Los Angeles

“ All the valley of the Los Angeles, the innumerable towns and villages and farms and groves and orchards and vineyards stretching far as the eye could see until bounded by the mountains of Mexico to the south, and the shimmering waters of the Pacific to the west, and to the north and east a limitless expanse of scarred and serrated volcanic mountain ranges, like the gigantic petrified waves of a mighty sea. ”

“ If I was disappointed with San Francisco I was more than pleased with Los Angeles, for several reasons—the most important being that it is the starting-point for so many trips into the most beautiful places, of which a deal might be said, more than I have time to say just now. ”

“ Los Angeles is city mad. They have done wonders and they think of the future without dismay. All things seem possible to the promoters. On the one side they have “the back country” where the products are going to enrich all the people and on the other side they have the ocean on which they are going to carry the commerce of the orient, all paying tribute to Los Angeles. ”

“ Los Angeles will always be written in golden letters in the archives of my memory. Crawling, sore and sullen, from the clutch of toil, I revelled in a lotus life of ease and idleness. There was infinite sunshine, and the quiet of a public library through whose open windows came the fragrance of magnolias. Living was incredibly cheap. For seventy-five cents a week I had a little sunlit attic, and for ten cents I could dine abundantly. There was soup, fish, meat, vegetables, salad, pudding and a bottle of wine. ”

“ Our memory of Los Angeles and the whole entourage of that garden spot will always be a vision of palms and flowers, of beautiful homes embowered in roses, of orange-trees in fruit and flower, and of a far-extended city whose future must be as magnificent as its present is beautiful.
We spent a delightful afternoon on our journey southward from Los Angeles to San Diego and Coronado Beach. We passed through the distinctive orange belt of Southern California, and the golden fruit was in evidence on every hand. Oranges lay on the ground. ”

“ IMPROVED HARBOR OF SAN PEDRO, PORT OF LOS ANGELES.
But Los Angeles is above all a city of homes and of gardens. The mildness of the climate permits the most delicate plants and trees to flourish throughout the winter. Giant bananas, fan and date-palms, rise above the houses, and at Christmas are seen hedges of callas, geraniums ten feet high, heliotropes covering whole sides of houses, and such wealth of roses and orange blossoms as baffles description. ”

“ It is the nation’s Forest Lawn, where is sunk its priceless heritage, killed by countless generations of getters and gimme-ers.
Washington is a reflection of Los Angeles—a Los Angeles without palm trees. Where it doesn’t look like a cemetery it resembles a movie set. It has a feel of unreality. This is a designed city, the only important one in America, and its streets are so straight, its architecture is so conforming, and its sidewalks are so neat and clean, it might have been set up in papier-mâché only today. ”

“ Los Angeles society is much like the frog that wanted to inflate himself bigger than a bull. New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit all have social leaders with recognizable names that stand for something in America and, in some cases, around the world. Los Angeles is different, for all its size. ”

“ And Los Angeles, with its palms and olives, its crumbling adobes, side by side with thirteen-story fire-proof steel business blocks, electric railway cars whizzing everywhere—what a marvel of the Past, jostled by Progress! Here are hotels of all sorts and sizes, and homes that are marvels of luxury and elegance. Here you can study climatology and sociology, with variations; can view the simple life through the eyes of the man whose only home is a covered wagon; or, you can get a permit to enter the iron gateway of the park of some retired millionaire. ”

“ It must be said, however, that there is less verdure here than in well-cared-for eastern towns of corresponding size, and that Los Angeles, and even Pasadena, notwithstanding their many palm trees, have on the whole a bare appearance, compared with a city like New Haven, with its majestic elms and robe of vivid green, which even in autumn seems to dream of summer bloom. Nevertheless, Los Angeles is clean, and poverty and squalor rarely show themselves; while, in the suburbs of the city, even the humblest dwellings are frequently surrounded by palm trees, and made beautiful by flowers. ”

“ Los Angeles is the metropolitan centre of all this region. A handsome, solid, thriving city, environed by gardens, gay everywhere with flowers, it is too well known to require any description from me. To the traveller from the East it will always be a surprise. Its growth has been phenomenal, and although it may not equal the expectations of the crazy excitement of 1886-87, 50,000 people is a great assemblage for a new city which numbered only about 11,000 in 1880. ”

“ It is possible for Los Angeles to lay hold of the motion picture as our national text book in art, as Boston appropriated to herself the guardianship of the national text book of literature. If California has a shining soul, and not merely a golden body, let her forget her seventeen year old melodramatics, and turn to her poets who understand the heart underneath the glory. ”

“ No city can offer more beautiful homes than those of Los Angeles; more attractive parks, more enchanting scenery, or more delightful excursions over a network of electric lines which aggregate above five hundred miles of single track and reach one hundred towns and villages from Monrovia of the foothills to Redondo by the sea. The world has but one Southern California, with its cool, soft, gray sea-fogs in the early mornings, followed by its cloudless days of blue sky over golden sunshine ”

“ And out in Los Angeles they boastfully tell you that one way in which Los Angeles "is like New York" is this: That whereas a man may or may not happen to go to Richmond or to Detroit, sooner or later you are bound to see him on the streets of Los Angeles. That, as I say, is what they tell you out there.
But what are those aspects of Washington which are peculiar to that city, and make it so unlike any other city in the United States? And which in some cases make it an influence for the bad to many of its visitors? ”

“ The monorail shot up toward the Palms-Pine pass of the San Jacinto Mountains. From the crest of the grade Hunter could look back at the flat, cemented field of the spaceport and the ragged teeth of the launching tubes rearing high on the Mojave. Ahead of him, misted by the blue haze of industrial smog, was Los Angeles, the capital city of Sector West—and indirectly the capital of the entire planet. ”

“ Whatever one sees he is asked to believe is the largest and best in the world. The gentleman of the whip who showed us some of the finest places in Los Angeles—places that in their wealth of flowers and semi-tropical gardens would rouse the enthusiasm of the most jaded traveller—was asked whether there were any finer in the city. ”

“ Los Angeles is really an exotic, for the latest census reveals the astonishing fact that ninety per cent of its inhabitants are from the East, leaving only ten per cent as native Californians. Never was the advertising of a city carried out to the degree of being fairly a fine art so wonderfully as in Los Angeles. In the Chamber of Commerce there is a perpetual exhibition of fruits and flowers in season, and of the products and manufactures of the country. ”

“ This attractive region, so lovely in its cultivation, with so many charming drives, offering good shooting on the plains and in the hills, and centrally placed for excursions, is only eight miles from the busy city of Los Angeles. An excellent point of view of the country is from the graded hill on which stands the Raymond Hotel, a hill isolated but easy of access, which is in itself a mountain of bloom, color, and fragrance. ”

“ The early Spaniards founded the pueblo of Los Angeles in its present location, because at this point the Los Angeles River carried an abundance of pure water which could be led out in ditches to irrigate the fertile bottom lands in the vicinity. Partly because it became a railroad centre, and partly because it is surrounded by rich valleys, Los Angeles has grown with great rapidity and now stands next to San Francisco in size among California cities. ”

“ The world is coming to an end and you know you can't convince anyone that it is. You feel the way Henny Penny—or was it Chicken Little?—must have felt. The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Hell—you're just one more caterwauling messiah in a city of messiahs. Los Angeles, where every man is his own messiah. ”

“ The very details which are "not Big enough" for the casual reader (mentally over-tuned to newspaper headlines and moving pictures) are the vital and enduring merits of this unpretentious volume. No one else has ever set down so many of the very things that the final historian of Los Angeles will search for, a hundred years after all our oratories and "literary efforts" have been well forgotten. It is a chronicle indispensable for every public library, every reference library, the shelf of every individual concerned with the story of California. ”

“ Los Angeles is one of the most wonderful towns in the United States, and the growth is phenomenal. It is essentially a tourist town, being practically 185supported by the tourists who come there to spend the winter, and by men who have retired from business and wish to end their days in a decent climate. ”

“ Some old Spanish padre named it "Nuestra Señora Reina de Los Angeles," making melody that still lures with its ancient charm. A city for angels, verily. A city of angels? Verily; some fallen, indeed, for there is much nefarious trafficking in real estate, but all in all the majority of souls in Los Angeles are celestial bound, treading upon sunbeams in their pilgrimage.
The plaza, round which the new town roars from dawn to dusk, is still haunted by a crumbling old adobe, while near it droop dusty pepper trees that seem to whisper to each other endlessly—"Mañana! ”

“ Together with the people of Los Angeles, we'll help to make that happen. That's the American way. At every crucial moment in our history, our people have somehow found the courage, the will, and the way to come together in the face of a challenge and to meet it head on. ”

“ Indeed, it is conceded by all who have seen Los Angeles grow, that this first Fiesta and the resulting strengthening of the Association have been among the earliest and, in some respects, the most important elements contributory to the wonderful growth and development of our city. ”

“ Emigrants, when the phrensy of the mines has passed, will be strongly attracted to los Angeles, the capital of the southern department. It stands inland from San Pedro about eight leagues, in the bosom of a broad fertile plain, and has a population of two thousand souls. The San Gabriel pours its sparkling tide through its green borders. ”

“ Leaving the office at four o’clock meant reaching home forty minutes later; so she hurried across the street 15and boarded a car marked “Beverly.” Los Angeles is a big city, because it is spread from the Pacific Ocean to the mountains—an extreme distance of more than thirty miles. Yet it is of larger extent than that would indicate, as country villages for many miles in every direction are really suburbs of the metropolis of Southern California and the inhabitants ride daily into the city for business or shopping.
It was toward one of these outlying districts that Orissa Kane was now bound. ”

“ Nor was Armour the only one who was so carried away by the phenomena of the times: San Francisco watched Los Angeles with wonder and interest, marveling at all she heard of the magic changes south of the Teháchepi, and asking herself if Los Angeles might not be able to point the way to better methods of city-building?
I have thus endeavored to give a slight idea of the lack of mental poise displayed by our good people in the year 1887, when the crop of millionaires was so great that to be one was no distinction at all. ”

“ Los Angeles was about ninety years old and I about one when we first met, neither of us, I am afraid, taking much notice of the other. For over twenty years San Francisco had been a city, a most interesting and alive city, making so much stir in the world that people forgot that Los Angeles was the older ”

“ Late in August, the paving of Main Street, the first thoroughfare of Los Angeles to be so improved, was begun, much to the relief of our townspeople who had too long borne the inconvenience of dusty and muddy roadways, and who, after heavy rains the winter before, had in no uncertain fashion given utterance to their disgust at the backward conditions. ”

“ Perhaps we had the spleen, but the meaning and beauty of the city was quite as obscured to us as her name is to those having no knowledge of Spanish. Another thing that is even more obscured is why Los Angeles calls herself the City of Hotels? New York might as well call herself the City of Mosques, or Chicago the Citadel of Fortifications, or Colorado Springs the Seaside Resort! ”

“ Los Angeles, however, with all its charms, is only one small corner of Out-of-Door Land. The holy fathers of Mexico and old Spain found that out over a hundred years ago, when they started from Loreto, in Paja California, to make their mission pilgrimage up the Alta California coast. From San Diego and Los Angeles they headed northerly, establishing their mission stations a day’s journey apart. In sheltered valleys, on slopes that look far to seaward, by never-failing water courses, they planted the cross and marked out the boundaries of their holdings. ”