Pico-Robertson

Los Angeles' Pico-Robertson has remained a unique Jewish ethnic enclave for generations. But what forces have influenced its creation?

The full 1939 redlining map of West Los Angeles, from the Pacific Ocean to East LA. Note the incidence of active oil fields in Baldwin Hills and La Brea (Source: Mapping Inequality)

Redlining Maps Determined Housing Accessibility

A 1939 HOLC Document of the Olympic Blvd. & Carson Road Tract, rating it as a "low yellow" grade

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, or HOLC, was a New Deal era bureaucratic agency tasked with grading subdivisions of metropolitan areas in respect to the appropriateness of providing federally insured loans to their residents. HOLC, corresponding with the contemporary trend of suburbanization during the 1930s (and even more so post-war), was a means of access towards stable homeownership for many who received their loans during an era of metropolitan expansion. However, the agency’s motivation was anything but practical and objective; the modus operandi of HOLC was that “local communities [should] follow the prevailing neighborhood patterns, thus perpetuating existing racial distribution,” (Johnson 105).  In turn, the reality was that access to federally insured loans was largely determined by whiteness and proximity to whiteness, denying minority communities access to equitable housing in a process dubbed redlining (due to the chromatically sequential "less desirable" categories: green, blue, yellow, and red). At the same time, "whiteness" is an aspect of the floating signifier, race; as Stuart Hall elucidates, the construct of race is not fixed to any objectivity, and thus the components that equate whiteness continue to shift over time (Hall). At the time of redlining, Jewish identity was distinct from whiteness; in this HOLC document from Los Angeles' 1939 city grading, the subdivision containing Pico-Robertson is degraded to a "low yellow" due to a "definite infiltration of Jewish families" (Home Owner Loan Corporation).

A 1939 HOLC Document of the Robertson Blvd. & Airdrome St. Tract, rating it as a "high yellow" grade

A second example of a redlining document that encompasses segments of the contemporary Pico-Robertson neighborhood. Again, this map specifies a "shifting or infiltration of American Jewish families [accounting for] 15% of the population." Notably, this area receives a slightly more forgiving "high yellow" grade because of the proximity to the country clubs further on the Westside (almost certainly the Hillcrest Country Club, across the street from the FOX studio lot). Accordingly, this brings into focus the tension between who is considered a deserving public to occupy a space. The country club that entices the HOLC graders was in fact the only Country Club in Los Angeles founded to accept Jews, as the others would not (Gabler).


The Kosher Economy

Why would the Jewish community cluster in Pico-Robertson?

Understanding the compulsion to cluster fundamentally requires familiarity with the concept of the ethnic enclave; this term refers to urban locations in which ethnicity is a defining feature of identity, and the subsequent and adjacent economy is integral to maintaining the way-of-life of the enclave’s inhabitants (Hummon). 

Pico-Robertson (via the Los Angeles Times)

Further, complicate this definition with considering the specificities of the culture and time period surrounding the clustering of Jews in Pico-Robertson. While the de jure factor of redlining created policy that actuated a spatial confinement of the Jewish community to Pico-Robertson, in which they were already present, the unique tenets of Judaism provides a de facto reasoning for continued segregation. 

This refers to something I dub the Kosher Economy: a framework through which to understand the necessary constriction and clustering of Jewish businesses. First, briefly consider the time period; in the late 1930s, when the seeds of a Jewish enclave were sown in Pico-Robertson, access to personal vehicular conveyance was not widespread enough to justify living long distances from essential businesses; accordingly, populations were inclined to cluster as close as possible to grocers, butchers, and other institutions critical for the maintenance of the household, rather than walk arduous distances to reach their destinations. 

However, the Kosher Economy likewise springs out of the idiosyncrasies of Rabbinical interpretation; in most sects of Judaism, operating a vehicle on high holidays or Shabbat (roughly Friday sundown to Saturday sundown) is not considered “kosher.” As such, Jewish communities are impelled to cluster within minimum walking distance of synagogues, so that houses of worship remain accessible without the use of vehicles, for the elderly, and during times of fast – in which the scorching climate of Los Angeles critically necessitates shorter distances. 

Lastly, the Kosher Economy is predicated on the interplay of different neighborhood businesses that do, in fact, interlink to create a unique marketplace. The kosher deli will find it advantageous to open near the kosher butcher and kosher grocer, as they not only minimize the cost of transportation, but fulfill an extreme niche (kosher groceries and meat are uncommon in wider markets, and even more so during the development of the enclave). Likewise, knowing that the area will attract customers to these generalized kosher businesses, more specialized ones follow suit: Judaica stores, kosher candy shops, Jewish medical offices, Jewish schools and others all pepper Pico-Robertson. 


Oil

Los Angeles, Resource Extraction, and Pico-Robertson

Pico-Robertson (and much of Los Angeles' Westside) rests atop the Beverly Hills and La Brea Oil Fields, once a lucrative source of “black gold” that shaped the development of Los Angeles around resource extraction. Yet while the heyday of Doheny-dynasty petro-fortunes have passed for Los Angeles, the oil deposits lay far from fallow. While open-air oil fields may persist further south near Baldwin Hills, the Westside has seen an enormous incidence of camouflaged urban oil drilling. 

The above map delineates the foundational relationship argued between resource extraction and demographics; the areas that were favored by HOLC practices (especially the A-tier or "green" zones) were spared the industry of petroleum-extraction within their boundaries. Note that the above map demonstrates that nearly the entirety of modern Pico-Robertson was once redlined as C-tier, "declining" neighborhoods. Accordingly the opening of the oil wells in the neighborhood in 1966, just over thirty years later, manifests into space the consequences of redlining.

Simultaneously, even outside of Pico-Robertson, oil extraction affects the neighborhood's population. Many of the adolescents in the area go to neighboring Beverly Hills High School – marked on the map by the top-left-most oil drilling site. To reiterate, the public high school for many years had an active oil well pumping on campus – one that led to a lawsuit over carcinogens in 2003 (Horowitz). At the same time, directly visible on the bottom-left of the map is Rancho Park, a large public green-space – yet another location of oil extraction – even while it is the preferred spot for children's soccer, pick-up basketball, holiday picnics, and birthday parties. Oil extraction is pervasive in the lives of Pico-Robertson's residents, even outside of the enclave's understood boundary.

Rich neighborhoods, who were able to maintain their status from HOLC practices, were not the preferred candidates for oil drilling; instead, it was cheaper, "declining" neighborhoods that were made to be "useful" through resource extraction. Yet, Pico-Robertson still received preferential treatment when compared to South Los Angeles; to understand this phenomenon, it is critical to briefly consider race in Pico-Robertson.

Source: the Los Angeles Times

The Jewish community of Los Angeles increasingly benefits from the inclusion into the social construct that is "whiteness." Yet this identity, being socially subjective, is anything but inherent; while many Jews in Los Angeles are considered white today, and essentially no Jews were welcome into the fold of whiteness under HOLC's jurisdiction, the mid-1960's (during which the Doheny well was constructed) was a transitional point in Jewish identity.

Oil drilling South of Ladera Heights (source: the  Los Angeles Times )

This is best understood in comparison to the experiences of the more traditionally white and African-American communities of Los Angeles. On one end of the spectrum, the white communities (that often inhabited A-tier and B-tier HOLC subdivisions) were largely spared extractive industries in their neighborhoods. Simultaneously, however, black communities in South Los Angeles were subject to an extreme density of oil drilling – with Los Angeles' most notorious and visible oil field remaining today just South of Ladera Heights, an affluent black community. Pico-Robertson, a Jewish enclave, received a moderate fate between these two extremes; "While [the oil company] carried out expensive modifications to lessen (but not completely eliminate) the noise and pollution harms emanating from the [Doheny] site, frontline communities in under-resourced neighborhoods are denied similar protections daily to shield them from the light, noise, and air pollution caused by oil drilling," (“Pico Blvd. Drill Sites”).


How do we conceptualize Pico-Robertson?

Pico-Robertson occupies a tension in the transitional racial identities of newer metropolises like Los Angeles. While suffering the detriment of oil extraction, in no small part due to historical "decline" as deemed by HOLC, Pico-Robertson's Jewish population is now widely accepted into the fold of whiteness. Consequently, this middle identity has spared the region of the same neglect that formerly "undesirable" redlined HOLC areas have suffered, in which black populations have suffered the pollution of even more substantial oil industries. Pico-Robertson, simultaneously, occupies the role of an enclave conceived through both external restriction and internal compulsion; this neighborhood persists as a unique testament to the critical nature of dense and walkable enclaves, partially through necessity (religious restriction and economic practicality), but also as a means of retaining and expressing a Jewish identity.


Methodology

The data for the maps included in this work came from a variety of sources. All maps were compiled in ArcGIS. The data for Jewish businesses in Pico-Robertson was retrieved manually (by walking through the neighborhood and cataloging locations). The boundaries of Pico-Robertson (and demographic data) was taken from the Los Angeles Times' Mapping LA project, and the boundaries themselves were traced-over and simplified by using an image-upload to Google Earth Pro. The data for the HOLC mapping was provided by the Mapping Inequality project, while the Oil Well data was derived from an ArcGIS webmap titled " LA County Oil and Gas Wells ." Finally, the house-of-worship locations originated in an ArcGIS webmap titled " All_Places_of_Worship Cali ," whose dataset was then manually cleaned to only include Jewish affiliates in Los Angeles.

Citations

Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. University of California Press, 2004. “Drilling for Black Gold: La Brea Oil Field, 1920s.” The Homestead Blog, 27 Jan. 2017,  https://homesteadmuseum.blog/2017/01/26/drilling-for-black-gold-la-brea-oil-field-1920s/ . Farr, Harvey. “Oil Drill Site in Pico-Robertson Found in Violation by Zoning Board.” Jewish Journal, 2 June 2021,  https://jewishjournal.com/news/337287/oil-drill-site-in-pico-robertson-found-in-violation-by-zoning-board/ . Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010. Hall, Stuart. “Race, the Floating Signifier: What More Is There to Say about ‘Race’? [1997].” Selected Writings on Race and Difference, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Duke University Press, 2021, pp. 359–73. JSTOR,  https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hhj1b9.23 .

Home Owner Loan Corporation. Olympic Blvd and Cadillac Road HOLC Map. 28 Feb. 1939.

Home Owner Loan Corporation. Robertson-Airdrome HOLC Map. 13 Mar. 1939. Horowitz, Joy. Parts per Million: The Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School. Viking, 2007. Hummon, David M. “Review of Urban Enclaves: Identity and Place in America.” Contemporary Sociology, vol. 25, no. 6, 1996, pp. 781–82. JSTOR,  https://doi.org/10.2307/2077289 . Johnson, Marilynn S. The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II. University of California Press, 1996. Nelson, Robert K., et al. “Mapping Inequality.” Mapping Inequality, 5 Dec. 2022,  https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/ . “Pico Blvd. Drill Sites.” S T A N D - L.A.,  http://www.stand.la/pico-blvd-drill-sites.html . Accessed 6 Dec. 2022. “Pico-Robertson.” Mapping L.A.,  http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/neighborhood/pico-robertson/ . Accessed 5 Dec. 2022.

A 1939 HOLC Document of the Olympic Blvd. & Carson Road Tract, rating it as a "low yellow" grade

A 1939 HOLC Document of the Robertson Blvd. & Airdrome St. Tract, rating it as a "high yellow" grade

Pico-Robertson (via the Los Angeles Times)

Source: the Los Angeles Times

Oil drilling South of Ladera Heights (source: the  Los Angeles Times )