Los Angeles

Los Angeles is the largest city of the Commonwealth of California, the seat of the Commonwealth’s Governor, the Realm’s principal Pacific port, and the only city in the United Kingdom of America that contains a chartered quarter. It holds approximately 4.1 million people within the city boundary and approximately 13.5 million in the metropolitan region that surrounds it.

It is a Latin American city and has never pretended otherwise. It was founded in 1781 as a Spanish pueblo, it was Mexican before it was American, Spanish is ordinary in its civic life rather than tolerated in it, and the openness on this point is the most striking difference between Los Angeles and the other great cities of the Realm. Its bilingualism is not a policy. It is a continuity that annexation interrupted and did not end.

The city is governed by a Council elected by ward, under a Leader of the Council who is the working head of the city’s government, with a Lord Mayor who is ceremonial, annual and largely decorative. The arrangement follows the British municipal pattern rather than the strong-mayor form used in several eastern polities, and it is the reason Los Angeles has no single dominant civic figure and has not had one within living memory.

The Governor of California lives here and does not govern. The Commonwealth’s head of state is resident at Government House in Los Angeles while the State Chancellor and the Legislature sit at Sacramento, two hundred and fifty miles north. The separation was a bargain: the south accepted a northern capital on the condition that the Crown’s representative sat in the south, and the city has spent a century and a half discovering what that bargain was worth. It received the ceremony because Sacramento received the power, and everybody involved knows it.

Its water comes from somewhere else. The city drew the Owens Valley through an aqueduct from 1913, having bought the valley’s water rights through agents acting under other names, and it emptied a farming county to fill a basin. It later drew the Colorado under a division of the river that allocated more water than the river carries. Los Angeles has never in its history drunk its own rain, and the two acquisitions that made it possible are the subject of the article’s longest section and its plainest judgements.

The economy runs on the port, the screen, aerospace, logistics and the enormous service sector that a metropolitan region of this size generates. The port complex at Los Angeles Harbour and Long Beach is the Realm’s primary Pacific gateway and the waterfront’s labour politics are a substantial part of the city’s own. The screen industry operates from six studio lots held under royal charters granted between 1924 and 1937, which cannot be amended by the companies holding them, which carry an obligatory deposit of prints, and which have consequently fixed both the studios and the Realm’s film archive physically in this city.

The article states four things the city did plainly, in the section on the failings: the repatriation drives that expelled citizens along with migrants; the clearance of the ravine communities for housing that was never built and land that went to a ball club; the restrictive covenants that drew a map the city still lives on; and a police force whose conduct has been the subject of five decades of inquiries that changed very little. The Brooklyn Avenue rising of August 1971 followed from the last of these, and the Governor’s response to it is the most consequential thing any Governor resident in this city has ever done.

Name

The city was founded on 4 September 1781 as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, the town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels, and the full form has been contracted, disputed and reconstructed by antiquarians ever since without any of them agreeing on what the founding party actually wrote down.

Ordinary usage is Los Angeles. The abbreviation L.A. is universal in speech and is avoided in the city’s own official documents, which use the full name with a consistency that visitors find faintly comic. The demonym is Angeleno, in both English and Spanish, and it is one of the few American city demonyms that passed from Spanish into English rather than the other way.

The pronunciation is contested and the contest is old. The hard g of Ángeles was ordinary in the city until the middle of the twentieth century, survived longest among Spanish speakers and among old Anglo families, and was displaced in general use by the soft form. The city’s own broadcasters use the soft form; its Spanish-language broadcasters use the Spanish; and the Council’s standing orders, which are printed in both languages, sidestep the question by never spelling anything phonetically.

History

The Tongva basin

The basin was held for several thousand years by the Tongva, whose villages stood along the rivers and the coast and whose largest, Yaanga, was on the ground the pueblo was afterwards laid out beside.

Spanish settlement and the mission system dispossessed them, and the population collapsed through disease, forced labour and the destruction of the food economy the villages had run on. The Tongva were not extinguished and the city long behaved as though they had been. Federal recognition came late and partially, the community’s principal sites are under freeway and rail, and the acknowledgement now read at civic occasions in Los Angeles was adopted in the present century after forty years of asking.

The pueblo and Mexican Los Angeles

The pueblo was founded in 1781 by eleven families recruited from Sonora and Sinaloa. Most of the founding settlers were of African, Indigenous or mixed descent, which the city’s own nineteenth-century histories omitted and its twentieth-century ones restored, and the founding roster is now read aloud annually at the plaza.

Under Mexican government from 1821 the town was the largest settlement in Alta California and the seat of its politics, and the ranchos of the surrounding basin were held by Californio families whose descendants are still here. The Californio period gave the city its street grid at the plaza, its water rights doctrine, its place names and the legal category of the pueblo’s own claim to the river, which turned out to be the most valuable thing anybody in the basin possessed.

Annexation and the Anglo city

California entered the United Kingdom of America by the settlement that followed the Mexican-American War, and the Californio landholders received guarantees of title that were honoured in the text and dismantled in the courts.

The mechanism was procedural rather than dramatic. A rancho title had to be confirmed through a commission and then through litigation, the process ran for years, the costs were payable in cash by families whose wealth was in land and cattle, and the land was sold to pay the lawyers. The guarantees were kept and the land changed hands anyway, which is the pattern the Register records elsewhere in the March and the Commonwealth and records here because Los Angeles is where it happened fastest.

The Anglo city that grew after 1870 was built by railway promotion, land speculation and the most sustained advertising campaign any American city has ever conducted on its own behalf. It sold climate. It was extremely successful and it created the city’s central problem, which is that a place marketed to the whole continent as a garden had neither the water nor the ground to be one.

The water, and the Owens Valley

The city took the Owens Valley, and the article states the method rather than the outcome.

Los Angeles had outgrown its river by the first years of the twentieth century. Its answer was two hundred and thirty miles of aqueduct from the eastern Sierra, and the water it carried belonged to a farming county with its own irrigation districts, orchards and towns.

The rights were acquired between 1905 and 1913 by agents acting under other names. Men presenting themselves as ranchers and as federal reclamation officials bought land and the water attached to it, from farmers who did not know who was buying or why, in a sequence deliberately arranged so that no seller could see the pattern until the pattern was complete. The federal reclamation project the valley had been promised was withdrawn in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained. The aqueduct opened in 1913 and the valley went dry.

The orchards died. The towns emptied. The lake at the foot of the valley became a dust bed that blew alkali across the eastern Sierra for the rest of the century, and the eventual dust mitigation was ordered by a court, paid for by the city, and completed eighty years after the harm.

Compensation was paid, late, partially, and to fewer people than were injured. The city’s own position for sixty years was that every purchase had been lawful and every price fair, which was true of the individual transactions and false about the enterprise, and the Register regards the distinction as the whole of the matter. Los Angeles bought the Owens Valley the way it was legal to buy it and took it the way it was not possible to buy it.

The Colorado, and the water that is not there

The city’s second source is the Colorado, drawn under an interstate division of the river agreed in the 1920s on flow measurements taken during the wettest sequence of years in the record.

The division allocated more water than the river carries, and has done so every year since. The Realm has known this since the 1950s, the polities that signed it have declined to reopen it because every one of them would lose, and Los Angeles is one of the largest holders of an entitlement that is partly notional. The shortage is managed by conservation, by recycling, by buying agricultural water in the interior at prices that are politically explosive there, and by not discussing the arithmetic.

The city has since become genuinely good at using less. Per-head consumption has fallen substantially over four decades while the population rose, the recycling and stormwater capture programmes are the most advanced in the Realm, and none of it alters the fact that a metropolitan region of thirteen and a half million people sits in a semi-arid basin on other people’s rivers.

The interurban city

Los Angeles is a rail city with freeways rather than a freeway city with a railway, and the reason is a charter.

The interurban network built from the 1890s was the largest electric railway system in the world, running from the mountains to the sea and from the valley to the harbour, and the pattern of the modern metropolitan region is the pattern those lines laid down. Its trunk routes were operated under a charter granted by the Commonwealth, and a charter in this Realm is a serious instrument: it confers advantages on terms the holder cannot unilaterally alter, and it is granted with conditions attached.

The conditions included service obligations on the trunk lines. When the operating companies sought to abandon them in the 1940s and 1950s, they found that they could not simply stop, that abandonment required the Commonwealth’s consent, that consent required hearings, and that the hearings produced a public record which made abandonment politically impossible in exactly the corridors where it would have been most profitable.

The branches went. Dozens of local lines were abandoned in the two decades after the war and their rights of way were sold, and the loss is real and is regretted. The trunks survived, were taken into public ownership through the 1960s, were electrified and rebuilt from the 1970s, and carry the metropolitan region’s spine today. The freeways were built anyway, at enormous cost and with the same destruction of neighbourhoods, and the city has both.

The result is a metropolitan region that is polycentric, moderately dense along its corridors and thin between them, and that moves a far larger share of its population by rail than its reputation abroad suggests. The reputation is forty years out of date and Angelenos have stopped correcting it.

The studios and the charters

The film industry established itself in the basin from about 1910 for the light, the varied ground within a day’s drive, and the distance from the eastern patent litigation.

Six of the studios obtained royal charters between 1924 and 1937, and the consequences for the city are treated in their own section below. In summary: a chartered studio cannot alter its charter alone, the charters attach conditions to the lots and to the archives, and the studio district of Los Angeles is consequently a physical place with statutory protections rather than a brand attached to an industry that has moved elsewhere.

The repatriation drives

Between 1929 and 1936 the city and the county organised the removal of Mexicans and Mexican Americans from Los Angeles, and a substantial proportion of those removed were citizens of the Realm.

The drives were conducted through public raids designed to frighten, through the removal of relief from anyone of Mexican appearance, and through trains chartered by the county and paid for out of public funds on the reasoning that a one-way fare cost less than a year of assistance. Families were separated. Citizens were expelled from their own country, and no procedure existed by which a person could establish a right to remain because no procedure had been thought necessary.

The numbers are contested and the lowest credible estimate for the county runs to tens of thousands. The Commonwealth apologised in the present century. The city has not, in terms, having passed a resolution of regret that its own Latin American members voted against on the ground that it acknowledged an era rather than an act.

The ravine

Three communities stood in the ravine north of downtown: La Loma, Palo Verde and Bishop, Mexican-American, poor, self-built, and holding some three hundred families.

They were cleared in the early 1950s under a public housing programme, by purchase where owners would sell and by condemnation where they would not, on the promise that the residents would have first claim on the housing that replaced them. The housing was cancelled. The programme was abandoned in the political campaign against public building, the land stood empty, the last families were carried out of their houses by deputies, and the site was afterwards conveyed to a baseball club relocating from Brooklyn.

The Dodgers play there still, and the article records both facts in the same paragraph because the city does not. The club is a genuine civic institution with four generations of Angeleno attachment behind it, and the ground it plays on was taken from people who were promised something else and given nothing.

The scandal produced the Realm’s modern relocation regime. The rules that now govern any senior club proposing to move, requiring disclosed finances, a funded local alternative, worker and supporter consultation, municipal hearings, heritage and naming provisions, compensation and independent appeal, were written in response to what happened in the ravine and in Brooklyn, and they were written by people who said so. Every relocation in the Realm since has been conducted under a framework that exists because of these three hundred families.

They received nothing, and the framework is not compensation. The Register states that plainly, because the durable achievement and the unremedied wrong are the same event and the city has spent seventy years mentioning only the first.

The Brooklyn Avenue rising, 1971

On the evening of 12 August 1971 officers of the city police killed a young man on Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights, and the eastside rose for six days.

The killing was of a kind the neighbourhood had been complaining about for twenty years, through channels that existed and produced findings and changed nothing. What followed was six days of burning and looting concentrated in the eastside and along the commercial corridors, thirty-four dead, the great majority of them killed by police and guardsmen, more than a thousand injured and some eight hundred buildings destroyed or damaged.

The Governor of California was three miles away, which is the fact that distinguishes this from every comparable episode in the Realm. A head of state resident in Sacramento can receive reports, consult the Chancellor and wait. A head of state resident in the city could hear it.

On the third day the Governor went to Boyle Heights, without police escort, without the Chancellor’s agreement and without any constitutional authority to do anything at all, and walked the length of Brooklyn Avenue with the parish clergy and a delegation of residents. The burning stopped within thirty-six hours. What the walk did is genuinely disputed and the Register does not settle it: the Commonwealth’s own inquiry concluded that the rising had been exhausting itself independently, the community’s account is that the walk was the first time anybody with a title had come, and both are supported by the evidence available.

What the walk did afterwards is not disputed and is the reason this section is written as it is. It became the image of the rising. It was photographed, reproduced, taught, and cited for fifty years as evidence that the Commonwealth’s constitutional arrangements had worked. The inquiry that followed made eleven recommendations on police discipline, of which two were implemented. The city acquired a photograph instead of a reckoning, and the photograph was better publicity than the reckoning would have been.

The Valley earthquake, 1988

An earthquake of magnitude 6.9 struck beneath the San Fernando Valley on 17 January 1988, killing seventy-one people, destroying two hospitals and a section of elevated freeway, and damaging property on a scale that took a decade to repair.

It rewrote the Commonwealth’s building code and, through the code, the codes of every seismic polity in the Realm. Unreinforced masonry retrofitting became compulsory and was enforced. Hospital and school standards were rebuilt from the ground. The freeway structures were redesigned and the redesign was applied retrospectively at very great cost.

The reconstruction money went to the valley. It did not go to the eastside, which had been damaged less severely and was in worse condition to begin with, and the seventeen years between the rising and the earthquake are the period in which the city’s two halves diverged most sharply. The Register notes the sequence without asserting a motive, because the allocation followed the damage assessments and the damage assessments followed the property values.

The San Andreas earthquake, 2028

At seventeen minutes past eight in the morning on Thursday 2 November 2028 the southern San Andreas fault ruptured, in an earthquake of magnitude 7.8, the event the Commonwealth’s hazard assessments had described for forty years as a matter of when. The rupture began beneath the Coachella Valley, near the north shore of the Salton Sea in the March of Arizona, and ran about three hundred kilometres north-west through the San Gorgonio and Cajon passes along the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, and the shaking lasted for well over a minute. The fault passes about fifty kilometres from the city centre; the soft sediment of the basin carried the shaking into the city and strengthened it.

The worst of the damage was in the Inland Empire, the San Gabriel Valley and the Coachella Valley, and across the basin in older concrete buildings that the code of 1988 had not reached. Fires burned through the first day in the east of the city. Interstates 10 and 15 and the railway through Cajon were cut at the passes, the airport at Ontario was closed by a crack across its main runway, power failed across the basin, and the three aqueducts that cross the fault, which bring the city most of its water, were broken, so that the city drew on the reservoirs on its own side for the first days. The dead had not been counted when the first bulletins were issued.

The Prime Minister, Lord Whitlock, declared a federal emergency in California and the March shortly after noon, New Westminster time, on the requests of both governments; the Navy sailed from San Diego, the Marines came up from Camp Pendleton, and the Army sent engineers. Search-and-rescue teams came overnight from Japan, Great Britain and the German Empire, and the government accepted a team offered by Russia. The Governor, Teresa Marchetti, remained at Government House throughout. That evening George V, who had succeeded two days before at fifteen, issued the first message of his reign, four sentences in his own words, ending: “Thank you to every one of them.”

Geography

The basin

Los Angeles occupies a coastal plain enclosed on three sides by mountains and open on the fourth to the Pacific, and the enclosure governs everything from the air to the price of land.

The San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains close the basin to the north and east, rising steeply and abruptly from the plain to over three thousand metres. The Santa Monica mountains run east to west through the middle of the city, separating the basin proper from the San Fernando Valley behind them. The Palos Verdes hills close the south-western corner. The rivers, the Los Angeles and the San Gabriel, run south across the plain to the sea and are dry for much of the year and dangerous for the rest.

The Los Angeles River is a concrete channel for most of its length, encased after the floods of the 1930s, and the long argument about restoring parts of it to something like a river is one of the city’s characteristic disputes: expensive, aesthetically appealing, and complicated by the fact that the channel does the job it was built to do.

Climate and air

The climate is Mediterranean, mild, dry through the long summer and wet in a short and unreliable winter, with the coastal margin cooler and the valleys much hotter.

The basin traps air, and the combination of enclosure, sunlight and a temperature inversion produced the worst urban air quality in the Realm through the middle of the twentieth century. The city could not see its own mountains for months at a time. Regulation from the 1960s, applied to vehicles, to industry and eventually to the port and its trucks, has improved it enormously and has not finished: the basin’s geography means Los Angeles must run cleaner than other cities to achieve the same air, and it does, and it still fails the standard on a substantial number of days each year.

Fire and earthquake

The chaparral of the surrounding hills burns, and burns harder as the climate dries. Fire seasons that were autumn events are now most of the year, the Santa Ana winds that drive the worst of them are unchanged, and the urban edge where houses meet brush has expanded for eighty years into ground that was always going to burn.

The basin sits across a system of faults and the ground beneath much of it is soft sediment that amplifies shaking. The 1988 earthquake was not the largest the region can produce, and on 2 November 2028 the larger one came. The Commonwealth’s own hazard assessments had described a considerably worse event on the southern San Andreas as a matter of when, the city’s preparation is better than any comparable region’s and is not sufficient, and municipal budgeting for it is a permanent and unpopular line.

Government

The city and its charter

Los Angeles is a municipal corporation of the Commonwealth of California, holding its powers under a city charter granted by the Commonwealth and amendable by it.

The city is a creature of Sacramento and says so with resentment. Its charter can be altered by Commonwealth legislation, its taxing powers are constrained by Commonwealth statute, and a metropolitan region holding a third of the Commonwealth’s population is administered under an instrument its own electorate cannot amend alone. The complaint is old, is entirely justified, and has never assembled a majority in the Legislature, because the interior members who would have to supply that majority have no interest whatever in strengthening the basin.

The Lord Mayor

The Lord Mayor of Los Angeles is the city’s ceremonial head, chosen annually by the Council from among its own members, and holds no executive authority.

The office receives visiting heads of government, confers the freedom of the city, chairs civic occasions, opens things, and represents Los Angeles at Commonwealth and federal ceremonial. Arturo Rosales holds it at present. The pattern is British municipal rather than American, it was adopted deliberately in the charter revision of the 1920s in preference to a strong mayoralty, and the reason given at the time was that a directly elected executive mayor of a city this size would be a rival to the Commonwealth’s own government.

Whether that was prudence or a successful piece of Sacramento politics is disputed. The effect is not disputed: Los Angeles has no single dominant civic figure, has not had one in living memory, and is the largest city in the Realm whose name most Angelenos could not attach to a head of government.

The Council and its Leader

Executive authority rests with the Council of the City of Los Angeles, elected by ward, and with the Leader of the Council, who commands its majority and is the working head of the city’s government.

Grace Okamoto has been Leader since 2026. The office runs the city’s departments, sets its budget subject to Commonwealth constraint, and negotiates with Sacramento, with the county, with the port authority and with the special districts, which is the greater part of the work. A Leader of the Council in Los Angeles governs by assembling agreement among bodies none of which she controls.

The ward system produces councillors with deep local followings and narrow horizons, and the standing criticism of the city’s government is that it is a federation of wards conducting a permanent negotiation rather than an administration with a programme.

The Governor of California

The Governor of California lives in Los Angeles and governs nothing.

The Commonwealth’s head of state is resident at Government House in the city, assents to legislation passed at Sacramento, certifies constitutional compliance through the Public Reasons system, holds the emergency role if the State Chancellor is incapacitated, and maintains a constitutional voice distinct from the ministry’s. Teresa Marchetti holds the office at present, appointed on the Chancellor’s proposal, approved by the Crown, and confirmed by the Commonwealth’s voters, a legitimacy chain no other executive in the Realm can reproduce.

The arrangement was a bargain of the nineteenth century. The southern counties accepted Sacramento as the capital on the condition that the Crown’s representative sat in the south, and both halves of the deal have held.

What the city got was ceremony. Government House supplies the openings, the honours, the state funerals, the visits, the constitutional set pieces and the standing presence of the Crown in the largest population centre of the Commonwealth. What it did not get was any share of the government, which is at Sacramento with the Chancellor and the Legislature, and the distance is two hundred and fifty miles and is felt.

The city’s own view of the arrangement is that it is a consolation prize. It is said in exactly those words by councillors, by the Commonwealth’s own southern members, and occasionally by Governors after leaving office. The Register records the judgement and notes that it undervalues one thing, which is that a resident head of state can arrive somewhere within an hour, and that on one occasion in 1971 this mattered a great deal and was afterwards used to avoid doing anything else.

The county, the districts and the port

A great deal of what an outsider would expect the city to run is run by somebody else.

The County of Los Angeles administers health, welfare, the jails, the coroner and a large body of services across the whole metropolitan area including territory the city does not govern. A tier of special districts runs water, flood control, transit and air quality across boundaries drawn for each function separately. The Harbour Authority runs the port under its own board.

The consequence is that responsibility in Los Angeles is genuinely hard to locate, that a resident with a complaint may have to identify which of five elected bodies is answerable before making it, and that the city’s government is frequently blamed for outcomes it has no power over and occasionally escapes blame for outcomes it does.

Policing

The Los Angeles Police Department is a major civic institution with its own culture, its own political weight and its own history, and the article states the last of these plainly.

Its conduct has been the subject of formal inquiry after the repatriation drives, after the ravine clearances, after the 1971 rising, and on four occasions since. The inquiries have reached consistent findings and have been implemented in part. The 1971 commission made eleven recommendations on discipline and complaint of which two were adopted; the pattern has recurred; and the Council’s own oversight body has powers of report and none of removal.

Reform since the present century has been real and is measured against a very low base. The department is more accountable, more scrutinised and more diverse than at any previous point, and the complaint records for the eastside and the harbour communities remain what they have been for seventy years.

The chartered quarter

Six studio lots are held under royal charters, and the district they form is the only chartered quarter in the Realm. Five of the lots are in the city of Los Angeles. The sixth, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s, stands across the city line in Culver City, which grew up around it, and the fact that the quarter the city calls its own crosses into another municipality is a quarrel between the two that neither has ever been able to take anywhere, since the charters name lots and not cities.

What a studio charter is

A charter was granted to each of the six older studios between 1924 and 1937, on ministerial advice, on the application of the company. It confers corporate personality on terms more favourable than ordinary incorporation. It cannot be amended by the company alone, alteration requiring the same process as the grant, and it carries conditions.

The conditions that matter to the city are two. The first is the obligatory deposit of prints, which requires a chartered studio to deposit and preserve a copy of everything it releases, and which is why the Realm holds the most complete film archive of any large producing country. The second is that the lots themselves are named in the charters, as the places at which the chartered activity is carried on.

What it does to a district

The second condition is the one that shaped Los Angeles, and it did so by accident.

A chartered studio that wishes to sell its lot for redevelopment, or to move its production to a cheaper jurisdiction and keep the charter, must alter the charter to do it. Altering a charter requires ministerial advice, which requires a government willing to give it, which requires hearings at which the Council, the unions, the supporter and heritage bodies and the Commonwealth’s own heritage officers appear. Three studios have attempted it. None has succeeded, and two abandoned the attempt at the hearing stage.

The result is that the studio district physically exists. Its lots are working lots rather than a preserved quarter, the sound stages are in use, the back lots have not been sold into housing, with one exception that proves the rule: Twentieth Century-Fox, refused a sale in 1961, was permitted in 1962 to develop its back lot as Century City while keeping the land, and is the district’s landlord still, and a district that would in ordinary commercial logic have been liquidated into real estate two generations ago is still doing the thing it was built for.

The city is ambivalent about this and the ambivalence is reasonable. Several hundred acres of extremely valuable land in the middle of a city with an acute housing shortage are held in a use that cannot be changed, by companies that did not ask for the restriction and now rely on it, under instruments granted a century ago. The heritage case is strong. The housing case is also strong. The Council has no power over either, because a royal charter is not a planning matter.

The archive

The deposit condition put the archive here.

The national film archive holdings for the chartered studios are maintained in the basin, in purpose-built cold storage in the valley and at the lots themselves, and the collection is the most complete of its kind anywhere. It cannot be moved without amending six charters, which is why proposals to consolidate it at New Westminster have failed three times.

Los Angeles therefore holds an institution of national importance that it does not own, cannot administer and did not ask for, and the arrangement is a fair miniature of the city’s position generally.

Economy

Structure

The metropolitan economy is the second largest in the Realm and is diversified to a degree its reputation does not suggest. Trade and logistics, the screen and media complex, aerospace and defence engineering, professional and financial services, tourism, higher education and health, and an enormous low-wage service sector that supports the rest.

The port

The port complex at Los Angeles Harbour and Long Beach is the Realm’s primary Pacific gateway and handles a dominant share of trans-Pacific trade.

Its labour politics are a substantial part of the city’s politics. The waterfront unions are old, disciplined and powerful, their agreements are negotiated coastwide, and a dispute on the San Pedro waterfront is a national economic event rather than a local one. Automation is the standing argument and has been for thirty years, conducted between an employer side that regards it as inevitable and a union side that has repeatedly demonstrated it can stop the coast.

The port’s burden falls on the harbour communities. Diesel emissions from ships, trucks and yard equipment concentrate in San Pedro, Wilmington and Long Beach, the asthma and cardiovascular rates in those neighbourhoods are the worst in the basin, and the populations carrying them are poorer and browner than the metropolitan average. The clean-truck and shore-power programmes are real, expensive and incomplete, and the communities’ standing complaint is that they have been asked to be patient for four decades while the Realm’s prosperity is unloaded on top of them.

The screen

The screen industry is the city’s most visible export and no longer its largest employer.

Production has dispersed, to other polities offering credits, to New Albion, and to locations abroad, and the chartered lots have held the industry’s centre in Los Angeles more effectively than economics alone would have done. What remains concentrated here is the part that cannot easily move: the finance, the agencies, the guilds, the post-production and effects houses, and the archive.

Aerospace

The basin was the centre of the Realm’s aircraft industry from the 1920s and of its space and missile work from the 1950s, and the sector’s contraction after the Cold War removed a large body of skilled industrial employment from the south bay and the valley in under a decade.

What survives is smaller, is concentrated in design, satellites and launch, and employs a fraction of the workforce at a much higher value.

Pressures

Housing costs are the metropolitan region’s central economic fact and constrain everything else. Wages in the service sector do not meet rents. The homelessness visible on the streets of the city is the largest such population in the Realm and is a housing problem before it is anything else, which the city’s own studies say and its politics resist.

Demographics and society

Population

Approximately 4.1 million in the city and approximately 13.5 million in the metropolitan region, growing slowly, ageing, and among the most diverse populations on earth by any measure that can be applied.

Los Angeles is the second city of the Realm by municipal population and the first by metropolitan region, and the two figures produce a long-running and unresolvable argument with New York which both cities enjoy.

A Latin American city

The population is majority Latin American and has been since the closing decades of the last century, drawn from Mexico above all and from Central America, and the city’s Latin American character is a continuity rather than an arrival.

Spanish is ordinary in civic life. The Council’s standing orders and its printed record are bilingual. Commonwealth services in the city operate in both languages as a matter of course. The city’s Spanish-language press and broadcasting are not a minority provision but a parallel public sphere of comparable size to the English one, and a candidate for the Council in a majority of wards campaigns in both.

The city never pretended otherwise, and this is the most genuinely unusual thing about it. The Register notes it because the pattern elsewhere in the Realm and beyond it has generally been for a Spanish-speaking city to be administered as an Anglo one, and because the precedent that made the difference is a documented one: the March of Arizona made its Spanish text equally authentic by re-enactment in 1948, and Los Angeles cited the March when it revised its own charter.

The candour is not innocence. The city that prints its record in two languages is the city that chartered the trains in 1931, and the section on the failings sets both out.

The map the covenants drew

Restrictive covenants and lending discrimination drew the map of Los Angeles and the map has not been redrawn.

Racially restrictive covenants were written into deeds across the basin from the 1900s, excluding Black, Asian, Mexican and Jewish buyers from most of the newer subdivisions. Lending practice reinforced them for another generation after they became unenforceable. The neighbourhoods that resulted are the neighbourhoods that exist: the concentration of Black Los Angeles in the south, of Mexican Los Angeles in the east, of the wealth on the westside and along the coast, and of the newer Asian communities in the San Gabriel Valley.

The covenants are void and the pattern they produced is eighty years more entrenched than when they were struck down, because the housing wealth they allocated compounded and the schools followed the housing and the transport followed the schools. The city’s fair housing enforcement is genuine. It operates on a map it did not draw and cannot move.

Faith

Catholic Los Angeles is the largest religious community and the archdiocese one of the largest in the Realm, shaped by Spanish colonial foundation and by Latin American immigration continuously since.

The Church of America has a presence and does not dominate. The city holds substantial Protestant, evangelical and Pentecostal congregations, one of the largest Jewish communities in the Realm, and Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh populations built by Asian and Middle Eastern immigration since the 1960s. The category of no religion has grown steadily and is among the largest single responses.

Language

English and Spanish are the languages of the city. Beyond them, Los Angeles is among the most linguistically various places in the world: Korean, Armenian, Tagalog, Mandarin, Cantonese, Persian, Vietnamese, Japanese and a long tail of others are spoken in concentrations sufficient to sustain their own press, schools and commerce.

Transport

The rail network

The metropolitan region is served by the surviving trunks of the interurban network, electrified, publicly owned and rebuilt, running from the mountains to the sea and from the valley to the harbour on rights of way laid out before 1910.

The system carries a far larger share of the region’s travel than the city’s reputation abroad suggests. It is not a subway with a city around it; it is a regional railway that the city grew along, and the corridors are correspondingly denser than the ground between them.

Union Station, of 1939, is the southern end of AmRail’s Pacific, the high-speed line to San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver, and of the Sunset Limited and the Southwest Chief.

The branches that were abandoned in the 1940s and 1950s are the standing regret, and a proportion of their rights of way have been reacquired at very great expense to build the lines that now cross the older radial pattern.

The freeways

The freeways were built anyway, from the 1940s, at enormous cost and with the destruction of neighbourhoods that such building always involves, and the neighbourhoods destroyed were the ones with the least ability to object.

The eastside carries more freeway miles per resident than any other part of the city. Boyle Heights alone is crossed by several, and the community’s objection at the time is on the record and was overruled.

The airport

Los Angeles International is the Realm’s principal Pacific gateway for passengers as the harbour is for freight, and it is the busiest airport on the western seaboard.

It is served by rail from the regional network, a connection completed decades later than it should have been and after three separate proposals had been abandoned. The airport is hemmed in by the city on every side, cannot expand outward, and the argument about whether a second regional field should be developed inland has been running since the 1970s without resolution.

Culture

The city on screen

Los Angeles is the most filmed city in the world and the least accurately filmed, and Angelenos maintain a connoisseurship of the geography of their own city in fiction that other places reserve for sport.

The city has a complicated relationship with the industry that made it famous. The screen economy is a substantial employer, the chartered lots are a source of civic pride, and the version of the city that reaches the world through them is a version most residents do not recognise: coastal, wealthy, Anglophone and empty, in a metropolitan region that is inland, working, Spanish-speaking and among the densest in the Realm along its corridors.

Music

The city’s music is the product of its geography and its migrations: the Mexican and Central American traditions of the eastside, the Black musical history of Central Avenue and the south, the country and western brought by interior migration, and the recording industry that grew up to capture all of it.

Central Avenue was the centre of Black musical life in the western Realm through the middle of the century, was hollowed by the covenants and the freeways, and is the subject of a preservation effort that arrived after most of what it aimed to preserve had gone.

Sport

The Dodgers are the city’s oldest senior baseball attachment, playing at the ravine, and the article’s treatment of the ground is above. The Rams and the Chargers carry the city’s football following. The metropolitan region supports professional clubs across every code the Realm plays, and the university sport of the basin is a substantial civic institution in its own right.

The supporter councils that the Realm’s clubs are required to maintain are unusually strong in Los Angeles, for a reason directly traceable to the ravine: the city’s supporters organised earlier and harder than anywhere else because they had watched what a club could be given.

Food

The city’s food is its demography. The Mexican and Central American cooking of the eastside and the valley, the Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Armenian, Persian and Filipino kitchens of their own districts, the Black southern cooking of the south, and a restaurant culture that treats all of it as ordinary rather than exotic.

Everyday life

Daily life runs on the weather, the distances, the rail timetable, the freeway traffic that persists despite the rail, and a habit of outdoor living that the climate permits for most of the year.

The city is legible to residents and illegible to visitors, who arrive expecting a single downtown and find a metropolitan region of centres, each with its own commercial street, its own station and its own name, most of which were separate towns within living memory and several of which still behave as though they were.

Symbols

The city’s arms carry the emblems of the sovereignties that have held the basin, and the seal is used on the Council’s record and on civic occasions.

The founding roster is read at the plaza each September, naming the eleven families of 1781 with their origins and descriptions as the Spanish record gives them, and the practice was instituted in the present century by a Council that had noticed the roster’s contents were not what the city’s own histories had said.

The jacaranda is the city’s unofficial tree and its flowering in late spring is a civic event of no formal standing whatever.

Assessment

Los Angeles holds the ceremony and not the power, the archive and not the ownership, the port and not the profit, and the pattern is consistent enough to be the article’s organising judgement.

It holds the Commonwealth’s head of state and none of the Commonwealth’s government. It holds the Realm’s most complete film archive under charters it did not grant and cannot amend. It handles the greater part of the Realm’s Pacific trade and carries the pollution in its harbour neighbourhoods while the profit is booked elsewhere. It is the largest metropolitan region in the Realm and is governed under a charter its own electorate cannot alter, by a Council that must negotiate with a county, a port authority and five special districts to do anything at all.

The pattern is not a conspiracy and is the accumulated result of a long sequence of arrangements each of which was reasonable at the time. Sacramento was made the capital to keep the government out of the largest city. The Governor was placed here to compensate the south. The charters were granted to studios for the archive’s sake. The port authority was separated for efficiency. Nobody designed a city that would hold the symbols of everything and the control of nothing.

Against that stands what the city did when it did hold power, which is the other half of the assessment and the harder half.

It took the Owens Valley by a method that was lawful in every transaction and dishonest as an enterprise, and emptied a farming county to do it. It chartered trains in the 1930s to expel its own citizens and has not apologised in terms. It cleared three neighbourhoods on a promise it did not keep and gave the ground to a ball club. Its police force has been the subject of seven inquiries in seventy years and has implemented a minority of their recommendations. Los Angeles was not short of power in any of those instances. It was short of the will to use it differently, and the constitutional weakness the city complains of is not an explanation for any of them.

The Register’s final judgement concerns 1971. The Governor’s walk down Brooklyn Avenue is the best-known moment in the city’s constitutional history and is remembered as a vindication of the arrangement that put a head of state in Los Angeles. It is at least as good an illustration of the arrangement’s limits. A Governor who could arrive within the hour arrived; a Governor who could do nothing did nothing beyond arriving; and the city took the photograph, published it, taught it, and implemented two of eleven recommendations. Proximity is not the same as remedy, and Los Angeles has spent fifty years treating it as though it were.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• AmRail, whose Pacific line ends at Union Station
• Commonwealth of California, whose Governor lives here and whose government does not
• Arts and Cinema, for the studio charters and the deposit of prints
• Baseball, for the relocation regime the ravine produced
• March of Arizona, whose 1948 re-enactment in two authentic languages is the precedent the city cited
• Phoenix, the other great city of the arid south-west, and the other one that runs on somebody else’s river
• New Westminster, the federal capital, which has three times tried to take the film archive
• The United Kingdom of America, for the Pacific trade the harbour carries

Categories

Land & Landscape · Cities · California · The Pacific Realm · Nineteenth Century · Twentieth Century