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From the book “Golden State: Making California” by Michael Hiltzig. Copyright©2025 by Michael Hiltzik. It was published on February 18, 2025 by Mariner Books, a trace of the Harpercollins publishing company. Excerpted by permission.
Writer Moreau Mayo rarely carved words, especially when his subject was the flashy Toudrey city that created his home in the 1920s and 1930s.
“Los Angeles should be understood and not just a city,” he wrote. “On the contrary, it has been a product since 1888, advertised and sold to American people, such as cars, cigarettes, and mouth washing.
Los Angeles knows how to survive the crisis. Angelenos is taking advantage of its resilience and strives to build a city for everyone.
Mayo’s Aselvik’s book, Los Angeles, appeared in 1933 when the city was in its second year as the dominant metropolitan city in California. The 1920 census finally exceeded the population of San Francisco. San Francisco has been the center of the state’s economic and political life since the Gold Rush and the grant of the state.
It was pre-defined in several respects that Los Angeles had one day been prominently overtaking San Francisco. San Francisco is geographically constrained, perched at the end of a claw-like narrow peninsula with water on three sides. As a result, its population has never even reached 900,000.
Surrounded by vast basins extending from the Pacific Ocean to the San Gabriel and the Santa Monica Mountains, Los Angeles can support a population of over 100 million people, with Santa Monica Mountain to the north and northwest, about 3.5 million acres of almost undeveloped territory.
In 1957, you can head north towards the Civic Center to enjoy aerial views of the highway construction of the south port.
(USC/Corbis via Getty Images)
But from another perspective, nothing is astounding as the birth in a massive, active Megalopolis in a particular location.
The Los Angeles Basin is a place where it appears to have no resources needed to sustain life and commerce. For most of its history, it had no reliable water supply or port. The best natural harbor in Southern California is from San Diego, and the nearest coast is a 30-mile trek from Pueblo, founded as a civic seat by the Spanish Mexicans in the early 19th century. The river is mostly a dry gulch. Mark Twain is said to have said he once fell into a river in Southern California and said “all dusty.”
Los Angeles, which became California’s Queen City, did not grow naturally, but had to be “summoned to being.” It had to be imported almost everything that made it habitable. That water comes from a river valley 200 miles away, and electricity reaches the 300 miles east from a river valley, bringing it to the city through a system, a titanic wonder of human engineering. It is wrong to think of a basin as a filling blank. It is better to see it as a huge canvas for settlers to portray a new, transformative future for their nation.
Postmarked in 1912 promoted the mild winters of Southern California from Pat Morrison’s collection.
(Commentary by Pat Morrison)
History of natural catastrophes
For decades, the economy of the region south of the Tehachapi Mountains has been stagnant. In 1850, while San Francisco was basking in the influx of people and wealth created by the Gold Rush, Los Angeles was not yet a village, and the 1850 census recorded 1,610 residents, saying, “There was no newspaper, public school, university, library, Protestant church, factory, bank or public interest. A third of the residents could not read or write.
With one exception, the Gold Rush left little trace of itself in parts of California, from the Montrei South to the Mexican border. The exception was the Southern California cattle industry, which thrived temporarily thanks to gold miners’ demand for beef. But soon, ranchers fell victim to the urgent boom and bust pattern of the Southern California economy. Beef prices have been so high due to a surge in demand that Mexican ranchers flooded the market with livestock, eroding what was Southern California’s monopoly. By 1855, prices had plummeted 75% due to competition.
Then came a series of natural catastrophes, beginning in 1856 and 1860, with punishing droughts. Heavy rain fell in 1861, leaving hundreds of heads owned. Yet another drought arrived in 1863, killing cattle by tens of thousands. For years, Southern travelers are “to be surprised by the sudden arrival of a true Golgotha, with long horns that are often rebellious, as if to protect their skulls.”
Throwing Southern California’s dreams
Promotion of Southern California’s Mediterranean climate took hold in the first decade of the gold rush and continued into the new century. Travel writers praised the region’s lack of moderate temperatures and humidity – dry but not too dry – explained that its healthy effects were almost miraculous. “The illnesses of children that are prevalent elsewhere are unknown here,” reported Charles Dudley Warner, co-author with Mark Twain of the 1873 novel The Gilded Age. “They cut their teeth without risk and cholera infants never come. Intestinal diseases are virtually unknown. … They also want kidney disease. Liver and kidney, gout and rheumatoid diseases are not native.
There is a postcard of “Winter in California” posted in 1905 from the Pat Morrison collection, with a sharp contrast between the East Coast and West Coast winters.
(Commentary by Pat Morrison)
East Coast transplant Ben C. Truman summed up the death rates from all causes in American cities for his 1885 book, “Houses and Happiness in California’s Golden State,” finding 37 deaths per 1,000 people in New Orleans. 24 St. Louis, Boston, Chicago. Only 13 in Los Angeles. “The fever and illness of the malaria personality carries about half of humanity, and respiratory diseases are a quarter,” he writes. “From such illnesses, many California towns are very free.”
German-born journalist Charles Nordoff is enthusiastic about the qualities that confer local climate health for local climate TB cases, describing it as equals to the French Riviera, lacking only the luxurious hospitality infrastructure of the rich. If he had been trying to warn the resort developers that it was written and written for great profits, he would have hardly done well.
A new place to start
In 1887, approximately 120,000 passengers were taken to Los Angeles from the South Pacific Railway, and Santa Fe served the area on as many as four passenger trains a day. Tourists sabotaged the hotel and boarding house, but they were not the only newcomers. The steady rise in land values has attracted people seeking fortunes who are looking at the prospect of killings on real estate and families with simpler ambitions to live new lives in the West. Between 1880 and 1890, the city’s population approached 11,000 to 50,000. Los Angeles “suddenly changed from a very old town to a very young city.” In 1890, more than three-quarters of its residents lived in the city for less than four years.
Travel writer H. Ellingtonbrook said, “Everyone who could find an office has joined the real estate business. The railway has brought a swarm of sharp operators who had already discharged the Midwest possible land fraud, detecting “a great opportunity for Fakir and Humbagh, and the man of his past” on the West Coast. Therefore, it was born as a new place for the image of Southern California, especially among those who have reasons to abandon their past lives.
A 1912 postcard from Pat Morrison’s collection shows the industry built along the LA River. The message behind it says that the river is dry in the summer and “There hasn’t been enough rain this year yet. It’s pretty well filled during the rainy season.”
(Commentary by Pat Morrison)
For the most part, the real estate value boom was based on fiction. Los Angeles still had few industries to maintain a growing population. In fact, there is very little economic activity other than real estate speculation. The promoters have established new town sites on every patch of vacant land, built hotels, and laid concrete sidewalks and community halls.
Big boom
Climate, romantic myths, and the seduction of real estate wealth — all these factors set the stage for the biggest boom of all. Nearly 1.5 million new residents moved to Southern California between 1920 and 1930. This is an influx labelled “the largest internal migration in American history,” and cannot exceed the 1940s and beyond the 1950s. The explosive growth has resulted in a reassessment of what it takes to make Los Angeles a new height as a western metropolitan city.
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