I. Architecture as Therapy

According to LA’s Early Moderns, the architects who brought the spare glass-wall style of living to Los Angeles in the 1920s and 30s saw the promise of architecture as revolutionary. It held the key to physical and emotional health. California architect Irving Gill was not only concerned with bringing more of what nature had to offer into people’s daily lives, he also felt that there was a morality inherent to his chosen field—architecture had the potential to do social good. He chose materials that were cheap and widely available, and used them efficiently. He sought to make good housing accessible to the wealthy and the working class alike, building at one point a barracks for Mexican workers and their families, and at another housing for Native Americans in an Indian resettlement area. Some prefabricated homes could be purchased and assembled by unskilled workmen in less than a week’s time.

In 1945, Arts and Architecture magazine sponsored a Case Study House Program, inviting architects to build six model homes intended to bring the most innovative ideals of architecture—as seen in the German Bauhaus movement and the work of American architect Philip Johnson—to everyday citizens. Many of these designs, created by Richard Neutra and the inventers Charles and Ray Eames, were phenomena of resourcefulness and odd beauty. But for the thousands of soldiers returning from World War II, and a majority of homebuilders who sought to house them, these modern visions (made with glass, steel, and plastic) seemed freakish—not to mention threatening. Boxy, uniform suburban tract homes sprouted up in the valley instead, bringing residents farther and farther away from the city’s riverside areas, like South Central Los Angeles.

Around the same time that the modernists attempted to revolutionize the architectural landscape of Los Angeles, educators were trying to account for increasing diversity in city schools. In an article in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Laura Pulido writes that Latino, Chinese, African-American and Caucasian students spent their childhoods together in elementary school classrooms. Pulido notes that some teachers even created curricula that honored the backgrounds of a diverse student body—long before the Civil Rights era prompted the establishment of ethnic studies departments in universities. These diverse populations were composed of working class families who lived along the Los Angeles River, where one could find industrial work and affordable housing.

But schools were not exactly havens of progressive ideals. Teachers pushed minority students to prepare for work as plumbers and construction workers like their fathers. Despite laws intended to keep kids in school, the Depression, World War II, and other factors forced children from less affluent families out of school and into the workforce. By the time children of this era reached adolescence, they were again surrounded by people who looked just like them. Because neighborhoods were usually composed of one ethnic group, white residents were able to modify policies that dictated the neighborhoods from which children were eligible to attend the best schools, making it less and less likely that Caucasian children would mix with minorities. Black students, like would-be mayor Tom Bradley, had to lie about their residence if they wanted to get a good education.

Some blacks sought to move into neighborhoods with better facilities and higher home values, but housing restrictions prevented this. An article by John Sides in the Pacific Historical Review points out that if African-Americans—many of whom had moved recently from the South—were able to find a loophole and buy or rent in a mostly white neighborhood, they could expect to meet with hostility, expressed through burning crosses, vigilante groups, and what has become known as an infamous system of racist police brutality. Los Angeles began to be separated by hard-drawn geographical lines: a city color-coded.