Los Angeles
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 .
Copyright Rough Guides Ltd as trustee for its authors. Published by Rough Guides. All rights reserved.
The Rough Guides name is a trademark of Rough Guides Ltd.