Pit City

Trading Cards
2018

Created to accompany our Pit City bike ride, these cards celebrated the most notable landscape feature of inland suburb Irwindale: its pits.

The material mass of the city—the roads, the bridges, the buildings—must come from somewhere. For Los Angeles, that somewhere has often been Irwindale. Over millions of years, the San Gabriel Mountains and their largest river deposited a massive pile of rocks and gravel ideally suited for construction underneath the inland city. And so, as Los Angeles has risen upward and outward, Irwindale has sunk downward.

In the 1950s, mining companies worked with the small community of local residents to incorporate the City of Irwindale. By that time, the majority of the land in “Pit City” was already well below street level. Since then, the City’s small population of only about 350 households has been dependent on the tax revenue generated by the pits. The pits, however, are limited. The mining companies are only permitted to dig down 200 feet, around which depth they encounter groundwater. Many of Irwindale’s pits have been exhausted for decades. Since the 1980s, Irwindale’s policy has been to find ways to reclaim the pits for tax-revenue-generating “urban land uses.” Former pits have become a race track, an industrial park, and a landfill. One land use that is not up for consideration is new residences.

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Concept, text, photography, and design by SpAN
Printed by GotPrint, Burbank, CA