The project Los Angeles Palms (2017) portrays the life and influence of the exotic palm tree species Washingtonia Robusta. ‘Ask anyone—native Angelino, recent transplant, or casual visitor—for their image of Los Angeles and you will hear the usual list: surf, sand, and palm tree-lined boulevards marked by the rise and fall of celebrities, shaped and clogged by the automobile, wreaked by repeated racial strife, menaced by impending natural disaster. Through more than a century of exposure through literature, cinema, and media these images insinuated themselves in the imagination. Of all of these clichés, however, the palm tree is the most easily distilled into a single frame, deployable whenever necessary to establish that the action takes place in Los Angeles and if the city lacks an architectural skyline—not a single downtown skyscraper has managed to burn itself into the collective unconscious—its rows of palm trees substitute.
Considering that the average lifespan of the Washingtonia Robusta ( Mexican Fan Palm) is seventy to a hundred years and that most of the palms visible now were imported and planted to beautify the city for the 1932 Olympics, the bulk of Los Angeles’s palm trees will disappear within a decade or two. Regardless of its link to the city’s popular image, the palm has never been the city’s official tree.’
All images of Los Angeles Palms are made on a Crown Graphic Field camera on Fuji 4×5 inch polaroids and 4×5 inch Kodak 160 negative-film between 5 AM and 7 AM.
The following is an excerpt from Marie-Josè Jongerius’s book, “Los Angeles Palms” written by Jared Farmer. (Fw: Books Amsterdam. January 2017):
In the postwar era, sidewalk palms grew into symbols of urban Los Angeles. Tall ranks of Mexican fan palm became familiar fixtures on the horizon, generic landmarks, the original skyscrapers of the horizontal metropolis. The entertainment industry magnified its stature. Advertisements, telecasts, television shows, movies, song recordings, and music videos produced in Southern California made ready use of street palm imagery. A telephoto shot of a row of lanky palms became shorthand for L.A.—America’s dream factory, the most filmed locale in the world. Long after the city’s street tree division gave preference to other species and genera, private developers, architects, and landscape designers utilized Mexican fan palms for the mass communication of desirability. The “L.A. look” transcended Los Angeles: shopping malls, gated communities, and casinos in places such as Orange County and Las Vegas mimicked and exaggerated the fashion for high-rise fronds. Ultimately, fan palms meant less to Angelenos than to outsiders and their idea of L.A. In 2006, when the City of Los Angeles officially discouraged fan palms as street trees, the world reacted in disbelief. People could not imagine “SoCal” without the shabby-chic Mexican fan palm. Even in San Francisco, a city with a distinctive palm history, the image of L.A. now affects the way that people interpret an urban plant with fronds. “Fashions in trees change year by year like styles in women’s dress,” remarked a Los Angeles Times writer in 1942. According to him, the rage for palms had subsided.
The tropical trees didn’t match the architectural styles of the day, English manor houses and Cape Cod cottages. “The present trend is away from the bizarre and exotic.” During the serious times of World War II, Angelenos even worried about dangers posed by palms. Very few of the tens of thousands of street palms planted in previous decades had ever been trimmed. The dried-up fronds formed thick mats of flammable material, a stockpile of fuel that conceivably might have been eyed by the Japanese for the incendiary attack. In 1942 hundreds of residents petitioned the city council to ameliorate this public safety hazard. Many petitioners felt angry that the board of park commissioners had ordered residential “owners” of municipal street palms to remove dead fronds. This job required special training and equipment; for novices, it would be “fraught with danger and hazard to life and limb.” The city attorney later advised the board that it had overreached its authority.
In the immediate postwar era, Southland planners and builders eschewed trees like Canary Island date palms and Mexican fan palms. In a time of mass-produced small lots, these large-form trees didn’t seem to fit. “Several decades ago as Los Angeles was developing its suburbs there was a vogue for lining the streets with long rows of evenly spaced palms or dotting front lawns with sentinels,” explained a garden writer for the Times in 1953. As these palms grew higher and higher, they fell out of favor; “we realized they were grotesque and lonely.” She advised home landscapers to use modest-sized varieties such as windmill palm and to set them in groups, thus avoiding the lollipop effect. The developers of Lakewood, an instant suburban city of 70,000 people in ranch houses, the western equivalent to Levittown, Long Island, didn’t use any palms. Lakewood’s list of approved species instead included throwbacks such as pepper trees and acacias. Prefab communities designed for veterans—and reserved for whites according to racially restrictive covenants—popped up like dandelions in the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County. Walnut and avocado orchards around Whittier fell before the bulldozer.
Within the boundaries of the City of Los Angeles, the development frontier shifted to the San Fernando Valley, where developers tore out citrus orchards and their eucalyptic windbreaks. The succeeding residential landscapes of “the Valley” contained many broad-leafed trees and few palms. The trendiest plant of the 1950s and 1960s in Southern California was the “rubber tree” (Ficus elastica), with its striking aerial and buttress roots. (Cities would later tear out ficus en masse because of sidewalk buckling.) When Walt Disney opened the gates of Disneyland in 1955, visitors streamed through Main Street, U.S.A., an idealization of a (white) Midwestern small town. The deciduous trees on Main Street looked modest and conventional, not Californian. The only section of Disneyland with conspicuous palms was Adventureland, home of the Jungle Cruise.
Even as landscapers downplayed palms on the new suburban streets of Greater Los Angeles, tourism promoters played them up the same old way. The All-Year Club continued its long tradition of wintertime “sunshine ads” in cold states. Predictably, these newspaper spots portrayed Los Angeles as an ideal winter destination, a region of oranges and palms. The advent of color television aided the cause. On 1 January 1954, NBC inaugurated coast-to-coast color broadcasting with coverage of the Tournament of Roses Parade, the floral procession in Pasadena that began on palm-lined Orange Grove Boulevard. The contemporaneous advent of passenger flights also aided the cause. In 1953 the Los Angeles Junior Chamber of Commerce welcomed service to and from Boston with the donation of a potted palm to Logan Airport. Around 1960 United Airlines advertised its service to Los Angeles with eye-grabbing posters showing fan palms backing a blond beauty in a bathing suit with shadows of fronds on her bosom.
Despite the energetic advertising, the image of L.A. as a sunny lotus land dimmed a bit in the mid-twentieth century. The 1965 riots in Watts, widely described as a “ghetto with palms,” gave a long-lasting bad name to a swath of the metropolis: South Central. The whole basin’s reputation for smog replaced its former reputation for healthy air. The vaunted freeway system, which seemed like Utopia when construction began in the 1940s, was as early as the 1960s derided as the “biggest parking lot in the world” (a quip often attributed to the comedian Bob Hope). Meanwhile, rival destinations beckoned with winter warmth and palms. The same airlines that made winter vacationing in Los Angeles more convenient opened up competition. Chicagoans and New Yorkers could now visit south Florida or the Caribbean with unprecedented ease. The Sunshine State aggressively courted and successfully captured much of the eastern market for winter tourism. Of America’s cities, only Miami Beach could match Los Angeles in its symbolic identification with palm trees. “Let me tell you, to me when I came here the first time, I had a feeling that I had come to Paradise,” recalled Isaac Bashevis Singer about Miami. “First of all, the palm trees.” Coconut-rich Honolulu joined the contest for tourists in 1959, when Hawaii became the fiftieth state and Boeing introduced the 707.
Even hot desert environments competed with Mediterranean L.A. for snowbirds, vacationers, and retirees. Most famously, the Del Webb corporation turned an expanse of saguaro cactus into the first master-planned retirement community, an age-restricted, self-contained complex with golf courses, shopping malls, medical facilities—and absolutely no schools and associated taxes. The original Sun City, located north of Phoenix, Arizona, opened in 1960 and became the template for many other leisure communities, including one in Riverside County. For Del Webb, palms became a trademark landscape element. At Scottsdale, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, and the latest “playground of the stars,” Palm Springs, California, leisure developers relied heavily on outdoor palms—and indoor air conditioning—to create an idealized environment. In the restructured geography of the postwar Sunbelt, the palms of Los Angeles, and especially Catalina Island, seemed less special and alluring than before.
Greater Los Angeles thrived nonetheless because it attracted so many workers. In the 1950s the metro area, which now included scores of municipalities, entered another long boom, more or less coincident with the Cold War, and transformed its identity yet again. Now, in addition to entertainment, oil, transport, and light manufacturing, boosters emphasized aerospace. Thanks to defense contracts, the GDP of Los Angeles County eclipsed that of many small countries. Area labs and factories designed and produced an awesome arsenal of fighters, bombers, missiles, and rocket boosters. Dozens of high-tech companies started, expanded, or relocated here, where a mighty river of defense appropriations disgorged.
The city continued to expand horizontally, engulfing the remaining open spaces, citrus ranches, horse pastures, dairy farms, and low- density neighborhoods. After Los Angeles lured the Dodgers away from Brooklyn in 1957, it facilitated the depopulation of Chávez Ravine, a semirural barrio in the Elysian Hills that had earlier been slated for a federal housing project. Developers razed the homes and gardens of evicted Mexican residents, terraformed the ravine into a platform, and built Dodger Stadium (1962) at the center of an Olympian parking lot. Obligatory groupings of mature fan palms lined the outfield pavilions. Although the Dodgers’ new home overlooked downtown, there was no easy way to get there. Chávez Ravine had been chosen for its proximity to several freeways, not its proximity to the city center. Downtown Los Angeles declined to near irrelevancy after the electric trolley system, the interurban Red Cars and then the municipal Yellow Cars, suspended operation in the early 1960s.
The dealings of General Motors contributed to the shutdown—the subject of a congressional investigation, conspiracy theories, and the film Who Killed Roger Rabbit? (1988)—but the consumer choices of city residents did so even more. As early as 1910 Los Angeles boasted the highest per capita car ownership in the world. The freeway system built in the 1940s and 1950s cemented the new order. In a sign of the times, downtown sacrificed the tree cover at Pershing Square to ease the construction of what was, on opening day in 1952, the nation’s largest underground parking structure. The relandscaped park consisted of a lawn lined with palms—a “see-through, walk-through park” where the LAPD could easily curtail political rallies, drug deals, and gay encounters. Palms facilitated urban surveillance.
In the early jet age, palm trees often took expressly architectural forms. While residential landscapers turned away from fronds, commercial designers and high-end architects embraced them. Throughout the metropolis, corporate draftsmen used palms as elements in their drawings, models, and finished projects. Aerospace firms such as North American Aviation built clean-lined modernist buildings with palms as accents. It became standard to group the logo like trees in twos or threes, often at angles crossing each other, even bracketed to the sides of buildings. This accessorizing effect could be seen at drive-in theaters and car washes as well as corporate headquarters such as the Capitol Records Tower (1955), high-end accommodations such as the Hotel Statler (1952) and the Beverly Hills Hilton (1955), and government buildings such as the Parker Center (1955), the new home of the LAPD. Architects even designed portico and awning holes to allow sidewalk palms to intersect buildings. In Palm Springs, some of America’s best modernist architects built homes for L.A.’s jet set and incorporated palms and native rocks into their designs. A California fan palm growing out of a trellis that enclosed and sheltered a free-form pool became a familiar design leitmotif at the desert resort.
Plants such as these did not belong to the garden, the seaside, or even the street. They grew out of architecture. The idea was to complement the beauty of concrete and glass, not hide its ugliness. In Los Angeles, building designers placed mature palms close to tall exterior walls so they would cast interesting shadows throughout the day. Select parts of the city—notably Wilshire Boulevard—went vertical in the fifties, adding multistory office towers and apartments (but no more public housing units, a “socialist” proposal defeated by voters). Vertical is relative: from 1905 to 1957, the city enforced a height restriction of thirteen stories or 150 feet. On mid-Wilshire, the oil billionaire J. Paul Getty razed the shade-covered mansion formerly occupied by his ex-wife (the film location for Sunset Boulevard) and erected a new corporate headquarters—an exposed block tower—with fan palms all but touching the building, held in place by cable supports.
On the suburban fringe, designers used perpendicular palms to break up the otherwise severe horizontality of large-form asphalt and concrete. Angelenos flocked to freeway-access regional shopping centers with vast parking lots placed in front—no longer in back as at Bullock’s on Wilshire. This new, stark landscape, which appeared fresh and modern in the fifties, featured little landscaping except for palm trees, which resembled aestheticized light poles. One early example of this arbo-architectural landscape was Valley Plaza (1951) in the eastern San Fernando Valley. The exemplar was the international airport (1961), the transportation hub of Cold War Los Angeles. In its expanded and redesigned form, LAX featured a futuristic air traffic control tower and the instantly iconic Theme Building, a restaurant-observatory that looked like a Martian flying saucer on a landing pad. From the bar, patrons sipped cocktails while looking out on a sea of blacktop dotted with island groups of palms.
Fronded trees, along with California modernism, fell out of favor with 1960s commercial designers. The dormancy lasted longer than the dry spell after the tropical 1930s. “Palms were very popular in the 1950s,” recalled the distinguished landscape architect Emmet Wemple, “and then they became a real no.” Many suburban Angelenos went to local garden stores for dwarf palms to adorn their new backyard swimming pools—as of the early sixties, Southern California contained roughly one-third of all such pools in the nation—but professional landscapers and arborists temporarily shunned fronds, and cities used them reluctantly. When the diseased queen palms on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills needed to be replaced in the 1960s, the city stirred up controversy by choosing Mexican fan palms over its initial choice, ficus.
In collective memory, the 1960s Southland means youth culture and the craze for surfing. Hollywood released seven Beach Party films from 1963 through 1966, not to mention the Gidgetfranchise. The teenage beach shows did not feature a lot of palm scenery, but cumulatively they probably reinforced the palmy image of Los Angeles in popular consciousness, as did the Beach Boys’ hit single “California Girls,” with its line about dolls, sand, and fronds.
Away from the beach, thousands of street side palms looked anything but modern, sleek, and fun. By the 1960s the mass plantings from the twenties and thirties reached heights of 50 feet or more. Thousands had never been trimmed, and their unkempt “beards” reached all the way to the ground. Worked on by gravity, a mat of dead, dingy fronds might collapse partway down the trunk, only to get snagged on the leaf stalks. Los Angeles boulevards with rows of Mexican fan palms in various states of shedding appeared rather disheveled. In the Citrus Belt, the palms were older, taller, and even shaggier. These combustible pillars attracted pyromaniacs and copycat vandals. From the early 1940s through the late 1960s, “gangs of youths” regularly attacked palmy avenues and driveways; they converted bearded palms into “Roman torches of terror,” destroying property and disrupting telephone and electric lines. By cover of night, “long-haired” hooligans lobbed bottles of aming liquid onto palm trees from the windows of moving cars, and plenty of well- adjusted children in broad daylight used clothespin-and-rubber-band guns to launch strike-anywhere matches into desiccated fronds. In rapidly suburbanizing towns such as Pasadena, Covina, and Redlands, firefighters, police, and utility crews rushed from one scene of arbo-vandalism to another.
Despite clear infrastructural advantages—no sidewalks buckled by roots, no storm drains clogged by deciduous leaves—palms create their own maintenance problems, mostly related to fronds. Some species of crown shaft palms, such as king palm and queen palm, are “self-cleaning,” meaning that each leaf base has two abscission zones. The used-up fronds drop freely in regular fashion as part of the growth cycle. But fan palms and certain feather palms, like Canary Island date palm, behave differently. Their leaves stay on the trunk until gravity or wind suddenly releases one or a bunch. In autumn, after the Santa Ana winds, the palm-lined streets of Los Angeles become obstacle courses. A downed frond, unlike a dainty maple leaf, looks like a dislodged piece of organic machinery. Weighing several pounds even when dry, palm debris can easily dent a car. To mitigate airborne damage, tall street side fan palms should be trimmed at least once every five years. Trimmers must beware of wildlife when they approach the crown. In and around Pasadena, noisy flocks of tropical parrots—escaped pets gone feral—have colonized the sheltered, fruit-filled canopies of palms. Rats, too, take refuge in these natural middens. If a tree becomes intolerably infested with rodents, municipal street tree crews may install a belt—a plate of smooth steel or aluminum—around the trunk, thus denying traction to tiny climbing feet. But only wealthy cities such as Pasadena, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica can afford regular palm trimmings and rat poison applications. Long Beach pioneered this approach in 1948, when its health department placed poison in more than four thousand rat-infested palms. A few years later, its board of supervisors characterized palms as “fire hazards and nesting places for rats.”
In Los Angeles, the superintendent of street trees reached his limit with palms in the mid-1970s. Despite constant complaints about rodent eyries, he had to lengthen the interval between maintenance visits to each of the city’s approximately 48,000 palms because of budget cuts. Hoping to lessen the labor on future rotations, city contractors known as “palm skinners” removed the bottom layer of green fronds as well as the brown skirt. These “bad haircut” palms looked ridiculous at first, resembling an upright pen with a green nib. (Unintentionally, the “hurricane trim” diminished the crown’s cantilevering support and increased the likelihood that healthy fronds would collapse.) As an additional cost-cutting measure, Los Angeles began to give away cut fronds, thus reducing disposal fees. Officials had noticed Jewish residents on the trail of palm skinners, picking up fallen fronds. Observant Jews prefer palm material for sukkahs, the shelters used for outdoor eating during the weeklong Feast of Tabernacles. Los Angeles decided in effect to sponsor the Jewish holiday. On a designated day in the fall, it freely distributed long, feathery leaves from Canary Island date palms—10,000 or more each year—at a city parking lot.
If even low-maintenance street trees such as fan palms require expensive maintenance, why not go the next step? Why not plastic trees? Los Angeles County conducted such an experiment in 1972 on a 1.7-mile stretch of Jefferson Boulevard near Loyola Marymount University. A culvert project beneath the roadway had removed the soil available to trees in the median. To compensate, county crews installed 1-foot-deep concrete planter boxes. To fill them, the county board of supervisors appropriated $35,000 for nine hundred plastic plants, including about one hundred steel-supported palms, as well as fake junipers, Chinese laurels, magnolias, and various owners such as birds of paradise. The road department set the artificial flora in crushed rock and arranged them in clusters for artistic effect. “Take that, Joyce Kilmer,” quipped the Los Angeles Times.
The pseudo-trees became an instant scandal. The city and county received hundreds of phone calls and comment letters and formal protests from garden clubs, which quickly came up with long lists of flowers and shrubs that could grow in 1 foot of topsoil. Letters to the editor maligned the inert monstrosities: What about the maintenance of the human spirit? In the interest of economy, I suggest we have real trees and plastic supervisors. This is just another example of the reason why outsiders refer to our city as “Tinseltown, U.S.A.” and why all of L.A. is identified as the “Phony Glamour Capital of the World.” A nighttime prankster attached plastic birds to some of the trees. Less amusingly, vandals destroyed about fifty of the fakes by trampling them, sawing them, and attempting to burn them. Reeling from the controversy, the road department “halted all plastic plantings.” However, the median ornaments would remain “as long as they survive.” The veteran columnist Jack Smith reported that the palms looked “clean and shiny” as well as “stiff and indestructible.” Alas, even space-age plastic was no match for the industrial-strength smog of Los Angeles. County workers resorted to cleaning the faux palms with spray detergent once a month. Finally, in 1976, the road department rooted out the entire beautification because of plastic degradation. “The road grime and the atmosphere destroyed [the trees],” explained the commissioner.
In the environmentally conscious 1970s, when redwood debates regularly made the news and housewives defended suburban eucalypts, tree huggers even fought for urban palms. Activists in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1972 successfully agitated to “save our palms” on Highland Avenue from a project to widen the road and create left-hand turn lanes. “When workmen showed up to mark a number of the 40-year-old palm trees for the saw,” wrote Jack Smith, “the householders rushed forth from their peep-holes like tribesmen defending their virgin daughters.” Residents erected signs on their lawns with messages like palms up, hands off. In response, the city council canceled the work contract, and the cultural heritage board declared the trees to be a “historic-cultural monument.” Later that year, the city of Camarillo in Ventura County designated its palms along U.S. 101 a cultural heritage landmark in an attempt to stymie plans by Caltrans to widen the road. The town had already tried the same tactic with its gateway eucalypts. This time the stratagem failed: the palms were uprooted and relocated.
In Los Angeles, the defining environmental issue of the 1970s was smog. The dread pollution filled the interior air basins, rose up into the mountains, and caused acid rain and ozone damage to pines. This Eco threat inspired local teenager Andy Lipkis, who founded an ecology club, the California Conservation Project, in 1973. Lipkis’s lifelong activism began in the San Bernardino Mountains, where he planted trees at summer camps. Banners for his project read smog kills trees! tree people save trees. In time, Lipkis moved his ecological concerns to the city. He wanted Los Angeles to be famous for its urban forest, not just its palms. The city needed leafy trees for air quality, he said, for energy conservation, and for neighborliness. A dynamic community organizer, Lipkis secured volunteer labor from civic and corporate organizations and free saplings from agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service. His new group, TreePeople, announced an ambitious goal in 1981: 1 million trees in the ground by 1984, the year the Olympics would return to Los Angeles. The project focused on leafy deciduous species, as suggested by its slogans, “Turn Over a New Leaf, Los Angeles” and “Urban Releaf.” In a complementary effort, a corporate-sponsored civic group called Los Angeles Beautiful oversaw tree plantings along high-profile streets that would serve as Olympic gateways. The group’s chairman knew about the 1931 precedent but didn’t want to follow it exactly: “One of the things they planted at that time were palm trees—the same ones that have now turned into 200-foot telephone poles.”
To see new systematic palm plantings in 1980s California, one had to go to Orange County, where the Irvine Company put the finishing touches on its edge cities and master-planned amenity enclaves. The owner of roughly 100,000 acres—the last rancho in the coastal Southland to be developed—the company became the state’s leading planter of palms and the curator of its most uniform palm landscape. Ironically, the company’s initial master plan had prohibited fronds, as seen at Newport Center, also known as Fashion Island, a high-end entertainment and shopping complex within a circular parking lot that functioned as an alternative to a downtown. The original Fashion Island (1967) played down the pizzazz. “The concept then was to give the Center an eastern look, with sycamores selected as the principal street trees,” explained the company’s vice president of urban design in 1985. “It didn’t work out well. The climate wasn’t right, the trees didn’t flourish, and many of them are now dying.” The VP spoke at the unveiling of a “Mediterranean” redesign plan for the “renaissance” of the Newport Center. Besides new retail space and an atrium court, the plan called for a triple row of eight hundred mature Mexican fan palms to line the main circle road as well as Canary Island date palms near the shops. The VP lauded palms as being affordable to maintain, distinctive, and dramatic, while in keeping with the “informal ambiance” of nearby Newport Beach. A short time later, the Irvine Company broke ground on a new civic/shopping center, the Irvine Spectrum Center. “By selecting palm trees, we’re making a statement,” said the director of the project. “We’re telling potential tenants and developers that Irvine Spectrum is a professional environment. Palm trees provide an orderly, consistent, high-tech look.” Irvine was a real estate brand, and its “consistent landscaping palette” communicated education, wealth, and quality. The company used its signature tree to create a “sense of identity” and a “hierarchy of place.”
The palmification of Irvine Ranch during the 1980s signaled a commercial trend. All over Southern California, developers returned to palms. In downtown Los Angeles, fronded plants were meant to communicate a sense of revival, a historic touch of class. In the Reagan years, real estate interests renewed their fitful effort to “clear the slums” and “take back” the city center from the homeless, the dealers, the junkies, and the hardworking immigrants who called it home. From the 1960s to the 1980s, downtown had shifted northwest to Bunker Hill, originally a residential neighborhood. With the old Victorians razed and proposals for public housing defeated, the hill became the bedrock for the city’s first skyscrapers. In the name of seismic safety, much of downtown’s affordable apartment stock was demolished and replaced with high-end commercial space. Fortress offices in the Wells Fargo Center (1983) looked down onto a dozen Canary Island date palms; luxury rooms in the Sheraton Grande (1983) overlooked one hundred Mexican fan palms. A few blocks to the east, out of sight and out of mind, thousands of unemployed persons, many of them veterans of the Vietnam War, set up semi-permanent residence in single-occupancy hotels, shelters, sidewalk tents, and cardboard boxes. The occasional raggedy palm amid the squalor of skid row mocked the California Dream.
The same real estate forces that built up Bunker Hill pushed low-density palm-lined developments to the city’s edge. In the go-go eighties, the exurban frontier reached into Ventura, Riverside, and San Diego counties. One old-timer in Ventura bemoaned the arrival of “trendoid” palms and expressed nostalgia for the former “country” look of eucalyptus. Developers plowed ahead. Shopping centers in Rancho Cucamonga, starter castles in Temecula, gated one-way streets at walled-in country club neighborhoods in Rancho Mirage: they all demanded palms, preferably mature ones that added instant verticality to design schemes. During this rush, the largest palm grower in Southern California sold out his entire mature stock. “It seemed every damn hotel in Los Angeles revamped their grounds and went art nouveau with palm trees,” he said at the time. “Architects are like sheep—every architect in Southern California is drawing palm trees now.” Queen palms sold best, followed by Mexican fan palms. To meet the demand for full-sized specimens, tree brokers went bioprospecting. They paid cash to owners of small bungalow lots in established neighborhoods who had inherited a hard-to-see 60- or 80- or 100-foot palm tree. In the Southland, it became common to see newly trimmed palms, their fronds tied up like a ponytail and their roots boxed up, piled in stacks on a flatbed. When Steele’s Motor Lodge, a venerable palm-shaded motel on Ventura Boulevard, closed its doors, it unloaded its trees to a broker; he, in turn, marketed them to Fashion Island in Newport Beach, the new Xerox Center in Santa Ana, and a savings and loan in Sherman Oaks. In San Diego, opportunists known as “scouts” or “spotters” or “locators” conducted palm cruises in older, poorer neighborhoods. After buying large specimens for low prices, they flipped them to new homeowners in the Irvine- like neighborhood near La Jolla known as the Golden Triangle. More than once, brokers uprooted rows of palms from municipal streets in San Diego County, disingenuously claiming legal permission.
The trendiness of fronds and the iconic stature of the L.A. fan palm could be measured by imitation. In 1987, shortly before the stock market crashed, the World Financial Center, a commercial real estate complex in Lower Manhattan with tenants such as Leh- man Brothers, added a final floral touch to its Winter Garden, an extravagant atrium within a luxury mall that boasted views of the Twin Towers on one side and the Hudson on the other. New York’s largest “public” indoor space after the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal, the Winter Garden contained a square array of sixteen 45-foot-tall Mexican fan palms. The project architect praised “the subtle interplay between architecture and vegetation.” His “living columns” came from Borrego Springs, California.
