I’ve lived in Iztapalapa—Mexico City’s most populous borough, with over 1.8 million inhabitants—for the last 26 years. The borough is considered part of the “periphery” of Mexico City, areas of the metropolis that are both politically and economically marginalized. It has a hilly, dense urban landscape that isn’t one of skyscrapers, but of unfinished, self-built homes. Most are gray, the color of the blocks they are made of; others have painted facades that are showing their wear. Inside, taps go months or years without running water, meaning that most inhabitants have to wait for tanker trucks to bring it in.

Another of the everyday ways that people living here experience our marginalization is in the question of transport. Residents who live beyond the end of the city’s metro system have to rely on a convoluted network of micro-buses, paying higher fares the farther away they live. For most of my life, traveling the six-and-a-half miles from Metro Constitución, at the end of the green line, to my neighborhood of Santa Marta took 90 minutes—and everyone knew the threat of getting mugged on the bus was high.

Then, three years ago, things changed radically. Now, every day, I and 70,000 others travel those densely and chaotically urbanized miles in 35 to 40 minutes, 100 feet in the air, at the cost of 7 pesos—the equivalent of 40 cents—and without the threat of being robbed. What changed? In 2021, the city introduced a novel form of transportation: the Cablebús, a public gondola system.

In 2021, Cablebús Line 2 earned the Guinness World Record for being the globe’s longest cable-car line used for public transportation. As a frequent user of Line 2, what I enjoy the most is the view. Iztapalapa has many hills and mountains, including the Cerro de las Minas (which has been gradually eaten away as its volcanic rocks have been extracted for construction material), the Sierra de Santa Catarina, and the Cerro de la Estrella, an important ceremonial site in the pre-Hispanic era. Between the Torres de Buenavista and Xalapa stations, the ascending ground below you makes it seem like the gondola might brush against the roofs of the houses. As you travel, the wind enters the cabins, brushing your cheeks and occasionally seeming to make the steel cables run faster.

One of the more than 900 murals painted below Line 2 of the Mexico City Cablebús. The line, which opened in 2021, has transformed the way tens of thousands of residents of the dense Iztapalapa borough move around their neighborhood. Photo courtesy of Blake Reyes

At first, not everyone was in favor of the Cablebús. When Line 2 was inaugurated, people who lived along the route protested. They felt it invaded their privacy, since their rooftops were visible from the gondolas. In response, the borough government suggested painting murals on the rooftops along the route, so that the passers-by would have something to look at, and residents would have a work of art instead of just a place to hang their laundry, and to store their water tanks and old appliances.

Since Line 2 opened, artists have painted more than 900 murals along its trajectory, composing what the borough government says is the largest urban mural project in the world. Known as the Iztapalapa Mural, it features portraits of characters from movies; of important figures from Mexico’s cultural, scientific, and technological realms; of local residents known for their commitment to the community;  and of animals like Frida, a search and rescue dog who became famous after the deadly 2017 earthquake for her work finding victims.

In many of the neighborhoods it serves, the Cablebús has transformed public spaces, making them safer and more communal. An example is the Desarrollo Urbano Quetzalcóatl area, formerly known for being among the most dangerous in the city—in 2019, the government even deployed the National Guard there in an attempt to reduce crime.  There used to be an unsafe market, with stores made of sheet metal and cardboard, where the neighborhood’s Cablebús station is now located. Today, alongside the new station, the market has been turned into a colorful, mural-covered place with eateries for Cablebús commuters. Once, fear of crime kept people away from the market after dark; today, they take photos of the murals and attend cultural and sporting events nearby. People feel—and are—safer.

These changes have brought tourism to the barrio. In the past, Iztapalapa wasn’t a place outsiders would visit—on the contrary, they usually avoided it. Now, it’s common for both Mexican and foreign tourists to ride Line 2 gondolas on the weekends. Guides specialize in teaching the history of Iztapalapa from above, utilizing the Cablebús route. I took two guided walks with Beatriz Ramírez, a crónista—local historian—and the coordinator of the borough’s archive. She brought historical images along during our trip to show how the hills of Iztapalapa have changed over time, taken over by the sprawl of the city.

Yet there are also tourist agencies that are less embedded in Iztapalapa’s culture and history. One tour offered on TripAdvisor, called “Fly over CDMX by Cable Car,” advertises itself as a way for foreigners to explore “a part of Mexico City that most tourists miss.” The company charges $42 per person—one hundred times the cost of a Cablebús ticket. This type of tourism benefits tour companies and the platforms they use to sell their excursions, but few benefits reach local residents. I worry that they offer a superficial vision of the place that exoticizes members of my community, turning us into something to be ogled. One such excursion, for the price of approximately $180, brings tourists from some of the wealthiest to the most marginalized neighborhoods in Mexico City, offering the opportunity to “see how different they are” and “feel the magic of the enormous metropolis.” But sustainable, community-focused tourism requires understanding, not just observation, and exchange, not just extraction.

In 2021, when Carlos Tapia Rojas, the Guinness World Records’ Latin America judge, recognized Line 2 as record-breaking, he told Iztapalapa residents, “¡Felicitaciones! Ahora son… Oficialmente, asombrosos.” Congratulations, he told us, we were officially amazing.

As a resident of Iztapalapa and a Cablebús user, I can say unequivocally that the Line 2 has changed our quality of life, along with the way we perceive our surroundings, for the better.

It’s also become clear that the negative impacts of the new form of transit are not in the intrusion of stations and poles into neighborhoods, nor even that onlookers might see you hanging out your laundry on your messy roof. They’re in the potential impact of being officially amazing. When you come to Iztapalapa to ride our gondola, seek out guides like Beatriz, who are real crónistas of the area, who are dedicated to sharing our culture and history, not just selling it. They’re the ones who can teach you what life is really like in Iztapalapa.

The post Riding the Cablebús Over Mexico City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“We are the hub of a community,” asserted Crenshaw High School principal Donald Moorer, who opened Thursday’s Zócalo event. It was the first in a series partnering with Destination Crenshaw, the organization behind the 1.3-mile-long public art and infrastructure project being erected along Crenshaw Boulevard.

The event was an invitation for panelists and audience members to consider the community stakes of the ambitious project—which includes pocket parks and original artworks by Alison Saar, Maren Hassinger, and Kehinde Wiley—and what it means for Black history, Black art, and Black success.

The event’s title, “How Do You Grow a Rose From Concrete?,” was inspired by the famous Tupac Shakur poem, “The Rose That Grew From Concrete.” And as the project’s concrete is still being laid, some of the visionaries behind it took the stage at Crenshaw High: architect Gabrielle Bullock, Los Angeles City Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, and Destination Crenshaw senior art advisor V. Joy Simmons.

They took turns asking one another questions, co-moderating the event—a format that held true to the sense of co-creation, collaboration, community, and contribution that all of them hope Destination Crenshaw will instill in each person who finds themselves in its midst.

Simmons asked the councilmember, a “son of South Los Angeles” whose mother was one the first people to graduate from Crenshaw High, what the Crenshaw Corridor was like when he was growing up. “The thing I remember most,” he said, “was that there was always motion.” Whether it was cars bouncing on hydraulics, young people doing the latest dance moves, entrepreneurs sweeping in front of their storefronts, or churchgoers coming and going, Crenshaw is “where life happens, where we witness what others are doing.”

When Crenshaw got wind that L.A. Metro was expanding a new train line and potentially cutting through their neighborhood—without stopping—Harris-Dawson was part of early efforts to win a Leimert Park station.

“This train could be a knockout punch” for the neighborhood, he said, transforming real estate, safety, and its connection to the rest of the city. For Harris-Dawson and others, one aim was undeniable: “We set out to do a project that would make us permanent in the City of Los Angeles. So no matter what happens going forward, there’s not going to be a situation where you get to say we were never here.”

That spirit of visibility—to be seen for what Crenshaw is—is one of the main reasons the train will be overground. In those earlier days, at the same time that Crenshaw community members were fighting for the train to be underground, Beverly Hills was fighting for it to stay above. Harris-Dawson asked why, and learned that they wanted to display what they had to offer: their shops, businesses, restaurants, museums, landscapes. Crenshaw could do that, too.

Drawing on an understanding that people will oppose what you do to them and embrace what you do with them, Harris-Dawson got community buy-in from businesses, neighbors, and leaders along the way. In fact, the construction site was able to get over 70% of its workforce from local hires, Destination Crenshaw president and COO Jason Foster noted later.

“I want the people of South Los Angeles to feel like it’s theirs,” Harris-Dawson said, just as other Los Angeles areas like Boyle Heights and Chinatown feel a sense of ownership over their neighborhoods. He also hoped that because consumers of Black culture would have to come to Crenshaw to experience this cultural project, the neighborhood could prosper.

“This project for me is a gift,” said Bullock, who co-led the design for Destination Crenshaw. Like Harris-Dawson’s efforts, the architecture firm Perkins&Will gave the people of Crenshaw power in design voice, she said. “In the end, we are merely interpreters.”

Bullock has been involved with other large-scale projects that highlight Black America: the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; the National Center of Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia; and Emancipation Park in Houston, Texas.

How does Destination Crenshaw compare? Simmons asked.

Because the project’s origin is in the community and will represent them, Bullock said, it is unique.

At one of the first “visioning workshops,” where community members were encouraged to bring an artifact or object that meant something to them related to Crenshaw, LA Commons founder and community leader Karen Mack brought in an image of the Sankofa bird, whose turning head is meant to symbolize the need to look to the past in order to move forward.

Hence, Sankofa Park will be the largest gathering area at Destination Crenshaw. The park itself has elements shaped like the bird, and on its highest viewing deck, you are able to look back and see where you’ve come from. “It’s about storytelling,” Bullock said.

The story Destination Crenshaw tells was important to Simmons, too. As the art and exhibition advisor, she selected artists who told a generational story of Crenshaw—ranging from in their 20s to 96 years old. There will be a sculpture on car culture by Charles Dickson (who will join the second event in this series, on May 31). And the RTN Crew will once again adorn the Crenshaw Wall with a new incarnation of mural art. Simmons noted that since at least the 1970s, the retaining wall has captured traces of the community through art, serving as a sort of public canvas. “I wanted us to understand that we are not a monolith,” she said of her selections.

All the panelists shared what they hope people will feel and take away from this project: that people feel seen, feel the intentional work put into it, and go away with a sense of the excellence of Black Los Angeles.

Many members of the in-person audience had deep roots in Crenshaw, which was made clear during the Q&A period that followed the talk. One questioner was the daughter of a former principal of Crenshaw High, another was a community historian.

One audience member asked where the late Crenshaw rapper Nipsey Hussle was in all of this. The name Destination Crenshaw, in fact, was inspired by Hussle, who thought it should be called that to mark the historic Los Angeles community as such: a destination, in bloom.

The post For Crenshaw, By Crenshaw appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How do you remember—and reconnect—a neighborhood destroyed by highway construction over a half-century ago?

Since 1983, this has been the mission of Saint Paul, Minnesota’s annual Rondo Days festival. “[You see] everyone you grew up with and everybody you’ve ever known, your childhood and everything,” said former Rondo resident Brian White, Sr. in 2015. “You might see people you haven’t seen since you were five, six years old out here.”

It may mix historical exhibits, field day tournaments, 5K runs, picnics, dances, and religious services, but the festival is no ordinary reunion. Rather, it is an effort to memorialize a riven historically Black community, while also giving living reminder to the persistence of the Rondo diaspora.

Since the early twentieth century, Pullman porters, factory and packinghouse workers, and accountants all populated Rondo, making it “a hub, a place where military, professional, and streetwise Black people gathered, talked, and exchanged ideas,” Marvin Roger Anderson, a co-founder of Rondo Days told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1990. By the 1950s, bounded by Rice Street to the east, Lexington Parkway to the west, and University and Selby Avenues to the north and south, Rondo’s roughly 1.25 square miles  were home to about 80% of St. Paul’s Black population.

It was a place of “beautiful and gracious homes,” remembered former resident Joyce Williams in a 2016 oral history interview, with “hardwood floors, beautiful woodwork, hutches, [and] stained glass windows.”

In 2021, while testifying to the Minnesota House transportation committee, Representative Ruth Richardson called Rondo “the heartbeat of the Black community” of St. Paul.

Nonetheless, between 1956 and 1968, the state of Minnesota and the city of St. Paul razed the neighborhood in order to make way for I-94, the east-west interstate that runs from Michigan to Montana. Richardson pointed out that, far from an accident, the decision to route the highway through Rondo was intentional: Officials had dismissed an alternative, less destructive plan through an “underutilized industrial area.”

The highway construction devastated St. Paul’s Black middle class. Over 600 Black families lost their homes, alongside longstanding businesses and institutions. Rondo residents also lost the ladder to generational wealth: a 2020 study suggested that, compounded over time, the lost home equity added up to nearly $160 million.

The 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act—at the time, the single biggest federal infrastructural investment in the nation’s history—reshaped the nation in countless ways. And it came at great cost. Between 1957 and 1977, nearly 1 million Americans lost their homes to highway construction, most of them people of color. Since the early 1990s, some 6,300 additional families have been displaced by highway expansion projects.

Planners knew that the interstates threatened urban communities. In 1958, the Sagamore Conference—convened by the Highway Research Board and attended by top federal, state, and municipal officials, academics, and civic leaders—issued a report clearly noting the perils of highway construction. It warned of widespread displacement, with low-income, non-white, and elderly residents facing the “greatest potential injury.” (Nevertheless, to this day, literature from the Department of Transportation that is used frequently in planning and engineering graduate programs self-servingly casts this history as a series of minor, unexpected, and unintended consequences.)

In some cities, “freeway revolts” did halt construction, but this advocacy failed to include non-white homeowners. In Memphis, the white, middle-class-led Citizens to Preserve Overton Park successfully challenged the construction of a highway corridor for I-40 in the Supreme Court. But Black activists in Nashville who organized a similar group to challenge I-40 construction through their community failed in the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court denied the case a hearing. Nashville’s Black community could only stand by as the highway ripped through its businesses, homes, and institutions.

In June 2021, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg initiated new efforts at the Department of Transportation (DOT) to address this problematic legacy, dedicating $1 billion to “reconnect cities and neighborhoods racially segregated or divided by road projects.”

But money doesn’t do anything on its own. To repair the damage that the planners of the 1950s wrought on communities of color, we have to address both the physical infrastructure itself, and the stories we tell about it. That means first, acknowledging and reckoning with the interstates’ history and, second, community-based efforts to restore the physical fabric of the divided neighborhoods.

To change the cultural narrative of the highways, urban planners Sarah Jo Peterson and Steven Higashide advocate for “truth and reconciliation” carried out, in part, by existing institutions such as the Transportation Research Board and university researchers, or perhaps even a Congressional commission.  “If we have any hope of avoiding future injustices, we have to fully understand the past,” notes Higashide.

These efforts feed physical solutions like ReConnect Rondo, which received a $2 million grant from Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods Grant Program in February 2023. ReConnect Rondo is aligned with but independent from Rondo Days: an initiative “to create Minnesota’s first African American cultural enterprise district connected by a community land bridge” that will “repair, restore, and revitalize Rondo.”

Nearly 25 years ago, St. Paul journalist Joe Soucheray wrote that the Rondo Days festival “comes in softly and touches in a healing way the fading scar of Rondo Ave.” Over the years, this soft touch has had an impact, including by efforts to make the community more visibile through signage, a tribute at the local library, and Rondo’s inclusion in a permanent exhibit at the Minnesota History Center. More recently, a small pocket park called the Rondo Commemorative Plaza opened with the intention to honor the community and welcome new members, such as Somali, Karen, Hmong, and Oromo residents. ReConnect Rondo’s dream of physically and psychologically suturing the old community through a land bridge serves as an extension of this decades-long project.

The eventual Rondo land bridge will be the physical culmination of the efforts catalyzed by Rondo Days. But it is only possible today thanks to the labor of locals, former residents, and activists to make the community’s narrative known. Now it’s up to the rest of us to build it.

The post A Black Neighborhood, Upended by a Highway, Looks to Reconnect appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Funny thing about the world we have created and the structures we build—they are only really seen for what they are when in states of abandonment. Our built environment reveals our ambition, labor, materiality, and sometimes the folly of believing that our constructions, even massive assemblies of concrete and steel, will persist in perpetuity. As consumed as we are by daily obligations, we devote little time to consider the spaces we occupy and what they represent.

The recent week-long shutdown of Interstate 10 in downtown Los Angeles, after a huge fire underneath the freeway, left a sudden void in the heart of the nation’s second-largest city.  Without the dizzying flow of commerce or the monotony of a daily commuting ritual, we found an unusual moment to witness the 10 for what it really is: a monument to our priorities including personal mobility, on-demand goods and services, and the expectation of government to keep everything flowing seamlessly. The lifestyle we take for granted was suddenly called into question by the absence of one roadway.

For some, the closure was a useful reminder of the need to rethink our relationship with the automobile and the air-polluting fossil fuels that most vehicles still burn. Others, such as the L.A. Times editorial board, seized the chance to reimagine transportation infrastructure and address the disastrous consequences large highway projects wrought as they were threaded through preexisting—and most often majority non-white—neighborhoods.

While we are at it, maybe this is an opportune time to consider reinvention of the city itself, as we leave behind 20th-century engineering and technology in favor of innovations we anticipate will foster more sustainable, equitable, and accessible urban environments.

This may seem like an inflated agenda to spin out from a single, isolated event. But we know in our collective gut that course corrections are necessary in many aspects of contemporary life and in the structures required to support it. Our infrastructure is a declarative statement of intent, reflecting who we are and the investments we are prepared to make to achieve various ends, for better and for worse. Given an opportunity for close observation—as the recent closure allowed—Interstate 10 can tell us much about ourselves and what we value.

Dan Walters of CalMatters wrote during the 10’s closure: “If any freeway is a cultural icon, it is Interstate 10, which stretches more than 2,460 miles through eight southern tier states, from the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica to the Atlantic in Jacksonville, Florida.”

Most drivers may see the 10 not as an icon but as a mundane, utilitarian artifact, if they think much about it at all.  But what Walters recognizes is that this transcontinental freeway is more than a road. Over the course of several thousand miles and wildly varying landscapes, Interstate 10 unites a dynamic, rapidly expanding, and diversifying area of the country.

The region I-10 spans is frequently referred to as the “Sun Belt,” a 20th-century reference to economies centered on recreation and retirement that the 10 itself helped to make possible.

But the southern tier of the U.S. is no longer characterized by leisure. It has become a place of rapid growth and industry.  In many ways, this is the “new America”.

Today, the impacts of climate change are impossible to ignore in this area of the country. If we are to resolve the challenges of diminishing water supplies, drought, and fire, the western I-10 provides the laboratory. If there is to be a transition away from fossil fuels, it will be centered in the 10 corridor, with Houston as the energy capital of the world. If the global challenges of sea level rise, land loss, and increasingly extreme weather are to be addressed, the path of the 10 along the Gulf Coast is the proving ground. An I-10 road trip has become the essential tour through a future with which we have yet to come to terms.

As a product of the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, Interstate 10 is an exemplar of national cohesion in the United States. The legislation for the creation of this national network of highways passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 388 to 19, a level of functional bipartisanship that we can only marvel at today. This was America at its post-war apex, building a comprehensive, well-engineered transport system that would lift the nation to unprecedented levels of productivity and connection.

Yet even as it represented newfound capacity to build, the 10, like other interstate freeways, was used to reinforce preexisting fissures and inequities in American society. The planning choices by many cities benefited some neighborhoods and did lasting damage to others—as evident in the ways the 10 was forced through Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, the Fifth Ward in Houston, and Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans.

Some 60 years after the interstate program began, the Biden Administration is addressing the negative byproducts of the system through the new Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods (RCN) Program and buttressed by the Justice40 overlay, which directs 40 percent of certain federal investments to communities marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution—ills in which highways are often the primary culprit.  Whether impacted by climate change or man-made structures, community vitality and resiliency will be measured by the security of the most vulnerable populations.

From its origins in the 1956 federal mandate to current efforts to right past wrongs, the 10 has always had a political dimension. Today, this roadway connects the three most populous states—California, Texas, and Florida—each with an economy larger than most countries. Given their scale, these states have an outsized influence on the national dialogue, social issues, environmental policy, and even the textbooks students across the nation will read. Most importantly, they present vastly different templates for the future of the country…and maybe even for democracy itself.

The political dialogue moving back and forth along the 10 ay be even more consequential than the goods being transported between Los Angeles and Jacksonville . We need a common understanding of the government’s role to not only maintain our roads but to address the existential threats posed by a rapidly transforming environment. Rather than defining ourselves by difference, we need to see ourselves as “neighbors on the same street,” finding throughlines in shared issues, imagining infrastructure in more expansive terms, and building a new pathway to a more resilient future.

The U.S. Interstate 10 corridor is positioned on the front lines of demographic, social, economic, and climate change, and presents the challenges of the 21st century in their highest relief. The case can be made for this “iconic” transect as the leading indicator for the nation as a whole and our capacity to respond to a knowable future. This is the inspiration for the Ten Across initiative

Ten Across is about equipping subsequent generations with the tools to manage a world in flux, one that is unfortunately going to be warmer, dryer, and more unsettled. This is being achieved through education, strategic communications, and forums for engaging the critical issues of our time, many of which are represented in their extremes along the 10.

The post Interstate 10 Is More Than a Road appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That spin on the old song, made famous by Dionne Warwick, might be the most important question facing the state’s transportation system. Because plans to bring trains and transit into the 21st century depend on transforming the Bay Area city of 1 million people into our state’s rail capital.

But, in dysfunctional California, can all these plans stay on track?

Transportation expectations for San Jose are a function of the economy—it’s the capital of Silicon Valley—and of geography. San Jose sits about halfway between California’s northern and southern borders. On the sound side of our richest region, the Bay Area, it boasts longstanding rail links to the Central Valley and the Central Coast.

Diridon Station serves as a major hub for Caltrain, Amtrak, BART, and San Jose’s VTA light rail system. Courtesy of Jim Maurer/Flickr.

It’s also home to Diridon Station, a Renaissance Revival rail hub where California’s transportation past, present, and future converge.

Most transportation dreams in the state now include Diridon. The high-speed rail plan envisions Diridon as perhaps its most crucial junction, where regional rail lines to San Francisco meet bullet trains going down to Fresno, Bakersfield, and one day, Los Angeles. Diridon is already the western terminus of the ACE train, which provides rail service to Stockton and is slated for expansion throughout the Central Valley.

Diridon is also a regional connector. It’s a major hub for Caltrain service that extends from San Francisco down the peninsula to Gilroy. It’s the southern terminus of Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor service to Sacramento. It’s a key stop on San Jose’s own VTA light rail system. And it’s a destination of the decades-long, multi-billion-dollar effort to bring Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to downtown San Jose.

Add on Google’s massive development plan for the area around Diridon—a downtown village of parks, thousands of housing units, millions of square feet of office space, and a community center—and the ambitions for the place are heavy.

One problem is that San Jose, and California transportation agencies, don’t seem able to carry the weight. With so many different interests and constituencies hanging hopes on Diridon, multiple failures of governance are converging there, too.

The high-speed rail plan is such a mess of delays, consultants, and overspending that state officials are focused only on a small segment of the project: Bakersfield to Merced. The most optimistic plans have high-speed rail reaching San Jose in 2031. It’s a better bet that the whole project will be mothballed by then.

There are reasons to worry about regional lines, too. Plans are proceeding for extension of the ACE trains into Sacramento and beyond Stockton into Modesto and Merced. But the BART extension to downtown San Jose keeps getting more time-consuming and expensive.

Originally approved by voters way back in 2000, this six-mile, four-station project is shaping up to be one of California’s largest and most difficult infrastructure efforts. Its main problem is local officials’ insistence using an expensive and less proven method to build one of the largest subway tunnels in the United States. What once was described as a $4 billion project to be completed by 2026, is now a $9 billion-plus project that won’t be finished until 2034.

Train platform at Diridon Station, which is at the center of a debate around integrating the Bay Area’s—and California’s—rail networks. Courtesy of Niall Kennedy/Flickr.

The debate over the troubled BART extension has become divisive, distracting San Jose from what should be a focus: integrating transit at Diridon. Various agencies involved in planning—from Caltrain, to the high-speed rail authority, to the city of San Jose—don’t seem to be on the same page in terms of how to remake the station to improve links. And beyond Google’s plan, there’s no clear vision for making Diridon and its surroundings a true destination. The station will need to be a beautiful and distinctive place in itself in order to help draw Californians there.

More disconcerting than the planning troubles is the current state of transportation in San Jose. Newer BART stations in San Jose are ghost towns, left empty because of pandemic shifts to remote work.

And San Jose’s light rail, which was shut down for months last year after a mass shooting, has been called “a colossally bad system” by the city’s own mayor, who has smartly suggested replacing it with electric buses.

When I rode the different VTA lines over the course of a recent weekday, the few passengers I saw appeared to be unhoused people living on the train. At several points, I was the only passenger on board. That made sense. The trains are so slow, and make so many stops, that driving is more than twice as fast as riding.

If it’s going to happen, the transformation of San Jose into a transportation capital can’t be that sluggish. All Californians have a stake in San Jose connecting us, especially by rail.

The state needs to step in, take charge, and remove regulatory barriers. The remaking of Diridon Station should get the same exemptions from environmental and other laws that the state granted to new sports stadiums. The state should establish a single governing authority to take over the San Jose transportation hub, and require high-speed rail and local agencies to defer to its decisions.

Timelines must be accelerated and plans simplified so that a new Diridon, with all connections humming, is in place before the end of this decade.

Let’s clear out the obstacles blocking our way to San Jose.

The post Is San Jose Destined to Be a Train Wreck for California Transportation? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Los Angeles is just the second U.S. city to host the Summit of the Americas, which brings together political leaders, civil society organizations, and business executives from North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean to promote inter-hemispheric cooperation, economic growth, and regional security.

The very first summit in 1994 was held in Miami, often considered the hub of Latin America in the U.S. But this time around the Biden administration gave Los Angeles the nod, pointing to its “deep and robust ties throughout our hemisphere.”

This relationship is over a century in the making: Los Angeles owes its status as the second-largest city in the U.S. today to the wealth and capital that crossed over the border throughout the last 130 years.

This is a history deeply rooted in American empire. Rather than pursuing formal territorial control and annexation, American government and business leaders, including those in Los Angeles, advocated for economic domination in regions such as Latin America and the construction of an “informal” commercial empire beginning in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

L.A. boosters and investors, in turn, set about establishing a borderlands economy that reached deep into Mexico and beyond to make their city boom. They created a built environment to facilitate this growth: In the 1920s, members of the Los Angeles-based Automobile Club of Southern California, the nation’s leading motoring association, for instance, initiated construction of the International Pacific Highway, a 12,000-mile road which, in California, overlay the Pacific Coast Highway. When complete, the highway—which began in Anchorage, Alaska, and headed south along the Pacific Ocean—linked every country along the west coasts of North, Central, and South America. The Los Angeles businessmen and Mexican state governors who championed the project believed it would increase the movement of tourists and trade goods within the Americas, with particular benefits for L.A. And, true to form, when the road was completed in 1957, it traversed 13 nations and epitomized a new type of “informal” commercial American empire in Latin America—one that promoted free-market capitalism and globalization.

Over the decades, trade and commercial publications highlighted and reflected Los Angeles’ growing position as a center of U.S. trade and diplomatic relations with Latin America. Business and civic leaders launched Pan Pacific Progress in Los Angeles in 1926 to track trade between Los Angeles, the Western Hemisphere, and the Pacific world. Regular columns in the magazine monitored metrics such as annual Pacific ports tonnage to gauge the number of goods moving between Latin American and U.S. Pacific ports. Others outlined trade and commercial possibilities with Latin America, ranging from the export of citrus to mining for zinc to building shipping infrastructure; and introduced American readers to presidents of Latin American republics including Mexico, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Brazil.

Anglo Angelenos were committed to furthering these hemispheric relationships. David Hamburger, a contributor to Pan Pacific Progress and successful department store proprietor who’d lived in Los Angeles for nearly half a century, reflected in 1929 that Los Angeles went “from a desert town to a metropolis that is bound to become the largest and greatest city in the world, economically and geographically.” In the piece, he advised American readers to take their capital to South America and approach business partners there with a cooperative spirit. “If we, with our experience, will lend our advice and assistance to our [South American] neighbors there is no limit to the profit to be derived,” he wrote, promising a “gigantic success will be assured.”

In the 20th century, Los Angeles boosters further tied their city’s fate to the exploitation of natural resources in Latin America, particularly Mexico, believing they needed to reach beyond the U.S. to grow. The city’s Chamber of Commerce organized investment excursions across the border. Oilmen such as Edward Doheny drilled wells in Mexico’s petroleum regions; the interlocked Chandler and Otis families, owners of the Los Angeles Times and successful real estate developers and corporate ranchers, developed a million-acre cotton and cattle ranch in northern Mexico. These ventures proved wildly profitable. Mexican resources helped transform the small town of Los Angeles into a large, successful, and prosperous city.

But this prosperity and success has not flowed both ways. While facilitating trade and investment, 19th- and early 20th-century Los Angeles boosters carefully controlled labor flows for the benefit of U.S. agricultural and industrial employers. Fruit growers with headquarters in Los Angeles, for example, actively recruited agricultural workers from Mexico whom they identified as an inexpensive, “compliant,” and reliable labor source to work in California’s Imperial Valley and citrus belt. As noncitizens, these workers had little recourse to challenge or improve poor wages and harsh working conditions.

Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the ‘70s and ‘80s, federal economic policies have deepened this inequality. The U.S. government’s push to lift regulations, free up trade, open markets, and promote private investment in Latin America led to collapses in industries such as agriculture, forcing millions of workers to flee Mexico and other countries. It is America’s “new imperialism”—nothing short of the “third conquest of Latin America,” as historian Greg Grandin observes in Empire’s Workshop, following Spanish colonization and American corporate and military interventions in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This forced mass migration from Latin America has continued to benefit Los Angeles, providing an influx of creative and economic talent that has remade and revitalized parts of the city, creating community and businesses, and invigorating neighborhoods such as MacArthur Park—once abandoned due to white flight, and now a residential and commercial center for Central American immigrants. Meanwhile, Latin Americans seeking refuge in the United States continuously find their economic opportunities limited to the agricultural and service sectors and the underground economy, and face below-minimum wage pay, dangerous working conditions, and scarce enforcement of labor laws. Complicating matters further is the shadow of the Immigration Act of 1965, which placed limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere just as U.S. dependence on Latin American labor intensified. This curtailment of legal entry led to mass undocumented immigration, compounding workers’ vulnerability.

At the summit in Los Angeles, we can expect leaders from across the hemisphere to lay out a strategy to maintain and stimulate U.S.-Latin American trade, and to promote regional “economic growth and prosperity based on [a] shared respect for democracy, fundamental freedoms, the dignity of labor, and free enterprise,” as the State Department puts it. But any honest movement in this direction must reckon with the U.S.’s long history of disruptive economic and political policies in Latin America, as well as its restrictive immigration policies and simultaneous reliance on immigrant labor. Because Latin America made Los Angeles—and Los Angeles, through the ties of commerce and migration, is part of Latin America.

The post How Latin America Built L.A. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With so many big issues looming—from the homelessness crisis to racial and economic inequality to climate-related disaster preparedness—the panelists agreed that this mayoral election will be pivotal for Los Angeles.

But what are we talking about when we say Los Angeles? KCRW’s Janaya Williams, who moderated the conversation began by getting a sense of which Los Angeles the panelists know. She began, sharing her journey, which began north of the city in Santa Clarita. She came of age in Santa Monica during the L.A. uprisings, and just returned back to Los Angeles after logging more than two decades on the East Coast. That history, she said, informs what she wants from the next mayor.

USC political scientist Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro, came to L.A. after her sister moved out here, and then the rest of her family followed.

“The sense of Los Angeles that I’ve had is that it is a town of neighborhoods,” said Hancock Alfaro, “and a place where there are a lot of people who are committed to Los Angeles but committed to a lot of other things.” The need to balance the local with a sense of global issues is paramount for any leader of L.A.

Fellow panelist Rafael De La Rosa, who is from Ventura—“the 805”—has spent the last five years at California State University, Northridge, where he is the government and community relations assistant vice president. De La Rosa agreed that L.A. is made up of distinct communities, but he also insisted on its cohesion: “All the issues in the Valley are the same issues in Los Angeles. There is no longer this ‘over-the-hill,’ Valley-centric view.”

Taylor Bazley is CEO and co-founder of Green Qween, a cannabis retail space that prides itself as an incubator for ideas of social justice. Bazley said he followed the 405 North to L.A., coming up originally from San Diego. “I’m really steeped in the LGBT political world of Los Angeles, and that perspective is something that has really colored my relationship with L.A.”

Williams then turned to the issues, asking Bazley as a business owner what he’s looking for in the next mayor when it comes to balancing budget priorities alongside social justice. They shouldn’t be separate, said Bazley, pointing out that “a budget is a statement of your values as a city.” Take one of the biggest stories in Los Angeles and across the country: police funding. “That will be a litmus test” for the next budget, said Bazley—it will tell the story of how the city’s thinking around policing has or has not changed.

By Soobin Kim.

What issues have been overlooked in the mayoral campaign so far? Williams asked the panelists.

Their responses ranged from transportation—De La Rosa citing the mayor’s power to appoint seats to LA Metro’s board, whose Sepulveda Transit Corridor Project is the largest infrastructure project since the Hoover Dam—to issues that don’t have large and active stakeholder groups, like aging water pipes.

All the panelists agreed that Los Angeles hosting the 2028 Summer Olympics poses an opportunity to get things done under the spotlight. Hancock Alfaro pointed to a project she is working on with different neighborhood councils to alleviate some of the biggest racial equity issues around housing, education, transit access, and public safety. She said she would like to see the candidates address how they would approach these issues so that “we’re not just sweeping it under the rug like we did at the Super Bowl … that we’re actually making a difference.”

Prompted by an online audience question on mayoral power, Hancock Alfaro described L.A.’s weak mayoral system relative to the City Council, and said that a stronger mayor could have more leverage when it comes to issues from homelessness to transportation. They could say “not on my watch,” she said. However, the risk with a stronger mayor is that one person from one part of L.A. can “lose sight” of issues impacting parts of L.A. that they’re less beholden to.

The conversation, then, turned to the voters. When it comes to voter registration and turnout, everyone agreed that universal vote-by-mail, 11-day vote centers, and newer voting machines have all made a difference. When it comes to making a change outside of voting itself, De La Rosa called attention to community town halls and council meetings to give voters a more direct forum to participate and effect change on the issues they care most about.

The penultimate question of the night came from a student participant of Creating Our Next LA:

What is one piece of advice you’d give to someone voting for the first time to help them choose the right candidate?

The panelists agreed that it comes down to values. “Decide which candidate speaks to your particular values and inspires you,” said De La Rosa.

The post Not Your Average L.A. Mayor Voter Guide appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Instead, Los Angeles is known as a world capital of traffic, a place of extreme mobility challenges and a pollution-choked smog-burger. Low-income communities bear much of the burden of our failures—in worse access to jobs and opportunities, more severe health impacts from pollution and long commutes, and higher rates of injuries and collisions in transportation-related accidents.

And despite strong recent efforts, including unprecedented amounts of investment in rail and other transit infrastructure, things are poised to get worse. Vehicle purchases are on the rise, continuing a pre-pandemic trend. Despite more telecommuting, traffic is back with a vengeance and transit ridership remains depressed.

How did we get here? Because over the course of our history we have chosen to provide the benefits of that massive public investment in transportation almost exclusively to private vehicles, and at almost zero cost to drivers. Those vehicles mostly carry only one person at a time, churn out dangerous pollutants, and are not available to a very large segment of the population who cannot drive, choose not to drive, or cannot afford to drive. We should not be surprised at the outcome.

Yes, buses, bicycles, and pedestrians can use roads—but buses must combat traffic while biking and walking are often dangerous. Every year in L.A. County, speeding cars strike and kill hundreds of people and injure thousands more.

These realities have been produced by the choices we made as a region, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Los Angeles has the infrastructure to support the greatest transportation system ever known. We are just completely misusing it.

Imagine a world where this fantastic infrastructure investment really works, for everyone. What if Angelenos—whether they choose to drive, walk, bike, take transit, or even stay home—could be free from traffic, pollution, and physical harm? It’s achievable if we change how we choose to use our road space.

To start, we can put exclusive bus lanes and protected bike lanes on our major thoroughfares. Then we can run more and faster bus service, expand our bike share programs, and perhaps even distribute bicycles to those who cannot afford them. We can ensure sidewalks on every street and curb cuts on every corner, plus bus shelters to protect waiting passengers from the sun. We can lower speed limits even more on city streets, enforce traffic laws, and create more pedestrian crosswalks that give people more time to cross.

Then we get to the hard part: We need to stop giving away roadway space for free.

Have you ever tried to get an ice cream cone at Ben and Jerry’s on free cone day? Have you noticed that there is always a line, so that even though the cone is free, you wind up paying with your time? If you don’t mind waiting in line, or if waiting in line is fun because you are with friends, it’s no big deal. But imagine you need that ice cream cone to survive, so you must wait in line for it every day.

This is what it is like to be a commuter in Los Angeles. Your roadway space is free, but because you need that space to get to work or school or wherever you have to be, you have no choice but to wait in line to use it. So, you listen to music, or books on tape, or call your mom as you sit in traffic. This is the life we have chosen for ourselves.

But what if our roads looked more like a Ben and Jerry’s the other 364 days of the year? What if we sold the product that is in high demand instead of giving it away for free? The result would be the same as with any other product—shorter lines (i.e., less traffic). The concept is known as congestion pricing and has been used for years in cities such as London, Stockholm, Milan, and Singapore. New York recently approved a similar concept.

Taken as a package, congestion pricing, in combination with improvements to our road network, would dramatically transform Los Angeles. Traffic would drop, pollution would drop, and the entire system would become far more equitable. The net cost of these changes would be zero, since congestion pricing revenues could likely pay for the improvements to biking, walking, and bus commuting—all of which cost much less than highway improvement and new rail projects.

So why do we insist on making every day free cone day?

Each of the above ideas faces serious obstacles. An exclusive bus lane or a new bike lane typically requires taking away a lane of existing traffic. The new lane could potentially move far more people far faster, and those people are likely to be predominantly low-income and minority. But drivers typically balk at giving up a lane—and take their concern directly to their elected officials.

Adding sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, and bus shelters might seem relatively non-controversial, but many neighborhoods resist these as well on the grounds that they might slow traffic or “change the character” of a neighborhood, and they are typically not a budget priority. Reducing speed limits and enforcing them is not only unpopular, but also challenging due to state laws and limited resources.

But the largest problem is cultural. In the land of the freeway, what could be more controversial than charging people to drive?

Fortunately, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro), is undertaking a traffic reduction study to examine how we might package together a combination of street improvements and congestion pricing for Los Angeles County.

Fun fact: we call them freeways because they’re supposed to be free flowing. The name has nothing to do with the cost, but rather with the operational intent. An intent we collectively have the power to fulfill.

LA Metro’s study is aiming to build support for a pilot program that could test the ideas above. Some lucky area—one with terrible traffic—will be a proving ground for whether they improve the health, safety, environment, and access for everyone equitably. If it works, perhaps more parts of L.A. will demand these changes, too. If it doesn’t, well, we can always go back to our traffic-choked ways.

Moving forward with congestion pricing, exclusive bus and bike lanes, better bus service, and other improvements will take greater political courage than we have seen in recent years. These changes inherently disrupt and expose the existing inequities in our society by improving services for non-drivers, who tend to be low-income and people of color, and asking drivers to pay their fair share. But isn’t this what most of our elected officials claim to stand for?

We already have the solutions to L.A.’s longstanding traffic, pollution and mobility inequities. Now we just have to decide whether to choose them.

The post How to Imagine a Los Angeles Without Traffic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I know I should call you Mr. President, but there’s no time for formalities. You must move fast if you’re going to save California’s high-speed rail project.

No malarkey: It has to be you. California has shown itself incapable of funding, managing, or building deep popular support for this $80 billion train, which would be the first truly high-speed rail system in the United States. You—”Amtrak Joe,” with your personal devotion to riding the rail and your multitrillion dollar infrastructure proposal, now before Congress—are the last, best hope for making it a reality.

Is it worth the political risk of associating yourself with an epic failure? You and your advisors are cautious people who don’t want to give Republicans who oppose infrastructure spending a tempting target. Saving high-speed rail would enrage the House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, whose hostility to progress runs so deep that he has spent years opposing the project even though it would run through his own Bakersfield district.

But should you succeed, the potential rewards extend far beyond California. If you can fix this problematic and high-profile project, you will show the world just how committed you are to remaking this country’s infrastructure, and fulfilling your campaign promise to “build back better.”

Taking on this California headache won’t be easy. To have any chance of success, you’ll have to change the mindset around the project. Most of the attention paid to high-speed rail focuses on its lack of money—it’s short tens of billions of the $80 billion-plus needed for completion. But the fundamental problem with high-speed rail, as with other mega-projects in wealthy California, is not money, but a lack of management.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority is a failed agency. Thirteen years after California voters approved the railway, this agency still hasn’t managed the fundamental task of assembling the land it needs to build the first stretch in the San Joaquin Valley. It lacks the size, engineering expertise, and management chops to handle a construction project of this scale. Contractors have run amok, adding extra charges while failing to meet deadlines. And the authority’s board of directors is weak and part-time.

Leading state politicians, instead of supporting the project, are taking it apart. In early 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom abruptly and foolishly abandoned the plan to connect the first piece of the project, from the Bay Area to the Central Valley, leaving behind a diminished rail line running from Bakersfield to Merced. By making high-speed rail a Central Valley-only regional project, Newsom hurt support for rail in other regions. Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon of Los Angeles has started pushing to redirect high-speed rail’s limited funds to Southern California.

Joe, this unwinding of the project will end in high-speed rail’s eventual demise—unless you intervene, and soon. The good news is that California’s vast mismanagement of the project offers your administration multiple leverage points to jump in and start calling the shots.

Two big leverage points involve money. The first is $929 million in rail funding that the Trump administration pulled back in 2019 after Newsom abandoned the Bay-Area-to-San-Joaquin plan (and made intemperate remarks about the federal government in the process). The second involves $2.6 billion the state received for high-speed rail from the 2009 federal stimulus bill that it still hasn’t spent. California is almost certain to miss a 2022 deadline for using the money, which means you have the power to take it back.

To put it in your earthy style, Joe, since you control $3.5 billion that this project badly needs to stay afloat, you have California by the balls.

You can force Californians to confront the question: Are we serious about completing this train or not?

Your demands should not be bashful. As a condition of California getting the money it needs to keep the project alive—not to mention the tens of billions of additional federal dollars that will eventually be necessary to complete it—you can demand major changes in the management and operations of high-speed rail. First, you should require the resignation of all authority board members—and insist that the governor and legislature appoint a board, and a new chief executive, of your administration’s choice. Second, you need to insist that the new CEO replace the current, ineffective contractors with a real corporate engineering and management heavyweight—I’m thinking Kiewit, or that California giant, Bechtel—that can handle a project of this scale.

And most of all, you must insist that the project plan take the high-speed rail from the Bay Area all the way to L.A. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Some California politicians will balk at such a severe intervention. But don’t give them an inch. When they object, go right after their pretensions of national leadership and say: “Well, if California is no longer interested in building the American future like the governor says, I’d be happy to send California’s money to high-speed rail projects in Texas or Florida, where they still have ambitions.” They should fall in line. After all, you’ll be stepping up to ensure proper management of a project they never bothered to oversee.

One cautionary note: You may be tempted to throw in tens of billions in federal money right now, when the pandemic has opened the door for big federal spending. But slow down. Only once your preferred team is in place should you offer a schedule of future federal payments. And that support must be tied to measurable progress in the construction and testing. Joe, we Californians need to be kept on a short leash.

You’ll have to shrug off criticism, including from Californians who say that the state, having put bond money and cap-and-trade dollars into the project, deserves to hold the reins. The hard truth about California is that we’ve never built much of anything big without federal assistance—our aqueducts, our highways, and our internet all required help from Washington.

But the biggest thing you’ll need is the resolve to walk away. If California won’t meet your demands, or if our leaders undermine the project, you should pull back the money and leave the state to clean up its own unfinished mess.

Your love must be tough, but high-speed rail is worth the trouble. The project also isn’t quite as big a loser as it looks right now. Already, thousands of people are building it in the Central Valley, starting with the replacement of dozens of at-grade crossings that will prevent deadly rail accidents, and free up capacity for freight rail. And high-speed rail, with a proven record of success in other countries, could one day provide a more convenient, climate-friendlier alternative to flying or driving around our state, and country.

But none of that will happen, Joe, unless you kick California in the butt right now.

The post Dear Mr. President, Please Save California’s High-Speed Rail  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Then, in the greatest labor uprising of the nineteenth century, he found himself cast as the villain and his reputation turned to dust.

Pullman began his career lifting buildings. Taking over a business started by his father, he moved warehouses and barns to allow a widening of the Erie Canal. During the 1850s, officials in Chicago decided to raise their whole city ten feet to allow for drainage of its mud-clogged streets. Pullman jumped at the opportunity. Directing hundreds of men armed with screw jacks and cribbing, he lifted houses and hotels, even an entire city block, without breaking a single pane of glass.

More than anything, Pullman wanted to raise himself. The word “businessman” had recently been coined—a man who was neither merchant nor manufacturer but a mobilizer of capital, an entrepreneur. Pullman was a businessman by instinct—shrewd, gifted at calculating value, and always open to the new.

Lifting and moving buildings was an exacting operation—hesitation or a lapse of control could mean disaster. It required careful planning, a commanding presence, and steady nerves. These were the qualities on which George Pullman built his success.

Railroads had begun to dominate the landscape before the Civil War, and those who could look beyond that terrible conflict could see opportunity approaching. Pullman hired a substitute to take his place in the Union army and set to work fashioning a high-quality sleeping car. It was ready before the war was over. When the first transcontinental rail line opened in 1869, his business took off.

George Pullman did not invent the sleeping car—most of the credit went to Theodore T. Woodruff, an upstate New York wagon maker whose car debuted in 1857. But Pullman contributed his share of innovations. He based his success on two ideas: luxury and revenue. Employing both traditional craftsmen and an early version of the assembly line, he created cars that appealed to the Victorian taste for ornamentation—lush carpeting, brocade upholstery, and chandeliers. He installed double-glazed windows and an improved suspension for a quieter, more comfortable ride.

Rather than sell the cars, he retained ownership and contracted with the various railroads to add them to passenger trains as an enticement to customers. Pullman then pocketed the extra fare each passenger paid for an upgrade to Pullman luxury. This arrangement gave him a steady stream of revenue. It also meant that he kept complete control over the operation and maintenance of the cars.

And those cars proved irresistible. Business travelers could sleep while they rode to the next day’s meeting. Middle-class customers could bask in tony amenities and attentive service. Hungry passengers could feast on gourmet fare in an ornate dining car, another Pullman innovation. For the very wealthy, he offered absurdly opulent private cars.

Through buyouts and mergers, Pullman’s company gained a monopoly in the business. The name Pullman came to stand for quality and class.

A staunch Republican, George Pullman followed the spirit of Lincoln when he offered jobs to freed slaves. The men served as porters on the cars. They catered to passenger needs and performed the intricate task of transforming a coach car into a rolling dormitory for the night. The Pullman Company soon became the largest employer of African Americans in the country.

Concerned about the tenements and squalor that had accompanied industrialization and about the trouble that unrest might bring to capitalists, Pullman constructed a model town adjacent to his huge factory on Chicago’s outskirts. Pullman, Illinois featured the Midwest’s first indoor shopping mall and an elegant library, along with parks, playing fields, and neat brick homes for the workers. A local clergyman said it was “how cities should be built.” Of George Pullman, the Chicago Times predicted that “future generations will bless his memory.”

But in the conflict between George Pullman’s idealism and his instinct for making money, money usually won. He hired African American porters in need of work, but he paid them starvation wages—they had to rely on tips and endure the scorn of racist passengers. He created a town replete with flowers and greenery, but he charged exorbitant rents, posted demeaning rules, and allowed no town government. The company ran the show and Pullman’s spies invaded employees’ privacy.

The patriotic Pullman was stung when economist Richard Ely criticized his model town as “well-wishing feudalism” that was ultimately “un-American.” The human aspect of affairs did not come naturally to Pullman. One of his office workers noted that “I never knew a man so reserved.” His boss, he felt, would have liked to have treated people as friends, “but he couldn’t. He just didn’t know how.”

Still, his company prospered and Pullman reveled in his position as one of the grandees of Chicago society. His sumptuous mansion on Prairie Avenue, “the sunny street that held the sifted few,” was the scene of gala parties. Pullman and his wife spent a week with President Grant at the White House, and the sleeping car magnate hired Lincoln’s son Robert as his personal lawyer.

Workers leave the Pullman Car Company factory in 1893, one year before they joined a national railroad strike. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Then came trouble. In 1893 a financial panic plunged the nation into the worst depression that American citizens had yet seen. Pullman laid off workers and cut wages, but he didn’t lower rents in the model town. Men and women worked in his factory for two weeks and received only a few dollars pay after deducting rent. Fed up, his employees walked off the job on May 12, 1894.

The Pullman strike might have attracted little notice—desperate workers struck against hundreds of companies during the depression. But the Pullman employees were members of the American Railway Union, the massive labor organization founded just a year earlier by labor leader Eugene V. Debs. At their June convention, delegates of the ARU, a union open to all white railroad employees, voted to boycott Pullman cars until the strike was settled.

At the convention, Debs advised members to include in their ranks the porters who were essential to the Pullman operation. But it was a time of intense racial animosity, and the white workers refused to “brother” the African Americans who manned on the trains. It was a serious mistake.

The boycott shut down many of the nation’s rail lines, particularly in the West. The workers’ remarkable show of solidarity brought on a national crisis. Passengers were stranded; rioting broke out in rail yards. Across the country, the price of food, ice, and coal soared. Mines and lumber mills had to close for lack of transportation. Power plants and factories ran out of fuel and resources.

George Pullman refused to accede to his employees’ demand, which was to assign a neutral arbitrator to decide the merits of their complaints. The company, he proclaimed, had “nothing to arbitrate.” It was a phrase that he would repeat endlessly, and one that would haunt him to his grave.

Railroad corporations cheered him on and fired employees who refused to handle Pullman cars. The railroad managers, determined to break the ARU, had a secret weapon in the fight. U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney, a practicing railroad lawyer even while in office, declared that the country had reached “the ragged edge of anarchy.” He asked courts for injunctions making the strike illegal, and he convinced President Grover Cleveland to send federal troops to Chicago and other hot spots to face down strikers.

Although state governors had not requested federal intervention, U.S. cavalry troops and soldiers with bayonets were soon confronting rioters. Several dozen citizens were shot dead. Debs and other union leaders were arrested. Nonunion workers began to operate trains. The strike was soon over.

That summer, the Pullman workers returned to their jobs on George Pullman’s terms. But their 63-year old boss had little to celebrate. Many thought the nation’s distress could have been avoided if Pullman had shown more humanity. He was scorned even by some of his fellow tycoons—one thought a man who wouldn’t meet his employees halfway was a “God-damned fool.”

Eugene Debs, although he had lost the strike, was lionized. One hundred thousand cheering supporters welcomed him when he emerged from a six-month jail term for defying the injunction. Frustrated by government intervention on the railroads’ side, Debs turned to socialism as the only way to rectify the nation’s industrial ills. He led the Socialist Party for almost a quarter century, running for president five times under its banner.

George Pullman’s public image never recovered. The federal commission that investigated the strike judged that his company’s paternalism was “behind the age.” A court soon ordered the company to sell off the model town. When Pullman died three years after the strike, he left instructions that his body be encased in reinforced concrete out of fear it would be desecrated.

A clergyman exclaimed at Pullman’s funeral, “What plans he had!” But most remembered only how his plans had gone awry. Eugene Debs offered the simplest eulogy for his pompous antagonist: “He is on equality with toilers now.”

The post The Sleeping Car King Who Brought America to the “Ragged Edge of Anarchy” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.