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.
The City
of Los Angeles
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...
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