Los Angeles

/laws an"jeuh leuhs, -leez', los/ or, often, /laws ang"geuh leuhs, -leez', los/

a seaport in SW California. 2,966,763; with suburbs 6,997,000; 452 sq. mi. (1170 sq. km).

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City (pop., 2000: 3,694,820), southern California, U.S. The second largest city in the U.S., it is situated between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

Bisected by the Santa Monica Mountains, which separate the neighbourhoods of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Pacific Palisades from the San Fernando Valley, it is near the San Andreas Fault, and earthquakes are frequent. It began in 1771 as a Spanish mission; the city was established as El Pueblo de la Reyna de los Angeles (the Town of the Queen of the Angels) in 1781. Taken by U.S. forces in the Mexican War, it prospered in the wake of the 1849 gold rush. Incorporated in 1850, the city grew rapidly after the arrival of the railroads in 1876 and 1885. In 1913 an aqueduct was built to supply it with water from the slopes of the Sierra Nevada. It was struck by a major earthquake in 1994. Sites of interest include early Spanish missions, the Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Educational institutions include the University of Southern California, Occidental College, and the University of California at Los Angeles.

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▪ California, United States

Introduction

 city, seat of Los Angeles county, southern California, U.S. It is the second most populous city and metropolitan area (after New York City) in the United States. The city sprawls across a broad coastal plain situated between mountains and the Pacific Ocean; the much larger Los Angeles county, which encompasses the city, contains some 90 other incorporated cities, including Beverly Hills, Pasadena, and Long Beach. The county also encompasses two of the Channel Islands, Santa Catalina (Santa Catalina Island) and San Clemente; Mount San Antonio, familiarly known as Mount Baldy or Old Baldy, 10,046 feet (3,062 metres) high; more than 900 square miles (2,330 square km) of desert; and 75 miles (120 km) of seacoast.

      Since the city and the county are interwoven geographically, culturally, and economically, any consideration of Los Angeles must, to some degree, involve both entities. Population density around the metropolitan area varies greatly—as low as one person per square mile in mountainous areas and as high as 50,000 per square mile near downtown Los Angeles. Area city, 466 square miles (1,207 square km); county, 4,070 square miles (10,540 square km). Pop. (2000) city, 3,694,820; Los Angeles–Long Beach–Santa Ana MSA, 12,365,627; (2005 est.) city, 3,844,829; Los Angeles–Long Beach–Santa Ana MSA, 12,923,547.

Character of the city

      Los Angeles, the heart of southern California, became a world-class city very recently. At the start of the 20th century it was considered merely “a large village.” This ascendancy is all the more remarkable considering that the city originally lacked some of the essential building blocks associated with cityhood, such as a natural harbour. Yet it overcame natural deficiencies and established itself as an important centre of commerce, agriculture, tourism, and industry. For more than a century it has been indelibly associated with a benign climate, extensive leisure, and outdoor recreation, as well as the special aura of celebrity associated with Hollywood. The lifestyle of Los Angeles residents (who are called Angelenos) relies on the automobile, idealizes the single-family dwelling, and favours informality. With notable exceptions, the skyline is primarily horizontal rather than vertical. Los Angeles is a place of extraordinary ethnic and racial diversity, owing largely to immigration, and, like other world cities, it reflects a growing gap between rich and poor.

      Los Angeles has endured the barbs of many detractors. Critics refer to it either as a laid-back “la-la land” or, conversely, as a place reeling from earthquakes, fire, smog, gang warfare, and riots. The city's defenders admire its mild climate and geographic variety. They claim that its major social problems are similar to those of all big cities and are perhaps even less severe there than elsewhere. In fact, some observers regard it as the most modern and quintessential American city.

Landscape

City site

 Los Angeles county is a vast and varied geographic entity. It includes a group of inland valleys, a coastal plain separated by low mountains that are interspersed with steep passes, an arc of still higher mountains, and a long seacoast. Nearly half of the county is taken up by mountain chains—most of them running east-west—that have a dynamic history of earthquakes, firestorms, and mud slides. To the north and northeast are the massive and sprawling San Gabriel (San Gabriel Mountains) and San Bernardino (San Bernardino Mountains) mountains. Stretching in front of them—and more or less in parallel lines from west to east—are the Santa Monica Mountains, Puente Hills, Repetto Hills, and San Jose Hills. These chains delineate the San Fernando (San Fernando Valley), San Gabriel, and San Bernardino valleys. Farther south—running roughly between Orange and Riverside counties—are the Santa Ana Mountains. A magnificent natural feature of Los Angeles county is the coastline's distinctive beaches, which attract millions of sun worshippers annually.

      Three waterways cross the county: the westward-flowing Santa Clara River in the north; the Los Angeles River in the south, extending from the San Fernando Valley east and south to the Pacific Ocean; and the San Gabriel River, which rises from the San Gabriel Mountains in the north and flows south to the ocean. Huge floods have periodically inundated large parts of Los Angeles, and much human effort has gone into confining the waterways within concrete channels. In historic times (1825) a deluge permanently shifted the direction of the Los Angeles River channel from its westward outflow into Santa Monica Bay to a south-flowing outlet emptying into San Pedro Bay. In the winter of 1861–62, a flood left the western part of the Los Angeles basin looking like a chain of lakes dotted with islands. The San Gabriel River also overflowed its banks and at one point merged with the Los Angeles River via a new channel called the Rio Hondo.

      The huge, sprawling, and tortuously shaped city of Los Angeles occupies a sizable portion of the southern part of the county. It too has a varied topography, climbing from sea level at the beach community of Venice to Mount Lukens, which rises above 5,100 feet (1,550 metres). The city started in 1781 as a tiny village of 28 square miles (73 square km) but expanded greatly through a series of annexations when it first established an ironclad legal monopoly over the Los Angeles River watershed and then brought in a new water supply from the Owens River (which rises from the Sierra Nevada, 230 miles [370 km] northeast of the city). To share in this scarce water resource—and to receive much-needed police and fire protection—neighbouring communities elected to join the city. The annexations of Wilmington and San Pedro and a connecting narrow “shoestring” of land (1909–10) resulted when Los Angeles created a harbour and linked it to the city proper. By 1917 Los Angeles had tripled in size by adding the entire San Fernando Valley and the district of Palms. Between 1922 and 1928, 34 unincorporated areas and five cities merged with Los Angeles. As it grew, Los Angeles encircled five independent cities—Beverly Hills, Culver City, West Hollywood, Universal City, and San Fernando.

      Original city districts and annexed communities—Boyle Heights, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Hollywood, San Pedro, Encino, and Watts, for example—still retain their community names and identities. On the other hand, the city never recognized neighbourhoods as such, so these smaller units have only vague and informal boundaries.

Climate

      The Los Angeles climate is typically classified as semiarid or Mediterranean. It results from a harmonious interplay of at least three natural conditions: the region's latitude is far enough south to dissipate the most severe North Pacific winter storms, a cooling layer of marine air moderates the summer sun, and the tall mountain ranges shield the region from potentially intense blasts of desert heat and cold. However, the warm climate and the bowl-like alignment of the ranges also provide the ideal conditions for another well-known Los Angeles phenomenon: photochemical smog, which has remained a part of the landscape since the 1940s. Tough antipollution laws enacted by state and local authorities have helped reduce the motor-vehicle emissions contributing to smog formation, but air quality has continued to be a serious issue in Los Angeles, as well as in many other cities in the state.

      Of the region's two seasons, one is a dry and moderately warm spell lasting roughly from April to November; the second is a wet, moderately cool, but rarely frigid period extending from November to April. The city's mean temperature is about 64 °F (18 °C).

      Temperatures can differ widely depending on location. The San Fernando Valley can be 10 °F (5.5 °C) warmer than Santa Monica in the summer and 10 °F cooler in the winter. Fog, wind speed, and elevation also determine temperature. Beach areas tend to be 10 to 15 °F (5.5 to 8 °C) cooler than downtown Los Angeles. The hottest month, August, averages 85 °F (29 °C) downtown and 68 °F (20 °C) at the ocean, only 15 miles (24 km) away. Areas near the mountains in the San Gabriel Valley can reach 100 °F (38 °C) during the day and fall to the low 40s or 50s F (low to upper 20s C) at night. The coldest month overall is January, when icy roads can close the passes. Temperatures on the plains, however, rarely drop below 40 °F (4 °C).

      The annual precipitation in Los Angeles averages about 15 inches (380 mm). The central Pacific weather pattern known as El Niño has sometimes (but not always) produced more than twice the average precipitation in a given rainy season. Prolonged rains or shorter intense downpours can trigger mud slides (more properly debris slides), especially after fires have stripped hillsides of their vegetation.

      The many days of sun and comparative lack of rain add to a sense of physical well-being. Blasts of Santa Ana winds, usually hot and dry, streak through the mountain passes in the fall and winter. Mystery writer Raymond Chandler (Chandler, Raymond) wrote that during these “red winds,” “Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks.”

Natural environment

 Despite the great allure of the region's natural environment, its other, less desirable elements—prolonged droughts, torrential rains, pounding surf, mud slides, wind-fanned fires, and especially earthquakes (earthquake)—pose serious challenges to human occupation. Earthquakes have been observed throughout the area's recorded history. Juan Crespi, a Franciscan friar and colleague of missionary Junípero Serra (Serra, Junípero, Blessed)'s, chronicled the expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá (Portolá, Gaspar de) in 1769 and noted that a temblor lasting “as long as half an Ave Maria” toppled a soldier from his horse as they crossed the Santa Ana River. The major fault line slicing through the area is that of the San Andreas Fault, located at its closest point just 33 miles (53 km) from downtown Los Angeles. The greatest temblors have been those centred in Long Beach in 1933 (magnitude 6.4), Sylmar in 1971 (6.6), and Northridge in 1994 (6.7). The huge Pacific Plate (containing the portion of California west of the fault) is grinding northwestward past the North American landmass at a rate of about 2 inches (5 cm) per year; in theory, at least, in tens of millions of years southern California and Los Angeles will slide past San Francisco.

      Ranching, farming, and urbanization have destroyed much of the area's original flora and fauna, yet native trees such as oaks, maples, sycamores, and willows are still abundant. The California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) blooms profusely in the spring near Lancaster, some 80 miles (130 km) north of the city, and the native chaparral blankets the mountains. Meanwhile, hundreds of exotic flowers, shrubs, and trees have been introduced. Because nearly every kind of plant can grow in the area, the flora is exceptionally varied. Most of the familiar palm trees are exotics, as are the eucalyptus and pepper trees. Animal species that were common in the 1850s, such as the grizzly and black bears and pronghorn antelope, are long gone, but deer, raccoons, and coyotes still roam in some areas. Even a few nocturnal mountain lions, a protected species, live in the hilly parts of Beverly Hills, Tarzana, and Chatsworth. The endangered El Segundo blue butterfly (Euphilotes battoides allyni) is native to the county.

City layout

      The city of Los Angeles is composed of a series of widely dispersed settlements loosely connected to downtown. It certainly does not conform to the popular Chicago school of urban theory of the 1920s and later, which held that a downtown was the main focus of community life, with its influence unfolding in a series of concentric circles out into the hinterlands.

      Apart from those who work there, the vast majority of Angelenos have little connection with downtown in their daily lives and are content to work, shop, and pursue recreation in the suburbs that stretch out in all directions. Among the outlying districts that lie within the city limits are Hollywood, located northwest of downtown; Encino, Van Nuys, and North Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley; Century City, Westwood, and Venice on the West Side; San Pedro and Wilmington in the harbour area; and Boyle Heights just east of the river. Some of the newer outlying communities, such as Warner Center, have the appearance of self-contained mini-cities.

      The main links connecting downtown and the suburbs are the famed Los Angeles freeways, which spread throughout the region in a vast network of concrete ribbons. A drive in any direction presents a variety of landscapes. Some roads cross the Los Angeles River, which appears in the guise of a huge, cement-lined flood-control channel. The mountains and their steep-walled canyons are lined with shrubbery, grass, and occasional houses. Motorists glimpse some dramatic vistas; for example, a nighttime view of the San Fernando Valley from the Mulholland summit of the San Diego Freeway. In general, however, there is little to distinguish one community from another as viewed from the freeways. Cars and trucks move in solid masses, streaming steadily along at rooftop level through single-story residential areas, shopping strips, and malls.

      There is no single manufacturing area in Los Angeles. The typical industrial establishment occupies a single-story building next to a large parking lot and can be found alongside a railroad line or near a major road or freeway that is accessed by giant trucks. All of this tends to illustrate why writer Dorothy Parker (Parker, Dorothy) is said to have once described Los Angeles as “seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.”

      Anyone familiar with a city like Chicago and its grid-based street pattern may justifiably believe that Los Angeles was never planned. The English architectural writer Reyner Banham called planning in Los Angeles “a self-canceling concept.” Yet the Spanish colonists had established the original pueblo in 1781 according to a plan laid out in the 16th-century Laws of the Indies (Indies, Laws of the), and the county later maintained a general grid for outlying tracts, roads, and highways. An imaginative and extensive regional planning proposal to preserve open space, completed in 1924 by the planning firm headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., failed to gather enough support to slow the powerful tendencies toward urban sprawl and the preference for automobiles. Still, the original designs of smaller planned communities in outlying areas such as Westwood and Palos Verdes Estates have achieved acclaim.

      Downtown Los Angeles brings hundreds of thousands of Angelenos to its government and commercial offices and its cultural facilities. It has distinctive subareas—Civic Center, Music Center, Spring Street, Broadway, Chinatown, Olvera Street, Little Tokyo, Library Square, and the Staples Center. Although these areas are crowded during workdays, most are nearly deserted in the evenings. Bunker Hill has by and large the tallest, newest, and most-imposing buildings in the city. Downtown has never housed many factories and lost most of its major department stores, theatres, restaurants, and residences when the freeways were constructed; it also has relatively few residents. The wholesale marts for garments, jewelry, toys, furniture, flowers, and produce, however, are among the busiest enterprises anywhere in southern California.

      Since the 1980s, the city has taken significant steps to redevelop downtown by increasing housing stock, accommodating new recreational and cultural activities, and inviting pedestrian activity. Loft conversions have created new condominium living spaces. The river is seen as a major recreational asset. Downtown's greatest deficiencies are its large Skid Row area (sometimes called Central City East) and its lack of housing for middle- and lower-income families and the shops and amenities that make life agreeable at street level.

People

      The relative positions of ethnic and racial groups in Los Angeles have shifted significantly with time. When the city began under Spanish rule in 1781, whites (i.e., people of European ancestry) were in the minority. Twenty-six of the 44 original settlers were of African, Native American, or mixed ancestry. From the late 19th to the early 20th century, whites became dominant; so many white Midwesterners arrived in Los Angeles during that time that it was nicknamed “the seacoast of Iowa.” With the exception of some eastern European Jews who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, southern California drew relatively few of the immigrant groups from eastern and southern Europe that populated the cities of the eastern United States. With the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the subsequent influx of Mexican agricultural workers in California, the nonwhite population began to increase. In the 1970s Los Angeles attracted many other ethnic groups, and in the course of the subsequent decades it became one of the most diverse metropolises in the country, if not in the world.

      In the early years of the 21st century, California reached the status of a “minority-majority state”—one in which the combined population of minorities exceeds the majority population. Los Angeles county has the largest Hispanic (the term Latino is also used in southern California), Asian, and Native American populations of any county in the United States. African Americans make up about one-tenth of the total population; in the early 21st century their numbers declined somewhat as middle-class families abandoned the traditionally African American neighbourhoods for newer suburbs as far away as San Bernardino county. Compton and Inglewood, which once had African American majorities, have become predominantly Latino.

 The shifts among the major ethnic groups have been the result of both natural increase (higher birth rates than death rates) and immigration. Since the mid-1960s, federal immigration practices have ceased giving preference to Europeans and have favoured immigrants with family already in the country and those having higher education and skills. Meanwhile, illegal immigration has increased dramatically from rural areas of Mexico and Central America, where the birth rate has been relatively high. Both legal and illegal immigration have contributed to the county's having the largest concentration of Mexicans outside Mexico. People from more than 140 countries now reside in Los Angeles county. Los Angeles has more Koreans, Filipinos, Iranians, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Cambodians living outside their native countries than anywhere else in the world and a greater concentration of Native Americans—most of whom were born in states other than California—than any other county in the United States.

      The overall population of the city and county may have become more diverse, but, for low-income Latinos, African Americans, and Asians in the central city, housing has remained largely segregated. Families of all groups who could afford to do so usually have moved to the suburbs to find better homes and to escape crime-ridden neighbourhoods.

      More than 90 languages other than English are spoken in homes around Los Angeles, most notably Spanish, Vietnamese, Hmong, Cantonese, Tagalog, Korean, Armenian, Russian, Farsi, Cambodian, and Hebrew. In a given week, radio listeners can hear perhaps a dozen or more different foreign languages on the air, and newspaper readers may choose from more than 50 foreign-language newspapers published in the county.

      The religious culture of southern California is equally diverse. Long an almost exclusively Roman Catholic town, Los Angeles began receiving many Protestants and some Jews in the late 19th century. Small sects proliferated in the 1920s. While most were short-lived and had narrow appeal, at least one gained vast influence. William J. Seymour, an African American preacher, created the Azusa Street revival in 1906 and sparked the Pentecostal (Pentecostalism) religious movement that, for the next century, would spread like wildfire throughout the Western Hemisphere and other parts of the world. In 1921 the prominent California newspaperman and poet John Steven McGroarty wrote, “Los Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies—no day passes without the birth of something of this nature never heard of before.” Roman Catholics still constitute the most numerous mainline religious group in Los Angeles, with about 100 parishes. Various Protestant sects, including Evangelicals, have come to outnumber members of mainline denominations. There is also a significant number of Mormons. The African Methodist Episcopal church remains a stalwart of the African American community. Some 600,000 Jews (Jew) live in Los Angeles, and Eastern Orthodox congregations are active in the growing Greek, Russian, and Armenian communities. Islam's many adherents in Los Angeles include immigrants from Africa and Indonesia. Buddhists and Hindus number in the tens of thousands in Los Angeles county. Smaller non-Judeo-Christian religions, such as the Bahaʾi faith (Bahāʾī faith), have also proliferated.

Economy

      Southern California's regional economy is huge, diversified, and in a perpetual state of flux. Agriculture became important after the first citrus orchards were planted by Spanish missionaries in the 1700s. Manufacturing has also been important. The county features a wide range of financial and business services, high-technology manufacturing, and craft and fashion industries such as jewelry, clothing, toys, music, and, most famously, movies. If the Los Angeles metropolis were a country, it would have a gross national product exceeding those of all but a handful of the most prosperous countries in the world.

      After a long period of growth in the 20th century, the local economy experienced a recession in the 1990s. A strong recovery began mid-decade, and the economy showed considerable resilience, particularly in the high-tech area. By the end of the century the fastest-growing sectors for employment were construction, transportation, public utilities, finance, insurance, real estate, and government services.

      The global economy has created bewildering crosscurrents in the regional job market since the 1980s. As less-profitable manufacturing plants have closed or have moved to other countries, higher-paying and more labour-intensive jobs have declined and lower-paying jobs have increased. Local employers rely increasingly on immigrant labour. Sweatshop conditions exist in some clothing manufacturing and other low-wage industries.

      From the 1930s to the '50s, the labour movement achieved considerable strength in the auto, aircraft, movie, trucking, longshoring, and food handling industries. Then, after a gradual membership decline in those activities, unions organized teachers, nurses, and other service employees. The gains continued in the 1990s and early 21st century, when the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations) embraced immigrant workers (especially those engaged in janitorial and hotel work), advanced the policy of a living wage for city employees, and took an active role in local politics.

Agriculture

      In generations past, agriculturalists nurtured bountiful orchards of oranges, lemons, apricots, and peaches, planted broad fields of vegetables, and raised dairy cattle. By the mid-20th century Los Angeles was the country's most productive agricultural county. Most of the county's orchards and farmland have succumbed to urban sprawl, but agriculture continues to play a role in the regional economy. Principal crops include nursery and greenhouse plants, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and hay.

Manufacturing

      When Edward L. Doheny discovered oil (petroleum) under a private residence in 1892, he set off an oil-drilling spree that made Los Angeles one of the world's major petroleum fields. Oil fostered industrialism. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, some of that city's manufacturers moved their operations south, where wages were lower. During World War II the federal government poured vast sums of money into plant expansions. Los Angeles produced enough warplanes and merchant vessels to earn the title “ Pittsburgh of the West.” During the Cold War, Los Angeles was, arguably, the centre of what became known as the military-industrial complex, notably in the aerospace industry. Partly through a federal housing loan program for service veterans, the construction industry reached its peak activity in the decade after 1945, when developers bulldozed as many as 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares) of farmland daily to build new homes, shopping malls, and offices. Corporations based in the eastern United States saw the advantage of opening branch offices—or even headquarters—in Los Angeles.

      Gradually, many of the leading industries of the first part of the 20th century—fish packing, shipbuilding, airplane and auto assembly, oil production, steel production, and tire and glassmaking—diminished or vanished. The newer plants feature fewer employees and smaller assembly lines, an increased involvement with electronics and computers, and alliances with laboratories such as NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration)'s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Despite these changes, in the 1990s most goods manufactured in California were produced within a 60-mile (100-km) radius of the Los Angeles Civic Center. The onset of recession in the 1990s—brought on in large part by considerably reduced post-Cold War military spending—shut down many of the leading aerospace facilities, causing severe unemployment and disruption in long-established blue-collar communities.

Finance and other services

      The service sector is the primary component of the Los Angeles economy. Business and professional management services, health services and research, and finance are important, as are trade and tourism. The bulk of the workforce is now employed in services such as retail, restaurants and hotels, government agencies, and schools and colleges. The single largest private employer in the city is the University of Southern California (Southern California, University of) (USC).

      Supermarkets, regional shopping malls, and retail strip malls are aspects of retail commerce closely identified with Los Angeles, particularly in the era of the automobile and related suburban expansion. When the city extended Wilshire Boulevard from downtown to the Santa Monica beach in the 1920s and '30s, the street became the first major shopping artery to cater specifically to customers arriving by car. The first regional mall was the Crenshaw Shopping Center (now called Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza), which opened in 1947. Suburban retail expansion came at the expense of downtown department stores, but downtown still has Broadway, which is frequented mostly by Latino working-class families and is the busiest retail street west of the city of Chicago. With its trade ties to countries in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles is now considered by some to be the crossroads of the Pacific Rim. More than 85 countries maintain trade commissions in Los Angeles, while the Los Angeles Convention Center features key trade shows for national marketers of cars, electronic gear, high-tech products, motorcycles, pleasure boats, and recreational vehicles, among other products.

      Los Angeles became a leading financial centre early in the 20th century in conjunction with strong activity in oil drilling, agriculture, and land development. A major milestone was reached in 1920, when Los Angeles's bank clearings exceeded those even of San Francisco. In later decades more than a billion shares of stock were traded annually on the Pacific Stock Exchange. That institution closed its Los Angeles offices in 2001, redirecting local investors toward electronic trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Transportation

      Automobile-dependent Los Angeles has struggled to create a balanced mass transit system. It once took pride in the Pacific Electric Railway (PE), a privately owned trolley system created at the start of the 20th century by real estate and railroad mogul Henry E. Huntington (Huntington, Henry E.). He intended the PE mainly as a vehicle for developing real estate, and it consistently lost money at the fare boxes. Over time, the PE's “Big Red Cars,” running on fixed rails, could not rival automobiles for convenience in navigating the suburbs, and they increasingly became the cause of traffic jams and collisions on downtown streets. PE management ignored reformers' repeated demands for system-wide improvements, while suburban taxpayers rejected proposals for a public buyout. The railroad slowly dismantled its lines, and the last Red Car ran in 1961.

      By the late 1940s, Angelenos considered cars—and freeways—as necessities. Although these high-speed, multilane, limited-access highways were developed elsewhere, they reached their full flowering in Los Angeles. The prototype Arroyo Seco Parkway (Pasadena Freeway) had opened on the last day of 1939, in time to carry revelers to New Year's Day festivities in Pasadena. The more-modern Hollywood Freeway (completed 1948) soon carried nearly 200,000 cars daily, prompting comedian Bob Hope (Hope, Bob) to call it “the biggest parking lot in the world.” The four-level downtown freeway “stack” became the city's most familiar icon of the built environment.

      There followed a frenzy of freeway construction, and by the 1970s the system was largely finished. Although these roads unified and defined the physical structure of Los Angeles, their steadily increasing traffic—with an attendant increase in delays and smog-generating pollution—fueled a renewed interest in public transit. Los Angeles voters rejected several proposals before approving a plan for a new system that, in addition to revamping a dysfunctional bus system, would construct several light-rail lines and a subway. In 1993 the state followed suit by creating the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to build and operate such a system.

      Work got off to a slow start owing to a tunnel collapse in Hollywood and delays in funding, but by the beginning of the 21st century the MTA had completed a subway between Union Station downtown and North Hollywood and several of the light-rail lines. Additional subway and rail lines were planned or under construction. The MTA also operates transitway buses (which follow dedicated bus roads, thus avoiding traffic problems) and Metro Rapid express bus service along several corridors across the city in addition to its regular city bus service. Los Angeles and neighbouring counties are also served by a patchwork of shuttle and other municipal bus lines. A separate regional commuter rail service, Metrolink, opened in 1992 and has developed into a network of lines connecting Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, and San Diego counties.

      Los Angeles is served by interstate buses and Amtrak intercity passenger rail service, but air travel is by far the most important transport link to outside the region. Los Angeles International Airport (popularly called by its international code, LAX) is one of the world's largest airports, handling tens of millions of passengers and millions of tons of freight annually. Traffic at LAX keeps rising, but proposals to expand the facility evoke strong opposition from surrounding communities.

 In the early 21st century, the combined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach accounted for nearly two-thirds of the West Coast's foreign import cargo and, in terms of volume, jointly constituted the third largest harbour in the world after Singapore and Hong Kong. Among the main imports were automobiles, gasoline and jet fuel, steel, footwear, lumber, scrap metal, copper ore, and inorganic compounds. The ports provided thousands of jobs and generated considerable tax revenues.

Communications media

      The city's first newspaper, the Star, began weekly publication in 1851. Three decades later the Los Angeles Times published its first issue. Acquired the following year by Harrison Gray Otis (Otis, Harrison Gray), it became the bible for the city's boosters, conservative Republicans, and antilabour forces. The paper continued in that mode for another generation under the leadership of Otis's son-in-law, Harry Chandler. For two additional generations, the Times remained rock-ribbed conservative. While Times scion Otis Chandler held the reins of the paper (1960–80), he transformed it into a more liberal and worldly publication, in the process offending most members of the Chandler family. The family's control of the paper ended in 2000 with the purchase of its parent company by the Tribune Company.

      In 1954 the city had four daily papers, but competition was fierce and their number began to shrink. When the Herald-Examiner ceased publication in 1989, the San Fernando Valley's Daily News remained the Times's only major competitor. The Long Beach Press-Telegram, the Pasadena Star News, and other regional papers provide good coverage at the local level. La Opinión is the major Spanish-language daily. More than two dozen of the area's radio stations broadcast in languages other than English. Several Spanish-language television network affiliates hold their own against English-language stations, and programming is broadcast in at least a dozen other languages on other stations.

      Commercial radio broadcasting began in Los Angeles in 1922 and reached a milestone with a coast-to-coast transmission of the Rose Bowl game on Jan. 1, 1926. Today more than two dozen of the area's radio stations broadcast in languages other than English. The first flickering TV images were transmitted to just five television sets on Dec. 23, 1931. By the 1950s the infant industry was strong enough to challenge the movies for a large share of the entertainment market. Several Spanish-language television network affiliates hold their own against English-language channels, and programming is broadcast in at least a dozen other languages on additional channels.

The entertainment industry

      The media business, with filmmaking (motion picture) as its core, pumps tens of billions of dollars into the Los Angeles economy yearly and directly employs several hundred thousand people. Hollywood produces about half of all the films shot in the United States.

 As California historian Kevin Starr pointed out, Hollywood is not only a town and an industry but also a creator of dreams and fantasies that have tremendous cultural impact. The “dream factories” are among the most global of industries, with huge overseas markets and an impact on people in practically every corner of the globe. Disney Studios elevated the cartoon character Mickey Mouse into what was arguably the most universally recognized icon of the 20th century. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Academy Award (Oscar) ceremony broadcast from Los Angeles is said to have a TV audience exceeding one billion people. The industry also draws hordes of tourists into southern California.

      The recording industry is another major player in the entertainment economy; virtually all major labels either are based in Los Angeles or have facilities there, and the industry employs thousands of workers. Giant corporations such as the Walt Disney Company (Disney Company), in Burbank, and Universal Studios, in Studio City, are involved in practically all aspects of entertainment, including theme parks.

Administration and society

Government

      A bewildering jungle of government jurisdictions—municipal, county, special district, regional, state, and federal—prevails in the county. Among elective bodies, the most powerful one is the County Board of Supervisors, a five-member panel with vast executive, legislative, and (in planning matters) quasi-judicial powers. It directly governs unincorporated parts of the county and contracts with some cities such as Lakewood for sheriff protection and other services. Wielding authority over a population of some 10 million people and an annual multibillion-dollar budget, the supervisors oversee the second biggest municipal government in the country, exceeded only by that of New York City. The next most powerful regional elective body is the 15-member Los Angeles City Council, with authority over contracts, permits, leases, licenses, zoning, planning, and funding for all city departments. The mayor is largely limited to preparing the city budget, nominating top officials, and vetoing council ordinances.

      By law, city and county elections are nonpartisan, a heritage from the Progressive movement's battle to eradicate party bosses early in the 20th century. Most Angeleno voters are registered Democrats (Democratic Party), although Republicans (Republican Party) have considerable strength in the suburbs. In the post-World War II generation, a small, well-organized group of white downtown businessmen ran the city virtually unopposed. The spread of population into the San Fernando Valley and the west side altered the old power alignments. In 1973 a new coalition of white progressives and African Americans led to the election of Tom Bradley (Bradley, Tom), the city's first African American mayor. This drastically changed the political climate. Upon Bradley's retirement two decades later, political power in City Hall became diffused, and citizens, especially those living in outlying areas, complained increasingly about bureaucratic red tape, inadequate city services, and insufficient representation on the city council. Voter turnout for city elections fell drastically. Meanwhile, disgruntled leaders in the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood, and San Pedro organized movements for secession from the city of Los Angeles. A major charter-reform movement arose from civil discontents. The new city charter of 1999 established the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) to organize neighbourhood councils everywhere (and seven new regional zoning commissions) to broaden the public's input on all legislative matters.

      By the early 21st century the substantial Latino population in Los Angeles had evolved into a potent political force. In the 2005 mayoral election, Antonio Villaraigosa captured an overwhelming majority of the Latino vote and three-fifths of the overall vote to become the city's first mayor of Latino background since 1872.

Planning and housing

      The future of downtown Los Angeles has been the subject of perennial debate in planning and redevelopment circles. The main problem has been finding sufficient resources to create affordable housing for low- and middle-income families, to create pedestrian-friendly promenades, to increase social services for the substantial homeless population, to preserve the historic theatres on Broadway, and to rehabilitate El Pueblo Park (Olvera Street), Chinatown, and Little Tokyo.

      State law requires direct citizen input in the city planning (urban planning) process and encourages strict enforcement of environmental impact laws. While the pressures for unrestrained growth prevailed in Los Angeles through most of the 20th century, neighbourhood and homeowners' associations and environmental organizations later coalesced and mounted successful campaigns to “slow the growth machine.”

      Los Angeles developed some public housing in the early 20th century. Later, in the 1950s, the city acquired federal funds for a carefully designed housing project in Chavez Ravine. The building industry opposed public housing, however, and blocked the Chavez Ravine plan by exploiting the public's fears of racial integration and communism. When housing official Frank Wilkinson refused to reveal his political affiliations before the House Un-American Activities Committee, it cost him his job. The city shelved the housing project and eventually earmarked Chavez Ravine as the home of baseball's Dodger Stadium. To ameliorate the housing problem, the city later adopted a rent-control law and enforced building codes against indifferent slumlords, but the supply of low-income units has continued to lag far behind the demand.

Municipal services

 Southern California governments have struggled to provide basic services to a rapidly expanding population spread over a huge area. The city of Los Angeles obtains an adequate water supply from the Owens River, with small amounts from the Feather and Colorado rivers, and from recycling facilities. It creates its own electrical energy from fossil fuels and hydroelectric sources, while the rest of Los Angeles county depends on private electric utility companies. Most other cities in the county (members of the Metropolitan Water District) draw water from the Colorado River and maintain wells and pumps that tap into ancient underground aquifers. The county and federal governments have gone to great lengths to control floodwaters throughout the basin. Many jurisdictions share the facilities of Los Angeles's Hyperion Treatment Plant, which empties millions of gallons of treated wastewater into Santa Monica Bay daily.

      Los Angeles homeowners burned combustible trash in backyard incinerators until 1957, when, in an attempt to reduce the eye-searing attacks of smog that were then plaguing the region, the practice was ended. Now, each day the city's sanitation trucks collect several thousand tons of household trash and dump it into large local sanitary landfills. Hillside areas covered with tinder-dry foliage in the summer and fall create a huge fire hazard in the region. Wind-driven fires in Bel-Air in 1961 and over wide areas of the county in 1993 caused enormous property damage. Thus, in addition to their ordinary urban duties, firefighters from both the city and county departments must also contend with potentially disastrous brush fires, though the county bears the brunt of fighting the most damaging of these conflagrations.

      The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was, until about 1965, considered one of the most highly professional and best-run law agencies in the country. In the 1950s and early '60s the department prided itself on its ability “to protect and to serve” the sprawling metropolis and its growing diverse population. Then riots (or “rebellion,” as some called it) occurred in the predominantly African American Watts neighbourhood in August 1965. The outburst of arson and looting there was traceable to a host of underlying economic and sociological conditions and to the deterioration of police-community relations.

      By the early 1990s the department had one of the lowest ratios of officers to residents of any city force in the country. The living conditions in South Los Angeles at that time were much the same as in Watts in 1965. Poor relations between the police and the community again set off rioting for five days in April–May 1992 when the police officers involved in the videotaped beating of African American motorist Rodney King were acquitted. The widespread disturbances that followed resulted in more than 50 deaths and caused extensive property damage. That riot differed from the Watts disturbance in that it also involved Latinos.

      A blue-ribbon commission convened by Mayor Bradley looked into the overall management of the LAPD, including racial and gender bias, the process of external review, and hiring and training practices. The commission favoured the concept of community-based policing, in which officers spend more time outside patrol cars and engage local citizens in crime prevention. The Neighborhood Watch program, in which a designated lead officer meets regularly with local residents in order to combat crime and vandalism, has been successful.

      One of the most intractable social problems in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was that of gangs (gang) and gang violence. The city had innumerable gangs and some two dozen separate programs to cope with them. The complaint of most reformers was that the lion's share of funds went for suppression, which achieved limited results, and that the money could have been better spent on intervention, social services, job placement, and economic development. One point upon which most people agreed was that the city's efforts were poorly coordinated.

Health and welfare

      Southern California's mild climate has long attracted health seekers. Beginning in the 1880s, thousands of tuberculosis and asthma sufferers were treated in numerous hospitals and clinics. Although this “health rush” ended long ago, the region has retained its outstanding medical facilities. The medical schools of USC and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the Kaiser Permanente, Cedars-Sinai, and City of Hope hospitals have won numerous awards for quality service.

      Responsibility for protecting public health and welfare (social welfare program) falls to the county. Its department of health services, the largest such agency in the United States, has long struggled with inadequate funding to serve an increasing number of poor clients. The county also handles all public welfare matters. Its caseloads rose by nearly half from 1988 to 1992, when 1.3 million persons were on welfare, a situation described as a social emergency of historic proportions. In the mid-1980s the welfare rolls swelled largely because of foreign immigrants, many of whom had entered the country illegally. More of those immigrants lived in southern California than in any other region of the United States. A welfare-to-work reform program instituted by national legislation in 1996 reduced caseloads significantly and connected people with social services. However, most participants in the program remained poor and worked at low-wage jobs without benefits. Owing chiefly to the influx of poor immigrant families, in the early 21st century Los Angeles county alone still had more cases to administer than did most U.S. states, and the concentration of poverty was increasing.

Education

      The Los Angeles area is renowned for its institutions of higher learning, both public and private, and its distinguished faculties, including Nobel Prize recipients. UCLA, established in 1919, is the largest branch of the University of California (California, University of) system. The California State University system has four campuses in the county in Dominguez Hills, Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Northridge. Among its well-respected private institutions, USC, the oldest independent university in the West (1880), has outstanding professional schools; the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has earned great distinction in the sciences; and the Claremont Colleges (Claremont Colleges), Occidental College, and Loyola Marymount are among the excellent smaller institutions devoted to the liberal arts. Los Angeles pioneered the creation of two-year community colleges, which now channel thousands of students into California universities.

      Southern California has scores of independent school districts. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest public school district in the country, is run by an independent elected board working under state—rather than city—jurisdiction. Turmoil erupted in the 1970s over court-ordered busing to eliminate racial segregation (segregation, racial). This litigation never gained full public support and resulted in “white flight” into the suburbs and the formation of numerous private schools. The LAUSD had upward of 750,000 students in the early 21st century, the majority of whom were Latino. In recent decades the system has struggled to improve instruction and learning amid exploding enrollments and declining public funding for education.

Cultural life

 Los Angeles entered the 20th century with the reputation of an overgrown village run by prudes and philistines. Eastern newcomers of the 1910s were aghast that no restaurant would serve a glass of wine with lunch. The later image of Los Angeles as “Tinseltown” was expressed by New Yorker Woody Allen (Allen, Woody) in his 1977 film Annie Hall, “I don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.” Nevertheless, by then the metropolis was already home to countless creative artists—including Europeans such as Aldous Huxley (Huxley, Aldous), Billy Wilder (Wilder, Billy), and Thomas Mann (Mann, Thomas)—who nurtured all of the arts and created impressive cultural institutions. In the 1960s an arts renaissance was begun by Dorothy Chandler, a civic leader and mother of Otis Chandler, when she tapped into private and corporate charities and arranged a county subsidy for the Los Angeles Music Center (which included the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion). The city bolstered its own arts program by requiring builders to set aside “one percent [of construction costs] for the arts” at major building construction sites and by supporting an arts council, which, among other things, funded many of the 1,000 murals that are now a prominent part of the cityscape.

Theatre

      Theatrical performances were held in Los Angeles as early as the 1850s. By the 1890s the city was a stopover for eastern touring companies on their way to San Francisco. Sarah Bernhardt (Bernhardt, Sarah) was one of many noted performers who appeared in Los Angeles on the Orpheum Circuit. Of the dozens of theatres built between 1921 and 1930, half could be used interchangeably for film or stage. Unique outdoor amphitheatres, such as the Hollywood Bowl (1916), the Greek Theatre (1929–30), and the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre (1920; rebuilt after a fire and reopened 1931), became and remain popular staging arenas for the performing arts. Los Angeles emerged as the country's second most important theatre city with the 1967 opening of the 2,000-seat Ahmanson Theatre and the 750-seat Mark Taper Forum at the downtown Music Center. Important small theatres arose and multiplied, nourished by the fact that some one-fourth of the country's professional actors, writers, and directors live in the region.

Music and dance

      The Los Angeles Philharmonic, founded in 1919, now ranks among the country's finest orchestras. It performs in the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003), designed by Frank O. Gehry (Gehry, Frank O.). Among the conductors who brought it to world renown were Alfred Wallenstein, Eduard van Beinum (Beinum, Eduard van), Zubin Mehta (Mehta, Zubin), Carlo Maria Giulini (Giulini, Carlo Maria), André Previn (Previn, Sir André), and Esa-Pekka Salonen. In the 1930s the classical music scene was enhanced by the arrival of European musicians fleeing Nazism. These included Otto Klemperer (Klemperer, Otto), Kurt Weill (Weill, Kurt), Igor Stravinsky (Stravinsky, Igor), and Arnold Schoenberg (Schoenberg, Arnold), who took up residence at UCLA, one of the many local universities with outstanding music programs. jazz has been played in Los Angeles since the early 1920s, when Dixieland's Kid Ory led the city's first African American recording orchestra. It proliferated on Central Avenue, in the heart of an African American community, where Charlie Parker (Parker, Charlie), Louis Armstrong (Armstrong, Louis), and others played in clubs. During the big band era of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, singers such as Jo Stafford, Lena Horne (Horne, Lena), Frank Sinatra (Sinatra, Frank), and Perry Como and bands led by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey (Dorsey, Jimmy), Glenn Miller (Miller, Glenn), Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington (Ellington, Duke) appeared regularly in local nightclubs, on radio shows, and in movie musicals. In the 1960s southern California became the centre of a surfing craze, which gave rise to the surf music pioneered by Dick Dale and others. Some teenage rock and rollers (rock) from Hawthorne—the Beach Boys (Beach Boys, the)—expanded on this genre and created a sensation, and since then Los Angeles has been home to a varied and thriving pop music scene. In the mid- to late 1960s the country rock style of Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds (Byrds, the), and the Flying Burrito Brothers (Flying Burrito Brothers, the) coexisted with the diverse musical styles of such groups as the Doors (Doors, the) and Frank Zappa (Zappa, Frank) and his group the Mothers of Invention.

      The Los Angeles Opera opened in 1985, and the city's first resident ballet company, Los Angeles Ballet, had its first season in 2006–07. Visiting companies regularly perform at the Music Center, and Los Angeles-based companies present performances of modern, tap, jazz, ethnic, and experimental dance.

Literature

      The genre of southern California fiction was established with Helen Hunt Jackson (Jackson, Helen Hunt)'s Ramona (1884), which created an enduring romantic mystique surrounding Native Americans and the missions. In the genre of Hollywood novels, Nathanael West (West, Nathanael)'s The Day of the Locust (1939) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon (1941) are among the best-known such works. Los Angeles has often been lampooned, as in Evelyn Waugh (Waugh, Evelyn)'s The Loved One (1948), a biting social satire about a cemetery, and Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939). Another variety of Los Angeles fiction was the hard-boiled detective novel. James Cain (Cain, James M.), Raymond Chandler (Chandler, Raymond), Chester Himes (Himes, Chester), and Walter Mosley (Mosley, Walter) depicted Los Angeles as having two faces: one smiling, sunny, and optimistic and the other ugly, corrupt, and violent. Also among the myriad novels set in Los Angeles are Joan Didion (Didion, Joan)'s Play It As It Lays (1970), Carolyn See's Making History (1991), and Janet Fitch's White Oleander (1999). The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, held annually since 1996, draws tens of thousands of participants to the UCLA campus and constitutes the country's largest such literary event.

Architecture

 Virtually any architectural style can be found in Los Angeles, although the ones most widely identified with the region are Spanish Mission Revival and Craftsman, as epitomized by the California bungalow. Such renowned architects as Irving Gill (Gill, Irving John), Frank Lloyd Wright (Wright, Frank Lloyd), Richard J. Neutra (Neutra, Richard Joseph), and R.M. Schindler did some of their most original work in Los Angeles in the first half of the 20th century. The abundant sunshine, attractive landscape, and lack of hardened aesthetic traditions have invited experimentation among private and public patrons. For decades, the streets sprouted vernacular buildings humorously designed to suggest their commercial uses. The hat-shaped Brown Derby Restaurant and the Tail o' the Pup hot dog stand resembling the featured product were among many that caught the public's fancy. The experimental Case Study Houses of Craig Ellwood and Charles and Ray Eames (Eames, Charles; and Eames, Ray) are still much studied by students. Until 1956, Los Angeles enforced a 140-foot (43-metre) building height limit (except for City Hall) so as to maintain a horizontal appearance. When the ban was lifted, skyscraper construction began.

Museums

 Los Angeles has more than 200 museums. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), founded in 1910, is the premier fine arts museum. It contains 250,000 pieces of art and is the anchor for what is known as “Museum Row” on Wilshire Boulevard. Other important art museums are the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens (1919) in San Marino; the Norton Simon Museum of Art (1975) in Pasadena; the J. Paul Getty Museum, with locations at the Getty Center in Los Angeles (designed by Richard Meier (Meier, Richard); 1997) and the Getty Villa in Malibu (opened 2006); and the three locations of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA; founded 1979)—MOCA Grand Avenue, designed by Isozaki Arata (1986), the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (1984), in a building renovated by Frank Gehry, and MOCA Pacific Design Center (designed by Cesar Pelli and Associates), which opened in 2000. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (1913) and its sister institution, the Page Museum–La Brea Tarpits (1977), are popular. Among the museums devoted to ethnic heritage are the California African American Museum (1984), the Japanese American National Museum (1985), and the Skirball Cultural Center (featuring Jewish culture and history; 1996). There are several museums associated with movie stars: humorist Will Rogers (Rogers, Will)'s ranch in Pacific Palisades, the Museum of the American West in Griffith Park (formerly the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum; 1988), and silent-film cowboy William S. Hart (Hart, William S.)'s home in Newhall. Other museums are devoted to children, crafts, maritime, television and radio, military, automobile, aeronautic, and railroad history.

Sports and recreation

  Angelenos are avid fans of nearly every imaginable sport. Four milestones in the city's evolving sports culture were hosting the 1932 Summer Olympic Games (Olympic Games), the arrival of the Dodgers professional baseball team (formerly of Brooklyn, N.Y.) in 1958 and the Lakers men's professional basketball team (formerly of Minneapolis, Minn.) in 1960, and again hosting the Summer Games in 1984 (Olympic Games). Other regional professional teams include the Angels (baseball), the Kings and Ducks (ice hockey), the Clippers (men's basketball), the Sparks (women's basketball), and the Club Deportivo Chivas USA and Galaxy (football [soccer]). In addition to professional franchises, Los Angeles also supports numerous amateur events and high school and college rivalries. The many sports venues—the Rose Bowl, Memorial Coliseum, Dodger Stadium, Inglewood Forum, and Staples Center—also attest to the city's high interest in sports.

      The city of Los Angeles has few neighbourhood parks but does possess the world's largest urban park, Griffith Park, covering some 6.5 square miles (17 square km) of rugged mountainous terrain. Exposition Park, Hancock Park, and Elysian Park are among other popular city recreation areas. Of the regional parks, the most important is the sprawling 239-square-mile (619-square-km) Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (1978), the largest such preserve in an American metropolis. Jointly managed by the U.S. National Park Service, the California Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the area includes some existing homes but restricts permanent new construction to protect the natural environment. Regional beaches attract millions of visitors yearly, requiring the services of as many as several hundred lifeguards on a given summer's day.

      Los Angeles revolutionized the theme park industry. From his Burbank studio, movie mogul Walt Disney (Disney, Walt) created a “Magic Kingdom” that would extend the life of his popular cartoon characters into an amusement park. He opened Disneyland in Orange county in 1955 to instant acclaim. Disney's venture inspired the creation of Universal Studios Hollywood, a theme park in Studio City that also draws millions of visitors yearly.

History

Spanish colonial outpost

      For many centuries, the area was occupied by some 5,000 to 10,000 Tongva ( Gabrielino) and Chumash Indians who lived in scores of villages and led a relatively stable existence by hunting, fishing, gathering, and trading actively with distant groups. Europeans entered their world in 1542 when a Spanish sea expedition headed by Capt. Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo (Cabrillo, Juan Rodríguez) sailed into Santa Monica Bay. Noticing the smoke rising from Indian fires, he dubbed the place Bahía de los Fumos (“Bay of Smokes”). Nearly two centuries later, royal authorities ordered Capt. Gaspar de Portolá (Portolá, Gaspar de) to California to locate suitable sites for Franciscan missions, military forts (presidios), and civilian settlements. The Franciscans, led by Junípero Serra (Serra, Junípero, Blessed), established 21 missions in California, including two in the Los Angeles area: San Gabriel (1771) and San Fernando (1797).

      In the fall of 1781, California Gov. Felipe de Neve and 44 settlers from Sonora and Mazatlán established a pueblo near a river they called Río de Porcincula, where the Native American village of Yang-na (or Yabit) was located. They called the new settlement El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles (“The Village of the Queen of the Angels”); the name was later shortened to Los Angeles. The newcomers raised enough food to sustain themselves. The Native Americans, soon ravaged by diseases introduced by the Europeans, fared less well. Spain's hold over colonial California ended in 1822, and in 1835 the new Mexican government raised the pueblo's status to that of a city. It also secularized the missions and granted about 50 tracts of land called ranchos. Ignoring legal restrictions against them, white settlers began to make their homes in Los Angeles. During the Mexican-American War (1846–48), southern California was the site of numerous armed skirmishes. When the war ended, California was a province of the United States; in 1850 California joined the union as a state and the city of Los Angeles officially became American. For a brief time Los Angeles was California's largest settled community, with a population of about 1,500.

The early American era

      American Los Angeles, the “Queen of the Cow Counties,” was a rough-and-tumble frontier town. Ethnic conflict flared, particularly in the 1850s. Murder was a daily event, with bandits and vigilantes periodically dominating the scene. In one generation Americans and European immigrants replaced Mexicans in city government. Economic life continued to be shaped by the rancheros until the 1860s, when a severe drought destroyed crops, killed cattle, and undermined the economic viability of the rancheros.

      The increasing dominance of whites in Los Angeles, along with economic instability after the American Civil War (1861–65), raised ethnic tensions in the city. Los Angeles earned nationwide notoriety in 1871, when rampaging mobs killed some 20 Chinese residents during an event known as the Chinese Massacre.

      At that time the town lacked the ingredients common to most successful big cities. It lay outside the world's major sea-lanes and had no natural harbour, no major fuel or lumber sources, no railway, and, worst of all, no water supply large enough to sustain a sizable population. It lay more than 20 miles (30 km) inland, along the banks of an unruly river. As late as the 1870s, Los Angeles was isolated from the rest of the country by vast deserts, mountains, and stretches of foreboding frontier territory. Novelist Mary Austin (Austin, Mary) aptly called it “an island on the land.” Yet, in just a little more than a century, this insignificant and remote village would become one of the world's great metropolises.

Inventing a city

 Los Angeles's metamorphosis to world-class metropolis began in the 1870s. Its first leap into the modern era came in 1876, when the Southern Pacific Railroad completed a rail hookup with San Francisco. Also during that decade, the city experienced a boom based on the arrival of newcomers seeking a healthy climate. Called “the Sick Rush,” it was one of the first of many booms that have punctuated the history of Los Angeles.

      In 1885 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway Company, The) opened a through line from Chicago, sparking a fare war and a two-year land boom. An army of land agents and pitchmen publicizing mild temperatures and ocean views sold off large parts of the old ranchos. When the bubble burst in 1887, thousands promptly left town. A newly formed chamber of commerce joined with the railroads, citrus growers, and hotel owners in a vigorous promotion of southern California. Focusing on the unspoiled natural beauty of the region, this campaign persuaded a generation of affluent visitors from the East Coast and Midwest to forgo trips to Europe and instead visit southern California. Many who did so ended up settling permanently in the state.

      Creating a harbour large enough to accommodate world shipping was equally important. It involved dredging the mudflats at the port of San Pedro, building a rail line to Los Angeles, and obtaining a federal subsidy for a breakwater. Southern Pacific's Collis P. Huntington (Huntington, Collis P.) backed Santa Monica as the location of the future port city, but business and political leaders in Los Angeles fought back. They won their battle in the U.S. Congress. In 1910 Los Angeles annexed the town of San Pedro; that act, along with the creation of a new harbour and the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, thrust Los Angeles into the position of a major international trading centre.

      Much of the city's expansive character was the product of Henry E. Huntington (Huntington, Henry E.)'s Pacific Electric rail network, established 1901–11. His crews of Mexican immigrant labourers laid more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of track. For less than a penny a mile, passengers could travel on one of his Big Red trolley cars from the San Fernando Valley to downtown and from Santa Monica inland as far as San Bernardino and Redlands.

      The years from 1890 to 1915 have been described as Los Angeles's golden age. Prominent Los Angeles author and urban ecologist Richard Lillard called it a “post-frontier, pre-industry, pre-Hollywood, pre-automobile” phase. The landscape was so amenable to portrayal on picture postcards that soon practically every household in the country's northern snowbelt knew of the city where, in the dead of winter, trees bore golden fruit at the base of snow-covered mountains. Despite the positive developments during that period, it was also time of significant social and political turmoil.

      At the turn of the 20th century, Harrison Gray Otis (Otis, Harrison Gray), publisher of the Los Angeles Times, led a national crusade to stimulate industry by undercutting labour unions. His venomous editorials stirred class resentment. A few unionists began a terrorist campaign against local capitalists and on Oct. 1, 1910, dynamited the Times building, killing 20 employees. In 1911, just as Los Angeles seemed poised to elect Job Harriman, the Socialist Labor candidate for mayor, two indicted unionists, John and James McNamara, confessed to the dynamite attacks. It dealt a mortal blow to Harriman's campaign and put unions on the defensive for a generation.

      Meanwhile, middle-class progressives were anxious to eliminate party bosses and end the political dominance of the Southern Pacific Railroad in California. A civic-minded physician, John Randolph Haynes, among others, convinced Los Angeles voters to adopt the initiative, referendum, and recall ballot measures. The reformers soon mounted an attack on Mayor Arthur C. Harper for his ties to the Southern Pacific, his stock speculations, and other corruption-related offenses, and their efforts prompted his resignation in 1909.

From the aqueduct to the 1920s

 Another decisive step toward creating a metropolis was the development of a system that would import enough water (water-supply system) from the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada to sustain a population of millions in the Los Angeles area. The designer of the Los Angeles Aqueduct was a self-trained, Irish-born water engineer, William Mulholland, who also oversaw its construction. The project (1904–13) involved aggressive dealings with ranchers and business owners in the Owens Valley, the work of some 4,000 labourers, and the invention and application of new technologies, including the Caterpillar tractor. The water was propelled entirely by gravity, coursing through open canals, pipes, and tunnels onto a spillway in the San Fernando Valley.

      On Nov. 5, 1913, addressing the thousands of Angelenos assembled to watch the water cascade down the aqueduct to the city, Mulholland exclaimed, “There it is; take it!” The city's 300,000 residents had acquired enough water to slake the thirst of millions. The 233-mile- (375-km-) long aqueduct, at the time the world's longest, was considered a modern engineering wonder and its designer a genius.

The 1920s and '30s

      In the 1920s, irate residents of the Owens Valley, believing their water had been stolen, vented their anger against Los Angeles by dynamiting parts of the system. To add to the tension of the disputes (popularly called “water wars”), the St. Francis Dam in northern Los Angeles county collapsed in 1928, releasing a surging wall of water that drowned hundreds of people. Mulholland accepted full responsibility. In the 1930s the city extended the aqueduct northward to Mono Lake for a total length of 338 miles (544 km) and later imported additional water from the Colorado River and California's Feather River.

 Historian Carey McWilliams wrote that Los Angeles's growth is “one continuous boom punctuated at intervals by major explosions.” By 1920 southern California's population had surpassed that of northern California, and in the next several years Los Angeles experienced “the largest internal migration in the history of the American people.” Hundreds of thousands of people arrived by automobile. It was a frenzied period of wildcat oil drilling, intense business speculation, religious excitement, extensive suburban development, the birth of the aircraft and film industries, and civic corruption. The charismatic Pentecostal minister Aimee Semple McPherson (McPherson, Aimee Semple) captivated audiences with her dramatic preaching. Droves of starry-eyed young people arrived hoping to follow in the footsteps of such movie actors as Mary Pickford (Pickford, Mary), “America's Sweetheart,” and her daredevil husband, Douglas Fairbanks (Fairbanks, Douglas).

 Los Angeles was very much a white-dominated town in the 1930s. Housing and public facilities were segregated, and job discrimination was widespread. The Great Depression caused high unemployment in the region and exhausted the resources of private and public assistance. To slash welfare lists, public officials repatriated thousands of Mexicans—and their U.S.-born children. Amid this dire situation, Los Angeles built facilities for and hosted the 1932 Olympic Summer Games (Olympic Games) as planned. The city's remoteness from Europe and from much of the rest of the world contributed to reduced international participation. Nevertheless, the Games were a great success and showcased Los Angeles to the world. Meanwhile, the corruption in City Hall led to a recall movement against Mayor Frank L. Shaw and his close associates. Police misconduct and the mayor's mishandling of public funds forced Shaw from office and led to the election of reform mayor Fletcher Bowron in 1938.

      Economic recovery was relatively swift in the late 1930s owing to the prosperity of the film industry, the tapping of electrical energy from Hoover Dam, and the production of airplanes for Britain and France at the outset of World War II.

World War II and the postwar years

 The World War II era witnessed an enormous surge in the Los Angeles economy, as southern California became a major American manufacturing centre, especially for aircraft production. It was also a time of significant domestic social conflict. After Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in 1941, thousands of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans were rounded up in the Los Angeles area and interned at camps inland. Racial tensions between sailors and local Mexican American youths exploded in the so-called “Zoot Suit Riots” (June 3–10, 1943). The servicemen targeted Latino youths who wore trendy zoot suits, double-breasted jackets with pegged pants. The youths were beaten and stripped of their clothing. Some of the violence spilled over onto Filipinos and African Americans. No one was killed in Los Angeles, but media attention helped spread racial intolerance to other cities, where fatalities did occur.

 The war (World War II), meanwhile, sparked another population boom, as tens of thousands of newcomers found wartime employment in aircraft factories and shipyards. Servicemen who passed through Los Angeles to and from the Pacific theatre of war later returned with their families. This fed yet another population spurt in the 1950s and early '60s. On a bean field near Long Beach, developers employing 4,000 workers built 23,000 tract homes in a three-year period, creating Lakewood, dubbed “the city as new as tomorrow.”

The contemporary city

  During the city's 1981 bicentennial celebration, the British periodical The Economist (Economist, The) declared, “Los Angeles has, it seems, at last become a place to take seriously.” All signs pointed to new levels of achievement: the skyline, freeways, tourist attractions, movie industry, universities, museums, sports franchises—and even the newspaper of record, the Los Angeles Times. The size, diversity, and energy of its population were enough to rank it second only to New York City. It was now a world-class city. Los Angeles's highly successful hosting of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games reinforced its new status.

      Maturation came with a price tag, however. The city acquired a host of problems endemic to urban American life: traffic jams, gang warfare, increasing poverty, inadequate low-income housing, overcrowded schools, and ethnic and racial hostility. In 1965 a violent uprising in the mostly African American community of Watts was an undeniable reminder that Los Angeles could no longer consider itself simply a sunny city of tourism and the good life. The record smog levels and the riot of 1992—which broke out after LAPD officers were cleared of criminal charges in the beating of African American Rodney King—were sober reminders that urban tensions had not disappeared.

      Yet private citizens, organizations, and civic leaders struggling to preserve open space, ensure a healthy environment, and maintain community stability could claim at least partial victories. Efforts to stem the flow of contaminants into storm drains helped clean up the beaches and improve fish habitats. A crusade to “green” parts of the Los Angeles River (i.e., restore areas of the concrete channel to wetlands, parks, and trails)—a laughable concept a few years earlier—was making tangible headway. The establishment of Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in 1978 preserved a vast tract of valuable open land. A persistent campaign succeeded in preserving at least a fragment of the Ballona wetlands adjacent to Marina del Rey. A broad-based coalition defeated the city's effort to build a high-technology trash incinerator near downtown and instead forced the city to start a curbside trash-recycling project. Youngsters were mobilized to plant tens of thousands of trees for aesthetic, recreational, and ecological purposes. A movement for historic preservation saved the treasured Central Library and subsequently other historic and cultural monuments. In the early 21st century, strict control of auto exhaust emissions and industrial pollutants noticeably improved air quality.

      Los Angeles in the early 21st century was a city undergoing major changes. In downtown, the old City Hall building underwent historic restoration and retrofitting for earthquake safety. The area along Grand Avenue was renovated significantly. The Walt Disney Concert Hall at the Music Center hosted its first musical performances in 2003, and a refurbished Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center for the first time housed resident opera and dance companies. A new Roman Catholic cathedral, designed by Spanish architect José Rafael Moneo, opened in 2002. Just east of Chinatown, the Cornfield, an abandoned railroad yard, became Los Angeles State Historic Park. Modernization of the Alameda Transportation Corridor, a 20-mile (30-km) pathway connecting the harbour with downtown, facilitated the movement of freight and helped pour billions of dollars into the local economy. New dredging and construction expanded cargo handling at what was already the country's busiest seaport.

      Los Angeles has a track record of confronting serious problems with inventive solutions. Even after major riots and serious earthquakes, the city continued to attract millions of visitors annually and large numbers of new residents. As historian Andrew Rolle wrote,

Los Angeles…continues to generate its own momentum. After two centuries of turbulent expansion, diehard residents remain optimistic about the city's future. Despite the fact that Los Angeles's image has been tarnished, these folk would live in no other place on earth.

Leonard M. Pitt

Additional Reading

Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (1997), is a comprehensive reference containing thousands of entries.

Geography and culture

The city's growth patterns and geography are covered in Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles 1850–1930 (1967, reissued 1993); and Howard J. Nelson, The Los Angeles Metropolis (1983). Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946; reissued 1973), is an indispensable history. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990), is a controversial social analysis.Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (1985), and Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s (1990), are masterful volumes on the cultural history of southern California. Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1998), deals with ongoing transformations and losses in the city.Environmental issues are explored in Richard G. Lillard, Eden in Jeopardy: Man's Prodigal Meddling with His Environment: The Southern California Experience (1966, reprinted 1976). Works concerning water development are Catherine Mulholland, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (2000); Abraham Hoffman, Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley–Los Angeles Water Controversy (1981); and Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (1999).Imaginative inquiries about suburban life are found in Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (2002), chiefly concerning South Gate; and D.J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996), dealing with life in Lakewood.Architecture is discussed in Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971); David Gebhard and Robert Winter, Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide (1994); Merry Ovnick, Los Angeles: The End of the Rainbow (1994); and Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (1998). Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja (eds.), The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (1998), presents essays on urban planning, architecture, and sociology. Steven P. Erie, Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development (2004), treats a timely subject.

History and character

An anthology of selections from 135 works is John and LaRee Caughey (eds.), Los Angeles: Biography of a City (1976), which provides an introduction to the city's history. A brief overall narrative is Andrew Rolle, Los Angeles: From Pueblo to City of the Future, 2nd ed. (1995). Jon Wilkman and Nancy Wilkman, Picturing Los Angeles (2006), is an expansive narrative with hundreds of historical photos. Lively historical sketches appear in Cecilia Rasmussen, LA Unconventional: The Men and Women Who Did LA Their Way (1998).Worthwhile studies of the first generation under American rule are Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913, 4th ed. (1984); and John Albert Wilson, History of Los Angeles County, California (1880, reprinted 1959). Tom Sitton and William Deverell (eds.), Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (2001), presents essays covering another era.Works addressing ethnic and racial history are Martin Schiesl and Mark Morrall Dodge (eds.), City of Promise: Race and Historical Change in Los Angeles (2006); James P. Allen and Eugene Turner, The Ethnic Quilt: Population Diversity in Southern California (1997); Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (2005); Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (2004); Rodolfo F. Acuña, A Community Under Siege: Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River (1984); George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (1995); Lisa See, On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred Year Odyssey of My Chinese American Family (1996); and Raphael J. Sonenshein, Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (1993).The racial explosion in South Los Angeles in 1965 is covered in Robert Conot, Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness: The Unforgettable Classic Account of the Watts Riot (1968). The riot of 1992 is explored in Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD (1999).Michael J. Dear, H. Eric Schockman, and Greg Hise (eds.), Rethinking Los Angeles (1996), collects interpretive essays about the city's past, present, and future. Robert Gottlieb et al., The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City, updated ed. (2006), concentrates on reformers' visions of the city.Leonard M. Pitt

▪ Chile

formerly  Los Anjeles 

      city, south-central Chile. It is located on a tributary of the Bío-Bío River in the southern part of the Central Valley. Founded in 1739 and elevated to city status in 1852, Los Angeles was swept by fire in 1820, has suffered earthquake damage repeatedly, and was destroyed several times in the long struggle with the Araucanian Indians. It is now an agricultural processing centre handling dairy, wheat, sugar beets, fruit, and lumber produced mainly in the valley. The city is on the Pan-American Highway; it is linked to Concepción 60 miles (97 km) northwest by road and rail and to the main north-south railroad by a 13-mile branch line. Pop. (2002) 117,972.

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