Whose downtown is it?

WHEN I WAS growing up not quite middle class in a suburb at the southeast edge of the county, when downtown Los Angeles seemed as remote as Duluth, my father worked in the former Southern California Gas Co. building on Flower Street. Sometimes he would take me to his office on Saturdays. On those mornings in the early 1960s -- between the bulldozing of Bunker Hill and the fires of Watts -- downtown's deserted streets looked like the setting of a "last man on Earth" sci-fi film. My father's downtown wasn't the center of anything except in TV reruns, where film noir L.A. looked like the capital of regret.

The making and unmaking of downtown has been the focus of the city's business and political elites since the 19th century. The area is historically contested ground, dividing Angelenos by ethnicity and class but rarely uniting them. The divisions are brutally sharp now. Fewer than 9% of the jobs in the city are downtown, and income disparities there are among the widest in L.A. The non-homeless population is less than 25,000, with middle-class residents a tiny fraction of that. So, whose downtown is it, anyway, and why are so few of us asking?

It's easy to see why. From its conception, the city's heart was divided. The pueblo that clustered around the plaza in the 1780s was purely secular. Its religious center was Mission San Gabriel, whose Franciscan padres were so suspicious of the pueblo's unruly residents that L.A. didn't have its own church until 1822.

By then, the city's pattern of centerless edges had been set. The foothills and valleys of the L.A. and San Gabriel rivers were divided into more than 40 semi-self-sufficient ranchos. The Pueblo de Los Angeles was just a depot and general store.

After California became a state, new American owners subdivided the ranchos into farms and crossroad villages only loosely tied to Los Angeles. Railways in the 1880s created more towns along the mainline tracks in the valleys north and east. Beginning in 1901, Henry Huntington's network of electric trolleys filled the intervening space with miles of housing tracts and little Main Streets. Only between 1890 and 1920 did a real downtown -- with tall buildings, all-day pedestrian traffic and neighborhoods -- boom. By the early 1920s, mostly suburban visitors filled the city's movie theaters and department stores. And by the end of the decade, suburbia had unmade downtown.