The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Dolores Hayden
hard that it had to be evacuated. Another site for a permanent commemoration
is preferable.
Today many of us who worked together in L.A. continue activities
in other cities, but some subsequent projects in Los Angeles go on too. In
Little Tokyo, a UCLA student working with me and The Power of Place, Susan
Sztaray, helped plan a project for a public art sidewalk wrapping the
First Street National Register Historic District. Sztaray wanted to recall the
scale of small, traditional Japanese American businesses that had flourished
there before the internment of the 1940s. The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment
Agency took up this plan, and ran a public art competition.
Working as an independent artist, Sheila de Bretteville, who designed the
Biddy Mason wall, won the CRA public art commission along with artists
Sonya Ishii and Nobuho Nagasawa. Construction has recently concluded.
Los Angeles will then have three cultural heritage projects—one African
American, one Latina, one Japanese American—in three very different
kinds of settings, ranging from a lost homestead to a reinterpreted theater
building to a National Register Historic district, that demonstrate some of
the new ways artists can work with preservationists and historians on parts
of the public landscape.
The projects I’ve discussed here are all located in the area of our
1984 walking tour, close to the center of downtown Los Angeles, set near
the high-rise buildings of the Bunker Hill redevelopment area. They have
challenged the idea that only massive commercial development can provide
a downtown with an identity: The Power of Place presented an alternative
account of the process of building a city, emphasizing the importance of
people of diverse backgrounds and work—both paid work and work in family
life—to urban survival. In a city where half the residents are women and
more than 60 percent are people of color, these small projects struck a responsive
chord.
The projects straddled several worlds: academic urban history and
public history, urban planning, public art, preservation, and urban design.
Every project had a multiethnic, multidisciplinary team. Teamwork is difficult,
especially across disciplines. But there are rewards. First, public space
has a resonance for local history no other medium can match. Second, locking
women’s history into the design of the city exploits a relatively inexpensive
medium. Over time the exposure can be as great as a film or an
exhibit can offer. Third, as projects like Biddy Mason and the Embassy
show, when you have one significant public place, there is less pressure to divide
history into academic categories (such as women, ethnic, or labor) that
often trivialize and marginalize urban stories. The university benefits as
well. A fieldwork program like The Power of Place connected students to