Eye of the Beholder
Michael Dear

The Cornfield is an eye watching over Los Angeles.  This is what Janet Owen told me when first we met.  Hers is a persuasive metaphor: the shape of an eye has universal aesthetic appeal, and an eye’s proximity to the brain echoes the Cornfield’s adjacency to the original pueblo.  It also reminds us that history lies in the eye of the beholder.  What, then, has the Cornfield witnessed?  How should we remember its past? [Place image # 1 at this point]

The notion of place is at the heart of the way we remember.  Pierre Nora observed that “Memory attaches itself to sites, whereas history attaches itself to events.”[1]  Memory also refers to the way individuals recall things, whereas history is more a collective process of formal commemoration.  Between memory and history lies the city, where the past is stored in buildings, ruins, parks and street corners.  The city is where time becomes visible.

Both memory (place) and history (time) are selective processes involving manipulation and forgetting as much as recollection.  Norman Klein refers to this as history’s ‘uncertainty principle:’ as soon as a chronicler gazes upon the past, the narrative is altered; the very act of writing history becomes an intervention in the historical record.[2]  In this sense, there is no way we can truly know our past.  History becomes a process of constant revision of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. In the words of novelist W.G. Sebald: “History requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and we still do not know how it was.”[3] The sense of history as an agreeable fiction is not an attack on historians; it is simply an admission about the limits of human knowing.  Multiple versions of history are the norm, and history only becomes dangerous when it is institutionalized as a single Official truth.  Then it is transformed into a political document intended to silence dissent, test loyalties and persecute unbelievers.

By contrast, memory is a much more democratic and egalitarian form of remembering because it proceeds from the eyes of many beholders who together constitute the meanings of place.  In order to avoid the potential tyranny of Official history, multiple autonomous acts of memory are necessary, each one tantamount to an act of historical sabotage. The accumulation of such acts produces a people’s history in place of the Official truth.

Indigenous Acorn Fields

There is in Southern California an archeological record of extensive human occupation and settlement going back over 11,000 years.  Reconstruction of that record has been hampered by rising sea levels that have obliterated most coastal sites, and by rapid urbanization that has carpeted many inland locations.  One important exception occurs in the Channel Islands off the coast of Los Angeles, where some sites record an active fishing culture from over 8,500 years ago.  On the mainland, nomadic hunter/gatherer societies sprang up around inland lakes and streams. Somewhere around 2000 BCE the acorn became a food staple that allowed permanent settlement, increased trade, and more complex social systems to develop. According to archeologist Brian Fagan:

In the sixteenth century A.D., the inhabitants of California formed a dense network of groups, large and small, speaking over sixty languages, and numbering an estimated 310,000 people. They occupied about 256,000 square miles of varied terrain, with an average population density of about 1 person per square mile, a higher figure than average for the North America of five centuries ago.[4] [2]

At this time, the lands surrounding the Los Angeles River were home to a group of 5,000-10,000 Tongva Indians.  They occupied many relatively small settlements of perhaps 200 inhabitants apiece, although the sites of individual settlements appear to have moved quite frequently.[5] One of these settlements, Yang-na, was established at or near the site of the future pueblo close by the Cornfield.  Another, called Maung-na, was located in nearby Elysian Park. [3.B]

The Tongva are generally regarded as “one of the most materially rich and culturally influential” indigenous groups in Southern California. [6]  After the Spanish conquest, they were renamed the Gabrieleño Indians, reflecting their incorporation into the Mission San Gabriel.  The Yang-na community survived until the 1830s largely because the pueblo was dependent upon its labor for survival.[7]  And the Gabrieleño peoples endured well into the twentieth century despite missionization, epidemics, and political/military upheaval.[8]

Spanish Footprints

The Spanish entrada on the west coast began in September 1542 when Juan Cabrillo entered San Diego Bay. However, extensive Spanish occupation and settlement was delayed for two centuries at a time when other colonial powers began to evince an interest in Spain’s far-flung empire. In 1769, Gaspar de Portolá, governor of Baja (Lower) California, set off with Father Junípero Serra on an expedition to colonize Alta (Upper) California. On August 2, the party stopped at a riverbank close to the site of the future pueblo. In a contemporary diary, Father Juan Crespi recorded the site’s appeal: it had “all the requisites for a large settlement,” including a vineyard of wild grapes, an “infinity of rose bushes in full bloom,” and a soil “capable of providing every kind of grain and fruit.”[9]

The Portolá expedition named the river and valley ‘Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula.” Portolá most likely forded the river at the northern end of the Cornfield site, near the present-day North Broadway (previously Buena Vista) bridge. His party proceeded to Yang-na, noted by Crespi as a “delightful place” where Indians presented them with gifts and a group of old men “puffed at us three mouthfuls of smoke.”[10] A few years later, another fabled explorer, Juan Bautista de Anza, traversed the same river crossing with a group of 240 people from Sonora, Mexico. Their purpose was to establish a settlement at San Francisco Bay. Anza’s 1800-mile journey, incorporating the Portolá pathway, is today commemorated as the Anza National Historic Trail. [4]

A permanent Spanish presence at Los Angeles was assured when the Governor of Spanish California, Felipe de Neve, arrived at Mission San Gabriel in 1781 to establish a pueblo at the Los Angeles River. Some months later, on September 4 1781, forty-four settlers accompanied by four soldiers arrived at the site chosen by de Neve not far from present-day Olvera Street. There the pioneers began to build a new settlement called ‘El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula.’

The first task of the settlers was to secure the pueblo’s water supply. By late October, a zanja madre (‘mother ditch’) was completed, diverting water from the river for irrigation and drinking purposes. [5] The main channel from the zanja madre followed the present-day northern perimeter of the Cornfield, and a second channel passed to the south of the site. More than any other single factor, the zanja system allowed the pueblo to prosper. By 1870, there were eight zanjas in Los Angeles, with a total length of about 50 miles.[11] However, the system became unsanitary, and local officials worried about public health. Pipes began to replace the zanjas, and private carriers sold to subscribers water drawn directly from the river. In 1858, the Los Angeles Water Works Company erected a 40-foot high water wheel near Abila Springs (present-day Chinatown) to lift water for conveyance by flume to a brick reservoir in the pueblo’s plaza. The waterwheel was destroyed by bad weather in 1861-2, and the zanja system itself was condemned and buried by 1885. [6]

Train stop

The first rail locomotive arrived in Los Angeles in 1869, ushering in the modern industrial age.[12] In thirty short years, between 1870 and 1900, the population of the City of Los Angeles grew from 5,782 to over 102,000. A large part of the boom was due to the Southern Pacific Railroad Company (SP) which in 1873 was offered a sweet deal to connect LA to its rail network. The deal included part of the Cornfield site where SP established a freight house and depot which came to be known as ‘River Station.’ The economic activities that quite literally “passed through and around” River Station in the early twentieth century established the foundation for LA’s emergence as an industrial metropolis.[13] [7.A]

After the 1876 arrival of the transcontinental railroad, SP acquired the northern portion of the Cornfield, known as the ‘Bull Ring.’ There the company built a new passenger depot and the two-storey Pacific Hotel, together with expanded maintenance facilities. [7.B] During the 1880s, the River Station/Cornfield complex served as SP headquarters for its passenger and freight operations. It was a period of vivid and tumultuous growth. [8] The agricultural lands around Station were quickly overtaken by railroad and industrial activities, including an iron works and one of Standard Oil’s first refineries. The great land boom of the 1880s saw the rise of streetcar suburbs. In 1889, the LA Electric Rail Company built trolley lines along Buena Vista (North Broadway) and San Fernando (North Spring) streets. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, SP’s expanded passenger and maintenance operations moved away from the Cornfield site, although River Station retained its function as “nerve center” of SP activities.[14] Trains continued to stop at River Station until 1915. [9 or 12]

As twentieth-century metropolitan Los Angeles expanded, SP began to decentralize its operations, transferring its freight operations to Taylor Yard in 1925. When road transportation grew in importance, especially during and after World War II, River Station expanded its intermodal capacity to facilitate freight transfer from rail to road transport. However, by the 1970s, sprawl and plant obsolescence foreshadowed the decline of the Cornfield facility: Taylor Yard closed in 1985, and River Station was sold in 1992.[15]

Eye on the Future

Aside from the pueblo itself, Los Angeles has no place of greater historical significance and continuity than the Cornfield. Once regarded as a site of limited historical interest, the Cornfield has rapidly acquired an almost mythological standing as people began to pour their memories into the site, flooding anew the zanja madre.

The Cornfield has been present at so many important openings: indigenous origins, the Spanish pueblo, and the modern industrial age. Close by, there have been countless other acts of local history: for instance, the 1871 Chinatown massacre, the 1890s Pullman Strike, the forced relocation of Chinatown and deportations of Mexican workers in the 1930s, and recent community struggles over the redevelopment of Chavez Ravine. Now the Cornfield is to be given new life as a state historic park. How can the place of so much history, so many memories be commemorated? Has the Cornfield simply seen too much?

I think it is possible, even necessary to imagine a Cornfield that will contain both an official history and a host of informal memories. But, truth be told, Los Angeles is not very good at official remembering. We have no grand palaces, monumental war memorials, commemorative boulevards, or garish testaments to governmental authority. Instead, we are better at small spaces that surprise most city dwellers: the Great Wall of Los Angeles mural, for example, or the Biddy Mason and Little Tokyo ‘Power of Place’ projects in downtown LA.

So let us begin with the Cornfield as a place of small remembrances. The past is present, anywhere memory acts. An orange-blossom fragrance always recalls the first time we came to LA; the phrase ‘Florence and Normandie’ reminds us (powerfully, without further qualification) of the 1992 civil unrest in the city. The challenge at the Cornfield is to incorporate multiple memories in ways that are consistent with present-day community needs and identities. Because it is a small site, perhaps the brimming, echoing well of Cornfield memories is best honored by ensuring its active engagement and connectivity with the places around it –  the Los Angeles River, pueblo, Elysian Park, Chinatown, and so on – to create a spontaneous people’s memory.

Yet there may also be space for official history in the Cornfield, through one of the few truly great urban vistas in Los Angeles. This begins at the northern end of the Cornfield site, close by the faux-classical columns of the North Broadway/Buena Vista bridge, and extends south to the towers of downtown LA and City Hall. [10] For me, the bridge’s classical references instantly, involuntarily evoked echoes of the Appian Way, the triumphant causeway into Ancient Rome. The distant towers recall the foreshortened perspective down the Champs-Elysées toward l’Arche de Triomphe in Paris. And walking south through the Cornfield causeway stirred memories of approaching the Pyramid of the Moon along the Calzada de los Muertos in Teotihuacán, Mexico City’s Aztec capital. These are not fanciful allusions. This heroic Cornfield vista can and should be preserved. It would be a noble act of official commemoration for our indigenous, Spanish and industrial heritages.

If we respect this place as a container of history and memory, the new Cornfield may serve as both an opening to a remarkable past and an eye toward the vistas of an unfolding future.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

I am grateful to Janet Owen and Steve Rowell for their extraordinary generosity in making available the Not a Cornfield archives to assist in preparation of this essay. Jennifer Mapes provided excellent research assistance and, like Janet Owen, made helpful comments on an earlier version of the essay. Any residual errors are mine, all mine.

ENDNOTES