In the ongoing debates about how Los Angeles will handle the additional millions of people who will settle here in the 21st Century, there is a temptation to look back and see if the early 20th Century had any good ideas that might be reinstated.

Two good elements from 80 years ago come to mind:

There were once hundreds of miles of interurban streetcars that connected the far flung cities of the Southland. Pasadena was linked to Long Beach by a circuitious but effective transport system that was dismantled after World War II. We lost a practical alternative to the car when they destroyed the Pacific Electric system.

Architecturally, the city built gracious Spanish style homes, theaters, schools, that fit into our Mediteranean climate. There were early Modern architects, who imported the Bauhaus to the Hollywood Hills and whet America’s appetite for outdoor living in the sunshine.

But nostalgia for a vanished way of life, should also provide a clear eyed view that we began building wrongly in the 1920’s and we are living with the consequences today.

It was the idea to keep LA low and spread out, linked by roads and autos, served by decentralized shopping centers that brought us smog, congestion, sprawl, and ultimately killed off and deadened our whole urban experience.

To see Wilshire Boulevard in the 1920’s, is to marvel at its cleanliness, but to also imagine walking miles along a street of gaping holes, where grass grows in vacant lots and car speed by billboards. We live in the same junkyard of commercialism today.

We are a city of many homes and gardens, but hardly any decent parks. We are a city of tall buildings downtown, that is deserted and desolate at night. We are a city with gorgeous weather, where the inhabitants sit in their cars, or in air-conditioned houses and offices. Many of the dreams of tomorrow were hatched in the Roaring 20’s and are facts of life today.

The post-war dream of a house, car, factory job and garden for every family is no longer possible. Millions of illegal aliens stand on the corner willing to work for $10 a day, while Congress approves $40 billion to fund a secret spy program. And California looks back 50 years ago to a time when our tax dollars did not fund pre-emptive wars, and there was still money for such frivolous things as the Hoover Dam and the construction of schools and hospitals. But we are living in 2006, and our realities, and the price of gas, has changed.

LA’s past is not a guide for our future. We need to imagine new ways of living and getting around.

Along Santa Monica Boulevard in Westwood, a new boulevard has been constructed with fancy lights and street trees in an imitation European style. But it looks contextually ridiculous because the structures along the street are still gas stations, horizontal strip offices, mini-malls, billboards and eight lanes of traffic. Designers used the past for inspiration–and we are still sitting in our cars at the corner of Sepulveda and Santa Monica…waiting for the 21st Century to arrive.