As the local Chamber of Commerce has long been aware, the most breathtaking days in La-La Land are those that follow the midwinter rains. The smog is washed away and the snow-topped mountains that ring the city are abruptly visible, though it may be a balmy 70 degrees throughout the flatlands. On such days, it's easy to understand why America's first filmmakers decided to set up shop here 90 years ago (well, that and the dearth of unionized labor), and why generations of urban visionaries were inspired to sketch grand plans for the City of Angels.
What defines this city, though, is that virtually none of those grand plans came to fruition. Los Angeles set the template for unplanned, sprawling, privatized growth. Time and again, the private defeated the public in the construction of L.A. The city became home to the largest number of backyard swimming pools and the smallest number of public parks. The great architects -- Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright -- designed private homes, not public buildings. Six years ago, a citywide celebration of the millennium was canceled for lack of a suitable public space.
In the absence of a strong central identity, there was no strong central authority. The mayors of New York and Chicago genuinely affected the lives of their cities, and they were covered accordingly. Not so in Los Angeles. About a dozen years ago, my friend Fred Siegel, the New York urbanologist, visited L.A.'s City Hall and, accustomed to the hubbub surrounding Rudy Giuliani, phoned me in bewilderment upon finding an almost empty press room. "Where is everybody?" he asked plaintively.
That's not a question anybody would ask today. In his first six months on the job, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has already surpassed his predecessors in one crucial regard: He is visible in his own city. In a media market where until recently most television news operations couldn't find City Hall without Mapquest, this is no small achievement.
Villaraigosa's visibility is partly a consequence of his charisma and life story: He's the mayor with the movie-star looks, the kid who grew up in the projects, the first Latino mayor of an American mega-city. But it's also the result of a relentless public schedule. Villaraigosa may not run to as many fires as did Fiorello LaGuardia, New York's legendary mayor, whose career Villaraigosa has studied, but he continually seems to be speaking in every quadrant of this vast city.
There's more to his visibility, though, than his story and his schedule. For he has become mayor at the very moment when Los Angeles seems finally to have realized that privatized, unplanned sprawl no longer works, that decent private lives depend on a decent public environment. Fifteen years ago, the residents of the city's tony Westside rejected the idea of a subway running down Wilshire Boulevard to the ocean: Their neighborhoods didn't need the transit or the polyglot riders who'd be tromping through their part of town. Today, having spent much of the intervening time stuck in ever-worsening traffic, the Westsiders are calling for a subway, and Villaraigosa is lobbying Washington and Sacramento for the funding.
The quintessential horizontal city is about to go vertical, with 52 new high-rises slated for construction. The mayor preaches the gospel of mixed-use development, of increasing density along the city's bus and current and future rail lines. "I talked about this when I first ran [unsuccessfully] for mayor in 2001, and it didn't resonate the way it does now," Villaraigosa says. "But people are now realizing that the gridlock, the pollution, the long commutes, the lost productivity have brought us to the point where we have to rethink what this city looks like. And we can no longer rely on single-passenger automobiles as our principal means of transportation in L.A.'s future."
In earlier times an elected L.A. official voicing such sentiments would have been considered not just politically self-destructive, but criminally insane. Today Villaraigosa has assembled an activist administration of builders and environmentalists committed simultaneously to densifying and greening the city, to mandating the construction of affordable housing and pocket parks, even to scaling back L.A.'s dependence on the automobile -- and it is winning plaudits all over town. In a city with a huge number of working poor, he's determined that these projects hire locally and pay decently. And he's also announced his intention to take over the city's beleaguered school district.
Villaraigosa is acclimating Los Angeles to the idea that private purposes need a public sphere, and, more elementally, that a mayor can matter. That may be old news in Chicago and New York, but in Los Angeles it's as if the smog has suddenly lifted.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Washington Post.
