Contents
- 1. Transcript
- 1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE JUNE 10, 1998
- 1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO JUNE 10, 1998
- 1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE JUNE 24, 1998
- 1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO JULY 24, 1998
- 1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE AUGUST 24, 1998
- 1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO AUGUST 24, 1998
- 1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 21, 1998
- 1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 21, 1998
1. Transcript
1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE JUNE 10, 1998
- Murdoch
- Mr. Holden, before we get into planning and your history in planning,
will you tell us a little bit about your early life and, particularly,
what got you into this part of the country?
- Holden
- Yes, Norm. I was born in San Dimas, in California, Los Angeles County,
in 1919. That's quite awhile ago. I am now seventy-eight years old. I
want to say a couple of words to begin, before we get back to the
immediate story. And that is basically that what we're talking about is
seventy-five years not only of planning, but basically the activity, the
wild waves of development, that swept over Los Angeles County in little
better than the seventy-five year period. Although I didn't know very
much about planning during the first few years of my life, I think that
the planning story of Los Angeles really begins somewhere about the time
of my birth, which was right after the First World War-- Actually, a
little after that, but we'll get to that later. As for my being in
California, the reason relates to another reason why many people came to
California--health reasons. The story is that my grandfather, Harry Justin Holden, was in Milwaukee
working for the Allis Chalmers Company as chief draftsman designing, I
should say, steam engines, big steam engines. The Holden family itself,
if we go clear back, arrived in America somewhere around 1620 or '21.
And when two Holdens came to this country from England--one of them
Justinian [Holden]--in various stages he, and much, much later, his
offspring, moved westward until finally they arrived in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. So we take up the story with my grandfather, who at that time
cleaned out the desk--so the family legend goes--of a gentleman who had
tuberculosis or consumption, as the word was in those days. So after
this, it turned out that he had in some fashion--he claims from this
cleaning out of the desk--contracted the disease. After a short time
with the disease, a family conference was held and my father, Harry
Roger Holden, who was then in the eleventh grade, not quite graduated
from high school, was selected with his father to move to a more
suitable, salubrious climate. So he and my grandfather were dispatched
by Santa Fe Railroad and arrived shortly after that in Palm Springs near
the spa-- There was a spa at that time on Indian land.
- Murdoch
- And approximately what year was that?
- Holden
- The year of that was, I think, 1913. My father and my grandfather then
slept out there for a period of time in front of a big old house which
turned out to be a sanatorium. Meanwhile, my grandmother Hannah Holden
and the other two children, my aunt and uncle [Helen Holden and Chester
Holden] packed up the house, sold it, and moved out to join the others.
My grandmother got a job as cook for a lumber company, a lumber
operation at Kean Camp, which is somewhere very near to Idyllwild. And
my father landed at least a part-time job where every week he went down
to Banning, picked up the mail, and brought it back to the Kean Camp.
Well, that was a pretty good life. It didn't last to long, and my folks or my grandparents thought maybe
they ought to look for something else. They met a fellow by the name of
Maybon, who lived in Claremont. And Mr. Maybon extolled the virtues of
that particular area and particularly the orange groves that were around
in that neighborhood. My grandfather then eventually made his way to San
Dimas and bought a five-acre orange ranch on the outskirts of town and
lived there for the next three or four years until his death. My father
started out as an entrepreneur and had a set of mules and did farmwork
for the orange growers. After a relatively short period of time--well,
not so short either-- During that same period my brother [Harry Steller
Holden] was born in 1918, and I was born in 1919. I should say that
indeed my father did get married in the interim. He managed that by
writing letters to my mother [Karolena Anna Steller] in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. They had met at a church there. She accepted his invitation
of marriage, and they came out to California on their honeymoon, back to
San Dimas. Well, where they arrived at that time was to my mind a very interesting
and stable community. It was in the heart of the orange empire of Los
Angeles County and extended Southern California then. I think one can
talk a bit about San Dimas and the orange empire and what was
accomplished during that time--maybe not things that were called
planning so much, though there were some which I'll mention in a minute.
- Murdoch
- Oranges were king in California.
- Holden
- Oranges were king at that particular period of time, that's right. There
were a few, you know, innovations. Like they developed the refrigerator
car, so the oranges could be moved to the East easily. The orange
growers-- I should describe the community a little bit, or the orange growers.
Actually, it was a community there, and I'm sure elsewhere, of
relatively small landowners. There were some very big ones, to be sure,
all around Southern California, but also many small ones. It's kind of
fascinating that five acres of orange grove would have supported two
people for a few years. Probably with a little help from my dad and
possible from-- Well, the other kids were too young, my aunt and uncle.
But it was pretty small. Ten acres could raise a family in those
days--ten acres fully developed in oranges. Twenty acres was a pretty
good living. And if you had sixty or two hundred you were in clover,
plus. Anyway, my father then decided that the two mules had to go one way or
another and that he wanted to get a job elsewhere. So he did obtain a
job on a sixty-acre ranch owned by a gentleman by the name of Dennison,
who is reported to have been, in family history, a meatpacker from the
Midwest--I think Kansas City. When I was very young, about four or five,
we moved into a house on that particular ranch--a nice ranch style
house, a couple of bedrooms, all the facilities. It had plumbing,
running water, etc. In other words, no-- [laughs] That brings up the point I wanted to make. This was a land of gentleman
farmers, and they had most of the amenities of life that they needed. It
was a very stable life for many, many years. There are a number of
things about it that were unusual. First of all, almost all the roads
were already paved. This was not a western ranch community in the
typical sense. There were also-- Particularly on the main survey lines,
places had long since been surveyed, the national survey.
- Murdoch
- Well, and were automobiles starting to be used?
- Holden
- Automobiles were starting to be seen. Well, as a matter of fact, by the
time I was four or five, there were a lot of automobiles. My folks at
that time had already owned a--not a Model T. Of course, Model T's were
around in--what was it?--1906 or 1908, or somewhere, where they really
came out. But we had an old Chevrolet and also, before that, an open
car. I don't know what it could have been. My uncle [Otto Steller] on my
mother's side came out from Wisconsin in 1928 or '29, I believe. He was
driving an old open Packard--well, maybe a new open Packard; I'm not too
sure [laughs]--which he drove cross-country. But, interestingly enough,
connecting this whole thing to planning, there was an amazing community
in the fact that the highways were paved. Also, another thing of great interest was that by that time, the water
availability problems had been solved. These are all, you know,
preliminary to any planning activity in the whole area. Carey McWilliams
describes this somewhat in at least one of his books. The net upshot of
the water solution, so to speak, was that most of the water rights were
congregated in water districts, special districts actually, so that many
small owners around and on the ranches would become members of those
districts. Even with the small ranch that my grandfather had, he had a
share in a larger water district, which assured him a certain amount of
water to irrigate the orange ranch as needed. That was true basically of
the whole area up and down and almost all the way around, even through
the orange empire as it went down to Orange County and as it went west
into the San Fernando Valley and into Ventura.
- Murdoch
- It's a fascinating story. You really grew up with California, didn't
you?
- Holden
- That's right. We started out that way. And importantly, you see, what
was happening is that all the infrastructure for later activities were
beginning to be put in place. Another one, up in San Dimas Canyon, we
have a situation where from time to time there were extreme floods. This
area did not escape all of these special problems [inaudible]-- But at
that time flooding, particularly, in addition to the question of having
enough water, was an important consideration. So California established
a flood control district and established a number of dams at the heads
of many of these canyons along the foothills. The net result of that-- Well, a story on that. On the ranch where my father worked when I was
five or six, in the couple of years before I have any memory, there was
rather a huge flood that came down San Dimas Canyon. It wiped out almost
a quarter of-- Well, not quite wiped out. What it did was take almost
all the topsoil off of one portion of the orchard, washed it down
through where the houses were and off into a two- or three-acre piece of
land up against the hills, where it all settled down. As I was a
youngster, what was happening a large part of the time was that by horse
and wagon a large part of that soil was being moved back to the upper
end of the sixty-acre property. In addition, a rather minor
flood-control diversion system was developed so that the water would
flow around that particular section. However, the dam completed not too
long before solved this particular problem to a good extent for that
particular area. The flood control district went on, of course, to bring
not only the dams in the upper reaches, but over a whole series of
years, including bond issues and so on, until in spite of the fact that
we could have some floods in extreme situations as late as the late
thirties and even into the forties and fifties, by the end of that
period there was almost nobody in this area who really had much of a
flood control problem. Now, I can't say that's absolute, because only
two or three years ago some parts of the area behind the-- What the heck
is the name of the dam [Sepulveda Dam] in the San Fernando Valley? There
were big floods there behind the dam.
- Murdoch
- But you were saying your uncle came out in 1928.
- Holden
- Yeah. He actually went to work in Los Angeles as an advertising
executive and eventually, with another party, in a small advertising
business.
- Murdoch
- Had that been his field before?
- Holden
- Yes, in Milwaukee. His name was Steller by the way, Otto Steller.
- Murdoch
- Well, that was when advertising was just coming into its own, because
radio had become a key thing and advertising really boomed.
- Holden
- That it did. And it was one of those many waves of activity that swept
over this region. My story, however, in terms of the orange empire,
basically relates to the fact that it was a great place for me to grow
up. There are many who have a nostalgia for the era and for the orange
empire and so on. And truly, it was a really stable community for many,
many years. We have to trace the start clear back to about 1873 and the
development of the navel orange and so on and the planting and growing
of a tree, which would last anywhere from thirty to sixty years, you
know. So in my day it was a stable community.
- Murdoch
- And a young boy could roam at will?
- Holden
- Pretty much at will. We could climb and enjoy the oranges at the top of
a tree instead of the nice big ones at the bottom. [mutual laughter] Of
course, we had to work, and I had to later help out on the five-acre
ranch, particularly. But we weren't very stressed or worked very hard.
- Murdoch
- Well, you were-- We're talking about the time when you were ten to
twelve years old?
- Holden
- Yeah. Throughout high school, throughout elementary school and high
school. They had, obviously, a complete school system. We had a county
library in town. Pomona College had long since been established nearby
in Claremont. The educational system was as complete as any place in the
country at that time. It was an ideal community.
- Murdoch
- You felt that it was a good school system?
- Holden
- Yeah, it was a good school system. I went to school with almost anybody
and everybody. Among them, descendants of the Quiróz family,
particularly, who owned originally, years ago, the original Spanish
grant in that particular area. And even now their house outside La Verne
is reserved by the state as an example of a hacienda.
- Murdoch
- What's the name again?
- Holden
- Quiróz is the name of the family. I think the hacienda house that still
exists east of La Verne is-- I can't recall the name at the moment. I
went to school in the first grade--they didn't have a kindergarten--and
met my first love, a little girl whose name was Bixby.
- Murdoch
- [laughs] Well, that's a famous California name.
- Holden
- Bixby is, of course, a famous name. I do not know--and, of course, I did
not know at the time--how closely this particular Bixby family was
related to Fred Bixby and some of the others who before that particular
time in the eighties owned the Los Cerritos Rancho and also the Los
Alamitos Rancho. By the way, some of that property was eventually sold
and became the city of Long Beach that the Bixbys owned down to the
south. Well, those are--
- Murdoch
- Well, but then the Depression hit the country, and I guess it didn't
really hit until '32 or '33. How did the Great Depression affect this
community?
- Holden
- Well, I think for the most part that the orange empire survived very,
very well. We felt it. My father was reduced from six days of working to
five with an agreement that he would take care of the five acres, which
he now owned--he inherited [it] from his folks--on the extra day and
work on the larger ranch with a slight reduction in salary. The salary
was not large, I must admit. [It was] large enough, however, so that we
could have bought a car and so that we had everything that we needed. So
I didn't--
- Murdoch
- No, but how did it affect other people in the community? About the same?
- Holden
- About the same. There were some who were unfortunate enough not to have
any resources. Of course, they had to be taken care of one way or
another. There were means of doing that; however, I don't remember that
anybody was really in need anymore, certainly not any more than they are
today.
- Murdoch
- Well, then a little later on, the dust bowl and there was immigration.
Now, did any of the immigrants fleeing the dust bowl arrive anywhere
near your community?
- Holden
- Not a great number, but quite a few in a way. They wandered in. They
worked on the orange groves.
- Murdoch
- Survived somehow?
- Holden
- Moved on, went to school-- [They] moved on and became substantial
members of the community for the most part. We didn't have too much of a
problem with race either, it seems to me, at that time, which might
sound odd.
- Murdoch
- Were there Hispanics working on the orchards?
- Holden
- There were Hispanics and there were Japanese. There were a couple of
Jewish store owners in Pomona, particularly. It was a substantially
Protestant-Christian community, I'll have to admit. But there was a
Catholic church. The main guy who ran the feed store was Catholic. So it
was quite mixed. And a couple of Japanese people who were very prominent
in the community and supervised picking for the orange house and so on
lived in the center of the community and went to the same church we did.
There was maybe a little discrimination in terms of earning power and so
on.
- Murdoch
- But, socially, everybody intermingles?
- Holden
- Socially-- And there was a barrio where the transient Mexican American
population stayed, some of them. But most of those who stayed
permanently were scattered out in the community.
- Murdoch
- You mentioned earlier some other names, [T. Roe] Hobbs, [R.M.] Teague,
and Gladstone. You want to comment on those?
- Holden
- Well, their names now grace many of the activities in the region. There
was a rather interesting history of the town written [inaudible]-- The
[T. Roe] Hobbs nursery, later acquired by R.M. Teague, was described at
that time as a worldwide organization in that they both supplied exotics
from this area, including the orange trees and so on, but [they] also
imported from the world. A much larger operation than I realized was
true. I actually went to school with a son of the original owner, Mr.
Hobbs. Mr. Teague was a large landowner. And the Teague family name is
one in the agricultural industry that you find in various places
throughout California, like a number of other-- Well, one I remember
particularly was a Teague Boulevard south of San Francisco. You run up
through the valley and you run through a town up there. We'll add the
name of the town later. But in any event, [it was] way up north, Teague
Boulevard. I went to school with Howard Teague. Oh, another item which the county took care of and was already
established at this time was fire control. There was a fire observation
station in the mountains--not clear on top, but a ways up to one of the
peaks that you could see in the foothills. The mountain is named
Gladstone. Gladstone owned a large orange grove there. I also went to
school with his daughter. But anyway, so you see the names of the old
families got to grace all the streets in the community. But to carry on, so it was a good community. Now, the thing that
occurred, of course, and began to occur as I finished high school and
decided to go on to college-- A couple of things occurred. First of all,
in my own case, and I think in many other sons and daughters of the--
- Murdoch
- Orange growers.
- Holden
- --orange growers, I had no idea and no intention whatsoever of becoming
an orange rancher. It was the last of my desires to settle in this
idyllic community and continue as an orange grower, you know? I know
several of my schoolmates at that particular time who wound up in the
education field. So what we were seeing in the people themselves was a
gradual shifting from an agricultural life to a more urban life.
- Murdoch
- Well, that's the history of the United States.
- Holden
- That's the history of the United States. And the immenseness of the
change comes when you consider that today you can hardly find an orange
tree in Los Angeles County. These hundreds of acres spread all across
the foothills, no more. Now, there are some left. There are some out by
Riverside, and there are some, not very many, down in Orange County.
- Murdoch
- Well, there's a few near one of those museums out there.
- Holden
- And which reminds me of one other thing that is background of this whole
planning bit. The University of California was established long since,
at the time I'm talking about, and had an agriculture experimentation
program. My father, even for the five acres that we owned, had a little
agreement with the researchers that he would supply them all the data
and practices he had on his little farm acres. And then other orchards
of various size were also giving the same data so that each year, as
crop seasons go by, he could compare his operation to what other people
were doing and how the whole citrus industry could be improved. And the
location of the experimental station that the state owned was, of
course, near Riverside and is now the campus of the University of
[California] Riverside. So I guess, from most people's point of view,
what I'm really recounting here in this period is that all kinds of
things which basically are the foundation for an expanded urban
development were already substantially beginning to be known. I think maybe we should digress one more minute to bring that up to date
in terms of the planning operation. Because remember that we had quite a
few people in downtown Los Angeles and so on and more came out during
World War I. There was quite a boom immediately after World War I. And
what was happening right then, the city of Los Angeles formed a planning
commission. What was it, 1921? Gordon Whitnall was the director. In 1922
at the end of the year, the [Los Angeles County] Regional Planning
Commission of the county was formed. And here, again, because I'm going
to be talking about regional planning later, I think it's important to
note that the county planning commission was deliberately named the
Regional Planning Commission. It was a commission, ultimately, of seven
members. It started off after some manipulation in the early couple of
years of many members down to a workable seven, which existed clear up
until the time in 1947 that I became a staff member of the Regional
Planning Commission and beyond. To this day there are seven members. Or
has it changed to five? It was changed to five at one time.
- Murdoch
- In '47?
- Holden
- When?
- Murdoch
- Well, somewhere in that--
- Holden
- Somewhere, yeah. And the next part that goes with that and relates to my
feeling that all the roads were paved is the fact that the first thing
that the Regional Planning Commission worked on in those early
days--Hugh Pomeroy and another man who has been interviewed here for
this series of interviews, William J. Fox-- They were working on the
highway plan at that time. Even the federal government was providing
money from a very early time.
- Murdoch
- Well, we'll get to that fascinating story, but let's get you through
college. Where did you go to high school?
- Holden
- I went to a high school called Bonita [Union] High School. Actually, it
is no more. As a matter of fact, I think it's a-- It isn't anymore. It
changed into a Catholic high school and a new high school was built.
- Murdoch
- Well, was that close by or was that much of a commute?
- Holden
- No, it wasn't a very far commute. The two communities of San Dimas and
La Verne are relatively close together, within five miles of each other.
- Murdoch
- How did you get to high school?
- Holden
- By bus for the most part. I rode my bike to elementary school, but by
bus to high school.
- Murdoch
- Are there any of your high school teachers that you felt were
particularly good, that had a lasting impression on you?
- Holden
- Oh, several actually. They had a pretty good program. The one I remember
particularly, strangely enough, is my English teacher, Miss Carpenter.
She got me interested in intellectual things, pretty much, reading and
so on. I don't necessarily say that she was the major source of my
interest in going to college. But from a very early time that I
remember, I felt the only thing that would satisfy me was to go on to
college.
- Murdoch
- And get off the farm?
- Holden
- And get off the farm, yeah. [laughs]
- Murdoch
- The farm just may not be quite the right word.
- Holden
- Orange ranch.
- Murdoch
- Yeah, get off the ranch. I should have said, "Get off the ranch."
- Holden
- Let me tell one other interesting incident or thought, rather. We're
talking about a period which really goes back to the 1880s and then
forward to my time after World War I. But the thing that occurred to me
at that time, somewhere along there I think, "I am in the West," you
know. And we have all these stories about the Wild West and all that
kind of stuff. I sure as heck don't see any Wild West. [laughs] By the
very earliest that I can remember, there was a Fordson tractor on the
big ranch. And shortly after that, only a year or two--I must have been
seven or eight--all the horses and mules disappeared off the place, and
we had altogether mechanical equipment. I never really learned to ride a
horse because there weren't any around to ride. Well, a neighbor of ours
did have a couple of riding horses, and once in a while I'd get a little
ride on a kind of a quiet riding horse.
- Murdoch
- Well, so you decided to go to college, and where did you go?
- Holden
- I was influenced by my uncle, who was in the advertising business, so I
got a scholarship and went the first year to USC [University of Southern
California].
- Murdoch
- And what year was it? 'Thirty--?
- Holden
- That was thirty--
- Murdoch
- --six, seven?
- Holden
- Let's see. I graduated from high school in '37, yeah. It was the year of
the big rain.
- Murdoch
- Well, USC was quite a ways-- Where did you live?
- Holden
- I lived at one of the dorms--not a fraternity, but the dorm in back of
the Sigma Chi [laughs]--for a year. The most important thing that
influenced me in that year was again a gentleman who taught an English
class--a literature class I think it was--at USC whose name I don't
remember, but who felt that there were only two good liberal arts
education schools in the western part of the United States. One of them
[was] in Oregon--if I remember, we can add its name--and the other one
[was] Pomona College, which was nearby my hometown. This encouraged me
to go--
- Murdoch
- To transfer to Pomona.
- Holden
- Transfer to Pomona College, where I subsequently graduated three years
later.
- Murdoch
- What was your major?
- Holden
- My major was political science, interestingly enough. So I wound up with
a degree in political science.
- Murdoch
- Well, that was what you were doing when you started this phase.
- Holden
- That's right.
- Murdoch
- That's basically political science.
- Holden
- It's a knowledge-- Well, actually, in terms of my total college career
and advanced degrees, it also applies. In sequence, next I decided I
wanted to get out of the country, locally, when I graduated from
college. So I got a scholarship and went to school on the East Coast in
Boston at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. I had this crazy idea
that I might be a diplomat or something. I went there a year. By the end
of that year it would have been 1942, and the war in Europe had started.
- Murdoch
- Well, before we leave Pomona, what other than your political science
courses--? Were there certain courses that you particularly enjoyed or
any other people that you particularly remember from the Pomona days?
- Holden
- Well, I go to about every fifth-year reunion there, and we have a number
of people that I know from my class. In terms of professors, I remember
several of them, a philosophy professor particularly, who in later years
caused me to want very much to travel, particularly to Greece and Rome,
which I subsequently did. But that's another story. My political science
professor was an old man; [he] irritated the life out of me because he
was a fairly conservative old guy. And most of the people around were
fairly liberal at the time. Also of some interest, politically--I guess we might as well mention
it--one of the schools that we had in the San Dimas area was the [Horace
Jeremiah] Voorhis School for Boys. And the boys in that school went to
my school, which was a smaller school about halfway between the main
grammar schools at La Verne and San Dimas, called La Verne Heights. So I
went to school with those people, and these are the guys that ultimately
staffed the congressional office of Representative Voorhis, a Democrat
who served a number of years during the Depression. But he is most
noted, of course, for the fact that he was replaced in later years by
Richard [M.] Nixon.
- Murdoch
- Well, those years were very tumultuous political years in California.
The impact of the Depression generated all sorts of movements--"Thirty
Dollars Every Friday" and "Ham and Eggs." It was a very tumultuous time.
- Holden
- My somewhat conservative uncle told me one time that he was going to
vote for Upton Sinclair, [who was] involved in one of these things
you're talking about [End Poverty In California (EPIC)], primarily
because things couldn't get any worse. I don't think he was quite that
bad off. There was some business still going on during the Depression
here, but things were pretty slow. Anyway, that's an incident-- Subsequently, in going back to Boston and then to work in Washington D.C.
for a short period of time, I did visit the office and met Voorhis and
chatted with some of my old friends in the Voorhis congressional office.
- Murdoch
- How interesting.
- Holden
- Naturally, I didn't vote for Nixon. [laughs] I guess that's a safe thing
maybe to say.
- Murdoch
- Well, you developed into quite a scholar and had quite a few academic
achievements. Don't be modest. Tell us about that.
- Holden
- Well, what happened, of course, at that time-- Now I'm down in
Washington after having spent a year in Boston, and the war was going on
as a matter of fact. I had been exempt because some doctor along the way
had thought I had some kind of heart murmur. Well, at that time the army
was getting a little short of personnel. That was in late 1942. So I got
a summons to come in for a reexamination. The army doctor at that time
couldn't find any heart murmur, and to tell you the truth, I couldn't
feel any effects of it either. So being a nice patriotic fellow, I had
no particular objection to his finding me fit for the service.
- Murdoch
- No, of course not.
- Holden
- So off I went as a private to basic training in Arkansas.
1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO JUNE 10, 1998
- Holden
- This session we are going to start with my entry into the armed forces
before World War II. This was in 1942 in the late fall. At that
particular time I was drafted, as a matter of fact; that's important to
note. I had previously had some medical exemptions, which were now
retracted, and the new doctors couldn't find anything wrong with me. It
so happened there wasn't anything wrong with me apparently, because I
served successfully for three and a half years. During that time my army
experience produced one interesting series of results. Shortly after
being drafted and being sent to Arkansas for basic training, I
volunteered, I thought, to go to the Army Air Forces. Well, it turned
out I did. They sent me to Rome, New York, and I became associated with
the Air Force Statistical Service. That statistical service is and was
rather interesting because it had to do in this particular situation
with inventory and other subject areas that were recorded in these
rudimentary aspects of data processing with IBM machines, etc. It was a
card system pretty much, but, nevertheless, it was the predecessor of
most of the computer-type activities that we know about today.
- Murdoch
- They called them Hollerith cards in the old days. The man who invented
the IBM card was a guy named [Herman] Hollerith.
- Holden
- Yes. And then, you know, at that time the secretary of the army was--
No, not the secretary but the man who was called upon to apply the
proper inventory procedures to the air force was Robert [S.] McNamara,
who worked for IBM and subsequently became secretary of the army. So I
got my introduction in the rudiments of computing and of record keeping
and inventories in those army days. I was in the army for three and a
half years. During that time I stayed in the United States, almost got
shipped out a couple of times but was finally retained in the United
States and accumulated enough points and was discharged in 1945, I
think, at the end of the Japanese effort. At that time what happened to me essentially was that I changed my mind
as to what I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. I no longer was as
interested in being a diplomat and was more interested in becoming an
architect. So I then immediately enrolled in 1945 at the USC School of
Architecture. After a year and a half or so I found I really was very
interested in city planning. I had taken a couple of classes. I was also
interested in getting married and getting a job. So I went downtown and
took an examination. I passed the examination for planning assistant
with the Los Angeles Regional Planning Commission. At the same time I
got married to Miriam Louise Bader. A few days after I was married I
went to work for the county of Los Angeles, the Regional Planning
Commission. That brings us kind of up to date, and we can start out with
a new phase of my career. I think maybe some background information about what was happening at the
time is in order. I came to the Regional Planning Commission right after
the war at a time when everything suggested a very rapid expansion of
the population of this region, particularly Los Angeles County, and not
only an expansion of the residential development but an expansion of the
industrial development as well. In other words, people weren't going to
come to Los Angeles unless they also had a job. After the war people
wanted to come to Los Angeles, and for a number of fortuitous
circumstances the jobs came with them. That wasn't particularly my job
at the Regional Planning Commission, but it was the Regional Planning
Commission's problem, I think. The problem was the vast expansion at
that time of the population. But we have to say, going back to the first part of my discussion, that
the things that happened in the thirties and in the twenties were many
things that made it possible for a rapid expansion to follow fairly
readily in the period after the war. For example, to summarize quickly,
the Regional Planning Commission had gone through a long period starting
from 1922, and they had developed a number of items. They had a viable
zoning ordinance, sub-division ordinance. They had a general plan of
highways, perhaps most important of all, related to the rapidly
expanding population. The commission, interestingly enough, had
developed a plan of freeways. It was not until a few years later that
the state assumed this planning activity. By that time, the initial
stretch of the Arroyo Seco Freeway had been completed. It is true,
however, that the continuation of the freeway through downtown Los
Angeles was not to be completed for another four years, not until the
early years of 1950. At that time also the county already had an air
pollution control district, and it also had many operations in flood
control. There were a lot of the fundamental needs of urban development
already basically ready to go in Los Angeles as this great number of
people came into town. William J. Fox, now retired from the Marine Corps, as a matter of fact--
[He was] promoted to general on his retirement. General Fox came back to
the Regional Planning Commission as its director. Actually, he was
director not only of the county planning commission, but since 1933 had
been director of the [Los Angeles County] Building Department. Kind of
an interesting association of ideas. In any event, as he came back to
town he noted the possibilities of expansion and looked at the staff of
the commission. Among other things that he did was to determine that an
extra effort should be made to refine many of the zoning plans that
existed for various parts of the county. Before we go into that in detail, I do want to digress a minute to say
that, actually, the first assignment I had at the Regional Planning
Commission was with John [P.] Commons, who headed the research division.
This enabled me to come in contact with a number of things that I had
had very little contact with before. Not the least of which, for
example, was counting automobiles in a traffic survey. This particular case--the first one I ever undertook or was a part
of--involved how many cars came through the Second and Third Street
tunnels into Los Angeles and whether or not those were flowing at
capacity. The reason for the study was that, at that time, the downtown
civic center plan was pretty well along, but there was a big fuss coming
up from the attorneys in the area who thought that maybe the county
courthouse in the civic center was not properly located with respect to
them and a better place for the courthouse would have been in the center
of the area, which is essentially a large parking area now and was, at
that time, between Second and Fourth Streets and--let's see what would
it be?--Broadway and Spring. Well, anyway, as a result of the traffic
studies that we made and other activities, what resulted was a change in
the plan, but not a major one. The courthouse was moved to the south
side of the civic center from its location at the north side in the
original plan. And the administrative center was moved to the north side
from the south side, as it was in the original plan.
- Murdoch
- And where was the office of the Regional Planning Commission located at
that time?
- Holden
- Well, at that time the county was expanding a lot. Our immediate
location had been for a while, and was for quite a while, the corner of
Second [Street] and Broadway. We stayed there for a good many years
until the department moved into a building which was basically the
county engineer's building and then into the new hall of records
finally, which was smack in the middle of the civic center.
- Murdoch
- Where the regional planning department still is.
- Holden
- And where the planning department still is. That's correct.
- Murdoch
- Okay.
1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE JUNE 24, 1998
- Murdoch
- Ed, we've talked about your early days and your graduation and your
entering into the planning profession. Please continue telling us about
your experiences at the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission
in the early days.
- Holden
- Yes, I was talking at the end of the last session about my experience
with John P. Commons in the research section. Again, it emphasizes that
the Regional Planning Commission, as John Commons so very often
reiterated, was a Regional Planning Commission. His position with the
research department emphasized the fact that the county had interests
throughout the county and that they were essentially at that time
concerned with the urban region, which was largely within Los Angeles
County. We were talking also about the fact of a traffic survey we had made. That
could be expanded to say that the results of doing that kind of study
ultimately resulted in the CAO, chief administrative officer of the
county, becoming very interested in traffic flow in downtown Los Angeles
and, ultimately, the adoption of a policy which was definitely to limit
the number of county activities which were to remain in the Los Angeles
downtown area and a conscious effort to decentralize many county
activities. Along with that question of decentralization, the CAO, consulting
together with the planning director of the RPC [Los Angeles County
Regional Planning Commission], decided to provide parking areas for
county employees who worked in downtown Los Angeles--plenty of parking
spaces. But, obviously, downtown cannot accommodate everybody, even
though most people would like to be downtown. And there was a definite
policy on decentralization of county activities. What I want to get back to now is the fact that the Regional Planning
Commission of the county was on the leading edge of the great expansion
that occurred at this point immediately after the war. I've already
alluded to various kinds of little incidents which suggested the
importance of this--for example, that I was born in this part of the
country and that during the war I did not have to defend this area in
any sense. Almost any time anybody began talking about Los Angeles
County, they were saying, "Oh, I'd been there during the war, and I'm
going to go back." This kind of thing. People were coming, and they
wanted to come to California. So there we were.
- Murdoch
- There was a very popular song in the late forties.
- Holden
- Yes.
- Murdoch
- "Make San Fernando Valley My Home" ["San Fernando Valley"].
- Holden
- Right. So, as I say, Fox had come back. He reorganized the county work
force and asked for more people. We began actively to look at the county
zoning ordinance and to refine the zoning in most of the unincorporated
areas south of the San Gabriel Mountains.
- Murdoch
- General Fox was such a dominant factor in planning in the thirties and
then in the forties. Tell us a little bit more. General Fox was a
director when you first went to work for the county. He was your boss,
your big boss. What was your first impression of General Fox when you
first met him?
- Holden
- I didn't know him from Adam. I was sent up to have an interview with
him, which was a rather short and clipped, military-type interview in
which he concluded by saying I was welcome to the staff of the planning
commission. [laughs]
- Murdoch
- Well, through the years you got better acquainted with him. What were
some of your impressions of General Fox?
- Holden
- General Fox was--
- Murdoch
- A martinet?
- Holden
- He was certainly a military man. If that qualifies as a martinet, I
guess probably that's what you would call him. The important point, of
course, was that he was an avid planner and that he believed in the
planning process particularly as it could be applied in any sense in an
engineering way. He was very interested, for example, in the plan of
highways as an engineering activity--the location of those highways--so
that they could then be properly surveyed and developed. He was a very
prominent and important person in the planning development of the area.
He did not stay a long time as a planning director after he came back
from the war. It may be remembered at that time there were a number of
efforts to combine various kinds of engineering, surveying, mechanical
activities into a department of the engineer or a--
- Murdoch
- Public works?
- Holden
- --public works department in a good many areas. One of the interesting
stories that he recalls or that I was told was that he and Art [Arthur]
Will sat down one day. They looked at all the county departments and
decided that the consolidation of the most important ones into a
Department of Engineering with the county engineer at the head was the
way to go, and they did. They put the surveyor, for example, the
department of the surveyor as well as all--not flood control, because
that was a separate district--the county engineering activities, all
except for one, which Fox didn't want to have under his jurisdiction,
namely the maintenance of automobiles for the supervisors-- [mutual
laughter] But most of the rest of the activities including the building
department, etc.--
- Murdoch
- So General Fox took over the department and gave up the regional
planning. What year was this, approximately, and who became the new
regional planning director?
- Holden
- That was in about 1954, and Milton Breivogel became the director of
planning at that time. We'll get to Milton Breivogel. There are some things that I'd like to add here in the period before
that. I, of course, learned a lot of my trade as a planner in this
period when we were doing these area or neighborhood zoning studies. The
real problem at that time was not that the county didn't have a zoning
ordinance, but basically the ordinance placed much of the unincorporated
area of the county in a zone called M3, which was not much of a
restriction. It had a few special permits required for the most
important, obnoxious developments. So almost anything went in most of
this area. It was only a short time, I guess, before that that
agriculture had been introduced in the county ordinance, but most of the
area was still M3. Some effort had to be made to tighten up, to decide
whether there were some areas which should be strictly reserved for
residential developments to keep out industrial developments. There's a
general selection process to select neighborhood and community centers,
etc. This was a process that we were supposed to be going through for
these individual, unincorporated communities. Now, this process
proceeded rapidly. Over a period of time the county got more staff, and
it gradually became possible to spend time on other planning concerns. There is one point that we might mention here. What we were doing at this
particular time-- We were acting as the local planning commission--not
the Regional Planning Commission, but the local planning commission--for
a population of about nine hundred thousand people in the unincorporated
area. Now, that's a lot of people, and obviously it was a rather huge
job and the reason that the Regional Planning Commission was as large a
commission as it was.
- Murdoch
- Ed, in that period of the early fifties, as you best recall, what was
the approximate size of the staff at the Regional Planning Commission?
- Holden
- To tell you the truth, I don't remember. It was probably fifty or sixty,
I would think.
- Murdoch
- Well, sixty people, that was a pretty good-sized planning staff for
those days.
- Holden
- Yes. It was for those days. Well, as a matter of fact, in the earliest--
Through the remainder of the forties and the first couple of years of
the fifties, though the staff had been pretty largely recruited and
nothing seemed to change very much at the top, which was something of a
question for some of us who thought maybe some day we were going to
advance in the ranks of the planning staff--
- Murdoch
- Well, you did.
- Holden
- Well, it turned out that the war in the Pacific started up again in
Korea, and one of the section heads was drafted to go off and fight a
portion of the Korean War, which left an opening. One day, actually,
more or less off a sickbed, I decided I'd better get up and go down and
take the exam for that particular position. With a little good luck, I
passed it and became number one on the list. Now, at that time,
apparently, there was no particular favorite of those who might have
otherwise influenced the appointment, [laughs] and I became the section
head for the exceptions and special permits section. Many people will
know this as the variance and special permits activity. So in about 1951
or '52, that's when I assumed that position. In any event, that brings up two or three points which I want to make
about what was happening, in addition to the zone changes and the zone
tightening that we were talking about. As for the attitudes of the
planning commissioners and how you could handle those permits and
exceptions at that particular period of time-- The first part of that,
which is rather an interesting thing, was the so-called hog wars. Hog
farms at that particular time were fed garbage primarily, and the
garbage-fed hogs didn't smell very good. So there were a number of
activities, and among them were attempts to revoke the automatic permits
which had been automatically granted to existing hog ranches. Not the
least of these areas were along the San Gabriel River, where it was an
expanding activity. Now, that was a little bit before my time, but three
or four of these continued to be major activities during my time running
that particular section. We had some huge cases. A couple of them were
in the north part of the county, actually, in the Santa Clarita Valley
and above Castaic. These would fill the auditorium with people
protesting or approving of the hog ranch. These were quite big
operations and, consequently, there was a lot of jockeying around for a
position as to whether or not they were going to continue to allow hog
ranches in that, at that time, rather isolated area. We sometimes wonder about the reasoning, the actions that supervisors
take in some of these activities. Well, in one of these major ones in
the Santa Clarita river valley, the hearing was immense. There were a
huge number of people before the planning commission. It had already
gone through and been approved by the zoning board and the planning
commission. Rumor had it that there were a lot of activities going on in
that respect, most particularly with respect to one of the supervisors,
who was out of that district. As the hearing progressed, it became
obvious that the passage of it seemed to be a pretty good idea. So the
vote came.
- Murdoch
- This was an ordinance to restrict hog farms.
- Holden
- No, this was an ordinance to approve this particular one, interestingly
enough. But there was apparently some other altercation and series of
events that I was not altogether sure of. Importantly here, what
happened was that four supervisors voted for--
- Murdoch
- --the hog farm.
- Holden
- And this one supervisor, whose motives were rumored one way or another
to be influenced by some of his constituents and others, finally threw
up his hands and said, "I pass." He could not bring himself to vote for
this particular hog ranch. What the background of that is is something
that somebody else can decide in terms of the morality of this activity.
So the hog ranches and getting rid of them was one of the activities
that was important to the development of the region. Also, other activities of the old agricultural activity in Los Angeles
County--
- Murdoch
- During this period, the staff was gradually re-zoning the entire county
to bring it up to more modern-day zoning standards.
- Holden
- Well, the entire county south of the San Gabriel Mountains. We were not
able somehow or other to get up into the Antelope Valley.
- Murdoch
- North county.
- Holden
- North county, Antelope Valley. As a matter of fact, as near as there was
a Wild West in anything that I knew, Antelope Valley was it. In the
early days, one of the fellows went out on a special permit
investigation somewhere up in the north county for some obscure use and
came back with a story that the old farmer shot at him. He wouldn't let
him through the gate. That's the only activity that I remember of this
kind, except that there were hearings held in, I believe, Lancaster at
that very early time. The story was that General Fox rolled up his maps
and came back to Los Angeles and decided that it was not yet time to
zone Lancaster in a more definitive way. So the activity was basically
south of the mountains.
- Murdoch
- Well, Milton Breivogel took over around 1954.
- Holden
- Actually, about 1953. That is correct. I just want to interrupt to finish the thought that I had about resources
and the county's attitude toward them, which came up often as a question
for the special permits section. I think it was a pattern. It was almost
completely predictable. What I'm talking about is the attitude towards
the resources of the county, and there were a number. Oil wells were a
very important part of that. Invariably when the environmental costs of
oil wells and, perhaps, their [the oil companies'] conflict with
residents came along, a decision was made which would allow the
exploration and exploitation of oil. Now, it happened in a number of
ways, among them two that are worth mentioning, one that I had a fair
amount to do with. There was an oil field that actually existed in the
La Habra Heights area of Los Angeles County, unincorporated area, in
which a number of new discoveries were made and where there was no
special zone to apply at that time, and besides which it was an area
which was soon going to develop. As a matter of fact, it had quite a few
houses in it. Well, the compromise at that time was relatively simple.
At that time slant drilling was beginning to be a technical fact, and so
a compromise was arranged where the companies operating in that area
would locate their drilling rigs in a restricted area in a couple of
places in the hills and slant drill from there. The rest of the La Habra
area could develop to be the rather pleasant semi-rural, estate-type
residential area. Well, this kind of thing could almost always be
counted on. Now, I want to raise one other point because I think it's interesting to
planning wherever, and that is that when you plan something and use the
zoning ordinances and this kind of restricted activity, some strange
things happen and some strange bedfellows enter into the picture. This
goes back to the hog ranch situation. You remember I said that the hog
ranches were, at that time, primarily garbage fed. At the time when it
seemed like we were going to have just so many more revocation hearings
for hog ranches, all of a sudden it became clear to the county health
department that feeding hogs garbage was not a very healthful thing to
do, that there was trichinosis and other things that were very
difficult. That resulted in state action. The state passed a law that at
all garbage- fed hog ranches, the garbage had to be cooked. That added
an economic element. So what happened? Well, cooked garbage-- The other
really halfway acceptable reaction to hogs was the grain-fed hog. These
two things caused commercial hog farms to become essentially
uneconomical.
- Murdoch
- In Los Angeles County.
- Holden
- In Los Angeles County. The result was that our great effort to take care
of these problems suddenly collapsed, [laughs] and we had very little
problem except for a couple of big hog ranches as mentioned earlier. So
this became the way. The other interesting story in this was in the dairy industry.
- Murdoch
- The dairy industry was quiet strong--still is quite strong in Los
Angeles County.
- Holden
- Yes. And there were interesting things happening in the dairy
industries. Individual cows were producing more milk through various
kinds of selective breeding and other activities. There were certain
areas where cows seemed to prosper much more than others. One of them
was Torrance, but Torrance was growing up pretty fast. The other one was
around the city of Artesia. In this early development-- Well, Artesia
was an unincorporated neighborhood community actually, and the dairies
came in around the little neighborhood community of Artesia. In our
zoning effort for that particular area, contact was made with all the
dairy industries at that time. The so-called A2 zone--the county's heavy
agricultural zone--was established in a doughnut-shaped form around the
city of Artesia. This was one of the few times when the county or we on
the staff ever had any great success in reserving areas for either open
space or separating out the agricultural areas. Importantly, it probably established some kind of precedent for this
region, which is a very hard one to overcome. It was not too long--maybe
another ten to fifteen years or so or less--before the good farmers of
that region looked around and said, "Well, things are getting even
harder on us, more pressure, in spite of the fact that we've got your
protection [a heavy agriculture A2 zoning classification]. Besides, the
[Los Angeles County] Board of Supervisors is clear downtown. So what
we'll do is have a special new city." So the city of Cerritos was
created over the zoned area pretty much that we had originally created
in the Artesia outlying area study.
- Murdoch
- That's very interesting. So there was a point when cities were created
to preserve agriculture. I've never heard that story before.
- Holden
- Well, that was not the first one. The first one in Los Angeles County,
or one of the first that I know of, was the city of West Covina. The
city of West Covina was substantially an orange raising area. Why or
what the causes were that caused a significant area to be incorporated
into a city I'm not really very clear, but it was essentially a
special-purpose city that was incorporated.
- Murdoch
- Well, around this time the outstanding planner, Milton Breivogel, took
over, and you were working your way up as one of his captains. It was
somewhere around this time that Planning Director Breivogel organized
the county into ten planning areas. Can you tell us anything about that
process, which was very significant?
- Holden
- Yes. That really relates to the fact that as a Regional Planning
Commission, from the beginning there was some assumption that there
would be a plan for the county. Actually, in 1941 there was a land-use
plan adopted. It was a very general plan of which, at one time, one of
our major planning consultants derisively said, "That's no plan at all."
It was a very general guide. What the land-use plan did do was to put--
What was done in 1941 was to organize a lot of research that was done in
the thirties, including maps of the entire county, land-use maps in
detail. Anyway, the expectation and the theory in planning was that
there should be a plan and that there should be a plan for the entire
county called a regional plan for Los Angeles County.
- Murdoch
- So the county was divided up into ten areas.
- Holden
- Yes. Milt didn't think he could get the backing, I guess, to do an
entire plan. So he looked around the county and he said, "Let's take
some reasonable physical areas"--the ten that you're talking about
basically--"designate them, and then we'll do a plan for those areas.
We'll do a research plan and then eventually an overall plan in
cooperation with the cities and hopefully get them to develop it." He
picked east San Gabriel Valley because it was next, basically, on the
expansion horizon, most particularly the south part of San Gabriel
Valley in the San Jose Creek area, the area from the outskirts of Pomona
down through the valley clear through Puente. But he also needed the
cooperation of more cities in the areas north of that and also in major
unincorporated, orange-growing areas in the northern part of the San
Gabriel Valley. So he proposed that we make a series of those studies
and got staff approved to do it and looked around. He and I had had a
lot of talks about a lot of things. Lo and behold, I became the director
or the section head to conduct the first regional planning study here.
- Murdoch
- The first subregional plan. That is what we now call a subregional plan.
- Holden
- The idea, eventually, was when you got ten plans together, you could
have--
- Murdoch
- You'd then have a plan for the entire county.
- Holden
- It was years later that, actually, a lot of that stuff was put together
and a plan was adopted. By that time I was working for SCAG [Southern
California Association of Governments]. Many things had passed.
- Murdoch
- Well, Director Breivogel once told me what a magnificent job you did on
the area plans. Looking back, you were able to get so much done in a
relatively short period of time, something like ten years. I'd be
interested to hear more about how you turned out all these area plans.
Who were some of your key assistants? Did the supervisors support this
effort? Tell us more about the area planning effort.
- Holden
- The important ingredient in this was a committee for each of these
regions actually representing each of the cities in the region and a
couple of people from unincorporated areas.
- Murdoch
- What later were called area planning councils.
- Holden
- Yes, the area planning councils. These councils really looked over our
shoulders and what we were doing and gave us some really very good
advice. With their help in sorting a number of things out, important
problems in the area were identified and many of them were taken care of
in good fashion. One of the major problem areas--and one that has a lot
of interesting things with respect to planning associated with it--was
the fact that two major railroads came through the city of Pomona and
extended down the San Jose Creek area, the Union Pacific and the
Southern Pacific going into L.A. The Santa Fe ran also through the area
but north through various towns--San Dimas and on into Pasadena and
down. Anyway, Milt was looking at that particular area and he said, "You
know, if we're going to think about residential development up here,
we've got to have some area for the work force, some area for industrial
development."
- Murdoch
- Jobs-housing. A perceptive concept of jobs-housing balance.
- Holden
- That's the idea. In addition to that, it seemed to be an ideal area. He
could drum up some support from the railroad representatives through
that area and so forth. We also had a problem, however, in that we had
to develop a liaison with the county air pollution control district. At
that time the air pollution control district's primary attitude and
philosophy was that the most likely way that we were going to get
control of air pollution was through mechanical engineering solutions.
They were interested in keeping the worst of the development industries
and so forth out. So what we could do was to zone most of that area
between the railroads coming down this strip into M1 or light industrial
zoning. This was not a completely either scientific or positive thing.
It was the best we could do.
- Murdoch
- Well, that strikes me as being very far-seeing. This was 1955?
- Holden
- Yeah. It was between 1954 and 1956. The plan for the valley was adopted
in 1956.
- Murdoch
- One of the things that strikes me as so remarkable is that some regional
plans were actually adopted or endorsed by the cities of the area.
- Holden
- They were for the most part. Well, actually, I'm not sure whether the
Board of Supervisors--I'd have to check that--adopted that particular
plan. But the planning commission did adopt the plan, and many of the
cities gave their okay to what was going on. I do want to go back and
talk about a couple of more things, planning considerations in respect
to the industrial development and a couple of anecdotes that may be of
some interest to young planners from time to time as to what happens in
some areas. The first one was that we made a considerable study there of
what might happen in this relatively new aspect of development called
"the mall" and the regional malls, commercial, retail development malls.
- Murdoch
- Regional malls were quite a new concept in those days.
- Holden
- They had not been around for too many years. Slightly before 1954 the
Lakewood mall was established. There was Framingham in the east and a
couple of other examples countrywide. Anyway, we looked at it and how
some of these were established and about what the population might be
eventually. And [we] suggested there might be four of these that could
be established in the east San Gabriel Valley, and some of our reasoning
behind it is in the book. One of these was about halfway up the San Jose
Creek area and had quite a service area around it. Another one we
thought might be further west in the La Puente area. One was already
developing in the city of West Covina. Our good fellow planner Gordon Whitnall was trying to and did approve
work with one in Covina, which is an interesting technical case. He
figured that this would be a success because he could draw a circle far
enough around to include a lot of the area which was over Kellogg Hill
and into the Pomona area. It turned out that that was never a very good
idea. The Covina mall generally never did develop very much. The real
mall turned out to be the one in West Covina, eventually. Also, the
beginning of the latest craze, which was the special discount
houses--they wound up in spaces that were out of the way and practically
impossible to know or really calculate into your--
- Murdoch
- I didn't know we had discount malls in the fifties. That's very
interesting.
- Holden
- They were just a beginning idea. It looked like not very much. We didn't
think it would be a major mall area, but it turned out to be a pretty
important sales thing eventually. So then I was out in the San Jose
Creek area one day in an area which was just to the south of where the
railroads were, outside the boundary between the two railroads,
extending to and beyond where we thought maybe the freeway was going
through and which we didn't really think much about. We thought that a
real small one would go in the north toward the Puente area, more on the
north side of the valley. But a man stopped by, and I talked to him.
Meanwhile, I had checked this area. It belonged to something called the
Jockey Club. He'd come to talk about that a little more, this guy who
showed up. What he told me was that he'd already contacted and had
commitments for four department stores to locate in that particular
region. Well, there I was. I didn't think that I was going to be in a
position to stop the commercial zoning, even though it was south of the
railroad. From him and from other sources I found out they had as many
as four department stores who wanted to begin thinking about developing
a mall in this rapidly expanding area. So that was the beginning of the
development of the Puente Hills mall in that particular area. A couple of other strange things happened at that particular point. The
idea of developing was evidently a good one for industry and things.
First of all, we did get a lot of warehousing as well as some
manufacturing. Secondly, there was an interest in having someplace for
people to gather on the east side. Consequently there was a plan
announced for a big hotel just to the north of this area on top of a
hill. So this area was gradually beginning to develop into a real wild
developing center.
- Murdoch
- It sounds as if your San Gabriel Valley area plan was just prepared in
the nick of time before this flood of development. If it had balanced
jobs and regional shopping and residential, that was quite advanced
planning for its time.
- Holden
- Now, let's carry the thing through to what happened after that.
- Murdoch
- I think, perhaps, we should continue that on the reverse side of this
tape.
1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO JULY 24, 1998
- Holden
- All right. We were talking at the end of the last tape about the San
Jose area, generally, and the railroads, the development in that area.
The second follow-up to the plan that we had prepared was to zone the
area we had designated for industry in that area and other changes in
the unincorporated areas and hopefully to encourage the cities to adopt
changes that were to be made.
- Murdoch
- To make the zoning ordinance match the area--
- Holden
- The plan, yeah. The county did adopt the industrial zones as generally
presented in the plans and also the commercial zones that would
accommodate the new center out there. That was fine. The next thing that happened was a series of particular events which are
politically important but maybe not so important for the ultimate,
long-term development of the area. The first thing that happened, of
course, was that a bunch of people got together out there for that area
and decided that they could control this new industrial area a lot
better than the county could and they proposed a new city, the City of
Industry. So it became a special-purpose city in the same area, almost
identical with the lines of our industrial zoning. There were some
exceptions, but not very many.
- Murdoch
- That's very interesting. You and Milton Breivogel were the parents of
the City of Industry.
- Holden
- That's right. Now, immediately before this, some interesting things
occurred. We had a vacant position for an assistant or deputy director
of planning. I've forgotten exactly how the vacancy occurred. But all of
a sudden, without any great announcement to anybody, we suddenly found
that Mr. Robert Rope, I think his name was, was to be the new deputy
director of planning. I subsequently heard that there was an oral
examination and that he came out on top of the list and was reachable. I
never got any announcement of Mr. Rope or of that examination. In any
event, Mr. Rope came in, and he seemed to be interested in a number of
things that affected the first district. Mr. Rope was with the Regional
Planning Commission for a short period of time. When the City of
Industry incorporated, Mr. Rope became the first CAO of that city. Now,
I also have to complete this story to tell you about Mr. James M.
Stafford. James Stafford was a planning commissioner.
- Murdoch
- A regional planning commissioner?
- Holden
- Of the Regional Planning Commission, that's correct, for a number of
years about the same time that we were working on the plan. He was aware
of what was happening and what we were doing and so on. We were talking
before about how the agriculture had to give way to the urban
development. One of the aspects of this was the change in the processing
of beef, most particularly the fattening yards.
- Murdoch
- Feedlots.
- Holden
- Feedlots. Mr. Stafford was a major player in the feedlot business. I do
recall talking to him one day when he said to me that it was a wonderful
business because it was a collegial one in which contracts for the
shipment of beef in and out were word-of-mouth contracts and that they
were inviolate and honored and that it was a wonderful operation in that
respect. Well, a couple of Jim Stafford's feedlots were, of course, in
the industrial area and were folded into the zoning, naturally, as
non-conforming feedlots, which was all right. As in many cases of
agriculture in this area, a solution other than zoning resulted in the
demolition of the existence of feedlots. It seemed to be easier to feed
these animals somewhere else. The old Cudahy activity resulted in the
first special-purpose city here in Los Angeles. What did they call it?
Cudahy?
- Murdoch
- Cudahy. Yeah.
- Holden
- Anyway, that had been around, a special-purpose city, for a long time.
Anyway, the processing of beef changed. The feedlots went out. That was
nice because we were having a terrible time with them, and that area
would have, too. So time went on and I went on to other things, to the
other area studies. Meanwhile, all of a sudden in this city, primarily industrial, there was
a big stink about some things a little out of the ordinary going on. It
turned out that Mr. James Stafford was brought up on charges of public
corruption. This was the same Mr. Stafford who had extolled the
advantages of the--
- Murdoch
- Handshake contract.
- Holden
- Handshake contract. That's correct. There are stories in the paper about
Mr. Stafford's conviction.
- Murdoch
- What was the nature of the charges?
- Holden
- Public corruption. Working with and taking a handout.
- Murdoch
- You mean bribes to slant zoning in the direction that you want it?
- Holden
- Bribes to facilitate development of the area. Considerable bribes,
apparently.
- Murdoch
- Let me digress to talk about politics for a second. At this crucial time
in the early fifties, were there supervisors that--? You were telling me
that some supervisors, one in particular, was very supportive of the
planning process. So who supported the planning process?
- Holden
- Mr. Jim Stafford was appointed by the supervisor, and the supervisor
himself was very supportive of the whole east San Gabriel Valley study.
- Murdoch
- As long as it was going in his direction?
- Holden
- That's right. And [he] took advantage of it in the effort to incorporate
the City of Industry-- [tape recorder off] Well, the question was who supported the planning. There were some that
those of us on the staff liked better than others. John Anson Ford was
certainly one of them, very much so. We did, however, have primary
relationships with the supervisors who had the two biggest districts,
which were always the first and the fifth districts at that particular
time and, to an extent, the fourth. John Anson Ford's district was
towards the center of the area, and he was very good on some of the
other things that the county got into from time to time, some of the
social issues and so on. On the same thing, I guess, if you were looking
at these people and their attitudes, you could characterize planning
things that the city would do and would do extensively as compared to
the county, where the county was more reluctant in certain areas. The
most important of these would be such things as public housing, though
the county did have a public housing program. One of the planning
commissioners who was most involved in that kind of thing and
subsequently took the job as director of the [Los Angeles] County
Housing Authority was Lewis Kanaster.
- Murdoch
- He was a regional planning commissioner? I didn't know that.
- Holden
- Yes, he was. He was appointed, I believe, by Burton W. Chace. He must
have been. I'm pretty sure he came from the fourth district.
- Murdoch
- Are there any other regional planning commissioners that come to mind at
that time as supporting your planning efforts, particularly your area
planning efforts?
- Holden
- One of the very best was Phillo. I think his first name was Robert.
- Murdoch
- Robert M. Phillo.
- Holden
- He was appointed when Warren M. Dorn became supervisor and replaced
Roger W. Jessup. I have several stories to tell later about Dorn as
supervisor. He was interesting because he was a major reason that we
were able to develop a program at a later time to bring north county and
the Malibu area up to date, but that's a little ahead of our story at
this point.
- Murdoch
- Well, after the east San Gabriel Valley plan, then you did the east
central area plan and developed a good working relationship with the
cities there. Around this time the Lakewood plan was invented. Did the
Regional Planning Commission have any involvement with that?
- Holden
- Yes. There's something that I would like to describe here in terms of
Lakewood and the cities that has occurred to me over the years and I
think probably is true and oftentimes is not mentioned in terms of
cityhood. It begins with the fact that when I first came to the planning
commission, there were not very many cities. There were about twenty-one
or something--I don't know-- maybe a couple more or less. There hadn't
been a new city incorporated in quite a period of time, and then just
very sporadically. Lakewood was then about three-quarters developed by
early 1953 through subdivisions. The big mall was in the city and so on.
The city leaders there decided that the Board of Supervisors was too far
away--the normal arguments--and that they'd like to do the whole thing
themselves. So they started to explore ways to do it. As we have
described before, you can have the whole urban development in the county
through a series of things--special districts and county activities and
so on. So the county, particularly some of the division heads, said,
"Well, if we're going to have somebody incorporating like that, why
we'll just offer to do this job for them." Some agreements were sought
at that time. By a series of those agreements, the so-called "Lakewood
Plan" was developed. It made possible a transition from county
unincorporated activity to cityhood, really, because it provided
services that it would take quite awhile to put together.
- Murdoch
- I think it fostered a rapid expansion in the number of incorporations
because it made it relatively easy for a relatively small city to have a
full range of services at, probably, an attractive cost.
- Holden
- Yes. This was one of the major reasons for the then gradually increasing
incorporation of cities. The second was something else, and I don't hear
it mentioned too often. That second item was that the state legislature
passed a bill increasing the sales tax and allowed cities to have a
portion of that tax. What was it? Less than 1 percent or 1/2 percent.
- Murdoch
- That was in the fifties.
- Holden
- That's right. Without that there probably would not have been a big rush
to incorporate. The idea of the Lakewood plan was possible, and it made
it easier in that it gave a possibility to the transition, but it was
basically the ability to transfer it to a city without increasing the
property tax that was the final economic situation which permitted
cities. And considering that from 1950 thereabouts with just over twenty
cities to the present-- I counted them off of a report that I had the
other day from 1996. There were eighty-eight then. I think there are
more now. The justification was local government. The economic
possibility was the 1/2 percent sales tax. But the important thing for
planning was something else, namely that almost all of these cities that
were created were not created in undeveloped areas. They were invariably
created out of substantial communities like Lakewood that were at least
three-quarters up to 90 or even 100 percent developed.
- Murdoch
- In the unincorporated areas.
- Holden
- In former unincorporated areas. Therefore, in effect what I'm saying is
that in the rapid expansion of a million people in this area in the
decade of the fifties and again a million people in the decade of the
sixties, almost all of that except for Los Angeles city and a little bit
in Lakewood was in unincorporated area. So the county of Los Angeles, in
effect, planned the whole damn region with the exception of the Antelope
Valley with the area plans and the zoning and the subdivision controls.
- Murdoch
- Well, around this time in the mid-fifties, the federal government became
supportive of local planning with the [Section] 701 [of the 1954 Housing
Act] program, and I assume that gave quite a boost to your planning
efforts.
- Holden
- Yes. I was looking around. I thought perhaps the east San Gabriel Valley
was one of the first, but I don't think so.
- Murdoch
- No, I think that you started area planning before there was any federal
help.
- Holden
- Yes, I think that's true, but shortly after that it came along and money
was provided for county planning. I think it was on the basis of that
that we got into this next major part of the planning and one of the
major things that was going on at that time. That was that Milt
Breivogel went up to Supervisor Warren Dorn, who had just in 1956 or so
been elected, and he said, "You seem to be having all kinds of problems
in north county. They're not really being solved. What we really ought
to do is to zone that whole area. In order to give you a little bit more
control, what we should do is to establish an emergency ordinance zoning
the whole of the Antelope Valley not now otherwise zoned"--meaning almost all of it-- "in the A2
zone." Mr. Dorn from this Pasadena experience thought maybe that was a
neat idea.
- Murdoch
- And supported you?
- Holden
- He offered and passed the ordinance creating a temporary A2 zone. Well,
what did an A2 zone do? What it did was made it impossible for anybody
to do anything in the north county, effectively, in any development way
until they finally settled on what kind of a zoning plan they needed or
what kind of a general plan they needed for the whole valley.
- Murdoch
- Well, that was very pioneering because subsequently it became quite
common that when you started a planning effort, or an updated planning
effort, that you would pass an emergency ordinance, which did not
require public hearings, to put a hold on them and allow the planners to
do their jobs. So I would say that was a very significant innovation.
[tape recorder off]
- Holden
- The reason that Milt looked forward to this was that in the lower half
of the county, his area plans were going ahead. They were doing fine.
There were beginning to be these outlined things. The question rose,
"Why wasn't there really good urban planning throughout the county? What
do we do about these little areas that are sticking around here, that
need to be attended to?" He thought, "Let's do the whole thing up at
once and do it right." So he included all of north county, the San
Gabriel Mountains, Castaic, Santa Clarita Valley area--
- Murdoch
- It included Santa Clarita Valley?
- Holden
- Yeah. And also the Malibu area, all the unincorporated area west of the
city of Los Angeles. So he did that. He applied for federal funds, and
he established a whole new division. Lo and behold, I became the
division chief of that particular division.
- Murdoch
- A major responsibility.
- Holden
- It was quite a daunting deal. So one of my major accomplishments or
claims to fame you might say, aside from some things about regional
planning we will mention later, is that I wasn't the man who initially
developed the zoning and so on, but I was the guy who virtually finished
up all the zoning in the Los Angeles County unincorporated area.
- Murdoch
- This was the late fifties--
- Holden
- Yes, it was '57 or '58, somewhere around that.
- Murdoch
- --when you started north county and extending on into the sixties?
- Holden
- Yeah.
- Murdoch
- Well, who were some of your key staff members on this major undertaking
and did you use any consultants?
- Holden
- We didn't use very many consultants except that we did employ somebody
to do an opinion survey throughout north Los Angeles County, which was
of considerable help.
- Murdoch
- Well, that was very innovative at the time.
- Holden
- It was very useful, as a matter of fact, as to what people were thinking
and so on. [tape recorder off] The planning teams that were set up for north Los Angeles County and for
the Malibu-- I was going to make some point now. Let's see.
- Murdoch
- Two separate teams.
- Holden
- There were two separate teams. We really started, basically, on north
county first, and we did it in three parts and very similar to the east
San Gabriel Valley in many ways--the initial research program, the
general plan, and then a whole series of zoning activities to bring the
whole area in line with the planning theory at the time. So that was the
basic, general outline of what we were trying to achieve.
- Murdoch
- You had one advantage in north county because there weren't too many
cities up there. Was Lancaster a separate city?
- Holden
- No.
- Murdoch
- Was it an unincorporated city? Or Palmdale?
- Holden
- I think Palmdale incorporated first. For some reason the Lancaster
people were a little skittish about it. It is true that at that same
time the county set up regional offices in Lancaster or included in an
existing office a representative of the planning commission. So after
that there was a permanent representative of the Regional Planning
Commission in Lancaster. Perhaps Lancaster felt a little less anxious to
be close to the supervisors for that reason. In any event, all the things that one could say about zoning and so on--
Various incidents happened, very like in the east San Gabriel Valley. I
found that it was not the Wild West that it really seemed to be, though
we did have some pretty raucous hearings from time to time. We developed
planning and research first, and then we started out and did several
different sections for specific zoning ordinances. The main things that we were concerned with were these. First of all,
even at the top of our activity out there and subsequent to that until
quite recently, the population out there really hasn't been all that
large. I think it got up to about one hundred thousand, as I remember,
and so on. So one hundred thousand people in an area that could contain
as many as are currently in Los Angeles County south of the mountains.
There were not very many people. We had many, many acres of vacant land. We had all the problems, some of
which I'm sure you had to contend with at your time and, I'm sure, even
Jim [James] Hartel has today as director of planning--this question of
illegal subdivisions and so on. I do remember an occasion in zoning
where John Malone, who was head of the subdivision section at the
county, and I were talking about what to do up there. I was wondering
what kind of an area requirement to put on some of those areas, if any.
So he looked around at it one way or another, and he said, "You've been
talking about maybe two and a half or higher." He said, "Forget it." He
said, "What we want is some area requirement that relates to
urbanization. So you put a two-acre area requirement out there on all
this stuff, and whenever these things come in, these two and a half acre
tracts with almost no subdivision requirements, we'll tell him he has to
get his zone changed in order to go for that larger area requirement."
They probably could have done it anyway, but it was a good ruse, and I
think it probably saved a lot of two and a half acre tracts, which had
much less than the required and logical amount of improvement. But,
actually, in the far reaches of the Antelope Valley, the question of
premature and inadequate subdivision, evidently, is still a problem to
this day.
- Murdoch
- You indicated that another major planning effort of the department at
that time was the county-wide recreation.
- Holden
- Yeah. Let's get to the recreation later. I want to talk about recreation
in general. In this particular case, it related to a couple of things in north
county. We'll complete my share of that anyway. One of the major jobs
obviously was to protect the Palmdale airport, and the real means--
Actually, there were two. As long as we kept some of the property at the
ends of the runway in the A2 zone, and it was actually developed for
agriculture, that was a pretty good deal. Heavy industrial zoning was
the other tool that we used, primarily to the west side. Since the
airport had its operations, the Lockheed [Martin Corporation] plant,
etc., its proximity to Muroc Air Force Base and the dry lake and the
experimental stations, this was an important thing to protect. We had
pretty good support for that, though some people wondered about it. As a
matter of fact, the director of planning for Los Angeles, Charlie
[Charles B.] Bennett, a good friend of Milt's, came out there and looked
around one time. Then he kind of mused to himself and he said, "You
know, I'm sure Milt realizes he's never going to see all of that
industrial land develop." Then he said, "Oh, well. You know, there are
ways and means of getting a job done."
- Murdoch
- Your efforts were very successful in protecting the glide path to the
airport, and when you see all the controversy that surrounds all the
other airports, it certainly was a job well done.
- Holden
- Yes. Subsequently to my plan, there was a complete second plan done
which was contracted out. I was not really-- I was off doing something
else at the time. I think it was probably an important plan in one
respect; it was more related to the environment somewhat. There are two other interesting highlights on this and the Castaic, Santa
Clarita activity. One of them is that peculiar situation in remote areas
that you get into-- A part of our problem was to zone the little
community of Gorman, which, you know, is at the top of the pass.
- Murdoch
- Near Castaic?
- Holden
- Beyond Castaic and over the Grapevine, up at the top and almost down the
other side. Right at the top. It's a little place. I got a call. They
wanted to have a meeting out there before we went too far. So I came
out, and we had some ideas of what we were supposed to do. It was kind
of a raucous thing. There were maybe twenty people there. They had all
kinds of ideas about this little place. So after a day or two later I
got a call. It was from a Mr. Ralphs, and I was invited to go out and
talk to him. It turned out that Mr. Ralphs, who was either related to or
actually did establish the Ralphs grocery store chain-- Actually, the
Ralphs family there owned most of this community of Gorman. So I went to
talk to him, and I talked to him. I showed him some of the problem areas
we had where some people had been talking with us a couple of nights
before about this. He looked at it and he said, "I think your ideas are
pretty good. Now, I don't want you to worry about any of these people
over here that are opposed to some of the things you're doing. When you
come to the hearing, it will all be smooth as cake." [laughs] And lo and
behold, when we had the zoning hearings on that particular area--smooth
as cake. The old patriarch had everything completely in hand.
- Murdoch
- Perhaps there's something to be said for old style politics.
- Holden
- Anyway, there are all kinds of things that happen to you in planning. We
did complete all the zoning and planning for north Los Angeles County. I
suppose there are dozens of other things that we could talk about. It's
just important to note--and it's important to me--that I had the
interesting experience of being the man who really had the experience of
finishing up the--
- Murdoch
- The first complete land-use plan and zoning ordinance for a
comprehensive view of Los Angeles County.
- Holden
- And of those particular areas which were the most outstanding, not used.
- Murdoch
- Well, in the Santa Clarita Valley I think that you and the county also
encouraged the family there--
- Holden
- The Newhall Land and Farming Company.
- Murdoch
- --the Newhalls, to prepare a new town plan which worked out quite well.
- Holden
- Yes, they did. They prepared a plan. I think the same thing happened to
it that's happened to other such plans and several of which have been
prepared around the region. That parent company had a tendency to sell
off portions of it, and then the buyers developed their portions. But
their individual development relates to their market needs at a given
time, and sometimes they didn't always equate completely with the plans.
So it's an interesting fact that sometimes these parcels of land were
somewhat critical in terms of following the general plan and sometimes
required extensive revision of the original plans. [tape recorder off] The other major area that we studied was Malibu. The question was, how
did that get started, and why after all these years were we invited into
Malibu to perform this study. I think that one of the major reasons, in
the first place, was that one of the people out there who wanted to
develop a small subdivision near the Malibu colony came in to see Milton
Breivogel. What he really said was that all the deed restrictions
established on a private lot-by-lot basis were expiring soon. A little
exploration of that came to the point where we found out that
historically the Ringe family had owned the entire Malibu coast clear to
the tops of the hills, the old Malibu Rancho. There had been some
development, but the old Ringe family held everything very closely under
their control. They even started a subdivision along the beach in the
thirties. They sold off parts of the land and issued some bonds in its
development, and in the Depression the development went bankrupt. But
the family retained a good many pieces of property in Malibu as part of
the settlement, and they also retained the water rights to Malibu Creek.
So the family, interestingly enough, had to be contacted every time
somebody wanted to build something in the Malibu area to assure that
there was water available for the development. Every time they did that,
the family requested deed restrictions on each lot. So, in effect, they
were actually developing a kind of plan for Malibu over all of these
years from 1930 on to the time we began to look at that area.
- Murdoch
- Nineteen-sixty.
- Holden
- Yeah, the late fifties and sixties.
- Murdoch
- The family was the local planner.
- Holden
- I got acquainted with some of them. I met Ms. Ringe--actually Ms.
Adamson, originally Rhoda Ringe--the daughter of the original Ringe, the
matriarch of that family. Rhoda spelled backward is Adohr. She was a big
dairy owner. Her family also owned much property up in the north. I did
visit them at the end of their pack- train trail up Malibu Canyon in
back of the big, high mountain with its chateau on top. We talked there
about a number of things, and one of the more important results of that
with Ms. Adamson was the fact that she had built a major house for
herself, an estate-type house, on the beach, right on a curve of Malibu
beach. A park [Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation] department man
by the name of Dougherty, Frank Dougherty, went out with me. What we
said was, "Well, what you're doing is you're complaining to us about all
the surf riders next to you near the Malibu pier and about things that
happened in the lagoon on the other side of you. Of course, you can
fence your property off, but you're really not going to take over the
surf and sand because that's state property. So we don't know what
exactly you want to do, but we might suggest--since you may not use the
beach that intensely and have these problems--that you might want to
give the mansion to the county as a part of the development of the whole
beach activity in Malibu." Well, we didn't hear a whole lot about that.
We went about our business and so on, but eventually the whole mansion
there came into county ownership.
- Murdoch
- That's a fantastic story.
- Holden
- As we zoned Malibu, we were talking about their practically having a
plan through the deed restrictions. We, of course, knew what those deed
restrictions were. We were researching as we were doing the zoning. It
was amazing how well what they did lined up with what I wanted to
suggest for various kinds of development, particularly the commercial
areas and things of that kind. It was kind of fantastic. They were
really pretty good planners. There were in the Ringe family--rather, the
Adamson family--two children, a boy and a girl. Now they're not children
anymore. They're grown adults. I got a call along towards the end of
this thing from Supervisor Burton Chace as a matter of fact, and he
said, "Before we really go to a hearing on some of these zoning plans
down there, I'd like to have you go out and talk to the Adamsons." So I
did go out to their headquarters, actually of Adohr [Farms] milk,
somewhere down south in Los Angeles. We looked at all of their
properties and discussed the possibilities and so on. I didn't have any
really great problems at all. It was one of those situations that could
have been pretty hairy, but, actually, they were quite reasonable and
minimal. We arrived at a very satisfactory plan for the several major
pieces of property that they owned, and I was also able to give them
some protection in the zoning our plan at that time proposed on a couple
of properties that they were particularly interested in. All in all, it
was a very interesting experience. Otherwise-- We were talking about supervisors. Burton Chace, who was supervisor of
the area Malibu is in, was a very conservative guy. He was a Republican,
but he was a kindly man and he had a good feeling about how to work with
staff. He was the kind of guy who you could go in and see, and he might
say, "Well, I'm going to have to vote for that," but that was it. He
wasn't saying, "You're wrong." He wasn't saying, "If you keep on doing
these kinds of things, I'm going to get you fired." He'd just say,
"Yeah. I feel like I have to go another way."
- Murdoch
- Very nice.
- Holden
- So he did. I remember one of the major situations. Milt and I went over.
He had an elderly man in his office. His property extended out to the
ocean from Pacific Coast Highway. It was in an area we'd probably put in
an A1 zone. We figured that eventually various things would develop,
probably single family [homes]. But his property was right in the middle
of this vacant property. This poor old man was putting up a great
argument that he couldn't sell the property for much unless it was zoned
multiple. What to do? It was obvious that Chace was sympathetic towards
him. He said, "What can we do for this man?" Another interesting incident about the adoption of that particular plan
was that there were a good many points where people disagreed.
Consequently, when we were holding the big hearing before the Board of
Supervisors, I had to explain what the final commission's adopted plan
was. Then we'd have a whole series of people come up and tell us how we
were all wrong. Finally, Milt Breivogel got up and went over to Chace
and he said, "Why don't we do this? Why don't you move the plan be
adopted, but that all these controversial areas be referred to the
planning commission and set up as separate cases?" Well, Chace said,
"That's a great idea. It will get rid of the A2 emergency zoning, and
all these people will have a second chance to say what they want to
say." That's the way it was handled. All these separate little incidents
were taken--
1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE AUGUST 24, 1998
- Murdoch
- We were talking about your experiences as a chief planner with the Los
Angeles [County] Regional Planning Commission in the mid-sixties. Tell
us more about what the Regional Planning Commission was doing in those
days.
- Holden
- Yes. We have already discussed the big project in its biggest parts in
the north county and the Malibu area. In this big project, finishing up
a major revision of the zoning for the county and a revision of most of
the small areas that it had only very cursorily zoned, there were a
couple of smaller items left, and those I'd like to start with this
morning. Actually, they were not so small in a way: they were more
unusual. In this same series of activities, one of the places that we looked at
was Universal City. It was my first introduction in a lot of ways to the
entertainment industry. It came about because of our basic program and
some discussions that I had with the studios. Now, there are two aspects
of this that I want to talk about really, and very shortly. One of them
is the peculiarities of movie studios, and the second one is that the
entertainment industry really has glamour-- In the second part--rather
anecdotal-- In the first part, having decided that we should take a look at Universal
City, we worked on what was actually going on there-- Perhaps a bit of
introduction: Universal City, actually, is a small enclave of
unincorporated territory bounded by Los Angeles city mostly and by
Glendale and Burbank, relatively small compared to either one of these
three places that I've mentioned, and almost completely, I think,
controlled or owned by the studio interests. So the first thing we had
to do was to go out and look at what was going on. And one of the first
things that becomes clear about a studio is they do practically
everything. They had a forge. They had buildings that had amazing
structures, which were really quite a problem to any building
inspector--how to handle it. Some very extraordinary things happened.
They had explosives going off on the property. So they didn't fit any
standard activity. So that was the first concern. Well, they had existed
there at Universal City for a long time, because the county had done
things to accommodate them. There was a fire department actually located
on the Universal [Studios, Inc.] lots. I think there was almost a
full-time building man to take care of any oddities that came along and
to make sure that they at least had a good deal of flexibility to do
what they wanted to do. Well, the more we got into this particular situation, the more it
appeared that the best really that we could do at that time was to look
at some things that might help separate the surrounding communities from
Universal Studios itself. So we put some commercial zoning along the
side of the freeway through Cahuenga Pass. It didn't completely satisfy
some of the people who lived across the pass, living in the hills. We
put some large area requirements and residential zoning, which would
severely limit the use of properties immediately adjacent to people on
the southeast side. I do believe that this experience, plus at least one
other that we had, did bring the county eventually to do some work on
how a zoning ordinance could be better adapted to this particular kind
of use.
- Murdoch
- I think you handled it with a conditional use permit, which I believe
may still be in existence.
- Holden
- I think Los Angeles City does an overlay zone, which might be the best
thing. And it may be that some places, maybe other counties or even Los
Angeles County, permitted a movie studio in the A2 zone. Anyway, be that
as it may, studios are in no way common activities. I might mention one other similar incident. Out in the Malibu area the
studios have outdoor lots and these lots were used for the old-- I
forget the name of the show-- The show with the Korean War medical
[unit]. Anyway, out there are these camps in Korea among other things.
- Murdoch
- You mean the USO [United Service Organizations] troops?
- Holden
- No, the M*A*S*H television series. Anyway, the important thing in that
particular instance was that we came across the idea that somehow or
other we had to incorporate this movie studio into the plan for Malibu,
which, generally speaking, in that area had low activity agricultural
uses with large area requirements. There we used a conditional use, not
a conditional use permit, but a special permit--as it's known in the
county.
- Murdoch
- Well, that studio that you helped start out in the Malibu area is now a
tourist attraction where people go and visit.
- Holden
- It may well be. We were almost in trouble with our attorneys, because
they thought it was a pretty large piece of property suddenly to put in
a special permit. Anyway, we did it. We were warned, but nobody seems to
have attacked it so far as a matter of law. I haven't been able to track
that again to see what the current status is. As you say, apparently
additional activities have gone on there in your knowledge or possibly
in your time. But the last thing I want to say about studios-- I was born, of course,
and grew up in Southern California. I had almost no exposure to the
entertainment business, and almost everybody in Southern California,
actually, does not have much exposure to the entertainment business
directly. So we thought, "Well, it's one of those things off there." I
thought, "Well, okay. It's just another kind of activity." But I noticed
that many people seemed to have a special interest in that. They all
perked up and were excited when you talked about the entertainment
business. Well, the workaday thing that we did out there, the talks we
had, were mostly with studio lawyers and people of that kind. But I did
get to drop in and see what was going on on the set of Spartacus, what
was going on in other big films way back there and so forth. I did get
to take my family and kids to the commissary when it was a real studio
and not an entertainment activity. And naturally we planned a trip for
the Regional Planning Commission, a field trip.
- Murdoch
- I'm sure they enjoyed it.
- Holden
- We went out there, and as we were looking around through the place, one
of our guides said, "Now, wouldn't you want to talk to somebody? Perhaps
we have somebody on the lot today that you would like to talk to." Well,
you could see everybody perk up. Even the commissioners are not immune
to this kind of thing. So-- "Yes, wouldn't we." So they said, "Well, it
happens today that little Beaver [Jerry Mathers]--" A show [Leave It to
Beaver] going on at that time, was available. And I looked around, and
Mrs. L. [Lucy] S. Baca, who was with the group at that time, was just
beaming. And lo and behold, they went out and they got little Beaver to
come over and he talked for a little while with us. Everyone, every one
of the commissioners, was paying close attention, and I was paying close
attention. I don't know. And suddenly I realized that I don't think
anybody's really immune to this glamorous side of the entertainment
business.
- Murdoch
- I'm sure that's right. Tell me a little bit more about Mrs. Baca. She, I
think, served as vice-chairman of the [Los Angeles County Regional
Planning] Commission and chairman of the commission during that time?
- Holden
- She did for a long period of time. She was a long time on the
commission. I can't really tell you about her leadership positions or
when she might have been chairman. I don't remember. But she was there
so long that almost everything that was available, she would have done.
Basically, I think she was a pretty good commissioner. She tended to be
quite personal in terms of the staff and other things like that.
- Murdoch
- Another interesting assignment you had in that time that you mentioned
was Catalina Island [Santa Catalina Island]. Tell us about Catalina
Island.
- Holden
- Well, I'm telling you about half of the story and [I will] indicate that
there was a fairly good conclusion. It turned out that the city of
Avalon was interested in some expansion and that William Pereira, the
architect, was involved with some development in that area. So an
unusual proposal was made that Pereira do some of the basic plan and
that the county contract with the other parties and we did some of the
implementations and planning in the sense of what the zoning ordinance
might be and its changes. Well, that came about, and so--because of my personal interest maybe more
than anything else--I did do the first land-use surveys. So we flew over
the island, and we examined the whole place in rather extensive detail.
- Murdoch
- What--you flew in an airplane? This was before helicopters, wasn't it?
- Holden
- This was in one of those old--
- Murdoch
- Pontoon planes?
- Holden
- Pontoon planes. Flying boats. That's right.
- Murdoch
- Wow.
- Holden
- There was a service from the mainland to Catalina which had those flying
boats--two or three of them. They landed near Avalon. So we commandeered
at least one of those for a while and the pilot, and we flew all over
the island. We drove all over most of it also. Now, what actually
happened was that then William Pereira-- One of his main interests was
in developing some apartment-type buildings adjacent to the present
development in Avalon, those that ran up against the hills. I had
various interesting kinds of suggestions: running the buildings and
tiers up against the hills, having little trams that run up and down the
hill to service the apartments and so forth. Some of these, actually,
did get built eventually. There was some expansion of the Avalon area.
It was a town toward the east end of the area. At that time Edison
Company was interested in taking over the supply of utilities for the
island.
- Murdoch
- Edison provided, and I think still does, a full range of utility--water,
gas, electricity. That was very unusual, I thought.
- Holden
- That is correct. They had a desalting plant and so forth. It was never
tremendously large, however. The other interesting area, and I think the area that developers were
interested in, was the isthmus area. Here again, provisions were made so
that the flat land in there, that area, could be fairly readily
developed for housing, vacation housing, regular housing--for anybody
who wanted to live on the island.
- Murdoch
- That isthmus area was the site of the 1930s movie Mutiny on the Bounty.
- Holden
- I think probably it was. The movie industry, not only there but also
speaking regionally on some of the island up to the north--
- Murdoch
- It occurs to me that they did cowboy movies, and that's why to this day
we still have bison--buffaloes--all over the island.
- Holden
- That's about true. Yes. In any event, there were two things that
happened at that time which rather limited the further thinking of
development. One natural thing--that some of those hills are pretty darn
steep out there, and the way of getting around-- I think the fact that
that's an island which is quite a ways from Los Angeles would attract
some people but not others. It is true that they improved communication
by subsequently providing large ferry boats, but not anywhere near the
kind that were originally used.
- Murdoch
- Well, one limiting factor is the water supply. Desalinization is a very
expensive process.
- Holden
- That's right. That result was that the more expanded ideas of the
expansion never did generate, and the county working with the interests
that owned the property--that would be the Wrigley interests--made an
agreement first to have the county--
- Murdoch
- Was that on your watch that that exciting Wrigley agreement was
developed?
- Holden
- Yeah. I think it was just afterwards.
- Murdoch
- Oh, just afterwards? Your plan may have--
- Holden
- Inspired it.
- Murdoch
- --influenced it, and that is very exciting.
- Holden
- At any rate, it was a good deal. There was an agreement to maintain
openness and so on, on the island. And I believe--you can carry on this
one, finish the story--the land was eventually ceded to the county, was
it not?
- Murdoch
- No, it's still--
- Holden
- UCLA conservancy trust--?
- Murdoch
- --in the trust.
- Holden
- You worked on it subsequently?
- Murdoch
- I subsequently prepared a plan for Catalina Island, and it was a very
interesting experience. We flew over with helicopters with the whole
planning commission, and then later there was an accident somewhere else
and the commission got a little bit squeamish about flying around--
- Holden
- Taking a helicopter ride [laughs]. That's very interesting.
- Murdoch
- --in helicopters. Well, another interesting assignment, which was a key
unincorporated county area, was East Los Angeles. Tell us about your
East Los Angeles plan.
- Holden
- That was an experience with, perhaps, a more definite ethnic community
than any that I had worked in. It was rather a continuation of the
original project.
- Murdoch
- The county-wide land use--on planning-- Yes, go ahead.
- Holden
- Yes. So we had to go out there and see what we could do, in this whole,
established--pretty well established--community. I suppose a few remarks about it would be in order. My impression at that
time was that the leadership in East Los Angeles and extending out to
the east was topside and fairly shallow in some ways. Art [Arthur J.]
Baum was an important player, and he owned the newspaper. There were
three or four judges and other people who had Spanish surnames.
- Murdoch
- I think the auditorium at the East Los Angeles Community College is
named-- Baum donated the money, and it's named after Arthur Baum, a
generous man.
- Holden
- Yes. However, at the time we went out there, we decided, mostly in
conference, that we would have instead of a committee to review the
zoning, that we would go out with some big, well-advertised hearings. So
we did.
- Murdoch
- Workshops?
- Holden
- Workshops. So we did have that first hearing, and guess what? It seemed
that about half the community showed up. The animosity toward downtown
in a number of these groups was rather significant. So actually, what we
had to do-- We listened almost all night--well, it was around towards
twelve o'clock--before we could close up the meeting, and we found out
in this big meeting a number of places where our problems would be. What
we obviously had to do was to have then a whole series of smaller
workshops and see what we could do to talk and work out some additional
problems with some members of this community.
- Murdoch
- I know exactly what you're talking about, because even twenty years
later, we heard a lot about Chavez Ravine whenever we worked in East Los
Angeles. I do think that the citizens of East Los Angeles were imposed
upon in the old days. All the freeways go through there and all the
freeway interchanges. That was, of course, before your time. *[At this
time I was reassigned, and the job of completing the East Los Angeles
unincorporated study was completed, I believe, under Joseph K. Kennedy's
direction.]
- Holden
- I have one other interesting anecdote, however, that we can add to this,
which occurred, I think, somewhat earlier. That's when I was in charge
of the special permits and exceptions section. There had been an
exception presented, filed, by a man just off of Atlantic Boulevard to
the west and north of what would be--well, anyway, Sixth Street or
something like that. Anyway, it was a request for a business in a
residential area with signs and other things that go with such a
business. Some of that subsequently is permitted in a residential zone,
but in this particular case it looked fairly significant. It was also
about six or seven houses up from the first commercial zone along the
boulevard. So the commission dutifully turned it down, and the general
theories of planning would find it natural--
- Murdoch
- This was an inappropriate spot zone proposal. Good for the commission.
So then what happened when it got to the [Los Angeles County] Board of
Supervisors?
- Holden
- So it was appealed to the Board of Supervisors.
- Murdoch
- Naturally.
- Holden
- I got a call from Hugh Dynes, who was then the chief deputy to I think
it was Legg. The supervisor Herbert C. Legg, [Frank G.] Bonelli, and
then [Peter F.] Schabarum were in the first district. Hugh Dynes was a
principal deputy there for a long time. Anyway, I went up to Hugh's
office and he went over two or three things with me and he said, "I've
got an interesting one here. Tell me about it." So I explained to him
what had happened, why it was turned down, and so forth. He looked at me
and he said, "Well, you know, that sort of makes some sense." He says,
"What I want you to do is to go out there and talk to this fellow." Then
he said, "If you can persuade him that this is the proper thing to do,
for him not to do this, then we can go ahead with this. Otherwise, I'm
going to have to take that up to Legg and get it approved." So I did. I went out to talk to this fellow. He listened to my story quite
respectfully, and he said, "Well, Mr. Holden, I think you don't realize
that things are a little different down here. I think-- I'm pretty well
known in this community. People come around and talk to me all over from
this region, and I like to know where they are. This is a convenient
spot. I don't think Herbert Legg's going to object to my having this
activity in this particular spot. I know that you have certain
allegiances, grandiose things, standards that you use, but--you know--I
just don't understand why it should apply in this particular case." And
that was his position. So I went back to Hugh Dynes, and I said, "It
seems to be a rather special case. I certainly can't persuade him not to
go ahead."
- Murdoch
- I think it was outrageous to even be asked to go and persuade a
developer not to do something that he wants to do. You would have one
chance of a snowball in hell of doing that.
- Holden
- What Hugh wanted to do was to show me that this particular guy was a
real power head from the ethnic background point of view, and as a young
planner it was a pretty good lesson.
- Murdoch
- Well, and it was subsequently approved?
- Holden
- It was subsequently approved.
- Murdoch
- Now, the developer said, "I don't think that anybody is against it," but
did you have any testimony at either of the hearings against it?
- Holden
- Sure, and the whole thing followed normal hearing practices.
- Murdoch
- Played.
- Holden
- Well, some. Not very much. It was such an outrageous location--that was
the problem. But this kind of an activity and what we would consider an
outrageous location was what this guy was saying didn't apply, he
thought, to his community and his leadership position.
- Murdoch
- Well, of course it applied.
- Holden
- Well, of course it applied.
- Murdoch
- Do you suspect that he made political contributions from time to time?
- Holden
- I'm sure he got many votes for whomever he supported for the Board of
Supervisors, which is a government unit.
- Murdoch
- Tell me more about-- Well, Hugh Dynes worked for a number of
supervisors.
- Holden
- Did he? I thought he was primarily first district.
- Murdoch
- No, no, no, but I mean, in the first district--
- Holden
- Yes.
- Murdoch
- --he stayed on. What was the series of supervisors again?
- Holden
- Legg was the first that I remember. After that, Bonelli, and finally
Schabarum.
- Murdoch
- Well, I knew Hugh Dynes when I first came to the county. He took me out
to lunch.
- Holden
- Did he?
- Murdoch
- Trying, I guess, to get me started in the right direction, but that's a
different story. What was your reaction to Bonelli?
- Holden
- Well, I think they're all pretty much the same. They were quite
interested and personally acquainted with a lot of the developers in
there. At that time, there were a lot of individual developers rather
than the big outfits that operate today. I would say one other thing. This leads us to the question of whether
there were illegal activities in the county and were some supervisors
crooked and all this kind of thing. I want to say that, in my time, the
professional departments seemed to be pretty clean. I did not know of
very many, if any, actual incidents.
- Murdoch
- All of California and Los Angeles had a reputation in those days--post
World War II, we're talking about--for being quite clean, and I know
from personal experience [they were] very clean compared to the East
Coast, where I had worked in New Jersey and New York and West Virginia.
But nevertheless, campaign contributions always play a role in planning,
even in Los Angeles.
- Holden
- That's correct, but the other thing I want to add on that is that the
professionals were very much able to work with the supervisors
generally, and they said, "Well, I know you know that this is against
the basic theories," as in the case of East L.A., "but I'm not in a
position to tell the supervisor that he cannot do something. He is the
elected representative."
- Murdoch
- Planning always has a very difficult problem of serving a number of
different constituents.
- Holden
- Yes, that's correct.
- Murdoch
- Tell me about Ted [Theodore] Lumpkin.
- Holden
- That's a good story here. Ted was black. He was a very smart man, and he
took examinations well. The thing that I wanted to remark about in
general was the fact that pretty much the Regional Planning Commission
was color blind. As a matter of fact, I don't really know any incidents
that were of great significance. This particular situation was that Ted
passed the civil service planning exam and he was assigned to my
activity. At the time, the major part of my activity was in the Malibu
area. The Malibu area was a rather rich, almost lily-white area at that
time. So I looked at Ted, at the situation, and I thought, "Well, I
don't want to bring any real hardship on Ted here. I think I'd better
talk to Milton. We should be of common mind as to what's going on here."
So I went to see him. God bless Milt. He said, "You know, he passed the
exam. He's supposed to be qualified for this job. I've assigned him to
you. Use him every place that you would use a planner." That's exactly
what I did. I sent him out. I introduced him the first time when he went
out to one of these contentious little communities, actually in the
Calabasas area, and--bless his heart--he did a wonderful job. And that's
my story about Ted Lumpkin and the basic approach that the county
Regional Planning Commission, and particularly Milt, had to the whole
question of color.
- Murdoch
- Good for Milt and good for you. Tell me more about the supervisors at
that time-- Burton Chace and then Kenneth "Kenny" Hahn came over from
the city.
- Holden
- Let me talk about Hahn first. This is a particular incident. I think it
was Joe Kennedy and maybe someone else was with me, and we were looking
at a big empty piece of property, actually under government ownership,
down in Lawndale. It was destined to be a large park and about to have a
golf course. While we were standing around--
- Murdoch
- Where was this located?
- Holden
- Lawndale.
- Murdoch
- Oh. Lawndale.
- Holden
- While we were standing around, Kenny Hahn, Supervisor Hahn, and a couple
of other people showed up. I'm not sure why they were there; I guess
they were doing the same as I: looking at the property. So he stopped to
talk to us. Supervisor Hahn liked to tell people what he thought, and he
was pretty gregarious. He started to lecture us on his points of view
about government.
- Murdoch
- He loved to do that.
- Holden
- Yes. He started, among other things-- There are two things that I
remember particularly: the first thing he said was, "If you give
constituents parks and roads, then they will get you elected."
- Murdoch
- Well, he was a master of local politics. There's no question about that.
- Holden
- So then he started to talk about relationships with the staff. What he
said was, "Well, I like my staff and the department heads, the people in
the county, to come up with great ideas. I like them to bring up the
best possible thing and the expanded things we can do." Then he says,
"When they bring it over to me and to the supervisors, that's when I can
knock it down to where we can--"
- Murdoch
- Actually do it.
- Holden
- "--actually do it." Now, this is not too odd a point of view among
politicians, but there are various ways of exercising it. Kenneth Hahn
was not above doing that in a situation where the department head or
presenter for the staff was standing up there trying to defend his plan.
And that is an awfully embarrassing position for a staff member. Not
always was that true, but-- He did have some very good deputies, and I
must say that some of his points of view, I thought, were better than
those exercised in some respects by some supervisors. In contrast to this, Burton [W.] Chace, as a supervisor, was a man-- He
served the whole beach area, from Long Beach on clear around here to the
county boundaries, as a matter of fact. There are a lot of difficult
problems in that area, but I never knew a situation where Supervisor
Chace in any sense deliberately put the staff in a compromising
position. In other words, although some things may not have gone as well
as some of us liked, we were not compromised, and he was an easy man to
work with. Now, that's two different styles.
- Murdoch
- That wasn't necessarily true of Burton Chace?
- Holden
- This was true of Burton Chace. It was not particularly true in some
instances of Kenneth Hahn. This was the difference. I just want to
contrast them for a difference in approach.
- Murdoch
- Ed, you mentioned the name Victor York. Tell us about Victor York. Who
was he?
- Holden
- I'd like to, because Victor York was one of the more interesting and
unusual planning commissioners--that I knew. Victor York was a
rough-and-ready man, self-educated I found out, and he was described one
time to me as a minor oil man, perhaps as a minor oil millionaire. He,
as I was able to observe, had a number of oil wells, that was for sure.
As a matter of fact, he gave one away one time to the Salvation Army,
which was one of his favorite charities. Victor was unusual in a lot of
ways. He was uneducated in the normal sense, self-educated in the best sense.
He had kind of a fierce sense of fairness and of independence and he
could be-- But before we leave the oil thing, I'd like to point out that
Victor told me the story one time of how he located oil wells. He used a
dousing stick very like you might use to locate water, and apparently it
worked quite well. What I noticed from his stories, however, was that,
invariably, where he was using the dousing stick was on the periphery of
an established oil field, which kind of looked interesting to me. He
didn't leave it all to the dousing stick. He had a nice selection of
areas to begin with. Anyway, he was a kind and generous man also and
always picked up the tab for anything that anybody was doing. He
subsequently donated one of the fields that he had acquired in his oil
activities to the city of Whittier and it became what's known as York
Field. The other thing I wanted to talk about with respect to Victor was that
he, along with other people earlier--for example, [Roger W.] Jessup did
more or less the same thing-- Victor would periodically have a big
meeting of people that he liked in government, and he would invite
particularly the first district supervisor, but perhaps others that he
cared to. He invariably had the sheriff there. He had a lot of local
officials. He had department heads and a few who might have particular
interests in some area at that time. What he described to me one day
relating to these meetings was-- He said, "You know, a lot of people
come and talk to me about things. They want favors of one kind or
another, or they want me to go in and talk to the supervisor and so on."
He said, "You know, I don't like to do that." He said, "I think there's
a better way. So what I do is I have these big meetings, and I tell
these people to come and talk to me." He said, "Well, I'll tell you what
I'll do. I'll invite you to a meeting that I'm going to have very soon.
It's going to be a luncheon. You'll have a good time." He said, "At that
meeting, you're going to have all the people that you're interested in
talking to." He said, "If you're really interested in talking to these
people, you go ahead and talk to them." That was his position with
respect to influence, one way or another.
- Murdoch
- It sounds like a very good innovation.
- Holden
- I'm sure Jessup had the same kind of thing when he had those big
parties.
- Murdoch
- What district was York? What area of the county?
- Holden
- He was the first district.
- Murdoch
- The first district?
- Holden
- Yeah, the Schabarum--
- Murdoch
- So he had been appointed by Bonelli?
- Holden
- Bonelli or Legg. I think, probably, Bonelli by the time he was
appointed. But, you know--
- Murdoch
- Very interesting.
- Holden
- His range of acquaintanceships was, of course, considerable. He was a
very good friend of the then sheriff. I don't remember which sheriff it
was. Very much so. Anyway, just an anecdote of one of the more colorful
commissioners. The only thing I'd--
- Murdoch
- You wanted to tell us a little bit more about your major-- Of course,
one of the key positive things of the Regional Planning Commission was
its act of major highway planning and the master plan of highways, and
you wanted to tell us a little bit more about the growing traffic and
what happened in La Mirada.
- Holden
- I guess the point I want to make--because who knows who might be reading
this someday, including, possibly, future planners--and the subject
really that I wanted to talk about was design in planning, which,
sometimes, and perhaps even through the course of this particular
discussion, we didn't hear very much about. There were instances when
some rather big design considerations did come into play. In my opinion,
it may be that subsequently, when many of the concerns that I've been
talking about may have been in some ways met, that we may get back to a
good deal of the actual design effort by planners working for--as [they]
are now--private parties and for other redevelopment and other
activities related to planning, which I had not too much direct contact
with. We did, however, have a couple of interesting examples, particularly in
the traffic areas, in how subdivisions were designed and what kinds of
compromises were made in their design. We were able to influence traffic
problems and the relationship of very busy streets to the residential
communities. These, actually, in most cases, were a matter of an
expansion of the theory of the super block and of controlling the
exterior edges, particularly in favor of the more fast-moving traffic.
- Murdoch
- Well, the [Los Angeles County] Highway Department [Metropolitan
Transportation Authority] worked with the planners of the county doing a
good job in laying out major routes that separated major traffic from
minor traffic.
- Holden
- That's right. That was a part of the original planning. I did notice on
coming up here on Crenshaw Boulevard that almost every house had an exit
driveway directly onto the street. This is probably the worst possible
way of designing for major highways and traffic and is avoided in
planning subdivisions today. There were other examples of good design.
In the San Fernando Valley, the service road was the major--
- Murdoch
- Innovation.
- Holden
- Innovation.
1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO AUGUST 24, 1998
- Murdoch
- You were telling us about subdivision and highway design. Carry on, Ed.
- Holden
- Yes. While I was working in the unincorporated La Mirada area at one
time, Milton Breivogel got together with Newt[on] Templin, who was then
the-- Templin was the road commissioner, and they decided, since this
was a large piece of property--once the McNally Estate--that they would
see what they could do about designing these super blocks to better
protect highways and people and so on. They decided, also, that they
would try to make the entire development of a single type back-up
design, where interior housing would be backed up to the major highway
and a wall would be required. If one visits La Mirada, you'll see these
pretty much today. They had a couple of problems, not the least of which was, "Who's going
to own this wall?" They could get it put up by requiring it to be a part
of a subdivision design. That was the reason for the cooperation between
the [Regional] Planning Department and the road department. And it was
successful. So what to do about the wall: Who was going to pay for it?
Well, the subdivision developer was going to pay for it really in the
additional construction, they decided first, but they did put it on an
easement and required the wall to be there. That's more or less where
they left it.
- Murdoch
- So the wall is actually built on a common easement.
- Holden
- On private property.
- Murdoch
- It's not a part of the adjacent block?
- Holden
- On private property. So the question was then, "What would happen to
these walls over a period of time?" And if you go down through La
Mirada, you will find that occasionally there is a wall that is in
pretty bad shape. But, of course, what happened mostly was that the
responsibility of the subdividers passed on to the individual home owner
to maintain the wall. Sometimes, in a few instances, they didn't do it.
But for the most part, the whole town of La Mirada is an interesting
total example of this particular kind of design.
- Murdoch
- And this was one of the first instances of that, was it not?
- Holden
- Yes.
- Murdoch
- So it was quite an innovation at the time.
- Holden
- Yes, and of cooperation between county depart-ments--quite interesting
from that point of view.
- Murdoch
- Well, you and Milton Breivogel did a great job of working with the other
county departments, and I know from personal experience that's not an
easy thing to do.
- Holden
- Sometimes not an easy job. That's right.
- Murdoch
- Ed, you were a key actor in park planning when you were a planner with
the county. Please tell us a little bit about your efforts in that
arena.
- Holden
- All right. Well, the first item that I wanted to talk to you about a
little bit is one that rather tickles me because it got more into
implementation than planners often get. In this particular case, the
county did, from 1948 on, have a local park plan. It was down to details
on how many acres various park sites needed and to a few generalized
location dots, etc. The problem with local parks as compared say with
schools was that in the school situation, the state had managed to look
further ahead and pass bond issues which provided money while areas were
expanded so that school districts could dig into that fund when they
truly needed to buy school sites at the same time as areas were being
developed. But there was no such fund for parks and, consequently, the funding of
parks was very off and on, up and down many times. At one particular
moment, somewhere back there, about the middle of my tenure with the
county, word came down that this next year's going to be a pretty good
budget year and we're going to finally do a little bit about catching up
with local parks. Now, I suppose this would fit in very well with
Kenneth Hahn's "What makes voters happy" idea, but in any event the time
had finally come. So the park department [Los Angeles County Department
of Parks and Recreation] and the representative of our planning
department, which in that case was me, and I think "Joe" [Joseph K.]
Kennedy were was involved in park planning along with us-- And our
problem was to go out and specifically designate properties consistent
with the general plan of parks for acquisition. And so we did prepare a
neat little, rather inconspicuous, typed report that listed just a large
number of local parks.
- Murdoch
- For the unincorporated areas--
- Holden
- For the unincorporated areas.
- Murdoch
- --of the county.
- Holden
- And in many, many of them--places like Cudahy, which is a little, little
place, or in east Whittier, where, under a previous administration, the
park for that area had somehow been moved up into Hacienda Heights
instead of being down where many people really needed one, south of
Whittier Boulevard-- So we located one where it really should have gone.
And you know what? Over a period of years, most of those specific places
were actually bought and developed by the parks department. It was
really a neat little thing because of all those-- It was sort of
hands-on work. Sometimes planners don't get that chance to see the
specific implementation of their general plans.
- Murdoch
- Well, it should be a source of great satisfaction to know that you
created the local park system, and all those people that have enjoyed it
all those many, many years since-- That this was so successful, did it
encourage the region to take more interest in parks?
- Holden
- Well, I don't know about that. I do think that the purchase of parks
kind of dropped off and then it goes up and so on. Now, we want to talk more about regional parks and expansion of the
region. The first comment, of course, is that Los Angeles County-- The
supervisors decided, being buffeted around a bit by cities, that the one
thing they really could spend county money on without getting too much
criticism was regional parks, and within regional parks that activity
which paid for itself was, of course, golf courses. So we didn't have a
lot of trouble, sometimes, selling regional parks to the supervisors.
Everybody wanted one, and every so often they felt like they'd like to
have one named after them, like the Schabarum Park.
- Murdoch
- Or Bonelli Park.
- Holden
- Or Bonelli Park and so on. So we did get some county parks, which were
called regional and were substantially recreation-type parks. We are not
talking here about a more difficult problem called open space, which a
number of people to this day mentioned as one of the problems of the Los
Angeles region--that somehow not too much attention was paid to actual
open space for people. The subject, I think, can be argued in some ways,
but it is true that we don't have urban separations of open space such
as the plans that occurred in England. But we do have a number of
regional parks. We have had a major effort to use areas which, under
flood-control activities, would have water on them in a major flood
period but are significantly most of the time dry. We have in this
region a number of very large spaces, such as the Whittier Narrows and
in the city of Los Angeles, the Sepulveda Basin.
- Murdoch
- That's near Pico Rivera?
- Holden
- Yeah. So things of this kind.
- Murdoch
- Well, those settling basins or replenishing basins do provide useful
open space.
- Holden
- They certainly do.
- Murdoch
- Aside from their purpose of providing us with a water supply.
- Holden
- That's right. So they serve a number of purposes, including some of the
recreational purposes. Anyway, that's happened and it was a good thing
and it was a pleasure to work there. The one I want to talk about now, however, is the fact that in the early
days, in the late fifties and early sixties, it occurred to a number of
people, some supervisors, certainly to Milt Breivogel, that there were
important reasons for concern about the park's picture in the region. I
suppose he was thinking at that time of the surrounding four counties
plus Los Angeles and not necessarily including Imperial County. Milt was
thinking regionally in a number of ways. It was at this same time that
he had created, which we were talking about earlier, a council of
planning, which included planning directors of the surrounding counties
and representatives of cities, and in many respects it was set up very
like the soon to be SCAG [Southern California Association of
Governments] organization. But it was strictly informal, organized by
Milt in the initial instance, by the director of planning of the biggest
county, and incorporating interested counties. All of them were
interested. All of them had some elected official, also, in addition,
who was interested--
- Murdoch
- I don't think it would be going too far to say that the council of
planning was really the precursor of what later became SCAG.
- Holden
- That's right. It fits into that point of view here directly. In any
event, two major studies of this kind--regional park plans--were carried
out. The implementation was left largely to the counties, but the plan
in Los Angeles County was adopted in 1963 by the RPC [Los Angeles
Regional Planning Commission], as a matter of fact. So there was
considerable interest in it. It was a response to a regional need. Open
space and parks is a continuing part of the regional concern, I think,
at least of the metropolitan area.
- Murdoch
- Do you recall the name of the 1963 plan?
- Holden
- Its exact name sort of escapes me for the moment. It was a plan of
regional parks for the Southern California region or something very
similar to that.
- Murdoch
- Very significant.
- Holden
- Yes. Of course, Los Angeles County did have its own county plan of
regional parks. All right. The importance of that is that basically,
along with the creation of the council of planning, they began to have
the earliest awareness of regional planning in this region. What also
appears to be true is that as various important regional issues began to
come up, we added increasing technical and professional interest in
regional planning but usually with particular individual emphasis. We
can review some of those because they're all precursors to the regional
idea, which began to become important and began to impinge on the
thinking of many of the public and private administrators and elected
officials and so forth. To mention a few, obviously, the county of Los
Angeles, acting in a regional capacity, had talked about some of the
activities that immediately impinged on regional planning and this led
to the concern, of course, with flood control, smog--really imaginative
activity by the county in the creation of the Los Angeles County Smog
Control District [now the South Coast Air Quality Management
District]--waste management in a series of districts, water policy,
pollution control in other areas, support of the Metropolitan Water
District [of Southern California], etc., going clear back into the
thirties. But now we are beginning to have other major concerns, not the least and
probably the most important in terms of development of regional interest
was the federal government and that, at this time, money came down to
the states and then to the counties and eventually to the cities for
major highway building. It was not too long before the period that we're
talking about, in the late forties, when the interest in freeways became
dominant, and in the early fifties the idea of a national web of
highways and important corridors for U.S.-wide communication-- And in
California, the state took on the job of doing what before had been
undertaken by counties, for example, their highway plans. Indeed, Los
Angeles County did have a plan of freeways as a matter of fact.
- Murdoch
- They were very advanced.
- Holden
- These plans were then absorbed into statewide plans. But then things
began to happen in the East and particularly in places where the old
system that worked so well for a long time and served Los Angeles County
no longer seemed to work. That started to be noticed in other places as
well. The first thing we began to find, professionally, was the
espousing of big area studies, regional transportation studies
primarily. These were substantially to include entire metropolitan or
regional areas.
- Murdoch
- I think Chicago was one of the first.
- Holden
- Chicago was one.
- Murdoch
- Detroit.
- Holden
- But, particularly, I remember Atlanta and Minneapolis among others. In
the Bay Area, the first work on such a thing was organizing the Bay Area
Council of Government and so forth. So we had precursors to the regional
organization building that came later, but most of the money for these
later regional and metropolitan plans came from the federal government. So the federal government, with prodding by a lot of the East Coast
organizations, including particularly some from the New England areas,
like Rhode Island or Massachusetts, Boston-- New York didn't have any
governmental unit that could encompass their entire metropolitan
area--substantial parts of it maybe, but a lot of it not on the map, so
actually private regional planning had taken place there earlier. But
these people, for example, played a prominent part in pushing for
certain actions from the then democratic regime in Washington-- And the
result of this is that in the writing of the transportation laws, we
got, first, the [Section] 701 [of the 1954 Housing Act] program under
one of the housing acts, which provided money for local planning and,
soon thereafter, regional planning. It started in 1954, I think, if my
history is correct. Then, through thinking about that, and then the idea
a few later years leading up to the sixties, maybe in the sixties or so,
the idea that we should have regional agencies at least to review
facilities that the federal government was putting out so much money
for. As we will see later, that involved more than transportation and
was a large part of the early work of SCAG. But what we're talking about
now is that these things, while they related very closely to our region,
they were slightly different and we were a little bit later in thinking
about some of them because of the previously built-up relationship, in
Southern California particularly, among the counties and the state.
- Murdoch
- In one sense, Southern California had a head start, even going back to
the creation of the first regional planning conference in 1921, and then
you're saying that in another sense, because we had that, we weren't so
quick to jump on this--
- Holden
- It's also true that this relationship was a state-to-county relationship
for the distribution of money, for many things--for flood control
districts, for traffic, etc. So the biggest county, Los Angeles, we can
add, was looking down its nose at the possibility of a wider regional
jurisdiction, which was going to take over its natural functions
previously developed with the state. But the state had taken over
freeway building, and they also became interested in, technically--the
professionals in the state departments--the big studies that were being
carried on regionally in several areas of the U.S. So what do we have? We have the creation of a highway district covering
this area within the California Department of Transportation, which in
turn created an organization called LARTS, L.A. Regional Transportation
Study. This, once again, was somewhat regional and somewhat informal in
nature, inasmuch as it was centered in the [California] State Department
of Transportation, but it was recognized that in order to get the
land-use input and other important inputs in terms of policy
considerations on which to base any estimate ultimately of trips and
hence the need for freeways, they would have to develop some kind of
cooperative entity. A ready-made one, of course, was the council of
planning and the county planning agencies.
- Murdoch
- Well, Ed, before we get onto a really key thing, which is your key role
in the establishment of SCAG, the Southern California Association of
Governments, I'd like to spend just one more moment on the county. When
you left the county to go with SCAG in 1967, I believe, what was the
size of the Regional Planning Commission staff in round numbers as you
remember?
- Holden
- It was over one hundred. I don't know quite how many.
- Murdoch
- Over one hundred and going strong?
- Holden
- Going strong. Milt was director still.
- Murdoch
- Well, let's turn now to the creation-- You were in on the creation. Tell
us about the creation of SCAG.
- Holden
- To really round out the picture, may I go back just a minute?
- Murdoch
- Oh, by all means.
- Holden
- Go back to Los Angeles County, what was happening to the metropolitan
area, namely its expansion. I think it's fascinating that in 1940, there
was no county in this region that was over two hundred thousand in
population other than San Diego and other than Los Angeles. Los Angeles
at that time, 1940, immediately before the war-- I think I have a figure
for comparative purposes-- It had two and three quarters million people.
That's compared to anybody else's two hundred thousand. By 1950, the
population of Los Angeles expanded to slightly over four million. By
this time, Orange County, I think, was the only county that had finally
risen to a population of five hundred thousand at the same time that
L.A. County had established four million. But there was no other county
that had exceeded two hundred thousand, but some were approaching this
figure. So the point I'm making, of course, is that Los Angeles was a
giant, and the rest were pretty much followers. But the other ones were
rapidly receiving more development, and this is what caused the shift in
effect in the consideration, particularly technically and by
professionals, of the needs for regional planning for certain activities
as, particularly, transportation planning-- Air pollution came to crop
up as a major problem. And so forth.
- Murdoch
- And air pollution began to be recognized as a problem larger than just
Los Angeles County.
- Holden
- Larger than just the county in spite of the county's extraordinary
leadership ability. That is correct. Now we're back on essentially. Then
what happened? In 1960, Milt was working with various political people on that question
of the founding of some kind of regional agency. At this time there were
two major political groups talking about some kind of regional effort.
There were key people in all the counties. I mentioned some of them to
you another time-- Maybe we'd better repeat. Paul [J.] Anderson was an
important one. He was primarily involved in the regional parks.
- Murdoch
- What was his home base?
- Holden
- He was from Riverside County. Dave--he's from Orange County--Baker.
- Murdoch
- David [L.] Baker.
- Holden
- From Orange County. And Dan [Daniel] Mikesell from San Bernardino
County. There were city people. I suppose we ought to review quickly,
because this all relates to why an agency exists and who your clients
are if you're trying to direct or you're trying to develop a program. A
couple of things were happening at the same time. In the county
situation we suddenly had a Supreme Court decision that said one man,
one vote. What that meant in effect was that smaller counties with
smaller populations, because they had two representatives in the
[California State] Senate, as every county did, and inordinate power--
At this time with the one man vote, they realized, many of them, that
that power would probably dissipate a good deal. So the people down in
Imperial County, for example, were seriously concerned that they were
going to lose that power at the state level, because certainly they
didn't have substantial population. So they didn't have anybody in the
[California State] Assembly, and they were going to go way down in
representation in the senate. So when they started talking about a
regional agency, we found that Imperial County was interested. San Bernardino County was interested, in a way, because they're a huge
county in terms of land area, and Supervisor Daniel Mikesell, with whom
I worked closely for a few months, worked very hard with the state to
provide money for some of these outlying county areas-- How do you
provide enough money to run a road across most of the Mojave Desert,
particularly if it is a local road? Maybe one or two major arteries were
of interest to the state and then what? So he was interested in how to
gain more power so that they could continue to get money that didn't
relate to the number of population they had but more to the possible
future development of areas. So these county members were not our
opponents. In Los Angeles County the support was rather thin, but I think from the
beginning Supervisor [Warren M.] Dorn, for whatever reason, liked what
he had seen and what Milton recommended to him, even though it must have
caused him terrible problems later when we had all those temporary
zones, while we were doing a project to get changes in the zoning of the
whole north county and so forth-- But Supervisor Dorn seemed to support
SCAG, was one of the few early participants and a president of SCAG in
the early years. Otherwise, I think there were other supporters. But it
is true that you couldn't get three votes for joining SCAG in 1960 when
all the others were interested in forming the organization. Nineteen
sixty--excuse me. Now, the other group that was primarily interested in SCAG and its
organization and function were cities, and most particularly the local
branch of the League of California Cities, which supported a regional,
locally organized, regional agency which had some representation for
cities. That plus the mayor of the city of Los Angeles, who had
obviously great interest in what happened around the city and some of
the major issues at the time.
- Murdoch
- Was that Mayor [Samuel W.] Yorty at the time?
- Holden
- Mayor Yorty, yeah. And along with him and a major spokesman, Councilman
Tom [Thomas] Bradley.
- Murdoch
- Later Bradley.
- Holden
- In the formation stage.
- Murdoch
- Bradley was the councilman?
- Holden
- He was a councilman.
- Murdoch
- He supported-- So both Bradley and Yorty supported SCAG.
- Holden
- And generally the cities supported the formation of SCAG.
- Murdoch
- Well, that's very interesting because Yorty and Bradley didn't see eye
to eye.
- Holden
- Maybe in some things, but I think they were together on this. I think.
Anyway, they certainly both voted for it at different times. So I
remember in the final formation stage-- By the way, Milton and I were
talking about possible programs for SCAG, to some extent, earlier than
this. Because of the very preliminary stage, it was clear that some 701
funds should be available to start some kind of planning programs at
SCAG. I was then in charge of advance planning for the county. Anyway, I
did attend one of the major formation meetings at the Ambassador Hotel.
I remember Los Angeles County was now represented [as well as] most of
the other counties and the whole city support team and a few opponents,
and a really eloquent speech was made by Tom Bradley. I have seldom
heard, and I have heard many political speeches, but none quite as
impassioned and elegant as Bradley's speech in favor of the organization
of SCAG.
- Murdoch
- What year was this--'62?
- Holden
- I believe it was '60.
- Murdoch
- As early as that?
- Holden
- No, wait a minute. It was in '66. I'm sorry.
- Murdoch
- 'Sixty-six.
- Holden
- I was thinking of something else for '60. Let's revise those dates for
the formation of SCAG to 1966.
- Murdoch
- Well, then SCAG was created by an action of the state legislature.
- Holden
- No, no. SCAG was created by an action of local governments in its
original form. It was created under the joint powers arrangements, a
state law which local governments could use in order to carry out some
functions. The law was probably supported originally by local
governments so that they could do things they didn't want the state to
do. [laughs]
- Murdoch
- That was clear. Yes.
- Holden
- So SCAG is now an organization. It's supported locally. It has
appropriated some money, not very much, enough that would basically
support a director and a secretary. That's money that came from all
these counties and cities, but importantly it was the local people and
local agencies that created the original SCAG and within less than a
year. I don't remember the exact time. The county of Los Angeles was
late in joining-- There was then a vote of the supervisors in Los
Angeles County, and they subsequently joined, I think,
because--again--of money and transportation and other concerns, where
they needed to tap into somebody else's supply, since the county itself
was beginning to be fairly limited in the funds that it could generate
itself.
- Murdoch
- I think that that is absolutely right. I've heard tales that the county
highway department felt that they could have more influence with SCAG
than they could have with the state highway department, which turned out
not to be true, but that was their thinking at the time.
- Holden
- That may be, at least, closer to home. But the department heads in the
county seemed to have a perpetual pass on the airplanes to Sacramento,
but that's another story.
- Murdoch
- So in 1967--who was the first director--? I should ask you.
- Holden
- Well, two items. The first one I want to talk about is at this time one
of the pressures on the county was the fact that federal legislation now
required a review by a regional agency of all major regional projects.
- Murdoch
- The A95 review process.
- Holden
- The A95 review process. Now, it didn't last a terribly long time, maybe
four or five years at the most, I think, as an instance of regional
government. Other things took its place, but it was important then
because some of the projects all these people wanted had to be reviewed
by a regional agency, and one of the first times I met the first
executive director, Will Smith, was when he carried into our back office
an A95 application and asked our help in preparing a report--
- Murdoch
- The first executive director of SCAG.
- Holden
- --that's correct--an A95 application, which he was personally reviewing
and asked the county for a little bit of help to get these things out so
that the executive body of SCAG could quickly review them and get things
underway, which we obliged. Now, in the meanwhile, money was available
from 701 for the initiation of some kind of a program. Will worked with
Milton Breivogel and myself and we developed an initial 701 program for
regional planning for SCAG and this was granted at the federal level
early in the next year.
- Murdoch
- Nineteen sixty-seven?
- Holden
- Nineteen sixty-seven.
- Murdoch
- Was "Cal" [Calvin S.] Hamilton part of your committee? It seems to me he
was.
- Holden
- Later. Later. A part of our program, the first 701, was to get it
started, to hire three or four people to do an overall view of
transportation planning and to get started on some operation and
economic review so we'd have some basis and money to develop a further,
more expanded program for SCAG.
- Murdoch
- Well, at that crucial moment, SCAG had the good sense to hire Ed Holden
as their chief planner.
- Holden
- So that's what happened.
- Murdoch
- So you were in at the beginning.
- Holden
- I was in at the beginning. So we, of course, had to go through the
initial processes. I didn't develop our personnel program so much as
consulted with it and used it to hire the first few people in SCAG and
to organize the real first expanded program of SCAG. In view of the
clients of SCAG, it seemed quite reasonable that we should pick some of
the major planners in the region and ask them to help us form an
ultimate program for SCAG. And the chairman of that committee, of
course, was Calvin Hamilton. Well, I didn't have many people working for
me at that moment. So the next thing was "Well, what are we doing? We've
been talking, some of us planners, all the time about all this special
advanced work that generated out of the war, the think tanks and all
this sort of thing. So why don't we go to one of these think tanks or
two of them and see what they might offer in terms of some advanced
thinking to help us develop an appropriate program for SCAG."
- Murdoch
- How interesting. I didn't know that.
- Holden
- So I've forgotten exactly-- I want to say Rand [Corporation], but it
wasn't Rand. It was one of the others. Yes, TRW,
Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge-- But anyway, there were two very important
people with SCAG that happened to be working for this particular think
tank, and those happened to be Bill [William C.] Ackerman and Frank
Hotchkiss. So Bill Ackerman and Frank Hotchkiss-- Frank Hotchkiss had an
extensive background in architecture and in planning. In many ways he
was very suited to this kind of work. Bill was a good administrator and
very apt in organizational functions and so on.
- Murdoch
- And you added them to the staff?
- Holden
- Well, eventually. After this program was all developed and adopted and
we got the money, one day I thought, "It would be kind of interesting to
have these guys actually on the staff to help me work on this." I don't
know which one of us mentioned it first, but I think probably Hotchkiss
was sitting in my office one day. We were talking and he said, "You
know, it wouldn't be too bad to work for SCAG." I thought, "Oh, boy. Now
we have an opportunity here." So we formed an alliance, and both of
those two gentlemen came to work for SCAG as it turned out. So I had my
individual think tank right there in SCAG.
- Murdoch
- Well, you certainly brought on some very bright staff people. By then it
was 1967?
- Holden
- Late in '67, early '68. Now, at that time, SCAG did not have any
guarantee of money coming in for the transportation effort, but the
federal government was at it again. And being as how in many parts of
the country their distribution of funds were to affect the region,
particularly the freeways, which had no single governmental structure
that could handle the whole thing, they managed to put in a requirement
that state expenditures on transportation had to be reviewed and
approved by a regional agency. So the [California State] Department of
Transportation started nosing around on just what they should do and how
they should organize this thing. They found, as they had already in
LARTS, a ready-made council of planning and now had an organizational
structure that they might work with. At this point, after a couple of
years, SCAG still pretty much had a very rudimentary review process and
was doing initial sorts of foundation studies. So at that time--I'm not
sure of the exact date on this--the Department of Transportation came
looking on behalf of the state. Dan Mikesell, who had always had a close
alliance with the state--
- Murdoch
- What was that name again?
- Holden
- Dan Mikesell, who was a supervisor of San Bernardino County, got quite
interested in this question. He was an advocate of SCAG's taking on this
job, because it was closer to home. The other thing that happened was
that Will Smith decided-- You asked me what his background was. I'm
afraid I can't really describe it very much. I think he was a successful
director of SCAG for this early, early effort. Anyway, Will decided he
would prefer Monterey County as a working site, apparently, to Los
Angeles.
- Murdoch
- When he left--
1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 21, 1998
- Murdoch
- As we ended the last tape, we were just getting into the very exciting
period when SCAG [Southern California Association of Governments] was
created. You played a key role in those early days. Please tell us more
about the early days of SCAG.
- Holden
- I think, Norm, that on the tape we did discuss this somewhat and
particularly the background situation-- the technical aspects that
encouraged the development of some kind of regional program. SCAG
eventually was formed. Will Smith was selected as the first executive
director. It was himself and one secretary that for a short time ran
SCAG and took care of the first reviews that the federal government
required for the transmission of funds down through to local areas. At
that time, of course, the federal government provided for [Section] 701
[of the 1954 Housing Act] programming and funds for regional planning.
Between Milton and myself, Milt Breivogel and myself, we developed an
initial program that SCAG might adopt. We did--submitted it to federal
government under the 701 housing-act section--and we were granted
approval and the program for SCAG was started. I think we covered, in addition to that, the fact that we then developed
a more elaborate program pretty much headed up as a committee by Calvin
[S.] Hamilton and where Frank Hotchkiss and Bill [William C.] Ackerman
from one of the think tanks we really employed as our advisers on this--
If I hadn't mentioned it before, it should be noted that both Frank
Hotchkiss and Bill Ackerman were subsequently employed as members of
SCAG. As the war effort and more funding for these kinds of activities
declined, they apparently thought fit to leave that particular kind of
work and did come to work for SCAG--Bill Ackerman in the transportation
program and Frank Hotchkiss was my assistant. Will Smith, I think, did a very good job getting the program started at
SCAG. You, of course, have to realize that in 1966, when SCAG was first
adopted--that is to say, enough cities and counties according to SCAG
bylaws signed up to be members of SCAG--there was no official staff at
that time. It was volunteered by various members of governments, one way
or another. So with strong support and, significantly, from many
outlying counties and with not very much enthusiasm from the county of
Los Angeles-- There were [some], such as [Warren M.] Dorn, who supported
it. It was supported by the city of Los Angeles. That was an important
item. Somewhere along as this program was beginning to be developed pretty much
along the lines we've already discussed, Will Smith decided to leave. He
wanted to go to, I think, a somewhat smaller jurisdiction. In any event,
he moved to Monterey County, where he had been offered a job, and soon
left. Now, at that time, in 1968, I believe, or slightly before--
Nineteen sixty-eight. Tom [Thomas] Bradley was president of SCAG at that
particular moment, and he was still, I believe, a councilman, I think--I
would have to check that--in the city of Los Angeles. We now had the
occasion to find a new executive director for SCAG. One of the
supervisors from San Bernardino County was rumored as being interested
in it. There were various questions as to whether a former elected
official of that kind should be a director of SCAG, and other
possibilities were investigated. Among the people looked at was Ray [Raymond] Remy. Ray was working for
the local division of the League of California Cities. He had a very
good reputation among city members and, of course, therefore, among
members of the executive committee who were looking for a director and
were a little worried about what the various points of view were with
respect to hiring a new director. The net result was that Ray Remy was
appointed. I believe that year was 1968, the beginning of the year, and
it's interesting to me that the 1969 annual report for SCAG then showed
Remy as the executive director, and it showed Daniel Mikesell as
president of SCAG. The power struggle, if there was one, may have been
somewhat settled by this kind of compromise.
- Murdoch
- What were your initial impressions when you first met Ray Remy?
- Holden
- Ray was a young man. He was only thirty-two years of age when he became
the executive director of SCAG or within a year or two of that. He was
young and gung ho. He had all the confidence in the world, and he was
about to build-- He was in the mode of organization building. He thought
that SCAG had the opportunity to grow in an area that he was quite
interested in and where he could see a great deal of support for the
cities and some of the counties who wanted to have a hand in what SCAG
might do to have an influence on various activities.
- Murdoch
- Transportation development.
- Holden
- The state and federal government passed money for various kinds of
activity. So Ray was right with the spirit that SCAG was conceived in
from the beginning, in two ways. First of all, as a preventative of
worse things, as effectively, members of SCAG-- And in Ray's mind, I'm
sure, [there were] the positive aspects of what SCAG might accomplish.
We should go on in that particular vein. Before we do, I think there are two things with respect to Supervisor
Daniel Mikesell that I want to report--anecdotes.
- Murdoch
- Well, he was one of the early presidents of SCAG.
- Holden
- Mikesell was--yes.
- Murdoch
- What was his home base again?
- Holden
- San Bernardino County. He also was chairman of the California
Supervisors Association Committee on Transportation, I believe. One of
his major interests was getting enough money and enough assignment of
activity to build roads in the vast expanse of San Bernardino County,
which is the largest county in land area in this immediate area and has
a huge back area that could never be supported on the basis of a per
capita allotment for the building of roads through and much less within
the area. So Dan was always interested in planning. The instance that I wanted to remark about is that there was a three
months' interim period between Will Smith's departure and Ray Remy's
taking over the reins of the executive director. I had the, perhaps,
less than envious job of being the interim executive director. There
were two things that happened during this period, one of them included
the major annual meeting date of SCAG, which involves a lot of
administrative activity, organizing the whole thing, holding sessions
and things of that nature. Anyway, going back to Mikesell, during this same period there had been a
lot of discussions with Will and with the Department of Transportation
of the state [California State Department of Transportation] about ways
and means of answering the needs of the federal government in terms of
offering money through the transportation plan to various communities
within the state. It's not impossible in my mind that a somewhat
reasonable distribution of that money could be made if it weren't for
the fact that at the federal level, they were thinking about
responsibility for serving large distributions of populations. There was
quite a demand for some kind of regional effort. It related, in many
cases, to states that did not have within their own borders complete
urban areas. Consequently, for a lot of reasons, these federal
requirements began to develop, not only for the A95 process, which would
follow, but also direct allocation from the federal government to the
local agencies. The opposite of this, of course, was the big demand that
a lot of this be allocated through the states instead of through
regional areas direct. This would switch back and forth as an idea over
time.
- Murdoch
- It was a tumultuous time for transportation planning. This was the era
of freeway revolts.
- Holden
- That too, but also still a large demand for funding. It was also a time
of consideration for national highways. They were interested in
interstate activity, passing through lots of money not only for
freeways, but also for not local highways, but for major and secondary
highways, such as were represented by the plans of counties
substantially. Anyway, Mikesell and I, during this interim of three
months, met with representatives of the department of transportation of
the state. Essentially we sort of batted the whole idea around for a
while. Mikesell was well known because, as I mentioned before, of his
association with the supervisors and his great interest in road building
in San Bernardino County. So at the end of this thing, I was a little
bemused because I was not completely sure what had been accomplished,
except there seemed to be an agreement out of that meeting that SCAG was
to get a large amount of money for transportation planning. This is, of
course, the way it worked out. I want to report that at the end of the
meeting, as we were leaving, Mikesell turned to me and said, "Well, Ed,
you've got your program."
- Murdoch
- Great.
- Holden
- It was essentially the final decision among staff at the state level and
ourselves as to the transfer of monies to meet the federal requirements.
So SCAG now had not only a 701 planning program, but it had a
transportation planning program established. For the record I would like to note how significant that was, because
there were many COGs [councils of government] around the country that
were not given the responsibility of transportation planning, and there
would be a dual organization. So that was really a very important coup
to insure that land-use planning and transportation planning would be
under one organization, namely SCAG. Now, the next thing that I want to add is an incident that relates to
just politics and the egos of individual people and perhaps
justifiable-- We were talking one day, Mikesell and I, about that time.
At that moment, a bigwig in the Department of Transportation at the
federal level [United States Department of Transportation]--I don't
remember who it was, probably the secretary of transportation--was
making a visit to California to check on things. Mikesell was
complaining rather bitterly-- What this man did, instead of coming to
the man who at that particular moment was probably most powerful in
terms of actual freeway money and local money distribution, representing
the supervisors, who were to get most of this money anyway--other than
the state-- The secretary followed protocol, so-called, and he had to
visit in accordance with his protocol the mayor of the principal city,
which was the city of Los Angeles for the region. Surprise, I know. The
transportation director never visited with Mikesell. It's kind of an
interesting sidelight on some of the problems of big egos in the
development of various programs.
- Murdoch
- The East Coast politicians never understood the relationship--the
strength of county supervisors.
- Holden
- I think that's very true.
- Murdoch
- I can add to your story: When there was such a big fuss and feathers
when, I think, foreign dignitaries visited the Los Angeles area and
would always check in with the mayor-- And I think this in the eighties
resulted in the [Los Angeles County] Board of Supervisors creating the
office of protocol for the county of Los Angeles to insure that visiting
dignitaries would appreciate the importance of the Board of Supervisors.
- Holden
- Yes. Anyway, going on. The other thing I want to remark about this
interim three months is that I got to work fairly closely with Tom
Bradley, who was then president of SCAG. We were about finished with the
whole annual meeting. We were, I guess, meeting here in town again. The
annual meeting, I think, was concluded in a big hotel--I've forgotten
which one at the moment. I think the one in the City of Industry.
Anyway, later I had a meeting with Bradley, and we were finishing up the
matter. It had been a pretty long three or four days to get this thing
over with, satisfactorily over with, as an administrative activity. I
guess I was feeling tired and I said, "Gee, I sure am tired." Then I
looked at Bradley, and I thought to myself, "Oh, my. That man must be
much more tired and worn out than I could ever hope to be." So I said to
him, "Well, I guess that wasn't so good to say. I'm sure that you're a
lot more tired after all this and with the additional council meeting."
He said, "Well, yes, I'm rather busy." That concluded that particular
conversation, but it was kind of interesting--
- Murdoch
- I take it he was quite supportive of SCAG at that time--
- Holden
- Absolutely supportive of SCAG.
- Murdoch
- --and a key figure in getting it rolling?
- Holden
- Absolutely, and we discussed that a little bit, as I remember, last
time. Okay. Moving on. We were talking about SCAG's background and
support awhile ago. As Remy came into office and with his penchant for
organization building and thinking about it, I think from the beginning
what he considered was that he would like to get SCAG established with
some of its functions and recognized by the state government. This had
not been possible in the past. I think it goes back to a penchant of
state government then and now that the general approach was the
formation of very limited-purpose agencies for activities that did not
fit easily under city, county, or state departments. It's been a long
practice at the state level. Consequently, almost every regional
activity, activity as opposed to coordination, had been to create
special districts. You can name a dozen any way you want-- individual
transportation agencies for various purposes--
- Murdoch
- Water districts.
- Holden
- Metropolitan water districts.
- Murdoch
- Mosquito control districts--every conceivable thing under the sun.
- Holden
- If they couldn't make it a part of the county government or the city
government, it was special purpose and with a different boundary, etc.
This has real consequences for this region and was the opposite of what
the federal government was in effect looking for in a lot of ways and
one reason why SCAG had support from the federal government in its
formation. So there was a lot of support for some kind of law to support
SCAG in its role. It's probably wise to remind people that its basic
formation was under state law, but a general state law which allowed
cities and counties to contract almost any kind of activity and,
consequently, they contracted together to form a regional agency which
they called the Southern California Association of Governments or SCAG.
- Murdoch
- Was this a joint-powers agreement?
- Holden
- Yes. That was how SCAG was formed instead of as a corporation. So it was
the desire of various interests to build up power, steam, to try to get
SCAG more officially recognized as an overall planning agency. So as a
consummate politician himself and administrator, Ray did take great
pains to cultivate a whole series of the original people who formed SCAG
and many others. He had friends in the League of [California] Cities. He
had friendships in many organizations and a number of county board
members, even though we were still having a little trouble with Los
Angeles County and still some trouble with Orange [County] and others
who liked their arrangements with the state. But we had these prevailing
regional problems which were not easily settled on the county level. So I recall a huge conference we then had, an annual meeting actually,
where a representative from every city and every county was present, and
it was held in Palm Springs. We had a well-directed presentation to this
group of the important things that SCAG should be doing--a description
of SCAG's then established transportation program and the actual
regional planning program and a number of other special activities which
looked to be possible in the future. After that meeting we got, I think,
a unanimous vote of the member representatives present to present a
law--
- Murdoch
- A legislative program.
- Holden
- --potential law to the legislature for adoption. I didn't spend very
much time on this, but, of course, Ray did-- [He] spent several hours in
Sacramento on this. We did get a sponsor. There was good support for
this along with other agencies which had activities going on in the
regional field at that time.
- Murdoch
- What year was this, Ed, about?
- Holden
- That would have been 196--
- Murdoch
- 'Sixty-nine? 'Seventy?
- Holden
- Probably '70--'69 and '70.
- Murdoch
- What happened?
- Holden
- Unfortunately, in spite of what I think was a masterful effort, the
activity foundered on the same principle that we just discussed. They
would not create a permanent planning agency.
- Murdoch
- A comprehensive body--?
- Holden
- An organization that might have some reach over several different
single-purpose activities. But as Ray said when he came back, "I didn't
get the single law for SCAG, but I did get what at that time the
legislature was considering--namely, what agencies should indeed be the
agencies to act for the required review of the state distribution of
funds for transportation planning." So SCAG was designated in that law
as a coordinating agency and recognized in that respect in state law. It
has been a safeguard and a support for SCAG.
- Murdoch
- I would say a key element in SCAG's survival. So Ray Remy got half a
loaf.
- Holden
- He got half a loaf but a very important half, and it has been sufficient
to keep SCAG alive in effect and not to have it completely vitiated by
other activities as time went by. Now, onwards and upwards to the plan. What kind of a plan did we have;
what were we working on? We can go to 1972. At that time, SCAG published
what they called a Regional Development Guide and represented our best
thoughts at that time about regional planning and how we should really
approach this particular problem. It had a lot of units within it which
really represented basically a lot of planning theory together with
various planning elements coordinated together as a general plan. We can
discuss some of them and how they were done and what was happening.
Listed in the 1972 plan, which was adopted by the SCAG executive
committee-- It was also adopted by a number of cities and several
counties in the region. First, its basic characteristics-- To begin
with, it was the result of a goals program, as a matter of fact, and
you'll find in the 1972 adopted edition a set of goals for practically
every regional issue and possible future plan that you might be looking
for. We can review a few of these quickly.
- Murdoch
- Please do.
- Holden
- The first was a land-use and form plan. This could be interpreted really
as a distribution of population plan. Where did people live in this
region, and what was the distribution? How many were there? This is over
time, in each year, revised in its estimates related to the
transportation plan, particularly because it was the basic foundation
for one leg of almost everybody's trip. Trips were, of course, then
accumulated, applied to transportation corridors, and you could then
begin to tell how many lanes of highway you would need, where you needed
a freeway, etc. So it's fundamental to transportation planning. It was
not altogether something that SCAG did by itself, particularly in
estimating current population, which is a starting point, because more
and more the state found that it was allocating funds, redistributing
property tax funds and other things. So the state got into the business,
at least, of estimating current population. And of course we have the
census and other studies and estimates. So it was possible for SCAG,
with not a completely overwhelming staff, to take a pretty good stab at
developing these figures, working with cities and counties to a
relatively fine level, at least to the census level, sometimes below.
Now, this was also compiled, and really in its final form for us was an
expression of population. It's worth noting that Frank Hotchkiss, bless
his heart, imaginative guy that he is, used to preach every day that
population distribution is a matter of policy. It's not a matter of
projecting only the natural expansion of particular areas. Consequently,
in the development of our plan here, if you look at it, there are
several interesting options for the possible development of the
metropolitan region. Now, I think Frank was right in a lot of ways, but
I think we have to, in looking at the policy question, go back a bit,
and I think a lot of planning and, to an extent, some of our estimates
depended significantly on this question of what was desirable and what
would be a good policy for the region. Because I think that policy that
affects land-use and population distribution is made up of many, many
subpolicies. If one or more of these subpolicies becomes very effective,
it is likely to influence development in ways which some of the broader
policies may not particularly equate with. Let me illustrate in two or three ways. Let's see. First of all, it's
true that in this area, there have been a huge number of decisions early
on which really reflect a policy that the area should grow, which have
made possible the development with proper infrastructure and most
services almost anywhere over a period of time, anywhere in our
metropolitan region-- There have been very few places where we have been
able to restrict development because of the absence of proper
infrastructure. An example of where it was tried for a while is in the
Malibu area, actually, and we've discussed that a bit. Until Malibu was
able to get itself incorporated into a sewer district and a water
district outside of Malibu itself, it didn't have enough water to
expand. It did get itself incorporated, and at that point its population
was capable of being expanded. Other than that, and a few times when
population expansions or urban development has been limited in this
area, it has been for short periods of time. There have also been some limitations which we described back in our
discussion of Los Angeles County. All of their deterrent activities have
been for a short period of time, and consequently there's never been a
concentrated effort to preserve open space other than the possible
purchase of land mostly related to parks. As nice as it would be to have
had a more aggressive and positive attitude towards this, the very fact
that open space is often not regarded as a benefit in itself is an
expression of policy going back a long way. What I'm really saying with
respect to policy in terms of allocating land use is that, if you're
really talking about this distribution and particularly if you express
an idea that you want to change a major direction of growth or that you
want to limit development in the area specifically by a policy
statement, if you're at odds with some of these very basic policies--not
expressed probably, but held--which you can see out there, you're going
to have a hard time implementing your policy. Now, let's talk about another example. One of the policies with respect
to population distribution and that relates to transportation planning
particularly is expressed here and I think is probably expressed very
much lately in SCAG work-- Namely, we are coming to a point where land
may become scarce in a lot of areas. In order to accommodate future
development, we should encourage land use, encourage residential
development to be a greater density in many specific areas. We should do
this so that in the long run we can reduce traffic congestion. People
can use transportation more readily and altogether it would be less
expensive because there would be more use of public transit. This is
expressed in here, the 1972 SCAG report. It's a basic idea that is based
on a common concept.
- Murdoch
- Well, I think that the goals that you set forth in the seventies now are
coming to be recognized as essential to the future. In this--
- Holden
- Let me finish an idea, Norman, and maybe a point of view, actually. My
point is that this particular idea--it has and still is in my opinion
substantially running against unexpressed policies about development and
about the way people live and how houses are built in our area. Among
other things, if today you look out around Los Angeles, look south from
a high point or from an airplane, it's flat. There's hardly any
construction in residential development that's over two stories and not
very much of that. Well, there is beginning to be more and more multiple
development, but it's likely as not to be two stories or less. There are
a lot of reasons for this. People don't seem to like to live in
high-rises. There are some exceptions to that, and there could some day
be more. I've noticed in traveling abroad, which I've done recently,
that when we have a lot of seven-, eight-story residential buildings, we
seem to have a limitation on where people park their automobiles. As a
matter of fact, they have fewer automobiles. Well, while we may say this
is good, it does not appear to equate with the basic idea that most
Angelinos have with respect to their love of the automobile. Now, there are ways to solve this in a way, because if you look in West
Los Angeles, where we do have a number of apartment buildings, we have a
garage underneath--same in the San Fernando Valley and so forth. What it
means, in that sense, if that is really true, is that the basic desire,
the unexpressed goal, is to have a convenient way to have your
automobile and have it close to where you live. That is still a very
dominant idea in the area. Now, the problem is, under those
circumstances, we have a situation where I think yourself and certainly
Calvin Hamilton and others who have been talking about the grouping of
multiple dwellings may one day find that the policy as expressed in the
'72 report and later reports has become more important. But it may not
come, to my mind--if we also look at other policies--nearly as early as
people expect. Actually, for example, it's been twenty years since--more
than that-- It's been about twenty years since I left SCAG and another
ten since this policy was expressed, and we still have--
- Murdoch
- We still have sprawl.
- Holden
- We still have sprawl.
- Murdoch
- In the seventies, SCAG played, I think, a key role in the beginning of
air quality planning and water quality planning. Would you say a few
words about that?
- Holden
- Yes. What I want to do, as a logical sequence, is to list some of these
plans associated as elements of a general plan and then the activities
which motivated additional studies by SCAG subsequently, which we took
advantage of in terms of financing.
- Murdoch
- Yes, yes: please do list them.
- Holden
- The basic plan included most of the things we were interested in. The
most important one, in addition to population, was economic development,
which also related back to the land-use plan. SCAG has worked then, and
does now, in estimating present and future locations of jobs in some
detail, considerable detail, and this too is a basic fundamental of
estimating trips.
- Murdoch
- Well, SCAG developed or perfected the concept of job-housing balance. We
must break now to turn the tape over.
1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 21, 1998
- Murdoch
- Tell us more about the role of SCAG.
- Holden
- We were talking about the elements of the initial planning program, and
we had come to economic development. The other in-house activity for us
was housing studies. We got on the staff a rather remarkable young
lady-- I think her name was Catherine Cousins, if I have the right
person. Catherine was able to take an awful lot of existing data and
interpret that data in terms of a number of housing questions--including
shortages, demands by economic groups, etc., etc., into a comprehensive
report by census tract and by city, most importantly. At that same time, the legislature in its wisdom had decided that in
spite of a reluctance of the legislature to support public housing
generally in the past years, they would now require all cities and
counties to prepare a housing element and specify certain information
that should be related to that or included in that housing element. The
SCAG element, much to my surprise--because I thought it would be a
horrendous job to do this--did have information along these lines which,
it turned out, could be used by a number of smaller cities and could
satisfy the state requirements. I was eternally grateful for Cousins's
activities to have been able to develop such a program for SCAG.
- Murdoch
- All the local jurisdictions now depend upon SCAG's population and
economic projections, even Los Angeles County--that resisted it for
years.
- Holden
- That's true. Okay. Next items were some of the ones which we developed
very cursorily at first. We did have an open space element. We were
interested in how much open space there might be, and that also
interpreted in terms of parks. Transportation was an element-- There was
an environmental and natural resources section, and here it was with
goals and so forth included. There were a couple of other elements which
were rather interesting thrown in here: a justice and safety element, a
health element, and an education element. My goodness, what--
- Murdoch
- An education element! You were ambitious.
- Holden
- --we were talking about today-- Now, to explain then what happened at
SCAG and really what went on to happen, particularly in the regional
issues area, we have to go back and we have to recognize that in the
seventies--
- Murdoch
- We're in the mid-seventies now.
- Holden
- --we finally had gotten to the point where a lot of the infrastructure,
which had been worked on now for a number of years after the war,
finally needed extra effort, and we came to some major decisions, some
of those policies that affect other things. The argument was that the
local governments--cities and counties--more and more were being denied
revenue sources to do their own work. Where did they look? Who could
raise the revenue? The national government. So we had all kinds of
funding for studies passed through to SCAG and local governments in
terms of block grants, etc. We had, again, the specific regional
activities, beginning with a long-established transportation program,
but now they were beginning to get concerned about the environmental--I
might as well call it "revolution" in those days. We wanted more money
in local areas for water quality study plans and facilities. We wanted
more money for waste management. We wanted more money even for parks and
open spaces, and there was a program of this kind beginning to be
developed at the federal level. And so SCAG took it upon itself to
satisfy the then increasing requests for all these programs, for some
kind of an overall regional planning agency to be involved in the
planning for these areas, to try to broaden the scope of concern for
these special-purpose activities. And so what did we get? Over a period
of time we got a cursory open space plan, but it did satisfy the need at
that particular time for qualifications for federal funds. We got
several programs suddenly coming before us in environmental areas,
particularly water quality and waste management.
- Murdoch
- And air quality.
- Holden
- We will come to air quality. That was one of the last ones, but an
important one and which I want to mention specially. We began to have
the federal government interested in justice and safety, health,
questions of education, and with the same idea that somehow or other
there should be some kind of coordinating activity. So SCAG has asked
for and gotten money over time for almost all of these programs and
almost all of them were financed as a part of this movement at the
federal government level. I don't need to, I think, trace all of that except, possibly, comment on
a couple of them. One of the more interesting ones is the air pollution
that you're talking about. This interest occurred particularly toward
the end of my time at SCAG. There was beginning to be federal money
available, and we began to explore with the districts and with others a
program that SCAG would apply for which would provide some studies and
background for air pollution that related to these individual needs
within the big cities and counties and so forth-- Begin to bring some
coordination. This development of a program was under way here, and all
of a sudden the state legislature in its wisdom decided to create a new
regional air quality district. It used a method of organization that was
almost identical to SCAG, but is now special purpose for air pollution.
I do recall--perhaps it summarizes what happened here--Frank Hotchkiss
came running into the office one day and he said-- This was just after I
had left. We'd already gotten our air pollution program approved. It was
just about to begin and so forth, but I was down there. Frank comes
around. He came rushing over and he said, "Do you know what, Ed? The
state government has finally created a real regional planning agency.
You know they gave that air pollution control district [South Coast Air
Quality Management District] more responsibility for controlling all
kinds of development in the Los Angeles region than any other agency
that I've ever seen." And, as a matter of fact, they had.
- Murdoch
- [laughs] Isn't that interesting, that the air quality agency became the
land-use agency?
- Holden
- Well, yes and no. The actual implementation of this ran afoul of some
other things. It's not too hard for the area in air pollution to have a
solution which is a technical solution as long as it doesn't cost too
much, and it's a preferred solution, a technical solution--in the cars
reducing emissions, etc. The action that we were talking about here
though is: We can't do it all with techniques of that kind. So what are
we going to talk about? What are we going to do? Are we going to have
special zones, carpool zones? We could go so far as to build special
zones, special roadways on the freeways to do this. We're going to--
- Murdoch
- High occupancy vehicle.
- Holden
- We're going to encourage rapid transit. We're going to encourage all
kinds of use of electricity. We're going to try to again come up with
the idea of more condensed population. All of these things. Every one of
them had some attack on the normal habits of people in this region at
this time. Right. Okay. The net result is that a number of these
activities have been explored. There had been a rather great use, it
seems to me, which I read in the papers and so on, that the air
pollution control district has tried and looked into an awful lot of
proposals. Carpooling, etc., was a great activity of SCAG for a while,
working with large industries. The latest reports are that maybe it's
not quite doing the job that people would like to have it do. I kind of
hate to see an almost vacant carpool lane when everybody else is one
person to a car out in all the other lanes, and you have an empty
carpool lane, which you sometimes do see these days.
- Murdoch
- Well, the air quality district does seem to be under political attack at
this time.
- Holden
- Yes, it does, and again it's saying "Can't we do it with technique and
not with change to the habit patterns of the whole community?"
- Murdoch
- Can I--? I'd like to go back for just a moment. During this very key
period when you developed the first development guide which really
looked ahead and solved all these problems, Jack Green and [Norton]
Younglove were key board members. Do you have anything to say about
them?
- Holden
- Jack was a very supportive one and certainly Norton Younglove. He was
interested in SCAG when he was councilman for the city of Riverside and
subsequently when he moved over to be a supervisor in the county of
Riverside. But to mention a number more-- Some of the founding fathers
should get a mention here in this. I'd like to mention some of the early
people and also some of those that became presidents of SCAG in addition
to Dan Mikesell and Tom Bradley. The first president of SCAG was, in
1966, Dallas [M.] Williams. He was a councilman in Burbank. In 1967,
David L. Baker, who was an Orange County supervisor-- They have all been
important on various SCAG committees. Jack Green was president in 1972.
John [T.] Conlon from Ventura County was president in 1971. In 1970, Ned
Chatfield, a representative from the city of Camarillo, was a president.
They've all been pretty helpful. We've already mentioned Mikesell, as I
said. You also mentioned Norton Younglove; [he] subsequently has been a
president of SCAG. A number of other people-- From time to time there
have been great supporters of SCAG, so that Ray Remy and--after his
leaving, shortly after I retired from SCAG--Mark Pisano have had quite a
bit of support from these people--
- Murdoch
- Tell us a little bit about the transition from Ray Remy to Mark Pisano
and their contrast in styles, if there was one.
- Holden
- Well, what happened at that particular point is that I decided that it
was a good time for me to go on to other things. We had by then at SCAG
started some kind of program on almost every one of these major regional
issues. They were all ready to go. They were ready to hire. There was
money appropriated and so on. So I decided to retire from SCAG at that
time.
- Murdoch
- What year was that?
- Holden
- Nineteen seventy-seven. As a matter of fact, in April, I guess. At that
time, Ray-- At the beginning of my--
- Murdoch
- That was around the time that Ray Remy went to work for Mayor Bradley,
right?
- Holden
- My first decision along that line-- He was still at SCAG, and there was
no rumor that he was going to quit. But all of a sudden one day, just
about the time I was leaving there--I'd made that decision--he came in
and said, "Well, I'm going to go to work for Mayor Bradley as his--"
- Murdoch
- Chief deputy.
- Holden
- "--chief deputy." Yes. SCAG started looking for somebody else. Mark was
an employee of Washington in the--
- Murdoch
- Water quality, I think, arena.
- Holden
- I think he was in the rapid transit or public transit division of the
Department of Transportation. He had knowledge and was working with the
distribution of funds for subways and rapid transit of different kinds.
Mark agreed to come, I think, because he felt that he could do some good
in the area in terms of allocating and working with these various
distributions of funds. He's also an economist and not a planner, not in
a disparaging sense, because he had a lot of planning ideas, but he's
very much a transportation-planning guy in the first instance and that,
of course, is our bread and butter, obviously. So he came to work for SCAG. He's been very much an advocate of SCAG. He
was also married to a very lovely lady who must be a genius, getting
herself involved in the community and very able in terms of networking
with a good many people, including business people in the community.
With her help--by the way she's a dean at USC [University of Southern
California] new school these days-- This is Mrs. [Jane G.] Pisano.
What's her first name? I've forgotten. Anyway, so Mark began to develop
support through those interesting contacts and his own efforts and
Washington associations. He had a lot of points of view in this area. It
is not, therefore, surprising that SCAG, I'm sure, was involved to a
substantial extent when the Business Roundtable in Los Angeles as
reported in the [Los Angeles] Times recently, comes out with the idea
that we'd better take another look at the infrastructure in this area.
Are we really developing it enough? Do we need more attention and more
money devoted to this purpose? I think we should. Anyway, Mark carries
on, and I think he's carried on in a number of different ways, using his
economic background and his transportation background-- I think he's
going in a good direction for the area.
- Murdoch
- How would you contrast Mark Pisano's style with Ray Remy's style?
- Holden
- I have never had a chance to be intimately associated or closely
associated--not to mention intimately--with Mark in terms of his direct
relationships with the SCAG executive committee or something of that
kind. I do know him because he'd been helpful to us in subsequent
programs, which we'd all been interested in, namely planning the history
program [Los Angeles Regional Planning History Group], which we'll get
to in a minute. I think we should carry on here, though, at this point--
- Murdoch
- But let me--
- Holden
- So far as I know, Mark is doing fine. I don't think he had quite the
clout or quite the organization building skills that Ray Remy had, but I
don't discount him for many of the good things that I think he's done
and, of course, keeping the whole outfit together. I do want to--
- Murdoch
- As you look back on your years with SCAG and have followed SCAG since,
do you have any thoughts on why it has been so difficult to build
support for some kind of regional organization when, to me, it seems so
dramatically necessary? We're just not facing up to our problems, and
yet there just doesn't seem to be-- It seems very difficult to build
political support for a true regional approach.
- Holden
- All right. I have a couple of thoughts on that-- well, on SCAG and why
it's going to be around for a while. These relate to certain political
policies, if you like--going back to that kind of a discussion--that
existed in this region. First of all, SCAG was formed partly as a
defense mechanism to get cities and counties in the game, so to speak,
in terms of their own interests for development in this region.
- Murdoch
- Well, they wanted regional self-rule rather than having the state of
California or the U.S. federal government making decisions.
- Holden
- It still remains true that a lot of people now are turning to the county
situation, and still believe that the three major multipurpose
governments are state, county, and city. Unless a major change occurs,
it is likely to me that this penchant on the part of the state
legislature is going to continue, and we'll get more rather than fewer
single-purpose approaches to solving regional problems. I don't see a
lot of interest on the part of support groups at the moment for
something other than that approach. I think it must be that the
legislature is getting feedback from local people, that that's the way
to go. This leaves a question. All right. It might be nice if we could figure
out how to reorganize the whole system here and put the number of
regional functional activities together as a single function and provide
an elected group for that agency which would have the authority to match
and look at and control these several regional agencies. I think it's
going to be a long time before we see it. It might be nice if there is
ultimately enough effort and discussion on this--or some kind of an
emergency that says it's necessary. We're not likely to get it.
- Murdoch
- What you're saying is, things have to get bad before they get better,
and I think you're right.
- Holden
- It may be. At the same time, there are many technical needs and many
coordination functions that need to be solved at a regional level.
Therefore--
- Murdoch
- And they're not being solved.
- Holden
- --the only agency currently that we have around that can do this kind of
thing is SCAG.
- Murdoch
- Right.
- Holden
- It may or may not be very strong. It may or may not be able to fight an
entrenched director of one of the major special districts in L.A. County
[laughs], but it's the only area currently where there is real
discussion. SCAG is organized to do something about these problems. Boy,
some of the discussions on some of the committees of SCAG, which
involved honest people, were amazing, and they were not all exactly in
line on how these things should go. So hopefully SCAG is still going to
be around. It's still active at this moment with some-- As long as the
federal government will finance it, fine. It would be nice to find some
additional kind of financing--maybe through the state, a recognized law
or something of the sort where SCAG would have enough money to do its
job. It would be in order. Meantime, SCAG will sometimes have lots of
activity. Sometimes it will have relatively little, but it will survive.
- Murdoch
- Let's move on. Tell us a little bit about your consulting activities and
particularly the organization of the regional planning history group.
- Holden
- After my retirement in 1977, I did take on a few little consulting jobs,
some of which were quite interesting. We might mention the fact that I
did do a general plan on zoning ordinances for the city of Blythe out in
the desert. It gave me a chance to run around the countryside and see
some of the region that I didn't see too often before, and it was a lot
of fun. I had a job with QUAD Consulting Group; two contracts I did for
them. One was a review of one of the electric utility lines, the new
line proposed by the [Los Angeles City] Department of Water and Power,
where QUAD was a consultant in terms of the appearance of these lines in
a report which would relate to an environmental impact statement which
QUAD was creating. I also worked with that group in terms of creating an
environmental impact statement with respect to a redevelopment project
in Bakersfield. There were a number of these things. They were
relatively small or limited, but a lot of fun to do. Actually, as time
went by, my efforts in that line became somewhat more limited, though
there were a number of things that carried over a period of time and it
was a fun activity. Moving on.
- Murdoch
- Tell us about organizing the regional planning history group.
- Holden
- Yes. One of my first loves, of course, has always been what happened,
what is happening, what will happen to the Los Angeles County Regional
Planning Commission. George [L.] Marr was a member of the Regional
Planning Commission staff for a long, long time. Some time ago, perhaps
maybe fifteen years ago now, George discovered some very important maps
from a late 1930s study of the complete coastal basin of Los Angeles
County in terms of a detailed land-use survey and the mapping of that
land use. It was created, I think, as a WPA [Works Progress
Administration] project, using federal funding. That became the basis
for important theoretical work by commission staff people. There was an
important name, but I can't remember it right at the moment. Anyway,
these maps were on file-- I'm not quite sure whether George found them
on file with the county or with the Regional Planning Commission or with
the county engineer. But in any event, the county was going through a
"let's clean out the papers" effort. George started to look for
someplace he could take those maps and preserve them. He went to, among
other things, the Huntington Library [Art Collections, and Botanical
Gardens]. There was a curator there for rare books by the name of Allan
Jutzi-- And Jutzi, who was very interested in Southern California and
Los Angeles history, took them in. But that inspired, mostly at the
behest of Cal Hamilton, the idea that there ought to be an organization
that looked after the collection of old planning data as one of its
objectives; as a second objective, educating this area in what kind of
planning history really had existed; a third part, perhaps to develop
oral histories of important people in the region, particularly that
related to the development of the county. Allan Jutzi, of course, was
primarily interested in this history of the development of this region.
That's his main concern here. The net result is that I became interested in this particular activity,
and with Allan, he and I formed and--with an attorney of his
acquaintance--created a non-profit California corporation with the title
Los Angeles Regional Planning History Group.
- Murdoch
- And what year was that in?
- Holden
- That was--the year for that-- I have it right here in one of these
papers. The Los Angeles Regional Planning History Group received its
papers of incorporation on January 11, 1984. I've served a number of
years as president of this group. We have accomplished a number of
things. There is a sizable library now at the Huntington, a collection
of papers that do reflect a lot of the planning history of the Los
Angeles region. There are three existing oral histories, and the program
continues. The oral histories are of William J. Fox, who was an early
director of the Regional Planning Commission, and subsequently county
engineer; Milton Breivogel, who worked for both city and county, and for
many years as director of planning for the RPC; and Simon Eisner, who at
a very early date, even before the 701 program was officially adopted,
decided that he would quit work for the city or the county and go out as
a professional planning consultant. His first job was a general plan, I
think, for the city of San Bernardino. In any event--
- Murdoch
- And Cal Hamilton?
- Holden
- And Cal Hamilton. There were four, weren't there? That's right--director
of planning for the city of Los Angeles.
- Murdoch
- Also, you have some videotapes, do you not?
- Holden
- Oh, yes. We have--
- Murdoch
- You have videotapes of a very interesting presentation by Milt
Breivogel.
- Holden
- Yes, we do have a couple. We have some transcriptions of seminars we
have had on various aspects of planning. We expect this work to
continue, obviously, over a period of time. I find I am now a part of
this oral history program, where I'll have completed one of these oral
history sessions. These are done, by the way, by LARPHG [the Los Angeles
Regional Planning History Group], but with the complete cooperation and
help of the UCLA Oral History Program. I am grateful for the chance to
do it. It's a very interesting process to express one's historical
viewpoint--
- Murdoch
- Well, as we start to sum up here in a little bit, tell us what you think
might be helpful to a young person, young planner, who wanted to be
active in encouraging a better land-use pattern and a better
environment? What advice would you have for a young planner?
- Holden
- Get into the field and get your education, preferably, at least, at the
graduate level, and in a professional planning program. Beyond that, the
situation is that a lot of these old-time activities, ones that I was
involved in, for example, essentially the initial zoning refinement for
large areas of Los Angeles County-- That kind of thing doesn't exist as
much anymore. Many young planners these days find that they're going
into things other than official government planning and the official
planning agency. The AICP [American Institute of Certified Planners],
the professional planners' organization, now has several thousand
members compared to the relatively few--less than four hundred--that the
AICP actually had way back when I started in planning. Well, where are
all these people employed, anyway? Well, they're employed in a lot of
activities, and as planners they have abilities and knowledge which is
useful to many different people. You could even go beyond the physical
planning groups, such as engineers and architects and landscape
architects, into fields such as administration work, corporate planning
even. I do find that planning education now tends to be consolidated, which may
be a good thing. It expands the scope of a planner. An example of that
is the fact that, not in my time but shortly after, the sort of combined
subsections of planning were combined into a planning school--a school
of urban planning and development. Today, just recently completed, we
have a reassertion of the same idea. We have now a larger school, which
is a school of policy, planning, and development recently established at
USC [University of Southern California School of Planning, Policy, and
Development]. It has the standard city planning component, but it also
has a particularly real-estate-oriented activity and it also is combined
with an old planning administration section, so that there can be an
interchange of--
- Murdoch
- I think you're right. I think it's a very exciting development down at
USC. They involve policy planning, and Tridib Banerjee is a key actor in
it. I think that USC will have a very strong planning school.
- Holden
- Yes, and it's worth mentioning and encouraging. Well, nowadays, we don't
see so many people being taken into the profession with only a B.A.
degree, but with occasionally a specific degree in planning, such as in
the polytechnic schools or in the graduate courses that we find in
various places. So it's going to be harder to get into the field unless
you have a very good education.
- Murdoch
- Well, in the planning techniques, it's so advanced now. I'm thinking of
computers and geographic information systems that young planners today
can do in days what would take us months or years in the old days.
- Holden
- That's exactly right.
- Murdoch
- The problem still seems to be that we don't seem to have developed a
political will to face up to our problems and plan ahead. I think,
perhaps, politicians--even if they provide lip service to long-range
planning--they're concentrating on the next election, which is
relatively short-term.
- Holden
- Very often.
- Murdoch
- I think maybe-- Remember, there was that concept that was developed at
your USC school--of continuous city planning. You break away from the
twenty-year comprehensive plan and have a continuous plan. You have a
two-year plan and a five-year plan and a ten-year plan.
- Holden
- May I add--?
- Murdoch
- Do you have any reactions to that or anything else in terms of what
direction you think planning is going?
- Holden
- I would suggest an additional axiom that supports to an extent what
they're thinking about, and that is that any area which, because of many
factors, is subject to rapid change must have more and more continuous
planning, because you have to change that plan on occasion when you have
these influences coming in often from the outside. You have to take into
account trends, trends that you may want to modify.
- Murdoch
- I think you also have to take advantage of opportunities when they
present themselves.
- Holden
- It's also true that change is going to come relatively gradually in the
larger sense, just as it may take a considerable amount of time for us
finally to think about housing people in high-rise buildings here in
this area-- The real question is whether it's desirable, such as they do
in, say, the plan they have in Beijing, China.
- Murdoch
- Well, we've enjoyed very much hearing about those really key days when
the county of Los Angeles completed for the first time a county-wide
plan and zoning ordinance and hearing about those founding days of SCAG,
when SCAG regional planning first got rolling. Do you have any other
final concluding remarks that you would like to make?
- Holden
- Before we go into a final statement, I would like to add remarks about a
couple of people. The first is Mr. Joseph [K.] Kennedy, who helped me
and worked with me in the planning of Blythe. He also worked with me for
many years at the county and is currently involved in many interesting
programs in the south Whittier area. That reminds me that we have not and should mention the early activity of
the Regional Planning Commission in providing planners to many cities
around the area, not only in terms of programs, but also as employees of
cities. They're graduates of an effective education process that went on
at the RPC [Los Angeles Regional Planning Commission] We should honor
that because there were a lot of people in this area who did graduate
from that L.A. County system. Finally, one last statement, something like this: We began this tape with
my mentioning that I was born on an orange ranch in San Dimas, that my
own interest was going actually into some other profession than
agriculture. Then we can go to 1947. In 1947 I married [Miriam] Louise
Bader, and seven days later I went to work for the Los Angeles Regional
Planning Commission. In the course of time we had three
children--Katherine Louise, Mary Jane, and Robert Edward Holden. We have
five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. In 1977, I decided to
retire. I worked on a lot of projects, but now, gradually, they have
become volunteer [projects] or hobbies. In 1997, now fifty years later,
Lou and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Today we live in
a comfortable suburban home on a hill here in Whittier, California. Our
house overlooks the Los Angeles plain. On clear days--and by the way we
have more clear days than when we first moved into this house--we can
see [Santa] Catalina [Island].
- Murdoch
- Thanks to your good air quality efforts.
- Holden
- We are now, at this location, about thirty miles from where I was born.
The orange groves are gone. Finally, we are today well within the
boundary of the metropolitan area of this region, the second largest
metropolitan region in the United States, in a world-class area.
- Murdoch
- Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Holden.
- Holden
- What a life!