Under the Bridge: A Talk with LA Historian and “Under Spring” Author Jeremy Rosenberg

By Peter RelicNovember 11, 2015

Under the Bridge: A Talk with LA Historian and “Under Spring” Author Jeremy Rosenberg
“LOS ANGELES IS NOT LOS ANGELES no more,” says LA native Anthony Adams in Jeremy Rosenberg’s book Under Spring: Voices + Art + Los Angeles. With its nostalgia-tinged double negative and inferred idea of destruction-as-creation, Adams’s statement is a thesis for the city itself. The act of becoming is simultaneously one of rubble and renewal. The only constant is change.

No part of Los Angeles embodies this better than the peculiar quadrant squeezed between Broadway and Spring Street just north of Chinatown: Los Angeles Historical Park. A former industrial site reborn in 2005 as a functioning farmland called Not A Cornfield, the park is currently undergoing an overhaul that promises a newly verdant public site for visitors by the end of 2015. One only need drive by (or take the Gold Line for a better view) to see the upheaval underway. The park is in plain sight. Yet it’s possible to traverse the adjacent Spring Street Bridge and remain oblivious to what lies beneath that structure. Under the bridge is a small but potent locus, the subject of the book by LA historian Rosenberg wherein Anthony Adams makes his telling statement.

Rosenberg, Assistant Dean of Public Affairs and Special Events at USC’s Annenberg School, has long chronicled the living history of Los Angeles. His KCET column “Arrival Stories” canvassed a diverse selection of residents about how and why they became Angelenos, in the process forming a composite underpinning of the city’s identity. Under Spring achieves a similar aim from a different approach. A time-lapse oral history of a single location, Under Spring documents the goings-on beneath the Spring Street Bridge between the years 2006 and 2013.

Soon after Annenberg Foundation Director Lauren Bon and her Metabolic Studios team took over the site in 2006, a neon sign announcing “CONCRETE IS FLUID” crowned their warehouse headquarters. It heralded a new era for the space under the bridge, formerly a graffiti-dappled homeless encampment known colloquially as The Tombs. In the subsequent seven-year period, Metabolic sponsored a series of events there called Under Spring — including a workshop “How Mushrooms Can Save the World,” a junker car project for turning old automobiles into planters, as well as weddings, puppetry, and dance performances, and an Earth Harp concert featuring U2’s The Edge. These events demonstrated, as another on-site neon sign proclaimed, “ANOTHER CITY IS POSSIBLE.”

“The area under the Spring Street Bridge is a public space,” Rosenberg writes in Under Spring:

It is also a microcosm of urban crisis — and opportunity. It raises all sorts of questions. What is meant by public space? What is or should be permissible there? What is the solution to the problem of homelessness? What is the best way to help an addict? What is the role of private interests attempting to reinvigorate a public space? Who controls land? What constitutes a power grab? What constitutes commendable, civic-minded community engagement?


As the above litany suggests, Under Spring is a book that poses more questions than it answers. Yet by weaving into its oral history the voices of 66 different speakers — among them urban landscapers, artists, security guards, City Councilmen, LA river experts, the formerly homeless, and a newborn baby — Rosenberg creates a tapestry as vibrant as the city itself. With its bountiful illustrations and photographs of the site dating back to 1873, the book was awarded the inaugural California Historical Society Book Award.

Here, Jeremy Rosenberg speaks on the creation of Under Spring and the civic response to the book, as well as announcing his next project, an ambitious work tackling the shifting identity of downtown Los Angeles.

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PETER RELIC: This November will be the one-year anniversary of the publication of Under Spring. Have you been back to the site recently?

JEREMY ROSENBERG: I have, and it’s incredible how quickly things change. Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studios have officially concluded their Under Spring event series there, and the city has commenced widening and earthquake-reinforcing the Spring Street Bridge. In the absence of community members coming in and doing projects under the bridge, it’s gone back to a graffiti-saturated state not seen in many a year. In my book there’s reference to someone scribbling on the wall “This Is God’s Most Desolate Place.” Now it looks like there’s a lot of conscious, colorful art under the bridge. I don’t know if there are homeless people living there. I doubt it, because it’s a construction site so they’d get roused. There are piles of rubble because the bridge is now being expanded. There’s a lot of construction material and detritus. It’s fenced off on all four sides, but you can still negotiate your way in there if you’re on foot.

How is it that so much happened within a thousand-foot square space beneath an old bridge?

The space just seemed like a giant cabinet of wonder. As Anthony Adams says in the book, he and his friends used to call that area “The Tombs” — the idea being if you’re already dead there’s no reason to hold back on anything while you’re there. And when Metabolic took it over, the space became reborn. In the book, Lauren Bon compares it to Berlin right after the Wall fell. It was such a real spot that when you’re there, you only talked about things that really mattered to you or to the world. The Day of the Dead observances there were magical. The Earth Harp performance was magical. The cover of Under Spring is a photo of Bill Close and his Earth Harp. It was amazing to watch him set it up. Another composition that Yuval Ron created incorporated the sounds of the trains running right behind the wall. These are serious, super-talented people, organized enough that they checked out the schedule of the tracks for when the trains were coming. It was awesome, in the biblical sense of awe.

The oral history format of Under Spring really captures the crosstalk of different people for whom the space beneath the Spring Street Bridge represented different potentialities. Why did you decide to make the book an oral history?

I wanted the style of the book to be representative of that space before and during Metabolic Studios’s Under Spring project, and also representative of this amazing city itself. I did not want it to be linear, or all my words. It would’ve been easier to write a book-length think piece, but it wouldn’t have had anywhere near the energy that the book does. The publisher of Heyday, Malcolm Margolin, is a wild character, and this fact appealed to him. This is nothing like the scholarly work that some people are producing. I’m not a PhD historian! It’s meant to be more of a tone poem than a work of scholarship.

One topic Under Spring addresses is the role of community agriculture. I didn’t know about the law prohibiting planting fruit trees on public land due to fear of vermin infestation. The punch line to that is, once fruit trees are growing on public land, they must be maintained.

That’s right! There was an alternative artistic intellectual crowd under the bridge, really smart civic-minded artists, broaching topics that one might think a government should take on. In the absence of government doing so, due to lower budgets and lower expectations of what governments should do, artists were tackling these issues. They were working to change the law about fruit trees, and they’ve gone on to successfully, legally, plant fruit trees in public places. There’s an online map now at fallingfruit.org to guide you to those public spaces.

One striking aspect of the area is its neon signs. How did neon come to Under Spring?

That was due to the former General Manager for Cultural Affairs of the City of LA, Adolfo V. Nodal. It turns out that streetlights are part of the purview of the Department of Cultural Affairs. Makes no sense, right? Not traffic lights, but street lights. When Al was at City Hall, he interpreted it to include neon signs. Al’s mission with Cultural Affairs was to relight many of the dark neon signs that are around LA. I think he succeeded in lighting up about a hundred of them, like on the tops of buildings downtown. Al knows neon. He’s got the hookup. So one day Steve Rowell said, “Concrete is fluid,” and Lauren Bon said, “Let’s get that in neon!” So Al connected Lauren Bon with the neon guys; their business name is Standard Electric. And, apparently, neon signs are like tattoos. When you get one, you have to get more.

Is Lauren Bon’s studio still there beside the bridge?

Metabolic is moving across the river into Lincoln Heights. I’m not sure how soon, but they’re in preparations for their move. It’s the end of an era. Lauren Bon’s next big project is building a water wheel that’s going to take the place of where the building currently is. I think Metabolic is moving because of the water wheel. I can’t stress enough that there never would’ve been an Under Spring project if Lauren and her team hadn’t been in that building.

What sort of feedback have you gotten from Under Spring?

People told me they had no idea that when they drove over the bridge, or took the Gold Line, that all this was happening right there under the Spring Street Bridge — all this activity hiding in plain sight. People have asked, “What can I do to start a place like that?” People are reading, they’re inspired, they want to do things. It’s been nine years since Metabolic’s Under Spring project began with no fanfare. Such a small number of people knew about it at the time that even now the ripple effect of what happened there is still spreading — same with the book. What do they say — not that many people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one who did started a band? Well, there may not have been that many people under Spring, but they all seem to have been inspired to do something as a result. That’s a success.

In that sense would you say the book has been more than a shelf-bound document, but a catalyst for activity?

The whole point of the book was to inspire people to go out and improve the city’s interstitial spaces. I really do hope that people who read this book are angry enough about what happened under Spring, or inspired enough by what happened, impressed by what happened, to go out and find other urban voids, other interstitial spaces, to do something with them that they think will make the city a better place. I really do mean that. That’s why I like to be involved in these Annenberg projects. I don’t expect anyone to replicate the vision that was Under Spring but there are so many other things that can be done here and beyond.

Like what?

Well, under the Broadway Bridge, California State Park System has set up a temporary interstitial space called Viaduct, with a neon sign that says “VIADUCT!” It’s a total homage mash-up of Not A Cornfield and Under Spring, with hay bales and a fire pit and turf laid out, and sometimes an old-timey band playing. It’s continuing in the spirit of activating space. It’s a clear knock-on effect of what Under Spring achieved. The night I went, I ran into a guy who runs a think tank to be part of a conclave at City Hall, and he invited me to a conference about interstitial spaces, a room full of 40 people who work in city government, others who are landscape architects and designers, figuring out ways to take underused urban voids like the one under the Spring Street Bridge and turn them into places for focused activity.

What’s your next book?

I’ve just signed a contract for it. The next book is tentatively titled Los Angeles Revival: How Downtown L.A. Has Changed For Better & Worse. After the success of Under Spring, Heyday asked me what I wanted to do next. I told them and they said, “Great, let’s do it!” It will be a follow-up book, looking back at these last 15 or so years of remarkable change downtown. I anticipate the new book will revisit the themes of gentrification and street art and homelessness and urban renewal and public art. It will involve a lot of photographers and illustrators. Under Spring was a microcosmic story that took place in a very small area, even though it talks about much bigger picture issues. Los Angeles Revival will cover a larger geographic area, all of downtown LA. I promise you it won’t be micro!

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Peter Relic is a journalist, photographer, and LA Galaxy fan.

LARB Contributor

Peter Relic is a journalist, photographer, and LA Galaxy fan.

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