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The city of Los Angeles is composed of a series of widely dispersed settlements loosely connected to downtown. It certainly does not conform to the popular Chicago school of urban theory of the 1920s and later, which held that a downtown was the main focus of community life, with its influence unfolding in a series of concentric circles out into the hinterlands.
Apart from those who work there, the vast majority of Angelenos have little connection with downtown in their daily lives and are content to work, shop, and pursue recreation in the suburbs that stretch out in all directions. Among the outlying districts that lie within the city limits are Hollywood, located northwest of downtown; Encino, Van Nuys, and North Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley; Century City, Westwood, and Venice on the West Side; San Pedro and Wilmington in the harbour area; and Boyle Heights just east of the river. Some of the newer outlying communities, such as Warner Center, have the appearance of self-contained mini-cities.
The main links connecting downtown and the suburbs are the famed Los Angeles freeways, which spread throughout the region in a vast network of concrete ribbons. A drive in any direction presents a variety of landscapes. Some roads cross the Los Angeles River, which appears in the guise of a huge, cement-lined flood-control channel. The mountains and their steep-walled canyons are lined with shrubbery, grass, and occasional houses. Motorists glimpse some dramatic vistas; for example, a nighttime view of the San Fernando Valley from the Mulholland summit of the San Diego Freeway. In general, however, there is little to distinguish one community from another as viewed from the freeways. Cars and trucks move in solid masses, streaming steadily along at rooftop level through single-story residential areas, shopping strips, and malls.
There is no single manufacturing area in Los Angeles. The typical industrial establishment occupies a single-story building next to a large parking lot and can be found alongside a railroad line or near a major road or freeway that is accessed by giant trucks. All of this tends to illustrate why writer Dorothy Parker is said to have once described Los Angeles as “seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.”
Anyone familiar with a city like Chicago and its grid-based street pattern may justifiably believe that Los Angeles was never planned. The English architectural writer Reyner Banham called planning in Los Angeles “a self-canceling concept.” Yet the Spanish colonists had established the original pueblo in 1781 according to a plan laid out in the 16th-century Laws of the Indies, and the county later maintained a general grid for outlying tracts, roads, and highways. An imaginative and extensive regional planning proposal to preserve open space, completed in 1924 by the planning firm headed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., failed to gather enough support to slow the powerful tendencies toward urban sprawl and the preference for automobiles. Still, the original designs of smaller planned communities in outlying areas such as Westwood and Palos Verdes Estates have achieved acclaim.
Downtown Los Angeles brings hundreds of thousands of Angelenos to its government and commercial offices and its cultural facilities. It has distinctive subareas—Civic Center, Music Center, Spring Street, Broadway, Chinatown, Olvera Street, Little Tokyo, Library Square, and the Staples Center. Although these areas are crowded during workdays, most are nearly deserted in the evenings. Bunker Hill has by and large the tallest, newest, and most-imposing buildings in the city. Downtown has never housed many factories and lost most of its major department stores, theatres, restaurants, and residences when the freeways were constructed; it also has relatively few residents. The wholesale marts for garments, jewelry, toys, furniture, flowers, and produce, however, are among the busiest enterprises anywhere in southern California.
Since the 1980s, the city has taken significant steps to redevelop downtown by increasing housing stock, accommodating new recreational and cultural activities, and inviting pedestrian activity. Loft conversions have created new condominium living spaces. The river is seen as a major recreational asset. Downtown’s greatest deficiencies are its large Skid Row area (sometimes called Central City East) and its lack of housing for middle- and lower-income families and the shops and amenities that make life agreeable at street level.
People
The relative positions of ethnic and racial groups in Los Angeles have shifted significantly with time. When the city began under Spanish rule in 1781, whites (i.e., people of European ancestry) were in the minority. Twenty-six of the 44 original settlers were of African, Native American, or mixed ancestry. From the late 19th to the early 20th century, whites became dominant; so many white Midwesterners arrived in Los Angeles during that time that it was nicknamed “the seacoast of Iowa.” With the exception of some eastern European Jews who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, southern California drew relatively few of the immigrant groups from eastern and southern Europe that populated the cities of the eastern United States. With the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the subsequent influx of Mexican agricultural workers in California, the nonwhite population began to increase. In the 1970s Los Angeles attracted many other ethnic groups, and in the course of the subsequent decades it became one of the most diverse metropolises in the country, if not in the world.
In the early years of the 21st century, California reached the status of a “minority-majority state”—one in which the combined population of minorities exceeds the majority population. Los Angeles county has the largest Hispanic (the term Latino is also used in southern California), Asian, and Native American populations of any county in the United States. African Americans make up about one-tenth of the total population; in the early 21st century their numbers declined somewhat as middle-class families abandoned the traditionally African American neighbourhoods for newer suburbs as far away as San Bernardino county. Compton and Inglewood, which once had African American majorities, have become predominantly Latino.
The shifts among the major ethnic groups have been the result of both natural increase (higher birth rates than death rates) and immigration. Since the mid-1960s, federal immigration practices have ceased giving preference to Europeans and have favoured immigrants with family already in the country and those having higher education and skills. Meanwhile, illegal immigration has increased dramatically from rural areas of Mexico and Central America, where the birth rate has been relatively high. Both legal and illegal immigration have contributed to the county’s having the largest concentration of Mexicans outside Mexico. People from more than 140 countries now reside in Los Angeles county. Los Angeles has more Koreans, Filipinos, Iranians, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Cambodians living outside their native countries than anywhere else in the world and a greater concentration of Native Americans—most of whom were born in states other than California—than any other county in the United States.
The overall population of the city and county may have become more diverse, but, for low-income Latinos, African Americans, and Asians in the central city, housing has remained largely segregated. Families of all groups who could afford to do so usually have moved to the suburbs to find better homes and to escape crime-ridden neighbourhoods.
More than 90 languages other than English are spoken in homes around Los Angeles, most notably Spanish, Vietnamese, Hmong, Cantonese, Tagalog, Korean, Armenian, Russian, Farsi, Cambodian, and Hebrew. In a given week, radio listeners can hear perhaps a dozen or more different foreign languages on the air, and newspaper readers may choose from more than 50 foreign-language newspapers published in the county.
The religious culture of southern California is equally diverse. Long an almost exclusively Roman Catholic town, Los Angeles began receiving many Protestants and some Jews in the late 19th century. Small sects proliferated in the 1920s. While most were short-lived and had narrow appeal, at least one gained vast influence. William J. Seymour, an African American preacher, created the Azusa Street revival in 1906 and sparked the Pentecostal religious movement that, for the next century, would spread like wildfire throughout the Western Hemisphere and other parts of the world. In 1921 the prominent California newspaperman and poet John Steven McGroarty wrote, “Los Angeles is the most celebrated of all incubators of new creeds, codes of ethics, philosophies—no day passes without the birth of something of this nature never heard of before.” Roman Catholics still constitute the most numerous mainline religious group in Los Angeles, with about 100 parishes. Various Protestant sects, including Evangelicals, have come to outnumber members of mainline denominations. There is also a significant number of Mormons. The African Methodist Episcopal church remains a stalwart of the African American community. Some 600,000 Jews live in Los Angeles, and Eastern Orthodox congregations are active in the growing Greek, Russian, and Armenian communities. Islam’s many adherents in Los Angeles include immigrants from Africa and Indonesia. Buddhists and Hindus number in the tens of thousands in Los Angeles county. Smaller non-Judeo-Christian religions, such as the Bahaʾi faith, have also proliferated.
Economy of Los Angeles
Southern California’s regional economy is huge, diversified, and in a perpetual state of flux. Agriculture became important after the first citrus orchards were planted by Spanish missionaries in the 1700s. Manufacturing has also been important. The county features a wide range of financial and business services, high-technology manufacturing, and craft and fashion industries such as jewelry, clothing, toys, music, and, most famously, movies. If the Los Angeles metropolis were a country, it would have a gross national product exceeding those of all but a handful of the most prosperous countries in the world.
After a long period of growth in the 20th century, the local economy experienced a recession in the 1990s. A strong recovery began mid-decade, and the economy showed considerable resilience, particularly in the high-tech area. By the end of the century the fastest-growing sectors for employment were construction, transportation, public utilities, finance, insurance, real estate, and government services.
The global economy has created bewildering crosscurrents in the regional job market since the 1980s. As less-profitable manufacturing plants have closed or have moved to other countries, higher-paying and more labour-intensive jobs have declined and lower-paying jobs have increased. Local employers rely increasingly on immigrant labour. Sweatshop conditions exist in some clothing manufacturing and other low-wage industries.
From the 1930s to the ’50s, the labour movement achieved considerable strength in the auto, aircraft, movie, trucking, longshoring, and food handling industries. Then, after a gradual membership decline in those activities, unions organized teachers, nurses, and other service employees. The gains continued in the 1990s and early 21st century, when the AFL-CIO embraced immigrant workers (especially those engaged in janitorial and hotel work), advanced the policy of a living wage for city employees, and took an active role in local politics.
Agriculture
In generations past, agriculturalists nurtured bountiful orchards of oranges, lemons, apricots, and peaches, planted broad fields of vegetables, and raised dairy cattle. By the mid-20th century Los Angeles was the country’s most productive agricultural county. Most of the county’s orchards and farmland have succumbed to urban sprawl, but agriculture continues to play a role in the regional economy. Principal crops include nursery and greenhouse plants, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and hay.
Manufacturing
When Edward L. Doheny discovered oil under a private residence in 1892, he set off an oil-drilling spree that made Los Angeles one of the world’s major petroleum fields. Oil fostered industrialism. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, some of that city’s manufacturers moved their operations south, where wages were lower. During World War II the federal government poured vast sums of money into plant expansions. Los Angeles produced enough warplanes and merchant vessels to earn the title “Pittsburgh of the West.” During the Cold War, Los Angeles was, arguably, the centre of what became known as the military-industrial complex, notably in the aerospace industry. Partly through a federal housing loan program for service veterans, the construction industry reached its peak activity in the decade after 1945, when developers bulldozed as many as 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares) of farmland daily to build new homes, shopping malls, and offices. Corporations based in the eastern United States saw the advantage of opening branch offices—or even headquarters—in Los Angeles.
Gradually, many of the leading industries of the first part of the 20th century—fish packing, shipbuilding, airplane and auto assembly, oil production, steel production, and tire and glassmaking—diminished or vanished. The newer plants feature fewer employees and smaller assembly lines, an increased involvement with electronics and computers, and alliances with laboratories such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Despite these changes, in the 1990s most goods manufactured in California were produced within a 60-mile (100-km) radius of the Los Angeles Civic Center. The onset of recession in the 1990s—brought on in large part by considerably reduced post-Cold War military spending—shut down many of the leading aerospace facilities, causing severe unemployment and disruption in long-established blue-collar communities.
Finance and other services
The service sector is the primary component of the Los Angeles economy. Business and professional management services, health services and research, and finance are important, as are trade and tourism. The bulk of the workforce is now employed in services such as retail, restaurants and hotels, government agencies, and schools and colleges. The single largest private employer in the city is the University of Southern California (USC).
Supermarkets, regional shopping malls, and retail strip malls are aspects of retail commerce closely identified with Los Angeles, particularly in the era of the automobile and related suburban expansion. When the city extended Wilshire Boulevard from downtown to the Santa Monica beach in the 1920s and ’30s, the street became the first major shopping artery to cater specifically to customers arriving by car. The first regional mall was the Crenshaw Shopping Center (now called Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza), which opened in 1947. Suburban retail expansion came at the expense of downtown department stores, but downtown still has Broadway, which is frequented mostly by Latino working-class families and is the busiest retail street west of the city of Chicago. With its trade ties to countries in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles is now considered by some to be the crossroads of the Pacific Rim. More than 85 countries maintain trade commissions in Los Angeles, while the Los Angeles Convention Center features key trade shows for national marketers of cars, electronic gear, high-tech products, motorcycles, pleasure boats, and recreational vehicles, among other products.
Los Angeles became a leading financial centre early in the 20th century in conjunction with strong activity in oil drilling, agriculture, and land development. A major milestone was reached in 1920, when Los Angeles’s bank clearings exceeded those even of San Francisco. In later decades more than a billion shares of stock were traded annually on the Pacific Stock Exchange. That institution closed its Los Angeles offices in 2001, redirecting local investors toward electronic trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
