Around Los Angeles these days there is some celebratoty/anticipatory foo-foo going on, involving the rapidly approaching 75th anniversary of the opening of the Union Station in downtown LA. It’s a neat building — a kind of modern (but not the weird modern of today) with a touch of Hispanic Old West. At least that’s how we would characterize it. Of course, the L.A. Times architectural good taste maven, characterizes it as — are you ready? — “a retrograde but winning blend of Spanish Colonial Revival, Mediterranean, Moorish and Art Deco styles.” Whew! Pivotal Hub of L.A. Life, L.A. Times, May 3, 2014, at p. 1A.
We like the place, and use it now and then to catch a train north to Santa Barbara, or south to San Diego. To digress for a moment, we recommend that you take those train trips. The southbound one takes you along the Orange County California Coast and provides vistas of the beach. The train goes right through the large Marine Corps base, Camp Pendleton. There you can sometimes catch a glimpse of the Marines practicing to storm the beaches. The northbound train also takes you along the coast and at one point goes right through the Vandenberg Air Force Base where, if you’re lucky, you may catch a glimpse of space vehicles sitting in their launch towers, getting ready to go. A good show that, as the British might put it.
But as we Angelenos get ready to celebrate the Union Station’s anniversary, little is being said about the events that preceded and accompanied its creation. Today’s L.A. Times says nothing about them. Union Station was built on the site of the Old Los Angeles Chinatown. This was in the 1930s, when all condemnees were badly treated as a matter of course, so you can imagine how bad it was for the Chinese who in those bad old days were legally disabled from owning property in California. They were lessees and tenants which meant that they often got no compensation at all because their leases, if any, were usually at market rents and thus had no bonus value. Month-to-month tenants didn’t own any compensable property interest, so they got nothing, because as we need not remind you, in those days there was no relocation assistance. That meant that the “just compensation” due those folks was zilch.
There was a long lead-up time to the taking of Old Chinatown, so in anticipation of the taking, landlords did not do much maintenance, and the area experienced what today we would call precondemnation blight that must have lowered values. In those days the courts had not yet ruled that condemnors may not take advantage of depressed “market” values that come about in anticipation of coming eminent domain acquisitions, and then acquire the affected land at the lowered prices. Hey man, said the California courts, market value is market value, and it’s not our business to inquire how it came to be so low.
“On the fateful day of May 19, 1931, a California Supreme Court decision was upheld approving land condemnations and the construction of the new Union Station upon the site of Old Chinatown. Two years were to slip by before an acceptable Chinese relocation proposal was accepted by the City.”
If you want to read up a bit about this history, click here http://oldchinatownla.com/history.html . That’s where the above quote comes from. That, in a manner of speaking, was the civic good news. The bad news, which is to say, the realistic news, stripped of the civic PR foo-foo, went like this:
“In 1933, the City forcibly evicted the residents and razed ‘Old Chinatown’ to build Union Station, which then resulted in the 1938 relocation of the Chinese to “New Chinatown”, which today we know as Central and West Plazas in the heart of Chinatown’s historic core.” Click here http://www.visitasianla.org/index.php/chinatown
Nothing about compensation.