Not motoring
Urban nightmare
Gavin Stamp
RMS Queen Mary is now permanently berthed at Long Beach, California, close to the geodesic dome in which Howard Hugh- es kept his huge and hopeless flying boat. The great ship still looks noble, if a little sad, and she manages to triumph over her immediate, preposterous surroundings: a Shakespearean heritage centre in which even the Scottish tourist shop is half-tim- bered — as if that had anything to do with the Glasgow of the hard 1930s when Hull No. 534 was built and launched on the Clyde.
The Queen Mary remains a reminder that international travel could once be calm and elegant. She belongs, of course, to the era of railways rather than that of cars and aeroplanes. And, oddly enough, it is possi- ble to reach Long Beach on the surviving remnant of Los Angeles's electric railway system. I was in LA to speak to the fourth World Art Deco Congress and, after dining on the ship, delegates had a somewhat fraught journey back to the Biltmore Hotel on the old Metro line that goes through Watts and other less salubrious districts.
The Metro system of Los Angeles con- sists of just three lines. One is new, and burrows under the Downtown to reach Union Station. The new stations are pala- tial and a little forlorn, for they are not yet? — much frequented as the line hardly extends anywhere useful. More is planned, but money- and car-obsessed politicians are questioning the cost while the tunnel works out by Frank Lloyd Wright's Barnsdall House recently collapsed. But the real trouble with the Metro is that what is now being done is too little and too late. Only a comprehensive system can begin to wean the public off the dense tangle of freeways which dominates the urban nightmare which is Los Angeles.
The tragedy is that LA once had an effi- cient and extensive public transport system. It was called the Pacific Electric Railway and in the 1920s it moved most commuters about the huge grid of low-density urban development between the mountains and the sea. By the 1950s most of the network was abandoned. The conventional explana- tion for this is the greater mobility offered by the automobile, but recently it has become public knowledge that this was not quite the case. Americans, perhaps, are given to conspiracy theories but in LA there certainly was a conspiracy. It was called National City Lines. Found- ed in 1936, it was, in fact, funded by a sub- sidiary of General Motors with extra help from Firestone Tyres and other concerns with an interest in promoting the universal- ity of the automobile. And, with this finan- cial backing, National City Lines bought up the electric railway and streetcar systems of city after city across the United States ... and ran them down. The services were made less frequent, so less attractive, until in the end whole lines could be closed. And then, to finish off the victim, the track beds were sold off. Once there was a direct electric railway line from Downtown LA to Santa Monica. Today it would be a huge boon, but to recreate it would cost a fortune.
So the motor car triumphed. And Los Angeles is its apotheosis. It is difficult to convey to those who have not been there just how ghastly the place is. Once upon a time, it may have seduced the disaffected British technomaniacs like the late Reyner Banham, but not any more — surely? For the non-motorist, the place is almost fright- ening as getting about is so difficult: virtu- ally no public transport and taxis expensive. But, whether you are in a car or a taxi, the roads are often so clogged that movement is slow — whether on the freeways or in the endless grid-iron of squalid and con- fused urban sprawl.
Only in Downtown LA is it possible to walk without being arrested as a 'transient' or deviant. Here the grid is built up with grand urban architecture, including the splendidly refurbished 1920s Biltmore and the magnificently restored and extended Public Library, designed by the great Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. But to no avail: most Angelinos never go near the city's heart — it is full of poor Hispanics, after all. Historical justice here, of course: California was stolen from Mexico by force, and now Spanish is returning as the first language.
The dream is fading. Hollywood has lost all glamour and those who can are now flee- ing north, to San Francisco and Seattle.
'My client wishes to protest about the jury in this stalking case, m'Lud!' Stand on one of the hills that surround LA and you can see why: even on a clear day, a filthy brown cloud of smog lies over the hot, dry city. This pollution is the ultimate tri- umph of General Motors. In Britain, the debate between the attraction of the pri- vate car and the necessity for some sort of public transport is conducted as if it is still a matter of free choice on a level playing field. But in LA the electric railways were destroyed by an overweening industrial car- tel leaving millions of people with no choice at all. And, even in Britain, the motor car lobby is as powerful as it is men- dacious.
So we have much to learn from Los Angeles — and it is not about the freedom of the road or the beauty of the Santa Monica/San Diego freeway intersection which made Banham wax so lyrical. It is about the disaster which can overtake a city when the motor car is allowed to triumph.
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