is a juxtaposition, a clash, a discomposition, since no one controls everything and the possibilities for development are extensively and inordinately explored, much as grasses and mosses grow in every concrete crack. While much of the city is constructed to be seen (although not the parts I have focused on), with those wonderful architectural photographs or engravings representing that goal, in fact we see it from inconvenient places as we go about our business, but then we edit out the inconveniences in our memory. Camera and film are less readily blind in that way. Friedlander’s camera and film capture the way things are, not necessarily but casually, opportunistically. The layers and planes are not so well aligned as we might hope, they clash with each other, and what is backstage is often in front of what is supposedly the main show.
A friend who knows Friedlander tells me, “Lee would never own up to being a critical/serious observer of the dynamics, etc., that determine the nature of what a city looks like, is. He’d just mutter something about just wanting to make a picture out of the elements at hand.” Craftsmen work this way. (If I recall correctly, Friedlander once said something like, “I’m just a worker with a tool in his hands,” referring to his camera.) Craftsmen know what they are doing, and it sort of all adds up, but that takes time and revision and learning to see the work as a whole, perhaps with lots of extra parts.
Chain-link fencing, plate-glass windows, riotous overlappings of plants or objects or people or cables and pipelines, and detritus such as broken concrete barriers are recurrent elements in Friedlander’s photographs—as they are in actual cities. Empty plazas, isolated buildings, and manifestly fake siding are ubiquitous. Everything that is possible is instantiated; all is in a larger context that displaces it from its more immediate situation; juxtapositions remind us that not everything obstructs everything; and almost everything peeks through and montages. The coincidences are there for the taking, the overlaps ever present but filtered in our memories by our being up to orderly and meaningful lives.
Industrial life and work and plants and shrubbery are some of Friedlander’s other recurrent themes. In each case whatever we take as formal photography of buildings or plants or places is displaced by a larger, more encompassing vision that is rather more disturbing even if it is just as accurate and just as seen. People at work are not merely at work, but they are fixed in place, almost trapped by his electronic flash. They are part of the machinery or bureaucracy, and yet they are not mechanical, not functional.
I suspect that Friedlander would say he is taking pictures of just what is there. By its repetition of themes, by its variety of perspectives and slices of city life, Friedlander’s work as a whole is urban tomography made into art.
Chapter 2
Cities, Streetscapes, and the Second Industrial Revolution
The next five chapters tell the stories, historical and economic and sociological, I have learned from doing the fieldwork and making visual, aural, and video documentation. I discuss how the images display those stories, and so how urban tomography investigates and reveals city life. Urban tomography allows one to imagine more adequate identities in that manifold presentation of profiles. In the fieldwork, you discover properly commodious identities, ones that better accommodate the various aspects. The stories I am telling are just those identities, stories that accommodate the documents I have made. It will be useful to begin with some fieldwork reports.
Union Central Cold Storage, Inc. (Figure 1A and B, #11), has an icehouse that was opened in 1908 and an adjacent cold-storage warehouse that dates from the 1950s, with more recent add-ons. It sits on three acres of land on Industrial Street on the east side of downtown Los Angeles, right off South Alameda Street. The land has become so valuable that the owner might sell it, move his plant to an industrial city several miles south, and refit a warehouse there so that it becomes a modern cold-storage plant—replacing an accumulation of added-on pieces of building and equipment at his old site. And, at least initially, the new owner might just demolish the Industrial Street buildings, pave the site, and use it as a parking lot.
SAC Industries on Avalon Boulevard at East 62nd Street (Figure 1A and B, #1; Figure 1C, “d”) has slowly but surely absorbed more and more buildings going east on East 62nd as the firm has expanded. What was once their focus, on end-of-runs in metal manufacturing and less than perfect metal stock, now also includes a very substantial used-clothing sorting and resale enterprise. In each case the proprietor’s skill is being able to buy vast quantities of less than perfect goods, sort them into bundles of goods that have shared qualities, and then find markets for those bundles.
SAC is located within a large superblock of industry, the Huntington tract, from Slauson Avenue to Gage Avenue, from Avalon Boulevard to Central Avenue (Figure 1A and B, #1; Figure 1C). (There is as well an adjacent superblock south, from Gage Avenue to Florence Avenue, the Goodyear tract, referring to a large rubber tire plant that used to be there.) The Huntington tract was threaded through and delineated by railroad spurs from the Slauson Avenue line of the AT&SF (now the Burlington Northern Santa Fe). Eventually the surrounding areas were developed as residential (an aerial photograph, Figure 1C, makes this apparent). Those residents might supply a labor pool for the industries in this area. Also, the rents are comparatively low in this superblock (say $0.40/sq. ft. several years ago). It is old (for Los Angeles, having been developed in the 1920s onward), and the current firms have reoccupied buildings built for other purposes originally and subsequently. Just outside the tract, across the streets—lining Avalon Boulevard, Central Avenue, and Slauson Avenue—a large number of industrial and auto repair establishments can be found. Across Central Avenue there are some peculiar commercial establishments: the terminal for pushcart ice-cream vendors in the area; a store that sells chickens killed on-site. Several blocks north, on Central Avenue, a new school is being constructed (Figure 1C, “e”). For less than two hundred feet into the adjacent areas, on the east and west, and perhaps five hundred feet to the north there is a fully residential district, with churches, single family homes, yards, and so forth.
More generally, these industrial neighborhoods might be said to have been abandoned by first-class uses, but they are still occupied by highly productive activities. Their abandonment or depreciation or filteringdown has made them ideal locales for businesses and residents who cannot afford better or who do not need to be first-class. The fact that they are polluted areas, mixing what should not be mixed, is just what makes them successful. The system of repurposable buildings is a resource in an industrial ecology of labor, pollution, economic factors of rentals and materials costs, and other firms (nearby) from which they take materials, process them, and move them on to other businesses (eventually, not so nearby).
I kept discovering industrial areas while going around the city or looking at maps and aerial photographs (in the aerials the industrial areas appear manifestly different from the residential areas): the Eastside Industrial District, east of downtown, along the Los Angeles River; the Alameda Corridor; the Central Manufacturing District, now part of Vernon; the Metropolitan Warehouse District, along Union Pacific Avenue; the City Industrial Tract, north of Boyle Heights; and such cities as the City of Industry, Vernon, and the City of Commerce.1 I came upon Union Pacific Avenue (Figure 1A and B, #7) in the course of the project documenting storefront houses of worship in Los Angeles. Sure enough, to the north especially, there is an adjacent residential neighborhood (and hence the churches listed in the telephone directory that led me there). However, on the Avenue,