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.
