Under Spring: Voices+Art+Los Angeles

By Jeremy Rosenberg

The winner of the first CHS Book Award reimagines what a history book can be, and it tells a story all California needs to hear in order to understand itself. Beneath Los Angeles's North Spring Street bridge, a deteriorated concrete landscape was used for years as a homeless encampment and a buffer zone between gang territories. Between 2006 and 2013, artist Lauren Bon and her Metabolic Studio team transformed the underpass into a vibrantly creative space that served as a public square, ceremonial ground, art gallery, community garden, and musical instrument. Under Spring explores the unlikely history of this underpass, revealing the past of Los Angeles itself.

Sixty-six people from all walks of life—artists, scholars, laborers, graffiti artists, urban planners, activists, gang members—chronicle the underpass's many metamorphoses, and in doing so construct an energized account of change and development in LA. We come to understand how agriculture and transportation have shaped the city's growth; how abandoned places serve as refuges for people excluded from society; and how civic pride can arise from a city’s blighted core. Under Spring offers a new look at the story of Los Angeles and a new way of telling the story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heyday
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781597143103

Jeremy Rosenberg

Jeremy Rosenberg is the Assistant Dean, Public Affairs and Special Events, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, and a former team member of Metabolic Studio. His writings about art, urban planning, policy, ideas, and much more have appeared in dozens of anthologies, newspapers, magazines, and online publications, including the Los Angeles Times, The Art Newspaper, ARTNews, and Art+Auction. His weekly columns have included “The Secret City” for LATimes.com, “The Laws That Shaped LA” and “Arrival Stories” for KCET, and “City / Culture” for Next City. He was named a Next American City Vanguard in 2009.

Book preview

UNDER SPRING

A marginalized space…Homelessness…Drugs…A week’s cleaning…Rescuing destitute places…The meaning of this place… Infrastructural crossroads…Where the village Yangna was…A concrete river…Planters and mobile gardens…Civic pageantry… From art project to public space…A source of inspiration

MANUEL CASTELLS: I was struck by a very small graffiti I found on the wall of a semi-abandoned building [nearby]—a warehouse that was not used. And the graffiti said, This is God’s most destitute place on earth. That instant, I realized that any attempt to re-create life—urban life, social life, vegetation life—in this place would be a triumph against adversity and against destitution.

MARCO KUSUMAWIJAYA: It reminds me of lots of places where cities originated, and became derelict, abandoned like this, all over the world. I think it somehow sadly reminds us of the fact that we move away and away and away from the origins of these cities.

MATTHEW COOLIDGE: One of the great forces at Under Spring is the crossroads it represents. With the river, the railway, and the roadway all crisscrossing one another right at that point, it’s like some kind of axis mundi for the city, with all these layers of conveyance, with the historical river, with trains representing another era of development in the west, and then the roadways being built on top of all that. You’ve got all those things layered up on top of each other right there in kind of a fulcrum.

JOE LINTON: The area’s really close to the earliest account of the river. It’s about a half mile downstream from the confluence of the L.A. River and the Arroyo Seco. In 1769, the Portola Expedition came through here from Spain and they encountered sage and wild roses and tall sycamores and oaks, and lots of fresh free-flowing