Eden By Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region

Greg Hise and William Deverell

2000. University of California Press. 314 pp. $25.95

In 1927 the business leaders of Los Angeles, represented by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce’s blue-ribbon Citizens’ Committee, asked two of the best urban planners of the 20th century for their advice. Three years later, after careful study, Harlan Bartholomew and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. gave it in their 138-page report, “Parks, Playgrounds and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region.” They covered everything from tiny beaches to the entire region of (then) two million people, and they offered Los Angeles something rarer than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: the chance to preserve and enhance the glorious Southern California landscape that had made their city a synonym for paradise. Their offer was rejected, and it’s no coincidence that other places, viewing the results, have long used Los Angeles as a synonym not for paradise but for its opposite.

“The Region is noted for its many natural charms and its varied human interests,” the planners wrote in their stiff-collar but straightforward prose. “Especially attractive, and especially subject to destruction, are the opportunities offered in the Region for enjoyment of out-of-door life…. with the growth of a great metropolis here, the absence of parks will make living conditions less and less attractive, less and less wholesome …. In so far, therefore, as the people fail to show the understanding, courage, and organizing ability necessary at this crisis, the growth of the Region will tend to strangle itself.” {83}

Strictly speaking, “the people” never got a chance to fail. Few copies of the report were printed, and it was never publicly discussed. After a brief initial announcement in the newspapers of March 16, 1930, it was disappeared, sunk as deep as an informant wearing concrete booties.

Historians Greg Hise and William Deverell don’t put the situation so luridly. They do note that during the months that the planners worked with the Citizens’ Committee, the Chamber’s leaders “could not seem to keep track of the Citizens’ Committee” that they themselves had authorized. Many of the Chamber’s leaders had wanted to seize primacy in recreational planning, but shrank back when they began to realize that would mean a regional authority with taxing and planning powers. “Thinking about an integrated park system, one that incorporated beaches and playgrounds, was one thing,” Hise and Deverell write. “Making the agency that could oversee such a thing was an entirely different matter.” {38}

Hise and Deverell sought out, scanned, and reprinted the plan, along with images of Southern California in the 1920s, and added some 100 pages of history, commentary, and analysis. The quality of the color maps in the original is greatly diminished by their being reproduced in grayscale, but the quality of the thought isn’t. Interviewed informally in a postscript, landscape architect Laurie Olin expresses amazement at the planners’ ability to master the detail without losing track of the big picture. {302} They note, for instance, that the beach at Coney Island had an average of 56 square feet per person “under conditions reported to be unduly crowded,” while on July 4, 1928, the beach at Santa Monica had just 15 square feet per person. {153} At the same time they marshal facts in an attempt to persuade their client to go for a reorganized government and tax structure in order to preserve paradise.

Mountain development drew their attention and (eventually) sharpened their prose: “It costs so much in the long run to adapt rough mountain lands satisfactorily to ordinary intensive private uses that their real net value as raw material for such use is generally far less than their value for watershed protection and for public recreation. Unfortunately in the local speculative land market this fact is often ignored and subdivision sales are made which commit the community to extravagantly wasteful private and public expenditures for converting a good thing of one kind into a poor thing of another kind.” {92}

Nor did they shrink from comparing LA to Paris, which transformed itself at great expense between 1850 and 1890. Now it’s the world’s travel center, they write, despite the fact that “Paris had far fewer economic possibilities, a much less advantageous location, and a smaller population than Los Angeles; and a climate that compares unfavorably.” {131}

The message, as is often the case with environmental issues, is the choice between paying now in capital expenditures (for acquiring parkland), or paying endlessly later in day-to-day ongoing operating expenses (to bail out flooded homes built where parkways should have gone), and paying implicitly in the decreased willingness of people to migrate there. “Study has unearthed no factor which indicates that the people of this Region will be permanently satisfied with lower standards than those of other great communities, .. . The big question is whether the people are socially and politically so slow, in comparison with the amazing rapidity of urban growth here, that they will dumbly let the procession go by and pay a heavy penalty in later years for their slowness and timidity today.” {126}

Some really big pictures are almost impossible to grasp. Eighty years ago “pleasure driving” was rather like “surfing the web” is now — the leading edge of a new and unfamiliar reality. The authors unhesitatingly count “pleasure driving” as one aspect of recreation, along with tot lots and football fields. The possibility that their projected pleasure parkways might get morphed into sterile interstate highways doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. Olin observes wonderingly, “Even the most thoughtful, environmentally conscious, prescient people in America had no idea of the transformative nature of the automobile.” {303}

Still, the idea of parkways that ran through linear parks in flood zones remains cutting-edge almost a century later. Less so is their idea of walling in the Santa Monica harbor with a trafficway. {158, 298}

For lovers and would-be lovers of LA, the words and images are a treasure trove of recovered knowledge, the kind that it almost hurts to have. For planners and designers, they’re “a textbook example of the distance that separates a plan, a vision of the future, from its realization.” {53} Dark as it was kept, even this plan influenced future work in the area. Professionals to the last, Olmsted and Bartholomew didn’t withdraw in disgust, they drew on the knowledge gained and kept working.

Connoisseurs of the planning process in growing cities may see the book from a different angle: it’s also the story of a sales pitch gone awry, a deal undone, a long-term investment plan turned down in favor of a long series of nights on the town. Olin puts it most crisply: “Great clients rise to the occasion.” {309}

And lest we find it too easy to look down our noses at the long-gone leaders of a booming city, Olin adds some perspective. Back in the 19th century, cities like New York and Boston and Chicago “bonded themselves heavily to undertake these projects [such as Central Park], projects they considered important public deeds or public works. But now cities aren’t doing that. Cities today aren’t putting themselves in hock to build public parks the way they did when the Olmsted office was active. … If the public wants this public good, the public has to get involved.” {306-7} These days we seem to want something for nothing. And like LA, nothing may just be what we get.

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