Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

Public Works

By Patricia Adler-Ingram

NEVER HAS THERE BEEN A TIME WHEN

the population of Los Angeles could forget or neglect the need for public works. Padre Juan Crespi, writing in August 1769, provided the earliest description of the site that became Los Angeles. He observed that there were hazards as well as advantages here: a river flowed in this spot, bright and clear, he wrote, but that a tan­gle of uprooted trees gave evidence of a recent inundation. Although he recognized the possi­bility of recurring floods during the rainy sea­son, he still considered this to be the best locality of any that he and his party had seen, having all the resources required for a large set­tlement. The riverbank appeared to be fertile. The Indians living there welcomed him. He noted that the spot was shaded by cottonwood and alder trees and there were wild grapevines and roses.' Crespf s description brought the site to the attention of Governor Felipe de Neve. Twelve years later, when the king of Spain granted approval for tlle establishment of a sys­tem of presidios in California, Governor Neve planned one of the ancillary pueblos (towns) for the riverbank site with the wild roses. 2

Neve's detailed instructions for the found­ing of a pueblo at Los Angeles included spe­cific directions for the first public works project. It was to be the construction of a dam and a ditch with a view to irrigating the largest

possible area. The pueblo was to be constructed on high ground near land suitable for planting and near the river or main ditch. A plaza was to be laid out facing the cardinal points of tlle compass, with its eastern side reserved for pub­lic buildings. There was to be a survey mark­ing out the house lots for the individual settlers and parceling the fields and gardens for which they were to draw lots.

Neve's plan was never completely realized. Like many subsequent designs for an ideal Los Angeles, the original intent was overtaken by the reality of weary settlers arriving to settle new households as best they could. The very popular legend of great pomp and pageantry at the city's founding has not been confirmed by recent scholarship. Emerging instead from new translations of tlle Spanish documents and new scholarly analyses is a picture of the gradual entry of eleven families recruited in Mexico, arriving overland to San Gabriel mission to be escorted within a few days onto the town site. The first of the settlers reached San Gabriel on June 9,1781. More recruits arrived through July and August. By the end of August, Governor Neve ordered that house lots in town and plant­ing fields outside town be marked off and dis­tributed to the settlers, although it was September 4,1781, before the governor formally declared that the town had been established.3

287

288· PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

Although the pueblo was able to maintain itself, it showed no great evidence of prosper­ity during the first two decades. The number of families did increase to seventy and, in 1798,

there was a mention in the records of the speedy completion of a jail, the first public building on the Plaza.

Even with a small population there was a growing concern about property rights: the ini­tial grants had been provisional, and there was no clear procedure for confinning the titles to house lots or cultivated lands. The officers of the pueblo, the alcalde (mayor) and the regidores (aldermen), were called upon to settle disputes and make new grants. The volume of requests for title increased substantially during 1836-37,

leading the president of the ayuntamiento (coun­cil) to appoint a committee to hearrequests, sur­vey the claims with the assistance of the Police Commission, and advise the council. Although there was no tax levied on land or improve­ments, there was a potential for overlapping claims and the disruption of street lines, irriga­tion ditches, and drainage channels. Resolution of title questions, like all the other functions that were later taken over by the city bureau­cracy, was handled by the residents themselves and their elected, unpaid representatives.

By 1846 and the beginning of hostilities between the United States and Mexico, Los Angeles had become the largest Mexican set­tlement in California. A relatively small num­ber of the town's adult males actually took part in the scattered skirmishes that offered resist­ance to the U.S. invaders. The town suffered no serious damage. The final engagements of the war occurred on the San Gabriel River near present-day Montebello on January 8 and 9, 1847, with the formal capitulation to the United States forces taking place a week later at Campo de Cahuenga.4

Historian Neal Harlow, in his chronicle of California in the years between the defeat of

the Mexican regime and the establishment of democratically elected government, observed that "bureaucracy, visible and complex, was the first fruit of democracy.'" He was describ­ing the years of kaleidoscopic changes in Cal­ifornia as the laws of the United States were being extended to provide for this vast and undeveloped western land.

BUREAUCRACY,

THE FIRST FRUIT OF DEMOCRACY

After the end of host iIi ties in 1847 the U.S. mil­itary governors had been instructed to observe the customs and laws of the land in local affairs, pending a decision in Washington about California's future. The changeover from military to civil rule in the new land was delayed in Congress by political considera­tions, among them the controversy over the extension of slavery. In 1849, however, the newly inaugurated president, Zachary Taylor, sent word to San Francisco that "it would not matter whether the first step toward Califor­nia statehood was taken by the people or the Congress.'" With very little delay, delegates, generally selected from what a contemporary called the "common sense class," were elected and convened in Monterey. They relied heavily upon the published constitutions of Iowa and New York and proceeded methodically to the drafting of their own provisions. Over a six­week period, they produced a workable consti­tution under which California could petition for statehood.

The first California legislature under the new constitution created twenty-seven coun­ties and provided for the incorporation of cities. The Pueblo of Los Angeles, with a pop­ulation of 1,610 (as enumerated in the official census) was duly incorporated as a city by the Act of March n, 1850.' Even though it was offi­ciallya city,

Los Angeles in 1850 did not have a single

graded street, a water pipe, or a single public

building belonging to the community. Every

citizen was his own street sweeper and on Sat­

urdaywas obliged to perform this function in

front of his house. The municipal lighting

department was a simple affair, inasmuch as

every owner of a store or person who lived in

a house facing on the street, was obliged to put

a light at the door during the first two hours

of every dark night. 8

Los Angeles immediately held elections for the required officials. The first meeting of the common council was convened July 3,1850, with the seven elected councilmen choosing a presi­dent. The newly elected officials, comprising the mayor, secretary, treasurer, assessor, attor­ney, and marshal, all formally assumed their offices. The council proceeded to appoint fif­teen committees, including one to deal with the water supply and irrigation, one on bridges, another on street cleaning and garbage disposal, plus one on sanitation and one on public works generally. Prominent among the named and pre­sumably permanent committees was one on land and lots while another, designated as "pro­visional," dealt with land and lot zoning.9 Taken together these committees addressed most of the functions of the later Board of Public Works. Los Angeles took the first steps toward bureau­cracy with very little hesitation.

The old ayuntamiento had been accustomed to appointing committees to deal with city problems as they arose. The new council intro­duced a greater formality into proceedings by giving some committees permanent status. As householders, the councilmen had experi­enced firsthand the problems of weed-choked zanjas (ditches), rutted roads, and flooded drains. They were familiar with the hardships oflife in this land of unforgiving weather. They had seen the years of prolonged drought and

PUBLIC WORKS· 289

the sudden winter storms that carved channels down from the mountains to the floor of the plain. They recognized the practical wisdom of assigning responsibilities among them­selves before any emergency arose, but they could not imagine-let alone pay for-large comprehensive measures to defend against the worst ravages of drought and flood.

Blake Gumbrecht, a modern historian of the Los Angeles River, writing of early efforts to control the periodic inundation of large por­tions of the city, states:

More people have been killed in Los Angeles

in floods than by earthquakes. Flooding

became an increasing hazard as the popula­

tion grew and development expanded. Human

beings made matters worse by building on the

floodplain, removing trees and vegetation that

had kept soils in place, cutting openings in

stream banks to divert water for irrigation,

erecting levees that constricted the flood

flows, and constructing railroads that inter­

rupted natural drainage patterns."

The first twelve years of incorporation were fortunately free of disastrous rain, but the usual measures of maintaining the zanjas and giving occasional attention to the riverbanks were clearly inadequate. In 1854 the council rec­ognized that supervision of the water system had been lax under the committee system and re-instituted from pueblo days the full-time position of zanjero (ditch overseer). The posi­tion was very well paid in keeping with the fact that the attendant powers and duties were extensive. Not only did the zanjero manage the upkeep of the ditches and make repairs to the city dam, but he also issued permits for the use of irrigation water, collected fees, and policed the system, having the power to arrest individ­uals who unlawfully diverted water or dumped garbage into the ditches.

The common council acted on February 24,

290' PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

1857, to improve the water distribution by granting a franchise to Judge W. C. Dryden to build a water wheel in the zanja madre (mother ditch). Subsequently Dryden acquired owner­ship of several natural springs known from the days of the pueblo as the Abila Springs. From these springs water was conveyed by a special zanja to the plaza. Historian Harris Newmark, chronicler of early Los Angeles events, recalled that "There, in the center, a brick tank, perhaps ten feet square and fIfteen feet high, was con­structed; and this was filled by means of pumps, while from the tank wooden pipes dis­tributed water to the consumer.""

This early attempt to provide an important part of the city's infrastructure by franchise was not successful. The townspeople com­plained that the brick tank was ugly, the wooden pipes leaked, and the households were still without water. The distribution of drink­ing water continued to be by vendors going house-to-house with their carts, selling water from a barrel fIlled at the zanja madre. In Sep­tember 1864 another committee was appointed and charged with removing Mr. Dryden's water tank. The committee first had to negotiate with Dryden and pay his price of five hundred dol­lars (in land scrip).

On November 13, 1857, the Common Coun­cil had resorted for the first time to direct levies on real and personal property, including one specifically for the purpose of maintaining the canal system. 12 The tax was not popular and the improvement of the ditches did little to improve the quality of the water. The city again sought to negotiate a franchise. After contract­ing with a local vineyard owner for the con­struction of a water distribution system consisting of about five thousand feet of one­and two-inch iron pipe, only to have it swept away in the flood of 1868, the city redoubled its attempts to find a satisfactory franchisee. Although there was a prolonged fight in the

common council against the project, centered on the demand by the prospective franchisees for a long-term contract, a thirty-year fran­chise was finally negotiated with local busi­nessmen John S. Griffin, Solomon Lazard, and Prudent Beaudry, who had incorporated as the Los Angeles City Water Company. For Beaudry, the underlying motivation was to deliver water to the tract ofland he owned on the heights of Bunker Hill. The company was relatively well capitalized and succeeded in building a distri­bution system, drawing water from the old Abila-Dryden Springs. By 1874 a schedule of charges to the ratepayers was approved. Charges per month were set at two dollars for a single family, with an additional twenty-five cents charged for a bathtub. Having a private water closet cost another dollar. Water for a pri­vate horse was one dollar per month, and that included water for washing the carriage. With a view to encouraging business enterprises, water up to ten thousand gallons used for man­ufacturing or mechanical purposes cost only a dollar per month.

This franchise proved successful, and the developers were pleased to find that cost of the needed improvements were more than recov­ered through direct payment by the individu­als receiving the service.

The money to build elements of the infra­structure that could not be marketed to devel­opers as a franchise had to be obtained through a loan, to be repaid by property taxes, or by direct assessments on the properties receiving benefits. In 1862 the California legislature approved the city's request to borrow money for unspecified municipal improvements. The loan was to be repaid through property taxes. Following that, Los Angeles was authorized to levy a tax for certain public works improve­ments including taxes for riverbank repairs, for street improvements, and for the installa­tion of gas streetlights. 13 In 1868 Los Angeles

requested and received approval of an act to allow the purchase by the city of seventy-five thousand dollar capital stock in the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad Company.

A special council committee, appointed in 1859, had anticipated the state's enabling leg­islation by drafting a city ordinance to borrow seventy tlIousand dollars to expand the irriga­tion system. It was also through the initiative of a special council committee that negotia­tions were begun with a local businessman to manufacture illuminating gas under contract to the city. If granted the job, the contractor promised to supply gas free to the mayor's office. When the contract came up for renewal, however, a new committee was appointed. The new committee decided that the services could best be provided through a franchise, rather than a contract, to furnish illuminating gas to city hall and rate-paying householders.

Perhaps the earliest practical matter clearly to exceed the capability of the council was the need to establish lines upon the land to define the existing and future boundary limits of both public and private holdings. The transition from the Spanish to the American (basically English) form ofland-holding required a major readjustment on the part of the conquered population. The councilmen, having been advised during the days of American military governance that they could no longer approve requests for house lots or for irrigated fields on lands granted to the pueblo by the king of Spain, were forced to look beyond their own expertise to carry out the requirements of the United States for establishing title. The bound­aries of the early Spanish grant to the pueblo had to be surveyed and marked, just as the old, inherited ranchos and private land claims had to be surveyed and approved by the United States Board of Land Commissioners.

The council appointed a committee to find a surveyor. Fortunately, a newcomer to Los

PUBLIC WORKS' 291

Angeles had placed an advertisement in the Los Angeles Star offering his services as an attorney and surveyor. His name was Henry Hancock, a New Hampshirelawyer and veteran of theMex­ican War." He was duly appointed and pro­ceeded to review the existing records and prepare a map. The position of surveyor/engi­neer thus created proved to be central in the evo­lution of the city's public works organization.

Hancock completed his survey in 1858, but the very important work of establishing title and obtaining a patent to the city lands contin­ued until 1866, when the United States issued a patent "to the Mayor and Common Council of the City of Los Angeles."

Meanwhile, in 1855 George Hansen was appointed city engineer. Hansen, a native of Germany, had arrived two years previously, practically penniless, and had obtained his sur­veying instruments with a loan from business­man John Temple. His services were contracted for by the day, and he was paid a total of $375 to prepare a city plat map marking out thirty­five-acre Donation Lots. Henry Hancock had begun the survey in 1853 but the map was largely Hansen's work. The lots were numbered serially for easy identification by the council and by the development-minded mayor, who planned to sell them at one dollar per acre.

Harris Newmark recalled that Mayor John G. Nichols tried for years to sell the Donation Lots, exhorting townspeople to be patriotic and show their faith in the town, but found very few buyers. IS

In support of the efforts to improve the water distribution system, the council com­mittee responsible for irrigation engaged Cap­tain William Moore to survey the reservoirs of the city along with the zanjas. Moore, working with George Hansen, also surveyed the city lands lying east of the river, their map being adopted in 1868 as "City Map NO.2."

The official "City Map No. I" was the survey

292· PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

and map purchased in 1849 by the old ayun­tamiento from Lieutenant Edward O. C. Ord, a young officer recommended by his army com­mander as having the ability to provide the map that would be needed to establish prop­erty rights based on the grant to the pueblo by the king of Spain. The three thousand dollars paid to Ord was by far the largest public expen­diture in the history of Los Angeles to that date. The ayuntamiento expected to recoup the cost by using the map to resolve the ongoing dis­putes between original house-lot owners and newer claimants and, most importantly, to pro­vide a basis for future land sales by the pgeblo. As years went by, however, it became clear that the map did not serve the purpose.

Surveyor George Hansen, reporting to the common council in November 1869, observed that Ord's starting point for the measurements could not be found. Hansen's experience in doing surveys had revealed that none of the several big rocks near the door of the pueblo church that were customarily pointed out as "Ord's Rocks" could serve as a monument. Fur­thermore, he had located an old letter from Lieutenant, now General, Ord stating that he had not set rocks, or monuments of any sort, to mark the corners of his survey, because the city had failed to supply him with the neces­sary means. Hansen subsequently learned that the rocks near the church door had been placed, with the best of intentions, by busi­nessmanJohn Temple. Hansen recommended that the council employ a surveyor to retrace and mark the corners to conform to City Map No. 1. '6

The city's next major surveying job was entrusted to Frank Lecouvreur, a gold rush immigrant from East Prussia who had given up on placer mining, tried various jobs in the San Francisco Area and then came to Los Angeles as a carriage painter. He willingly interrupted his career as a carriage painter

when Captain Henry Hancock offered him a job as a flagman for a survey party assigned to work in the Mojave Desert. Apparently Lecouv­reur became a competent surveyor very rap­idly. During the winter of 1858 Lecouvreur worked for Surveyor William Moore on a con­tract to draw a plan for a new water supply for Los Angeles. In between surveying jobs, he worked as agent for Phineas Banning in his San Pedro warehouses.17

By 1869 Frank Lecouvreur had gained enough solid, practical experience to back his tone of assurance when he notified the com­mon council that the "City Map NO.1 is utterly valueless as a record, since it contains not a sin­gle word or figure which refers to dimension, courses, distances, landmarks, starting points, or in fact anything that can be of service or give the smallest hint to a surveyor in attempting relocations."18 What was needed, he told the council, was a committee to decide upon and mark a spot that would become Los Angeles Station Number One. Meanwhile, Lecouvreur himself used the corner of the plaza church as the point of beginning.

Lecouvreur's great contribution to the devel­opment of Los Angeles was his survey of ele­vations of the existing and projected street intersections, made in 1869, and the huge map based on his survey that was presented to the common council in the following year. It was approved by the common council and declared to be the "Official Map of the Grades of the City Streets and Sidewalks."19

His field notes show a painstaking effort to determine elevations, noting the differences between one side of a street and the other, the occasional encroachment of houses and, most importantly, the fact that Alameda Street was actually below the mean level of the Los Angeles River, with only a low berm serving to keep the water out. 20

Lecouvreur's report accompanying the map

gave his thoughts on sewerage and drainage, a subject he considered a science in itself. After describing the sewer systems of other cities, including the famous sewers of Paris designed to be cleaned manually and flushed with waters of the Seine, he recommended the use of glazed clay pipe from twelve to twenty-four inches in diameter as most appropriate for the arid cli­mate of Los Angeles. He emphasized that on no account should the irrigation ditches be used as overflow channels to relieve the city sewers. He urged the immediate construction of a sewer beneath Alameda Street as a public necessity, "in view of the nuisance created by the dis­charge of the Commercial Street sewer into ZanjaNo.3, which the sooner abated the better for the health and convenience of the city."21

Having the Lecouvreur survey and map available did not immediately refocus the attention of the various council committees on the perennial public works concerns-the sewer and storm-drain channels. The council, and Lecouvreur himself, assumed the final des­tination of all the sewer and storm waters to be the Los Angeles River.

Harris Newmark described the condition of the sewer system as the city gradually assumed responsibility. He wrote:

Until near the end of the seventies, there was little done toward the laying of sewers, although the reader will remember that a pri­

vate conveyor connected the Bella Union with the zanja running through Mellus' Row. Los

Angeles Street from First to Second, in 1873, had one of brick and wood; and in 1875, a brick sewer was built from the corner of Main and Arcadia streets down to Winston and thence to Los Angeles Street. It must have been in the

early seventies that a wooden sewer was con­structed on Commercial Street from Los Angeles to Alameda, and another one on New

High Street for about one block. In 1879, one of brick was laid from Los Angeles and Com-

PUBLIC WORKS' 293

mercial as far north as Arcadia, and connect­ing with the Main Street sewer. At about the

same time, vitrified clay was used on a portion of Temple Street. My impression is that there was no cloaca laid on Spring Street until after 1880, while it was still later that Fort, Hill and

Olive streets were served. As late as 1887, Hope Street had no sewer and very little conduit building, if any, had been undertaken south

of Seventh or west ofFlower."

Substantial houses and business blocks had been constructed in the city before Lecouv­reur's grading map was adopted. The old pueblo streets had been extended by the new­comers to serve their new buildings, some­times dog-legged around an existing orchard or garden, sometimes contoured around the base of the hills. The needs of the newcomers, ever more urgent, drove every aspect of what became the functions of the department of public works. Street alignments, sanitation, bridges, and above all the water supply and dis­tribution were chronically inadequate for the growing city.

The appointment of successive committees to handle the same type of task or, in the case oflonger-running projects, the identical task, reflects the fact that members of the common council were initially elected to a one-year term. The council members were frequently re­elected, but there was a tendency to shift com­mittee appointments with each new session. Individual members, if they were energetic and dedicated to their work, acquired a broad expe­rience with the business of running the city. They were directly responsible to the voters for getting a job done. On the other hand, there was a potential for setting in motion a multi­plicity of schemes that drew upon tax funds and created new indebtedness. The council was expected to act as its own clearinghouse. It was only indifferently successful.

Changes in the bureaucratic framework

294· PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

could be made at any time by vote of the com­mon council, just as changes could be insti­tuted by an act of the state legislature. Sacramento sent down an amendment to the city charter on March 5, 1868, limiting the direct tax in Los Angeles to $1.25 per $100 val­uation, and another on March 30, changing the term of all elective officers from one to two years and providing for ten council members, five to be elected each year. 23 In addition to the problem of keeping up with the multiplicity of organizational changes, members of the com­mon council had to contend with the fact that many original copies of ordinances enacted prior to 1869 were mislaid or simply lost. It was necessary to rely on the institutional memory of the old-timers or enact new ordinances, whichever appeared more convenient in the course of council deliberations.

In 1872 the common council appointed a board of public works, members of which served on the existing committees, of which there were about twenty dealing with various aspects of public works. At the same time the council adopted a procedure requiring sealed bids for all work, with the award going to the lowest responsible bidder. The board super­vised the activities of two operating depart­ment heads-the street superintendent and the city surveyor, each appointed by the mayor. An organizational chart for the year 1873 shows the Board of Public Works on a level with the Board of Health, the Fire Department, and the water overseer. 24 The council committees were charted at a higher level, a confirmation of the strong preference for reserving the overall management of civic improvements to the committees.

The California legislature passed a law in April 1876 creating a new board of public works for Los Angeles equipped with such powers as to nullify the power of the common council. The council immediately appointed a special

committee to investigate the law. Six men, comprising half the entire council, were charged with assessing the legality of the action taken by the state. Ten days later a sec­ond committee was appointed to consider a communication received from three citizens stating that they had been duly appointed by the state as the Board of Public Works for Los Angeles and stood ready to enter upon the dis­charge of their new duties. The second com­mittee promptly recommended and the council just as promptly ruled that "the several standing committees should continue to func­tion as though no such board were in exis­tence."25 The state legislature did not pursue the matter.

Through the 1870S iliere was a constant revi­sion in the titles of elected officials as well as changes from appointive to elective status of various positions. The city surveyor was some­times on the ballot as ilie city engineer. In 1872 John Goldsworthy had been elected to fill the combined job but resigned after six months whereupon the council abolished the office of surveyor and engineer by ordinance. 26 The fol­lowing year, the job description was revised to combine the duties of street superintendent and surveyor and made an appointive position.

For twenty-eight years, from 1850 to 1878, the city operated according to the patched framework of the original charter. Meanwhile, the population grew from the original census count of 1,600 in 1850 to 3,700 in 1860, and despite many deaths due to outbreaks of small­pox, had increased to 5,728 by 1870. By the time the charter of 1878 was signed by the governor, there were estimated to be 10,000 people liv­ing in Los Angeles.

The years of favorable weather in the 1870S brought a boom in sheep raising, while the business in cattle driven north to the mines continued to add to the prosperity of the city, which was still essentially an agricultural cen-

ter. In September 1876 the Southern Pacific Railroad line from San Francisco was com­pleted with the driving of a golden spike at Lang Station in Soledad Canyon, north of Los Angeles. Historian W. W. Robinson described the lively celebration when ilie news came by telegraph that the spike had been driven, and expressed his opinion that

It was the culmination of the wishes of Ange­lenos, expressed in 1872, when they went to the polls and voted to meet the Southern Pacific's subsidy demands in order to avoid being by­passed. It was perhaps Los Angeles' most sig: nificant moment, for it ended El Pueblo's isolation and was the first step in opening Los Angeles to the world. z;

The cost of bringing the rail line into the city had been very high. Not only did the voters have to agree to an incentive payment of 5 per­cent of their assessed valuation but had to turn over to the Southern Pacific their first and increasingly profitable railroad venture, the Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad. The pub­lic discussion before the vote was bitter and complicated, with alternative proposals intro­duced. City officials and businessmen election­eered on all sides, the majority, however, following the banner flying above the court­house steps: "Los Angeles Must place Itself on the World's Highway." 28

The spirit of expansion was reflected in the increased activity of the city council, which focused renewed attention on the business of improving the infrastructure. All ten mem­bers, now elected from three wards, served as committees of the whole to deal with flood control and with sewerage. They called a con­ference on zanjas, with six council members meeting with ilie water commissioners to deal with an urgent problem regarding pollution in Zanja Number 8. Another conference was called regarding water rates. The usual three-

PUBLIC WORKS' 295

or four-member committees were appointed to consider plaza improvements, draft a city pound ordinance regarding the pasturing of sheep and cows, establish a fire department to augment the services of the volunteer compa­nies, and to work out a contract with the Los Angeles Gas Company for lighting the city for sixteen months. One committee was appointed to compare several franchise offers made to ilie council for building street railways, another to employ an engineer to locate a feasible route for the disposal of sewage and provide an esti­mate of ilie cost of building a separate canal for sewage. The objective, however, remained the same. As ilie councilmen saw it, ilie task was to move the sewage out of the built-up areas and into the river.

There was a special committee to examine a complicated new street law that had been framed in thirty-wee sections. The commit­tee was to consult with the city attorney as to its legality and with the city surveyor as to the probable cost of putting the law into effect. 29

Micromanagement of the growing city by council committees continued at a quickening pace through the 1870S, with individual coun­cilmen participating in an array of committees. Functions that were later considered within ilie purview of the Public Works Department were handled as separate concerns. For example, in 1873 a committee was appointed to provide lighting on ilie bridges across the Los Angeles River and another to confer with the county supervisors regarding the feasibility of plac­ing half the bridge-lighting expense on the county. Yet another was appointed to hire a bridge lamplighter and instruct him to use sperm oil instead of coal oil.

The following year, the council appointed a committee to conduct research on the subject of improving city government. The results of their research may have contributed to some extent to the enactment by the state legislature

296· PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

of a new charter for Los Angeles. No sweeping changes were brought about by the charter of 1878, although the more cumbersome of the many amendments that had accumulated like so many layers of silt over the original charter were removed or simplified. The standing com­mittees of the council, however, were still set forth in the council rules rather than being included in the charter. Those having to do with public works were, first, the Board of Pub­lic Works, then individual committees on sew­ers, zanjas, and land. It was a duty of the council to handle all improvements and con­tracts, which meant that the custom of work­ing by means of special committees could continue. When it appeared possible to abate a public nuisance by simply prohibiting it, the appropriate committee had the power to pro­pose language to the council and have an offi­cial declaration, with a fine, published. A sanitation problem, for example, was taken care of by simply prohibiting the carriage of household garbage, or swill, through the pub­lic streets between nine o'clock in the morning and nine at night. The ordinance was later amended to require the use of closed, water­tight boxes on the wagons collecting the swill. The sanitized wagons made their nightly jour­ney to the hog farms south of the city where the farmers reimbursed the drivers directly for the swill they delivered.

In the interest of urban progress, the Board of Public Works was given the power by the council to order necessary sidewalk repairs at any time and any place within the city and, in cooperation with the surveyor, to provide house numbers. The board ruled that odd numbers were to be assigned on the north and west sides of the streets, one hundred per block, and with not less than twenty feet frontage of vacant lots per number.30

Some small degree of order in the prolifer­ating enactments of the council was estab-

lished in 1883 when W. W. Robinson, as auditor and clerk, compiled the ordinances from 1878 on, finishing that task just as the mayor was approving Ordinance 104. Henceforth, the ordinances were to be numbered after adop­tion but before publication, the compilation by Robinson being officially approved. 31

Frederick Eaton, the first "native son" to serve as city surveyor and engineer, brought to public works a wide-ranging and innovative approach beginning in 1885 and returning in 1889-90 as engineer under the terms of the home rule charter. He was one of a number of dynamic men to occupy the lead position in public works and to influence not only the organization but the direction of major proj­ects. He designed a prototype sewer system and worked to establish a park system. He did not confine his civic interest to public projects but served as superintendent of the privately owned Los Angeles Water Company and as chief engi­neer for the Los Angeles Railway Company. In 1998 he began a two-year term as mayor. Eaton went on to become a rancher in Mono County and incorporate the Owens Valley Land and Cat­tle Company, and he was instrumental in pro­moting the Owens Valley Aqueduct. 32

Eaton was followed as city engineer by John Henry Dockweiler, a different type of innova­tor. He is credited with procuring in fee sim­ple the ocean frontage where the outfall sewer was designed to terminate. He was interested in organizational matters as well, being cred­ited with originating the system of indexing public works records in the engineer's office by operating divisions.33

Another attempt at improving the frame­work for city government was made in 1888-89 under a state assembly constitutional amend­ment. A fifteen-member board of freeholders was elected and given ninety days to frame a charter. By devising organizational ground rules suited to local needs and setting up a sys-

tem guaranteeing open deliberations, the free­holders sought to prevent corruption. At the time, the fight against corruption in Los Angeles tended to focus on blocking the pow­erful Southern Pacific Railroad's political "machine." Known as the "Home Rule" char­ter, it contained 22 articles and 228 sections. It was approved by a wide margin.

The chart of organization prepared by Bur­ton L. Hunter to accompany his discussion of the home-rule charter shows that no provision whatsoever had been made for a separate board or department of public works.34 The mayor and council jointly appointed a superintend­ent of buildings and a water overseer. There were an elected street supervisor and a city engineer. Otherwise, the various functions pro­vided for in earlier charter organizations, such as the construction and maintenance of sewer and sanitation systems, of bridges, and of street lighting were not specifically assigned.

In 1898 when the thirty-year franchise for water distribution expired, the city began a four-year negotiation to regain from the fran­chisee the control of the water works. Public ownership of public utilities was one of the tenets of the new, reformist, political thinking. The council enacted an ordinance providing for a seven-member commission to oversee opera­tions, "pending a change in charter provisions." The commission thus brought into being found itself with the responsibility for establishing a water-distribution system that could keep pace with the burgeoning growth. Not only were there more residents, but by 1899 the city had expanded in size to comprise almost twice the original area. The farmers and homebuilders in the areas of Highland Park, Garvanza, Sycamore Grove, and, to the southwest, the alfalfa grow­ers on lands south of Slauson Avenue and west of Arlington had persuaded the council to annex their respective territories to the city.

Only 4.63 inches of rain fell in 1898, only 8.69

PUBLIC WORKS· 297

inches in 1899. For comparison, the average rainfall recorded between 1878 and 2003 was 14.96 inches. It was the most severe drought in twentyyears.35 The city council was confronted simultaneously by the two least-manageable imperatives of its governance-the rainfall and the city's growth.

The new Board of Water Commissioners of the domestic water works system of the city stated in its first annual report on November 30,1902, that:

The city has the paramount right to so much of the water flowing in the river at any point from its source to the southern boundary of

the city as it may require for municipal uses and for the use ofits inhabitants, and thatthis right inheres not only in its surface stream but in the stream as it flows under the surface, and

in all subterranean waters which supply the surface or underground stream; and that this right is not limited to the territory covered by the original Pueblo, but attaches to all addi­tional territory from time to time brought

within the city limits. 36

The board's report was largely the composi­tion of young William Mulholland, a self­schooled hydraulic engineer who had been chosen to be the superintendent and chief engineer of the Board of Water Commission­ers. In line with his report, he immediately began working to provide storage facilities to conserve the winter runoff from the river. He proposed building reservoirs to be fed by a sup­ply line along the river in the vicinity of Griffith Park. He also led a campaign for conservation and instituted tighter financial controls within the bureau. All moneys received from the sale of water were placed in the water revenue fund, under direct control of the commissioners. City water rates were fixed by the commission subject, however, to council approval.

After the home-rule charter went into effect,

298' PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

there were no amendments made until 1903. The council simply exercised its prerogative to create additional officers as needed. Byordi­nance, a board of plumbing examiners was cre­ated, only to be disbanded a few months later. A board of examining engineers and boiler inspectors was created, with their salaries to be paid through charges for inspections and licensing. The post of city electrician was cre­ated to install, operate, and maintain fire­alarm and police call-box systems and to handle street lighting, as the lights were mod­ernized from gas to electric fixtures.

Following fourteen years of operation and innumerable efforts to reform the home rule charter, all of which failed of adoption by the voters, a slate of amendments proposed in 1903, finally gained acceptance. Foremost among the changes were an increase in the power of the mayor, an increase in the debt limit, a provision for new election laws, and the creation of a civil service commission. This revision was the product of a fairly intensive campaign of education and debate sponsored by some of the city's newly emergent social clubs. In line with their ideas of efficient administration, the mayor was to serve as pres­ident of the various existing boards and com­missions with the power to appoint members.

THE BETTER CITY:

THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

Los Angeles had something of a tradition of influential social organizations. The earliest had been the chamber of commerce, formed in 1873 as the Board of Trade, and reorganized on a more effective basis as the Boom of the Eight­ies dwindled. It became a booster organization and was very effective in creating enthusiasm for sunny southern California. By the turn of the century, it had approximately one thousand members, characterized by Charles Dwight

Willard as "the wealthy and progressive men of the city, with sufficient funds to carryon an active campaign.""

A number of the clubs drawing membership from the ranks of newcomers at the turn of the century were, indeed, Progressive-leaning and tended to focus on reforming municipal gov­ernment. Among the organizations for which the club movement furnished a forum was the League for Better City Government. This par­ticular club had the good fortune to draw the attention of a young doctor, John Randolph Haynes, who had moved to Los Angeles in the hope of improving the health of his family. The league was a reform organization including both "liberals and conservatives who were fed up with scandals in municipal government and the city school system. Its formation was a sig­nificant step in the evolution of progressive municipal reform in Los Angeles.""

Dr. Haynes's version of Socialism fused lib­eral religious thought with immediate social concerns such as direct legislation, women's suffrage, abolition of child labor, full employ­ment, graduated taxes, and civil service. He was particularly interested in direct legislation and saw the initiative, referendum, and recall as processes by which voters might become sufficiently enlightened on political issues to pass or reject legislation by petition when leg­islatures refused to do so. He worked tirelessly to bring what he considered "Direct Democ­racy" into municipal government.39

The enthusiasm for civic betterment took a number of forms, prominent among them was a campaign led initially by the Reverend Dana Bartlett for improvements in city living condi­tions. He wrote a very popular book entitled The Better City, calling for uplift generally and, specifically, for the reform of public services, workers' housing, city parks, and thelandscap­ing of the banks of the Los Angeles River.40 He applauded the action of the Municipal Arts

PUBLIC WORKS' 299

commission in bringing to Los Angeles the apostle of the City Beautiful movement, Charles Mulford Robinson, and .he later applauded Robinson's recomm~ndatlOn to the art commission in 1907 that Improve~ents should be financed by the city's becommg a

defense of the city's stewardship of the public's business. The floor plan of the City Hall shows that fully one-fourth of the whole area was given over to the offices, the dr~fting .~b~es, and the me rooms of the Engineermg DlVlslOn.. .

The report presented in.full the ne~ .Clvil service requirements for reSIdence and CItizen­ship status, and for a minimum employnIent age (twenty-one years except for el.evator oper­ators draftsmen, chainmen, and lIbrary atten­dant~, for whom there was a minimum of seventeen years). There was, of course, no sep­arate public works report, b~t the report of the city engineer lists all street Im~rovem~nts ~y street, mileage, and cost. There IS a speCIal dIa­gram of the cross sections ?f ele:en types of graveled streets, and a sectlOn With a p~oto­graph showing the new outfall sewer pIer ~f Hyperion. There are also reports by the engI­neer on the utilization of the separate funds for sewers, bridges, and storm sewers. The re~ort of the street superintendent is similarly detailed. He reports on streets completed under the old city charter, those completed under an act of 1903 (not otherwise identified), ~nd those com­menced but not completed. He mcludes a four­page compilation of "cash streets" and those built with bond funding. For the water com­missioners, this was the third annual report, and they were pleased to announce that 5,~45 new customers had been added and37·62 miles of street mains installed in the past year. An abstract of franchises in the city is appended, showing the range of services performed under municipal franchise, from burglar alarm.s~s­tems, gas lines, telephone, and electnClty

land developer in its own right. ., The city's old-line bureaucracy was ;n.sprred

to show that it, too, had developed a CIVIC con­sciousness. Giving belated attention to the c~n­dition of the city streets, overcrowded .WIth freight wagons, delivery carts, street raIlway cars and the occasional private buggy, all dra~ by horses, the street superintendent's annual report for 1902-1903 notes that

The improper sweeping of our streets was of

great annoyance to this Department when I took charge of it in January, 1903. Merchants and property owners were continually com­plaining, and it was useless to attempt to rem­edy the defect on account of the system then

in vogue. Under your instructions I purcha~ed two Furnas Pneumatic Street Cleamng

machines, and last August commenced oper­ating them on ourfrrst class paved streets, with results vastly more satisfactory than those obtainable under the contract system, then abolished. During the day the "white-angels"

with their brooms and pushcarts prove invalu­able aid, in keeping frrst class streets clean. The cans that were placed on street corners have

been abolished, and three pick-up wagons

carry the sweepings during the day."

One of the most elaborate annual reports ever issued by the City of Los Angeles was that com­piled by the auditor, L. H. SclIwaebe, for the year ending November 30,1904. It was something of a swan song for the old regime. In ~ stoutly bound volume of 403 page.s, replete With excel­lent photographs, statistical tables, and a ~a­gram of the office layout of the two-story CIty Hall, Mr. Schwaebe presented an exhaustive

installations, through the large number of

il . 42

street ra way seIVlces.

THE FLOWERING OF BUREAUCRACY

C. D. Willard, styling himself the editorial con­tributor, created a weekly publication, the

300' PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

Pacific Outlook, representing the Progressive movement to publish reports on Los Angeles improvement work and legislation. It listed the streets opened, graded, paved, or built with sidewalks, noting especially work done under the state-approved Vrooman Act, which enabled the city to use bond funding on a reg­ular basis to pay for improvements.43

The Vrooman Act, approved March 18,1885, by the California legislature, was an important and very well-crafted law providing for "work upon streets, lanes, alleys, courts, places, and sidewalks, and for the construction of sewers within municipalities.""

Henry Vrooman, Republican assemblyman from Alameda, authored the bill as an attempt to regularize California's local assessment dis­trict ventures. The bill gave to municipalities the power to order work, notify property own­ers, advertise for bids, assess costs to owners and costs to the city treasury, let and supervise contracts, and, perhaps most importantly, incur indebtedness and issue bonds. Taxes on real and personal property were to cover pay­ment of interest on the indebtedness and to maintain a sinking fund to payoff the indebt­edness within a period of not more than twenty years.

There was a strict obligation incurred by cities using the Vrooman Act to provide com­plete financial records on every project. Under the charter of 1889 there existed no Los Angeles department with jurisdiction over the range of public works covered, and no provision for sep­arate bookkeeping and financial management on a project-by-project basis. The Annual Report of the Street Superintendent for the year ending December 1, 1902, presents infor­mation in tabular form for each type of improvement. It shows the funds expended for street improvement under the bond provisions of the Vrooman Act to be $266,788 and under the cash provision of the actto be $55,845, with

an additional $26,090 spent for paving with asphaltum. Sewers constructed under the act cost $65,762, for an unprecedented total of $4170566 in improvements.45

A manuscript tabulation filed with the Annual Report of the City Engineer of the City of Los Angeles for the Year Ending November 30,1904, lists by street name the street and sewer improvements completed by means of Vrooman Act funding. The tabulation, on sheets the size of circus posters and in a beautiful Spencerian hand, details by name the streets improved, the length in feet of the work done, and whether asphalt paving, simple grading, or gravel and oil were used. Curbs, gutters, culverts, side­walks, and crosswalks were also detailed. The cost of the work, however, was not noted, and consequently this accounting cannot be com­pared with the prior report. The summary sheet shows the $14,615.38 expended from the "Sundry Vrooman Act Accounts" as one of twenty-four accounts from which the $74,108.97 in total department salaries were paid. Other revenue accounts ranged from the work for the board of health, the chain gang, and the Fire Department to the Board of Education. 46

In his narrative accompanying the Sixteenth Annual Report to the Honorable Council, Harry F. Stafford, city engineer, complained that "The work of this department continues to grow to such an extent, that I have become discouraged over ever attempting to get caught up with it." He also admits that, "Delays in the construction of our 'Outfall Sewer' has been a great worry to this department ... as there is a very large proportion of our people without sewer facilities and it is impossible to extend our interior system until such time as the out­fall is nearing completion."47

The forces of governmental reform were augmented in 1903 with the advent of a new, politically motivated association that evolved into the Good Government Organization. As

the league gained prominence, the Los Angeles Times labeled them the "Goo Goos." They were determined to fight machine politics. They joined with the City Club in exercising the newly approved recall provision to oust Coun­cilman James P. Davenport on charges of col­lusion with the Times on a contract for the city's printing." The Times retaliated in 1906 by cam­paigning alongside the unpopular Southern Pacific Railroad machine to defeat the Good Government candidate and elect their man as mayor of Los Angeles. The Good Government and other reformist groups then turned their attention to promoting individual elements of their platform within the new city regime.

In 1905, after years of campaigning by civic clubs, innumerable speeches at luncheon meetings, and weekly exhortations by the Pacific Outlook, the voters had approved a char­ter amendment creating a board of public works. It was to consist of three prominent cit­izens; assigned to it was the oversight of all functions performed by the street superintend­ent' the superintendent of buildings, the elec­trical department, and the Street Assessment Bureau. It was to include the supervision of an accounting section for all public works proj­ects. The city engineer was also placed under the commission in the following year.49

The aim of the Progressives in assigning public works to the control of a commission was to prevent political manipulation of the many contracts handled in the course of con­structing city projects. The charter amend­ment stated clearly that the board was to be made up of prominent citizens. It also stated that the members were to be appointed by the mayor.

The Los Angeles Times enjoyed taking a jab at the prominent citizens of the Board of Public Works reporting,

Yesterday the new Board of Public Works was fairly inundated by complaints of failure to

PUBLIC WORKS' 301

collect garbage. Housewives have discovered that the board is now responsible and they are demanding their pound of flesh. Telephones in the rooms of the board kept up an almost constant jangle all morning. "The garbage man missed us," was the burden of the com­plaint. The new garbage wagons ordered for use by the city have not yet arrived. Until they are received and placed in commission the board can do little toward bettering present conditions.50

The new mayor, Arthur c. Hatper, appeared to enjoy his position enormously, taking full advantage of the powers bestowed on the office by the recently achieved reforms. In addition, he found time to foster a stock scheme to line his own pockets and, adding insult to injury, to encourage the private interests that were attempting to appropriate the city-owned Los Angeles River bed for use as a gravel pit. 51 The Municipal League and other civic groups had opposed a riverbed franchise for years. They foresaw that a private holder of the franchise would be able to mine the city's own land for the sand and gravel in great demand by the city itself for the construction of streets. There was no question of the growing need for the material.

The Annual Report of the Street Superinten­dent 1902-1903 stated that:

This City has an average of 268 miles of grav­eled streets, and with my present limited force I have endeavored to accomplish as much work as possible in keeping same in proper repair. Gravel has been expensive, and in order to economize I have obtained gravel from cel­lars in different parts of the City at very little expense, considering the prices of gravel at the present time.52

By 1907 Mayor Hatper reported one thousand to two thousand wagonloads of sand and gravel were being taken from the riverbed every day by contractors. "If the gravel pit was owned by

302· PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

some individual or company it would pay enor­mous dividends," he said. "I see no reason why the city should not operate such a gravel pit.""

Mayor Harper appointed as a new member on the Board of Public Works a keen advocate of the riverbed franchise, Ed Kern, who had served two years as chief of police. Kern's career in city politics was actively supported by the Times despite the fact that he had been forced to leave the Police Department amid charges of protecting vice throughout the city. For the reformers, his immediate appointment to the Board of Public Works was the last straw. His­torian Mark H. Stevens, in his detailed analy­sis of the municipal elections of 1909, points out that the board was

highly respected throughout the city because of its broad comprehensive powers in munic­ipal affairs. Consequently, its members had to be men of sterling character, beyond reproach, capable, competent administrators, and con­sidered unreachable by petty politicians. 54

Members of the Municipal League and the City Club joined with the Good Government Orga­nization and concerned individual citizens at a meeting that voted to prepare a petition to recall Mayor Harper. The Municipal League began soliciting signatures on the recall peti­tion' and "the signatures came in at the rate of 1000 a day."" Meanwhile, Edwin T. Earl, editor of the Los Angeles Express, published a series of investigatory reports detailing unsavory details of police graft in the red-light district. Thomas E. Gibbon, editor of the Herald, brought forth examples of irregularities in Mayor Harper's business dealings. The county grand jury found that the mayor and the Police Depart­ment had failed to enforce statutes prohibit­ing gambling, prostitution, and the sale of liquor. Ex-police chief Kern resigned quietly from the Board of Public Works.56

The recall campaign continued to gain

strength. At the last possible minute for changes to the ballot, Arthur C. Harper gave in his notice of resignation, thereby avoiding the recall. With the emotional charge of the recall rhetoric defused, the question before the vot­ers was a choice between candidates to fill out Harper's unexpired term.

George Alexander, a former county supervi­sor and one of the grand old men in Los Angeles public affairs, an advocate of temper­ance, law and order, and direct democracy, had accepted the invitation of the Good Govern­ment forces to head their ticket. He defeated the Socialist candidate only narrowly but man­aged to carry a number of men on the reform slate into office.

The Board of Public Works had survived Mayor Harper's attempted corruption and set­tled into its position of considerable power. Now, the members refused to resign when Mayor Alexander made his formal request for the resignation of appointees held over from the previous regime. They declared themselves averse to any substantial revision of adminis­trative policies and procedures.

As in other cities experiencing a comparably growing complexity of formal authorities, such bureaucratic intransigence, coupled with functional divisions within the boards, had evolved into what one political scientist described as "islands of functional power.""

Charter amendments of 1906 greatly expanded the powers of the Board of Public Works by giving it control of the design and construction aspects of an aqueduct to be built from the Owens River Valley to the San Fer­nando Valley, the system to be completed and then turned over to the Board of Water Com­missioners. 58 In tandem with the aqueduct project, a Bureau of Aqueduct Power, with a chief electrical engineer, was created within the Department of Public Works.

The first annual report of the Board of Pub­lic Works, December 15, 1906, foresaw the com­plexities of cooperating with William Mulholland's Water Department and sought to clarify the relationship. "This great undertak­ing would naturally fall under the Water Department, but this board has jurisdiction because the same is to be built with money from the sale of bonds of the City." The report went on to acknowledge that

We fully appreciate the value to the City of the experience and public spirit of the present members of the Water Board, who are entitled to the credit of initiating this great work and had full charge of the same until the organi­zation of this Board, and we have requested the Water Department to co-operate with this Department in the supervision of this work. 59

The dynamic, self-taught engineer William Mulholland, having been superintendent of water works for the Los Angeles Water Com­mission since 1902, moved with his staff into the new organizational structure with no dis­cernable sacrifice of personal independence.

Mulholland had been working informally since the drought of 1904 with Fred Eaton, erst­while city engineer, mayor of Los Angeles from 1898 to 1900, and subsequently an enterprising water-seeker. Eaton had been spurred into action in the summer of 1904 when he took it upon himself to tag along after an engineer sent out by the new federal reclamation serv­ice to survey the water resources of the Owens Valley. Eaton came to the realization that the snowmelt streams from the great eastern face of the Sierra Nevada mountain range could provide enough water for the immediate and future needs of the parched Los Angeles basin. He also realized that the city would have to move immediately if the water resources were to be brought under its control. As historian Remi Nadeau described Eaton's next move,

PUBLIC WORKS· 303

Eaton took Mulholland to see for himself the beautiful, abundant water flowing into Owens Valley from the snow mountains of the Sierra Nevada.

Driving a two-horse buckboard, the two friends "roughed it" across the Mohave Desert, camping in the open and living on simple rations of bacon and beans. On September 24

they stood in the shadow of the massive Sierra, two hundred and fifty miles from Los Angeles, while Eaton showed Mulholland a placid val­ley of green fields and abundant water ... enough to provide a city of 2,000,000 people."o

For days Eaton went over the ground with Mulholland, proving with barometer and rough calculations that the water could be diverted around briny Owens Lake and carried to Los Angeles by gravity. They foresaw the technical difficulties of ditches, pumping stations, and siphons as routine problems. What they didnot foresee were the scandals, bitterness, and vir­tual warfare that would almost ruin the project. The farmers and townspeople of Owens Valley realized they were facing utter devastation and fought back. Nor was the project unanimously favored within the City of Los Angeles, espe­ciallywhen it came to voting the necessary $23

million in water bonds. Harrison Gray Otis and the Times were strongly in favor, while the lead­ing Socialist spokesman, Job Harriman, was convinced that there had been an egregious land swindle and the aqueduct should not be built. Chief engineer and superintendent of water works William Mulholland entered the contro­versyjust before the election, when "with a glib Irish tongue," armed with maps and charts, he "took his crusade before the men's organiza­tions in every precinct of the city."6! On election day, June 12, 1907, Los Angeles voted 10 to 1 in favor of the Owens River project.

The new Board of Public Works gained a rather anomalous responsibility with the

304· PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

enactment by the city council on February 5, 1907, of Ordinance 14,113, which required the board to review plans and issue permits for the construction or maintenance of house court properties. The ordinance was sponsored jointly by the College Settlement Association and the Municipal League. C. D. Willard, as sec­retary of the league, had, in fact, drafted the ordinance. The campaign to improve housing conditions for the working people of Los Angeles was begun by the civic clubs after a visit by a renowned guest speaker, the New York slum-clearance activist Jacob Riis. He had toured the house courts of Los Angeles and pronounced them as bad, if not as extensive, as anything to be found in New York. 62

The responsibility assigned to the Board of Public Works was carried out by a seven-mem­ber commission. It was made up of prominent citizens including a doctor, a minister, three businessmen (an architect, a plumber, a retired stock salesman), and two women (an attorney and a settlement worker). They stated in their report of 1906-1908 that

The Commission feels that the work so far

accomplished has been of undoubted benefit.

The lessening of disease in these courts, and

the uplifting of the moral tone of the inhabi­

tants will not only now, but in the future,

make its effects felt upon these congested

areas, and upon the city at large. 63

The re-elected Good Government candidate, Mayor George Alexander, re-appointed the commission in 1910 with two new members, the well-respected minister Dana W. Bartlett and Robert Watchorn, the treasurer of the Union oil Company of California and formerly the commissioner of immigration of the Port of New York. The report of the commission for 1909-10 includes statistical tables on the progress being made. Two hundred sixty house courts had been inspected, serving 4,480

inhabitants with 21 courts being demolished, 28 abolished, 10 vacated, leaving only 204

house courts active for which written notices were sent out to file plans and obtain permits from the Board of Public Works. Thirty nation­ali ties were represented among tlre residents. In the opinion of Robert Watchorn,

The growth it [Los Angeles 1 has already man­

ifested has attracted the attention, not only of

our entire country, but is well known through­

out the world. Coincident with the opening of

the Panama Canal, California in general and

Los Angeles in particular will be placed many

miles nearer to those sections of Europe which

are most prolific of manual laborers .... All

industrious classes added to a community are

producers of great wealth. A moiety of that

wealth ought to be wisely and prudently

expended in protecting them.64

The Housing Commission was shifted from the Board of Public Works in 1913 to become a bureau witlrin the health department.

THE BIGGER CITY

The population of Los Angeles more than dou­bled between 1890 and 1900. In 1901 Charles Dwight Willard wrote, in the closing paragraph of his History of Los Angeles City, "That it should some day become one of the great metropoli­tan centers of the nation is not a dream, but the natural outgrowth of existing conditions."65 By 1910 the city's population had more than tre­bled, standing at 310,198, while tlre incorporated area was approximately three times that of the pueblo's original twenty-eight square miles. When water from the Owens Valley reached tlre basin in 1913, it intensified the demand for annexation, since the water was reserved by the provisions of tlre bond measure for areas within the city limits. Annexations had expanded the city to 363.69 square miles by 1920.

Along with its daring reach for a water sup­ply, Los Angeles moved to make up for anotlrer fundamental lack in its resources by creating an all-weather harbor. Following a long "Free Harbor Contest" between San Pedro and Santa Monica, Congress had settled the dispute by voting money for San Pedro, and the building of a breakwater had begun. Construction of the port facilities was undertaken by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. By 1910 the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce was announcing in one of its pictorial tourist brochures that

The Los Angeles Harbor at San Pedro recently

(by a vote of 70 to 1) made a part of the city of

Los Angeles, is absolutely safe for the largest

sea-going vessels and can be entered safely in

any kind of weather. It is the logical harbor for

the trade of the Orient, when the Panama carra! shall have been completed. The City of Los

Angeles has promised to spend $10,000,000 in

the next ten years on the further improve­

ment.66

A board of harbor commissioners was cre­ated by ordinance, with the first commission being appointed in 1908. The city engineer was ex officio the harbor engineer. The Board of Public Works was given control of the con­struction of wharves, docks, piers, warehouses, sea walls, and other improvements authorized prior to January 1,1912, with construction after that date to be under the control of the harbor commissioners.67

Ideas of reform in Los Angeles had under­gone an abrupt rethinking in the mayoral cam­paign of 1911, when the Socialist party, led by Job Harriman, had strongly challenged the can­didate of the Good Government League. The bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, the subsequent trial of the McNamara brothers, and their dramatic confessions of guilt on the very eve of tlre voting had been ruinous for the

PUBLIC WORKS· 305

Socialists. Job Harriman had believed in the innocence of the McNamaras and had drawn strong support from sympathizers. When the brothers confessed, Harriman's followers "lit­tered the gutters with the buttons they had been wearing."68 The humiliation of the Social­ists, combined with the fact that the hated Southern Pacific Railroad machine had been given a setback during the scandals surround­ing Mayor Harper, changed the tenor of the effort to reform city government. The determi­nation to restore local politics to the control of the voters was not shaken but given more of a centrist direction.

Professor Martin Schiesl has characterized the Los Angeles Progressives of these years as

"structural" progressives, unreceptive to the

desires of workers to improve the social and

economic status of the underprivileged in the

city and, as elected officials, pressing mainly

for a government to be conducted by experts

according to the corporate ideals of economy and efficiency.69

Burton L. Hunter, author of the Evolution of Municipal Organization and Administrative Prac­tice in the City of Los Angeles, believed the period from 1911 to 1915 to have been marked by new policies and ideas not heretofore found in the local municipal government. His analysis is of particular interest because he went on to become an efficiency engineer in the Bureau of Budget and Efficiency of Los Angeles.

It was in these years that the Municipal League of Los Angeles, in its quest for reform in city administration, hired the New York Bureau of Municipal Research to survey the city bureaucracy and make recommendations. To no one's astonishment, the survey revealed a lack of efficiency in the city government. The council, thereupon, enacted an ordinance to create an efficiency commission. It was to have the

306' PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

power to investigate the administration of the

various departments of the city for the purpose

of determining the duties of each position

therein, to fix standards of efficiency, to estab­

lish a system of individual efficiency records,

and to recommend to the city council and to

the respective boards and commissions of the

city, measures for increasing individual, group,

and departmental efficiency; and providing for

simplicity of operation and uniformity of com­

pensation throughout the service.70

The activities of the new commission were not popular. It required extraordinary efforts by the Municipal League, the chamber of com­merce, the local press, and a number of indi­vidual good-government advocates to keep the commission in existence and to preserve its independence.

A "Chart of Los Angeles City Government, July 1, 1914" shows the lines of control extend­ing from the office of the mayor, and from the city council as well, to each of the commissions and boards. Functions of the government were divided into nine groups with a councilman assigned to each. To emphasize the new objec­tives of rational operation, a second chart, "Organization of Large Private Corporations," is appended for comparison, the inference being that the city should emulate business (see page 61).

Another hard-driving, self-taught man was appointed to the post of city engineer in 1906:

Homer Hamlin, who was to serve until 1917.

He completed the outfall sewer by driving a series of tunnels through an area of water­bearing rock strata that had stalled the proj­ect. He also supervised improvements on the harbor and completed the Hill Street vehicu­lar tunnel. His personal campaign for the acquisition of a strip of land known as the "Shoestring" had perhaps the most far-reach­ing consequences. The annexation of this

land-half a mile wide and sixteen miles long-assured the city of a land-based admin­istrative link to the harbor area. 71

To a number of prominent reformers, it seemed that the growing factionalism in Los Angeles necessitated a major re-ordering that would centralize authority under officials com­mitted to "scientific" administration. The council appointed a fifteen-man charter-revi­sion committee. Their proposal featured a commission form of government, in line with recommendations of the National Municipal League. A few cities across the United States were experimenting with the commission form, whereby the work of governing was per­formed by commissioners expert in their respective fields. A similar plan was approved for Los Angeles by a board of freeholders and put before the voters in 1912 with the claim that, if adopted, "it will give Los Angeles a posi­tion of enviable distinction among the best governed cities in the world."72 The proposed charter was rejected by the voters.

Following this defeat, a group of conserva­tive reformers met as the Citizen's Committee of 1,000 to draft amendments to the existing charter, while another group, including many Socialists, met as the People's Charter Confer­ence. Each group submitted a set of proposals to the council that, in turn, submitted the entire lot to the voters, who rejected every­thing. The voters elected a board of freehold­ers in 1915 but defeated the charter it submitted and again, in 1923, elected a board with many of the leading reformers still patiently accept­ing membership. During the long delibera­tions, the reformist idea of a pure commission form was given up in favor of departments, each to be headed by a single officer, presum­ably a well-trained specialist. Only one func­tion of the city government was to be under the control of a commission-that of public works. Finally a new charter for the city was

hammered out and adopted by a vote of 126,058

to 19,287 on May 6, 1924, going into effect in 1925. The provisions of this charter established clear authority for the Board of Public Works.

During the final years of the old charter, and without reference to the well-publicized work of the freeholders to bring more efficiency to city government, the council created by ordi­nance a great number of individual depart­ments within the Board of Public Works. 73

Most of these new departments were related directly to projects that originated in the office of the city engineer. They included one to build monumental concrete bridges and viaducts and another, most notably, to build the Mul­holland Highway along the crest of the hills that separated the basin from the San Fernando Valley. Individual departments for the con­struction of Cahuenga Pass Road and Beverly Boulevard followed. Each of the projects was to be funded by an independent assessment district. Neither the Mulholland Highway nor the other roads were the type of projects being recommended in the ongoing studies for the improvement of the Los Angeles street system.

Representatives of both the city and county Engineering and Planning departments, the chamber of commerce, and the Automobile Club of Southern California, assisted by a team of nationally prominent planning consultants, had been working for several years to formu­late an efficient plan for traffic flow. Their objective was to facilitate cross-town travel by automobile in a rational manner, benefiting the whole community and having substantial appeal for the voters who were expected to pay the bill. The voters did approve a $5 million bond issue, but in the opinion of the engineers, the money would build only about 10 percent of the plan. The more sweeping elements of the plan met with opposition from the thousands of property owners living in the proposed assessment districts. The more modest ele-

PUBLIC WORKS' 307

ments of the major traffic street plan, however, moved forward so quickly that "the Traffic Commission recommended that the city coun­cil impose a temporary property tax to support

d . f' t "7' a secon umt a street Improvemen s. The enthusiasm for the traffic plan died

down in very few years, despite the resultant improvements, such as the better traffic flow resulting from an overhaul of the old traffic and parking ordinances. It became apparent that the number of cars was increasing expo­nentially, outstripping the road builders, and that downtown congestion was becoming worse rather than better. The traffic plan, willi its focus on bringing greater and greater traf­fic into the central business district, ran counter to the fundamental outward pull of the new suburbs.

It has been suggested that the complications of working among the myriad property inter­ests in established downtown areas left the city engineers frustrated and at a loss as to how to go forward. The major street traffic plan did not offer the grand scope and challenge of the Owens Valley Aqueduct they had just com­pleted. The golden age of Boulder Dam, Hetch­Hetchy, and other heroic public works projects had not yet reached an end.

When venturesome real estate promoters con­

cocted a plan to open a vast new territory for

development by running a highway atop the

Hollywood Hills [Mulholland Highway], the

engineers saw an opportunity to express what

was important to them: to build a major high­

way without opposition, to create an uninter­

rupted corridor, [and] to honor their own work

and those associated with it. 7S

The promoters formed Municipal Improve­ment District 22, collected signatures ofland­holders in the district, contracted for a survey of the boundaries, and managed to have the city clerk validate the signatures against the

308· PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

voter rolls in an uncommonly short time. The affected land owners approved a bond issue to fund construction by a 2 to 1 margin. The bonds sold immediately.

For the engineers, working under the nomi­nal oversight of the Board of Public Works, the highway was to be an adventure in the rugged outdoors and, like the aqueduct project, a grand camping expedition with a purpose. But almost from the beginning they were hard pressed to explain the purpose. The roadway would not connect with anything at either end of its tor­tuous twenty-two-mile course and, since the bond funds did not pay for any of the water, sewer, or electric lines that might facilitate real estate development, it would not invite any use beyond the enjoyment of the vistas of the city. The engineers suggested it would be of use to the Fire Department in case of brush fires. They further claimed that it fell under the emergency provisions of the city charter and was, there­fore, covered by a waiver from the bidding pro­visions that governed city purchases. The Board of Public Works went along with its engineer­ing bureau in approving the suspension of usual procedures. Construction was speeded through the summer, and the opening ceremonies were held December 27,1924, with William Mulhol­land as the honored guest. It afforded a rare moment of celebrity for members of the Board of Public Works. Mulholland's biographer, Mar­garet Leslie Davis, described the event.

Following respectfully behind the man of the hour were civic leaders, the Board of Public Works and the man who actually built the highway, DeWitt Raeburn. Befitting an east­ern potentate, the parade included a squad of mounted police, followed by uniformed offi­cers and a bugler; marching behind them was the Third Coast Artillery Regiment with a mobile searchlight, a field cannon drawn by military tractor, and a motorized antiaircraft

gun. Behind them came a full naval band, five thousand sailors, two hundred marines, and bringing up the rear, bagpipes, mariachis, and the American Legion Band.76

The charter of 1925 brought sweeping changes to city government that included spe­cial consideration for the Board of Public Works. It was unique among the newly recon­figured departments in that it was the only one creat~d by charter to be headed by a full-time, salaned commission without a general man­ager. 77 Fred G. Crawford, who has written an analysis of the first thirty years of achieve­ments under the 1925 charter, noted that the Board of Public Works was unique.

All other commission-headed Charter depart­ments are governed by part-time, fee-atten­dance-paid commissioners. A second dif­ference is that most of the other city depart­ments are of an almost single-purpose type of organization while the Department of Public Works is more nearly multi-purpose. Another significant difference is that this Department, which is usually thought of as a line organiza­tion, has a relatively large number of organi­zational units that perform staff services."78

The board was given wide powers to dele-gate responsibilities along functional lines to various bureaus that could be created, consol­idated, or abolished either by board action or by ordinance. The board designated its presi­dent as administrative officer. Under Section 234 of Article XXXIII of the charter, the board was put in charge of six tasks, namely:

1 construction and maintenance of all streets,

2 all work in, on, over, or under the streets including parkways, trees, and parking,

3 design, construction, and maintenance of sanitary and storm drains,

4 cleaning and lighting all public buildings,

5 design, construction, alteration, mainte­nance and care of all public works and improvements, and

6 disposal of garbage, sewage, and street refuse.

"It has the powers of street superintendent and the powers and duties imposed by the general laws of the state on any municipal board or officer under special assessment and proceed­ings relating to bids, awards, contractors' bonds, [and the] determination of benefits, damages, and costs, making and levying assessments on all public improvements ordered by the councilor board."'9

The Bureau of Engineering, headed by the city engineer, was by far the largest and most powerful of the bureaus overseen by the mem­bers of the Board of Public Works. The board now had the authority to appoint the engineer, who was exempt from civil service regulations. plans and specifications for all city projects were prepared by his staff. For the first two years of operation under the 1925 charter, an inspector of public works, with his staff and his clerical assistants, were budgeted as sepa­rate entities within the Department of Public Works. The inspector and his staff were then transferred to the Bureau of Engineering, fur­ther enlarging its scope.

The mechanical division was removed from the Bureau of Engineering in 1926 and set up as a separate department directly under the supervision of the board. With eighty-four employees, including auto mechanics, electri­cians, machinists, and blacksmiths, the scope of the division's work was considered more of a maintenance function than the preponder­ance of the work in the engineering section. The mechanical division was given its own accounting staff as a part of the change.8o

The era of heroic engineering proj ects in Los Angeles suffered a tragic setback on the night of March 12, 1928, when the St. Francis Dam

PUBLIC WORKS· 309

collapsed. The dam had been constructed as one of the storage facilities for the city's vast aqueduct system. Following spring storms in the mountains, a torrent of water raged down San Francisquito Canyon and through the Santa Clara Valley, destroying the dam. More than four hundred people were killed. Abra­ham Hoffman, in his study of the Owens val­ley Aqueduct, describes the event.

On March 12, 1928, all Los Angeles city-owned reservoirs, including the st. Francis, were filled to capacity. During the day Mulholland and his assistant, Harvey Van Norman, were called to the dam by the damkeeper, who had noticed a new leak in the dam. Concrete darns frequently have cracks and small leaks, and Mulholland found nothing unusual about this one. Various workmen and employees of the dam had made remarks about the dam's possiblefailure, more out of mordant humor than serious concern. Mulliolland inspected the leak and declared it of no consequence. At 11:57 PM the dam failed."

Charles F. Outland, working from eyewit­ness accounts, contemporary photographs, and what documentary material was made available to him from the departmental reports, produced a convincing narrative of the building and destruction of the dam. He notes that, in compliance with the agreement of cooperation between the Water Department and the Board of Public Works, Mulholland had reported to the board on the proposed reser­voir and had pointed out the treacherous nature of the rock formation at the dam site as early as 1911. He had described the face of the canyon opposite the lower power line to be "exceedingly rough, and the dip and strike of the slate such as to threaten slips, in case side­hill excavations were made."" Although not questioned at the time, this geological charac­teristic proved to be one of the major factors contributing to the failure. So strong was the

310' PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

board's reliance on Mulholland's judgment that no other engineering opinion was sought.

There had been some concern about the site on the part oflocal residents, but it was focused on the possibility thatthe city might be captur­ing the water from the natural stream in San Francisquito Canyon. The Santa Clara River Protective Association had hired an engineer to render an opinion as to the right of Los Angeles to store the natural runoff waters of the canyon, but safety did not appear to be an issue. Aque­duct water was turned into the reservoir on March 1, 1926, two months before the comple­tion of the dam. Some leakage appeared a month later, when the water level had reached what some geologists considered a "dead" fault line on the canyon wall, but the workmen were ordered to pack the area with oakum. Follow­ing this period of mild concern few criticisms can be found on record. Mr. Mulholland declared, "of all the dams I have built and of all the dams I have ever seen, it was the driest dam of its size I ever saw."83

The city was stunned by the magnitude of the disaster. The reality was bad enough, but the newspapers circulated rumors and explanations of mythic proportions. Mulholland took per­sonal responsibility for whatever engineering errors had occurred. The Board of Public Works did not make a public acknowledgement of any possible responsibility for control and over­sight, but the enthusiasm for initiating grand engineering projects disappeared.

The completion of the new twenty-eight­story City Hall was the major accomplishment noted in the Annual Report of the Board of Pub -lic Works for the Year July 1927 to June 1928. The architects had provided a beautiful design, and the city had spent the $9.7 million needed for first -class construction. The secretary of the Board of Public Works was responsible for all bookkeeping and related matters pertaining to the City Hall and proudly reported details. The

board received his report on every aspect of the building, including the weight of structural steel (8,167tons), the number of columns (400), and the number of rivets used in assembling the steel frame (900,000). There were nearly twenty acres of floor space, and the staff in the board's newly formed Department of the Build­ing Custodian numbered 221, of whom 147 were janitors and 8 were janitresses.84

The duties of the secretary of the Board of Public Works had been expanded to include the purchase of supplies and maintenance equip­ment, not only for the new City Hall downtown but for six new branch City Halls. The area of the city had increased to 441.25 square miles, bringing in additional populations and new demands for public works. The city council sought to serve the expanding area through branch city offices, each with public counters for applications to various city departments. San Pedro, Wilmington, Venice, Sawtelle, Eagle Rock, and Van Nuys had permanently staffed offices by 1928.

Despite the city's pride in the work of its engineers, an attempt to obtain salary increases for the technical employees of the department failed of adoption by the council and was referred back to a joint committee of members of the finance and the efficiency and personnel committees. The board's report stresses that it had complied with the policy of eliminating inefficient and undesirable employees, with 51 men having been discharged and35 requested to resign. There were in 1928 some 500 techni­cal positions in the office and another 500 in the field, in addition to the clerical staff, with the total of all classifications in the engineer­ing department standing at 3,338. As the year closed, the joint committee on finance and effi­ciency was considering the elimination of auto­matic pay increases in favor of fixed rates of pay for each class, with increases dependent on an employee's service ratings.

The board reported that

During the past year the engineering work of the city has acquired a closer interlock with the engineering work of the county and sur­rounding communities. The necessity for the construction of sanitary sewers to the ocean

to serve portions of the City of Los Angeles jointlywithincorporated and unincorporated areas adjoining the city has been an important

factor in pooling interests and consolidation of engineering work in the entire metropoli­

tan area.8S

The public tended to disregard cit~-county jurisdictional lines. The Board ofPu~lic Works received complaints about pollutIOn of ~he beaches, not only in front of the Hyper:on Treatment Plant but at Venice, Santa Moruca, and county areas beyond the city boundary ~ne at Topanga Canyon. There w~re also WIde­spread complaints about offenSIve odors fr?m areas where screenings from the Hypenon plant were being buried.

Annexed areas south of Los Angeles such as low-lying Watts and Green Meadows ~ere in desperate need of sewer ties into the mam sys­tem in order to get rid of the old cesspools that were periodically contaminating eve~ wate.r­way in the area. Individual hom~ bU1lde~s m many other neighborhoods, haVIng ?roVIded independently for the disposal o~ theIr sewage by simply digging a cesspool behind the house, were becoming aware of the danger of contam­inated groundwater entering the local water wells. Public pressure to extend the sewer sys­tem became formidable. The scope of the prob­lem was greater than the Board of Public Works could handle through the annual budgets.

The board did report that work was nearing completion on the handsome ~rid~es and viaducts begun with bond fundmg m 1923, 1924, and 1925. The report notes that "The Glen­dale-Hyperion Viaduct, which is perhaps the

PUBLIC WORKS' 311

most spectacular bridge proj~ct so f~r under­taken by the City, is now rapIdl~ taki~g form and the public is beginning to VIsualIze what

• "86 will be accomplished by this large structure. The Mullrolland Highway, on the other hand, was not faring welL The original design had extended only to the bluff above the Ca~uenga Pass and the access link that would brmg the roadway down into the pass was stalled at the bluff for years, further lessening the useful­ness of the proj ect.

In a special section of the annual.rep~rt for 1928 the division of opening and WIderung of stre~ts went on record as advocating that "the greatest care should be ~xercised in giving first preference to those projects that are a r~al traf­fic necessity. The institution of proceedmgs for the exploitation of real estat~ ~~y sh?uld be avoided."" The work of this dIVISIOn, like that of the Department of Engineering, was relat.ed to the decisions being made in another CIty department, the Department of City Planning and Zoning. Although there was only an eleva­tor ride between them in the new City Hall, the Board of Public Works was senior to the plan­ning department and made very li~tle effort to solve subdivision problems by mteragency cooperation. The report of the Engineering Bureau notes that subdivision activity had increased 20 percent from the prior year, with 225 tracts having been recorded. The San Fer­nando Valley continued to experience th~ gr~at­est activity, with a trend toward the dedIcatIOn of more of the tract area for streets. The trend indicated smaller lot sizes, resulting in higher population density and greater requirerr:ents for services, beginning with street mamte­nance. In the opinion of the Engineering Department, certain improvements such as paving, curbs, and gutt~rs sh?uld be required of the promoters in consIderatIOn o~ the acceP.t­ance of subdivision maps by the CIty council. This idea was not popular with the promoters

312' PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

of subdivisions who campaigned to influence council members in favor of the status quo.

The board sought cooperation with the county in resolving drainage problems in the 200-Square-mile area of the San Fernando Val­ley. Before annexation and the rush of subdivi­sions began, the area had been the province of the Los Angeles flood-control district. The demands of the farmers living in the Valley had been met by the construction of special ford, or dip, sections wherever storm channels inter­sected roadways. Motorists who were not farm­ers found the resulting irregularities of the road beds very annoying. The Board of Public Works now recommended that the road surface of north-south streets be lowered and twelve-inch curbs installed, thereby providing what seemed to be a better means of conveying storm water to the Los Angeles River. The streets would, in effect, serve as run-off channels.

was chosen to host the 1932 International Olympic Games. Promoters stressed the fact that Los Angeles was to be the first city in the United States to hold the games. With more civic pride than ready cash, the Board of Pub­lic Works undertook the enlargement of the municipal stadium to accommodate

105,000

spectators and added architectural elements befitting the spirit of the Olympics.

The annual report of 1927-28, in magnitude of accomplishments, general tone of enthusi­asm, and sheer bulk, attained a high point. By the following September, the council had abol­ished by ordinance seven departments within the Board of Public Works, including Bridges and Viaducts, Cahuenga Pass Road, Sherman Way, Beverly Glen Road, and Mulholland High­way."

Although the business interests that suf­fered most acutely during the stock market crash of 1929 did not make up a very large part of the local economy, Los Angeles was imme­diately affected by the widening economic col­lapse. No longer did the expansion of the city seem to be inevitable. Home building and real estate speculation dropped precipitously. Workers lost their jobs and struggled to meet payments on their mortgages. The number of people accepting public aid from the county rose from 35,700 in 1932 to 120,000 in 1933.

Despite the strictures of the Depression, Los Angeles rallied to meet its obligations when it

Otherwise, the Annual Report of the Board of Public Works for the Year 1933-34 of the Depression reflected a sharply diminished number of accomplishments and a shift from an expansive to an economy-focused opera­tion. Mayor Frank L. Shaw and the city Coun­cil were informed by the board that the Bureau of Engineering had reorganized itself in the interests of economy. The work had been divided into "logical units" with all the duties and assigmnents to be correlated "without con-flict" by the city engineer. 89

Lloyd Aldrich, one of the most colorful men to hold the post of city engineer, was respon­sible for the reorganization. He had been appointed in AuguStl933, first as deputy engi­neer and then, four weeks later, advanced to the top position. He went on to serve for twenty-two years, longer than any other city engineer. Besides pushing through the con­struction of the Hyperion sewage treatment plant, constructing four hundred or so bridges, and designing a comprehensive beach-expan_ sion project, he became active in local politics, eventually seeking to defeat Mayor Fletcher Bowron. 9o

Soon after his appointment, Aldrich was des­ignated the coordinator for the city for all fed­erally funded projects, including those to be undertaken by the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Reconstruction Finance Corpora­tion (RFc), the Public Works Administration (PWA), and, for the state, the State Highway and the State Emergency Relief Administrations.

F ur and one-half million dollars' worth of :ark was undertaken during the fiscal year for the RFC and CWA programs alone. The.sework­relief agencies of the Depression Era mcorpo-

ted the New Deal programs of the early years raf h Franklin Roosevelt administration. Under ote rdbthe the RFC program, labor was supp Ie y.

If department while the matenal, county we are . equipment, and supervision were paid :or out of city and county funds. Jobs were proVIded to unemployed men using hand tools on as many projects and for as many months as the money

lasted. men The RFC program gave work to 5,200

for five months, with individual workers get­ting paid for an average of only ten d~ys per

nth. The CWA program started m Los mo b 3 and closed Angeles on Novem er 24, .193 : down on March 29, 1934, haVIng glVen employ­ment to a total of twenty-two tho~sand men. In that time, 7.7 miles of sewer hne and 6.9 miles of storm drain were built, as much of ~he work as possible being done by men usmg hand tools. The Board of Public ,:,",orks ~re­pared and submitted $81,500,000 m apph.c~ tions to the PWA administrators, of whlc approximately $17.5 million was requested as an outright grant. Eight projects were act~ally approved for a total of $400,400 in fundmg. The largest of the projects approv~d was the Union Passenger Tenninal with serVIce streets, sewer lines, and a subway beneath the tracks. Construction was actually begun before the year's funding ran out. .

Meanwhile, drastic cuts in personnel m all the departments administered by the Board of Public Works had been required. In the Bureau of Engineering, the hours of regular employ­ees were reduced, with less than half the staff continuing a forty-hour week.,rhe total num­ber of employees at the nommal forty-~our week fell from 2,271 in the already restncted prior year to 1,787 in the report year. At the

PUBLIC WORKS' 313

t · e there was a substantial increase in same 1m, the workload. The work increased, not because

f h b d's own undertakings but because oteoar . it had been made responsible for comphance with the federal requirement that each lo~al pplication for funding had to be accompamed ~y a detailed proposal des~gned by the local uthorities. Additional deSign work was gen­

:rated by the city's cooper.ation with the Stat~ . .. f H1'ghways to Improve thorough DIVISlOn 0 .

fares within the city that constituted links con-tl'ng main arterial routes. The street

nec . . . . hi th opening and widening dlVIslOn Wlt n e Bureau of Engineering, with a staff reduced to thirty-six persons, was require~ to pr~p~re maps and calculations for use m ~cqUlnng rights-of-way for the new highway lmks. State and federal funds expended during the report year for designing the improvements total~d $ 6 00 with an additional $2,368,519 m 3 ~7 , . 91

preparation for future fundmg. The report for 1933-34 also notes a marked

increase in work for the engineering b~r~au due to a re-awakening of subdivision achVIty. After nine years of decline, forty-five new tract maps were flied, covering 510 acres. The report points out that

The heavy storm of December 31,1933, com­bined with the depleted forces of personnel

d I ck of funds for street maintenance work an a . b ght forcibly to the attention of the city rou . .. the desirability of requiring a certam mlm-mum of street improvement construction at

the time subdivision maps are recorded.

At the end of the report year, tract maps were pending approval that would add another twenty miles of streets p~oposed by develop-ers for dedication to the Clty. "

Plans to take advantage of a slgmficant effort on the part of the United States ~eolog­. 1 Survey (USGs) to extend the geodehc con­Ica .. ted trol network to local authonhes were repor

314· PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

to have been delayed by staff reductions. The Engineering Bureau had completed in previ­ous years about half of the district maps cov­eringthe city; utilizing the USGS survey, but in the report year only about 4 percent of the remaining area could be mapped. The objec­tive of the project was to prepare district maps for the entire city area on a scale of one hun­dred feet to the inch, with coordinated center lines permitting better alignments of tract and jurisdictional boundaries.

Depression constraints were also reflected in the activities of the sewer design division. With a staff reduced to forty-two persons, the division was called upon to compile plans and data for applications to the CWA, PWA, and the State Emergency Relief Administration. Although sanitary sewers were planned and construction actually begun during the year on federal projects valued at $104,222, and another $636,700 in projects were planned but not started, the report year fell substantially below the needs of the city. A chart summariz­ing mileage and value of sewer line improve­ments since 1911-12 shows the total value to have reached the highest level in 1927-28 when $29,651,067 was reported as compared with the level for the 1933-34 report year, including fed­erally funded projects, for a combined total of only $3,157,456.92

Mayor Frank Shaw continued in his post from 1933 to 1938, when he was accused of cor­ruption. He was recalled, despite the backing of the Los Angeles Times. The old Good Govern­ment forces were mobilized again and acted together to elect a reform mayor to finish out Shaw's unexpired term. The Municipal League played a leading part alongside a new nonpar­tisan group, the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee (CIVIC), which had spearheaded the publicity and circulated the recall petition. Their candidate was Fletcher E. Bowron, a conservative Republican, known as

an honest public servant and highly respected as a superior court judge. Taking office in 1938, he immediately asked all sitting commission­ers to resign, as was customary. He proceeded to reconstitute entirely a number of commis­sions. Mayor Shaw's well-known practice of favoring certain contractors for city jobs brought into question the integrity of the Board of Public Works. All five members were replaced. The bureau chiefs, being civil serv­ice appointees, continued at their assigned posts.

The annual report for 1939 presents an organization chart detailing twenty-eight pub­lic works divisions reporting to five bureau chiefs who, in turn, reported to the city engi­neer. There is no indication of the position or the oversight responsibility of the Board of Public Works on this particular chart. In line with Bowron's objective of bringing a more rational structure into the governance of the city, the bureaus under the control of the board were more clearly defined by function. Accounting, formerly performed in the Bureau of Engineering, was established as a separate bureau in the 1941-42 budget, bringing the total number of bureaus to six.93

The 1925 charter specified the responsibility of the Board of Public Works for awarding city contracts in an unbiased, competitive, and open manner. All meetings were to be open to the public for comment and questions. The board convened three times a week, with Wednesday reserved for the opening of bids. A ritual gradually evolved whereby the secretary of the board entered the committee room at 10

AM carrying the box of sealed bids. With appro­priate solemnity; the bids were opened in full public view. A protocol was developed for chal­lenges to bids, counter proposals, and the pres­entation of performance bonds by the bidders. Board members were required to be strictly impartial in examining and comparing the

bids, and to be guided by reports from the bureau chiefs most directly involved in the proj­ect for which the bids were being obtained!' It was an accepted practice, however, that the councilmen whose districts would be affected by the project would have an opportunity to review and comment on plans in advance. The protocol for bidding was generally respected during the Bowron years.

In May 1940 President Roosevelt called for the building of fifty thousand war planes within the coming calendar year. Los Angeles, with its growing airframe-production facili­ties, found itself directly involved in the war effort. Since 1938 Lockheed, Northrop, North American, and Douglas Aircraft had been fill­ing orders for war planes from Britain, France, and the United States military. Now, "the Pres­ident was asking the aircraft industry to turn out in one year as many planes as had been manufactured in the United States since the invention of flight."95

The expanding aircraft plants and the shops of subcontractors supplying component parts looked to the Board of Public Works to provide access roads, sewer lines, and storm drains to serve their needs. New tract deVelopments sprang up to supply housing near the jobs for incoming workers. The tracts, as usual, required automobile access and sanitation services, all funded by the city. As wartime con­struction was getting underway, Los Angeles suffered another major flood. "For bom the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers, the inunda­tionofMarch 1938 was the flood of greatest vol­ume on record."96

This flood marked a change in the role of the Board of Public Works in controlling the Los Angeles River. Beginning with this disastrous event, the board was no longer the agency of first response. The federal government stepped in promptly, first, to protect from devastation its war-industry commitments, and second, to

PUBLIC WORKS' 315

utilize the Army Corps of Engineers' efforts that had been instituted in 1935 as part of the unemployment-relief programs. The corps brought in huge grading and paving machines. Its most noteworthy accomplishment was paving the rivers of the Los Angeles basin. Upon completion, the installations were han­dled by the Los Angeles County Flood Control District.

Mayor Bowron instituted a major emergency council in 1940 and followed wim me appoint­ment of a fifteen-member Defense Council of the City of Los Angeles, later designated as the War Council. In the Department of Public Works, an eighth bureau was added by estab­lishing the post of inspector of public works and bringing together inspection duties formerly assigned among the other bureaus. Publication of the public works annual reports was sus­pended during the years of World War II as part of the national effort to economize on all non­military activities. The workforce was subject to the Selective Service Act of 1940, affecting directly me younger employees and increasing the workload for remaining personnel.

Major local real estate developers were quick to realize that the incoming war workers pre­sented a market for tract houses located near war plants. Fritz B. Burns and Fred Marlow were foremost among the subdividers, prefer­ring now to be known as "community builders." Fred Marlow acknowledged that they had for­merly done nothing more than "file a record of the survey map, crown up the streets with a blade pulled by mules, and sprinkle a little decomposed granite on the roads."9' By the time the war plants had drawn in new cus­tomers for housing, the developers were able to take advantage of federal financing to stabi­lize their operation and had learned how to comply with federal standards for lot design and tract improvements. Although now the tract streets were paved, the tracts provided no

316' PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

police stations, fire stations, or emergency medical facilities, and space for social centers or churches was simply absent. Provision for access roads, drainage, and all other custom­ary services devolved upon the city and the Board of Public Works.

On October 14,1940, Congress approved the Lanham Act, "a measure designed to provide relief to specified industrial areas with an exist­ing or anticipated future shortfall in adequate housing for workers in crucial defense indus­tries."" In March 1945 Mayor Bowron sent a telegram to President Roosevelt: "I appeal to you for help in connection with a critical hous­ing shortage in Los Angeles."" The federal gov­ernment responded by providing 90 percent of the funding to build five permanent and twenty-two temporary housing projects, including installation of the fifteen hundred Quonset units called the Rodger Young Village. The Q!1onset huts went up in the section of Grif­fith Park that now accommodates the zoo and the Autry Museum. All public housing, even the later permanent projects that were more thoughtfully designed and relatively expansive, continued to depend upon local agencies for infrastructure beyond the boundaries of the project.

Wartime population growth brought increased pressure on all resources adminis­tered by the Board of Public Works, especially the sewage treatment and disposal facilities. The intensive development of industry and housing south of town involved not only the city but great tracts of unincorporated land, as well as a number of smaller incorporated cities. The county favored the formation of sanitation districts along topographic and geographical lines, without regard to jurisdictional bound­aries. The first such county venture, the "South Bay Cities District," opted to connect to the city's Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant. According to county supervisor John Anson

Ford, the move was ill-advised. In his opinion, the city had "a very sorry record with its sewage system: huge pipes had collapsed or disinte­grated and a pollution menace at the Hyperion plant had proved costly to correct."'00

The Annual Report of the Department of Public Works for 1956-57 notes that the

continuing crisis in the city's sewerage system and the means to alleviate it again engrossed the attention of the members of the board. Considerable progress was made during the year on a number of elements in the $60 mil­lion program, financed by a public-approved bond issue, to expand, improve and modify the vast system of sewage flow, treatment and disposal facilities. '"

The report details two large projects in the pro­gram that would

1 extend the ocean outfall to seven miles, making it "probably the largest of its kind in the world," and

2 enlarge and modify the Hyperion Treat­mentPlant.

In the closing weeks of the report year, six miles of the outfall conduit were "pulled" out to sea and laid to rest in a canyon some three hundred feet below the surface.

In this report year, the board inaugurated the citywide collection of residential combustible rubbish in a campaign to combat the ever­increasing smog. Up to this time each house­hold had disposedofits own rubbish by burning it in a backyard incinerator. A fleet of trucks fit­ted with special chassis now rolled through the streets to pick up the rubbish and haul it to land­fills and central incinerators. The board had pre­pared carefully for the vast new program, from planning collection routes to testing truck design to recruiting and training drivers and helpers. The annual report stated that "prepa­rations and planning had paid off. The verdict

of the public: 'Well done.' "'02 Backyard inciner­ators were outlawed the following year.

Subdivision activity intensified, with 450 new maps flied over 4,926 undeveloped acres, with 126 miles of new streets required to serve 14,279 new building lots. The postwar subdivi­sions no longer depended on streetcar or interurban rail lines. In fact, the end of the war signaled the beginning of the rapid abandon­ment by transit companies of miles of right-of­way. The rail lines were taken over by the city. The removal of the rails from some of the busiest commercial streets improved automo­bile travel and, on many routes, permitted the creation of landscaped medians and left-turn pockets. The work was handled by the Bureau of Street Maintenance, which had been created as a separate agency in 1947 through the divi­sion of the Bureau of Maintenance and Sanita­tioninto two bureaus. By 1956-57 it had a force of 2,002 full-time and 66 part-time employees responsible for lot cleaning, street tree plant­ing, trimming and maintenance, street use inspection, and, of course, maintaining the thoroughfares.

The city's wartime civil defense and disas­ter board had been abolished in 1951 but cer­tain of the duties and responsibilities of the board were reassigned among the public works, police, fire, communication, and hous­ing departments. The Civil Defense and Disas­ter Corps Public Works Division reported in 1956-57 that it was continuing to conduct a four-day basic training course with graduates of the course now numbering thousands of workers equipped for any type of rescue oper­ation. Training included "damage surveys, maintenance of streets, bridges, sewers, storm drains and other facilities, debris clearance and preparation of plans for the safety of occupants of city buildings."'0'

The total number of bureaus reporting to the public works board in 1956-57 was brought

PUBLIC WORKS' 317

to twelve by the board's administrative action to create a bureau of transportation. This action grew out of efforts to bring into more rational order the various tasks of dealing with downtown parking, beginning with the city's own parking facilities under the City Hall. Meanwhile, however, another city agency, the department of traffic, had been created in 1953 to address the broader problems of traffic man­agement. The city council had been influenced to take action by growing public dissatisfac­tion and by a series of studies initiated by the Automobile Club of Southern California. The studies, begun in 1948 and continued into 1966, were bringing into focus the need for better long-range planning for all aspects of automo­bile travel, as well as planning for the problems that had arisen from the increasing complex­ity of related tasks being handled by various local agencies. 10'

Following a long illness, Lloyd Aldrich retired from the position of city engineer in 1955, whereupon Mayor Bowron appointed a thirty-year civil servant from the engineering department, Lyall Pardee, as his successor. Pardee's early career was devoted to street and freeway design. As city engineer he was instru­mental in procuring more than $200 million in state gas tax funds for the city. He contin­ued to serve until 1972.'05

The overall form of city governance was dra­matically changed during the reforms of the Bowron administration with passage of a char­ter amendment on May 29, 1951, creating the office of city administrative officer to succeed the Bureau of Budget and Efficiency. The new office was given responsibility for bringing the procedures and practices of all city agencies into more rational and consistent order. The Board of Public Works, with its diverse respon­sibilities and revenue sources, was subject to intensive examination. The city administrative officer questioned the efficacy of a commis-

318' PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

sion rather than a single administrator to man­age the city's most diverse agency. The annual report for 1956-57 carried the board's own defense of its efficacy:

The needs of the city are well considered as the five-manfnll-time Board in open public meet­ings discusses the constant flow of important projects, policies and plans, and by this method of open debate arrives at decisions that represent the thinking of five well quali­fied men and their technical aides rather than the summary judgment of one powerful man­ager. I06

Ten years later the board was experiencing more explicit criticism from the cityadminis­trative officer focused now on its bureau of accounting. The chief accountant, J. L. Barclay, had occupied his position since 1954. He announced in the annual report of 1967 that

the old concept and practice in municipal departments throughout the land was tossed onto the heap of discarded traditions by the Bureau of Accounting this year. This practice involves the err.ployment of an outside con­sultant or management firm to investigate some barnacled procedure, a long-established way of doing things wrong, or a means of improving the production, or the service, or the efficiency of the hired help.'07

The chief accountant sought to satisfy the requirement for a full-scale outside audit by contracting for an independent audit director to supervise a five-man team of city employ­ees, three from within the Bureau of Account­ing and two from the new special services division of the Department of Public Works. The team reviewed all cost accounting systems, with emphasis on the Bureau of Engineering and Bureau of Street Maintenance reporting, and recommended changes designed to pro­vide more timely and reliable job-cost infor-

mation, billing procedures, and collections from the public, other agencies, and the vari­ous tax and bond funds. Attention was focused on the new special services division as well, which had been assigned the task of devising a system for analyzing payroll and other costs and assuring full reimbursement. Originally this division had been assigned the task of fact­finding after heavy rains in June 1965 triggered disastrous landslides that closed roads and destroyed hillside properties. The division had also worked on the Planning Department's Model Cities Program and the mayor's propos­als for a new equestrian center in Griffith Park. It had been created, however, with no formal set of procedures for paying its own way.

The Board of Public Works also announced in its annual report for 1966-67 that the first steps had been taken toward the redevelop­ment of the Venice canal system and the con­struction of a major public equestrian center. Construction of a convention hall and exhibi­tion center was in the design phase, with the preliminary plans for streets, storm drains, sewers, a lighting system, and utility services for the thirty-five-acre development site on Figueroa Street at Pico Boulevard well under­way. The Bureau of Right of Way and Land acquired through purchase and condemnation some seventy-seven parcels for the project.

City engineer Lyall Pardee, calling his bureau the "heartbeat unit of public works construc­tion in Los Angeles," described remarkable strides toward demonstrating that "effluent (waste water resulting from sewage treatment processes) can economically be reclaimed for use in such diverse fields as irrigation and industry." 108 In line with a directive the board had received from Mayor Sam Yorty, the city engineer ordered the suspension of work on an additional San Fernando Valley relief sewer that included a twelve-mile large-bore tunnel through the Santa Monica Mountains in favor

of the new wastewater reclamation plants that were expected to render a tunnel unnecessary.

The Bureau of Sanitation announced that its operations had been facilitated by the acquisi­tion of data-processing programs to utilize the city's IBM 360 EDP system. Daily operating data could now be key-punched by remote control from each of the six refuse collection stations. The bureau had begun to search for new land­fill sites and to experiment with techniques for surcharging the partially completed fill with borrowed material for better control of settle­ment and easier transition to a new land use. Experiments were also underway to evaluate the kinds of vegetation that might facilitate the re-use oflandfill areas, the appropriate irriga­tion rates, and the possibility of obtaining compost from the sites.

The Bureau of Contract Administration pre­sented statistics on high-rise construction projects in the city during the decade since the removal of the height-limit restrictions in 1957. Based on the number and value of permits issued for excavations in the public right-of­way, the high point had been reached in the current report year, with eighty-two permits issued and the value of foundation work inspected totaling $1,640,830.109 The annual report failed to provide information regarding provisions, if any, for the subsurface utility and sewer lines that would be needed by future population densities for which the high-rise structures were designed.

In this report year, the Bureau of Assess­ments appended to the customary report on the value of its proceedings a justification­in fact an appreciation-of its role in building the city. Assessment proceedings, the report stated,

are about the best way that can be conceived by which a group of neighboring property owners may jointly start an action which will result in the construction of some form of

PUBLIC WORKS' 319

public works needed or wanted by the com­munityin the interests of public health, safety, convenience, enhancement. or other objec­tive; and with its cost spread equitably and with justice; and with sufficient time allowed so that payments can be made without hard­ship to the property owner. And by the appli­cation of the various Assessment Acts (most often used is the Improvement Act of 1911) the City of Los Angeles has been improved with­out cost to the general taxpayer. l1O

On February 5,1975, the city council passed a motion requesting that the city attorney pre­pare the necessary documents to place a char­ter amendment on the ballot for the May 1975 election that would replace the Board of Pub­lic Works with a general manager or director. The matter was referred to the charter and administrative code committee that, in tum, referred it to the city administrative officer. The city administrative officer (CAO) studied the ramifications of such a change for more than a year, reporting back to the charter and administrative code committee onJuly 16,1976. He noted that, "Past studies have cited the great increase in complexity of the Department of Public Works, problems in expediting proj­ects, and advantages of centralized planning, direction, and control as reasons for supplant­ing the Board with a single executive as depart­ment head."'ll He recommended a study of several alternative structural changes and fur­ther recommended that the change be made by ordinance rather than charter amendment. He pointed out that the council had passed an ordinance in 1949 establishing a public works-administrator position but the position had never been filled. He noted that the Little Hoover Commission in 1952 had recommended a general manager's position for public works but that a conforming charter amendment pre­pared by the CAO had been rejected by the vot­ers in the May 1953 election. Again in 1960 the

320· PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

CAD had recommended that the old ordinance providing for an administrator be fully acti­vated. This recommendation had been dis­cussed by the council, but on November 22,

1961, the council had voted to "receive and frle" the proposal. 112

The Board of Public Works turned to its own special services division for an analysis and rebuttal of the CAD'S report. This report, adopted by the board on August 6, 1976, con­cluded that

It does not appear that the proposal to replace the Board of Public Works with a general man­ager or director is cost effective, organization­ally sound [or 1 practical. The proposal does nothing to change the level or quality of department services. However, it does increase departmental operating costs without atten­dant benefits. Furthermore, change for the sake of change is counterproductive and can deteriorate efficiency and morale of a depart­ment.113

At this point, the council's charter and administrative code committee noted that a full management audit of the Board and Department of Public Works had never been performed and asked the CAD to estimate the time required and the cost of such a study. The CAD estimated that the audit would require 120

days and cost $40,000. The audit was author­ized by the council committee.

The CAD completed the first version of the audit in July 1977. The report not only amplified the original criticism that "The Board of Pub­lic Works, as a plural executive comprised of political appointees, cannot effectively manage the magnitude and diversity of programs for which the Department of Public Works is now responsible," but went on to find that several other city departments should also be "restruc­tured on the basis of common objectives to focus on functional responsibility for major

programs, facilitate better management coor­dination and reduce administrative costS."'14

The report analyzed four organizational alternatives for the Board of Public Works. The least disruptive added an administrator and transferred the board's construction and industrial coordinating and expediting officer (primarily serving the motion-picture indus­try) to the mayor's office. The second alterna­tive reduced the board to a part-time advisory status, installed a full-time professional gen­eral manager to head the department, but oth­erwise retained most of the existing bureaus. The third alternative went further, to combine functions and reduce the number of bureaus from twelve to five. The fourth alternative elim­inated the board and the department of public works altogether and re-shuffled the bureaus into five new entities reporting directly to the mayor and city council. All four alternatives recommended the elimination of the special services division, the new Latin-American affairs section, and all of the alternatives dropped references to equal-opportunitypro­grams, opportunities for women and other outreach measures despite the fact that these were mandated by projects involving federal funding.

The Bureau and Department ofTransporta­tion under the jurisdiction of the Board of Pub­lic Works came in for extensive criticism. The report found that

responsibility for the planning, operation, and maintenance of a transportation system in Los Angeles is now divided among a nUm­ber of city departments and outside agencies such as SCAG, SCRTD, CALTRANS, and the recently established Los Angeles County Transportation Commission. Federal agen­cies, too, are involved insofar as they set requirements and priorities for grant funded improvement projects.

The CAD recommended that all or portions of eight city departments and bureaus be com­bined into a single organization to present a solid position on transportation needs in rela­tion to the planning activities of other govern­ment agencies.

The Board of Public Works submitted its response to the CAD's audit on December 21,

1977, in the form of a comprehensive, two-vol­ume report. Included were detailed explana­tions from each of the bureau chiefs describing the current nature and scope of their work and the disruption envisioned if drastic reorgani­zation were to be mandated. The consensus of the bureau chiefs was that the audit proposals addressed neither the details for implementa­tion nor the impact on operations. The propos­als had been presented as a concept without evidence that benefits would be derived, with­out attention to financing the changes, and without "awareness or concern for the seven thousand employees of the department, all of whom may lose seniority rights and some of whom may lose their jobs."'lS As volume two of the response, unsolicited letters from the public were presented. Over a hundred let­ters from individuals, church groups, schools, businessmen, and other public agencies expressed appreciation of services expedited by members of the Board of Public Works. Illustrations of the board's liaison service to the community included providing delivery of palm fronds from street maintenance yards in time for Easter and Succoth celebrations, scheduling ramps to be installed at neighbor­hood crosswalks, arranging tours for schools, accommodating visiting dignitaries wanting to visit the water-treatment centers, and help­ing with a university survey of public policies regarding natural disasters.

One element of the proposed reorganiza­tion, the creation of a new department of trans­portation, gradually worked its way to the

PUBLIC WORKS· 321

forefront of the discussion. The Department of City Planning prepared a report alerting the mayor and city council to the problems of cre­ating a specialized agency in a very complex field. The report noted that

Simply by merging all activities that happen to bear somewhere in their title the word "transportation" does not make a logical case for insuring that the best types of actions will emerge to meet citizen needs or that the city will be able to "speakwitlr one voice" on trans­portation matters.116

The city planner also pointed out that state law and the city charter required that trans­portation planning be part of comprehensive planning, along with land use and environ­mental planning. The Planning Department offered its own organizational chart for the proposed transportation department, de­emphasizing the planning aspects while advo­cating the creation of a transportation advisory board.

The Police Department was drawn into the discussion because the CAD'S audit had recom­mended that traffic functions might rationally be brought into the new transportation depart­ment. The chief of police cautioned against the proposal, citing, "the close relationship traffic and parking control have to crowd and crime control during special events," and noting that "the people of the city have learned over a long period of time to call the Police Department when troubled over a parking or traffic control problem. To educate them to call the Depart­ment of Transportation may be an impossible task."117

The council approved the proposal, as amended to reflect concerns of the police and planning departments, to create a Department of Transportation. The council voted to delay for six months the consideration of the overall reorganization of the Bureau and Department

322' PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

of Public Works. The matter was placed on the calendar for October 17, 1978. The council's chieflegislative analyst took the occasion to warn that the passage of proposition 13 (a homeowners tax-relief measure to prevent rate increases unless properties changed hands) in the coming election "may bring about signifi­cant organizational changes on a citywide basis."'18 In anticipation of diminished taxrev­enue, he went on to advance two alternatives of his own to the CAO'S management audit report on the reorganization of the Bureau/ Department of Public Works. He proposed that the existing bureaus be combined into two operating divisions, but that the five-man full­time board be retained as administrator with the power to award contracts.

The matter of reorganizing the Department of Public Works remained on the council cal­endar for ten years, being taken up, delayed, returned to committee for updates, again delayed, but always being re-activated when procedural questions regarding any aspect of public works arose. The board continued its operations, making occasional changes in the organization, usually in response to budget cuts, but maintaining the old ritual of bid­opening and the open-meeting policy. The board guarded its power to award contracts, buttressing its position by a firm policy of awards going to the lowest bidder except where that bidder failed to demonstrate the capacity to perform.

The annual report for the year ending June 30, 1981, the bicentennial year of the city, cov­ered the activities of seven bureaus: accounting, engineering, sanitation, street maintenance, street lighting, inspector of public works, and management-employee services. The report states:

This Board of Public Works is committed to serving the public and forming a partnership with the private sector. Where earlier boards

saw to the deVelopment of services using city

forces, the modern board administers the programs and has other people building its projects,119

The board had cut the number of bureaus by merging the duties of the Contract Compliance Bureau with those of the Contract Administra­tion Bureau. The responsibility for monitoring and enforcing equal opportunity, affirmative action, and other federal labor regulations on city-awarded contracts was assumed by the expanded Bureau of Contract Administration. Among the major projects in the 1980-8rreport year was the construction of the large Sepul­veda Water Reclamation plant, begun in 1981. It was financed through75 percent federal grants and 12.5 percent state grants, with the balance being drawn from city bond funds. The work was performed by private contractors. Also under construction were the C. Erwin Piper Technical Center, an administration building at the Hyperion Treatment plant, the Terminal Island Sewage Treatment Plant, and the East Valley Relief Sewer System. In preparation for the Olympic Games to be held in 1984, the Board of Public Works did the design work, awarded contracts, and monitored construction of a new terminal and extensive improvements in run­ways and passenger facilities at LAX. The board also participated in a citywide beautification program by planting new street trees, particu­larly jacarandas that were expected to display a crown of blue flowers during the Games.

The computers in use throughout the Department of Public Works were being up­graded to provide for direct entry of data. The Bureau of Accounting realized immediate sav­ings as the need for key-punch operators diminished. At the end of the report year, the greatest need was for specialized software to handle the cost accounting involved in recov­ering the city's expenditures under the state and federal programs. Throughout the 1980s,

the Board of Public Works contracted with out­side consultants for technical computer serv­ices as capital improvement funds became available from a wide range of sources, each with its own accountability standards that required special adaptations to the software programs. The city received $44 million in clean water grants and over $8 million from the federal Urban Program (later administered through the Housing and Urban Develop­ment's Block Grant Program). The revenue received through the various county alloca­tions totaled almost $6 million, while the State Gas Tax Allocation exceeded $33 million.

Working with grant funds required a higher level of cash management in order to assure that money would be available to make progress payments to contractors. CALTRANS,

as administrator of the state gas-tax funds, and the city administrative officer of Los Angeles, as recipient, agreed upon a program to be administered by the Board of Public Works whereby grant anticipation notes were sold on the bond market to generate "up front" money for eligible street improvement projects. '20

The administration of Tom Bradley (1973-93) placed an emphasis on service to the public that encouraged the Board of Public Works to emphasize its long-standing policy of open meetings where a broad spectrum of citizen concerns could be heard and acted upon. Ever since the first board, appointed in 1906, had been inundated by complaints from house­wives about the late pick-up of garbage, the bureaus and departments handling public works had taken pride in being able to respond to the needs of individual citizens. Major improvements in the city hall telephone serv­ice included "hotlines" in each department for the use of citizens in directly reporting pot­holes, sidewalk breaks, street-tree problems, trash accumulations, sewer odors, and street­light failures. Complaints received by the

PUBLIC WORKS' 323

mayor's office or through the offices of the fif­teen council members were also referred or scheduled for a public hearing through the hotlines. In addition, the Board of Public Works cooperated with other city agencies to create a "one-stop" permit-processing center to help the building industry and property owners obtain at a single public counter all the permits and approvals needed for construction. '2'

Donald C. Tillman was appointed city engi­neer in 1972, having served as a member of the Board of Public Works and as board president, the only civil servant ever to do so. He had received B.S. and M.S. degrees in civil engineer­ing from the California Institute of Technology, served in the U.S. Navy Engineer Corps during World War II, spent twelve years as an engineer­ing assistant with the city, and was eminently well qualified to guide the work force of twelve hundred men and women comprising the pub­lic works department in the postwar years. He took the lead in focusing public attention on the aesthetic aspects of city projects, issuing a manual of design for agency use. He also emphasized emergency preparedness, prepar­ing a training manual to cover procedures for responding in the aftermath of fires, floods, or earthquakes. Tillman was responsible for the engineering and development of modern water­reclamation plants, such as that at Terminal Island with its egg-shaped sludge digesters. He improved effluent treatment levels at the Hype­rion Sewage Treatment Plant, installing an energy-recovery system. Tillman also began construction on the Sepulveda Water Reclama­tion plant designed to process wastewater upstream for reuse in park areas. l22

By the time of the board's annual report for 1986-87 the computer program for tracking disbursements from the clean water grant pro­gram had been expanded to include a financial management information system. Full-scale trials were performed, and on December 11,

324· PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

1986, the system was adopted as the standard for cost accounting citywide.

Efforts to separate and recycle household rubbish, begun twenty years earlier, when Sam Yortywas the mayor, were reactivated through a public relations campaign and the introduc­tion of dual-purpose refuse collection trucks designed to separate recyclables and refuse at the time of pick up. A limited number of the trucks were assigned on a test basis. A prelim­inary cost analysis showed a net cost to the city of $1.24 per unit per month or $88.09 per ton of recyclable material, projected citywide. Sav­ings in landfill space were not significant. San­itation problems on a much larger scale involved the upgrading of the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant spurred by public demands that ocean discharge be discontin­ued. The plant was now more efficiently removing solids from the wastewater, deliver­ing reclaimed waterto irrigation systems, gen­erating electric power by burning gases generated by the process, and reducing odor emissions. The East Valley interceptor sewer was nearing completion, allowing the Bureau of Sanitation to meet a court deadline for shift­ing the processing of effluent to the new Don­ald C. Tillman Water Reclamation plant.

The Los Angeles Public Library was virtu­ally destroyed by a fire in 1986, requiring the Board of Public Works to assign staff from the Engineering Department to participate in the relocation of services and the planning of reconstruction and expansion of a new library structure. Other major projects reported in tIre 1986-87 annual report included improvements at LAX and Ontario Airport. Air-cargo facili­ties, new runways, and a new passenger termi­nal were in the initial construction phase at Ontario. Work on the Metro Rail line between Los Angeles and Long Beach was begun, requiring the relocation of utilities, sanitation and street facilities. The Board of Public Works

also had the responsibility for inspections on all excavation permit jobs along the route. '23

The annual report of the board for the years 1990-91 reflected increasing emphasis on envi­ronmentally beneficial handling of all aspects of public works. Each of the seven bureaus emphasized contributions to recycling pro­grams, preventing pollution, improving sys­tems-management, and promoting innovative community outreach while performing an increased range of work.l24

The voters indicated their approval of preservation and emergency preparedness by voting in 1990 for Proposition G, a $376 million bond issue to upgrade city-owned buildings and bridges to current seismic-design stan­dards. The Bureau of Engineering developed a proposal for the seismic upgrade of City Hall, focusing not only on withstanding earthquake forces without collapse but also on preserving the existing masonry, providing for maximum energy efficiency and preserving historic aspects of the architecture. Together with an engineering consultant, A. C. Martin and Asso­ciates-successor to Albert C. Martin, one of the original architects for city hall-the city engineer adopted as a goal the reinforcement of tIre building to survive a quake of magnitude 8.1 on the San Andreas earthquake fault and 6.1 on the Elysian Park fault. The city subsequently adopted a plan for "base isolation" whereby City Hall foundations were to be cushioned from earth movement and retrofitted with reinforced concrete shear walls.l25

In 1992 a disastrous civil disturbance aris­ing from a police incident marred the close of the twenty-year mayoralty of Tom Bradley. Burning and looting sweptthe city for six days, leaving fifty-five people dead and the city in shock. Bradley rallied the public agencies and took the lead in forming a citizens group to raise funds forrebuilding. Damage to the city's infrastructure proved to be extensive.

The emergency efforts required from every level of the Department of Public Works had not been completed when, in 1994, a severe earthquake with the epicenter in Northridge caused new destruction. City Hall sustained major structural damage. The engineering department immediately joined with A. C. Martin and Associates to assess the nature and extent of the new problems. The building was inspected in minute detail by the seismic-engi­neering team already at work, augmented by newly hired specialists. The cost estimates were expanded by an estimated $153 million. The entire project was approved by the coun­cil on July 29, 1994, a little more than six months after the quake. The council voted in fact for a very thoroughgoing and innovative retrofitting of City Hall from the subbasement to the tower.

The census of 1990 enumerated 3,485,390 people in the City of Los Angeles. By the year 2000 there were 3,694,823 people in the city. The total regional population thatlooked to the city for support in some aspect of daily life was even greater because of shared transportation ties, interconnections of the infrastructure, and the interlacing of jurisdictions. Keeping the city running continued to grow ever more complex, just as it had since the founding of the pueblo. Public works continued to rely on the probity and energy of a few individuals to carry out wave after wave of improvements while the details of upkeep and maintenance of every aspect of the infrastructure, from computer programs to earthmoving equipment, contin­ued to require unflagging attention. The city's multinrillion dollar improvement projects were carried forward at the same time and by the same agency that responded to citizens demanding the repair of potholes after the rains while a prompt response to the needs of the public remained as important as in the days of weed-choked zanjas.

PUBLIC WORKS' 325

NOTES

Juan Crespi, A Description of Distant Roads: Originaljoumals of the First Expedition into California, 1769-1770, ed. and trans.

AlanK. Brown (San Diego: San Diego State University Press,

2001),337-38. 2 J. M. Guinn, A History of California and an Extended History of

Los Angeles and Its Environs, 3 vals. (Los Angeles: Historic

Record Company, 1915), 1: n 3 Harry Kelsey, ''A New Look at the Founding of Old Los

Angeles," in The Founding Documents of Los Angeles: A Bilin­gual Edition, ed. Doyce B. Nunis Jr. (Los Angeles: Zamorano Club and Historical Society of Southern California, 2004),

3-15. 4 Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, Los Angeles A to Z: AnEncyc1ope~

dia of the City and County (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer~

sity of California Press, 1997), 327. 5 Neal Harlow, California Conquered: War and Peace on the

Pacific, 1846-1850 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 1982), 337· 6 Ibid., 324. 7 Maurice H. Newmark and Marco R. Newmark, Census of the

City and County of Los Angeles, California,for the Year 1850: Together with an Analysis and an Appendix (Los Angeles: Times~Mirror Press, 1929), n8.

8 Burton L. Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal Organization and Administrative Practice in the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Parker, Stone & Baird Co., 1933), IS.

9 Municipal Reference Department of the Los Angeles Public Library, comp., "Chronological Record of Los Angeles City Officials, 1850-1985," typescript, 3 vols. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Public Library, 1938; reprinted 1966: Project SA3123~ 5703~6077-8121~9900, Works ProgressAdministration), 1: 3-7.

10 Blake Gumbrecht, TheLosAn9eles River:ltsLife,Death, andPos~ sible Return (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), 131-

11 Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California: 1853-1913, Maurice H. and Marco R. Newmark, eds. (Los Angeles: Daw~

son's Book Shop, 1984), 211.

12 "Chronological Record," 1 (1857-1858): 7· 13 Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal Or9anizatton, 23· 14 W. W. Robinson, Maps of Los An9eles from Ord's Survey of 1849

to the End of the Boom of the Ei9hties (Los Angeles: Dawson's

Book Shop, 1966), 16. 15 Newmark, Sixty Years, 33· 16 Francois D. Uzes, Chainin9 the Land: A History ofSurveyin9 in

California (Sacramento: Francois D. Uzes, 1977), 44-45· 17 Frank Lecouvrem, FromPrnssia to the Golden Gate: Letters and

Diary of the California Pioneer, Edited in Memory of Her Noble Husband by Mrs.Josephine Rosanna Lecouvreur (New York: Angelina Book Concern, 1906), 207, 308.

18 Frank Lecouvreur, letter, "To the Honorable the Mayor and Cornmon Council of Los Angeles City, April 20, 1870," box 15, Solano~Reeves Collection, Huntington Library, San

Marino, California. 19 Robinson, Maps oiLos An9eles, 48. 20 Lecouvreur's field notebooks for the survey made in 1869,

in preparation for his map and report, are in the Hunting~

ton Library.

326· PATRICIA ADLER-INGRAM

21 Lecouvreur, "To the Honorable the Mayor," 5. 22 Newmark, Si~ty Years, 472. 23 Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal Or9anization, 23. 24 Ibid., 45. 25 "Chronological Record," 1 (1875-1876): 8. 26 M. C. Desnoyers, The Ordinances andResolutions of the City of

Los Angeles, AU9ust 19, 1872-ApriI8, 1875 (Los Angeles: Her~ aId Publishing Co., 1875), 20.

27 W. W. Robinson, Los Angeles from the Days of the Pueblo: T0gether with a Guide to the Historic Old Plaza Area Includin9 the Pueblo deLosAngeles State Historical Monument (San Fran­cisco: California Historical Society, 1959), 78.

28 John W. Robinson, Southern California's FirstRailroad:The Los Angeles and San Pedro Railroad, 1869-1873 (Los Angeles: Daw­son's Book Shop, 1972), 80-89.

29 "Chronological Record," 1 (1870-1871): 10. 30 Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal Or9anization, 57-59. 31 Ibid., 59.

32 John P. Hunt and Bernice Kimball, City of Los Angeles City En9ineers 1855-1981, Prepared in conjunction with the City of Los An9eles bicentennial observance by direction of City En9i~ neer Donald C. Tillman (Los Angeles: n.p., mimeographed, [1981]) n.p.

33 Ibid., n.p.

34 Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal Or9anization (chart show­ing Charter Organization of City of Los Angeles year 1889),

73-35 Los Angeles Times, "Los Angeles Rainfall" (June 30, 2004).

Published at the close of each recording year, the graph includes rainfall amounts beginning in 1894.

36 Los Angeles Board of Water Commissioners, ''Annual Report for the fiscal year ending November 30,1902," 3, box 1055, Los Angeles City Archives, C. Erwin Piper Technical Cen­ter (cited hereafter as LACA).

37 Willard, The Herald'sHistory of Los Angeles City, 345. 38 Tom Sitton, The Haynes Foundation and UrbanRiformPhilan~

thropy in Los An9eles: A History of thejohn Randolph Haynes andDoraHaynes Foundation (Los Angeles: Historical Society of Southern California, 1999), 23.

39 Ibid., 25.

40 Dana W. Bartlett, TheBetterCity:ASociologicalStudy ofaMod­ern City (Los Angeles: Neuner Company Press, 1907), 27-50.

41 E. R. Werdin, Street Superintendent, ''Annual Report of year ending December 1, 1903," box C-2294, LACA.

42 L. H. Schwaebe, camp., ''Annual Report ofL. H. Schwaebe, Auditor of the City of Los Angeles, For the Year Ending November 30,1904" (Los Angeles: n.p., 1904), 98, 118-28, 167-80.

43 Pacific Outlook 7 (July 10,1907): 7. The Pacific Outlook had a long-running arrangement with the Municipal League to mail a weekly copy to each member. It also reported activ­ities of the City Club.

44 "Statutes of California, Twenty-sixth Session," 147-65. Office of the City Attorney, Los Angeles Law Library.

45 Street Superintendent, ''AnnualReportforyear1902-1903,'' box C-2294, LACA.

46 ''Annual Report of the City Engineer, Los Angeles, California for the Year Ending November 30, 1904," box C-2294, LACA.

47

48

49

50

51 52

53

54

55 56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65 66

67 68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

Ibid., transmittal letter. Pitt, LosAngeIes A to Z, 178.

Office of the Board of Public Works, "Annual Report, December 15, 1906" (Typescript, n.p.) box C-I054, LACA. This is the fIrst annual report issued by the Board of Public

76

Works.

Department of Public Works, ''Annual Report, 1981, Pref- 77 ace," box C-2011, LACA. This report includes numerous ret- 78 rospective quotations to memorialize the department's seventy-five years of service. Pitt, Los An9eles A to Z, 191.

Street Superintendent, ''Annual Report for Year 1902-1903," 5, boxC-2294, LACA. 79 Gumbrecht, The Los An9elesRiver, 115. 80 Mark H. Stevens, "The Road to Refonn: Los Angeles Muruc- 81 ipal Elections of 1909," Southern California Quarterly 86 (Fall 2004):208.

Pacific Outlook 7 (December 11, 1909): 3. 82 Pacific Outlook 7 (December 18, 1909): 3. MartinJ. Schiesl, "Progressive Refonn in Los Angeles Under Mayor Alexander, 1909-1914," CaliforniaHistorical QJLarterly 55 (Sprinp975)' 4', 43.

Charter, 1889, amended to 1909, Sec. 146 1/4 as quoted by 83 Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal Organization, 113. Department of Public Works, ''Annual Report, December 15,1906," n.p., box C-1054, LACA. 84 RemiA. Nadeau, The Water Seekers (Santa Barbara: Peregrine Smith, 1974), 15. Ibid., 33- 85 Housing Commission, "Report of the Housing Commission 86 of the City of Los Angeles, February 20, 1906 to June 13, 87 1908," 3, collection of the author. 88 Ibid., 16.

Housing Commission, "Report of the Housing Commission of the City of Los Angeles, June 30, 1909 to June 30,1910,"

89

8,10, box B-1060, LACA.

Willard, History of Los An9eles, 354. 90 Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Los Angeles Today (Octo-ber 1, 1910), n.p., Huntington Library. 91 Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal Organization, 132. W. W. Robinson, Bombs and Bribery: The Story of the McNa- 92 mara and Darrow Trials Following theDynamitin9 in 1910 of the 93 LosAn9eles TimesBuildin9 {Los Angeles: Dawson's Book Shop, 1969),21. 94 Schiesl, "Progressive Reform inLos Angeles," 43. Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal Or9anization, 145. Hunt and Kimball, City of Los Angeles City En9ineers 1855-1981, n.p.

John Randolph Haynes, quoted in Schiesl, "Progressive 95 Refonn in Los Angeles," 49. Haynes was a member of the charter-revision committee as well as a member of the free- 96 holders committee that created the charter of 1925. Ordinances, New Series, 47,833, 49,330, 49,683, 50,401, 53,446, box B-1465, LACA. 97 Scott Bottles, Los An9eles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City {Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cal-ifornia Press, 1987), 114.

Matthew W. Roth, "Mulholland Highway and the Engineer- 98

PUBLIC WORKS . 327

ing Culture afLas Angeles in the 19205," in Technology and 99 Don Parson, "The Burke Incident: Political Belief in Los

Culture, The International Qy.arterly of the Society for the His~ Angeles' Public Housing During the Domestic Cold War,"

tory of Technology 40 (July 1999)' 557· Southern California oyarterly 84 (Spring 2002): 53·

Margaret Leslie Davis, Rivers in the Desert: WiIliamMulhol- 100 John Anson Ford, Thirty Explosive Years in Los Angeles County

land and the Inventing oiLos Angeles (New York: Harper Collins (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1961), 104.

Publisher, 1993), 156. 101 Department of Public Works, "Annual Report, 1956-1957,"

Charter, 1925, Art. XXIII, Sec. 78 and Sec. 230-36. 4, box C-547, LACA.

Fred G. Crawford, Or9anizational and Administrative DeveI- 102 Ibid., 5.

opment of the Government of the City of Los An9eIes During the 103 Ibid., 13.

Thirty-Year Period july 1, 1925 to September 30,1955 (Los 104 Carlton C. Robinson and Peter G. Koltnow, Progress in TraF

Angeles: School of Public Administration, University of fie Management in Los Angeles, 1966 (Los Angeles: Automo-

Southern California, 1955), 141. bile Club of Southern California, 1966), 4·

Hunter, The Evolution of Municipal Or9anization, 223· 105 John P. Hunt and Bernice Kimball, City of Los An9eles City

Ordinance 55567, box B-1465, LACA. Engineers 1855-1981, n.p.

Abraham Hoffman, Vision or Villainy: Ori9ins of the Owens 106 Department of Public Works, "Annual Report, 1956-1957,"

VaHey-LOS An9eles Water Controversy (College Station: Texas 5, box C-547, LACA.

A&M University, 1981), 203-4. 107 Department of Public Works, ''Annual Report for Year Ended

Charles F. Outland, Man-Made Disaster: The Story of St. Fran- June 30, 1967," 207, box C-548, LACA.

cis Dam, Its Place in Southern California's Water System, Its Fail~ 108 Ibid., 21.

ure and the Tragedy in the Santa Clara River VaHey, March 12 109 Ibid., 101.

and 13, 1928 (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 110 Ibid., 219-20.

1977).37. 111 City Administrative Officer, "To Charter and Administra~

"Transcript of Testimony and Verdict in the Coroner's Jury tive Code Committee, 7-16-76," Council File 75~589 (here-

in the Inquest Over Victims of St. Francis Dam Disaster," after cited as CF) and Supplement, 1, boxB-574, LACA.

quoted in ibid., 46. 112 CF 93,339, boxA-1549, LACA.

Department of Public Works, ''Annual Report of the Board 113 Special Services Division, "Report NO.3," adopted by the

of Public Works of the City of Los Angeles, July 1,1927 to Board of Public works August 6, 1976, box B~2203, LACA.

June 30,1928," 34, box C~2011, LACA. "4 C. Erwin Piper, City Administrative Officer, "Management

Ibid . .34· Audit Report of the Department of Public Works ,july, 1977," n.p.,

Ibid., 59. File 75~589, boxes B-573 and B-574, LACA.

Ibid., 69· 115 Governmental Efficiency Committee, "Report to the Council

Ordinance 64,876, New Series, September 17, 1929, box B- of the City ofLosAngeles,"n.p., File75-589, boxB~573, LACA.

1498, LACA. 116 Calvin S. Hamilton, Director of Planning, "Reorganization

Department of Public Works, ''Annual Report of the Board of the Department of Public Works, December 22, 1977," CF

of Public Works of the City of Los Angeles, July 1, 1933 to 77-589,5, box C~659, LACA.

June 30, 1934," box C-2911, lacA. 117 Daryl F. Gates, Chief of Police, letter, "To Honorable Tom

Hunt and Kimball, "City of Los Angeles City Engineers Bradley, Mayor, June 21, 1978," CF 78-105, n.p., box C-2004,

1855-1981," n.p. LACA.

Department of Public Works. "Annual Report, July 1, 1933," 118 KenSpiker, ChiefLegislativeAnalyst, "To Honorable Mem-

50, box C-2911, LACA. bers of the City Council, March 14, 1978," box C-2037, LACA.

Ibid.,55-57· 119 Department of Public Works, ''Annual Report for Year Ended

"Chronological Record of Los Angeles City Officials," Sup- June 30, 1981," vi, box C-2011, LACA.

plement (1941-1943), n.p. 120 Department of Public Works, ''Annual Report for 1983-1984,

Department of Public Works, ''Annual Report, 1981," iii-iv, Bureau of Engineering Report," box C-2011, LACA.

box C-2011, LACA. In honor of the city's bicentennial cele~ 121 Ibid., "Letter of the President of the Board of Public Works

bration, this annual report features a number of retrospec- transmitting the report to the mayor and council," box C-

tive passages describing projects and procedures of earlier 2011, LACA.

years. 122 Hunt and Kimball, City of Los Angeles City Engineers 1855-1981,

Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, n.p.

1940-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 134· 123 Department of Public Works, ''Annual Report for 1986-

Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Floodin9 and Urban Ecol09Y 1987," 16, 31, 32, 36, box C-2011, LACA.

in Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cal- 124 Department of Public Works, ''Annual Report 1990-1991,

ifornia Press, 2004), 110. preface,"boxC~201l, LACA.

James Thomas Keane, Fritz B. Burns and the Development of 125 Department of Public Works, Bureau of Engineering,

Los Angeles: The Bi09raphy of a Community Developer and Phil- "Report NO.3, November 14, 1994, Additional Personnel for

anthropist (Los Angeles: Loyola Marymount University and the Seismic Strengthening of City Hall," box D-424, Office

the Historical Society of Southern California, 2001), 40. of the City Clerk, LACA.

Ibid.,79·