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Abstract
The urban unrest following the Rodney King verdict was a turning point for the city of Los Angeles, which became the physical stage for violent expressions of protest. Specific “flashpoints” triggered increasing unrest with a particular urban geography. This paper examines how many of the most consequential sites exist today without a palpable trace of the events that momentarily brought visibility to long-standing inequities and that indelibly transformed the city. The study considers the potential of preserving the spatial inheritance of the uprisings as restored sites of resistance, while addressing the pressing needs of disinvested areas today.
Notes
1 The political contentions over terminology used to describe the events of April 1992—riot, uprising, rebellion, unrest, insurrection, crisis, etc.—are often used as an expression of differing ideological viewpoints and political allegiances. Riots, while most recognizable, is a term perpetuated by the right. For some review of terminology, see Lynn Mie Itagaki, Civil Racism: The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion and the Crisis of Racial Burnout (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2016), 4–5. The Rodney King verdict refers to the acquittal of the white police officers caught on video tape beating Rodney King, who was African American.
2 Mike Davis and Edward Soja are often cited as key figures in what is called the LA School of Urbanism or “postmodern urbanism.” For a synopsis of these topics, see Michael Dear and Steven Flusty, “Postmodern Urbanism,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88, no. 1 (1998): 50–72; and Michael Dear, “The Los Angeles School of Urbanism: An Intellectual History,” Urban Geography 24, no. 6 (2003): 493–509. For a counterargument to the “reductionism” of these theorists, see Robert Sullivan, Street Level: Los Angeles in the Twenty-First Century (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014). Of particular use to this research was Edward Soja, “Los Angeles, 1965–1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to Restructuring Generated Crisis,” in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the 20th Century, ed. Allen Scott and Edward Soja (Berkeley: University of California, 1996). Recent documentary coverage recognizing the 25th anniversary of the riots focus primarily on police brutality, drawing connections to recent high-profile cases where police have killed black citizens. See LA Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later, directed by One9 and Eric Parker (A&E, 2017); Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982–1992, directed by John Ridley (ABC, 2017); Burn, Motherf*cker, Burn!, directed by Sacha Jenkins (Showtime, 2017); Lost Tapes: LA Riots, directed by Tom Jennings (Smithsonian, 2017); and LA 92, directed by Daniel Lindsay and T. J. Martin (National Geographic, 2017).
3 I use the term restore as one of the “four approaches to the treatment of historic properties” (preservation, restoration, rehabilitation, reconstruction) canonized by the US Secretary of the Interior Standards that evolved out of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. According to these standards, “Restoration depicts a property at a particular period of time in its history, while removing evidence of other periods.” Secretary of the Interior's Standards, “Four Approaches to the Treatment of Historic Properties,” accessed December 20, 2017, https://www.nps.gov/tps/standards/four-treatments.htm. In this case, the “other periods” are years of continued neglect and disinvestment. Here the study asks for both the restoration of public space and the preservation of memory.
4 Peter Kwong, “The First Multicultural Riots,” Village Voice, June 9, 1992.
5 Sources that corroborate on the general facts related to the lead-up to the uprisings include Don Hazen, ed., Inside the LA Riots: What Really Happened—And Why It Will Happen Again (New York: Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1992); Edward T. Chang and Jeannette Diaz-Veizades, Ethnic Peace and in the American City (New York: NYU Press, 1999); Robert Gooding-Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993); Edward T. Chang and Russell C. Leong, Los Angeles: Struggles Toward Multiethnic Community (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). See also the University of Southern California's Christopher and Webster Commission Records Collections held by the USC Library Special Collections. Recent documentaries listed in n. 2 provide additional sources, as does much coverage in the Los Angeles Times.
6 Crime statistics using data from LA County Sheriff's Department and California Department of Justice found in Los Angeles Almanac, “Gang Related Crime, Los Angeles County,” accessed January 18, 2018, http://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr03x.php.
7 Mike Davis, The City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso Books, 1990), 251–52. This passage includes the statement: “… exceeding synchronization, thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with identifying street numbers, transforming the aerial view of the city into a huge police grid.” This has since been discredited (see Geoff Manaugh, “How Aerial Surveillance Has Changed Policing—and Crime—in Los Angeles,” accessed December 2, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/magazine/panopticops.html?) and a number of critics have challenged the accuracy of some of Davis's other claims. Rob Sullivan critiques Davis and allies for presenting a “lop-sided and myopic view of the City of Angels” (Sullivan, Street Level, 60). See also Christopher Hawthorne, “Reading LA: Mike Davis, ‘City of Quartz’ and Southern California's ‘Spatial Apartheid,’” Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2011, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/06/where-to-start-when-it-comes-to-city-of-quartz-mike-daviss-1990-polemic-against-the-rampant-privatization-and-gated-communi.html.
8 Elston Carr, “Riot Homecoming,” in Inside the LA Riots, 52.
9 See Calvin Sims, “In Los Angeles, It's South-Central No More,” New York Times, April 10, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/us/in-los-angeles-it-s-south-central-no-more.html. In 2015, the 8th district councilmember Bernard Parks supported the rebranding of this area once again into “SOLA.” See Angel Jennings, “Can South LA Re-Brand Again? How Does ‘SOLA’ Sound?” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-south-la-could-be-renamed-sola-by-city-in-image-makeover-20150421-story.html?utm_source=dlvr.itutm_medium=twitterdlvrit=649324.
10 Carol Tice, “Helicopter Journalism,” in Inside the LA Riots, 121. See also Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 38–42.
11 Itagaki, Civil Racism, 26–27 (see n. 1).
12 Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 158.
13 Joel Sternfeld, On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997).
14 See Josh Begley's Officer Involved, accessed August 17, 2016, https://theintercept.co/officer-involved/ and https://joshbegley.com. See also “Collective Punishment: Mob Violence, Riots, and Pogroms against African American Communities (1824–1974), Interactive Map,” accessed August 17, 2016, https://collectivepunishment.wordpress.com.
15 See Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” accessed August 17, 2016, http://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america; and EJI, “Map of 73 Years of Lynchings,” accessed August 17, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/10/us/map-of-73-years-of-lynching.html. EJI has since opened the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Montgomery, AL), the latter dedicated to the memory of victims of lynching.
16 Itagaki, Civil Racism, 19.
17 US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, “National Register Criteria for Evaluation,” accessed December 20, 2017, https://www.nps.gov/nr/publications/bulletins/nrb15/nrb15_2.htm.
18 While the broader institutional forces of state–market–media that led to the uprisings were national in scale, the specific urban conditions of Los Angeles made it particularly fertile ground for violent expressions of protest. This tension between official sanction by typically federal preservation policy and the particularities of the local that contribute to a site's significance relates to James Holston's and Arjun Appadurai's arguments on the shifting nature of citizenship where “cities are challenging, diverging from, and even replacing nations as the important space of citizenship as the lived space not only of its uncertainties but also of its emergent forms.” “Introduction: Cities and Citizenship,” in Cities and Citizenship, ed. James Holston (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 3.
19 Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 256; citing Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
20 For “symbolic memorial,” in particular the discussion of the Oklahoma City National Memorial, see Erika Doss, “Death, Art, and Memory in the Public Sphere: The Visual and Material Culture of Grief in Contemporary America,” Mortality 7, no. 1 (2002): 63–82.
21 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University, 1996), 22.
22 Elizabeth Meyer, “Uncertain Parks: Disturbed Sites, Citizens, and Risk Society,” in Large Parks, ed. Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 62. See Mira Engler, Designing America's Waste Landscapes (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, 2004).
23 Meyer, “Uncertain Parks,” 82.
24 Jennifer Wolch, John P. Wilson, and Jed Fehrenbach, “Parks and Park Funding in Los Angeles: An Equity-Mapping Analysis,” Urban Geography 26, no. 1 (2005): 4–35. On South Los Angeles vacancies since the unrest, see Emily Alpert Reyes and Angel Jennings, “‘It Looks Bad. It's Dangerous.’ Vacant Lots Dotting South LA a Painful Reminder of LA Riots,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2017.
25 From Itagaki, Civil Rascism, 2. For these numbers, she cites Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1995); Chang and Diaz-Veizades, Ethnic Peace (see n. 5); E. H. Kim, “Home is Where the Han Is: A Korean American Perspective on the Los Angeles Upheavals,” in Reading Rodney King (see n. 5); and Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000).
26 Josh Sides, “20 Years Later: Legacies of the Los Angeles Riots,” Places Journal (April 2012), https://doi.org/10.Footnote22269/120419.
27 The riots destroyed approximately 200 of the 728 liquor stores (mostly Korean-owned). Many were not reinstated because of community efforts, but as of 2012, South Los Angeles still had 8.Footnote51 liquor stores per square mile as compared to 1.97 in West Los Angeles and 1.Footnote56 in LA County. According to Josh Sides, “Renewal through Retail? The Impact of Corporate Reinvestment in South Los Angeles,” in Post-Ghetto: Reimagining South Los Angeles, ed. Josh Sides (Berkeley: University of California, 2012), 98. See also David Sloan, “Alcohol Nuisances and Food Deserts: Combating Social Hazards in the South Los Angeles Environment,” in Post-Ghetto, 93–108; and Kyeyoung Park, “Confronting the Liquor Industry in Los Angeles,” International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 24, no. 7–8 (2004): 103–36.
28 For description of police reforms, see Jill Leovy, “Homicide, the New LAPD, and South Los Angeles,” in Post-Ghetto, 191–208; and Institute for Nonviolence in Los Angeles, “Days of Dialogue on the Future of Policing,” accessed June 15, 2016, http://futureofpolicing.org.
29 Sides, “20 Years Later.” Robert Gottlieb, Regina Freer, Mark Vallianatos, and Peter Dreier, The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (Los Angeles/Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 68.
30 See Sides, “20 Years Later.” The new investments in South Los Angeles and the debates relating to gentrification have been well documented in regional media sources. See, for instance, Mike Sonksen, “The History of South Central Los Angeles and Its Struggle with Gentrification,” KCET, September 14, 2017, https://www.kcet.org/shows/city-rising/the-history-of-south-central-los-angeles-and-its-struggle-with-gentrification.
31 Sides, “20 Years Later.”
32 These neighborhood designations are coming from “Mapping LA Neighborhoods,” Los Angeles Times, accessed June 15, 2016, http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/.
33 As of 2014, see Los Angeles Housing and Community Investment Department, “Interactive: Foreclosed Properties Still Dragging Down Neighborhoods,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-g-foreclosure-registry-map-20140609-htmlstory.html.
34 See Annie Park, Nancy Watson, and Lark Galloway-Gilliam, South Los Angeles Health Equity Scorecard (Los Angeles: Community Health Councils, Inc, 2008).
35 See “Crips' and Bloods' Plan for the Reconstruction of Los Angeles,” accessed January 7, 2015, http://gangresearch.net/GangResearch/Policy/cripsbloodsplan.html.
36 Melvin Oliver, James Johnson Jr., and Walter Farrell Jr., “Anatomy of a Rebellion: A Political-Economic Analysis,” in Reading Rodney King, 135 (see n. 5). Italics by author.
37 James Holston, “Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship,” in Cities and Citizenship, ed. James Holston (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 155–73.
38 See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994); and Richard Sennett, Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (New York: Knopf, 1970).
39 See n. 5 for a list of primary assigned texts.
40 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); and Dolores Hayden, “Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space,” in Understanding Ordinary Landscapes, ed. Paul Groth and Todd Bressi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 111–33; Doss, “Death, Art, and Memory” (see n. 20); and Doss, Memorial Mania (see n. 19); Craig Barton, ed., Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001); Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (New York/London: Verso, 1997).
41 Soja, “Los Angeles, 1965–1992” (see n. 2); Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (New York: Wiley, 1996); Edward Soja, Postmetropolis (New York: Wiley, 2000); Leonie Sandercock, Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities (Wiley, 1997); Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (London/New York: Continuun, 2003); Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (see n. 12); John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, eds., Everyday Urbanism (New York: Monacelli Press, 2008); Sennett, Uses of Disorder; Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Knopf, 1990); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California, 1984); and Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990): 19–36.
42 Events that led up to the violence at Florence and Normandie really began one block north at 71st Street and Normandie Avenue.
43 Josh Sides, “Conclusion: How to Get to Post-Ghetto Los Angeles,” in Post-Ghetto, 209–10 (see n. 27). See Nicole Santa Cruz and Ken Schwencke, “South Vermont Avenue: LA County's ‘Death Alley,’” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2014, http://homicide.latimes.com/post/westmont-homicides/.
44 See Sassony Group, “Vermont Entertainment Village,” accessed June 1, 2018, http://sassonygroup.com/vermont/.
45 The complex fight over this land has a long history. The blocks have been property of real estate developer Eli Sasson (Sassony Commercial Real Estate) since before 1992 and have been deemed a blight on the neighborhood. For a profile of this history, see Jason McGahan, “A Beverly Hills Developer Has Held 3 Acres of South LA ‘Hostage’ for 25 Years, Critics Say,” LA Weekly, April 18, 2017, http://www.laweekly.com/news/beverly-hills-developer-eli-sasson-is-holding-three-acres-of-south-los-angeles-hostage-critics-say-8129446. See also Tim Cavanaugh, “Can the Vermont/Manchester Project Be Saved?” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2008, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/17/opinion/oe-cavanaugh17; and Tim Cavanaugh, “Vermont and Manchester in Pictures,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2008, http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2008/04/vermontmanchest.html. Most recently, the county moved to seize the land by eminent domain; see Emily Alpert-Reyes, “LA County moves to Seize Long-Empty South LA Parcel,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-vermont-manchester-20171205-story.html.
46 The Department of Public Social Services building was completed in 2007 immediately north of the current vacancies and it houses the departments of Social Services, Child Support Services, Children and Family Services, and Mental Health Services. It has limited ground-floor eateries (Subway and Wingstop).
47 The Community Redevelopment Agency was given its mandate in 1996 to redevelop this area. See CRA/LA, “Vermont/Manchester Recovery Redevelopment Project,” accessed January 22, 2017, http://www.crala.org/internet-site/Projects/Vermont_Manchester/about.cfm. See also Cavanaugh, “Can the Vermont/Manchester Project Be Saved?”
48 See Estudio Teddy Cruz, “Designing and Economic Process,” accessed June 10, 2015, https://vimeo.com/16778067.
49 For a recently discovered project tackling the issue of community policing from an architectural standpoint, see Studio Gang, “Polis Station: Toward a Community-Centered Police Station,” accessed December 20, 2017, http://studiogang.com/now/watch-now-polis-station-film-by-spirit-of-space.
50 In addition to Cruz's example, the students looked more locally at the mission and structure of Esperanza Community Housing Corporation, a community development agency and nonprofit developer that is responsible for Mercado La Paloma, a market and community space about five miles north of the site (still in “South Los Angeles”) intended to reverse the effects of long-term disinvestment in this area (specifically the Figueroa Corridor; see linkages in diagram, ). Mercado La Paloma, accessed August 17, 2016, http://www.mercadolapaloma.com; and Esperanza Community Housing Corporation, accessed August 17, 2016, http://www.esperanzacommunityhousing.org. In addition, while not a project emphasizing community development, another point of reference for the retail aspects of the proposal was the Plaza Mexico, situated in the city of Lynwood not far from our site and just north of Compton. With a local majority population from Mexico, the Korean developer designed this “cultural wonderland of shopping, dining, and entertainment” to emulate the ancient city of Monte Alban near Mexico City and the town squares of pueblos throughout Mexico. See Plaza Mexico, “About the Plaza,” accessed August 17, 2016, http://www.plazamexico.com/menu/abouttheplaza.html. Despite its kitsch simulation of “traditional” Mexican towns and their central plaza (with its theme park pastiche of Mexican cultural symbols from different eras), the site has been embraced as an actual cultural center for festivals and performances as well as political rallies; it is seen as a public space in an area where maintained public spaces are scant. See Clara Irázabal and Macarena Gómez-Barris, “Bounded Tourism: Immigrant Politics, Consumption, and Traditions at Plaza Mexico,” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 5, no. 3 (2008): 186–213. Its mixed programs and facilitation of new forms of appropriation and occupation provided a local point of reference.
51 The proposal uses as a point of reference both Plaza Mexico and Future Fest. The latter was organized as a rally, march, and arts festival recognizing the 25th anniversary of the uprisings; see South LA is the Future, “Future Fest,” accessed April 15, 2017, http://southlaisthefuture.com/events/.
52 For a brief history and inventory of businesses that were destroyed by arson in 1992, see “After the Riots: A Dream up in Smoke,” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1992, http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-22/news/mn-315_1_financial-status. See also Mark Platte, “Merchants in South LA Ponder Future,” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1992, OCA3.
53 See Wolch et al., “Parks and Park Funding in Los Angeles,” (see n. 24). As of 2007, in South Los Angeles there are 1.2 acres of public green space per 1000 residents versus West Los Angeles, where there are 70.1 acres of public green space per 1000 residents. See Park et al., South Los Angeles Health Equity Scorecard, 58 (see n. 34).
54 Ash Amin, “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City,” Report for the Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions and the ESRC Cities Initiative (January 2002).
55 Elizabeth Timme makes similar claims in her description of the Frogtown (Los Angeles) community process where participants in meetings insisted on maintaining the status quo even though that ultimately hurt them in the long run. She states: “the community members in the neighborhoods where we work struggle to speak a shared language with designers, planners, and developers because they have not had the benefit of learning the ramifications of contextual issues and sustainable practices. Without an education in the potential of alternatives, a layperson will most often default into proposing the contextual and propagating the known.” “Community,” in Tabula Plena: Forms of Urban Preservation, ed. Bryony Roberts (Oslo: Lars Muller, 2016), 49. My own writings on Lawrence Halprin's Take Part Process argue that though the community workshops might exhibit what some would call the manipulation or engineering of participant responses, their main strength was the process of progressively shaping environmental values across diverse constituents. See Alison B. Hirsch, City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and Alison B. Hirsch, “Facilitation and/or Manipulation? Lawrence Halprin and ‘Taking Part,’” Landscape Journal 31, n. 1–2 (Winter 2012): 119–36.
56 See Max Page, Why Preservation Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
57 Ibid.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alison B. Hirsch
Alison B. Hirsch, MLA, HS (Historic Preservation), PhD, is a landscape historian, designer, and assistant professor in the University of Southern California's School of Architecture. Her book on landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, City Choreographer (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) emerged out of her graduate work on his disappearing physical legacy. Hirsch co-edited The Landscape Imagination (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014) and has published widely in international journals. Co-founder of the transdisciplinary practice called foreground design agency (www.foreground-da.com), Hirsch's design interests focus on public histories and politics of urban settlement, which is the topic of her forthcoming book, The Performative Landscape: Frameworks for Action. Hirsch is a 2017–2018 Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.