The Telephone Shapes Los Angeles, 1880-1950
by Emily Bills, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University


On March 30, 1924, the front-page headline in the Los Angeles Sunday Times announced that the Southern California Telephone Company’s swelling construction program provided “Evidence in Concrete and Steel of the City’s Growth.” The unprecedented enlargement of an already expanding city, the Times suggested, could not only be gauged by the increased number of automobiles on the street or the demand for housing, but also by the number of Angelenos who were talking on the phone. “Telephone officials,” the Times concluded, “say that [the] astounding increase in ‘talk traffic’ is an excellent criterion of the growth and activity of Los Angeles.”

The assertion was not a new one. Two years earlier, Los Angeles Realtor made a similar connection between the city’s physical growth and the growth of its communications infrastructure. But as the Realtor reminded its readers, the surge in the demand for telephones was not solely a product of the city’s recent growth spurt. Between 1912 and 1918, the journal reported, Hollywood went from 1,472 to 9,266 subscribers, “a gain of 535 percent in the period of six years.” Furthermore, the Realtor declared, this increase was “typical of practically every section of this super-city.”

What these articles suggest in their comparison of telephone expansion to city growth is that early advances in telecommunications might be added to the catalog of technological marvels whose integration into urban areas has become inseparable from the definition of the metropolis itself. Indeed, the telephone came of age at the same time as the tall building and the electric light, it traversed the American city in a web more complex than commuter train lines or sewer systems, and it helped establish international commerce as we know it today. As geographer Aharon Kellerman states, out of all the modern advances used to gauge a city’s growth, telecommunications has the most extensive geography.

In this paper, I’d like to explore a few ways in which the telephone informed Los Angeles’ own unique geography, both physical and social. How, for example, did the flow of information enabled by early telephone services support economic concerns, and thus physical settlement, in both the city center and surrounding region? How did the introduction of the telephone contribute to the way Angelenos perceived city space? Finally, in what ways did advertising and the media align phone use with notions of “Westerness” and “Southern California living?”

Building the City

Starting in the early 1980s, a growing interest in the role advances in telecommunications play in shaping urban form brought new attention to Los Angeles’ urban physiognomy. With an eye on the region’s inclination toward establishing multiple commercial centers surrounded by high-density developments, Los Angeles’ polynucleated structure seems symptomatic of similar socio-geographic transformations in restructuring capitalist cityscapes around the globe. These changes in the urban landscape reflect, in sociologist Manuel Castells’ words, a greater dependence on an efficient “space of flows” connecting dispersed informational “hubs,” a great virtual communications web that ties together the “technopoles” of a new global economy. L.A. emerges from these discussions as one of the quintessential “technopoles”—or as other urban thinkers might have it, a prototypical “edge city” (Joel Garreau), “exopolis” (Edward Soja), “midopolis” (Joel Kotkin), or incipient e-topia (William J. Mitchell). But although a growing interest in communications has placed new importance on the need to reexamine the spatial patterns of Los Angeles’ unyielding development, a persistent contemporary focus leaves blank the role foundational communications systems played in the physical formation and social dynamics of the city over time. Current scholarship provides an opportunity to speculate on how telecommunications contribute to the shape and function of the L.A. of the future, but it also signals the need to reinterpret how early means of transferring information, via the telephone, influenced L.A.’s socio-spatial formation in the past.

When mentioned in this dialogue, the telephone is traditionally presented as having a decentralizing influence in that it facilitates the separation of manufacturing and managerial concerns by enabling industry to relocate to more affordable land outside of urban areas. Sociologists like Roger Burlingame, however, also cite the telephone’s role in permitting the physical concentration of people and buildings in dense city centers, in part by alleviating foot traffic in large structures and on city streets. L.A.’s unique urban development during the early years of its expansion reflect both of these historical growth patterns and is thus of particular interest when tracing the telephone’s relationship to the maturation of that city. From the 1880s through the 1930s, when the telephone was being rapidly integrated into daily life, Los Angeles was forming in both a centralized and decentralized manner: it possessed an active cultural, commercial and civic center in what is now downtown, while simultaneously experiencing unprecedented growth in the surrounding region.

As Manuel Castells suggests, however, it is not technology itself but primarily the economic sphere, where advances in communications are felt, which fundamentally affects spatial structure. At the turn of the twentieth century, the bulk of the region’s commercial activity centered on professional services, real estate, trade (mostly oil), and agriculture, but not manufacturing and financial services, with which telephone use at the time is generally aligned. Urban thinkers considering the (sub)urbanization of the country post-1960, however, recognize business and producer services as the sectors most impacted by communications, particularly in their need to facilitate flows of information between disparate locales. This parallel may help explain the rapid growth of telephone interests in a region that, in comparison to major economic centers in the East and Midwest, was still relatively small but was characterized by a rapidly growing and spatially dispersed populace. The statistics are indeed impressive: Los Angeles demonstrated the telephone only one year after Bell’s famous test drive in 1876, established its first phone company in 1881, and saw greater phone use per capita by 1895 than anywhere else in the country, including Boston, Chicago, and New York. By 1905 it outstripped Sweden for the world record.

L.A.’s initial subscribers were men with enough capital to indulge in experimental technology and with the daring disposition of the western pioneer. The adventurous included Hellman, Haas & Company and Harris Newmark & Company, both grocers; M. Dodsworth for the Los Angeles Packing Company, movers; and J. M. Griffith & Company, lumber, Perry, Woodwarth & Company, lumber, and Deming, Palmer & Company, the local timber mill. Shopping, building, and transporting: these were the initial uses ascribed to the telephone and they continued to be the most consistent.

In the years before improvements in repeaters and wires made it practical to extend lines long distances, hookups connected these businesses within a six-mile radius in the center of town. When such technological obstacles were overcome, the telephone continued to be regularly employed as a boon to downtown development. The press significantly aided this effort, particularly the Los Angeles Times, whose parent company, the Times-Mirror Corporation, founded in 1881, had strong interests in real estate downtown and communications in general. For example, the Times placed pressures on outlying communities to hook up to downtown or risk business losses:

In Los Angeles County this [telephone] development has been perhaps greater than anywhere else…The telephone was practically unknown here four years ago. To-day its use is an indispensable necessity to business and professional persons and for those who live in the suburbs to be without a telephone is almost as bad as to be out in the woods.

Hooking up to the city center, the Times thus hinted, supported the economic life of growing communities around the county, thereby encouraging the widespread diffusion of the new device. Although historian Robert Fogelson describes how the impact of transportation installations and other utilities on the spread of L.A. was particularly profound when it developed into a metropolis after 1885, the telephone, which was widely installed in the central city in 1881 and linked to the outlying county by 1883, may have provided the communications infrastructure needed to support subsequent growth in the years before the interurban railroad and road improvements facilitated practical travel. As the Times recognized by 1882, “the utility of such a [telephone extension] project for the accommodation of business between adjacent towns must commend itself to everyone.”

The active campaign for telephone connections by Angelenos in all parts of the region reflect recognition of the phone’s usefulness to outlying towns. Only one year after the formation of Los Angeles Telephone in 1881, many local papers encouraged the city to extend a line of her system to the neighboring towns of Downey, Anaheim, Orange, and Santa Ana, and continue as far as San Diego. Another line was to reach through Pasadena, San Marino, and San Gabriel. The port of San Pedro was of course important, and a line there would take in many settlements, like Compton, along the way. By 1883 every one of these lines, except for the one to San Diego, had been completed, in addition to a line to the burgeoning beach towns of Santa Monica and Long Beach. Hence, before commuter train service linked the county together and electric lights illuminated it, the telephone crisscrossed Los Angeles as a sign of commercial, technological and social progress. A comparison of electric interurban train extensions and telephone extensions throughout the county illustrate this timeline.

Connections were particularly important for growing farming communities. Take, for example, the experience in Pomona. Located about thirty miles from downtown and fifty miles from the port at San Pedro, the telephone allowed Pomona’s agriculturalists to remain competitive in fruit exports, for which it was rapidly building a national reputation. Although Sunset Telephone (the successor to Los Angeles Telephone) installed Pomona’s first exchange in 1885, by 1895 the burgeoning community’s fifty installations did not meet the increasing demand. Such deficiencies were particularly frustrating to citrus growers, who were concerned that the lack of coverage in the rural areas would depress their exporting businesses and devastate their town.

To remedy this, a group of progressive farmers organized an independent telephone company, incorporated as the Pomona Valley Telephone and Telegraph Union, in September 1902. Construction was financed entirely by local capital, and although the system was built for five hundred subscribers, within two years the company had more than one thousand stations with lines extending to Claremont, La Verne, San Dimas, and Chino. Even after Pomona was connected to the interurban train system in 1904, Pomona Telephone was so central to the social and economic life of that community that by 1912 it successfully purchased Sunset’s competing exchange.

Although telephone access was indispensable to the farmer, the most adamant proponent of telephone service should logically have been the real estate developer, who was heavily involved in subdividing and improving Los Angeles’ vast tracks of land. In Glendale, for example, Leslie C. Brand, who formed the San Fernando Valley Land and Development Company with Henry Huntington, also organized and became president of the local telephone concern, the San Fernando Valley Home Telephone Company. When Brand ran into trouble trying to secure rights-of-way for the Big Red Cars, he concentrated on updating Sunset’s original 1899 exchange and then extended telephone connections to La Cresenta, La Cañada, Burbank and Lankershim.
In general, however, it is extremely difficult to track the specific activities and attitudes of real estate interests toward telephone installations. In part, this lack of record may relate to the speculative nature of land development during the first few boom periods of Los Angeles’ growth, which was a private and relatively autonomous affair. As in many cities, municipal pressures and private efforts encouraged utilities services as a means of raising property values in town and encouraging real estate sales in surrounding regions. However, municipal agencies in Los Angeles did not regulate the actual improvement of property, and as a result, the pace of utilities expansion depended to a large degree on the willingness of private enterprise to install connections.

Unfortunately, Los Angeles’ developers often had trouble securing telephone, as well as electric and gas installations. Many utility companies were not willing to risk financial loss by moving into new territory, and most developers could not afford to enter the utility business themselves. In 1902 the Los Angeles Board of Public Utilities enacted regulations meant to protect utility interests by giving subdividers the right to service only if “a tender of money sufficient to defray the cost be made to the company.” Most small-scale developers were unable to afford this investment, and because subdivision was often a speculative affair only the bare minimum in improvements were made before selling lots.

Larger companies did exert more effort in this direction. In San Fernando Valley, for example, the Sunset Company required that Los Angeles Suburban Homes purchase $10,000 of its bonds. L.A. Homes also appealed to the Southern California Gas and Edison Electric Companies, each of which made their own demands, but in the end decided that only electric and telephone services were most essential to a successful return on their land investment. They thus met Edison’s requests and bought $20,000 of Sunset’s securities.

As the most powerful land developer in Southern California, Henry Huntington’s attitude toward telephone services might be used to gauge its relevance to the subdivision game. Huntington owned thirty-six independent telephone companies from California to Tennessee—including investments in L.A.’s Home Telephone—making his interests the largest in the country. Never one to think small, in 1908 Huntington hinted at plans to establish an “interocean telephone” that would link L.A. via a southern route to the east coast, thereby establishing Los Angeles, and not San Francisco, as the economic center of California. Within Los Angeles, it is not clear to what extent Huntington took part in decisions made by the Home Telephone or other local independents connected with his land, like San Fernando Telephone in Glendale. However, his railroad interests alone mandated close alignments. The telephone was used to maintain the efficient running of lines by tracking miles traveled, maintenance needs and scheduling. As the Times explained, railroad dispatching in the city was brought to perfection by private telephone wires that reached wherever the interurban trains extended.

Imagining the City

By the turn of the twentieth century the telephone had thoroughly penetrated greater Los Angeles, and its presence likely began to shape the way Angelenos perceived city space. As the first modern convenience to thoroughly link the downtown area, and then to extend those links to the rest of the county, initial installations signaled pioneering efforts to bind the region into a comprehensive whole. As the interurban railroad would do shortly, and the freeway and subway system would replicate much later, telephone lines crisscrossed, and by 1883 radiated around and out of the central business district. In so doing, it helped establish the city center as the nucleus of the region, both physically and psychologically.

Early diagrams helped telephone workers and citizens alike visualize these links. They usually portrayed downtown as a large circle, with arms linking this core, via trunk lines, to other “centers.” In real life, poles were erected along dusty downtown streets and then followed unimproved cart roads out to surrounding communities. Standing alone in the widely undeveloped countryside, these poles and wires would have functioned as palpable signposts of L.A.’s move into the future, curious colonnades of leafless timber lining the path to downtown.

These physical paths also signaled new virtual paths that could facilitate travel without requiring one to leave the home or office. The general importance of the telephone for navigating the vast, horizontal region is illustrated in part by the constant battle for reasonable rates, which remained consistently lower than anywhere else in the country. Beginning in the 1880s, the phone companies contributed to this telephonic reading of the city by trying to organize greater Los Angeles into “zones” and basing rates on calls made within and between these sectors. For example, while telephone traffic eventually followed any number of paths around the region, for many years the bulk of calls were directed toward downtown. Telephone interests were thus under constant pressure to lower “traveling” rates to this “zone 1” from cities as far as Santa Ana and Palos Verdes, much as Huntington’s railroad was compelled to provide free transfers between suburban and downtown stops. In 1912 the public was clearly winning. As the Board of Public Utilities stated, “Few cities have such intimate relations with so many outlying settlements and such ease and low cost of telephone communication therewith.” Getting around the city, it seemed, was conceived as a telephone issue as much as it was a transportation issue.

Starting in the late 1920s, the Bell Company began encouraging the housewife to become one such telephone traveler by transforming the consumer image of the telephone from that of a business necessity to that of an accommodation. Part of its “comfort and convenience” advertising campaign, for example, strove to make it “the style” for an average home to have two or three telephone extensions and an affluent home to have as many as fifteen. These ads, placed in architecture, real estate, and women’s magazines, encouraged telephone installations as part of the homebuilding process. Pacific Bell, for example, informed the housewife that their Free Architects and Buildings Department could help her to defeat the inconveniences of space and time by installing extensions in every room of the house. This easy access, she was told, would take the “run” out of running her household.

Part of Bell’s project was to insert the telephone into studies conducted by domestic scientists like Lillian Gilbreth, who applied Frederick Winslow Taylor’s time-motion principles for factory production to the home. The telephone, Bell suggested, facilitated the efficient organization of errands and social commitments by enabling the housewife (or her servants) to order goods for delivery, call repairmen, and schedule activities—a modern necessity, they told her, that no disciplined housewife would do without. She was, in other words, encouraged to imagine the city as a space of consumption, and the telephone as a tool with which to more efficiently navigate it. This campaign was not specific to Los Angeles, but Western lifestyle journals like Better Homes and Gardens and Sunset Magazine actively encouraged this perception of urban space in columns that acted as “guide books” on how to negotiate the rules and practices for using the telephone.

Advertising the City

It took until the 1950s, however, for Bell to align the modernization of the interior of the house with modern architecture itself. These ads were often regionally specific, selecting house types that were associated with specific parts of the country and architects that would testify to the benefits of such pre-phone planning. Pacific Bell ads in California-based journals like Western Architect and Engineer, for example, featured the cutting-edge house designs for which Southern California had become known. In this particular rendering, SoCal “modernity” is signaled through the clean simple lines of a board and batten plywood façade, large picture windows, the far reach of an open trellis that filters the hot sun, and, of course, an interior thoroughly wired with telephone conduits.

In a city known for its eclectic collection of fantastic mansions, however, almost every genre was represented, while L.A.’s celebrated but less radical architects were more likely to be featured as spokespeople for the conservative Bell monopoly. One 1930 issue of Architecture magazine announced that Carleton M. Winslow’s streamlined-moderne house contained ten built-in telephone outlets, including an extension in the room most frequented by the typical Angeleno: the garage. In this ad, Ralph C. Flewelling notes the boost in resale value telephone extensions bring to the Spanish-style residence he built for a family in Beverly Hills. In a town where the truly hip changed residences like they changed attire, this was an important selling point.

In L.A., even Mickey Mouse’s new Tudor castle was thoroughly pre-wired, complete with a poolside extension for Disney’s biggest star. Hollywood, it seemed, was filled with people talking on the phone, particularly the barrage of cinematic personalities who were pictured gabbing at the Wilshire golf course, chatting in the gardens of their Beverly Hills homes, and passing on the word about the latest product. On screen, the telephone appeared in classy, black-lacquer attire, but with the advent of color models, it also began to don a more fantastic wardrobe of gold, white, and powder blue. The movies were instrumental in putting casual telephone use in the eye of the public, and, in turn, the public soon came to associate the telephone with what many saw as the decadence and frivolity of L.A. living.

Los Angeles’ laid-back reputation, however, had been established well before Hollywood became inseparable from L.A. in the public imagination. It had been a key aspect of the original booster campaign to advertise the region’s resort-like features. As the Great Depression wore on, architectural trends that paralleled the scientific management of the home were aligned with the small house and its low-maintenance family, an association that melded nicely with the notion of the “simplicity” of Western living. This association had already appeared by 1910 with the nationwide popularity of the California bungalow and the outdoor lifestyle it represented. When Bell initiated its “convenience” campaign a few decades later, it seized on the bungalow as the quintessential middle class home: in a series of ads released in architecture journals in1937, for example, the architect is asked to consider the telephone needs of the fictitious “Bailie Family” who have requested “a small home of the California bungalow type.”

After WWII, the media focused more closely on the backyard as the locus for the recent obsession with exaggerated family fun. Once again, the Southern California lifestyle seemed to meld particularly well with these new ideals; ads by Pacific Bell actively cultivated this image by suggesting telephone extensions for outdoor areas. In one ad, for example, a relaxed, pipe-smoking husband replaces the boardroom and suit and tie for the lawn chair and Hawaiian T-shirt. Plucking a pear from his abundant fruit tree with one hand, he leaves his other free to answer a conveniently located outdoor extension. “Here in the West,” the ad reads, “where pleasant, relaxed living has become a custom, built-in telephone facilities are a feature every home-owner goes for.” And in this 1955 ad run in Western Architect and Engineer, the builder is asked to consider the functional needs of “Big Chief Hot Stuff”: “Especially here in the West,” the ad states, “where we live outdoors a lot, they want to be able to talk on the patio or even by the barbecue.”

As Mike Davis so aptly suggests, however, Los Angeles is not only a land of sunshine but of noir. Who better to conclude with, then, than Raymond Chandler, whose L.A.-based crime fiction novels provide a seemingly unending amount of references to the telephone’s role in L.A.-living. Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s shamus star, is a true Angeleno detective: he navigates the underbelly of L.A. from behind the wheel of his car, a tool so indispensable to him that it has often been characterized as a kind of physical appendage. A close reading of Chandler’s books, however, reveal the telephone to be as important as the automobile to navigating the physical and social spaces of the city. Given the opportunity, Marlowe will always avoid driving if he can telephone instead, as it is a much easier way to get around. Entire chapters revolve around telephone conversations during which the subtleties of a voice or Marlowe’s handling of the receiver function as key descriptive devices. As for most Angelenos, events in Marlow’s life are often triggered by the ringing, or not ringing, of the telephone. The style of telephone a suspect owns is an important indication of their character, as in the Lady in the Lake, where the playboy’s gilded French model points to the decadent lifestyle of Hollywood denizens: “I looked at the phone,” Marlow sneers, “It was on a small table against the wall beside the fireplace. It had a long cord so that Mr. Lavery could be lying on his back on the davenport, a cigarette between his smooth brown lips, a tall cool one at the table at his side, and plenty of time for a nice long cozy conversation with a lady friend.” For those without a phone, well, that just indicates one’s socio-economic status. By the time Chandler wrote The Long Goodbye, one of his most biting L.A. novels, Marlowe has formed a clear opinion about telephone use in Los Angeles: “There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadget-ridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk.” In Los Angeles, Marlowe has finally figured out, “The telephone is a fetish.”