see the great potential that lay hidden there. In the ensuing 25 years since Boulevard was published, Los Angeles has caught up to Suisman. The city has experienced a renaissance of its boulevards, in part due to the arrival of Mexican, Central American, Korean, and Middle-Eastern immigrants who depend on the proximity of neighborhood shops and public transportation, and in part to a growing realization among Angelenos that the freeways don’t actually lead to anything in particular—you must get off of them to take advantage of all the city has to offer, which is right there, on the boulevards.
Suisman got there first, one might say, and he uses the second half of this book to review several key projects he’s taken on since 1989—many in Los Angeles, many scattered across the nation and across the globe, from Pittsburgh to Palestine—to show how his original insights informed this work. This feels like the very long way around. What one longs for, at the end of this indispensable book, is Suisman himself at the scene of the crime, X-raying the boulevards as they are today, telling us how far we’ve come, and how far we must go. Still, Los Angeles Boulevard remains a guide, even if the road ahead is unclear.