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

Our Oasis

THINKING of Los Angeles as a booster city is almost hard to believe; that people were led to the city on false pretenses for the purpose of creating a metropolis leaves me slightly confused. Through my understanding of Starting Points, many ideologies of LA are presented through the history of the great city. The concept of Los Angeles being attributed to as “the New Italy, the New Spain, and the New Athens” seems so cliché in that LA cannot have one cultural disposition, nor can it be defined in any such instance. In regards to that notion, it is a bizarre point to explore because in its early stages of life, the city was illustrated as the great civilizations of said European nations.

Having traveled to many places in Europe while predominantly living in the Southern California area, I have found that this reference to LA having any Mediterranean appeal is completely false and most likely did not emulate any of the aforementioned identities in any of its previous history. Los Angeles has its own culture; more than likely because it was established on an artificial reality. The allure to Los Angeles referred to within the article depicted the city as “the New Eden” which provokes the images of an oasis; a place where everything is perfect yet the irony of temptation and corruption insinuates more of the stereotypes of Los Angeles present today.

In one of the last passages within the text of Starting Points, it is said that since the booster era, over a century has passed and LA is still a destination of settlement and migration. This appeal of Los Angeles began over one hundred years ago, and is still highly present today. At what point in time will people no longer want to venture to the highly polluted city-at what point will people come to the region, see the overwhelming lifestyle, and want to turn back in hopes of finding a new place to call home? It seems as though Los Angeles will, literally, be the “New Rome”. The city will build on top of itself for years to come, and people will flock to the renowned city to live in the oasis and drink from the fountain of youth. Because LA is purely that- LA is a legend. Whether or not the legend is true, well, that’s for us to figure out on our own.

-Chelsea Vogt

photo via publicartinla.com

How Far Will It Go?

THE more I learn about the history of L.A., the more I am inclined to not want to be from here. The rapid growth in population was due to an idea that never existed. People chased after a land and a lifestyle that they thought could take away their problems and worries. Competing with San Francisco for size and popularity, the two rail lines that made it happen were the Southern Pacific in 1876 and the Santa Fe in 1886.


In the ten years between 1880 and 1890 the population grew from 11,000 to 50,000. Outgrowing San Francisco was no longer a concern due to the room that southern California had for expansion.After the 1930s, Los Angeles had a population of 2.2 million and was the second largest city in the United States, competing with New York for being the most culturally diverse. I am proud of Los Angeles for its multi-ethnic background, but I am ashamed at the behavior of the “Anglos” towards the other races in the process of settling. The old southern California idea of Manifest Destiny disappoints me and I wish I could have been around to tell Horace Bell and the Los Angeles Rangers exactly what I think of them and their vigilante behavior.

It’s understandable that the people of Los Angeles would use the sunshine as propaganda to promote the region, but labeling it names such as the New Italy, New Spain, and New Athens is taking it a little too far. Not to mention the terms New Eden and Holy Land-- as if the people here lived in complete peace and harmony with one another. I agree with Carey McWilliams when he said that the overwhelming migration to L.A. may have been the largest but it was “the least heroic.”

The continuation of expansion due to the aviation industry, the Pacific Electric rail lines, and the Auto Club spread the outer boundaries of L.A. north to San Fernando, south to the harbor, and west to the coast. With new land came new divisions that are still seen today. It’s interesting to see the breakdown of territory in the mid 1900s and how much things still haven't changed. The Westside of Wilshire and Sunset was home to the Anglo’s, while the East L.A., Boyle Heights area was dominantly Mexican-American. South Central, commonly known as Watt’s, was inhabited by the African American community and I suppose it has changed a bit today because now it includes a community of Asians and Latinos.

Angeleno’s dared to label Los Angeles as the "American Dream Capital, keeper of our national fantasies.” Is that a joke? Sunshine and a couple movie sets don’t make up for the lack of cultural unity and intense racism that was rampant in all areas of L.A. What makes it even worse is that there are still traces of that same racism and segregation today. People are so busy “chasing the dream,” that they couldn’t and still don’t see Pandora’s jar lying open and empty. Is it safe to say that hope has finally escaped? Have we dug ourselves in a hole so deep that it’s going to take more than 4,083 miles of track to reach down and pull us out?

-- J. Garcia