Square: AAA86, Date: 6.23.96, Time Elapsed: 6:31, Mileage 120.4

A woman standing in her two-car driveway. In shade, deep in thought. Ruby X. About to answer a question, or to ask one?

Ruby X. Raped at the age of three by a cousin, later told she could never conceive. Ruby becoming pregnant at 18 with Marvin, her "miracle child." No father mentioned. Only Marvin. Marvin and Ruby X.

All this is foreground. Ruby beside her car and Marvin's, up close, her stance telling us a common story, nothing more. It falls short of even providing symbols.

The real story is across the street -- an urban landscape, California style, infill, so new, so pristine -- so raw. Four houses, identical in their frame, tile roofing, facade, dual second-story windows, garage doors, driveways with autos and vans. The only visible sign of individuality the garage doors, several partly raised to various degrees, one totally raised, all somehow suggesting flight in those vehicles poised on the concrete strips in front of the doors, the vehicles the real sign of wealth in this putative community. Then, off to the extreme left, on another street, a second style of house by a second developer. There are no doubt multiple houses here, too; they're simply not in view.

No doubt Ruby's house exhibits one of several interior plans ( A, B, or C), variations on this year's theme of organized domestic space. TV room, with Family Entertainment Center, a negligible living room, a mod kitchen with dishwasher and built-in microwave, refrigerator, a sweep of counter with tall stools, multi-bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs, a quarter bath downstairs. (Gone are the wet bars of yesterday.) Regimentation. Bad jokes about finding one's own home after an alcoholic office party at Christmas time. There is no sense of community -- no one on the street. What happens collectively in this neighborhood is mostly by individual family in front of the TV set, the family's major contact with the outside world, or in the back yard, sandbox, trampoline, barbecue grill, Doughboy pool. And standing tall over it all, planted in their midst, huge towers that carry power transmission lines. According to some people, they let off radiation and promote cancer.

An American Dream, a California Dream that too often fails. A Dream: instant community. The real truth is isolation -- these houses seem to set people apart, not bring them together. They hold no social memories. To find true, long-term or lifelong friends, it is not enough to search the neighborhood; one has to travel down the freeway farther and farther, to perhaps another such collection of houses where there lives an acquaintance and potential friend who is drawn to the same activities and has similar attitudes. It isn't easy; in fact, it's work. There is no local tavern in view where common interests and values are shared. But there is the freeway.

The freeway represents escape, more precisely freedom. A true Southern California communal experience. It takes people to work, it brings them home. The great leveler of social status, gender, race, its various exits represent the democratization of experience. Florence or Westwood. Anyone may exit or enter. For the model tract community, accessibility is a mixed blessing. Surrounded as the tract is by housing not far away that is rundown, vermin ridden, overcrowded, it is an open invitation to theft and burglary. Live with it.

The freeways. Hate them. Love them. Drive them. They provide the long vistas of Southern California, concrete and natural configurations mostly blending but sometimes at odds with each other, overpasses a reminder of the way the city is crisscrossed by diverse cars and diverse people. Few understand the beauty of this landscape. Much of the freeway system, its girders, sound walls, and exit ramps, is marred by graffiti, L.A.'s unintelligible communal language. Gangs marking their territory, identifying themselves -- to other gangs, not to the drivers. But gang graffiti is self-defeating, particularly against streams of freeway traffic passing it by. The gangs are insular, not going anywhere, defending a little space when the broad expanse is right before their eyes. The future.

Mobility is what Southern Californians value. In the late eighteenth century, when the Jeffersonian grid makers did their work, no allowance was made for rivers, lakes, hills, wetlands -- or roads. No one, especially the farmer, wanted to go anywhere beyond market, the local town. Roads then were truly local. In a sense, of course, they still are local today, claimed by the community which surrounds them. But notice how broad the street of the model project is. It dominates the landscape, a reminder of its function of access. If our roads and streets have been superseded by still larger roads, freeways and highways, the predominant metaphor for the American experience, even in our literature, is still "the road of life." One has only to recall Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, where major events take place on the road to West Egg.

It was John Stow, in his famous Survey of London (1603), who said that "men are congregated into Citties and commonwealthes, for honestie and vtilities sake, these shortly bee the commodities that do come by citties, comminalities, and corporations. First, men by their nearness of conversation are withdrawn from barbarous feritie and force to a certain mildnes of manners and to humanity and justice . . . Also the doctrine of God is more fitly deliuered, and the discipline thereof more aptly to bee executed . . . by reason of the facilitie of common and often assembling." Stow was, of course, thinking of walled cities, of protection against invasion. He also lived in a hierarchical world of "equals and inferiors," "heades and superiors." His dual reasons for the presence of cities were right for his time. And Stow was already worried about decay and decline. London had been through as many changes, fires, catastrophes, as the Los Angeles Basin looks to go through.

The major framework of Stow's Survey was his walking the wards of London, with a keen eye for observation and a memory of earlier years. To this he added the use of written records whenever he could secure and peruse them. Douglas McCulloh has used the methods of his day, inventively designing a grid system and making a refined use of the basics of street photography, to which he has added the significant idea of "chance encounters." The result is this incredible and unique Survey of Los Angeles.

R.W. Lid

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