When Reality Hits

THE "New Eden": a land full of sunshine, amusement parks, exotic palaces, healing air, magical spiritualists, movie stars, property and well, land. Come out West to the new metropolis and all your problems will be solved!

This is the place that boosted in population from 11,000 to 50,000 in a single decade. At least that's what place the brochures said it was. Thousands of people moved to Los Angeles from all over the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries based on these promises. Did they get what they expected? No, yet that didn't stop people from arriving here until it was a metropolis that far surpassed San Francisco-"the West Coast Metropolis."

The city "boosters" essentially lied to get people to come to L.A., but somehow they knew that it didn't matter if what they said was true or not, people were going to stay there. This leads me to believe that although people came here on pretenses that it would be like Utopia, they stayed here for different reasons. L.A. may have been manufactured "to look like a movie set," but it was not the "unreal city" that novelists portrayed it as for satire. It was a real place even though it was manmade and it had the qualities of life that people were looking for in a city. No, the Spanish myths weren't true and it wasn't like Athens or Spain or Italy. Los Angeles wasn't these things, but it wasn't necessarily pretending to be them either. Since everyone knew that L.A. was like a movie set, they knew that everything was "fake," or rather, imitating something else.

It should be no surprise that literature about the city was very mixed. Themes of romanticism quickly changed to satire. Novelists wrote about the outrageous in L.A., like spiritualists and cults; they also wrote about the boosters themselves. The city was virtually brand new and it must be taken into consideration that the people writing about it were new to the place. They wrote about the oddities and the main characteristics like architecture and climate but then they wrote about feelings like the "sense of dislocation and estrangement." The darker turn to literature about L.A. is due to the fact that people felt lost in such a big, new city, in my opinion. They wanted to put a label on it and they didn't know how to make it feel like home amongst the movie industry and stereotypical aspects of it. Not to mention that it was so spread out and decentralized that it was nearly impossible for it to be defined, yet writers focused mostly on "Hollywoodland" and natural disasters.

It is interesting how the writing about L.A. is as confused as the way it came together physically. The different cities within the city and so many people in one place probably created the sensation of being lost in an unreal place and dreams being shattered among all the competition. Fine illuminates the seeds of present-day L.A. because it seems as if not much has changed and writing about it today is just as difficult as it was at the beginning of the city's history.

--Claire Ensey

caption: Pamphlet by the Los Angeles Chamber of Congress in 1928
credit: Jasperdo, flikr creative commons