For the Re:Research column, Nina Sarnelle writes about her pandemic practice of walking in LA, gathering the evidence of our civilization that litters the roadways. Visit the ongoing Thin City photo archive here. An audio version of this article is available below.
Thin City is another kind of road work: a photo archive created in ongoing collaboration with the vehicles of Los Angeles. On optimistic mornings, I conduct my dog walk like an archeologist from the future, pausing in the middle of an intersection to investigate the residue of a fossil-fueled species before its collapse. Like most human cultures of the past, we will likely be remembered by our trash.
Horizontality is one of LA’s defining characteristics. Concretizing settler colonial myths of infinite, “uninhabited” space, our freeways have been called the skyscrapers of the West—feats of engineering, expansion, and domination. As Reyner Banham wrote in 1971, LA speaks “the language of movement, not monuments.” The imagination of canonical white academics like him has long considered this city the global capital of fantasy (Hollywood) and simulation (Disneyland). There is truth to these assessments for the scholar who confines his rhetoric to the city’s most affluent neighborhoods. In Beverly Hills, oil extraction is hidden behind elaborate sets, while human bodies are sculpted and reskinned to fit evolving beauty standards. Is this thin attention something essential to Los Angeles, a city obsessed with surface and resurfacing, chasing the smooth terrain of pavement without pores?
In the Spring of 2020, as I dutifully locked myself “down” in a safe and comfortable home, daily walks began to assume an exaggerated sense of liberation. The exhilaration of open space and outdoor movement, the occasional distanced social interaction, the opportunity to temporarily exit my own thoughts: all of this seems to inspire a fresh curiosity on foot. I often find myself moving my feet to the beat of that Missing Persons song playing in my head: “NO-BO-DY WALKS-IN-L-A.” Is that even true?
Out there, slowed to the pace of an elder with an errand cart, I begin to appreciate the downward pressure exerted by the city’s relentless horizontal motion. This pressure interacts with objects in the street like a printing press. In a year of Zoom birthday parties and long morning scrolls, it’s hard not to notice the compression of community, interaction, and physical experience into ever-thinner surfaces. How thick is a screen? I think to myself. 7.7mm of Gorilla Glass (or less with every new release)? Just a few photons of light that substitute for a parent’s face? Or the mere idea of a parent’s face? How thick is an idea?
Throughout this global pandemic, I go on a lot of walks. But it’s worth noting that going for a drive is also deemed safe under lockdown: traversing the city in one’s private bubble of podcast-equipped, climate-controlled, metal-and-glass PPE. And indeed, car culture was designed for social distancing. Until the 1950s, Los Angeles had a massive electric trolley system. At that time, the integrated space of public transit—with all of its interracial, cross-gender, and multi-class contact—was imagined by those in power to pose a social threat, like a virus. One city official called the Red Cars “wheeled slums,” while General Motors referred to them as “mongrel” vehicles. In contrast, the newly available private automobile offered a physical walling-off for those who could afford one, and a new way of segregating bodies via the racist co-development of housing and freeways. Who is in my bubble? I wonder. Even in a public health emergency, fortressing won’t ever quite feel right. Who is in my “pod”? Just then, a neighbor approaches on the sidewalk. I duck my head and quietly cross the street.
The highlight of my walk is the pedestrian pathway over the I-10, which at rush hour takes on the thrill of a natural attraction, like our very own Mid-City River Crossing. According to Reyner Banham, my neighborhood is part of “the utilitarian Plains of Id,” the only part of LA “flat enough and boring enough to compare with the cities of the Middle West.” To the white settler theorist, these middle- and low-income Black and brown communities are “flyover territory,” or quite literally on the freeway—drive-over territory, a vast terra nullius without specificity or culture. Clearly Banham can go fuck himself. It is in the car, he claims, that we Angelenos “spend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of [our] daily lives.” Standing on my bridge over the I-10, I watch the driver of a Subaru cut off a UPS truck with a harsh, wailing expletive, and I’m reminded that I’ve never heard a river curse.
The cars below are dotted with solitary drivers. In these early days of the virus, only the carless continue to take the bus or—gasp—to carpool. Workers deemed “essential,” disproportionately poor and people of color, who are forced to continue working in the freshly dangerous public sphere, have been tasked with provisioning the dependent “work-from-home” class, myself included. They are quite literally keeping me alive. Is it any wonder, then, that Native Americans, Latinx, and Black Americans have died of COVID-19 at three times the rate of white Americans like me? Cars flow below my feet. I’ve always thought Arroyo Seco had the best name for a freeway. Our rivers may be dry, but they move with devastating speed.
As I reach the other side of the overpass, I’m greeted by a cul-de-sac of stunning Craftsman houses. Well-watered and trimmed, with their front yard dogs thoroughly restrained, many of these homes have been recently renovated, but they aren’t new. When I first moved to the neighborhood seven years ago, I was surprised to find these little mansions built right up against the freeway wall. Why would someone build a million-dollar structure on a property that hears, smells, and breathes cars day and night? The answer is simple: the houses were here first. West Adams Heights, formerly known as “Sugar Hill” in reference to Harlem’s successful district, is a neighborhood that played a part in dismantling racist covenants and paving the way for the Fair Housing Act. This area endured white supremacist violence and became a thriving home for LA’s African American elite, including celebrities like Hattie McDaniels and Ethel Waters, as well as successful business owners.
The LA freeway system was designed to provide an unhindered flow of traffic, with no signals, intersections or property access. But to those that live next to it, the I-10 is simply a loud, dirty and dangerous wall. This infrastructure designed to connect can just as easily divide. That’s exactly what it did in West Adams. According to Josh Sides, “in 1954, the California State Highway Commission selected a freeway route that cut a 500-foot-wide swath through what the California Eagle proudly described as the ‘most prosperous, best kept and most beautiful [Black]-owned property in the country.’ In opposition, a group of West Adams residents formed the Adams-Washington Freeway Committee, choosing several delegates to present the community’s grievances to the commission in Sacramento.” The protests delayed construction but ultimately did not stop the bulldozers. According to the Los Angeles Sentinel, “The road could have been built without cutting through Sugar Hill … but it would have cut through Fraternity and Sorority Row around USC. That area still stands and Sugar Hill doesn’t, so you know who won out.” The freeway construction destroyed dozens of mansions owned by African Americans. By 1964, almost all the wealthy Black families that called Sugar Hill home had moved away. As Eric Avila has written, “the freeway casts darker shadows over some communities than others.”
Perhaps Thin City is just a digital flower pressing, a scrapbook for a place that is full of inequality, pain, and contradiction. As I walk my dog, my stomach stirs a nauseating cocktail of activist rage and gentrifier guilt. My gaze follows the dog’s nose to the ground where the fresh tracks of Michelin, Goodyear, Firestone, Hankook and Pirelli have been left in piles of junk mail, old food, and plastic toys. I crouch to snap a photo of Flamin’ Hot Doritos mingling with Q-Tips near the curb. I pick up a poo and tie off the compostable bag. I do believe it’s the work of artists to make meaning from the shit on the sidewalk. x
Nina Sarnelle is an artist and musician living on stolen Tongva/Kizh land that is often referred to as Los Angeles. She earned a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2012. A founding member of artist collectives Institute for New Feeling and dadpranks, her artwork includes intimate participatory performances, large public events, music composition, video and sculpture. Nina recently had a solo video show at the New Museum. Her work has also been shown at Whitechapel Gallery (London), Hammer Museum (LA), Getty Center (LA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), MoMA (NY), Istanbul Modern (Turkey), and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), among others; and been featured in Frieze, Art in America, Vogue Italy, Huffington Post, Flash Art, and Hyperallergic.