Abstract
The Getty Research Institute’s new translation by Timothy Grundy of Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California, a study by Anton Wagner originally published in 1935 in German, offers readers the opportunity to step back into the Los Angeles of another era. The book is an excellent resource for those interested in the history of the field of geography, the intersections between Germany and the United States in the 1930s, and the development of the city of Los Angeles.
In his introduction, the book’s editor, Edward Dimendberg, situates Wagner’s study alongside those of other geographers from the 1930s. German scholars had played a pioneering role in the formation of the field, and Wagner is situated in a longer tradition of geographers who traveled to and studied faraway locations around the globe, as in the significant early example of Alexander von Humboldt, who also came to the Americas. At the same time, Wagner had undertaken this project as his dissertation, and it demonstrates his response to important changes in the field. In many ways, Wagner anticipated scholarly trends that would only be normalized after the Second World War, including in his decision to dedicate an entire study to a single metropolis. Furthermore, while earlier geographers were interested in natural features, Wagner shifted the emphasis away from erosion cycle theory and environmental determinism and towards a human ecology that introduced historical change as an important factor.
Dimendberg’s introduction also addresses Wagner in the context of American and even local, Los Angeles academic traditions of the time, including the regionalist movement of the 1930s. Noted, but worthy of further study, is the connection between Wagner’s work and government sponsored, New Deal programs of the era. Contemporaries of Wagner, such as Joseph Pomeroy Widney, Hubert Howe Bancroft, and Charles Fletcher Lummis were also invested in researching and writing about Los Angeles history. The carefully reconstructed bibliography and the captions of images in the appendix testify to the range of source material available to scholars of the era. According to Dimendberg, “Wagner read nearly everything available at the time on Los Angeles,” and his sources extended beyond municipal archives to those of banks, the automobile clubs, and title insurance companies that maintained in-house historians and libraries of primary materials. 1
Wagner’s book is an essential resource in any study of Los Angeles as it marks the first published urban geography of the city. Notwithstanding an initial period of success after its 1935 publication in Germany, including a favorable reception in Los Angeles in reviews such as one in the Los Angeles Times, the book quickly fell into obscurity. Despite an early attempt at a translation by O. Paul Straubinger, the book was never published in English likely given a reticence to celebrate a German’s perspective of the city after the beginnings of World War II. Both Dimendberg and Anthony Vidler, who has written the foreword, are interested in the revival of the text by the architectural critic Reyner Banham in the 1960s, including the reference to it in Banham’s 1971 book, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Dimendberg and Vidler analyze the important parallels between Wagner’s and Banham’s working methods and interests, including in the complex challenge posed by mobility in the city. Dimendberg also draws connections between Wagner and Mike Davis who, in his 1990 book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, comes to similar conclusions to Wagner about the antidemocratic arrangement of the city but is motivated by anticapitalistic sentiments unlike Wagner, who was an advocate of commercial development.
Wagner’s study of Los Angeles is driven by questions of what makes the region exceptional. While the geology plays a fundamental role in this analysis, Wagner focuses on inhospitable features that discourage growth rather than ones that encouraged it. Today, as Los Angeles continues to be celebrated for its temperate weather, we might ask why Wagner chose to emphasize these adverse conditions in his study. According to Wagner, despite the lack of a natural harbor, and insufficient water sources, the city grew and flourished. Wagner suggests that Los Angeles succeeded in becoming such a large urban environment as a result of its citizens not its geographic location. Wagner’s study unfolds chronologically, with a heavy emphasis on the entrepreneurial efforts that characterized three boom cycles between 1880 and the mid-1930s. As Dimendberg describes, Wagner’s celebration of economic stimulus demonstrates a common approach by his generation of thinkers, who had just experienced a global depression.
In some ways, Wagner’s observations are echoed by subsequent scholars of Los Angeles: the tourism industry, real estate speculation, and transportation infrastructure played essential roles in the ways human intervention shaped the environment. While these larger themes might not serve as new information for the average reader, Wagner’s proximity to his subject of research, and his style, in which he makes ample space for small details, promises innumerable strange and surprising observations. Tantalizing references, such as one to the fashion for miniature golf courses on undeveloped Los Angeles lots between 1930 and 1931, might inspire new research. As a text of its period, the lavish detail differs from much contemporary scholarship, and can at times risk overwhelming the reader, lending the book to a highly specific mode of inquiry as well. Are you interested in all of the locations in which Los Angeles’s street grids intersected or a catalog of the species of trees that had been propagated in the city in 1935? If yes, then Wagner’s book is for you.
When reading the book, it is important to remember Wagner would have considered his German contemporaries his primary audience and could hardly have imagined the first published English translation of his work coming nearly 90 years after the initial German one. Wagner uses German comparisons for distances and size, relating Los Angeles to the local landscape features that his original readers might have known firsthand. He defines American concepts, from the “term city [which] has entered German urban-geographic nomenclature from the English language, specifically in reference to London.” 2 Instead, Wagner introduces a different, understanding of the term “when applied to urban centers of America” which “refers to an urban district with an independent municipal government.” 3 Similarly, he uses the term boom throughout, one with significance in the United States that he lays out for his readers: “U.S. Americans employ the word boom to characterize such developments by leaps and bounds.” 4
While Dimendberg writes in his introduction that he “seeks to generate rather than preempt discussion of a work that has been little studied, not offer a final judgement,” such as judgments that previously contributed to the omission of Wagner from the historical record, the introduction does do important work to situate Wagner within the context of Nazi Germany and highlight the biases in the work. After Wagner returned from Los Angeles in 1933, he worked for the government of the Third Reich from 1934 to 1945. Although Dimendberg’s careful analysis of terms such as Lebensraum, which gained a new, racially charged significance when employed by Adolf Hitler, suggest Wagner was using the word in its original sense, other parts of the book, especially the conclusion which was written at a later date, are blatantly influenced by the nationalist tone of the Nazi party. Throughout the text, Wagner favorably characterizes people of Nordic heritage, who he argues have superior entrepreneurial aptitude, denigrating the contributions of others, such as Los Angeles residents of Japanese descent.
While the introduction does address Wagner’s text in the context of geography in the German academy, it does not discuss parallels between Wagner’s study and those of German ethnographers and anthropologists. Like geography, the discipline of anthropology in Germany had grown rapidly alongside an imperial push for empire. Other leading, German-born anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, had traveled great distances, to North Americas’ Pacific Coast, in search of unique cultural and communal traditions. While Charles Lummis is framed as Wagner’s peer in the introduction, given his interest in Los Angeles history, Lummis serves as an intriguing comparison for other reasons as well. In addition to his anthropological studies of Native American culture, Lummis was well known for walking from Cincinnati to Los Angeles on foot, recording the journey as newspaper correspondent. Like Lummis, Wagner modeled the peculiar way in which a landscape could be observed and understood while walking, as he traversed Los Angeles primarily by foot during his six months studying the city. Employing the same techniques as an anthropologist, Wagner immersed himself in the local community in order to engage in this study.
Anthropology as a field was driven by questions of racial difference at the time. The parallels between Wagner’s working methods, and those of an anthropologist, raise the important question of how Wagner understood the residents of Los Angles, whether people of color or not, in relation to German citizens. Wagner most commonly belittles people who came to Los Angeles from the Midwest, implicitly privileging a socioeconomic elite originating in the northeastern United States. For example, in one passage, he credits “the arrival from the Midwest of members of the petty bourgeoise and farmers,” who he refers to as an “unsophisticated group of inhabitants,” with “ugly buildings in bad taste” which “succumb to the prevailing monotony of the Midwest.” 5 While Wagner focuses on Los Angeles’s entrepreneurial successes as a potential model for Germany, he also might have been motivated by notions of primitivism and the exotic when selecting Los Angeles as the subject of his research.
At the same time as Wagner’s biases must be acknowledged and treated with skepticism and even criticism, the moments in which his personal investments come to the fore can be the most interesting. Wagner’s careful research of the German immigrant community in Los Angeles could be a vital source for future scholars in addition to his careful analysis of viticulture traditions in the region, research inspired by his own family’s involvement in Germany’s wine industry.
The book’s many topics give it an interdisciplinary appeal. Beyond planning and development of the cityscape, the text touches upon issues of political, social, and commercial history. The book is also of interest to scholars of visual culture. While preparing his research, Wagner took 432 photographs of the city which are now owned by the California Historical Society. Only sixteen were included in the final, printed text, and instead, the medium served as an aide-mémoire for the geographer, who wrote “I documented the appearance of the city and its districts in countless photographs that served to remind me of the details that make up the cityscape, even across the great spatial and temporal distance.” 6 The documentary record anticipated the efflorescence of photographic survey projects sponsored by the New Deal and later initiatives in urban photography. Like many photographers of the Farm Security Administration, for example, Wagner did not identify as an artist. He does not analyze the images within the text, leaving them as an independent appendix, and evidences an indifference to the visual arts in general throughout his analysis of Los Angeles, something Dimendberg finds startling given Wagner’s doubtless exposure to the Bauhaus’s popularization of modernist art and architecture in his native country of Germany. However, despite his refusal of the mantle of the artist, Wagner’s work not only parallels that of later historians and critics, but also that of artists such as Ed Ruscha, Denise Scott-Brown, and Robert Venturi, who sought to chart and map the way people moved through cities such as Los Angeles.
Ultimately, to the contemporary reader, Wagner’s text not only communicates the unprecedented, rapid development of Los Angeles in the boom years that he studies, but also is instructive in considering the continued growth of the city since the author undertook the project. Many of Wagner’s observations describe a city with striking differences from the Los Angeles we know today, including the startling statistic that only 55% of the land it encompassed had been developed at the time of Wagner’s visit. We might ask whether an updated version of this study is demanded today and how it might look different, taking a more objective approach to the racial and socioeconomic iniquities evidenced by the cityscape.
