A Justice Site
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP - Archives
California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: April 13, 2003
Latest Update: April 13, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Backup of East Coast, West Coast, and Where the Twain Meethttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/nyregion/13ANGE.htmlApril 13, 2003
East Coast, West Coast, and Where the Twain Meet
By JANNY SCOTT[N] ew Yorkers in certain circles wear their disdain for Los Angeles like a credential — proof of their superiority, intellectual and otherwise (should all else fail). Angelenos, of course, resent New York's claim to center stage. To them, Los Angeles is the future and New York is history. And they don't see the romance of living in an overpriced shoe box, waiting out snowstorms in April.
The New York-Los Angeles dichotomy has long infected far more than annoying dinner-party conversations on both coasts. It has a way of coloring the discourse on everything: politics, culture, art and architecture, urban life.
Taking sides seems practically a condition of citizenship: Vertical vs. horizontal? Print vs. celluloid? Seasons vs. sun?
Now a bicoastal detachment of social scientists is riding to the rescue. Using everything from census and employment data to crime statistics, newspaper articles and hundreds of previously published academic papers and books, they have compared and contrasted Los Angeles and New York — their populations, politics, economies, residential patterns, immigrants, school systems, art worlds, images, riots, police.
Partisans may be sorry to learn that the two regions strike some scholars as increasingly alike, despite many real differences. Under scrutiny, perceived polarities blur. New York is becoming L.A.-ified and Los Angeles York-ified, some argue. Certain cherished assumptions about the two places turn out to be rooted less in reality than in myth.
Both regions have disproportionate shares of rich people and of poor people and a shrinking share of middle-income people wedged in between. Both areas are highly segregated, but in complex ways that bend the term. The proportion of Latinos is growing and the proportion of blacks is dwindling. Black ghettos are being Latinized. Chinese immigrants are skipping the inner city.
Los Angeles, kingdom of sprawl, has lately been cultivating its center. New York City, infatuated with its center, is spawning new vitality along its outer edge. Both regions are balkanized politically, the scholars found. Even the New York art scene, once tightly concentrated, has spilled into places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Hoboken, N.J. — becoming more like the Los Angeles gallery scene.
"The first thing one had to do was get out of the horse race mentality," said András Szántó, a sociologist and deputy director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University, who compared the visual art worlds in the two cities. "Rather than seeing this as a story where New York is ahead and Los Angeles is playing catch-up, increasingly I began to see it as two sides of the same coin."
Saverio Giovacchini, a historian who examined the New York film culture and the lure of Los Angeles from 1930 to the present, traces much of the bipolarism between Los Angeles and New York culture to the period after World War II when the New York intellectuals defined mass culture and Los Angeles as the opposite of art, modernism and New York.
"This discourse about Hollywood is, in a sense, a `state of mind' — the mind of a largely New York-based American intelligentsia that manufactured this cultural image of the movie citadel as the anti-intellectual `sausage factory,' " Mr. Giovacchini writes in the 530-page book that includes the group's findings. The University of Chicago Press plans to publish "New York and Los Angeles: Politics, Society and Culture — A Comparative View," in June.
The book was conceived and edited by Prof. David Halle, a British-born sociologist with a lifelong interest in cities. For the past seven years, Professor Halle has commuted weekly between his home in Manhattan, where he lives with his family, and his job at U.C.L.A.
Professor Halle, director of the LeRoy Neiman Center for the Study of American Society and Culture at U.C.L.A., said the New York-Los Angeles project arose five or six years ago, in part out of his bicoastal existence. (His wife is Dr. Louise Mirrer, vice chancellor for academic affairs at the City University of New York — which helps explain his commuting.)
Professor Halle said he happened upon what is known as the Los Angeles school of urban sociology, which focuses on what has been called the "sprawling, polycentric character of the urban, built environment." Los Angeles, with its development on the periphery and its fragmented politics, is seen as a prototype for a new pattern of metropolitan growth.
In contrast, the work of another group of scholars, which Professor Halle calls the New York school, focuses on central cities. They remain fascinated with contemporary New York City and Manhattan. They tend to champion the superiority of city over suburban life, not simply for the working class but also for the middle class and the rich.
"When I first said, `I'm doing New York/L.A.,' a lot of people then started the `Well, which place is better?' kind of argument," Professor Halle said last week in his Manhattan apartment, shortly before flying to Los Angeles. "That's the one thing we don't have much of in the book — people going on about which place is better than the other."
In a chapter on the so-called social geography of the two cities, Prof. Andrew A. Beveridge and Susan Weber of Queens College find that the two regions resemble each other in many ways.
For example, both have a large share of their more affluent, native-born and white residents living beyond the core, while poorer, nonwhite and foreign-born residents cluster near the center.
On the two cities' economies, Susan S. Fainstein, a professor of urban planning at Columbia, and David L. Gladstone of the University of New Orleans question whether being "global" enhances either city's well-being. For it is their global qualities that leave them vulnerable to economic downturns and make them "symbolic targets for terrorist wrath."
A U.C.L.A. sociologist, Prof. Jack Katz, compared perceptions of crime and law enforcement in the two cities.
He found that crime in Los Angeles had been attributed largely to gangs and that the police had been viewed as disorganized and incompetent.
In New York, crime had been attributed to "a diffuse culture of chaos," and the police had been credited with success in reining it in.
Professor Katz challenges the popular impression that the decline in the 1990's was that much more dramatic in New York than in Los Angeles. Analyzing the cities' crime statistics, he found that the murder rate in New York dropped to 8.3 per 100,000 population in 1999 from a high of 30.7 in 1990; in Los Angeles it dropped to 10.5 per 100,000 population in 1999 from a high of 30.3 in 1992.
Professor Katz suggests that "the image of New York's exceptional drop" resulted in part from the practice by the news media and the public of not looking comparatively at the experience of other cities, and from the habit of looking at raw homicides rather than rates. "Something miraculous arguably happened," he said, "but the difference in the decline of the two cities does not make an overwhelming case for attributing saintly powers to the police in New York."
Professor Katz also traces the greater respect accorded the New York Police Department in part to the five separate district attorneys' offices and two United States attorneys' offices available, and sometimes vying, to prosecute police misconduct in New York City. Los Angeles, he writes, has just one county district attorney's office, overseeing 49 police departments, and one United States attorney's office with jurisdiction over a wide stretch of California.
A number of the researchers found unexpected differences between the two places. Two scholars who wrote together about New York and Los Angeles as immigrant cities and regions examined the attitudes of Angelenos and New Yorkers to the immigrants who arrived after the 1965 Immigration Act. They found that New Yorkers were "far more accepting and welcoming" than Angelenos — a difference they attribute to the two regions' immigration patterns and histories.
They traced the contrast in part to New York's longer history as an immigrant magnet. But they also pointed to differences in the makeup of the immigrant population in the two cities. A much larger percentage of immigrants to Los Angeles are illegal, and they are seen as straining social services, particularly in hard times.
In another chapter, Professor Halle and Kevin Rafter of the City University of New York question the assumption that Los Angeles is more prone to riots than New York, as some have suggested since the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Comparing riots in the two regions over the past 40 years, they conclude, "There is little reason for complacency when considering the social fabric of either New York City or the city of Los Angeles."
Looking back on the project, Mr. Szántó said in an interview last week: "In a sense, it's unfair at any one time to compare New York to Los Angeles. You have a city that came into its own 100 years ago. Los Angeles is just getting started. To compare at any one moment the two cities is rather like having a wrestling match between an older brother and a younger brother.
"The question is, compared with how youthful L.A. is on this growth trajectory, where is it? Especially in the last quarter-century, L.A. has every bit as much of the dynamism that New York had in its initial period of growth."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company