Past Due

@civicmemoryla

Report and Recommendations of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group | Website: civicmemory.la

66 posts

6710 La Tijera Blvd.

Sam Sweet

“Like every Armet & Davis diner, Pann’s was designed to seduce motorists from a passing glance. The exterior walls were glass curtains that revealed huge glowing triangular pendant lamps. It could have been a Cadillac showroom. From the outside, it looked as spacious as a church and as mesmeric as an aquarium. Helen said each coffee shop should always appear like the site of a special event, even if the only movement within was a transient sipping coffee on a swivel stool.”

I first noticed Pann’s from the backseat of a Lyft I was taking to the airport over winter break my sophomore year. The building’s structure and sign intrigued me in exactly the way it was designed to, and I wrote it down on my long list of places in Los Angeles that I wanted to visit. I finally managed to go in May 2019, and took a picture (with a Snapchat filter) of the unique exterior.

My dad, who met me at Pann’s the first time I went in 2019, was back in town last week and stopped by to pick up food from the restaurant after landing at LAX.

He talked to the current owner, Jim Poulos, and asked him about the white tiles with Helen Liu Fong’s red nail polish that were mentioned in the article. Poulos said that he knew about the tiles but they aren’t on display currently. My dad instead got pictures of the map mentioned in the article, an original neon sign, and one of the original light fixtures.

Subcommittee 6

I had one question regarding the suggestions about how to commemorate the communities displaced from Chavez Ravine. All of the suggestions involve art or technology that utilizes the space around Dodger Stadium or in its parking lot, but why not do something that educates people about these displaced communities within the stadium itself? I don’t think that a monument or commemorative act should be inaccessible to people who cannot or do not go to Dodgers games, but many people who attend these games are not familiar with the history of the stadium they are in, and some may not be interested in going through great efforts to educate themselves. I think the City could work with the Dodgers organization to acknowledge and educate more people about that history, and encourage people to do more research on their own.

Subcommittee 5

“And in central L.A.’s Arlington Heights neighborhood, artists Noah Davis and Karon Davis created the Underground Museum in 2012 to “bring museum quality art to a community that had no access to it”

I would love to see more examples like this when thinking about how the City will work with museums

Subcommittee 5

“And in central L.A.’s Arlington Heights neighborhood, artists Noah Davis and Karon Davis created the Underground Museum in 2012 to “bring museum quality art to a community that had no access to it”

Subcommittee 4

“This process seems to have yielded an incoherent body of memorials. In Hollywood alone, official squares memorialize several celebrity entertainers (including comedian Bob Hope, television host Larry King, and singer Celia Cruz), the Famous Amos brand of cookies, gay rights activist Morris Kight, and slain LAPD officer Ian Campbell. “I Love Lucy Square” (at Melrose and Plymouth) honors both comedian Lucille Ball and Lucy Casado, owner of the landmark Lucy’s El Adobe Café on Melrose. Several subcommittee members described these squares as feeble gestures toward civic memorialization; in most cases, only a few descriptive words accompany the name on the sign, with nothing visible at street level to provide context”

This quote is especially interesting to consider after reading the Roundtable that discusses the relationship between Hollywood and whiteness. It is also interesting to think of in the context of the broader discussion of memorials, what should be memorialized, and how long the monuments we create should last. These walk of fame stars are their own kind of monuments, and they have a symbolic significance that is tied to the image of Hollywood. But in a lot of ways, it is a superficial significance, which the authors point out in the last sentence.

Subcommittee 4

“This process seems to have yielded an incoherent body of memorials. In Hollywood alone, official squares memorialize several celebrity entertainers (including comedian Bob Hope, television host Larry King, and singer Celia Cruz), the Famous Amos brand of cookies, gay rights activist Morris Kight, and slain LAPD officer Ian Campbell. “I Love Lucy Square” (at Melrose and Plymouth) honors both comedian Lucille Ball and Lucy Casado, owner of the landmark Lucy’s El Adobe Café on Melrose. Several subcommittee members described these squares as feeble gestures toward civic memorialization; in most cases, only a few descriptive words accompany the name on the sign, with nothing visible at street level to provide context”

Glorifying the Lion: Telling the Other Side of L.A.’s History

Tyree Boyd-Pates

“This is the kind of exhibition-making that we are referring to when we talk about community curation, a methodological approach that attempts to make museums and their collections more responsive to and inclusive of the diverse communities that surround them. It begins with the participation of communities of color seldom involved in the decision-making process in museums. It also works to center voices and perspectives that are traditionally not heard because of historical erasure.”

I agree that it is important to make museums more inclusive and representative of the diverse communities that surround them. I also wonder what we can do to make the museums themselves more accessible to all communities, whether that means expanding opportunities for people to enter them for free, bringing exhibits to different locations throughout the city, or something else entirely.

Glorifying the Lion: Telling the Other Side of L.A.’s History

Tyree Boyd-Pates

“This is the kind of exhibition-making that we are referring to when we talk about community curation, a methodological approach that attempts to make museums and their collections more responsive to and inclusive of the diverse communities that surround them. It begins with the participation of communities of color seldom involved in the decision-making process in museums. It also works to center voices and perspectives that are traditionally not heard because of historical erasure.”

Roundtable

Eric Avila: “We should also acknowledge the role of the Spanish fantasy past in the regional construction of whiteness. When I teach the Spanish fantasy past in my courses, I often compare it to the minstrel show. I compare it to a regional version of racial appropriation, racial disguise, not necessarily on the stage of a theater but in architecture, in the built environment, in landscape design. As a cultural historian, I come back to questions of performance, of narrative. I think Wendy’s point is an excellent one about creating publics, creating audiences, creating readership. The L.A. Times—great example of white racial formation by creating a readership. I think you can talk about the Spanish fantasy past very much in a similar way.”

This quote reminded me of the documentary Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times. It discusses the narratives that the Los Angeles Times used to grow the city in the late nineteenth century, including the “mission myth” that is famously romanticized in the 1884 novel Ramona.

Roundtable

Eric Avila: “We should also acknowledge the role of the Spanish fantasy past in the regional construction of whiteness. When I teach the Spanish fantasy past in my courses, I often compare it to the minstrel show. I compare it to a regional version of racial appropriation, racial disguise, not necessarily on the stage of a theater but in architecture, in the built environment, in landscape design. As a cultural historian, I come back to questions of performance, of narrative. I think Wendy’s point is an excellent one about creating publics, creating audiences, creating readership. The L.A. Times—great example of white racial formation by creating a readership. I think you can talk about the Spanish fantasy past very much in a similar way.”

Subcommittee 2

“The miles of concrete highways built in the mid-twentieth century not only sliced through communities of color that Caltrans might have imagined would pose the least resistance, but exaggerated, in Eric Avila’s words, ‘the increasingly separate and unequal geography of race in postwar America’ … These infrastructural monuments to racism do not just divide and segregate, they impose life sentences on those who live along their corridors, where high rates of asthma, cancer, and stunted lung development are among the public health impacts. Importantly, they are all sites of both industry and damage to working-class communities.”

This reminded me of a quote about Los Angeles in the early twentieth century from “Newcomers in the City of Angels,” a chapter in the book Becoming Mexican American, by George Sánchez:

“Los Angeles’ urban planners gave priority to large economic interests and led government officials away from improving living conditions or investing in urban parks or recreation centers. Conditions were often allowed to deteriorate in anticipation of turning a particular area into an industrial district, promising owners higher profits. As one respected sociologist observed, ‘they are allowed to continue in their illness-producing and death-dealing roles, because love of money by some ‘Americans’ is greater than the love of the Mexican’s health and life… .’

“Substandard housing and overcrowded conditions, of course, bred disease and general poor health. Of particular concern was the prevalence of tuberculosis among the immigrant population. Although Mexicans comprised no more than 10 percent of the city’s population, they constituted over one-fourth of the tuberculosis patients and contributed one-fourth of tuberculosis deaths in the city” (p. 82)

Subcommittee 2

“The miles of concrete highways built in the mid-twentieth century not only sliced through communities of color that Caltrans might have imagined would pose the least resistance, but exaggerated, in Eric Avila’s words, ‘the increasingly separate and unequal geography of race in postwar America’ ... These infrastructural monuments to racism do not just divide and segregate, they impose life sentences on those who live along their corridors, where high rates of asthma, cancer, and stunted lung development are among the public health impacts. Importantly, they are all sites of both industry and damage to working-class communities.”

Key Recommendations

[ESP] [Website]

Though readers will find specific policy recommendations threaded throughout this report, the list below features those that attracted the broadest and most energetic support from the members of the Civic Memory Working Group over the course of our collaboration. Together they offer a sort of road map suggesting where the work begun here should turn next.

Continue and Expand the Conversation

1. Spend the second half of 2021, virtually or in person as the COVID-19 pandemic allows, discussing these recommendations and other materials in this report with a range of Los Angeles communities. These listening sessions should explore, among other subjects, how the City can shift its focus in stewarding civic memory from acting as a gatekeeper to a facilitator, giving fuller voice to community memory and bottom-up representation. Use these sessions to begin to turn the recommendations on this list into policy or built markers of civic memory.

2. Develop programs to train all city employees in civic history and Indigeneity, as they are hired and on an ongoing basis.

Increase Access and Share Information

3. Create a new City Historian position, or a three-person council of historians and community elders, on a rotating two-year basis, looking to the City’s Poet Laureate position as a model and potentially drawing from the ranks of college and university history departments and independent scholars.

4. Organize a task force of museum professionals, working artists, historians, Indigenous and other community leaders, and others to explore the creation of a Museum of the City of Los Angeles, with the understanding that this group may recommend instead supporting similar work inside museums and other cultural institutions already established.

5. Complete and publish an audit of the monuments and memorials in Los Angeles on public and publicly accessible land.

6. Broaden the accessibility and impact of the Los Angeles City Archives and Records Center as a basis for new civic memory initiatives.

7. Create a room or other space inside City Hall, open to the public, to celebrate civic memory and the Indigenous history of the site and its surroundings. This room should include both historical records and archives and rotating exhibits and displays related to civic architecture and the history of Los Angeles.

Recognize Indigenous History

8. Begin the process of adopting an Indigenous Land Acknowledgement Policy for the Mayor’s Office and for the City, in close collaboration with the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission (NAIC), as outlined in the summary appearing later in this volume from the Indigenous Land Acknowledgement subcommittee.

9. Create a new, full-time staff position within the Mayor’s Office to serve as official liaison to the NAIC and the broader Indigenous community.

10. Embed historians and Indigenous leaders on a compensated basis in City-led planning efforts, for example the Taylor Yard/G2 Equity Plan for a site along the Los Angeles River. Preserve or Acknowledge the Various Histories Embedded in the Built Environment

11. Take steps to protect the architecture and civic memory of the recent past, beginning with an effort to extend the Department of City Planning’s SurveyLA initiative from 1980 to the year 2000.

12. Strengthen financial and other penalties for the prohibited demolition of significant architecture, particularly residential architecture.

13. Pursue the expansion of Historic-Cultural Monument status to include thematic or non-contiguous designations, for example the Bungalow Court, and to protect the body of work of a single prominent firm or social or cultural movement.

14. Consider a City-led effort to mark and make visible the boundaries of racially exclusive zoning and lending practices in housing, e.g. redlining, or the communities displaced or disfigured by freeway construction.

Reconsider Memorials and Difficult Histories

15. Create a garden or series of gardens dedicated to the essential workers of Los Angeles.

16. Arrange specific community-engagement sessions during the remainder of 2021, guided by the recommendations in this report, to solicit ideas for commemorating the 30th anniversary, in 2022, of the 1992 civic unrest in Los Angeles. The goal should be a range of commemorative approaches, rather than a single event or memorial.

17. Work with the leadership of the Chinese American Museum and a range of community groups to develop citywide commemorations, considering both ephemeral and permanent forms, to mark the 150th anniversary of the 1871 Anti-Chinese Massacre on October 24, 2021.

18. Develop strategies to recontextualize outdated or fraught memorials as an alternative to removal—although removal will, in certain cases, remain the best option.

Note about #17: These citywide commemorations could also be used as an opportunity to discuss the violence against Asian communities that has spiked in 2020 and 2021 as a result of the pandemic. The 1871 Anti-Chinese Massacre was a tragic event that must not be forgotten, but the City should still work to facilitate discussions about anti-Asian violence that persists today.

Christopher Hawthorne

I think it is a good idea to create more memorials in the form of gardens, especially because there is a lack of public (outdoor) space in Los Angeles where people can spend time without paying money. This is an especially important issue during the pandemic, when spending time indoors with others risks spreading the virus.

Daily Life in Early Los Angeles

Marissa López

“Cycling defamiliarizes our sense of space by allowing us to move through the city at different speeds; it amplifies and makes possible what philosopher Henri Bergson refers to as “presence.” To be “present” in space is to experience time as “duration,” apart from chronology. This idea allows Bergson to distinguish between knowledge and sense experience and to develop his theory that an encounter with anything outside our self is a physical transformation that depends on presence and duration.

Changing the way we move through the city can shift us away from a conception of time as spatial progression to time as sense, towards Bergson’s duration, where the past can be sensed rather than known. Duration involves “dimensional” experience, according to Bergson, rather than “representational.” He explains this as the difference between walking through a city versus looking at pictures or reading about it. Our tour replaces representation with dimension, offering a transformative experience of the history of Mexican Los Angeles. For us, transformation relies on bikes: specifically, in the case of this project, the bike-share program that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or Metro, launched in 2016.”

This reminds me of the dérive, defined by Guy Debord as “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.”

Wikipedia writes that the dérive is “an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and ‘let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.’ Though solo dérives are possible, Debord indicates that ‘the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions.’

The dérive’s goals include studying the terrain of the city (psychogeography) and emotional disorientation, both of which lead to the potential creation of Situations.”

The dérive and this idea of a bike tour both consider the time and feelings that come with exploring a city, rather than just the movement through geographical space.

Daily Life in Early Los Angeles

Marissa López

“Cycling defamiliarizes our sense of space by allowing us to move through the city at different speeds; it amplifies and makes possible what philosopher Henri Bergson refers to as “presence.” To be “present” in space is to experience time as “duration,” apart from chronology. This idea allows Bergson to distinguish between knowledge and sense experience and to develop his theory that an encounter with anything outside our self is a physical transformation that depends on presence and duration.

Changing the way we move through the city can shift us away from a conception of time as spatial progression to time as sense, towards Bergson’s duration, where the past can be sensed rather than known. Duration involves “dimensional” experience, according to Bergson, rather than “representational.” He explains this as the difference between walking through a city versus looking at pictures or reading about it. Our tour replaces representation with dimension, offering a transformative experience of the history of Mexican Los Angeles. For us, transformation relies on bikes: specifically, in the case of this project, the bike-share program that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or Metro, launched in 2016.”

6710 La Tijera Blvd.

Sam Sweet

“Like every Armet & Davis diner, Pann’s was designed to seduce motorists from a passing glance. The exterior walls were glass curtains that revealed huge glowing triangular pendant lamps. It could have been a Cadillac showroom. From the outside, it looked as spacious as a church and as mesmeric as an aquarium. Helen said each coffee shop should always appear like the site of a special event, even if the only movement within was a transient sipping coffee on a swivel stool.”

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