DTLA 2040 — — July 12
DTLA 2040
The journey of Skid Row is from nickname to neighborhood.
There are a few explanations of where the name “skid row” comes from, but the most common goes back to the Pacific Northwest in the late 1800’s. Temporary workers would come to the mountains filled with trees to cut down the trees as logs. Wooden skids were built down the mountain to slide the trees/logs to the bottom to then be loaded onto ships.
Some of the temporary workers spent their money on booze, gambling, sex workers and ended up living in a row of shacks. Like the skids taking the logs down the mountain, they hit the skids, their lives going downhill.
Similar to the Pacific Northwest was Downtown Los Angeles. But it wasn’t the logging industry, it was harvesting the crops of oranges and apples, the first major industry in the city. Temporary workers would come in by train for harvest season and they would stay in Single-Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels. The hotel rooms were tiny and you shared a bathroom. You were there to work the harvest season for a few months, save your money, and then go back home by train.
But some of the workers in these SRO hotels spent their money on booze, gambling, and sex workers. The area of Downtown with the highest concentration of these SRO hotels became known as skid row.
Lyrics from the 1986 movie musical Little Shop of Horrors:
Downtown, where the cabs don’t stop
Downtown, where the food is slop
Downtown, where the hop-heads flop in the snow
Down on Skid Row
But while in 1986 Little Shop Of Horrors perceived Skid Row where you ended up when your life had collapsed, a condition, a set of circumstances; the reality is in the mid-70’s Skid Row had officially changed. You were no longer on Skid Row, you were in Skid Row. This change was the Policy of Containment. Now Skid Row was no longer defined as a personal set of circumstances, but defined as a physical location with boundaries.
If you’ve seen the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, then you know the history of Los Angeles where suburbs, freeways, and rubber tires for cars birthed a new Los Angeles. Downtown Los Angeles was no longer the center of the City.
During this time, the field of Urban Planning used Urban Renewal/Eminent Domain to restructure cities and in the 1950’s a huge push back to Urban Renewal began as people saw it was the poor neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color that were being demolished to help those with more money — for example, destroying established neighborhoods to build a highway so folks in these new suburbs could easily drive somewhere desirable like a beach.
One place Urban Renewal/Eminent Domain happened in Downtown from the late 1950’s through mid-1960’s was in Bunker Hill. Residents in Bunker Hill were displaced as the affordable housing (aging Victorian mansions) was demolished to make way for massive skyscrapers. With Urban Renewal push back gathering momentum across the country, folks rallied around Skid Row to keep the aging SRO hotels from suffering the same fate as the aging Victorian mansions in Bunker Hill. The negotiated settlement/compromise became the City Hall Policy of Containment.
With physical boundaries now for Skid Row (you’re not on skid row, you’re in Skid Row), the centerpiece of the Policy of Containment was for the government to work with the nonprofits SRO Housing and Skid Row Housing Trust to acquire these single room occupancy hotels from the slumlords running them to renovate them as government subsidized housing for the poor.
Added to that was an understanding that social services for the poor of Downtown would be centered in Skid Row. Housing, social services, and people were contained in one part of Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA), opening up the rest of Downtown for redevelopment.
In 1999, the Los Angeles City Charter welcomed the Neighborhood Council system. Neighborhood Councils are the “boots on the ground” for a neighborhood; volunteer residents and business interests as a bridge from the people to the elected officials of the City.
When the Neighborhood Council system was applied to the City, Skid Row unsuccessfully tried to have a Neighborhood Council. Instead, Skid Row became part of the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC).
Mom. Apple Pie. Skid Row Neighborhood Council. Led by the office of Jose Huizar in 2016, City Hall adopted a subdivision policy, a process for a neighborhood in an existing Neighborhood Council to possibly branch out on their own. It came down to an April 2017 vote and Skid Row lost by sixty votes — 826 No and 764 Yes.
Then a DLANC whistleblower revealed that property owners ran off to Delaware (where apparently you can do this sort of thing quickly) to create an LLC called Downtown United to then hire the former City Attorney of Los Angeles as a lobbyist to work the levers of power in City Hall to block Skid Row from getting a Neighborhood Council.
Why all this effort to keep Skid Row residents from being officially recognized and empowered, something that seemingly anyone interested in Good Government would want to see happen? Because Neighborhood Councils have a PLUC (Planning and Land Use Committee) and PLUC’s have serious influence on what gets built and what doesn’t get built in their neighborhood.
The City of Los Angeles has 33 Community Plan areas. This is how the Department of City Planning structures the City. Community Plans set Land Use Policy with the zoning tools needed to implement the policy. Community Plans should be updated on a regular basis, but the Downtown Community Plan was neglected for decades. With outdated Land Use policy, Downtown development ended up with a system of spot zoning or variables. What if the Community Plan says this area can only go ten stories high and you want to build thirty stories of luxury condos? You go to City Hall for some spot zoning.
This ad hoc system to fill the gap of an outdated Community Plan ended up with Councilmember Jose Huizar, who represented Skid Row and Downtown, going to prison for accepting bribes by Chinese real estate developers.
Enter DTLA 2040, or what will Downtown be by the year 2040 with an updated Community Plan. City Planning began DTLA 2040 public engagement in 2016. Skid Row realized this process to update the existing Downtown Community Plan had huge implications for the future of Skid Row.
The coalition Skid Row Now and 2040 came into being in 2017 to engage City Planning in this process. Through the years of engaging City Planning, Skid Row Now and 2040 has three main points to see in the finished Community Plan with some secondary ones.
Here are the main ones:
— — Maintain the IX1 Zone covering one third of Skid Row and expand it to the modern traditional boundaries of 3rd to 7th and Main to Alameda. IX1 is the technical designation; for the first few months City Planning called it the Affordable Housing Only Zone.
— -Create some type of “district council” to ensure Skid Row residents have an active voice in implementation of the Community Plan.
— -Lift up the sections of the Plan in alignment with the aspirations of Skid Row as a neighborhood community.
This effort to understand modern Skid Row took an official step forward on September 21, 2021 when City Planning in their presentation of DTLA 2040 to the Los Angeles Planning Commissioners named their section on Skid Row — Recognizing Skid Row As A Neighborhood.
Dr. Catherine Guidis worked closely with the Skid Row Now and 2040 coalition in releasing a “green paper” in 2021 titled “Containment and Community: The History of Skid Row and it’s Role in the Downtown Community Plan. It’s a green paper because the cover is green. Leading up to the Policy of Containment was a strategic plan based on business interests nicknamed “the silver book” because of it’s cover, and a strategic plan based on social justice nicknamed “the blue book” because of its cover.
The finished Downtown Community Plan was approved by City Council and the Mayor’s Office more than a year ago and has now been sitting with the City Attorney’s office for legal examination.
JULY 12
July 12-LOS ANGELES TIMES — — Opinion: Kevin de Leon’s plan to rename Pershing Square is not the way to honor Black Angelenos.
Alison Rose Jefferson is a historian, curator, heritage conservation consultant and the author, most recently, of “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era.” Catherine Guidis is a professor of history and the director of the public history program at UC Riverside, the scholar in residence at the Los Angeles Poverty Department’s Skid Row History Museum & Archive, and a former member of the Civic Memory Working Group.
“Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de Leon recently introduced motions to rename Pershing Square after Bridget “Biddy” Mason, who got her freedom from bondage in Los Angeles in the 1850’s. His effort to reimagine the long-beleaguered public space, which is undergoing renovations, may be well-intentioned. But it is disconcerting.
For one thing, Biddy Mason Memorial Park, opened in 1989, already recognizes her accomplishments at her home seated a few blocks northeast of Pershing Square, at Third and Spring Streets. Why hasn’t De Leon considered other worthy Los Angeles Black settlers who owned property and enterprises downtown so that more of the city’s pioneering African Americans could be recognized? Black Angelenos whose stories are less known could be honored at the site.
It seems all too possible that De Leon is pandering to the Black community, women and others to make up for that infamous racist conversation among city leaders exposed in 2022. Given their redundancy with an existing memorial, his efforts do not seem truly directed at showcasing Los Angeles’ overlooked histories and historical figures.
Take, for instance, Robert and Winnie Owens and their children, Sarah, Martha, and Charles, who were also prominent formerly enslaved people and have yet to be appropriately recognized by the city. Robert Owens purchased his and his family’s freedom from bondage, and they migrated from Texas to Los Angeles between 1852 and 1853. The Owens family owned real estate and a livery venture and provided other business services in Los Angeles. By the time the formidable Robert Owens died, in 1865, he was considered the wealthiest African American in Los Angeles County.
The family — along with Los Angeles’ Manuel Pepper and San Bernadino County’s Elizabeth Rowan, both African Americans, and a few white allies — helped Mason, her children and members of her extended family escape enslavement in 1856. Mason and her children, Ellen, Ann, and Harriet, initially lived with the Owens family as newly free people in Los Angeles while forming a relationship to their adopted community. She eventually became the first African American woman who was a sole owner of real estate she purchased. Biddy Mason’s daughter Ellen married Charles Owen, merging the two families.
Louis (or Lewis) Green, a barber who held other occupations in his lifetime, is another Black Angeleno worthy of broader recognition in our civic memory. After he overcame racist subterfuge by white locals, Green became the first African American to register to vote in Los Angeles County in 1870, the year the 15th Amendment extended voting rights to Black men.
Biddy Mason Memorial Park was among the significant efforts to acknowledge the histories of working people and communities of color in Los Angeles’ public spaces. Created by the nonprofit group the Power of Place, the project was a result of years of historical research, community engagement, collaboration, wrangling over permitting and policy and fighting with dismissive city leaders. Thirty years later, in 2019, when then Mayor Eric Garcetti convened advisors, historians, cultural critics and designers as the Civic Memory Working Group, the Power of Place initiative remained an important touchstone.
Yet it seems too easily forgotten. In proposing to rename Pershing Square for Biddy Mason, De Leon had derided Memorial Park, which is in his district, as dark and secluded. It’s unclear if or how he intends to fix that.
The city seems to have done little to sustain Biddy Mason Memorial Park. There are no big entrance signs; two small metal plaques on Spring and Third Streets, both defaced, offer no directional guidance. The lighting and seating do not invite visitors to look at the weathered commemorative features, which are overdue for rehabilitation. These include “Biddy Mason’s Time and Place” designed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, a commemorative wall with imprints and artifacts of Mason’s life and times. Adjacent to it is “Biddy Mason: House of the Open Hand” by the renowned Los Angeles-based African American artist Bettye Saar, whose installation offers a glimpse of what Mason’s home looked like based on historical photographs.
The city has long lacked a process and policies for addressing commemorative sites. The Mayor’s Civic Memory Working Group was formed to address this gap. In a 2022 report by the group, then-Chief Design Officer Christopher Hawthorne wrote a “chief lesson” is that “broad based discussions about memorialization and commemoration” are needed, and that “Los Angeles has not yet engaged in that conversation to the degree it needs to, especially when it comes to initiatives launched from City Hall.”
L.A. needs to reconsider civic memory beyond renaming plaques, removing statues, and creating new commemorative efforts. This requires more comprehensive review and maintenance of past efforts. The report also stresses the need for community involvement, acknowledgment of multilayered histories and a thorough process involving historians, Indigenous leaders, and community elders.
De Leon should join us in calling on his fellow City Council members and Mayor Karen Bass to take the steps clearly laid out by the Civic Memory Working Group to honor Biddy Mason and others like her.”
An article from February 22, 2022 by NBC Los Angeles:
Descendants of Biddy Mason, the ‘Grandmother of LA,’ Want Her Honored
“Known by many as the ‘Grandmother of LA,’ Bridget “Biddy” Mason’s descendants want to make sure she is honored for all of her contributions, including trying to get a street named after her.
Mason was once a slave, but worked her way to become one of the wealthiest Angelenos of her time.
If you are walking down Spring Street, you might miss the Biddy Mason Memorial Park hidden behind a building. The park includes an 80-foot-long concrete wall that has a timeline of Mason’s life.
Cheryl Cox and Robynn Cox are Mason’s great-great-great grandchildren. They have petitioned the city to rename Spring Street after her. Mason was a woman who’s been called the ‘Grandmother of LA,’ but is still unfamiliar to many Angelenos.
“It was great that they initially found a way to honor her,” Cheryl Cox said. “It doesn’t seem to be enough for the contributions she made to Los Angeles.”
Mason was born into slavery in 1818 and in 1856 fought for her freedom in court, which led to a trial ruling in favor of Mason’s freedom.
She became a nurse and a midwife, and through savvy real estate investments, became one of LA’s wealthiest women in the nineteenth century.
“Due to her efforts, the city is what it is today,” Cheryl Cox said.
Spring Street is where Biddy Mason brought her first property, and is where her memorial park sits. She was the first Black woman to do so in Los Angeles, and she would go on to help others.
“Feed those who didn’t have food, to heal those when they were sick, regardless of race or skin color,” Robynn Cox said.
She’s part of a mural at the First AME Church in South LA, a church she helped build into a cornerstone of LA’s Black community. This all earned her two titles — the ‘Godmother of Black LA’ and the ‘Grandmother of all LA.’
Jackie Broxton is the executive director of the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation, which last year, opened a home to help current and former foster youth. The walls feature inspirational African American leaders. The rooms provide clothing and other needs, because that is what Mason would have done.
“This was a woman who overcame insurmountable challenges,” Broxton said. “When you realize the conditions under which slave women had to live, it’s a miracle any of us are here.”
That miracle began, in many respects, with Biddy Mason, a woman many Angelenos still don’t know about — a fact her descendants hope to change.
“We believe her accomplishments merit a street being named after her,” Robynn Cox said.”
When this article came out in 2022, I approached Blair Beston, the Executive Director of the Historic Core Business Improvement District, and talked to her about it. She said renaming Spring Street after Biddy Mason is a massive “ask” and renaming Pershing Square after her makes more sense.
All of this is very important and very sensitive and should involve respectful public dialogue. Public comments have been made to Councilmember De Leon’s effort saying this effort is disrespectful to the identity of Pershing Square as a dynamic space used as a war memorial, especially after World War I and World War II.
What I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing with is that Biddy Mason Memorial Park and Wall needs both physical renovation and maintenance, better communication in the form of signage etc., and should be a far more activated civic space than it has been in years past.