California Dreamin': A History of LA

We explore Los Angeles' Past and take a look at its present.  

Transcript

Californian Dreamin’: A History of LA 

January 2025

If I didn’t tell her 

I could leave today

California dreamin’ 

On such a winter’s day

Michelle and John Phillips

Tip the world over on its side, and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. 

Frank Lloyd Wright

This ain’t no disco

It ain’t no country club, either

This is LA

Sheryl Crow

From the South Bay to the Valley

From the West Side to the East Side

Everybody’s very happy

’Cause the sun is shining all the time

Looks like another perfect day

I love LA (we love it)

Randy Newman 

And different views of the same city:

In Los Angeles, the gang capital of the world, we have 1,100 gangs and 120,000 gang members, so it is a daunting, complex social dilemma. 

Greg Boyle

I love Los Angeles and Hollywood. They’re beautiful. Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic. 

Andy Warhol

Except for New York City, no city in the United States plays on the American imagination in the same fashion as Los Angeles. Not Chicago or declining Rust Belt cities such as Cleveland or St. Louis. Not Philadelphia or DC, despite their historical richness or current power locus, respectively. And certainly not the new high-growth locations like San Jose, Phoenix, Miami, or Dallas. These might boast large populations but do not capture an ethos like LA.  

Much of Los Angeles’s image is shaped by its entertainment culture, where its only rival is New York. We have an impression of sunny locations and ocean views. However, there is also the notable underbelly of the city, captured by smog, gangs, race riots, and, most recently, burning homes.  The first cities, like Ur or Memphis, and later prominent ones like Rome, all began along rivers.  America’s first metropolises were all ports ranging from Boston, New York, Baltimore, and even Philadelphia.  LA was different.  The port came later after the city because LA is truly an industrial age creation.  Before the late 1800s, LA was a backwater.  It was not even worthy of European settlements until 250 years after the Spanish arrived.  Forgetting the images of lushness and sunny skies, the vast majority of what we now think of LA was inhospitable without the advent of industry.  The twin liquid substances of oil, the lifeblood of the industry, and water, brought in from remote areas due to modern canals, created the LA we now know today.  This is why LA is more similar to Phoenix or Miami, cities that could not exist before the 1890s.  None of these places would have grown to their current scale without Air Conditioning, another fruit of technological build-out.  All of the glitz and glamor, the grit and gangland territories, would not be possible without the advent of the industrial age.  It is one of the ironies of our time that the wealth produced by capitalism, the exploitation of fossil fuels, and war production created a progressive paradise.  Today, entertainment and technology carry the load, but to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, socialism often runs out of other people’s money.  Paradise could be ending on the West Coast.  

Around 13,000 years ago, people settled in and around what is today California.  Notably, the core of their survival depended not on agriculture but on marine life.  These people migrated into these areas supported by oceanic resources (an ecological zone referred to as the “Kelp Highway”) extending from Asia to South America. The different kelps of the Pacific Rim are major contributors to productivity and biodiversity and support a wide variety of life, such as marine mammals, shellfish, fish, seabirds, and edible seaweeds. This biodiversity was a key condition that supported human migration and settlement during this early period.  In other words, they hugged the coast because the near-desert climate was inhospitable even a few miles inland.  

Over 100 tribes and bands inhabited California. Various estimates of the Native American population during the pre-European period range from 100,000 to 300,000, but these were scattered throughout the region.  

In 1542, The first Europeans to explore the California coast were the members of a Spanish sailing expedition led by Captain Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo from the Viceroyalty of New Spain (modern Mexico).  They entered San Diego Bay on September 28, 1542, and reached at least as far north as San Miguel Island. Cabrillo and his soldiers found that there was essentially nothing for the Spanish to easily exploit in California. Located at the extreme limits of exploration and trade from Spain, it would be left essentially unexplored and unsettled by Europeans for the next 234 years.

Unlike in the Caribbean, no plantations grew staples like sugar to entice settlement.  Unlike Mexico and Peru, there were no great civilizations to plunder.  And, as in 1607 on the East Coast, ready-made agricultural opportunities (Tobacco) were not abundant.  And here we come to one of the first relevancies of historical California to today.  The ecoregions of California can be grouped into four major groups: desert ecoregions (such as the Mojave Desert), Mediterranean (such as the Central Valley), forested mountains (such as the Sierra Nevada), and coastal climate. We tend to think of California as one of the most hospitable climates in the nation, and the coastal areas are just that.  But inland – even a few miles, that changes quickly.  

The indigenous Tongva people originally inhabited the Los Angeles area and later became part of Cabrillo’s rather extensive claim in 1542. A group of Franciscan monks established 21 missions in California, including two in the Los Angeles area: San Gabriel (1771) and San Fernando (1797). The city (well, actually a Pueblo, city status came later) was founded on September 4, 1781, under Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, in the village of Yaanga, beginning with a whopping population of 44 Spanish colonists.  El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora was the first name but was later renamed El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles or Queen of the Angels and later redesignated as simply Los Angeles.  

It became part of the First Mexican Empire in 1821 following the nation’s successful War of Independence from Spain. In 1835, the new Mexican government raised the pueblo’s status to that of a city. Ignoring legal restrictions against them, white settlers began to make their homes in Los Angeles. Displacing native Americans was made easier by diseases such as those introduced in the 1500s, which continually decimated local populations.  

In 1848, at the end of the Mexican–American War, Los Angeles and the rest of California were purchased as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and became part of the United States. For a brief time, Los Angeles was California’s largest settled community, with a population of about 1,500, or less than 1% of New York’s. Los Angeles was incorporated as a municipality on April 4, 1850, five months before California achieved statehood.  Yet Los Angeles continued to be a backwater city for much of the 19th century.  In 1880, its population was just over 11,000. Contrast this with San Francisco, a significant port and the transcontinental railroad terminus, which boasted a quarter of a million population.  

We tend to think of Texas as the state of oil barons, but the discovery of the black goo in the 1890s changed the city’s fortunes. In a piece by Jorge Navarro Comet, entitled “One Family, Three Giant Oil Fields in Los Angeles,” the author notes, “Greater Los Angeles, Calif., holds the world’s largest urban oil fields, including some of the most productive fields in the United States, within one of the world’s richest oil-producing basins. 

In 1892, a small agricultural village became a boomtown nearly overnight when oil was first discovered by sinking a well with a pick and a shovel. Since then, many more oil discoveries have been made, and the city has grown alongside the oil industry, embedding it into the urban environment. The total cumulative production from the Los Angeles Basin amounts to more than 9 billion barrels of oil, mostly from multiple sandstone reservoirs of the Late Miocene to Early Pliocene age. Many active oil wells remain in Los Angeles, located amid a population of more than 13 million population. Storage tanks, refineries, pipelines, active rod pumps, and a few oil rigs dot the metropolitan area, often hidden from sight by tall fences and false buildings.  It has been one of Governor Gavin Newsom’s dreams to shut down as much if not all, oil production since he took office, including several bills in 2024.  “The health of our communities always comes first. These new laws allow local leaders to limit dangerous oil and gas activities near homes, schools, and other areas as they see fit for their communities.”  They are not actually drilling near schools, but what is truth to eco-religion?   

The city was further expanded with the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which delivers water from Eastern California. Even at the dawn of the 20th century, the ability to manage water would become critical for LA.  Built between 1908 and 1913 at the cost of $23 million (about $800 million in today’s dollars), the LA Aqueduct tapped into the waters of the Owens River and delivered water 233 miles south to Los Angeles.  When completed in 1913, the Los Angeles Aqueduct was considered a significant engineering accomplishment, second only to the Panama Canal. A century later, it continues to be a marvel in modern engineering.

The LA Aqueduct was essential to bringing water to a growing area that needed additional resources to sustain its people and their endeavors. It helped spur an economy that today rivals that of many nations. A century later, this gravity-fed system continues to be a major source of water for Los Angeles—on an average year, it supplies 29% of the water needs for four million people.

The opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct provided the city with four times as much water as it required, and the offer of water service became a powerful lure for neighboring communities. The city saddled with a large bond and excess water, locked in customers through annexation by refusing to supply other communities. 

Also, during this period, another “industry” was cemented. Hollywood has been synonymous worldwide with the film industry for over a hundred years. It was incorporated as the City of Hollywood in 1903 but merged into LA in 1910. In the 1900s, moviemakers from New York found the sunny, temperate weather more suitable for year-round location shooting. It boomed into the cinematic heart of the United States, 

In 1906, the approval of the Port of Los Angeles and a change in state law allowed the city to annex the Shoestring, or Harbor Gateway, a narrow and crooked strip of land leading from Los Angeles south towards the port. The port cities of San Pedro and Wilmington were added in 1909, and the city of Hollywood was added in 1910, bringing the city up to 90 square miles (233 km2) and giving it a vertical “barbell” shape. Most of the annexed communities were unincorporated towns, but 10 incorporated cities were consolidated with Los Angeles: Wilmington (1909), San Pedro (1909), Hollywood (1910), Sawtelle (1922), Hyde Park (1923), Venice (1925), Watts (1926), Barnes City (1927), and Tujunga (1932). 

The type of corruption that accompanies big cities was certainly a factor in early LA. In the 1920s, for example, it was common practice for the city’s mayor, councilmen, and attorneys to take contributions from madams, bootleggers, and gamblers. The mayor’s top aide was involved with a protection racket. Thugs with Eastern Mafia connections were often engaged in violent conflicts over bootlegging and horse-racing turf.

In 1933, the new mayor, Frank Shaw, started giving contracts without competitive bids and paying city employees to favor crony contractors. The city’s Vice Squad functioned citywide as the enforcer and collector of the city’s organized crime, with revenues going to the pockets of city officials right up to the mayor. The mayor’s brother was selling jobs in the Los Angeles Police Department.

This behavior existed for twenty years until a reformed-minded mayor in 1950 appointed William H. Parker as chief of police. Parker pushed for more independence from political pressures, enabling him to create a more professionalized police force. The public supported him and voted for charter changes that isolated the police department from the rest of the government. Through the 1960s, the LAPD was promoted as one of the more efficient departments in the world.  A popular show, Dragnet, exemplified the department’s efficiency, incorruptibility, and focus.  

But Parker’s administration was increasingly charged with police brutality—resulting from his recruiting of officers from the South with strong anti-black and anti-Mexican attitudes.

Aviation and War Production

Alongside the discovery of oil, the entertainment industry, and the ability to bring in plentiful water for a thirsty population, one of the largest drivers of LA growth was war production in World War II.  Los Angeles became a center for producing aircraft, ships, war supplies, and ammunition. Aerospace employers headquartered in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, like Hughes Aircraft Company, Northrop Corporation, Douglas Aircraft Company, Vultee Aircraft, and Lockheed Corporation, were able to provide the nation’s demand for the war effort by producing strategic bombers and fighter aircraft like B-17s, B-25s, A-36s, and P-51 Mustangs needed to bomb the war machine of the Axis powers. As a result, the Los Angeles area grew faster than any other major metropolitan area in the US and experienced more war traumas while doing so. By 1943, the population of Los Angeles County was larger than 37 states and was home to one in every 40 US citizens, as millions across the US came to Southern California to find employment in the defense industries.  

In addition to the large Mexican populations who either were settled or came later due to proximity to the nation, the war also lured a large number of African Americans from the rural, impoverished Southern states to the Los Angeles area in the second chapter of the Great Migration. Part of this was due to manpower industrial shortages and Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination in wartime defense industries. Lonnie Bunch, a longtime historian with the Smithsonian Institution, writes, “Between 1942-1945, some 340,000 Blacks settled in California, 200,000 of whom migrated to Los Angeles.” Most of these migrants to Los Angeles came from South Central states like Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma 

Chinese immigrants began arriving in Los Angeles in the 1800s, drawn by the California Gold Rush and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. They faced violence, exploitation, and discrimination, but they established their economy in Los Angeles Chinatown.

After the war, hundreds of land developers bought land cheap, subdivided it, built on it, and got rich. Real estate development replaced oil and agriculture as Southern California’s principal industry. In July 1955, Walt Disney opened the world’s first theme park, Disneyland, in Anaheim.  Universal Studios opened its first theme park nine years later with the public studio tour tram at Universal City. This later touched off a theme park war between Disney and Universal that continues today. In 1958, Major League Baseball’s Dodgers left New York City and came to Los Angeles. The population of California expanded dramatically to nearly 20 million by 1970. This was the coming-of-age of the baby boom. By 1950, Los Angeles was an industrial and financial giant created by war production and migration.  Los Angeles assembled more cars than any city other than Detroit, made more tires than any city but Akron, Ohio, made more furniture than Grand Rapids, Michigan, and stitched more clothes than any city except New York. 

With the rapid expansion came a natural threat. Beginning November 6, 1961, Los Angeles suffered three days of destructive brush fires. The Bel-Air—Brentwood and Santa Ynez fires destroyed 484 expensive homes and 21 other buildings, along with 15,810 acres of brush in the Bel-Air, Brentwood, and Topanga Canyon neighborhoods. Most of the destroyed homes had wooden shake roofs, leading to their loss and sending firebrands up to three miles away. Despite this, few changes were made to the building codes to prevent future losses.

In the 1960s, the US did not yet have strong air quality standards, and the emissions of automobiles and industries polluted the air, sometimes resulting in deadly smog. This resulted in a concerted effort to move industry out of and away from the city.  At its height, LA, once one of the industrial hubs of the nation, eschewed factory work, a process that has lasted since the 1960s.  The last of the automobile factories shut down in the 1990s; the tire factories and steel mills left earlier. Most of the agricultural and dairy operations that were still prospering in the 1950s have moved to outlying counties while the furniture industry has relocated to Mexico and other low-wage nations. Aerospace production has dropped significantly since the end of the Cold War.  

One of the few industrial aspects left of the city is managing trade.  Los Angeles and Long Beach ports make up the largest harbor complex in the US, handling 44% of all goods imported by cargo container. In 2007, the equivalent of 7.85 million 40-foot shipping containers poured through the ports, with most then moving along the region’s highways to massive rail yards and warehouses before heading to the nation’s interior.  International trade has generated hundreds of thousands of jobs in Southern California. Moving goods is now one of the larger industries in the region, one that helps provide low-cost imports to consumers across the country. The ports are among the region’s more valuable economic engines.

In an eight-year period, from 1984 through 1992, the best and worst of LA were shown. In that first year, LA hosted the Olympics in what is considered the most successful sporting event of all time. Part of the success was that LA’s infrastructure in terms of universities, arenas, pools, and facilities was so ubiquitous that the only thing they needed to build new was a biking velodrome.  

Yet just eight years later, after a group of LA police officers brutally assaulted career criminal Rodney King, the city erupted in a massive race riot when the police officers involved were acquitted at trial. This was not LA’s first calamity along racial lines.  In 1965, the city was rocked by a series of violent confrontations between the Los Angeles Police Department and residents of the Watts neighborhood. The riots were a response to police brutality, employment discrimination, and other grievances.  

And this brings us to the latest calamity: the LA Fires.  

There are really a number of factors involved in this.  First, city and state-allowed housing in areas of potential forest fires has increased over the past 70 years.  As far back as 1904, Los Angeles has seen devastating blazes.  It is a simple process.  Rainfall, which can come in vast quantities, enables vegetation to grow.  Then, extended drought dries out the plants, making them into virtual kindling.  Finally, fierce Santa Ana winds blew as much as 100 MPH fans, which could be controllable fires into infernos.  I do not think this is climate change, by the way.  This has been the weather situation since the city was settled.  The difference now is given the urban sprawl of the place; many more residents live in fire zones.  I am open to climate change arguments but still see that position as debatable. What is certain? is that if it were the case, it lets local officials off the hook, sort of.  Whether climate change is real, there are governmental steps that local officials and the voters who give them power can take in three key areas.  

Fireproofing

Insurance 

Incompetence

Let’s begin with spend.  The state’s current budget had reduced “$101 million from seven’ wildfire and forest resilience’ programs” from the 2023-2024 to the 2024-2025 budget cycle.  Ok, but that is not an actual cut to the budget.  

Technically, the fire budget hasn’t shrunk since city leaders last autumn approved a new union contract that boosted pay and benefits by $76 million—about $20,000 per firefighter. Even before this raise, firefighters earned about $200,000, plus $90,000 in benefits. Many can retire at 55 with pensions equaling 90% of their final salaries. Los Angeles spent $350 million this year on firefighter pensions and benefits. Much of that would have been better spent on fire prevention, which made up only 5% of the department’s budget. The Fire Chief, Ms. Crowley, calls “diversity, inclusion, and equity” a top priority, and the Fire Department boasted nine DEI positions.

Before 1800, California lost an average of around 4.5 million acres to fires yearly. As we introduced scientific land management and fire suppression measures, that average dropped to around 250,000 acres by the end of the 20th century.

The 117-million-gallon water-storage complex in the heart of the Palisades had been empty since February 2024 over a tear in the cover. (How long could it possibly take to fix that tear?) In 2014, California voters authorized $2.7 billion for new water storage projects, and none of the projects will be operational until 2027 at the earliest and 2035 at the latest. 

Why is it so hard to get these obvious things done? Start with its environmental obsessions. In 2019, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power sought to widen a fire-access road and replace old wooden utility poles in the Topanga Canyon abutting the Palisades with steel ones to make power lines fire—and wind-resistant. In the process, crews removed an estimated 182 Braunton’s milkvetch plants, an endangered species. 

The utility halted the project as state officials investigated the plant destruction. More than a year later, the California Coastal Commission issued a cease-and-desist order, fined the utility $2 million, and required “mitigation” for the project’s impact on the species. This involved replacing “nonnative” vegetation with plants native to the state. You have to chuckle at the contradiction: California’s progressives want to expel foreign flora and fauna but provide a sanctuary for illegal immigrants.

Insurance

Back in 2023, Allstate (along with 12 other major insurers, left the state because “The cost to insure new home customers in California is far higher than the price they would pay for policies due to wildfires, higher costs for repairing homes and higher reinsurance premiums,” Allstate said in a statement.

In Proposition 103, CA can limit or prevent insurers from adjusting rates to market levels.  “Rates and premiums reduced pursuant to subdivision (a) may only increase if the commissioner finds, after a hearing, that an insurer is substantially threatened with insolvency.” 

As Dominic Pino notes:

After decades of strict price controls, California’s average insurance price is well below the market rate. California’s rate suppression, the difference between the fair actuarial rate and the rate allowed by regulators, is 29 percent for homeowners insurance, the highest of any state. As economist Brian Albrecht put it, California “forces the biggest gap between rates and risk in the nation.” 

A significant part of leadership is simply the act of being there.  During Bass’s congressional years, she was notorious for taking taxpayer-funded trips abroad, especially to Ghana.  Bass is another of those leftists (she was a great admirer of Castro) who decry capitalism but are more than willing to reap its fruits.  Her campaign pledge was not to leave the nation during her mayoral time and only to travel to select cities within the Republic.  She did not consistently violate this, but before leaving for Ghana, she was repeatedly warned about the potential for a bad fire.  She went anyway and, even after the conflagration began, did not hastily leave.  This is a piece of her entire leadership.  Why cities would put uber progressives like Brandon Johnson in Chicago, Bill DeBlasio in New York, or Bass in LA is a mystery for another time.  But even during the fires, when she returned to her city, she repeatedly made statements contrary to those of her fire chief, seemed confused, and generally failed in her primary roles.  

There is a misnomer that California is some sort of paradise ruined by progressives.  This is partially true.  Whether it be oil, water, aerospace, agriculture, entertainment, and most recently, for the north of the state, technology, California’s fair climate, and resources have been a magnet for Americans for over 100 years.  But this state also contains the seeds for massive forest fires, drought and flooding, mudslides, and Pacific storms.  The Midwest has tornados and severe winters. The SE and Florida have heat and hurricanes.  Even the East Coast has seen these with Sandy.  It is not natural disasters nor the bogeyman of climate change (note they do not want to build nuclear reactors, the best way out) that define the best places to live.  But instead, how local governments manage the resources available and the challenges that come to all areas.  For example, should Pacific Palisades be built first?  There is a template for leadership available.  We saw in 2001 when pre-Trump Guiliani led a city out of a disaster.  We see it in Florida, where Ron DeSantis now manages severe Hurricanes as almost routine.  Progressivism and good governance simply do not go hand in hand.  Progressivism focuses government on the wrong things, social engineering, or changing the fundamental makeup of humanity.  Progressivism does not concentrate on keeping crime down, building roads, repairing bridges, or, in these cases, fireproofing power lines, adding firefighters, or maintaining existing reservoirs in working condition.  Los Angeles has so much going for it, but the people of that city had better think a little harder about the direction of their city.