Arcades Limited: The Southland and Spatial Evaders

My presentation, if anything, is a work in progress and at some level a proposition for further investigation. The core mapping and definitional elements are malleable and open to suggestion. Yet the core understanding and spatial relations between class, ethnicity, and access to gaming spaces appear, for the moment, to be strongly suggestive. The principal ideas were inspired by a variety of works, including Abigail Norris’ “Mapping Memphis” that examined the spatial connections of a black owned mortuary and the surrounding community in Memphis, Tennessee. Similar digital history projects map communities that are under-represented and help visualize economic and social connections and how historical spaces are often problematized by conscious and unconscious bias and racism. At its core, the project looks to investigate the relationship between game spaces and ethnic neighborhoods, particularly in black communities in Los Angeles County.  I’m primarily concerned with the differentiated game and recreational spaces such as arcades, access to those game spaces, and their creation, lack of creation, or differential creation in relation to historical economic racism throughout Los Angeles. And while similar recreative spatial divides may have played out in other metropolitan areas throughout the nation, it is the Los Angeles area that, as I will argue, felt a specific impact rooted in recreational racism.   Critical questions that I would like to address with more research, but will only be able to touch on here include --Where did communities of color and economically depressed youths go to play games? How and what attention did they attract by the local and larger community? What types of games did they play and were they differentiated from the more suburban arcades? What types of spaces were these games placed in and how did they reflect the local community and its separation from economic investment? Ultimately, this project will map the placement, access, and community discourse around video game arcades and smaller spaces such as liquor stores, fast food restaurants, and recreation spaces that also housed games.

The economic and racial basis throughout the Los Angeles area created a variety of spatial differences that varied according to accessibility to jobs, transportation, education, and recreation. Accessibility to a variety of recreational spaces within Los Angeles County demonstrate a spatial and racial divide that is not readily apparent to those outside the margins of segregated neighborhoods. The differentiated game and recreational spaces such as arcades was heavily impacted and deterministically associated to the historic economic racism that has dominated Los Angeles since its inception and further marginalized groups through housing and economic barriers in the later half of the twentieth century. To understand the differentiated game spaces and play areas that existed and came to exist in Los Angeles, it is necessary to outline the relationship of segregation to leisure space in Southern California. As Lawrence Carver reveals in his book The Frontier of Leisure, recreational spaces in Southern California foreshadowed and helped mold American attitudes towards leisure in the in the 20th century: “underlying issues of race and class, power and privilege, connected leisure in these different places” (Culver, 53). Video games and arcades may fall outside the more lavish leisure spaces such as Palm Springs that are part of Culver’s argument, yet the prohibition and segregation of other leisure spaces such as pools, beaches, and parks meant that there was a dearth of recreational facilities and land available for the segregated communities in the larger Los Angeles area.

Southern California had been imagined as a white leisure space for most of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; a place where white Americans could enjoy a healthy climate that afforded opportunities and space to grow and own your own home. Although Los Angeles was never purely a white space, its imagination as one, facilitated through restrictive policies that isolated communities of color and Asian descent, created distinctive spatial access and use (Culver, 81). Recreational spaces required not only legislation that didn’t specifically discriminate, but also land (space) and funding for acquisition and maintenance. As Culver states, “The funding – or mor accurately the lack of funding – for recreational spaces and amenities in nonwhite areas of the city and county functioned as a pernicious form of fiscal discrimination” (Culver, 76).  A 1961 race “riot’ (as it was dubbed in the Los Angeles Times) in Griffith Park, a large, hilly natural space surrounded by urban / suburban Los Angeles, exemplifies the tension over recreative space that often had restricted access. Griffith Park is also situated outside of older, segregated neighborhoods. The event took place during Memorial Day weekend near the merry-go-round when a 17-year African American was accused of boarding without paying. The event quickly escalated with 75 police called in to “quell” the tension, while several of those involved could be heard stating out loud that “This is not Alabama” (L.A. Times, May 31, 1961).  The situation was also conflated, without a bit of irony, by Los Angeles Police chief Parker as a ‘racial situation’ that was “’stimulated in part by the actions of southern ‘Freedom Riders’’” (L.A. Times, June 1, 1961 pg. B1 2 More Suspects Jailed in Riot at Griffith Park). While Griffith Park was not a specifically segregated space, the events of that day demonstrate racial tension of who belonged and who was considered a danger to the perceived safety of the park. These contested spaces were primarily outside and typically recreative, but they demonstrate the types of spaces and connection to recreation that was by and large explicitly segregated or associated with and protected by the white majority in Los Angeles.

The diversity of Los Angeles County is further complicated by its large population and geographic size, encompassing over 4,000 square miles and 88 cities. The size of the county and the maze of neighborhoods rooted in segregated policies make mapping game spaces, on the one hand, simple, as the larger and more obvious arcade spaces existed outside most middle-class idealized spaces. One reason for this appears to be the available land for malls, mini-golfing, and larger entertainment centers. A second reason is related to the movement of recreative spaces to newer or whiter suburbs. And yet, on the other hand, the mapping is also incomprehensibly difficult, as the game / play spaces were more varied or deeply buried in non-normative and segregated neighborhoods. As these play / game spaces were mapped, it become readily apparent that my own markers of game space were inadequate, but also that identifying atypical spaces (from my perspective) was essential in mapping and understanding the association between race and recreational play spaces. As Greg Hise has written, “social space affects social relations; zoning regulations confer both monetary and symbolic value on land; the social and spatial are intertwined.” (Hise, 549). This topography of place intersected with a topography of race that helped configure the make-up and differentiation between the ‘inner-city’ and the growing suburban hubris of Southern California (Hise, 550). Game spaces, then, differed markedly in terms of access, venue, and acceptability.

The topography of place was clearly rooted in “racialized fantasies” that idealized suburban space as homogeneously white with the corresponding ‘safeness’ that implied to white sensibilities (Avila, ch2 Vanilla Suburbs, et al). As Josh Sides notes in L.A. City Limits, the rigid segregation that existed in the Southland and specifically in Los Angeles was a result of many factors including restrictive covenants, redlining, economic racism, and a political structure that limited the ability of non-whites to move beyond or within certain spaces.  According to the U.S. Census, by 1970 “low-income area residents constituted 20 percent of the city’s population” and African Americans made up 55 percent of that population (Census, 1970 low-income report). Additionally, “30% of the residents of the low-income area were below poverty level as compared with only 9 percent of those living elsewhere in the city (census). Eric Avila notes that in 1970 there were fifty-eight cities in Los Angeles with “populations less than 1 percent black, containing 33 percent of the regional population” (Avila, 20). The low-income neighborhoods, which were primarily non-white, overlap almost directly with the Census maps of 1980 that show a preponderance of African Americans living in the city and county core. The core represents a highly separated racial space that lacked access to recreative spaces and additional land to build recreational spaces.

The spatial disparity that existed between the newer, whiter neighborhoods and older ethnically mixed neighborhoods can be highlighted in the availability of open and investment ready property (stats).  The more urban and segregated spaces left behind in a wave of white flight to new suburban neighborhoods after World War II reflected racial and economic fears, were fundamentally different spaces. As the city moved to the suburbs so did the recreative institutions including “ballparks, amusement parks, and other cultural institutions” (Avila, 2). When recreative or game venues did appear, they tended to be on the edges of the city core at best. Legal and extra-legal practices helped shape the corresponding reality that marked older neighborhoods with older facilities (and housing), little excess land, and marginal outside investment (cite). Where new arcades in newer developments, often housed in mini-golf or multi-entertainment complexes (FECs), afforded themselves to a more benign sensibility, the lack of investment and space meant that older, more segregated communities often found their arcade games in smaller venues. While arcades and arcade game spaces of all kinds were envisioned as inviting delinquent behavior and gateways to local crime, access meant some communities were still afforded a comfortable leisure space, this is especially relevant when viewed through the lens of the development of family entertainment centers such as Chuck E. Cheese establishments in the early 1980s. …situates the separation of these communities from play spaces that could offer leisure of another kind.

These segregated spaces were also affected by a decaying infrastructure and economy brought on, in part, by deindustrialization in the post-World War II era when jobs, transportation, and leisure spaces were moving to the new suburbia.  As Josh Sides writes, “undoubtedly, the most salient feature of the economy in the 1970s was corporate disinvestment in the large-scale production capacity of the nation.” (Sides, 180). Not only were the various neighborhoods within central Los Angeles segregated, they were also the communities most heavily impacted by job loss.  A list of plant closures from the early 1970s to early 1980s is a case in point -- Chrysler (Commerce, 1971); B.F. Goodrich (commerce, 1975; Uniroyal (commerce, 1978); U.S. Steel (commerce, 1979); Norris Industries (south gate, 1979); ford motors (Pico Rivera, 1980); firestone (south gate, 1980); goodyear (south central, 1980); Bethlehem Steel (Vernon, 1982); General Motors (south gate, 1982) (Sides, 181) – Within a four-year period, from 1978 to 1982, approximately seventy thousand jobs were lost within this segregated economic zone (Sides, 181). The movement of jobs to outlying suburban areas highlights the lack of employment opportunities that asymmetrically impacted older central neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were further affected by increasing highway development from the 1950s to 1970s that also displaced tens of thousands of people and removed land from community development. Surrounding communities that were mostly working-class white in the 1940s and 1950s shifted to ethnically mixed neighborhood by the 1970s as white flight increased with the growth of suburbia and the concomitant racialized policies. These transitional areas saw continued economic decline and investment that further highlighted the lack of literal and figurative space to play, including indoor spaces (arcades) or outdoor spaces (parks, or mini-golf with arcades).

Post war demographic and economic shifts continued the historic segregation of land use and space that ultimately had an impact on the availability and accessibility of game and play spaces in Los Angeles County. The early mapping data that suggests a fairly direct correlation between white and non-white communities’ access to video game arcades and associated ‘family entertainment centers’ -- (as differentiated from spaces with game. At this point it will be helpful to explain the categorization that I have employed to visualize qualitatively different types of spaces with games. –--Arcades were typically defined via local code throughout Los Angeles County as spaces with either 4 or 5 games and it was often easier for many locations to have 3 or 4 games to avoid the regulatory paperwork and hearings to obtain an arcade license (cite). Nominally, route operators defined three spaces (Arcades, FECs, and ‘street’). Those definitions are useful, but don’t contain the necessary affectation that various games spaces might provide a player. For purposes of this paper, larger arcades (Primary game spaces) and family entertainment centers (arcade spaces) include sites such as mini-golf venues and Chuck E. Cheese (FEC). Secondary game spaces (spaces with games) that may or may not qualify locally as an arcade but were housed within larger businesses, such as bowling alleys, skating rinks, pizza parlors. These secondary games spaces afforded other entertainment while attracting individuals to play arcade games. The third group, I refer to as gamed spaces and route operators referred to as ‘street,’ were housed in liquor or convenience stores, laundromats, restaurants, etc. Due to the volume of gaming spaces within the County, my initial research has focused on arcade spaces and spaces with, yet the ubiquity and relevance of gamed spaces, spaces not defined as arcades but still housing 1 to or 4 games can be demonstrated with the example of specific game operator. George Typaldos owned 600 games that were variously situated in 200 spaces / venues. Mr. Typaldos appears to be operating [exclusively or primarily?] in the city of Gardena (north of Torrance, east of hawthorn, west of Compton, south of Inglewood near 100 freeway) where city code defined an arcade as a site with 4 or more game machines. While some of these games may have been distributed in [any] arcade that existed in Gardena, it is much more likely that these games were distributed throughout the city and surrounding area in smaller game spaces. (L.A. Times Dec 5, 1981 City May Open Its Own Arcade). In this instance we can see that games proliferated as a sub space within a larger venue (liquor stores, pizza parlors, laundromats, etc). Games spaces, as I have defined them [ liminal spaces housed in small business such as convenience stores that contained 1-4 games] housed thousands upon thousands of games in Los Angeles County. Mapping these spaces is extraordinarily difficult; however, what we can note from the mapping of arcade spaces (arcades, FECs) and secondary games spaces or spaces with games (bowling, skating, mini-golf) is that the majority of spaces with games in ethnically diverse or segregated neighborhoods existed primarily in gamed spaces – convenience and liquor stores, etc.

I have yet to determine the specific number of ‘official arcades’ (as defined by city ordinance or other definition) during the period from 1977-1983 and there is a large divergence between how the varied cities within Los Angeles County regulated games and arcades (telling note that they were often included in regulations regarding dance halls, sex stores, etc.). What can be noted is an apparent division between communities of wealth and an idealized sense of a suburbia that included specific R1 zoning and those communities that historically lacked physical room and access to development funds and the corresponding discussion, placement, and types of games spaces available. Some cities / areas had as few as zero arcades (San Marino – a wealthy suburban city located south of Pasadena), some such as Burbank had eight by early 1982. Larger arcade spaces, such as The Castle are easier to identify as are arcades within Malls and mini-golf centers, but it is the proliferation of small arcade-like spaces, spaces that grew in number throughout many communities, that are more difficult to map. Initial data make it clear that arcades, and especially large arcades (20+ Machines) were located outside or on the periphery of the most economically depressed and racially separated communities. The reality of differentiated game spaces speaks to the historically racialized topography of Los Angeles County that shaped where and how people lived, worked, and played.