LA has a rich offering for culture vultures. Start with the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, located in the historic area of Little Tokyo, which was transformed by Frank Gehry. The Walt Disney Concert Hall is another Frank Gehry masterpiece, and has a diverse program of concerts and recitals. Another downtown resident on Grand Avenue is The Broad. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, it houses a permanent display from founders Eli and Edythe Broad’s collection alongside a rotating program of temporary exhibitions. The mammoth Los Angeles County Museum of Art Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) takes up an entire corner of Wilshire Boulevard and boasts the title of largest museum in western United States with its extraordinary collection of130,000 objects dating from antiquity to the present. Must-sees include Michael Heizer‘s phenomenal Levitated Mass and Chris Burden‘s lamppost installation Urban Light (pictured above). Then there is the Getty legacy. Firstly, the Getty Villa, modeled after a first-century Roman country house, houses a collection of 44,000 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities. Secondly, the Getty Center, on a hilltop with its splendid gardens and views, has an impressive collection of photography, paintings and sculptures from the 19th century onward.
Los Angeles (US: /lɔːs ˈændʒələs/ (listen) lawss AN-jəl-əs; Spanish: Los Ángeles [los ˈaŋxeles], lit. ’The Angels’), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the most populous city in California, the most populous U.S. state. It is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Southern California. Los Angeles is the second-most populous city in the United States after New York City, with a population of roughly 3.9 million residents within the city limits as of 2020. Los Angeles has a Mediterranean climate, an ethnically and culturally diverse population, and a sprawling metropolitan area. It is perhaps best known as the home of the Hollywood film industry.
The majority of the city proper lies in a basin in Southern California adjacent to the Pacific Ocean in the west and extending partly through the Santa Monica Mountains and north into the San Fernando Valley, with the city bordering the San Gabriel Valley to its east. It covers about 469 square miles (1,210 km2),and is the county seat of Los Angeles County, which is the most populous county in the United States with an estimated 9.86 million residents as of 2022. It is the third-most visited city in the U.S. after New York City and Miami with over 4.6 million visitors as of 2019.
The area that became Los Angeles was originally inhabited by the indigenous Tongva people and later claimed by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo for Spain in 1542. The city was founded on September 4, 1781, under Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, on the village of Yaanga.[16] It became a part of Mexico in 1821 following the Mexican War of Independence. 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. Los Angeles was incorporated as a municipality on April 4, 1850, five months before California achieved statehood. The discovery of oil in the 1890s brought rapid growth to the city. The city was further expanded with the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which delivers water from Eastern California.
Los Angeles has a diverse economy with a broad range of industries. It has one of the busiest container ports in the Americas. In 2018, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had a gross metropolitan product of over $1.0 trillion, making it the city with the third-largest GDP in the world, after New York City and Tokyo. Los Angeles hosted the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympics and will host the 2028 Summer Olympics. More recently, statewide droughts in California have strained both the city’s and Los Angeles County’s water security.
Climate
Los Angeles has a two-season Mediterranean climate of dry summer and very mild winter (Köppen Csb on the coast and most of downtown, Csa near the metropolitan region to the west), but it receives less annual precipitation than most other Mediterranean climates, so it is near the boundary of a semi-arid climate (BSh), though narrowly missing it. Daytime temperatures are generally temperate all year round. In winter, they average around 68 °F (20 °C) giving it a tropical feel although it is a few degrees too cool to be a true tropical climate on average due to cool night temperatures. Los Angeles has plenty of sunshine throughout the year, with an average of only 35 days with measurable precipitation annually.
Temperatures in the coastal basin exceed 90 °F (32 °C) on a dozen or so days in the year, from one day a month in April, May, June and November to three days a month in July, August, October and to five days in September.[100] Temperatures in the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys are considerably warmer. Temperatures are subject to substantial daily swings; in inland areas the difference between the average daily low and the average daily high is over 30 °F (17 °C).[101] The average annual temperature of the sea is 63 °F (17 °C), from 58 °F (14 °C) in January to 68 °F (20 °C) in August. Hours of sunshine total more than 3,000 per year, from an average of 7 hours of sunshine per day in December to an average of 12 in July.
The Los Angeles area is also subject to phenomena typical of a microclimate, causing extreme variations in temperature in close physical proximity to each other. For example, the average July maximum temperature at the Santa Monica Pier is 70 °F (21 °C) whereas it is 95 °F (35 °C) in Canoga Park, 15 miles (24 km) away.[104] The city, like much of the Southern Californian coast, is subject to a late spring/early summer weather phenomenon called “June Gloom”. This involves overcast or foggy skies in the morning that yield to sun by early afternoon.
Religion
According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, Christianity is the most prevalently practiced religion in Los Angeles (65%). The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles is the largest archdiocese in the country.[147] Cardinal Roger Mahony, as the archbishop, oversaw construction of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, which opened in September 2002 in Downtown Los Angeles.
In 2011, the once common, but ultimately lapsed, custom of conducting a procession and Mass in honor of Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, in commemoration of the founding of the City of Los Angeles in 1781, was revived by the Queen of Angels Foundation and its founder Mark Albert, with the support of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles as well as several civic leaders. The recently revived custom is a continuation of the original processions and Masses that commenced on the first anniversary of the founding of Los Angeles in 1782 and continued for nearly a century thereafter.
With 621,000 Jews in the metropolitan area, the region has the second-largest population of Jews in the United States, after New York City. Many of Los Angeles’s Jews now live on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley, though Boyle Heights once had a large Jewish population prior to World War II due to restrictive housing covenants. Major Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods include Hancock Park, Pico-Robertson, and Valley Village, while Jewish Israelis are well represented in the Encino and Tarzana neighborhoods, and Persian Jews in Beverly Hills. Many varieties of Judaism are represented in the greater Los Angeles area, including Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist. The Breed Street Shul in East Los Angeles, built in 1923, was the largest synagogue west of Chicago in its early decades; it is no longer in daily use as a synagogue and is being converted to a museum and community center.[151][152] The Kabbalah Centre also has a presence in the city.
The International Church of the Foursquare Gospel was founded in Los Angeles by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923 and remains headquartered there to this day. For many years, the church convened at Angelus Temple, which, at its construction, was one of the largest churches in the country.
Arts and culture
Los Angeles is often billed as the creative capital of the world because one in every six of its residents works in a creative industry and there are more artists, writers, filmmakers, actors, dancers and musicians living and working in Los Angeles than any other city at any other time in world history. The city is also known for its prolific murals.
Museums and galleries
There are 841 museums and art galleries in Los Angeles County,more museums per capita than any other city in the U.S. Some of the notable museums are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (the largest art museum in the Western United States, the Getty Center (part of the J. Paul Getty Trust, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the Petersen Automotive Museum, the Huntington Library, the Natural History Museum, the Battleship Iowa, The Broad, which houses over 2,000 works of contemporary art and the Museum of Contemporary Art. A significant number of art galleries are on Gallery Row, and tens of thousands attend the monthly Downtown Art Walk there.
City layout
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.
Transportation of Los Angeles
Automobile-dependent Los Angeles has struggled to create a balanced mass transit system. It once took pride in the Pacific Electric Railway (PE), a privately owned trolley system created at the start of the 20th century by real estate and railroad mogul Henry E. Huntington. He intended the PE mainly as a vehicle for developing real estate, and it consistently lost money at the fare boxes. Over time, the PE’s “Big Red Cars,” running on fixed rails, could not rival automobiles for convenience in navigating the suburbs, and they increasingly became the cause of traffic jams and collisions on downtown streets. PE management ignored reformers’ repeated demands for system-wide improvements, while suburban taxpayers rejected proposals for a public buyout. The railroad slowly dismantled its lines, and the last Red Car ran in 1961.
By the late 1940s, Angelenos considered cars—and freeways—as necessities. Although these high-speed, multilane, limited-access highways were developed elsewhere, they reached their full flowering in Los Angeles. The prototype Arroyo Seco Parkway (Pasadena Freeway) had opened on the last day of 1939, in time to carry revelers to New Year’s Day festivities in Pasadena. The more-modern Hollywood Freeway (completed 1948) soon carried nearly 200,000 cars daily, prompting comedian Bob Hope to call it “the biggest parking lot in the world.” The four-level downtown freeway “stack” became the city’s most familiar icon of the built environment.
There followed a frenzy of freeway construction, and by the 1970s the system was largely finished. Although these roads unified and defined the physical structure of Los Angeles, their steadily increasing traffic—with an attendant increase in delays and smog-generating pollution—fueled a renewed interest in public transit. Los Angeles voters rejected several proposals before approving a plan for a new system that, in addition to revamping a dysfunctional bus system, would construct several light-rail lines and a subway. In 1993 the state followed suit by creating the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to build and operate such a system.
Work got off to a slow start owing to a tunnel collapse in Hollywood and delays in funding, but by the beginning of the 21st century the MTA had completed a subway between Union Station downtown and North Hollywood and several of the light-rail lines. Additional subway and rail lines were planned or under construction. The MTA also operates transitway buses (which follow dedicated bus roads, thus avoiding traffic problems) and Metro Rapid express bus service along several corridors across the city in addition to its regular city bus service. Los Angeles and neighbouring counties are also served by a patchwork of shuttle and other municipal bus lines. A separate regional commuter rail service, Metrolink, opened in 1992 and has developed into a network of lines connecting Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, and San Diego counties.
Los Angeles is served by interstate buses and Amtrak intercity passenger rail service, but air travel is by far the most important transport link to outside the region. Los Angeles International Airport (popularly called by its international code, LAX) is one of the world’s largest airports, handling tens of millions of passengers and millions of tons of freight annually. Traffic at LAX keeps rising, but proposals to expand the facility evoke strong opposition from surrounding communities.
In the early 21st century, the combined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach accounted for nearly two-thirds of the West Coast’s foreign import cargo and, in terms of volume, jointly constituted the third largest harbour in the world after Singapore and Hong Kong. Among the main imports were automobiles, gasoline and jet fuel, steel, footwear, lumber, scrap metal, copper ore, and inorganic compounds. The ports provided thousands of jobs and generated considerable tax revenues.
Communications media
The city’s first newspaper, the Star, began weekly publication in 1851. Three decades later the Los Angeles Times published its first issue. Acquired the following year by Harrison Gray Otis, it became the bible for the city’s boosters, conservative Republicans, and antilabour forces. The paper continued in that mode for another generation under the leadership of Otis’s son-in-law, Harry Chandler. For two additional generations, the Times remained rock-ribbed conservative. While Times scion Otis Chandler held the reins of the paper (1960–80), he transformed it into a more liberal and worldly publication, in the process offending most members of the Chandler family. The family’s control of the paper ended in 2000 with the purchase of its parent company by the Tribune Company.
In 1954 the city had four daily papers, but competition was fierce and their number began to shrink. When the Herald-Examiner ceased publication in 1989, the San Fernando Valley’s Daily News remained the Times’s only major competitor. The Long Beach Press-Telegram, the Pasadena Star News, and other regional papers provide good coverage at the local level. La Opinión is the major Spanish-language daily. More than two dozen of the area’s radio stations broadcast in languages other than English. Several Spanish-language television network affiliates hold their own against English-language stations, and programming is broadcast in at least a dozen other languages on other stations.
Commercial radio broadcasting began in Los Angeles in 1922 and reached a milestone with a coast-to-coast transmission of the Rose Bowl game on January 1, 1926. Today more than two dozen of the area’s radio stations broadcast in languages other than English. The first flickering TV images were transmitted to just five television sets on December 23, 1931. By the 1950s the infant industry was strong enough to challenge the movies for a large share of the entertainment market. Several Spanish-language television network affiliates hold their own against English-language channels, and programming is broadcast in at least a dozen other languages on additional channels.
The Entertainment Industry
The media business, with filmmaking as its core, pumps tens of billions of dollars into the Los Angeles economy yearly and directly employs several hundred thousand people. Hollywood produces about half of all the films shot in the United States.
Oscar ceremony
Oscar ceremony
As California historian Kevin Starr pointed out, Hollywood is not only a town and an industry but also a creator of dreams and fantasies that have tremendous cultural impact. The “dream factories” are among the most global of industries, with huge overseas markets and an impact on people in practically every corner of the globe. Disney Studios elevated the cartoon character Mickey Mouse into what was arguably the most universally recognized icon of the 20th century. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ annual Academy Award (Oscar) ceremony broadcast from Los Angeles is said to have a TV audience exceeding one billion people. The industry also draws hordes of tourists into southern California.
The recording industry is another major player in the entertainment economy; virtually all major labels either are based in Los Angeles or have facilities there, and the industry employs thousands of workers. Giant corporations such as the Walt Disney Company, in Burbank, and Universal Studios, in Studio City, are involved in practically all aspects of entertainment, including theme parks.
Theatre
Theatrical performances were held in Los Angeles as early as the 1850s. By the 1890s the city was a stopover for eastern touring companies on their way to San Francisco. Sarah Bernhardt was one of many noted performers who appeared in Los Angeles on the Orpheum Circuit. Of the dozens of theatres built between 1921 and 1930, half could be used interchangeably for film or stage. Unique outdoor amphitheatres, such as the Hollywood Bowl (1916), the Greek Theatre (1929–30), and the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre (1920; rebuilt after a fire and reopened 1931), became and remain popular staging arenas for the performing arts. Los Angeles emerged as the country’s second most important theatre city with the 1967 opening of the 2,000-seat Ahmanson Theatre and the 750-seat Mark Taper Forum at the downtown Music Center. Important small theatres arose and multiplied, nourished by the fact that some one-fourth of the country’s professional actors, writers, and directors live in the region.
Music and dance
The Los Angeles Philharmonic, founded in 1919, now ranks among the country’s finest orchestras. It performs in the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003), designed by Frank O. Gehry. Among the conductors who brought it to world renown were Alfred Wallenstein, Eduard van Beinum, Zubin Mehta, Carlo Maria Giulini, André Previn, and Esa-Pekka Salonen. In the 1930s the classical music scene was enhanced by the arrival of European musicians fleeing Nazism. These included Otto Klemperer, Kurt Weill, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg, who took up residence at UCLA, one of the many local universities with outstanding music programs. Jazz has been played in Los Angeles since the early 1920s, when Dixieland’s Kid Ory led the city’s first African American recording orchestra. It proliferated on Central Avenue, in the heart of an African American community, where Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, and others played in clubs. During the big band era of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, singers such as Jo Stafford, Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como and bands led by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington appeared regularly in local nightclubs, on radio shows, and in movie musicals. In the 1960s southern California became the centre of a surfing craze, which gave rise to the surf music pioneered by Dick Dale and others. Some teenage rock and rollers from Hawthorne—the Beach Boys—expanded on this genre and created a sensation, and since then Los Angeles has been home to a varied and thriving pop music scene. In the mid- to late 1960s the country rock style of Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers coexisted with the diverse musical styles of such groups as the Doors and Frank Zappa and his group the Mothers of Invention.
The Los Angeles Opera opened in 1985, and the city’s first resident ballet company, Los Angeles Ballet, had its first season in 2006–07. Visiting companies regularly perform at the Music Center, and Los Angeles-based companies present performances of modern, tap, jazz, ethnic, and experimental dance.
Literature
The genre of southern California fiction was established with Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884), which created an enduring romantic mystique surrounding Native Americans and the missions. In the genre of Hollywood novels, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon (1941) are among the best-known such works. Los Angeles has often been lampooned, as in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (1948), a biting social satire about a cemetery, and Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939). Another variety of Los Angeles fiction was the hard-boiled detective novel. James Cain, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Walter Mosley depicted Los Angeles as having two faces: one smiling, sunny, and optimistic and the other ugly, corrupt, and violent. Also among the myriad novels set in Los Angeles are Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970), Carolyn See’s Making History (1991), and Janet Fitch’s White Oleander (1999). The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, held annually since 1996, draws tens of thousands of participants to the USC campus and constitutes the country’s largest such literary event.
Sports and recreation
Angelenos are avid fans of nearly every imaginable sport. Four milestones in the city’s evolving sports culture were hosting the 1932 Summer Olympic Games, the arrival of the Dodgers professional baseball team (formerly of Brooklyn, New York) in 1958 and the Lakers men’s professional basketball team (formerly of Minneapolis, Minnesota) in 1960, and again hosting the Summer Games in 1984. Other regional professional teams include the Rams and the Chargers (football), the Angels (baseball), the Kings and the Ducks (ice hockey), the Clippers (men’s basketball), the Sparks (women’s basketball), and the LA Galaxy and Los Angeles FC (football [soccer]). In addition to professional franchises, Los Angeles also supports numerous amateur events and high school and college rivalries. The many sports venues—the Rose Bowl, Memorial Coliseum, Dodger Stadium, Inglewood Forum, and Staples Center—also attest to the city’s high interest in sports.
The city of Los Angeles has few neighbourhood parks but does possess the world’s largest urban park, Griffith Park, covering some 6.5 square miles (17 square km) of rugged mountainous terrain. Exposition Park, Hancock Park, and Elysian Park are among other popular city recreation areas. Of the regional parks, the most important is the sprawling 239-square-mile (619-square-km) Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (1978), the largest such preserve in an American metropolis. Jointly managed by the U.S. National Park Service, the California Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the area includes some existing homes but restricts permanent new construction to protect the natural environment. Regional beaches attract millions of visitors yearly, requiring the services of as many as several hundred lifeguards on a given summer’s day.
Los Angeles revolutionized the theme park industry. From his Burbank studio, movie mogul Walt Disney created a “Magic Kingdom” that would extend the life of his popular cartoon characters into an amusement park. He opened Disneyland in Orange county in 1955 to instant acclaim. Disney’s venture inspired the creation of Universal Studios Hollywood, a theme park in Studio City that also draws millions of visitors yearly.