Author: Thomas Joseph SittonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Los Angeles (Calif.)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Urban Politics and Reform in New Deal Los Angeles
Author: Thomas Joseph SittonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Los Angeles (Calif.)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Los Angeles Transformed
Author: Tom SittonPublisher: UNM Press
ISBN: 9780826335272
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
When Fletcher Bowron (1887-1968) ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 1938, his twelve years as a superior court judge with a reputation for honesty and fairness carried him to victory against a notoriously corrupt incumbent. During his nearly fifteen years as a neo-progressive mayor, Bowron presided over fundamental reforms in the police department, public utilities, and other agencies charged with basic services, rooting out bribery, kickbacks, and influence peddling. World War II brought economic and population booms, racial conflict, social dislocation, and environmental problems to Los Angeles and complicated Mayor Bowron's job. After the war Bowron initiated massive public housing and desegregation projects. These forward-looking programs alienated enough voters to cost him the 1953 election as his leftist supporters fell away under the influence of McCarthyism. This political history of the mid-twentieth century reform period in Los Angeles is also a case study of the ways outside events can affect municipal affairs. As Tom Sitton demonstrates, the choices made during Bowron's administration have had a direct bearing on how Los Angeles looks today and how its government operates.
Radical L.A.
Author: Errol Wayne StevensPublisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806186488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Book Description
When the depression of the 1890s prompted unemployed workers from Los Angeles to join a nationwide march on Washington, “Coxey’s Army” marked the birth of radicalism in that city. In this first book to trace the subsequent struggle between the radical left and L.A.’s power structure, Errol Wayne Stevens tells how both sides shaped the city’s character from the turn of the twentieth century through the civil rights era. On the radical right, Los Angeles’s business elite, supported by the Los Angeles Times, sought the destruction of the trade-union movement—defended on the left by socialists, Wobblies, communists, and other groups. In portraying the conflict between leftist and capitalist visions for the future, Stevens brings to life colorful personalities such as Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis and Socialist mayoral candidate Job Harriman. He also re-creates events such as the 1910 bombing of the Times building, the savage suppression of the 1923 longshoremen’s strike, and the 1965 Watts riots, which signaled that L.A. politics had become divided less along class lines than by complex racial and ethnic differences. The book takes stock of the rivalry between right and left over the several decades in which it repeatedly flared. Radical L.A. is a balanced work of meticulous scholarship that pieces together a rich chronicle usually seen only in smaller snippets or from a single vantage point. It will change the way we see the history of the City of Angels.
The Reluctant Metropolis
Author: William FultonPublisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801865060
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller "William Fulton is the Raymond Chandler of Los Angeles real estate."—Kevin Starr, California State Librarian and author of Material Dreams: Los Angeles through the 1920s A Los Angeles Times Bestseller"William Fulton is the Raymond Chandler of Los Angeles real estate."—Kevin Starr, California State Librarian and author of Material Dreams: Los Angeles through the 1920s In twelve engaging essays, William Fulton chronicles the history of urban planning in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, tracing the legacy of short-sighted political and financial gains that has resulted in a vast urban region on the brink of disaster. Looking at such diverse topics as shady real estate speculations, the construction of the Los Angeles subway, the battle over the future of South Central L.A. after the 1992 riots, and the emergence of Las Vegas as "the new Los Angeles," Fulton offers a fresh perspective on the city's epic sprawl. The only way to reverse the historical trends that have made Los Angeles increasingly unliveable, Fulton concludes, is to confront the prevailing "cocoon citizenship," the mind-set that prevents the city's inhabitants and leaders from recognizing Los Angeles's patchwork of communities as a single metropolis.
The City at Stake
Author: Raphael J. SonensheinPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400849640
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
The City at Stake tells the dramatic story of how the nation's second-largest city completed a major reform of its government in the face of a deeply threatening movement for secession by the San Fernando Valley. How did Los Angeles, a diverse city with an image of unstructured politics and fragmented government, find a way to unify itself around a controversial set of reforms? Los Angeles government nearly collapsed in political bickering over charter reform, which generated the remarkable phenomenon of two competing charter reform commissions. Out of this nearly impossible tangle, reformers managed to knit a new city charter that greatly expanded institutions for citizen participation and addressed long-standing weaknesses in the role of the mayor. The new charter, pursued by a Republican mayor, won its greatest support from liberal whites who had long favored reform measures. Written by an urban scholar who played a key role in the charter reform process, the book offers both a theoretical perspective on the process of institutional reform in an age of diversity, and a firsthand, inside-the-box look at how major reform works. The new afterword by the author analyzes the 2005 election of Los Angeles's first modern Latino mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, a milestone in the development of urban reform coalitions in an age of immigration and ethnic diversity.
Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era
Author: Clarence N. StonePublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022628915X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
For decades, North American cities racked by deindustrialization and population loss have followed one primary path in their attempts at revitalization: a focus on economic growth in downtown and business areas. Neighborhoods, meanwhile, have often been left severely underserved. There are, however, signs of change. This collection of studies by a distinguished group of political scientists and urban planning scholars offers a rich analysis of the scope, potential, and ramifications of a shift still in progress. Focusing on neighborhoods in six cities—Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Toronto—the authors show how key players, including politicians and philanthropic organizations, are beginning to see economic growth and neighborhood improvement as complementary goals. The heads of universities and hospitals in central locations also find themselves facing newly defined realities, adding to the fluidity of a new political landscape even as structural inequalities exert a continuing influence. While not denying the hurdles that community revitalization still faces, the contributors ultimately put forth a strong case that a more hospitable local milieu can be created for making neighborhood policy. In examining the course of experiences from an earlier period of redevelopment to the present postindustrial city, this book opens a window on a complex process of political change and possibility for reform.
The Next Los Angeles
Author: Robert GottliebPublisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520250095
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
"With this rich account of its community and labor struggles, the city of angels—and apocalypse—becomes the city of hope."—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America "This wonderful book, with its evocations of LA's alternative histories, and its bold templates for social and environmental justice, is proof that the American Left is alive and well, especially in Southern California."—Mike Davis, author of Dead Cities "A rare book combining history, analysis, strategy and a platform – and it may well be carried out in this decade."—Tom Hayden, former State Senator, Los Angeles
The City, Revisited
Author: Dennis R. JuddPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816665753
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 389
Book Description
Reexamining urban scholarship for the twenty-first century.
Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles
Author: Stephanie LewthwaitePublisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816526338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
Beginning near the end of the nineteenth century, a generation of reformers set their sights on the growing Mexican community in Los Angeles. Experimenting with a variety of policies on health, housing, education, and labor, these reformersÑsettlement workers, educationalists, Americanizers, government officials, and employersÑattempted to transform the Mexican community with a variety of distinct and often competing agendas. In Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles, Stephanie Lewthwaite presents evidence from a myriad of sources that these varied agendas of reform consistently supported the creation of racial, ethnic, and cultural differences across Los Angeles. Reformers simultaneously promoted acculturation and racialization, creating a Òlandscape of differenceÓ that significantly shaped the place and status of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans from the Progressive era through the New Deal. The book journeys across the urban, suburban, and rural spaces of Greater Los Angeles as it moves through time and examines the ruralÐurban migration of Mexicans on both a local and a transnational scale. Part 1 traverses the world of Progressive reform in urban Los Angeles, exploring the link between the regionÕs territorial and industrial expansion, early campaigns for social and housing reform, and the emergence of a first-generation Mexican immigrant population. Part 2 documents the shift from official Americanization and assimilation toward nativism and exclusion. Here Lewthwaite examines competing cultures of reform and the challenges to assimilation from Mexican nationalists and American nativists. Part 3 analyzes reform during the New Deal, which spawned the active resistance of second-generation Mexican Americans. Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles achieves a full, broad, and nuanced account of the variousÑand often contradictoryÑefforts to reform the Mexican population of Los Angeles. With a transnational approach grounded in historical context, this book will appeal to students of history, cultural studies, and literary studies
New York and Los Angeles
Author: David HallePublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226313700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 575
Book Description
Capturing much of what is new and vibrant in urban studies today, "New York and Los Angeles" should prove to be valuable reading for scholars in that field, as well as in sociology, political science and government.