Bradley: The Last Flourish of Los Angeles as One City : Mayor: His dream of shared symbols and values may have spent itself. The future is Balkanization--warring enclave politicians.

Tom Bradley was the most visible leader of a generation who sought to see Los Angeles as a whole, as one city to be approached through the universalized perspectives of civic culture. Whatever his critics might have said of him--and they said plenty--no one ever questioned that this tall and stately figure, so human in his strengths and weaknesses, had internalized, into his very physical self, Los Angeles as an all-compelling imaginative symbol and social program.

Bradley has always been laconic. After the riots in April, he became even less talkative, for he and his generation of leaders have had less and less to say. Sadly, they were facing--are facing--the breakup of what they and their predecessors assembled, the City of the Angels.

Like Marshal Josip Tito, Bradley held Los Angeles together by the force of his physical presence. The mayor must now watch Los Angeles become the Yugoslavia of U.S. cities: disestablishing itself into a murderous mosaic of warring parts. His successor will most likely be one of many warring chieftains--tribal warriors, enclave politicians, who slashed their way, temporarily, to the top.

One might easily sketch a scenario in which the people of the City of the Angels decide that the city, in fact, no longer exists, that it has become West Los Angeles, San Fernando Valley, Downtown Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, South-Central Los Angeles: Each of these places being, not districts, but civic identities that, as did the breakaway republics of Yugoslavia, demand, simultaneously, their independence and the right to slit each others throats.

Twenty years ago, Bradley came to office having felt the sting of prejudice in his youth and early career, but also having experienced an ever-expanding series of roles--police lieutenant, attorney, neighborhood activist, councilman--that were morally and psychologically reinforced by the conviction, however abused, that there was a Los Angeles out there and that it was worth fighting for.

It was roughly 1900 when the ruling oligarchy of Los Angeles first glimpsed the possibilities of a great city on the south coastal plain. The establishment of a deep-water port under the leadership of L.A.-based U.S. Sen. Stephen Mallory White was the first big step in the direction of bringing a major urban center into being. Then came the Los Angeles Aqueduct, completed in 1913. Then came further harbor development. And then, in the mid- to late-’30s, came the hydroelectricity and water of the Hoover Dam Project, an enterprise dominated by Californians on behalf of Southern California.

In the ‘20s, the oligarchy who built the aqueduct and was in the process of creating the Boulder/Hoover project began to withdraw from elective politics. The Progressive personality, after all, preferred appointive office and public works to the hurly-burly vulgarity of elective life.

Almost 20 years later, the oligarchy returned to the elective arena, joining the Folks--middle- and lower-middle-class white emigrants to the city, led by cafeteria magnate Clifford Clinton--to recall playboy Mayor Frank L. Shaw and install the solidly bourgeois Fletcher Bowron.

As they entered the ‘40s, the oligarchy and the Folks had an agenda--the completion of the city-state. Los Angeles was not a city in the sense that Boston, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco are cities--coherent in space and population, organized around a controlled cluster of civic symbols. Like greater New York after the boroughs were joined, like Philadelphia when it became co-terminus with its county, Los Angeles was an imperial city, a city-state, a dream imposed on an otherwise empty map.

And like any empire, the City of Los Angeles grew through annexing other regions and other cities. In 1913, Mayor H. H. Rose established an Annexation Commission to oversee the expansion of Los Angeles through water. Hollywood had already been annexed in 1910, followed, in 1914, by Wilmington-San Pedro. A year later came the San Fernando Valley, the Louisiana Purchase of L.A. history--200 square miles of adjacent back country transformed by irrigation into productive acreage. By 1927, Los Angeles had become, through annexation, the largest metropolitan territory under a single government in the United States.

That final phase was enamored of public works as the form and symbol of civic unity and oligarchical control. It began in the ‘40s with the construction of the freeway system, first suggested by the completion of the Arroyo Seco Parkway in December, 1940, and continued through the financing and construction of the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.

Putting aside any doubts that it might have had regarding quality of life for the many and social justice for the exploited minorities--seeing, that is, the Watts Rebellion of 1965 as an aberration, not a long-term symptom--the oligarchy continued its public-works program, in public and private sectors, through the high-rise boom of the 1980s, serviced by a multibillion-dollar rapid-transit program designed to keep the idea of Downtown L.A. alive.

Critics of this growth are quick to point out that it was, among other things, a real-estate deal of heroic proportions. People got rich in the rise of Los Angeles So what else is new? The creation of a city-state is not a Sunday School.

More credibly, critics point to the fact that many whose labor went into the creation of Los Angeles--Mexican-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Afro-Americans--were not extended the benefits of this prosperity. Nor were they treated with the dignity each human being deserves. Los Angeles was the city that allowed Mexican and black people to swim in its public swimming pools only on designated days, then drained the pools the day after.

Bradley, African-American, came up through this culture and experienced its harshness. Yet he also absorbed its vision of Los Angeles as one place, one city, one idea. It is not to dismiss or, in any way, to devalue the prejudice and discrimination experienced by the mayor in his youth and adult life to say that at the same time, amid it all, Bradley became part--nay, the leader!--of the Los Angeles oligarchy in its last phase of civic control.

The oligarchy of which Bradley became the living civic symbol upon his election as mayor in 1973 finished with a flourish. Epic poems are frequently written in the final phases of the cultures they celebrate. A candle will flare brilliantly just before it guts. There was the Olympics of 1984, when for a brief few weeks, Los Angeles seemed whole again. And there were the long dialogues of the Bradley’s Los Angeles 2000 Committee, which searched and searched for common ground in a landscape already revealing its Balkan future.

The contenders to replace Bradley are strong among their own kind but knowing or caring for little else. They are not politicians representing, as Bradley did, the dream, perhaps the daydream, of Los Angeles as one place, a dream that might have been irretrievably lost as far back as the 1970s. What the candidates may or may not do, however, is ask a simple yet profound question. Has the city-state of Los Angeles ceased to exist? Has the dream of one civic entity with shared symbols and values spent itself?

Bradley’s announcement on Thursday that he will not seek reelection underscores, on a note of deep disappointment on his part, the passing of what was once an all-compelling identity and idea--the City of Angels.