As a contrast with historic Philadelphia and industrial Pittsburgh, we chose to highlight the evolution of Los Angeles in our opening episodes because the sprawling, multi-centric metropolis has pretty much defined urban growth in the 20th and now 21st centuries.
LA was designed to be a decentralized city, with its wide open spaces and year-round sunshine serving to lure migrants from the crowded industrial cities of the east and midwest (the foreign immigration boom would come later). The city even imposed a roughly 13-story height limit in the early 1900s to limit density and keep from having canyon-like streets that were then sprouting in New York and Chicago.
Contrary to popular perception, LA’s famous freeways were originally seen as a way to tie together its collection of far flung communities that had grown up along the Red Car rail system rather than a vehicle to extend the city’s boundaries. Even with the world’s most expansive rail transit network, Los Angeles already had more cars than any city anywhere by the mid-1920s, while the first freeway, the Arroyo Seco (now I-110) to Pasadena, didn’t open until 1940.
And as early as the 1920s and 1930s, major stores had begun opening away from the city center with some, such as New York’s Saks Fifth Avenue and San Francisco’s I Magnin, completely bypassing downtown for their LA locations, usually along Wilshire Boulevard.
*For those who followed the story of San Francisco’s Mission Bay school in our last newsletter, groundbreaking took place last week and opening is planned for August 2025.
After watching Saving the City, you will never look at cities in the same way again. And we hope you will be inspired to act and encourage others to act to make a difference in your local communities.
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Meet Manuel Pastor, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Watch more videos.