Los Angeles, Houston and the rise of the unreadable city

Los Angeles, Houston and the rise of theunreadable city

Downtown L.A., seen from the Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area. (Jay L. Clendenin / LosAngeles Times)

This is not going to be a column about all the things the New York Times got wrong about theLos Angeles Times in its recent front-page story by Tim Arango and Adam Nagourney, “APaper Tears Apart in a City That Never Quite Came Together.” It is not, for the most part,going to be about all the things the New York Times got wrong (or simply failed to mention)about Los Angeles itself in that article, which argued that recent turmoil at this newspaper isemblematic of the city's broader lack of support for its major institutions. Plenty of smartpeople have already weighed in on both fronts.

And yes, every word in the previous sentence links to one of those smart people. Here are acouple more for good measure. When Josh Kun, Carolina Miranda, Daniel Hernandez, DavidUlin, Alissa Walker, Matthew Kang and Carolyn Kellogg are united in knocking your analysisof Los Angeles, it might, you know, be a sign.

Anyway. This is going to be a column, instead, about something slightly different: about the

legibility (and illegibility) of cities more generally. About how we react — as reporters andcritics and simply as people — when we’re confronted with a city that doesn’t make sense tous right away.

Ten days or so before that story appeared, I spent a long weekend in Houston, meeting upwith three old friends ostensibly to see the Warriors, the NBA team I grew up rooting for, playthe Rockets — but also just to hang out and eat barbecue and visit the Menil, my favoritemuseum building in America (just edging out another Texas landmark, the Kimbell in FortWorth).

Houston is casually written off even more often than Los Angeles, which is saying something.Now the fourth largest city in the country in population — and gaining on third-place Chicago— it’s an unruly place in terms of its urbanism, a place that (as Los Angeles once did) hasroom, or makes room, for a wide spectrum of architectural production, from the innovative tothe ugly. Like Los Angeles, it’s a city that invested heavily in freeways and other car-centricinfrastructure last century and remains, in many neighborhoods, a terrible place to walk.

It’s long been a place people go to reinvent themselves, to get rich or to disappear. The flipside of its great tolerance is a certain lack of cohesion, a difficulty in articulating a set ofcommon civic goals. (Here’s where I concede that the instinct behind the New York Timespiece on L.A., if little about its execution, was perfectly reasonable.) As is the case in LosAngeles, the greatest thing and the worst thing about Houston are one and the same:Nobody cares what anybody else is doing. Freedom in both places sometimes trumpscommunity. It also tends to trump stale donor-class taste.

Roughly one in four residents of Houston’s Harris County is foreign-born, a rate nearly as highas those in New York and Los Angeles. Houston’s relationship with Dallas, the third biggestcity in Texas, is something like L.A.’s with San Francisco; the southern city in each pair is lessdecorous, less fixed in its civic identity and (at the moment, at least) entirely more vital.

I’ve been to Houston five or six times; I like spending time there largely because I don’t knowit as well as I’d like to. That’s another way of saying that while I’m there, I’m reminded of theway in which much of the world interacts with and judges Los Angeles, from a position ofalienation and even ignorance. I just happen to enjoy that sensation more than most peopledo.

If I had to put my finger on what unites Houston and Los Angeles, it is a certain elusivenessas urban object. Both cities are opaque and hard to read. What is Houston? Where does itbegin and end? Does it have a center? Does it need one? It’s tough to say, even when you’rethere — even when you’re looking directly at it.

The cover of Lars Lerup's "The Continuous City: Fourteen Essays on Architecture andUrbanization" Rice Architecture/Park Books

The same has been said of Los Angeles since its earliest days. Something Carey McWilliamsnoted about L.A. in 1946 — that it is a place fundamentally ad hoc in spirit, “a giganticimprovisation” — is perhaps even more true of Houston. Before you can pin either city down,you notice that it’s wriggled out of your grasp.

People who are accustomed to making quick sense of the world, to ordering it into neat andsharply defined categories, tend to be flummoxed by both places. And reporters at the NewYork Times are certainly used to making quick sense of the world. If there’s one reason thepaper keeps getting Los Angeles so spectacularly wrong, I think that’s it. Smart,accomplished people don’t like being made to feel out of their depth. Los Angeles makesout-of-town reporters feel out of their depth from their first day here.

Their reaction to that feeling, paradoxically enough, is very often to attempt to write thatfeeling away — to conquer that sense of dislocation by producing a story that sets out toexplain Los Angeles in its entirety. Because it’s a challenge, maybe, or because they simplycan’t be convinced, despite all the evidence right in front of them, that Los Angeles, as citiesgo, is an especially tough nut to crack.

Plenty of journalists have left Los Angeles over the years and moved to New York to work forthe New York Times; none of them, as far as I know, has attempted, after two or three monthson the job, to write a piece explaining What New York City Means. I can think of many NewYorkers — each of them highly credentialed academically or journalistically or both, which isperhaps the root of the problem — who have come to Los Angeles and tried to pull off thatsame trick here.

That tendency — to attempt the moon shot, the overarching analysis, too soon — is equalparts hubris and panic. It usually goes about as well as it went this time around for Arango,not incidentally a brand-new arrival in the New York Times bureau here, and Nagourney.

Among the most dedicated scholars of Houston’s urban form in recent years has been LarsLerup, former dean of the Rice University School of Architecture. In his new book of essays,“The Continuous City,” he argues that the first step in understanding Houston and cities like itis to begin with a certain humility about the nature and scale of the task.

This kind of city has grown so large — in economic and environmental as well as physicalreach — that it begins to stretch beyond our field of vision. The best way to grasp it,according to Lerup, is to understand that it is not Manhattan, Boston, San Francisco orChicago — to recognize it instead as “a vast field with no distinct borders.”

“The old city was a discrete object sitting on a Tuscan hill surrounded by a collectivelyconstructed wall; the new city is everywhere,” he writes. “Only when we accept that we canonly attain a partial understanding can work begin.”

Lerup stresses that huge, spread-out cities like Houston — which he also calls “distributedcities,” places where “the spiky downtown is just a blip in the flatness” — have long beentough to read, in part because they are “always in the throes of change.” But the relationshipbetween urbanization and climate change has added a new layer of complexity, because bigmetro regions and their pollution are exacerbating the ecological crisis. The city now “owns

everything” and must answer for everything, “even the raging hurricane bearing down on itscoast.” The vast city has grown vaster still.

If there’s one place I part ways with Lerup, it has to do with his insistence that “fewconceptual tools have evolved” to help us grapple with the distributed city and its meanings.At least in the case of Los Angeles, the literature on this score is richer, going back manydecades, than even many locals realize.

There’s not only McWilliams’ superb, clear-eyed book “Southern California: An Island on theLand,” which I would make required reading for every new hire if I were running the LosAngeles bureau of the New York Times. (Especially the part where McWilliams admits that hehated Los Angeles when he arrived and that it took him “seven long years of exile” tounderstand and appreciate the city. Seven years! And that was with a brain bigger and morenimble than most.) There’s also architect Charles Moore’s 1984 guidebook, “City Observed:Los Angeles,” which he wrote with Peter Becker and Regula Campbell.

Right at the beginning, Moore, as if to anticipate Lerup, reminds his readers that L.A. is“altogether different from the compact old centers of Manhattan and Boston.” (It is not adiscrete object sitting on a Tuscan hill.) Making sense of it, as a result, requires “an altogetherdifferent plan of attack.”

That simple bit of advice is the only one journalists newly arrived in Los Angeles really needto get started on the right foot. It’s also one those journalists have been ignoring for 34 yearsand counting.

christopher.hawthorne@latimes.com

Twitter: @HawthorneLAT