Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971(1976), 256 pp., 1976, 1971, 1960s, 1949, 1927, 1905, 1903, 1885, 1870s, 1860s, 1848,
"The most senior of the beach cities, 'San Mo' has probably the most distinctive civic atmosphere . . . Partly it is the generous planning of the street-widths, partly it is the provision of a very good municipal bus service, but chiefly it is having been on the ground long enough to develop an independent personality. The railway that failed to make it a great port nevertheless got it started as a resort city well before most of the others were even a twinkle in a realtor's eye." p. 46
"South along the beaches, the immediately succeeding cities are much less stylish. Venice, intended to be the most stylish of the lot, was overrun by oil drilling and is now a long uncertain strip of frame houses of varying ages, vacant lots, oil-pumps, and sad gravel scrub. It has the charm of decay, but this will almost certainly disappear in the redevelopments that must follow the creation of the Yacht Harbor inland behind Venice. . . ' p. 47
[Santa Monica Pier photo, p. 53, described as having been rebuilt in 1921, features the Santa Monica Seafood Company]
" . . . The reputations of the piers are understandably functional, rather than architectural, but the whole class of piers must be saluted here as the most characteristic structures in Surfurbia. The beaches are uncommonly well provided with public piers, whether commercially or municipally operated - Malibu, Santa Monica, Pacific Ocean Park, Venice . . ." p. 53
" . . . Santa Monica, by contrast, is rich and complex and blatantly commercial, a little Luna Park, complete with off-shore parking lots, shops, restaurants and a famous enclosed carousel with apartments for rent in it's corner turrets, and Charlie Chaplin used to eat at a famous restaurant near the end of the pier in his early Hollywood days . . . And if anyone sought a major monument to the heartbreak that ends the Angeleno dream, there was always Pacific Ocean Park, a recent fantasy in stucco and every known style of architecture and human ecology (including a giant artificial rock at the seaward end), a magnificent set of rides and diversions, now demolished after years of bankruptcy . . ." p. 54
{The p. 55 photo "Dereliction at Pacific Ocean Park."}
" . . . mention of Spanish Colonial Revival fantasies calls to mind two planned communities . . . One is Naples, east of Long Beach, . . . Subdivided by A. M. Parsons in 1903 . . .
"The other is romantically blighted Venice. Decreed by Abbott Kinney in 1905, it created a dream city of gondolas, bridges, and lagoons out of the squaggy sands and marshes south of Santa Monica. The overall layout was the work of Norman and Robert Marsh, who also designed public structures like the ornate canal bridges, and some uninhibited private houses. It must have been a splendid vision-but in 1927 oil was struck there and fantasy had to give way to fact.
"When I first saw it, bridges wrapped in barbed wire (because they were dangerous) spanned a single slimy canal among abandoned oil machinery and nodding pumps that were still at work. Desolation was everywhere, except where a narrow strip of houses still straggled down the ocean beach, and where two or three blocks of the original arcaded shopping street still survived on Windward Avenue. Those arcaded fragments are among the most affecting . . . The district is run-down still, something between a ghetto and a hippie haven . . . pp. 157, 158, 159 and 160.
" . . . "'the basic Los Angeles Dingbat' was probably invented by Francis Ventre during the year he taught at UCLA and lived in a prime example. . . . p. 175
"It is normally a two story walk-up apartment-block developed back over the full depth of the site, built of wood and stuccoed over. These are the materials that Rudolf Schindler and others used to build the first modern architecture in Los Angeles, and the dingbat, left to its own devices, often exhibits the basic characteristics of a primitive modern architecture. Round the back, away from the public gaze, they display simple rectangular forms and flush smooth surfaces, skinny steel columns and simple boxed balconies, and extensive overhangs to shelter four or five cars. . . ." p. 175
"The dingbat . . . is the true symptom of Los Angeles . . . trying to cope with the unprecedented appearance of residential densities too high to be subsumed within the illusions of homestead living . . ." p. 177