Fired Up (New York Review of Architecture)
In Issue #22 of New York Review of Architecture-set-night-on-fire-review
Not long after touching down in Los Angeles in 1965, the architectural critic Reyner Banham began gathering impressions for a book that would overturn the consensus of urban and cultural critics who found the city to be lousy, inscrutable, and “unserious.” Following a stint at UCLA, and countless star-studded dinner parties, Banham published Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), a work of pop historiography thin on substance but high on style. In it he famously praised the youthful, ephemeral quality that arose from the unique circumstances of the city’s creation—a place “seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep,” lacking or disavowing all the conventional markers of urbanity. Banham’s contrarian thesis was encapsulated in the book’s very first sentence: “Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape.”
But Four Ecologies was derided by several of Banham’s contemporaries who viewed his concept of urban instantaneity as the product of an incomplete, privileged vision of Los Angeles. While Banham lauded the city’s topographical novelty, pointing to its freshly installed freeway system as a potentially utopian gesture, Los Angeles had come to represent the opposite for the artist and critic Peter Plagens. “Freeways have destroyed or aborted the very egalitarianism Banham and the highway commission think they promote,” Plagens argued in his review of Four Ecologies, “Los Angeles: The Ecology of Evil,” published in Artforum in 1972. To Plagens, the wily English beardo was a careless interloper, “an architectural geewhizzer taking such delight in the outsized perversities slowly killing” the city’s destitute and overlooked.
Banham’s vision of a sprawling “instant city” glossed over the slow violence of urban development and abuse of state power that had been unfolding for decades a few miles south of Central Los Angeles. The infrastructure that had divided the city, quickly and without abatement, had also divided the attention of its politicians, studio heads, journalists, and tastemakers, who, like Banham, set their sights more narrowly on the marvels of the Strip or Wilshire Boulevard. This cultural divide, diagnosed on the world scale by the theorist Walter Mignolo as that between “modern colonialisms and colonial modernities,” or modernity and “coloniality”—a term he defines as “the reverse and unavoidable side of modernity”—had been laid bare for all to see by the Watts riots, a six-day uprising in August 1965 that began on the streets of the South-Central neighborhood of Watts and later spread throughout the city and the global media sphere along with it.
It was in this same year that Mike Davis, a 19-year-old Trotskyist from the nearby city of Fontana, was newly minted as the Los Angeles regional organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. Organizing campus protests, building a local draft resistance movement, and witnessing the tyranny of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) up close—all while picking up odd jobs to make ends meet—granted Davis a perspective of Los Angeles that admitted none of Banham’s distanced optimism or (for the time being) Plagens’s despair, only a tireless belief in positive change from the bottom up. The city’s infrastructure had waged war against many of its own people, Davis might have thought as he traveled across its freeways as a part-time truck driver, and it was time the people fought back.
The optimism that had defined Davis’s youth, however, does not come across in his first two books about Los Angeles, which were written decades after his earlier formative experiences. City of Quartz (1990) and Ecology of Fear (1998) both read as a People’s Guide to Los Angeles, as genuine as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980), yet boundlessly more cynical, especially when it came to the city’s anti-homeless architecture, gated communities, and other grim urban innovations. While both Quartz and Ecology grappled with L.A.’s troubled past through the author’s signature mix of urban studies and journalistic fury, they generally depicted its citizens as casualties subject to the cruel exigencies of geography, power, and violence.
Davis’s third book in the Los Angeles series, on the other hand, reanimates his fresh-faced thirst for revolution. Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, a self-proclaimed “movement history” coauthored with UC Irvine professor Jon Wiener, was released in April of last year, weeks before the country broke out in massive protests resembling those of six decades earlier. Davis and Wiener’s turbulent Los Angeles is neither the buoyant city of Banham’s delirious account nor that of Hollywood or daytime television. And if their L.A. shares some features of Plagens’s desperate vistas, it nonetheless thrums with the energy of the street, reclaimed by those of African, Asian, and Mexican ancestry who had been “edited out of utopia.”
As Set the Night on Fire asserts, the ’60s was the formative period for Los Angeles, and from this roiling decade the authors isolate three critical years: 1963, during which the United Civil Rights Committee swiftly rose and fell; 1965 and the Watts Rebellion, as Davis and Wiener characterize the events; and 1969, when Tom Bradley, who would go on to become the city’s first Black mayor, launched his political campaign against the callous, staunchly conservative Sam Yorty.
As in many accounts of this era, Davis and Wiener fixate on the Watts Rebellion, in which the alienating city had been torched to force the growth of a better one. “[T]housands of young Black people in Watts set fire to the illusion that Los Angeles was a youth paradise,” the authors write. But they do not depict the uprising as a monolithic event with mystified origins. Instead, the details of the uprising are sprinkled throughout the book’s 638 pages, in which satellite movements and loosely connected groups appear caught up in history’s swell while also contributing to its rise and fall.
These disparate plights were given credence in the now-forgotten Los Angeles Free Press, to which Davis and Wiener devote a chapter. The most widely circulated underground newspaper at the time, the Free Press unflinchingly expressed support for the residents of South-Central L.A. while major news outlets were busy stoking the fears of middle- 3 class and wealthy Angelenos. The cover story of the paper’s August 20, 1965, edition implored those living in Central L.A. to reconsider their own relationship to South-Central— rendered invisible to them through urban segregation and police containment—and to make amends. “[T]he voice of reason, of compassion, of immediate positive action must be heard, and it must be heard from the white community, or else the next Black protest will be still more severe,” Art Kunkin pleaded. “Not only the Black neighborhoods, but every neighborhood in the city will become an armed camp. Not only white businesses in South LA will go up in flames but the very mountains and oil fields ringing Los Angeles.”
This warning, though heartfelt, was not altogether different from the apocalyptic missives coming out of the LAPD. Without mincing words, Davis and Wiener limn a vitriolic portrayal of police chief William Parker, who often failed to conceal his disdain for the city’s nonwhite residents. Parker’s role during the rebellion, according to the authors, was to blame everyone but his own department for the distrust sown between Black Angelenos and police. Using language reminiscent of the Red Scares, he painted the Civil Rights movement as tantamount to anarchy and communism. In seemingly round-the-clock press conferences, he dramatized the danger presented by the rebellion even after it was squashed and manufactured public support for maintaining an even greater police presence in South-Central L.A. throughout the following year. “1966 was a grim year for social justice, but it had one bright spot,” write Davis and Wiener. “At a testimonial dinner in July and in front of hundreds of guests, Chief Parker keeled over dead.”
With Parker’s sudden demise serving as a midpoint, Set the Night on Fire proceeds to highlight the positive outcomes of the rebellion, a critical yet often-overlooked component of its history, as well as subsequent uprisings in other parts of the city apparently inspired by its efforts. In the aftermath there also appeared the Watts Renaissance, a period of rebuilding in late-’60s South-Central Los Angeles marked by exhaustive creative output, from the tortured sculptures of Noah Purifoy to the literary events of the newly established Watts Writers’ Workshop. “Watts was becoming, if only for a few seasons, Los Angeles’ Left Bank,” write Davis and Wiener, directly tying this flourishing to the infernal events of 1965. “The seeds for the hothouse growth of Watts’ cultural enterprises were provided by the unity, pride and community spirit generated by the rebellion.” Fastforwarding to 1972, a time still reeling from the turbulence of the previous decade, Davis and Wiener conclude with an account of Wattstax, a benefit concert commemorating the seventh anniversary of the Watts Rebellion held at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum. The event was the largest all-Black gathering in American history—with blues, funk, jazz, and soul music, and without a single LAPD officer allowed on-site. A joyous, fitting end to a book about grassroots resistance.
Set the Night on Fire offers a rigorous catalog of strife between the people of Los Angeles and its hardset institutions, of which the Watts Rebellion was but the largest manifestation. It had taken decades to foment, but its effect on the city and nation was profound, shattering the illusions of universal postwar prosperity. The book is also an impassioned plea for taking up new stands and lighting more fires—right now, everywhere— to combat the injustices that mark contemporary life. As Davis and Wiener show, we can’t simply wait around for a spark, but must prepare the kindling ourselves.
