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Industry, political alliances and the regulation of urban space in Los Angeles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2009

GREG HISE
GREG HISE*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Nevada Las Vegas, John S. Wright Hall (B-313), 4505 S. Maryland Pkway, Box 455020, Las Vegas, NV 89154- 5020, USA
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Abstract:

The formation of industrial districts and the role that development played in shaping the pattern of American cities has become a standard for urban history. This has not been the case for Los Angeles. Despite its centrality for a metropolitan economy that has led California for a century and that today leads the nation in manufacturing employment, scholars and pundits have overlooked production in favour of consumption. Little is known about how firms, business associations and city officials created space for industry during the late nineteenth century when manufacturers' locational decisions contributed to spatial concentration in the city's core. A case study of the Cudahy Packing Company reveals why such sites were favoured, how a sectoral-specific district emerged and the processes through which Angelenos transformed a Yankee pueblo into an industrial city. Two factors, the local state's enablement of manufacturing via policy and regulation and the use of industrialization as an immigrant removal strategy, emerge as significant. Neither has been prominent in the literature on the growth of Los Angeles while the latter, the linking of race-ethnicity with land use, has been less prominent in prior studies of industrial districts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , December 2009 , pp. 473 - 497
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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8 Business addresses from city directories and directories of manufacturers; inputs and products taken from promotional literature. P. Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton, 1997).

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11 Survey map dated 6, 10–11 Aug. 1880 of the J.M. Ramirez and J.J. Shepard properties in the Solano-Reeves Collection, The Huntington Library.

12 O'Rourke, J.M., The Cudahy Packing Company: A History, 1890–1924 (Chicago, 1925): 1Google Scholar.

13 Cudahy firm history drawn from ‘The anniversary story’, Annual Report for the Cudahy Packing Co. for the Fiscal Year of 1950; O'Rourke, The Cudahy Packing Company; ‘The “significant sixty”: a historical report on the progress and development of the meat packing industry, 1891–1951’, National Provisioner (26 Jan. 952).

14 Yeager, M., Competition and Regulation: The Development of Oligopoly in the Meat Packing Industry (Greenwich, CT, 1981)Google Scholar; Skaggs, J.M., Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 1607–1983 (College Station, 1986)Google Scholar; ‘A meat war – Armour's advent in ‘Frisco causes a row’, Los Angeles Times, 31 Dec. 1892 (hereafter LAT).

15 O'Rourke; The Cudahy Packing Company. See Ordinance No. 10,909 (New Series), Slaughter House Districts (adopted 5 Dec. 1905), in E.H. Wilson, Penal Ordinances of the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 1910). Book of Deeds, Los Angeles County: City to White, 12 Feb. 1858 (Book 4, p. 87), Gillmore v. White, Decree of Partitions, 9 Apr. 1881 (Book 79, p. 113), Gillmore to Scheerer, 25 Mar. 1882 (Book 90, p. 86), Scheerer to Smith, 17 Jan. 1887 (Book 187, p. 609), Scheerer to Cline, 14 Apr. 1887 (Book 209, p. 273), Scheerer to Los Angeles Refrigerating Co., 12 Mar. 1888 (Book 203 of Deeds, p. 111), Scheerer to Haines, 29 Mar. 1892 (Book 783, p. 186), Haines to Cudahy Packing Co., 31 Oct. 1892 (Book 826, p. 95), all in Los Angeles City Archives (hereafter LACA).

16 Times-Mirror Co., Los Angeles City and County Directory, 1886–7, in Three Parts (Los Angeles, 1886); ‘The city council. Adjourned session on the packing-house question’, LAT, 24 Dec. 1892.

17 ‘House and lot. . .Mr. Cudahy pays $196,000 cash for Nadeau property’, LAT, 3 Jun. 1893.

18 City of Los Angeles, Bureau of Engineering, ‘Plan of levee, west side of Los Angeles River’, 1886. For a later discussion of this project and related infrastructure see California Public Utilities Commission, Report on Railroad Grade Crossing Elimination and Passenger and Freight Terminals in Los Angeles, California (Sacramento, 1920).

19 For a record of the levee project see the petitions from the Southern California Railway Co. to the council in box B-1, v. 64, LACA. Gumprecht, B., The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Baltimore, 1999), 161–3Google Scholar.

20 County Board of Supervisors to Los Angeles City Council, 7 Jun. 1889, council records, box B-3, v. 70, LACA.

21 See the call from residents and property owners along Aliso and Marchessault streets petitioning the council to declare ‘Chinatown’ a nuisance and the Chinese a threat to public health for example; petition to council 19 Sep. 1887, box B-1, v. 64, LACA. For a reformer's assessment see N. Sterry, ‘The sociological basis for the re-organization of the Macy Street school’ (University of Southern California MA thesis, 1924). For a Chamber discussion see Carton #3, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce Minutes, 30 Nov. 1904, p. 27 (Special Collections, University of Southern California).

22 Ordinance 1523, New Series, ‘Slaughtering in city’, approved 29 Dec. 1892, in Charter and Revised Ordinances of the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 1898), 299–300.

23 Council minutes, vol. 21: 28 Jun., 12 Jul., 18 and 25 Oct. 1886, box B-91, LACA. For a subsequent case see vol. 24, 12 and 19 Sep. 1887, when the council and Public Works addressed levee construction on the east side of the river.

24 Southern California Packing petitions to council #222 (Feb.) and #393 (Apr.), box B-2 and #1224 (Dec.), box B-3, LACA.

25 From 1899 to 1904 meatpacking recorded the greatest value of product in the city as reported in Division of Economics and Statistics, Federal Housing Administration, ‘Housing market analysis, Los Angeles, California, volume 1, part 2’, 12 May 1938, 250.

26 Times-Mirror Co., Los Angeles City and County Directory, 229–32. See ‘Orange County’, LAT, 14 Dec. 1892 for a description of Santa Ana Pork Packing.

27 Sawers, L. and Tabb, W.K. (eds.), Sunbelt/Snowbelt: Urban Development and Regional Restructuring (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Logan, J.R. and Molotch, H.L., Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley, 1987)Google Scholar.

28 Cudahy petition to council 12 Dec. 1892 (#781) box B-8, LACA.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Revised Ordinances, of the City of Los Angeles. Passed and Approved July 31, 1855 (Los Angeles, 1855); Ordenanzas de la Ciudad de Los Angeles, Traducidas al Espanol por J.H. Van Rhyn (Los Angeles, 1860).

32 Petition #781, LACA.

33 ‘Another important addition’, Los Angeles Express, 15 Dec. 1892, ‘The City Council’, Los Angeles Express, 13 Dec. 1892 (hereafter Express).

34 ‘A needed enterprise’, Express, 22 Dec. 1892.

35 Petitions to council 19 Dec. 1892 (#792), 19 Dec. 1892 (#794), 23 Dec. 1892 (#810), 23 December 1892 (#811), box B-8, LACA.

36 Maier petition to council 19 Dec. 1892 (#793), box B-8, LACA. Other wholesale butchers requested the ‘privileges asked for by the Cudahy Packing Company’ to slaughter within city limits and to use the river water for ‘washing and cleansing purposes’. H.J. Doyle petition to council, 19 Dec. 1892 (#795), and Burton and Weir petition to council, 19 Dec. 1892 (#796) box B-8, LACA.

37 ‘Great enterprise’, LAT, 25 Dec. 1892.

38 Ibid. The Times reprinted a 22 Dec. letter signed ‘Progress’ from a former resident of South Omaha who claimed Cudahy ‘will bring ready cash to our farmers and be the means of building up Southern California and attracting other manufacturing industries to this section.’

39 ‘Slaughtering in city’, Charter and Revised Ordinances (Los Angeles, 1900), Section 1, Ordinance 10,999, New Series, ‘Slaughter House Districts’, approved 5 Dec. 1904, in E.H. Wilson, Penal Ordinances of the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 1910).

40 The Board of Health investigated whether the ‘stench arising from the packing house of the Cudahy Co.’ constituted a nuisance. Members thought it did yet the board presented its findings to the council ‘without recommendation’. Board of Health records, box B-1272, LACA.

41 Clerk W.W. Robinson to Mayor T.E. Rowan and the Honorable Council, 8 May 1894, Board of Health records, box B-1272, LACA.

42 ‘Big Cudahy plant gone, packing-house near river ruined by fire’, 25 May 1904; ‘Second fire, hot cooler, flames cut another piece of Cudahy plant’, 26 May 1902, both in Los Angeles Daily Times.

43 Health Officer L.M. Powers memo 25 Aug. 1904, Board of Health records, box B-1272, LACA.

44 13 Jun. 1904 petition (#612) to council, box A-11, LACA.

45 Ibid.

46 See for example Rev. Eugene Sugranes’ evocation of ‘Early Days in Los Angeles’, who evoked Don Ignacio Francisco de la Cruz Garcia (1781–1877) an ‘eyewitness to the building of the original Our Lady’, who remembered ‘what is now [1914] called Sonora Town as a very swampy section, crossed by several little creeks that ran down to Commercial and Aliso streets’, The Tidings, 20 Feb. 1914; Gumprecht, Los Angeles River.

47 J.A. Owen, publisher and editor, quoted in C. Elliot, City of Commerce: An Enterprising Heritage (Los Angeles, 1991), 75. For interpretive accounts of this and like divides see G. Hise, ‘Identity and social distance in Los Angeles’, Landscape Journal, 26, 1 (Mar. 2007), 45–60; G. Hise, ‘Border city: race and social distance in Los Angeles’, American Quarterly, 56, 3 (Sep. 2004), 545–58.

48 Hise, ‘Border city’.