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The rambling metropolis of LOS ANGELES sprawls across the thousand
square miles of a great desert basin, knitted together by an intricate
network of congested freeways between the ocean and the snowcapped
mountains. Its colorful melange of shopping malls, palm trees and
swimming pools is both mildly surreal and startlingly familiar,
thanks to the celluloid self-image that it has spread all over the
world.
LA is a young city; in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a community
of white American immigrants, poor Chinese laborers and wealthy
Mexican ranchers, with a population of less than fifty thousand.
Only on completion of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s
did it really begin to grow, as a national mecca for good health,
clean living, plentiful sunshine and endless acres of citrus crops.
The biggest group of transplants were refugees from the Midwest,
who created a new political ruling class to replace the old Mexican
elite. The old ranchos were soon subdivided, the population grew
rapidly, and the enduring symbol of the city became the family-sized
suburban house (with swimming pool and two-car garage). The biggest
boom came after World War II with the mushrooming of the aeronautics
industry - which, until post-Cold War military cutbacks, accounted
for one in four jobs.
The first-time visitor may well find Los Angeles thrilling and
threatening in equal proportions; it's a place that picks you up
and sweeps you along whether you want it to or not. While it has
its fine-art museums, California cuisine and a few old-fashioned
urban plazas, what people really come here for is to experience
the city that has come to epitomize the American Dream - the fantasy
worlds of Disneyland and Hollywood , as well as the gilded opulence
of Beverly Hills and Malibu .
With only limited space between the desert, the mountains and the
ocean, LA has long since filled in the gaps between what were once
small and isolated towns. As a result, it's a massive conglomeration
of interconnected, amorphous districts, often with little in common.
If LA has a heart, however, it's downtown , in the center of the
basin. It offers a taste of almost everything you'll find elsewhere
around the city, from upscale avant-garde art along Bunker Hill
to the abject dereliction of Skid Row in the Eastside, compressed
into an area of small, easily walkable blocks. The area around downtown
contains some decaying Victorian suburbs, 1920s Art Deco buildings
and the center of LA's enormous and growing Hispanic population.
Heading west from downtown to the coast, the first major district
you come to, Hollywood , has streets caked with movie legend - even
if the genuine glamour is long gone. Adjoining West LA is home to
the city's newest money, shown off in Beverly Hills and along the
Sunset Strip. Santa Monica and Venice to the west are the quintessential
seafront LA of palm trees, white sands and laid-back living, while
the coastline itself stretches another twenty miles northwest to
glamorous Malibu , home to the movieland elite.
Suburban Orange County , to the southeast, holds little of interest
apart from Disneyland and a handful of laid-back beach towns. On
the far side of the northern hills lie the San Gabriel and San Fernando
valleys , or simply "the Valley," seen by mainstream Los
Angeles as nothing more than depressing tract homes and endless
strip malls - not unlike the generic LA stereotype viewed by the
rest of America.
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