L.A.'s 'Sunken City' May Reopen to the Public

In her 2000 work on Los Angeles, the UCLA architecture theorist Dana Cuff gives La La Land a new nickname: “Lurch City.” Modern cities—and particularly Los Angeles, she argues—are the products of “convulsions,” series of disruptions in which old visions of the metropolis suddenly lurch to make way for new ones. This seems particularly true in L.A., which bloomed quickly (its population grew 200-fold between 1870 and 1970) and seems always on the cusp of natural disaster—fire, earthquake, flood and now, drought.

In late 1920s, the ground below a six-acre tract of bungalows in the Los Angeles community of San Pedro began to (somewhat slowly) lurch into the sea. By 1941, authorities had fenced off the area and declared it inaccessible to visitors. Only two houses ended up sliding into the ocean, but the small neighborhood’s buckled roads and broken pipes remain.