11/29/04

LC041129

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

A special report on Southern California's growth. Are we
building an unlivable future or fulfilling dreams?

John Young>> More homes, more single family detached homes,
more apartments, more condos, more townhouses.

Katherine Perez>> That kind of thinking is going to suffocate
us.

Val>> And then, she's a living legend in the art world. Meet
June Wayne who made her imprint on print-making.

These stories on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> It seems endless, the sea of tract homes under
construction that continues to expand the boundaries of Southern
California. Sprawl is a blessing and a curse and tonight Saul
Gonzalez begins a special series of reports looking at the
future we are building for ourselves. Are we edging ever closer
to dystopia, as it's called, or are we fulfilling the California
dream?

Saul Gonzalez>> To drive through today's San Bernardino and
Riverside Counties, it's to journey across a landscape changing
before one's eyes. As heavy machinery carves up and grades acre
after acre of once rural land, construction workers are
everywhere, drilling, hammering and sawing. What they're making
are homes, street after street of them, subdivision after
subdivision, quickly covering vast swaths of the Inland Empire
in fields of suburban sprawl.

John Young>> We're seeing an astronomical growth. The
population has increased, more housing, more shopping, more
freeways, more things that happen when you have growth.

Saul Gonzalez>> Home developer, John Young, thrives on that
growth. His company is one of the Inland Empire's largest
producers of single family residences. In about a hundred days,
Young's workers can turn a bare field into a street of ready to
move in tract homes, front lawn included.

John Young>> The American dream that most people want is a
single family home with a big back yard, a place you can put a
pool, a place they can raise their families.

William Molette>> On a scale of one to ten, I'd say the quality
of life here is at least an eight, maybe even a nine.

Saul Gonzalez>> That good?

William Molette>> Yeah. Oh, I love this community.

Saul Gonzalez>> William Molette, a former Los Angeles area
resident, recently move into a Moreno Valley subdivision built
by Young's company. Like others who moved here, he came looking
for tranquility and he says he's found it.

William Molette>> My wife and I, we might take off and just go
walking. Just walk. Los Angeles, you've got to constantly keep
looking over that shoulder. We love this area and I would
recommend it to any young people.

Saul Gonzalez>> And every year, thousands of others are
following people like Molette out to the Inland Empire. Most
often, they're young families fleeing high real estate costs in
Los Angeles and Orange Counties.

John Young>> People are driven out here for prices. You have
prices that are six, seven, eight hundred thousand for a starter
home in the coastal areas now.

Saul Gonzalez>> And here?

John Young>> Here, after prices are in the three's, so you can
buy a home almost half price that you can for the coastal area.

Saul Gonzalez>> As quickly as the Inland Empire is developing,
growth so far is only a taste of things to come. It's estimated
that, by the year 2020, another million and a half more people
will be living here. That means more than a sixty percent
increase in population. In response, Young says developers like
him must continue to do what they do best: build.

John Young>> The mantra is that we need availability. The
mantra is more homes, more single family detached homes, more
apartments, more condos, more townhouses. We need for sale
products and we need for rent product. We need to house our
population.

Saul Gonzalez>> Of course, suburban growth is nothing new to
Southern California. Over a half century ago, in about an
hour's drive west of the Inland Empire, ground was broken in one
of the first post-war suburbs in America. If Southern
California sprawl has a birthplace, it was here in a project
worthy of the Pharaohs.

Between 1950 and 1953, seventeen thousand five hundred homes
were built on former farmland creating something that looked
like a human hive from the air. The result was the community of
Lakewood, the quintessential 1950's suburb and the direct
ancestor of subdivisions being built across Southern California
today. For newcomers, Lakewood meant a new life and a fresh
start.

D.J. Waldie>> My neighbors came from the borders south, from
Tennessee and west Texas and Oklahoma. They knew hard lives
and, for them, Lakewood was a kind of paradise. It was a place
of pilgrimage. They came here and wanted to stay here because
it gave them enough of the good things of life to lead a decent
life.

Saul Gonzalez>> Author, D.J. Waldie, is a social critic and
lifelong Lakewood resident. He writes about how suburban life
has shaped the character and dreams of Southern Californians.

D.J. Waldie>> Suburbs are places where a whole class of
Americans invented themselves. Beginning in the mid-1950's,
tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions
of working class Americans, not exclusively white but of all
complexions, found enough space, enough opportunity, enough
employment to lead decent lives. Those decent lives occurred in
a place called suburbia.

Saul Gonzalez>> Yet as sprawl continues to spread, many experts
and citizens worry about the long-range costs of rapid growth.

Katherine Perez>> When you're driving along the freeway and you
look over and there's a new development project here and a new
development project there, it's the unplanned nature of this
growth that's the concern.

Saul Gonzalez>> Katherine Perez is the Director of the
Transportation and Land Use Collaborative, an organization that
studies growth and planning issues in Southern California.

Katherine Perez>> I think we live in this fantasy world where
we have this attitude where there will be an endless supply.
Endless supply of water, endless supply of land, endless supply
of resources to continue to do what we've been doing for the
past two and three generations. The fact of the matter is, that
kind of thinking is going to suffocate us. It's going to
suffocate us in terms of the air we breath, the contamination of
the water that we're trying to drink and the land that we
actually are not being very good stewards of.

Saul Gonzalez>> Critics of rapid development argue that sprawl
spawns a multitude of environmental problems from the paving
over of open space and farmland to the over-consumption of water
and other natural resources to the creation of pollutant-
spewing, nerve-grinding gridlock that gets ever slower. For
example, in the Inland Empire, time spent by commuters in
traffic has grown from nine hours a year in 1982 to fifty-seven
hours today, a more than five hundred percent increase. Less
measurable than the environmental costs of sprawl, but just as
significant, are the social costs of growth. Many worry about
the spread of so-called cookie cutter communities and the
decline of civic identity.

Katherine Perez>> You can literally get lost in a cul-de-sac of
some development project, not know what street you're on, not
know what city you're in because everything looks the same.
It's basically garage door after garage door after garage door.
You feel isolated. You feel detached. There's no sense of
place. People feel like, you know, I push the button, I put my
car in the garage. I push the button and I'm home.

Saul Gonzalez>> As the Inland Empire and other rapidly
suburbanizing areas grow, so do conflicts over how and where we
should build. For his part, Young asks critics, with the
mushrooming population in Southern California, what's the
alternative to sprawl?

John Young>> I have a young family growing up. I have a son
and a daughter and they're going to need to buy a home. Do I
tell them to move to Arizona? Move to Nevada? I want them
close to me. I want to be able to see my grandchildren as they
grow up. So I don't like that. I think it's like I have mind
and, if you get yours, I don't really care and, if I can
restrict you from getting yours, I'll do that. We call it
nimbyism and you've heard the term.

Saul Gonzalez>> Not in my back yard.

John Young>> Not in my back yard. I think that's a very
destructive thing to our society.

Katherine Perez>> We're paving our way up to Las Vegas. That's
what we're doing. If we in fact want to put people in places
where there is limited water, there's actually lizards and
sagebrush right now, but we're putting up housing tracts.
That's what we're doing. If that's the kind of Southern
California or even California we want to give to our children
and our grandchildren, that's the kind of place that they're
going to have to reckon with all these problems in twenty or
twenty-five years.

Saul Gonzalez>> Whether one damns suburban sprawl or embraces
it, a challenge remains. How do we build decent homes and
communities for growing numbers of Southern Californians while
also protecting the environment that sustains us all? For Life
and Times, I'm Saul Gonzales.

Val>> There is an alternative to sprawl and tomorrow night
we'll take you to the city of Brea that has taken a very
different approach to development with some very different
results.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts
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Val>> It must be frustrating to be Long Beach, always sitting
in the shadow of the massive Los Angeles, and yet this resort
town turned military town turned port city is full of
architectural gems. Well, now a new book has brought them to
life. The book is called "Long Beach Architecture: The
Unexpected Metropolis" by Cara Mullio and Jennifer Volland.

I met Jennifer at her loft in downtown Long Beach where she gave
me a pictorial tour of Southern California's third largest city.
In fact, these lofts are in the historic Walker Building, which
used to be a department store. Jennifer is a writer and working
on her Masters in architecture at UCLA.

Jennifer Volland>> Of course, the iconic buildings like the
Villa Riviera that everyone knows about Long Beach, but there
are also some buildings that were surprises to us. You know,
vernacular buildings, little houses that no one knows about.
Cara has a favorite on Linden and Third Street that's called the
Linden Towers. It's an apartment complex that was built in the
1960's that anyone else driving would just pass by, but we
really saw this sort of special qualities in it and wanted to
showcase not only the buildings that people know, but also bring
to light some of the ones that people have no idea existed.

Just to point out, we include residences, we include civic
buildings, we include commercial buildings and, of course, we
include churches as well. This is Grace United Methodist
Church. This is one instance where we did want to show the
interior because of these wonderful stained glass windows and
the way the light comes in.

[Film Clip]

This is the Bixby Ranch House. It was built in 1890 by
Cockshead & Cockshead which was a firm that did a lot of work in
San Francisco. The Bixby family was an important family here in
Long Beach and we liked this page because it shows the old
photograph juxtaposed against a new one. The house is still
there, although all the land around it is not as vast and open
as it once was. But now it's in a gated neighborhood with
pretty close neighbors.

[Film Clip]

Jennifer Volland>> This is actually a very important home by
the architect, Irving Dillon. One of the few residential
projects by him still is existing in Los Angeles. You see these
wonderful white simplistic walls that are reminiscent of Pueblo
architecture even with the arches and the flat surfaces. This
is across the street from Bluff Park, so this house has a
wonderful view of the ocean.

[Film Clip]

Jennifer Volland>> This is Marina Tower model apartment by the
architect, Edward Killingsworth and his firm. What's unique
about this building is not only the architect who was the
preeminent architect in Long Beach, but also the fact that this
was a model apartment for a tower that was supposed to be built
next door to it. Because of the cost of the apartment, I think
it never got built, but we have this wonderful legacy of the
model apartment that still exists.

[Film Clip]

Jennifer Volland>> This is the Villa Riviera. It's an icon of
the Long Beach skyline. It was built in 1929 by Richard King
and people love to talk about this building because rumor has it
that Charlie Chaplin lived in this building.

[Film Clip]

Jennifer Volland>> This is the YWCA, an important project
because, well, one, it was torn down, so it's a demolished
building that we want to highlight. It was on Sixth and
Pacific. It's by the architect, Julia Morgan. She did Hearst
Castle and, unfortunately, this was torn down. There was a
devastating event that happened there where a ceiling that was
added later, not even part of the original building, fell into
the pool and killed someone. When it was being demolished, it
put up a fight. It took a long time for them to get this
building down and it's a testament to the engineering of her
architecture.

Val>> Now a lot of people in Long Beach or even around Long
Beach will remember this because this is a well-known building.

Jennifer Volland>> Right. This is the Roosevelt Naval Base by
Paul Revere Williams. This was torn down pretty recently and
there was a public outcry when this happened. But when it was
torn down, there was a mitigation effort set up of several
million dollars and based on projects related to preservation in
Long Beach. They actually funded the pre-production phase of
our book.

This is actually also on the cover of our book. We picked the
cover because it's sort of a juxtaposition of old, the Villa
Rivera, and new. This is the International Tower and locals
refer to it as the beer can (laughter). It has this wonderful
curtain wall of glass and views out in every direction. Again,
sort of indicative of the 1960's.

[Film Clip]

Val>> People would not believe this.

Jennifer Volland>> Exactly. This is the International
Elementary School. The principle of this firm is Tom Mange
who's doing a lot of projects now, a very eminent architect.
What's interesting about this is that the playground is in the
middle of it and all the classrooms are on the periphery, so
it's a wonderful solution to problems inherent in constricted
downtown environments.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Now this was built in 1998?

Jennifer Volland>> This is a wonderful example of new
architecture in the city that we think really successfully
achieved what it set out to do. The forms are reminiscent of
water and waves and it really helped the redevelopment efforts
in downtown, bringing more tourism and local residents to this
area.

[Film Clip]

Jennifer Volland>> We've also included some projects that we
hope will be realized in the future. There's this one Olive
Court. It's for both moderate income housing and they placed
this development near public transportation. They're trying to
build the infrastructure in this certain area. This is on Long
Beach Boulevard, so it's another unique approach to urban
living.

[Film Clip]

Jennifer Volland>> This is the proposal for the new bridge
which will be built --

Val>> -- this is a proposal?

Jennifer Volland>> Yeah, I know.

Val>> It looks so real.

Jennifer Volland>> I know. It's a computer rendering. It will
be built alongside the old bridge and then, when this one is
finished, they'll tear down the old one. We wanted to include
this, of course, because Long Beach's economy is still so much
based on the port. I think it's slated for 2010.

[Film Clip]

Jennifer Volland>> We wanted to make this book practical, so we
included maps in the book and we want people to be able to drive
around or walk around and experience these buildings firsthand.
We really did make a concerted effort to bring projects in from
various neighborhoods. Of course, Long Beach is so large that
it's hard to include everything, but this is really the
selection that we felt really best represented the city.

Val>> Jennifer Volland, thank you for your time and for
bringing Long Beach out of the shadows of Los Angeles.

Jennifer Volland>> Thank you, Val.

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Val>> Tonight we open up the Life and Times Vault and re-
introduce you to an artistic visionary, June Wayne. At age
five, this young girl from Chicago was a protégé. By sixteen,
she had a one-person show and, over her eighty year career,
she's worked in various mediums, but her biggest influence has
come in print-making. In 1998, the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art honored June Wayne with a fifty year retrospective of her
work. That's when Patt Morrison had the chance to talk with
this living legend.

Patt Morrison>> This is the art of June Wayne, meticulous,
exquisite, always original. She was a child in Chicago when she
found art in a crayon box. By the time she was fifteen, she
left high school out of boredom. And by the time she was
seventeen, she had had her first solo exhibition.

I'd like to ask you about your artistic acuity. I read that, at
the tender age of thirteen, you noticed that the comics are
composed of colored dots which in later years has become pop art
and, of course, very lucrative. What was it about your vision
that even at that tender age you could see still these quantum
qualities we've talked about?

June Wayne>> Fortunately for me, I was nearsighted (laughter).
I would read the funnies on my stomach on the living room floor
and read them. I was a lot younger than thirteen at the time I
noticed that to get a green, you see all of these blue and
yellow dots and orange was yellow and red dots, all this kind of
stuff, so I began making pictures out of dots. And it had a
considerable impact in two ways, one on the style with which I
would work that everything would be broken up and coming
together. The idea that large things are made of small things
and that small things can make small things. These were very
impressive ideas to me when I was a child.

Patt Morrison>> The depression that ravaged so many millions of
life nonetheless gave artists the chance to create for the Works
Project Administration and June Wayne was among them. When
World War II began, Wayne came to California. As an illustrator
for the aircraft industry, she found a curious beauty in the
confluence of art and aeronautics technology and, soon after,
found the same appeal in science and biology. In World War II,
you worked as an aircraft illustrator. Not Rosie the Riveter,
but Irene the Illustrator. How did that influence your work?

June Wayne>> Very, very powerfully in that, in order to do it,
I had to learn a great deal of the rules of perspective and
that, as soon as you projected an image in perspective, you had
to start tricking the outside to make it look right because the
rules wouldn't make it look right, you see. That lead me to
consideration of vision and how we look and I found I went into
the idea of optics just because perspective wouldn't hold. What
was it that made it look right? And that caused me to start
looking at things a different way.

Patt Morrison>> In time she found that, to create a certain
optical effect, there was only one way to do it: a lithograph, a
print made from a drawing on stone. But the art of lithograph
was lost in this country, so Wayne traveled to Europe to study
with its masters and, in 1959 back in Los Angeles, Wayne founded
her own studio, the now fabled Tamarind Lithography Workshop and
lithography in the United States was reborn.

The physicist, Fred Hoyle, used the term Big Bang derisively to
describe the origins of the universe, and yet here we are
sitting at the big bang, camera and studios, the big bang of
lithography and print-making on the west coast for the last
forty years. How did that come about?

June Wayne>> Well, I had been making friends in Europe. That
was in the late fifties and the Ford Foundation at that time was
looking for a policy of what they should be doing with their
money in the visual arts and we had quite an interchange on what
the foundation should be doing. I said, for instance, American
artists do not have the artisanal resources. We don't have
foundries, we don't have weavers, we don't have printers to work
with us in lithography and all this kind of stuff. And so
eventually he said to me, well, tell us what we ought to do and
I did and they did and then we did and this whole print-making
thing just burgeoned.

Patt Morrison>> Throughout the 1960's, two hundred artists
trained at Tamarind. But in order to teach them, Wayne had to
put her own art, her own inventiveness, on hold. Then after ten
years, she passed the workshop on to the University of New
Mexico and turned back to the world of her own art. She found
inspiration in the smallest worlds and the biggest. She was in
the human genome projects and the space program. As science and
technology have evolved, so too has June Wayne's art. You've
always been intrigued by the sciences, by Sputnik, by the
structure of DNA, by magnetic fields and by subatomic particles
and you coined the phrase "quantum aesthetics" to describe this
aspect of your work. It's science on a small scale.

June Wayne>> Well, for one thing, I'm only five-feet three.

Patt Morrison>> So you're quantum yourself (laughter).

June Wayne>> (Laughter) I'm a small quantum myself. It's a
good phrase. It's at least forty years that I have been
interested in the interplay between the aesthetics of science
and the aesthetics of art. Very often you see the image
developing out of the modules which transmit energy from one to
another. I try to make the invisible possible to see.
Everything is a form of energy, not just mental and social
energy, but also genes and magnetic fields and particles and all
of that. Maybe this kind of thinking is what gives my art its
look.

Patt Morrison>> Let's take a virtual walk through some of your
work. The Palomar Suite which sounds like a lovely composition
of music.

June Wayne>> It was intended as a tribute to all of the
observatories. There are so many of them. I did the series on
Palomar, a tribute to it as though I was looking at California
from space. And I think it is the most California life images
I've ever done because the colors are wonderful colors that we
get out here, thanks in part to pollution. So this suite is one
in which you have to really decide which is the detail and which
is the field.

Patt Morrison>> You have a long history of political activism
in women's issues and women's vision, the Joan of Art seminar,
the Dorothy series about your mother and her life. Rosalyn
Franklin, the scientist who was cheated by her own death out of
the piece of the noble prize for DNA. What is it that so
engages you about women in art and science?

June Wayne>> The fact is that I was born a girl and I had to
live my life as we all do. It was fine when I was a little girl
being an artist. But if you want to be professional, then that
was the game for boys. But there were many other ways when I
was working as a designer in New York, the problem of the kinds
of services my boss expected as part of my working day. Of
course, that would never happen today if it hadn't been for
feminists. But in those days, you ran and you knew how to get
around the desk pretty fast (laughter).

Patt Morrison>> Is there a quality of day in-day out heroism to
women who just lead their lives?

June Wayne>> I think every person who gets up in the morning
and makes it through the day without being hit by a brick is a
hero and I don't think I was any more heroic than anybody else
(laughter). Life is difficult.

Val>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at
Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

There has to be a better way, but what is it? Our special
report on surviving sprawl takes us to a city with a different
way of thinking.

>> People said we want a place to congregate, we want a place
to call our own. We want entertainment, we want places to shop
and eat. We want a gathering spot for the community.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.