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Life & Times Transcript
09/23/05 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- Long commutes and crowded freeways haven't done it. Will the high price of gas finally get Angelenos out of their cars? Marc Littman>> When you can buy a three dollar Metro day pass for the price of a gallon of gas and can travel unlimited rides on buses and trains throughout Los Angeles County day and night, that's a pretty good bargain. Val Zavala>> And then, we visit one of the oldest homes in the state, an off the beaten path gem of Southern California history. It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times. Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. With additional support for Life and Times from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation. Val Zavala>> So what will it take to get Southern Californians out of their cars and into mass transit? Recently Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa encouraged people to make the switch, but will they and is it practical? As Toni Guinyard tells us, perhaps the biggest incentive is gasoline at three dollars a gallon. Toni Guinyard>> The price of gas in one word -- >> "Unbelievable." Toni Guinyard>> But you already know that if you've watched the fluctuation in gas prices from day to day, station to station. Robin Collins>> You just keep wondering where it's going to stop. It just keeps going up. Toni Guinyard>> What you might not be aware of is what some people want you to do. Focus your attention not only on the price of gas, but also on the nation's growing dependence on foreign oil and the growing desire for the public to utilize mass transit options. In Los Angeles County alone, seventy-three miles of rail service and two hundred bus routes. Marc Littman>> When you can buy a three dollar Metro day pass for the price of a gallon of gas and can travel unlimited rides on buses and trains throughout Los Angeles County day and night, that's a pretty good bargain. Toni Guinyard>> Marc Littman is Deputy Director of Public Relations for Metro, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. While it's his job to promote Los Angeles County's complex public transportation system, he also uses it. Marc Littman>> I've been using public transportation in Los Angeles for more than forty years. Toni Guinyard>> Now he's commuting with more company. The Metro rail and Metro bus system is getting a little more crowded. Rail ridership has jumped fourteen percent in one year. Bus ridership has spiked nine percent. Marc Littman>> We've never seen anything like that. If you go back ten or fifteen years, we've never seen a spike that high. Obviously, the rise in gas prices has something to do with it. Toni Guinyard>> Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is even encouraging people to get out of their cars at least once a week and take some form of mass transportation to or from work. Now given the price of gas, it may seem appealing, but some say it's not appealing enough. Megan Ott>> I'm from the East Coast and I never thought getting around would be such an issue, but I've gotten really good at riding the bus and it's really been pretty painless. Toni Guinyard>> Like many passengers, Megan Ott is riding the bus because she doesn't have a choice. Getting commuters who have a choice to take public transportation is the challenge. Jesse Gift>> I'd never taken the bus ever in my life in Los Angeles. Toni Guinyard>> That changed for Jesse Gift a couple of years ago. At the urging of his youngest daughter, Gift decided to give public transportation a try. The Santa Monica resident is an editor for Life and Times. We joined him during the second leg of his commute to KCET. Jesse Gift>> It takes me forty-five or fifty minutes to drive from Santa Monica to the studio in my car and it takes me an hour and ten minutes to an hour and twenty minutes to ride the bus, so it's not much difference. Toni Guinyard>> Most days, Gift leaves his car parked at home and navigates from the Santa Monica Big Blue Bus Line to Los Angeles County's Metro Bus Number Two. Remember, his acceptance of public transportation was driven by his daughter's request long before the spike in gas prices. Now he shakes his head at a public dependent on petroleum. Jesse Gift>> When I drive up to a pump and it's almost three dollars a gallon, that is just disgusting. I'm not neutral about that. I'm not like, oh, well. I am, you know, irritated. That's obscene. The traffic is just too much. And even if gas prices weren't so high, traffic is just awful. But gas prices and traffic are horrible. Toni Guinyard>> So it's a combination of things that keeps Gift out of his car and on the bus. But based on his experience, it's going to take a lot more than an appeal by the mayor or high gas prices to lure first-time passengers. Jesse Gift>> It seems clear to me that the MTA has no desire to recruit new riders. They're satisfied with servicing the clientele they have right now. If that changed, if they decided they wanted everyday people who do have cars to ride the bus, I believe they could come up with a marketing position to make that happen. Marc Littman>> We're beefing up our marketing program to let people know that you can save a lot of money. Put your money in your bank, not in your tank. Toni Guinyard>> The MTA is touting incentive programs, offering retail coupons and special deals to employers who subsidize the cost of Metro passes for their employees. Marc Littman>> We're offering it to carpools and vanpools. You can get it off the Metro rideshare program. We're giving incentives like Starbucks coupons and other retail coupons and so forth, different prizes and promotions. Toni Guinyard>> Littman also emphasizes what may not be so obvious, the change in the way city planners and developers are thinking when it comes to the proximity of housing to public transportation hubs. Marc Littman>> There's more than four billion dollars worth of development that's taking place around Metro stations from Long Beach to Pasadena, Hollywood, downtown, North Hollywood, even here at Union Station. Mary Nichols>> We're seeing the market driving developers to produce more housing in the areas that are already built up. I think that the time has come where people are ready to take some of these alternative ideas more seriously than they have in the past. Toni Guinyard>> Mary Nichols is the Director of the Institute of the Environment at UCLA and former Assistant Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. On this day, she is also one of several participants in a simulation called "Oil Shockwave". >> "We have breaking news that China has deployed a large naval fleet around the Spratly Islands which are rumored to hold billions of barrels of oil and substantial reserves of natural gas." Toni Guinyard>> The exercise places an expert panel, including former CIA Director, James Woolsey, and former California Governor, Pete Wilson, in the roles of cabinet members. Their job? Address the global impact and how our need for oil affects national security after a hypothetical terrorist attack on oil infrastructure in Alaska and Saudi Arabia. The impact? The cost of oil has spiked to $120 a barrel. The price of gas at the pump is forecast to shoot to $4.74 a gallon. James Woolsey>> "This may well be, frankly, the worst news that we have yet had." Rep. Jane Harman>> "The simulation we engaged in is hypothetical today, but it could be real tomorrow." Toni Guinyard>> So real that participants in the "Oil Shockwave" simulation transitioned into promoting what they see as solutions, including the use of alternative fueled vehicles as a way of easing foreign oil demand. But they stress that it's going to take a change in culture to make a difference. Mary Nichols>> What we have to get over is the notion that there is this silver bullet that's going to fix everything for us. Because if we can shift even a portion of the cars off the roads or a few more people increase the average ridership of the cars even by a small fraction of a percentage point, that would make a huge difference in terms of the amount of the gasoline, the amount of pollution that we're putting into the environment. Lois Parker>> We're grimacing and we're groaning and one of my dear friends already has her hybrid. She's already getting into the carpool lane. We're all trying to catch up as far as that. It seems to be the one that hits us most of all, the fuel cost. Ronan Hellmann>> It's about fifty-five or sixty dollars per every four or five days. Toni Guinyard>> For many commuters, options are available. You just have to be willing to take a ride. Jesse Gift>> Everyone is in this fantasy that, oh, I can still just drive my car everywhere and I think the reality is clashing with that fantasy that all of us can get in our car one at a time and drive anywhere all over Los Angeles. I think it's over. Toni Guinyard>> I'm Toni Guinyard for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> For more information on the Los Angeles Metro system, you can go to their website. It includes schedules, fares and routes and you can check timetables for buses in various parts of the city or get helping forming a carpool if mass transit won't work for you. The address for the website is www.mta.net. You can also get route information by calling Los Angeles Metro at 1-800-COMMUTE. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times". Val Zavala>> So what do you think humankind's greatest achievement has been? Going to the moon? Curing disease? Or great works of art, music or architecture? Well, according to one thinker in Southern California, none of these. It is the city, and he says Los Angeles is a model for the future. Saul Gonzalez spoke with Joel Kotkin, author of the new book, "The City: A Global History". Saul Gonzalez>> Joel, whether it's the cities of ancient Samaria a millennia ago or twenty-first century Los Angeles, what has been the importance of urban areas to the larger tale of humankind? Joel Kotkin>> Well, cities have really been the place where virtually all of culture, science, technology, art, have all come from cities. It's been a unique category of things that only cities have been able to do. Now we may be entering a different era with the internet. With new technology, the rural areas, smaller towns, suburbs may be able to do many of those things. But if you look over five millennia, it's been the city where all this has happened. Saul Gonzalez>> They've been kind of the engines of civilization, right? Joel Kotkin>> Yeah, they've been the incubators of ideas, the incubators of great concepts, that have really emerged almost completely from the interactions that have taken place within the cities. Saul Gonzalez>> What makes a working city work well? What do you need? Joel Kotkin>> Cities really need to have three things. This is something that I stress in the book. One, they have to be sacred. People have to care. People have to feel that this is my city. This is Los Angeles. This is where I live and I'm willing to sacrifice some conveniences in order to be here. So that sense of sacredness, originally religious, now perhaps more a matter of civic or neighborhood involvements as well. Saul Gonzalez>> A sense of common participation in the life of the city? Joel Kotkin>> Right. I mean, this notion that this place matters to me. This neighborhood matters to me is very, very, very critical. Second is safety. Safety is absolutely critical. Anybody who went through the 1992 riots can see what happens to a city when order falls apart. Third, you've got to be busy. You have to have commerce, you have to have business, you have to have jobs and you have to have a middle class. Those are the things that really have made cities work and be viable. This is the model of the twenty-first century in every place where there is enough money to afford it. You go to London today or Paris and you go to the outskirts of those cities and they look at lot like -- Saul Gonzalez>> -- they look like Los Angeles. Joel Kotkin>> They look like Los Angeles. Los Angeles is really about the possibilities of urbanism when there's been enough affluence, enough land and the technology allows for people to live in a way which allows them greater private space. Saul Gonzalez>> And to those who say that the Los Angeles model for a city just isn't sustainable on this planet. It chews up too many resources, too much land. It's something that shouldn't be exported for the rest of the world. How do you respond? Joel Kotkin>> Well, I mean, if everyone in India lived like everyone in the San Fernando Valley, it probably would be a problem. I don't think we have to worry about that for a while. But fundamentally, I think the key issue is how do we evolve this way of life in a way that is more environmentally friendly? My ideal is that you build an a cappella row of villages and that the metropolitan area is a series of villages that connect together, but are fundamentally more or less self-sufficient, as opposed to the historical model which is you have this center city and everything builds up outside of it. I don't think that makes sense in the twenty-first century, given what we can now do. Saul Gonzalez>> Because of technology, because through our keyboards and through the internet, we can all in a sense have an urban experience, go to places that at one time you could have only found in cities. Does that change the nature of cities in the future? Joel Kotkin>> I think it changes them profoundly. I think one of the things that you're going to see over time, for instance, is that you now can conduct very sophisticated business from almost anywhere. For instance, my home office. I'm online to China, to Great Britain, to New York, every day and it's not anything difficult. Saul Gonzalez>> And a kid in Kansas can visit the Louvre online, you know? So how does that change what it means to have an urban experience? Does it make us all cosmopolitans? Joel Kotkin>> Well, it makes us more cosmopolitan. The urban space, in a funny way, is becoming universal so that I can be, and I have been, in small towns in North Dakota where they have high-speed internet and you've got kids getting online. They are just as well informed in many ways as a broker on Wall Street or as a scientist at JPL is because they've got access to this tremendous amount of information. Now some people say, well, that's the end of cities. I think, you know, what's happening is, in rural America in small towns and suburbs, they are becoming more urban. The world itself, which now has a majority of people living in cities, is actually more urban. It is the triumph of urbanity, not its defeat. It's just a new form of urbanity. Saul Gonzalez>> Looking ahead to the rest of the twenty-first century, are you generally optimistic about the future of our cities both in this country and around the world? Joel Kotkin>> I'm optimistic, I think, in many ways about the evolutionary development of the cities in this country. I think I am optimistic about Canada. I'm optimistic about Australia. Europe, I think, has some very serious problems along with Japan because of the very low birth rate, so that they lack children. Societies without children are doomed to extinction. I think that's pretty obvious. We certainly would say that about a species in the wild. Then I think that the real question and the great issue of the twenty-first century is what happens to the cities of the developing world? What happens to Mexico City? What happens to Lagos? What happens to Baghdad? What happens to Cairo? That is the great urban issue of the twenty-first century. Saul Gonzalez>> Where hundreds of millions of people try to survive in squalor, in misery, right? Joel Kotkin>> And where technology is making it harder and harder for them to, first of all, survive in the countryside and to have any real role in the world's economy. I would say that's the place where I have lots of concerns and I think it's where the world is going to have to address much of its resources in the twenty-first century or we will see, on a global basis, something akin to what happened during the industrial revolution where you had tremendous disruptions. You cannot go on over the long term with millions and millions of people living in cities who have no sense of a future. Saul Gonzalez>> Joel Kotkin, I want to thank you for joining us on Life and Times and thank you very much for writing "The City". Joel Kotkin>> Thank you. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Val Zavala>> It's a part of our Spanish past, but it's nearly hidden, surrounded by industry and factories. It's a one hundred eighty year old adobe and you'll see in a moment why volunteers have spent years restoring it. Vicki Curry takes us inside the Dominguez Rancho Adobe in Carson. Tom Huston>> This is the birthplace of the South Bay. Vicki Curry>> And the former home of one of Southern California's oldest families. Tom Huston is a descendant of Juan Jose Dominguez, the original owner of this land, now known as the Dominguez Rancho Adobe Museum. The family recently restored the adobe and the surrounding grounds. Tom Huston>> Two of the families still have land. There's probably around twenty-three to twenty-four hundred acres still remaining of the original land grant. That's remarkable that they still believe in their forefathers' thought and that is to keep the land. Vicki Curry>> It all began when Juan Jose Dominguez came to California in 1769. He escorted Father Juniperro Serra on the Portola Expedition to set up Spanish missions throughout the state. Tom Huston>> Juan Jose Dominguez was a soldier in a king's army and his job was to protect the exploration. Upon his retirement, the King of Spain granted him the first Spanish land grant in California which was called Rancho San Pedro. That incorporated seventy-five or seventy-six thousand acres. Vicki Curry>> The 1784 land grant encompassed most of the South Bay including parts of eleven present-day cities, but Juan Jose never spent much time at the isolated rancho and built only a small adobe there. When he died, the land passed to his nephew, Cristobal, and then to Cristobal's son, Manuel Dominguez. Tom Huston>> And Manuel came up here and took a look at the land and said this is fantastic, I love it, and that was the beginning of really the Dominguez influence in the area. That's when Manuel and his brothers and his sisters and mother all moved up this way and they started the building of the adobe. Vicki Curry>> The family finished this adobe in 1826 and, one hundred eighty years later, it's still standing. Donna Harris is the museum manager. Donna Harris>> This site and this family have been instrumental in every era of development of Southern California in rancho life, in agriculture, in the oil era, real estate and transportation. Here in the map room, we have many of the artifacts from Manuel's political and business career. Unlike many of the other rancheros, he was bilingual, he was well educated, and this resulted in him serving in political office under both the Mexican and the American governments. He was the Mayor of Los Angeles, elected three times over. He was on the County Board of Supervisors. He was a judge. He was one of only seven delegates from Southern California to serve on the initial California Constitutional Convention where they wrote the first Constitution for the state. Vicki Curry>> Despite his prominence, Manuel Dominguez had to withstand regular challenges to his ownership of the rancho. Tom Huston>> Because Juan Jose had not taken too heavy of a vested interest in the property, over the years there were people that came in and laid claim to it. So Manuel was busy through most of his life defending the land. There was a case where the Sepulvedas were ranching for the Dominguez family. They raised some cattle and some crops up on what is now Palos Verdes. They had laid claim for it and Manuel would go up and defend his rights in court. Vicki Curry>> Manuel successfully defended his rights on seven occasions. However, during the eighth challenge, Jose Delores Sepulveda was killed in an Indian uprising leaving his wife and children alone in Palos Verdes. Tom Huston>> At that time, Manuel had said forget it. Give them the property. Their home had been established up there and he felt sad. That chunk, which was about thirty thousand acres, went to the Sepulvedas. Vicki Curry>> When California became a state, Manuel had to prove his ownership again. Then finally in 1858, President James Buchanan officially recognized the Dominguez land grant. Donna Harris>> You notice that he is holding a document there which is the notification from the United States government that the rancho is the first to receive a clear patent of ownership in recognition under the United States government. Vicki Curry>> When Manuel Dominguez died in 1882, he was survived by six daughters. Three of them married men who would play important roles in the South Bay. Donna Harris>> And Susana married Dr. Gregorio Del Amo, as in the Del Amo Mall, Del Amo Boulevard. Victoria married Carson, as in the city of Carson. Delores Dominguez married a man named James Alexander Watson. Tom Huston>> And Jack Watson is my side of the family. Manuel devised a plan to get one of his six daughters married to a lawyer who could defend their land grant and the lawyer was Jack Watson. Vicki Curry>> The six Dominguez daughters and their husbands split the property between them and maintained the rancho and adobe. Tom Huston>> With the eve of the 1900's came the dirty words, property taxes, and with the droughts and the floods, it wasn't a consistent income coming in, so the family was forced to sell some of their land. Vicki Curry>> Two of the sales resulted in the cities of Redondo Beach and Torrance. Tom Huston>> Manuel had also given the right-of-way to the railroads to service the land south of here. Without the granting of that easement, I don't know if he'd had those ports today. Vicki Curry>> The families formed corporations for the land they continued to own, two of which still exist today. The Carson Companies and the Watson Land Company operate several industrial parks throughout the area. But because there were no male heirs to carry on the Dominguez name, the daughters decided to give their home and the surrounding seventeen acres to an order of Catholic priests. Tom Huston>> The Claretian Fathers then were going to set up a seminary and they were going to call it the Dominguez Seminary. Vicki Curry>> Dwindling enrollment caused the seminary to close in 1974. That's when Father Pat McPolin decided to turn the adobe into a museum to preserve the history of the Dominguez family. Tom Huston>> Manuel understood what he had and wanted to make sure that he protected it and passed it on to generations and generations. Vicki Curry>> And the museum staff is making sure the legacy of the Dominguez family lives on. I'm Vicki Curry for Life and Times. Val Zavala>> For more information on the Dominguez Rancho Adobe and Museum, you can go to their website or give them a call. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. With additional support for Life and Times from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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