Hanoch Bartov

One of Israel’s foremost writers and journalists, Hanoch Bartov spent two years in the United States working as a correspondent for the newspaper Lamerchav. As a newcomer to Los Angeles in the early 1960s, he was both fascinated and appalled by Americans’ love affair with the automobile.

Our immediate decision to buy a car sprang from healthy instincts. Only later did I learn from bitter experience that in California, death was preferable to living without one. Neither the views from the plane nor the weird excursion that first evening hinted at what I would go through that first week.

Very simple — the nearest supermarket was about half a kilometer south of our apartment, the regional primary school two kilometers east, and my son’s kindergarten even farther away. A trip to the post office — an undertaking, to the bank — an ordeal, to work — an impossibility. …

There are no tramways. No one thought of a subway. Railroads — not now and not in the future. Why? Because everyone has a car. A man invited me to his house, saying, “We are neighbors, within ten minutes of each other.” After walking for an hour and a half I realized what he meant — “ten minute drive within the speed limit.” Simply put, he never thought I might interpret his remark to refer to the walking distance. The moment a baby sees the light of day in Los Angeles, a car is registered in his name in Detroit. …

At first perhaps people relished the freedom and independence a car provided. You get in, sit down, and grab the steering wheel, your mobility exceeding that of any other generation. No wonder people refuse to live downtown, where they can hear their neighbors, smell their cooking, and suffer frayed nerves as trains pass by bedroom windows. Instead, they get a piece of the desert, far from town, at half price, drag a water hose, grow grass, flowers, and trees, and build their dream house.

The result? A widely scattered city, its houses far apart, its streets stretched in all directions. Olympic Boulevard from west to east, forty kilometers. Sepulveda Boulevard, from Long Beach in the south to the edge of the desert, forty kilometers. Altogether covering 1,200 square kilometers. As of now.

Source: “Measures of Affluence” by Hanoch Bartov (1963) in Chapter 16 from The Outer World, edited by Oscar Handlin and Lilian Handlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). © 1997. Reprinted by permission of Oscar and Lillian Handlin.