From the guide “GOLDEN STATE: The Making of California” by Michael Hiltzik. Copyright © 2025 by Michael Hiltzik. Revealed on February 18, 2025, by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission.
The author Morrow Mayo seldom minced phrases, particularly when his topic was the gaudy, tawdry metropolis the place he made his house within the Nineteen Twenties and Nineteen Thirties.
“Los Angeles, it ought to be understood, is just not a mere metropolis,” he wrote. “Quite the opposite, it’s, and has been since 1888, a commodity; one thing to be marketed and offered to the individuals of america like cars, cigarettes and mouth wash. … Here’s a spirit of enhance which has grow to be a fetish, an obsession, a mania. All the pieces else is secondary to it.”
Los Angeles is aware of the right way to climate a disaster — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to construct a metropolis for everybody.
Mayo’s acerbic guide “Los Angeles” appeared in 1933, when town was in its second decade because the dominant metropolis of California; within the 1920 census, its inhabitants had lastly exceeded that of San Francisco, which had been the middle of the state’s financial and political life for the reason that Gold Rush and the granting of statehood.
That Los Angeles would sometime overtake San Francisco in prominence was in some respects preordained. San Francisco is geographically constrained, perched on the finish of a slim peninsula like a fingernail, with water on three sides. Consequently, its inhabitants has by no means reached even 900,000.
Los Angeles lies nestled inside an enormous basin stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountain ranges on the north and northwest, some 3½ million acres of principally undeveloped territory succesful, within the fullness of time, of supporting a inhabitants of greater than 13 million.
An aerial view of Harbor Freeway building at forty second Road South, trying north towards the Civic Middle, in 1957.
(USC/Corbis by way of Getty Pictures)
But seen from one other perspective, nothing might be as stunning because the start in that exact location of a big, vigorous megalopolis.
The Los Angeles Basin is a spot seemingly devoid of the sources wanted to maintain life and commerce. For many of its historical past, it has had no dependable provide of water, no port. The very best pure harbor in Southern California is San Diego’s, and the closest shore is a 30-mile trek from the pueblo that the Spaniards of Mexico established as their civic seat early within the nineteenth century. Its rivers are dry gulches for a lot of the yr; Mark Twain is claimed to have quipped that he as soon as fell right into a Southern California river and “come out all dusty.”
The Los Angeles that grew to become the queen metropolis of California didn’t develop naturally, however needed to be “conjured into existence.” Virtually all the pieces that made it liveable wanted to be imported. Its water got here from a river valley 200 miles away and its electrical energy from a river canyon 300 miles to the east, dropped at town by way of methods which might be titanic marvels of human engineering. It’s fallacious to consider the basin as a void to be crammed up; higher to view it as a big canvas on which its settlers painted a brand new, transformative future for his or her state.
A postcard postmarked 1912 from the gathering of Patt Morrison touts the delicate winters of Southern California.
(Courtesy of Patt Morrison)
A historical past of pure catastrophes
For many years, the financial system of the area stretching south of the Tehachapi vary stagnated. In 1850, whereas San Francisco was basking within the stupendous inflow of individuals and wealth produced by the Gold Rush, Los Angeles was nonetheless barely a village, with 1,610 inhabitants recorded within the 1850 census and “no newspaper, hospital, public college, faculty, library, Protestant church, manufacturing facility, financial institution, or public utility of any variety.” One-third of its residents may neither learn nor write.
With one exception, the Gold Rush left nearly no hint of itself within the portion of California from Monterey south to the Mexican border. The exception was the Southern California cattle business, which briefly prospered due to the gold miners’ demand for beef. But in time, the cattle ranchers fell sufferer to the emergent boom-and-bust sample of the Southern California financial system. Beef costs had been pushed so excessive by the surge in demand that Mexican ranchers flooded the market with livestock, eroding what had been a Southern California monopoly; by 1855, the competitors had despatched costs plummeting by 75%.
Then got here a sequence of pure catastrophes, beginning with punishing droughts in 1856 and 1860. They had been adopted perversely by torrential rains in 1861, which drowned lots of of head. One more drought arrived in 1863, killing cattle by the tens of hundreds; for years to return vacationers within the south could be “usually startled by coming out of the blue on a veritable Golgotha, a spot of skulls, the lengthy horns standing out in defiant perspective, as if defending the fleshless bones.”
Pitching the Southern California dream
The promotion of Southern California’s Mediterranean local weather took maintain within the first decade after the Gold Rush and continued into the brand new century. Journey writers praised the area’s average temperatures and lack of humidity — dry, however not too dry — and described its healthful results as nearly miraculous. “The illnesses of youngsters prevalent elsewhere are unknown right here,” reported Charles Dudley Warner, the co-author with Mark Twain of the 1873 novel “The Gilded Age.” “They reduce their tooth with out danger, and cholera infantum by no means visits them. Ailments of the bowels are virtually unknown. … Renal illnesses are additionally wanting; problems of the liver and kidneys, gout, and rheumatism, aren’t native. … These information are derived from medical apply.”
A “Winter in California” postcard postmarked 1905 from the gathering of Patt Morrison attracts a pointy distinction between East and West Coast winters.
(Courtesy of Patt Morrison)
Ben C. Truman, an East Coast transplant, compiled the dying charges from all causes in American cities for his 1885 guide “Properties and Happiness within the Golden State of California” and located 37 deaths per thousand inhabitants in New Orleans; 24 in St. Louis, Boston and Chicago; and a mere 13 in Los Angeles. “Fevers and illnesses of the malarial character carry off about half of mankind, and illnesses of the respiratory organs one-fourth,” he wrote. “From such illnesses most of the cities of California are remarkably free.”
The German-born journalist Charles Nordhoff wrote glowingly of the regional local weather’s health-giving qualities for tuberculosis sufferers, describing it because the French Riviera’s equal, missing solely the deluxe hospitality infrastructure of that famend gathering place of the wealthy: “You’ll not discover … tasteful pleasure-grounds or massive, finely-laid-out locations. Nature has performed a lot; man has not, up to now, helped her.” If he was making an attempt to alert resort builders to the existence of a clean slate to be written on for nice revenue, he may hardly have performed higher
A spot to begin anew
In 1887, some 120,000 passengers had been introduced into Los Angeles by the Southern Pacific railroad, whereas the Santa Fe served the area with as many as 4 passenger trains a day. Vacationers jammed lodges and boardinghouses, however they weren’t the one newcomers. The regular rise of land values attracted fortune seekers eyeing the prospect of constructing a killing in actual property in addition to households with the less complicated ambition of constructing new lives within the West. Between 1880 and 1890 town’s inhabitants practically quintupled, from 11,000 to 50,000. Los Angeles “out of the blue modified from a really previous metropolis to a really younger one.” In 1890, greater than three-fourths of its residents had lived within the metropolis for fewer than 4 years.
Recounted journey author H. Ellington Brook, “All people that might discover an workplace went into the real-estate enterprise … a crowd of speculators settled down upon Los Angeles like flies upon a bowl of sugar.” The railroads introduced swarms of sharp operators who had already drained the Midwest of its potential for land fraud and detected on the West Coast a “golden alternative of the fakir and humbug and the person with the previous that he wished forgotten,” a municipal historian wrote. Thus was born Southern California’s picture as a spot to begin anew, particularly amongst these with cause to shed reminiscences of a earlier life.
A postcard dated 1912, from Patt Morrison’s assortment, reveals the business that constructed up alongside the L.A. River. A message on the again says that the river is dry in the summertime and that “we now have not had sufficient rain but this yr. It will get fairly effectively crammed up within the wet season.”
(Courtesy of Patt Morrison)
To an excellent extent, the growth in actual property values was primarily based on fiction. Los Angeles nonetheless had nearly no business to maintain its rising inhabitants — certainly, just about no financial exercise in any respect apart from actual property hypothesis. Promoters established new townsites on each patch of vacant land, constructing lodges and laying down concrete sidewalks and group halls: “A miniature metropolis appeared, like a scene conjured up by Aladdin’s lamp, the place a couple of months in the past the jack-rabbit sported and the coyote howled,” Brook wrote.
The massive growth
Local weather, romantic mythology, the lure of actual property wealth — all these elements set the stage for the best growth of all. Practically 1.5 million new residents moved into Southern California between 1920 and 1930, an inflow that was labeled “the most important inner migration within the historical past of the American individuals,” and one that may not be exceeded till the postwar Forties and Fifties. The explosive development introduced with it gimlet-eyed reassessments of what it had taken to convey Los Angeles to its newfound stature as reigning metropolis of the West.
