New Car Los Angeles

With the menace of smog hanging over an increasing number of American cities in the 1960s, "Clean Air!" became a rallying cry for a new environmentalism. Citizen activists rallied passionately to force state and local governments to address problems that threatened human health and even survival. In Don't Breathe the Air, Scott Hamilton Dewey traces the history of air pollution control efforts, focusing on the decade of the sixties, and describes how local efforts helped create both the modern environmental movement and federal environmental policy. Early in the fight against air pollution, activists recognized the need for intergovernmental solutions. Because air was mobile, no single jurisdiction could address problems alone. Dewey has chosen three case studies involving different sources of air pollution and different configurations of governments to discover how jurisdictional issues affected environmental organization and the ability to clean up the air. First, Dewey looks at Los Angeles, arguably the birthplace of modern air pollution. Because much of the city's air pollution was automobile-related, Los Angeles had to enlist help from the State of California to regulate both the industry and car owners. Relatively speaking, Los Angeles was a success story, one that set important precedents and illustrated a pattern of local concerns entailing action in a larger arena. Dewey then turns to New York City, a city plagued by air pollution problems that involved more than one state and required regional action. In its comparative lack of success in dealing with its atmospheric woes, compounded by the pollution descending on it from neighboring New Jersey, New York was more typicalof the overall national pattern than was Los Angeles.

Imagine a world without automobiles, traffic lights, and interstate highways. Or the words commuter and parking. For a nation that prides itself on the freedom of movement and the long weekend, this seems nearly impossible. In Down the Asphalt Path, Clay McShane examines the uniquely American relation between automobility and urbanization. Writing at the cutting edge of urban and technological history, McShane focuses on how new transportation systems - most important, the private automobile - and new concepts of the city redefined each other in modern America. We swiftly motor across the country from Boston to New York to Milwaukee to Los Angeles and the suburbs in between as McShane chronicles the urban embrace of the automobile. McShane begins with mid-nineteenth-century municipal bans on horseless carriages, a response to public fears of accidents and pollution. After cities redesigned roads to encourage new forms of transport, especially trolley cars, light carriages, and bicycles, the bans disappeared in the 1890s. With the advent of the automobile, metropolitan elites quickly and permanently established cars as status symbols. Down the Asphalt Path also explains the escapist appeal of the motor car to many Americans constrained by traditional social values. This book includes more than thirty photographs detailing the transformation of urban transportation. They bring to life chapters on modes of travel before the trolley; the push for parks, parkways, and suburbanization; the car in popular culture; and the battle for traffic safety and regulation. McShane's analysis of gender relations in the rise of automobility - in particular, definitions of gender in terms of mechanicalskill and of driving as male power - is both timely and innovative. Wonderfully readable, this book will be a treasure for readers of urban history, popular culture, and technology - as well as car buffs.