Trolley Thursday 12/02/21 - The Watts Local: An Examination of Los Angeles' Racial History, "White Flight", and Watts.

So today's Trolley Thursday post is actually one I'm also submitting to my "Literary Los Angeles" Class (English 2600) as part of my Final Creative Project. As such, I want to make sure the language within is cleaned up, the sources are front and center, and some of the content may not be suitable for all readers. For my topic, I chose to demonstrate my knowledge of Los Angeles history by examining its place in depictions of race relations in LA Literature like Nina Revoyr's 1993 novel, "Southland", as well as how it reflects in "Southern California: An Island on the Land", written by seminal LA area lawyer and author Carey McWilliams in 1946. I also always wanted to examine the sociology of streetcars, and how it played a role in turning the suburbs from white to multi-ethnic or vice-versa. As such, consider this a special presentation of "Twice Weekly Trolley History" and I hope you enjoy as much as my professor.

Introduction

Pacific Electric No. 626 on the Sierra Vista-Watts run from
Pasadena to Watts via 6th and Main Terminal, 1949.
The building to the right is the old LA County General Hospital.
(Jeffery J. Moreau, SCRM)

The town of Watts holds a significant place in the eyes of electric traction enthusiasts, like myself, as being one of those "legendary names" that represented what was seen as the glory days of Los Angeles. It was a place of junction, commerce, meeting people and trains going to the far-off beaches in Orange County or meeting the Great White ferries in Wilmington. Nowadays, the name “Watts” conjures up myths of gangbanging violence, buildings on fire in the 1965 Riots, and a general distrust of the area that, when described out loud to someone who doesn’t live in Los Angeles, sounds completely undeserved. So why do we, as Angelenos, regard Watts this way, when other areas of Los Angeles like East Los, West Hollywood, and even Highland Park maintain a genteel, near-gentrified identity by comparison? The simple answer to a white supremacist society is "the white people left", and just how and why this happened, is because of racist attitudes, systematic oppression, and a changing cultural landscape that eventually left Watts, and its citizens of color, behind to fend for themselves.

Residency on Steel Rails

A much-different look at Los Angeles, showing most of its
ranchos dating back to the early-mid 1800s. Rancho La Tajuata
is seen on the lower right of the picture.
(Ranchos of LA County)

    Before we look at how Watts changed, it's important to first look at how the area was inhabited in the first place. Prior to the 1843 "Rancho La Tajuata" Mexican land grant, the flat grasses of Watts were home to Tongva people until the Californios walked through and shuttered them into Missions. The land was used for grazing and beef production soon after the land grant, but by 1870, shifting demographics necessitated selling of the land. The rancho fell into the hands of Charles H. Watts, who purchased a generous 220-acre parcel for livestock farming in 1886. Watts kept this trade until 1902, when he donated ten acres of land to land developer Henry E. Huntington for his Pacific Electric Railway (PE) station. As the area had no name, Huntington named the station "Watts". Soon after this, a steady influx of Mexican laborers (dubbed "traqueros", or "track workers") emigrated into Watts to build Huntington's march to the sea, what eventually became the PE Long Beach Line.

A 1904 land allotment map with the PE mainline at upper right.
(Los Angeles Magazine)

    The traqueros living in Watts formed their own "Hell-on-Wheels" style camps, first in "boxcars with their families", then later in "four-room houses occupied by two families" all on company property and dime. (Romo, 69) Eventually, seventy-six households called Watts "home" and this became quite the issue for the Los Angeles Board of Health, who opined, ""Because of the low status and low wage of the Mexican family, it is impossible to enforce the state law" concerning the living spaces of the homes owned by the Pacific Electric Company." (Romo, 70) As the PE built away from Watts and further down to Long Beach and Santa Ana, many traqueros followed, with Watts finally opening to service in 1904. As the land around the station was too expensive to afford at the time, many Mexicans would not return until the 1920s. This left the door open for what Los Angeles-based author and lawyer Carey McWilliams (1905-1980) called "The Pullman-Car Migration". 

A typical Southern Pacific real estate promotional poster, this one from 1909.
(Unknown Author)

A Northern Pacific "Emigrant" car promoting land in the northwestern United States.
(American Studies @ The University of Virginia)

A 1911 Southern Pacific "Sunset Limited" railroad advertisement
attracting Eastern Snowbirds on the "Road to the Pacific".
(Period Paper)

    In his compendium of then-contemporary Angeleno cultural criticism and historical review, Southern California: An Island on the Land, McWilliams tells of how "the Southern Pacific Company, in particular, promoted Southern California by every means at its disposal: through publicity, settlement agents, land bureaus [...], lecturers, exhibits, and inspired news stories." (125-126) Beyond hiring lecturers to serve as real estate salesmen, the Southern Pacific's most-successful gimmick was running "emigrant" trains, special coaches packed with the fruits (sometimes literally) of Southern California with the promise of cheap land, perfect weather, and new opportunities. These trains appealed not to the lowly dirt farmers that would have braved the perils of the Oregon Trail, but "people who could afford to purchase a railroad ticket: the merchant, the banker, the uprooted professional man, the farmer with an invalid wife. Many of these settlers were drawn west by the excitement and novelty of a train trip." (McWilliams, 127-128) Considering that Southern Pacific and Henry Huntington were both involved in the real estate business (and would later merge their railway enterprises in 1911), this deal was essentially a money factory.

Watt's main street in the early-mid 1900s, with
the PE depot on the right side of the street.
(Blackpast)

    With the rise of this dominant middle-class now making their way to Southern California on SP trains, it was now the sale of real estate that drove Huntington's interurban onward. Cheap lots for as little as $1 down and $1 a week ($24.13) and tract homes for $25 a week ($603 in 2020) by 1916 were now popping up all over Watts. What made the area very attractive was that unlike most areas in Los Angeles at the time, Watts was also open to white, black, and Latino families alike, with an ordinary Mexican laborer able to purchase their "dream house" on wages of $2.65 a week ($34.86 in 2020) by 1920, totaling $500 ($6577) for two lots. (Romo, 70) Even African Americans now had an initial foothold in Watts as 14% of the city's population, the highest in California at the time. (Meakin) With such an enormous clientele to serve, it seemed that the PE was at no shortage of potential passengers.

"Who Needs a Car in Los Angeles?"

Pacific Electric Hollywood Car No. 748 blocks a train of
Blimps at the 6th and Main Terminal on a sunny postwar morning.
(George Krambles)

    As Detective Eddie Valiant opined in Robert Zemeckis' 1988 cartoon-noir, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, "Who needs a car in Los Angeles? We got the greatest public transportation system in the world!" Right before, of course, a sign announcing PE had just been bought by Cloverleaf Industries. However, before the freeway blight that killed off the interurban cars, the "Red Car" really was a fact of life for many people. Its attractive low rates meant that a train to Downtown Los Angeles' manufacturing and garment districts, or a day trip out to Huntington Beach or Pasadena was well within reach for people making $2 to $12 a week. And of all the lines on the PE, the Watts Line proved to be the most popular and highest-earning, with an average of 7.5 million people traveling through the station between 1917 and 1920. (Swett, 126) These passengers were lower-middle class African Americans, Mexican-Americans, and white folks alike depending on the PE, at a time when cars were nigh-unattainable status symbols.

Riders of all walks of life gather on the PE Watts depot's platform.
(esngblog)

    This fact, in turn, created an odd cultural shift between people who could afford a car (nominally white people) and those who could not (lower-class whites, African-Americans, and Mexican-Americans). This shift began happening in the 1920s, when the car enabled people to just drive everywhere where the streetcar couldn't, on their own schedules and all on their lonesome. Pretty soon, this perceived gap began widening as suburbs like Beverly Hills (normally reached by the PE's Santa Monica and West Hollywood lines), Westwood, and the San Fernando Valley began spreading far out of reach of any further streetcar development. The effect on Watts was quite stark, as while the outer suburbs grew with the automobile, the railroad-centric town's growth was stunting massively. Even the suburbs around it like South Gate, Willowbrook, and Green Meadows began growing faster as people radiated away from the railway. It seemed now, even with the largest transportation system in the world, it was better to be seen in a car than in a Red Car.

Mind you, it wasn't always safer, as this motorist found out
colliding with Metropolitan Coach Lines No. 1537.
(Bill Whyte, Steve Crise, PERYHS)

War Makes for Strange Bedfellows

A USMC train made of two "Blimp" interurban cars are
caught past the Sing Kee Laundry building in Long Beach,
northbound to Los Angeles.
(Jack Finn, PERYHS)

    World War II brought about gasoline rations for all of Los Angeles, which meant that the PE (now running under the US Maritime Commission) became the primary source of transit for Watts residents. This was also the period of the "Second Great Migration", where tens of thousands of African-American residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas (all segregated states) flocked to California for new employment, bringing the percentage of African-Americans in Watts from 4% to 14%. Several new housing projects were now built in Watts not by the railroads, but by employers like North American Aircraft and the US Naval Dry Docks, enormous multi-family-per-room apartment buildings built as cheaply as possible. This capricious agreement between employer and employee only lasted as long as the war went on, because by the time the war ended in 1945, America's automobile manufacturing was booming and the gas rationing was rescinded. With more opportunities to buy cars, much of the remaining white population fled Watts on the brand new "Harbor Freeway", marking the largest "white flight" in LA's history.

White Flight, Black Fight

The Hollywood Freeway in the late 1940s-early 1950s,
enabling many residents with cars to flee to the untapped
peace of the San Fernando Valley.
(Unknown Author)

    "White Flight" is a term that dates back to the 1950s (with some incidents happening as early as 1888) that is a backbone of discrimination. Whether by unconscious means or through systematic discrimination, white flight is the act of a white population moving out of a neighborhood when other people of color, or white people of a lower economic status, move in. From here, there are many perceived threats at play like tanked land values, a need for entrenched white people to defend their property, and an eventual abandonment of the inner city for the "safe" haven of suburbia. For the city of Watts, many residents of color were outright denied being able to move out to surrounding suburbs, as the suburbs "excluded black settlement", leading to the town becoming "an island of black poverty". (Meakin) An example of this systematic denial was the passing of Proposition 14, a controversial constitutional amendment boosted by the California Real Estate Association (now the California Association of Realtors) and the Los Angeles Times. Its intent was to repeal the Rumford Fair Housing Act (which financially punished landlords and property owners who refused to sell property to African Americans under racial discrimination) and bring back systematic real-estate discrimination, in the same response to rising African American populations that the "white flight" also committed.

A two-car "Watts Local" service is seen departing the Watts depot,
northbound, heading for downtown Los Angeles under MCL operations.
The photo is dated January 30, 1958.
(Steve Crise, PERYHS)

    Another victim of "white flight" was the Pacific Electric Railway, whose ridership was lost after WWII and were suffering increased competition from the automobile. With more people driving in Los Angeles, the once-mighty interurban company began to close down its lines and its parent, Southern Pacific, sold it to Metropolitan Coach Lines (MCL) in 1953. MCL, along with fellow LA neighbor National City Lines (NCL) were both in the bus transit business and were interested in replacing LA's old streetcars with "modern" buses (funded, of course, by Firestone Tires, General Motors, and Standard Oil, among others). Once the "Watts Local" service between Watts and Downtown LA closed in 1959, many were left without a viable commute option as commute times got longer, bus frequency lessened, and capacity woes ensued. New regional transit systems also chose to ignore some neighborhoods like Watts due to a perceived discrimination to keep the lower-class that depended on public transit off and outside of their nice, shiny new buses. 

The warzone during the Watts Riots of 1965.
(New York World Telegram)

    Deprived of an important public transit link to the rest of Los Angeles County, and facing increasing "economic and racial isolation", the loss of important industrial and production centers, and growing police brutality, it was only a matter of time before the citizens of Watts made their anger and anxieties known: through the Watts Riots. On August 11, 1965, following the aggravated arrest of 21-year-old Marquette Frye and his mother Rena Price being shoved by officers which both led to their arrest trying to defend themselves, Watts exploded into a "46-square-mile [...] combat zone during the ensuing six days." (Woo) Only the little PE Watts Depot stood testament to the riot in what eventually became known as "Charcoal Alley".

Charcoal Alley is set ablaze as firefighters gather in the middle of 103rd Street.
(LA Fire Department Historical Society)

    "This particular storm had been a long time coming. Anyone who kept an eye on the horizon, a nose lifted to the wind, had known it was on its way. [...] All through the night, the storm was building, gathering force and dimension. A few bursts of fire split the sky like heat lightning. The storm, inflamed by history, swept down in curtains, sheets, and shrouds, all twisting together, forming rivers and collecting in pools. [...] Those who got stuck in the storm - outsiders and even some long-time residents who should have known better - did not make it home unscathed. They got dragged from cars and beaten, but not a single outsider died. That fate was reserved for the people who lived there - engulfed in the storm they helped along or tried to contain, or caught by the armed outsides who tried to quell the storm by force. By late Thursday night, Watts was glutted; by Friday it started to flood. And all the powerful, churning water that had gathered there spilled over the banks, streaming into other parts of the city." - Nina Revoyr, Southland, pages 302-303.

Rioters jubilantly mob a police car, August 12, 1965.
It was a time of violent and much-needed revolution.
(Los Angeles Times)

    Nina Revoyr (born 1969), a Polish/Japanese contemporary fiction author, put the close personals of the Watts Riots in a better way than I can ever describe with my own flowery loquaciousness, as her 2003 novel "Southland" dealt with both the fallout of the Watts Riots (as its centerpiece of its neo-noir leanings) and how neighborhoods like Watts and Crenshaw lost importance in successive generations, with only the old guard to keep it tended at every corner store. For the flames quelled by the Watts Riots, it was not a flame of destruction, but a flame of rebirth, a purposeful flame that, in the words of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, "marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life." Whatever was left of the original white population of Watts left soon after, including others from untouched areas like Huntington Park, and while the McCone Commission investigation found numerous issues with Watts' civic landscape (including recommending improved police-community ties, increased low-income housing, upgraded health-care and education services, and especially more efficient public transportation), none of these recommendations were ever implemented. (Dawsey)

One year after the riots, many buildings are still rendered into rubble, as this 1966 photo shows.
(LIFE Magazine)

 

A Grave of Cloverleafs

The LA Metro Blue/A line's 103rd street/Watts Towers
station, right outside the original PE depot.
(Foursquare)

    Today, the town of Watts is surrounded by three freeways, flanked east and west by the 710 and 110, respectively, and bordered on the south by the often-gridlocked and controversial 105. It and the other neighborhoods around it like Compton, South Gate, and Florence remain examples of your typical forgotten suburbs, with town centers and shops following the main roads and thin, ribbon-like blocks of residential homes filling up the empty space. Even with the re-addition of the LA Metro Blue Line in 1990 following the original Pacific Electric tracks to Los Angeles, Watts continues to have a much-maligned myth about it that keeps many from seeking opportunities there. After all, the opportunities left a long time ago and with it went many longtime African-American residents, replaced by low-income Latino households. As Los Angeles spread out and soared to new heights, Watts remains one of the city's most impoverished areas, and a far cry from the equal promise it had almost a century ago (to say nothing of the gang activity following the Watts Riots).

The famous Watts Towers, a prime example of "naive art".
(Angelus News)

    Despite being an island in one of the country's biggest metropolitan centers, a continuing generational shift is occurring within the city. Neighborhood leaders, cultural figures, and city council-people are always trying to raise Watts up without having to open the town to the cheap and patronizing insult of gentrification. The Watts Towers Arts Center now became the nexus for a new city identity in 1990, following their designation as a National Historic Landmark, and other civic activities like the "Toys for Watts" toy drive and the Watts Summer Games helped make the area a welcoming and community-driven place. Even the Bloods, Crips, and Pirus formed a peace treaty in 1992 to aid in declining gang violence within the city, recognizing the need for peace and togetherness in a period of Los Angeles fraught with more riots and violence. Despite all of the white flight, and the violence, and the brutality, Watts continues to be reborn in defiance of its reputation.

Reconciliation by Rapid Transit

A modern-day interurban departs 103rd/Watts on
a glimmering evening, June 28, 2018.
(Bryan's Productions)

    As Watts continues to rebuild and improve, so too does the public transit. Despite the Blue Line's much-maligned reputation, one thing that could not be discounted was how it got Watts back on the move, opening its low-income households to new opportunities outside the town while bringing them back home at the end of the day. However, being able to leave one's neighborhood for new opportunities is always a double-edged sword, as a generation that may leave now might never come back and leave its old neighborhood to rot. Nina Revoyr, in her prologue to Southland, writes, "In the city where history is useless and the future is reinvented everyday, no one has any need for game you hunted and cooked yourself; for berries stolen off the vine; for neighbors in pairs and threesomes sitting on stoops with cups of coffee, faces lifted to accept the morning sun. No one thinks about the neighborhood, it's little corner market. No one, including the children of the people who lived there." (12) There will always be this anxiety of a generational abandonment, where children who grew up in Watts will recognize the history and feel ashamed or embarrassed by it, and so they leave. 

Pacific Electric's famous "four tracks" in 1904, looking south,
showing how desolate and undeveloped south Los Angeles was.
(Jack Finn, PERYHS)

    And yet, this anxiety fuels writing like "Southland", and fuels my writing as well, as we both attempt to help people better appreciate where they live so that it can be restored to greatness and prosperity. Even if it's super-hyper-focused like I am on streetcars. Revoyr's anxiety, much like the older generations of Watts residents, want to see their otherwise inconsequential way of life to live on because they want future generations to know they were here, and they are still here. They are about as "here" as the LA Metro Blue Line along the former PE Four Tracks, as "here" as the former buildings that were replaced in the wake of the Watts Riots, as "here" as you, the reader, and as me, who retells for future knowledge. Watts is reinventing itself like Revoyr is saying, but without forgetting its roots, much like how rapper Kendrick Lamar continues to rep his own community in Compton and bring it prominence, and that in turn can secure Watts as a cultural touchstone and sign of identity in many people and in Los Angeles as a whole.

A modern view of the Four Tracks at Slauson Boulevard, looking north to downtown.
(Justefrain)

Conclusion

 A modern Metro Kinkisharyo P3010 departs 103rd/Watts
Northbound on a gloomy, foggy Los Angeles morning.
(Myself)

    So why do we as Angelenos still regard Watts as an impoverished, crime-ridden, gang-violent hellhole? Watts is a part of our identity as the Pacific Electric was, and both histories are firmly intertwined. Watts housed PE's track crews, and in turn the Red Car brought Watts' sons and daughters out into the world. I'm not saying Watts should be totally romanticized as this utopian equal-opportunity place, as it has its faults and missteps like any other city. However, it is also important to put Watts' place in the grand LA hierarchy as a worthy part of this city, and one that should not be forgotten but helped along. So long as one has their wits about them, they can still visit the original PE Watts Station, hear the LA Metro rocket past, and imagine themselves boarding a train to downtown, or to Long Beach, or just back in time before the Red Cars roamed the city. If Carey McWilliams can love LA and criticize it all the same, then Watts can be loved by you and I too. Now go out there and ride the Metro.

Thank you for reading today's Trolley post, and watch your step as you alight on the platform. My resources today included "Southland" by Nina Revoyr, "Southern California: An Island on the Land" by Carey McWilliams, "Lines of the Pacific Electric: Southern & Western Districts" by Ira L. Swett and Interurban Publishing, "East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio" by Richardo Romo, Blackpasts' "Watts, California" by contributor Kate Meakin, Elaine Woo's obituary for Rena Price in the Los Angeles Times, Darrell Dawsey's 25-year anniversary report on the Watts Riots, the Watts Neighborhood Council, and the photo credits listed in each caption. The trolley gifs in our posts are made by myself and can be found under “Motorman Reymond’s Railroad Gif Carhouse”. On Tuesday, we return to the City that made some beer famous as we revisit the Milwaukee Electric Railway and Light Company. For now, you can follow myself or my editor on Twitter, buy a shirt or sticker from our Redbubble stand, or purchase my editor's self-developed board game! It's like Ticket to Ride, but cooler! (and you get to support him through it!) Until next time, ride safe!