Walls from Berlin to Bradbury
Barkin, Kenneth
The decision to dismantle the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, offers us the opportunity to reflect on walls in the past and their surprising renaissance in contemporary California. The...
...1840) wanted the poor to be settled and, if possible, transformed into taxpayers...
...Justi's view was widely shared by the artisans, craftsmen, and shopkeepers who made up much of the population of towns...
...Those residing in such developments for a year complain about defective gates and unstaffed barriers...
...In 1981, Indian Wells, the most affluent town per capita in California and home to Gerald Ford and Spiro Agnew, took steps to build a wall around its 1,400 inhabitants...
...The issue, however, had received extensive coverage in California, and, with increasing crime in the eighties, the idea of "gated communities" began to intrigue real estate developers...
...The Eldorado Country Club had built many homes within gates along its golf course and feared residents would revolt at having to go through two barriers to reach their front doors...
...Oddly, we do this just as Eastern Europe is adopting this traditional liberal goal...
...New developments with new walls did not violate any state laws...
...Despite these findings, more and more Californians are choosing to live in "gated communities...
...They feel protected from criminals, beggars, and the homeless...
...In practice, we are rejecting the nineteenth-century liberal heritage of freedom of movement for all citizens...
...Most European towns were encircled by walls from the early Middle Ages until the quite recent past...
...police want to permanently barricade public streets in a twelve square block area in the San Fernando Valley and erect a guard station to admit only residents and their guests...
...police commander Chet Spencer said, "Why should [solid citizens] be subjected to the danger and shootings that go along with drug activity...
...Maintaining that it would reduce crime, city councillors sought a barrier that would be staffed twenty-four hours a day by security guards, who would control those entering and leaving Indian Wells...
...Today we would call it denial...
...The most famous of all is probably the Great Wall of China...
...Peasants, who might be romanticized by poets, were termed "shit-hens" by the townsmen because of the barnyard excrement on their shoes, which aroused disgust on market days when they were allowed inside the walls...
...Lest easterners think this is a typically mad California phenomenon, it should be noted that residents of the Seagate area of Brooklyn recently voted to enclose their neighborhood to keep out pedestrians from surrounding poor areas...
...In 1760 a German jurist, Johann Justi, wrote, "Without them [walls] no place can be called a town, however large and handsomely built it is...
...One may well ask what this all means...
...Freedom of movement was enshrined in the German constitution of 1867, and even the Nazis were slow to change this heritage of Imperial Germany...
...The walls had to go...
...Even the police are getting into the act...
...After three years of litigation, California Superior Court Judge Fred Metheny ruled on technical grounds against the wall in January 1984...
...When asked why they buy houses within the walls, Californians respond as did Biedermeier Germans a century and a half ago...
...The modern state (c...
...Liberals sought full citizenship for all male adults and complete freedom of movement...
...Whereas the latter sell on average sixty days after being put on the market, thirty days is the norm for the former...
...With the rise of liberalism in the nineteenth century and centralized state bureaucracies, a persistent attack was launched on the walls and their defenders...
...The revolutionaries in 1848 demanded and achieved an end to restrictions on movement...
...Walls retained their function in Central Europe well into the nineteenth century and became the object of serious political discord between centralizing civil servants of the larger states, such as Prussia, and the local town notables...
...q WINTER • 1991 • 29...
...The urban middle class might close its eyes to the social problems beyond the walls and pretend they did not exist...
...two clearly would be disruptive and depress real estate values...
...The Berlin Wall, erected in 1961, was designed to keep the population from fleeing a Stalinist-type dictatorship...
...Ignoring the Newport and Irvine crime studies, L.A...
...Chinese emperors also viewed the wall as a barrier preventing criminals and deserters from fleeing the domain of Chinese law...
...Your typical German townspeople did not concern themselves with what they could not see...
...Every householder was expected to pay $50 a month for the increased security...
...Vienna's city walls were not taken down until the 1860s, when they were replaced by the broad Ringstrasse, which so impressed the young Hitler...
...The issues dividing the two camps illuminate the functions that walls allegedly fulfilled...
...Ironically, police in Newport and Irvine have found that the crime rate is not significantly different within the walls...
...The answer, I think, is affirmative...
...Are we like the Celts of Ireland, who built round towers for security against the Vikings, or the solid German burghers, who did not want Gypsies, Jews, and "shit-hens" from invading their respectable Chris28 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad tian community...
...Television monitors would add a further dimension of control that Chinese emperors and Biedermeier Germans lacked...
...Curiously, the contrasting visions of the role of walls in civil society that divided Biedermeier Germans have reemerged in California, the trendsetting state whose innovations often give us an indication of where the rest of America is headed...
...Realtors and developers have found that demand for houses within the walls is three times greater than for conventional houses...
...In 1980 there were no walled communities in Los Angeles's sprawling San Fernando Valley...
...For these solid, respectable citizens, the walls were the primary barrier preventing them from being inundated by the shiftless vagabonds who, in their imagination, resided beyond the walls...
...For a town had to be constituted so "that nothing can get in or out without police oversight...
...Civil servants had no such luxury...
...They may, indeed, be the model for America on the eve of the twenty-first century...
...by the emperor Shi Huang to protect Chinese farmers from marauding nomads of the Asian steppe...
...Liberal ministers could not escape dealing with the poor, the aged, and other marginal groups, whether they were within or without the walls...
...Although threequarters of the residents in the city already lived in what Californians call a "gated community," the city council wanted all of Indian Wells enclosed...
...In a sense it was a return to the controlled WINTER • 1991 • 27 Reports from Abroad pre-1848 society...
...Two hundred fifty thousand Jews emigrated legally between 1933 and 1939...
...One barrier meant security...
...Today there are over one hundred, and the number is rising rapidly...
...For years gangs in Los Angeles have established turf boundaries that delineate areas under their control...
...Burglary and robbery are as common outside the walls as within...
...The townsmen fought a successful rearguard action in the 1820s and 1830s to prevent people of "bad reputation" (a term they deliberately refused to define) from penetrating their sanctuaries...
...The latter objected to the ostensibly elitist character of the proposal...
...Mack Walker, who studied the mentalite of the urban citizens, tells us that their way of avoiding conflict was to maintain separate, impenetrable worlds: the walls were the instruments to control who could enter the town and thus protected the "virtuous" from the "sinful" aliens...
...This sharp departure from traditional methods of law enforcement is being watched by police chiefs across the country...
...They say there is a greater sense of community behind the walls, and they do not mind paying for street maintenance and lighting...
...A good deal of crime is intrafamilial, for which the walls are irrelevant...
...Signal towers were constructed and troops garrisoned along the wall to form an impenetrable boundary between China and the barbarians of the outside world...
...On the face of it the decision seemed a victory for both cosmopolitan citizenship and property values...
...Ironically, the wall was abandoned for the same reason that it was built—that is, to keep the population from fleeing, now through Hungary...
...The coming of the railroad age also sounded the death knell of the enclosed town and city...
...A city councilman said the comment cast aspersions against "the Indian Wells way of life," which was described as "private...
...At the time three other affluent towns—Rolling Hills, Hidden Hills, and Bradbury—were entirely enclosed...
...It was begun in 221 B.C.E...
...Blacks and Hispanics claim this innovation is designed to keep them out—a form of apartheid...
...Specifically, the walls protected them from people of "bad reputation," which one artisan described as "beggars, tinkers, sharpeners, players, musicians, peddlers and Jews...
...The Los Angeles Times recently reported, "In a radical proposal to curtail drive-by drug sales, L.A...
...Other terms for outsiders were immoral, incompetent, lazy, promiscuous, irresponsible, and homeless...
...Perhaps it is the folk model that the more affluent are now seeking to emulate...
...Police recently claimed it is more difficult to apprehend criminals because they have trouble getting inside the walls when the barriers are unattended...
...Many crimes are perpetrated by construction workers, resident teenagers, and those who slip over the walls...
...The wall was estimated to cost $387,000, and, of course, police at the four gates of entry would have greatly added to the city's budget...
...Supporters of the wall claimed he had been prejudicial and had made gratuitous remarks about walls creating a prisonlike atmosphere...
...What has all of this to do with jet-setting California...
...We feel increasingly threatened by members of our own society, and the solution is to create separate spheres with as little contact as possible between the self-proclaimed people of virtue and the others—our contemporary version of the barbarian hordes of the Asiatic steppe...
...A lawsuit was subsequently filed by a country club and some town liberals to prevent the wall from being built...
...Police attribute this to residents' leaving their doors and windows unlocked because of a false sense of security...
...Although reaction set in after the revolution's defeat, it proved impossible to resurrect the walls...
Vol. 38 • January 1991 • No. 1
