Town Center, USA
I grew up in Somers, Connecticut, which was not necessarily the picturesque New England town from the postcards.
There was no town green ringed by white-steepled churches, but the only chain business in town was a single Mobil station, with a hand-painted wood sign, no tall neon allowed, and one traffic light at the main intersection.
I lived at the top of a hill on a street that connected the main road to the residential cul-de-sacs. Woods on one side of the house, fields on the other. The fields have since been sold and developed, which is a different essay. The elementary school playground was downhill; I could ride my bike there in under a minute and had to walk it back in ten. My friend across the street was a year older than me and the youngest of seven. Her family owned the Italian restaurant in town.
The geography made the relationship inevitable.
This is what "town center" actually means. The architecture, not the postcard version of it.
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I think about this a lot in Los Angeles. Not in a wistful way — I love it here, and Somers is not a model that scales to millions of people on a coastal basin. I think about it because LA is full of evidence. You start walking and you notice things. A stretch of Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock that is obviously the main drag of a former somewhere, even though the city it once was got annexed into Los Angeles in 1923. A diagonal commercial strip in Venice that points toward a sea that streetcars used to bring you to. Pasadena and Long Beach and Santa Monica and Glendale and Burbank, all still going, all still functioning as their own towns with their own town centers, sitting inside Los Angeles County like punctuation marks the rest of the sentence forgot to honor.
You see the remnants and you think: something was here. Something other than this.
That instinct turns out to be historically exact.
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From roughly 1900 to the 1950s, the Los Angeles basin was knit together by Pacific Electric, the largest electric railway system in the world. Eleven hundred miles of track. Nine hundred trolley cars. The Red Cars ran from downtown out to Pasadena, Long Beach, San Pedro, Santa Monica, Pomona, Riverside, San Bernardino, dozens of other towns that were still towns at the time. During World War II, Angelenos took a hundred million rides a year on them. The basin was a constellation: independent town centers, walkable inside each one, transit between them.
By 1961, every Red Car was gone.
The popular story is that General Motors killed them, and there's a version of that story that's true — National City Lines, Firestone, Standard Oil, a 1949 federal antitrust conviction. But the honest version is more interesting and more useful: streetcar ridership had been declining since the late 1920s, federal money after the war poured into highways, suburbs were policy decisions before they were lifestyle ones, and the dismantling happened across the country in places GM never touched. Many actors. One outcome. The constellation got disconnected, paved over, and rebuilt for cars only. The centers stayed. The connective tissue between them did not.
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This is the part I keep coming back to, especially this summer, with the country turning two hundred and fifty.
The most useful thing to remember about the United States is that it was designed as an experiment. The framers said so out loud. An experiment is a thing you can rerun. A thing you can pivot. A thing whose result is not destiny. We built one model of American life — towns with centers, cities with centers, all connected by rail and foot — and then we built a different model: sprawled, automobile-dependent, zoned to keep uses apart from each other. Both were choices. Both were made by people, in rooms, voting and signing things.
The form we live with now is not weather. It is policy that got cold and hard and started to feel like geography.
The 250th is a useful moment to say that out loud, because the alternative — treating what we have as the inevitable result of "growth" or "the market" — is the surest way to make sure nothing changes. The Somers I grew up in chose to keep its Mobil sign low. The cities that survived around Los Angeles chose to incorporate before they could be swallowed. The Red Cars got dismantled by a series of choices, not by a law of nature. Whatever comes next will also be a choice.
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I do not think Los Angeles is going to become Somers, Connecticut, and I don’t want it to. What I think is that Los Angeles is already much more of a constellation than the freeway map suggests. The town centers are all still there. Pasadena has been Pasadena the entire time. Eagle Rock and Highland Park and Boyle Heights and Echo Park and Culver City are all main streets pretending to be neighborhoods. The connective tissue is what we cut, and the connective tissue is the part we can rebuild. We are, slowly, with Metro reopening corridors the Red Cars used to run.
The premise of this site is that you find out what a place is by walking around in it. That is true at the scale of one neighborhood and it is true at the scale of an entire basin. Every loop I publish is, quietly, an argument that Los Angeles is still a constellation under the asphalt. Because it is. You just have to be willing to go look.
Two hundred and fifty years in is a fine time to remember that we built this on purpose. And that on purpose is something we can do again.
