Notable events
Swimming pool desegregation An end to racial segregation in municipal swimming pools was ordered in summer 1931 by Superior Court Judge Walter S. Gates after Ethel Prioleau, the widow of an Army major, sued the city, complaining that she, a Negro living at 1311 W. 35th Street, was not allowed to use the swimming pool in nearby Exposition Park because of her race but had to travel 3.6 miles to the "negro swimming pool" at 1357 East 22nd street. Other city pools were opened to Negroes but closed to whites one day a week. The City Council, by a vote of 6 to 6 on one occasion and 8 to 6 a week later refused to have the city attorney appeal the case.
Summer Olympics Los Angeles hosted the 1932 Summer Olympics. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which had opened in May, 1932 with a seating capacity of 76,000, was enlarged to accommodate over 100,000 spectators for Olympic events. It is still in use by the USC Trojans football team. Olympic Boulevard, a major thoroughfare, honors the occasion.
Griffith Park fire A devastating brush fire on October 3, 1933, killed 29 and injured another 150 workers who were clearing brush in Griffith Park.
Annexations and consolidations
The City of Los Angeles mostly remained within its original 28 square-mile (73 km²) landgrant until the 1890s. The original city limits are visible even today in the layout of streets that changes from a north-south pattern outside of the original land grant to a pattern that is shifted roughly 15 degrees east of the longitude in and closely around the area now known as Downtown. The first large additions to the city were the districts of Highland Park and Garvanza to the north, and the South Los Angeles area. In 1906, the approval of the Port of Los Angeles and a change in state law allowed the city to annex the Shoestring, or Harbor Gateway, a narrow and crooked strip of land leading from Los Angeles south towards the port. The port cities of San Pedro and Wilmington were added in 1909 and the city of Hollywood was added in 1910, bringing the city up to 90 square miles (233 km²) and giving it a vertical "barbell" shape. Also added that year was Colegrove, a suburb west northwest of the city near Hollywood; Cahuenga, a township northwest of the former city limits; and a part of Los Feliz were annexed to the city.
The opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct provided the city with four times as much water as it required, and the offer of water service became a powerful lure for neighboring communities. The city, saddled with a large bond and excess water, locked in customers through annexation by refusing to supply other communities. Harry Chandler, a major investor in San Fernando Valley real estate, used his Los Angeles Times to promote development near the aqueduct's outlet. By referendum of the residents, 170 square miles (440 km²) of the San Fernando Valley, along with the Palms district, were added to the city in 1915, almost tripling its area, mostly towards the northwest. Over the next seventeen years dozens of additional annexations brought the city's area to 450 square miles (1,165 km²) in 1932. (Numerous small annexations brought the total area of the city up to 469 square miles (1,215 km²) as of 2004.)
Most of the annexed communities were unincorporated towns but ten incorporated cities were consolidated into Los Angeles: Wilmington (1909), San Pedro (1909), Hollywood (1910), Sawtelle (1922), Hyde Park (1923), Eagle Rock (1923), Venice (1925), Watts (1926), Barnes City (1927), and Tujunga (1932).
Annexation references: Municipal Secession Fiscal Analysis Scoping Study www.valleyvote.net, Annexation and Detachment Map (PDF) lacity.org.
Olvera Street—an idealized Mexican past
In 1926, socialite Christine Sterling became alarmed when the City Council posted a condemn sign on the old Francisco Avila Adobe near the Los Angeles Plaza. She became very dedicated to the preservation of the area and developed the idea of creating a tourist site with a romantic theme of Old Mexico.
Her efforts finally won the attention of Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times who staged a $1000-a-plate luncheon on her behalf. Chandler also set up a for-profit business, the Plaza de Los Angeles Corporation, with himself and Sterling in charge.
Chandler's interest in developing the idealized Mexican marketplace was twofold: 1. It would give him a way to control the level of free-speech activities on the Plaza and 2. it would present an image of "good Mexicans" who did not include union organizers and angry workers protesting their exploitation. Ceramic figures of a Mexican sleeping at the foot of a cactus with a sombrero over his head would symbolize the stereotype Chandler wanted to project.
Sterling and Chandler's efforts finally paid off with the opening of Olvera Street in 1930. Sterling spent the rest of her life managing the tourist attraction as a profitable business.
Civic corruption and police brutality
The downtown business interests, always eager to attract business and investment to Los Angeles, were also eager to distance their town from the syndicated crime and violence that defined the stories of Chicago and New York. In spite of their concerns, massive corruption in City Hall and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)—and the fight against it—were dominant themes in the city's story from early 20th-century to the 1950s.
In the 1920s, for example, it was common practice for the city's mayor, councilmen, and attorneys to take contributions from madams, bootleggers, and gamblers. The top aide of the mayor was involved with a protection racket. Thugs with eastern-Mafia connections were involved in often violent conflicts over bootlegging and horse-racing turf. The mayor's brother was selling jobs in the LAPD.
In 1933, the new mayor Frank Shaw started giving out contracts without competitive bids and paying city employees to favor crony contractors. The city's Vice Squad functioned city-wide as the enforcer and collector of the city's organized crime, with revenues going to the pockets of city officials right up to the mayor.
In 1937, the owner of downtown's Clifton's Cafeteria, Clifford Clinton led a citizen's campaign to clean up city hall. He and other reformers served on a Grand Jury investigating the charges of corruption. In a minority report, the reformers wrote:
A portion of the underworld profits have been used in financing campaigns of … city and county officials in vital positions … [While] the district attorney’s office, sheriff’s office, and Los Angeles Police Department work in complete harmony and never interfere with … important figures in the underworld.
The police Intelligence Squad spied on anyone even suspected of criticizing the police. They included journalist Carey Williams, the district attorney, Judge Bowron, and two of the County Supervisors.
The persistent courage of Clinton, Superior Court Judge, later Mayor, Fletcher Bowron, and former L.A.P.D. detective Harry Raymond turned the tide. The police became so nervous that the Intelligence Squad blew up Raymond's car and nearly killed him. The public was so enraged by the bombing that it quickly voted Shaw out of office, one of the first big-city recalls in the country's history. The head of the intelligence squad was convicted and sentenced to two years to life. Police Chief James Davis and 23 other officers were forced to resign.
Fletcher Bowron replaced Shaw as mayor in 1938 to preside over one of the most dynamic periods in the history of the city. His 'Los Angeles Urban Reform Revival would bring major changes to the government of Los Angeles.
In 1950, he appointed William H. Parker was sworn in as Chief of Police. Parker pushed for more independence from political pressures that would enable him to create a more professionalized police force. The public supported him and voted in charter changes that isolated the police department from the rest of government.
Through the 1960s, the LAPD was promoted as one of the most efficient departments in the world. But Parker's administration would be increasingly charged with police brutality—resulting from his recruiting of officers from the South with strong anti-black and anti-Mexican attitudes.
Reaction to police brutality resulted in the Watts riots of 1965 and again, after the Rodney King beating, in the Los Angeles riots of 1992. Charges of police brutality dogged the Department through the end of the century. In the late 1990s, as a result of the Rampart scandal involving misconduct of 70 officers, the federal government was forced to intervene and assumed jurisdiction of the Department with a consent decree. Police reform has since been a major issue confronted by L.A.'s recent mayors.
Social critic Mike Davis has recently argued that attempts to "revitalize" downtown Los Angeles decreases public space and further alienates poor and minority populations. This enforced geographical separation of diverse populations goes back to the city's earliest days.
World War II and postwar 1941–1950
During World War II, Los Angeles grew as a center for production of aircraft, war supplies and ammunitions. Thousands of African Americans and European Americans from the South and the Midwest migrated to the West to fill factory jobs.
By 1950, Los Angeles was an industrial and financial giant created by war production and migration. Los Angeles assembled more cars than any city other than Detroit, made more tires than any city but Akron, made more furniture than Grand Rapids, and stitched more clothes than any city except New York. In addition, it was the national capital for the production of motion pictures, radio programs and, within a few years, television shows. Construction boomed as tract houses were built in ever expanding suburban communities financed by the largess of the Federal Housing Administration.
Los Angeles continued to spread out, particularly with the development of the San Fernando Valley and the building of the freeways launched in the 1940s. When the local street car system went out of business, Los Angeles became a city built around the automobile, with all the social, health and political problems that this dependence produces.
The famed urban sprawl of Los Angeles became a notable feature of the town, and the pace of the growth accelerated in the first decades of the 20th century. The San Fernando Valley, sometimes called "America's Suburb", became a favorite site of developers, and the city began growing past its roots downtown toward the ocean and towards the east.
This is also the time when General Motors persuaded most urban regions in North America to shut down their light rail street car systems and replace them for more flexible, but polluting and inefficient, bus systems. This drastically changed growth and travel patterns in the city in subsequent years and contributed to the severe air pollution events that Los Angeles became famous for.
The years 1950–2000
Beginning November 6, 1961, Los Angeles suffered three days of destructive brush fires. The Bel-Air—Brentwood and Santa Ynez fires destroyed 484 expensive homes and 21 other buildings along with 15,810 acres (64 km²) of brush in the Bel-Air, Brentwood, and Topanga Canyon neighborhoods. Most of the homes destroyed had wooden shake roofs, which not only led to their own loss but also sent firebrands up to three miles (5 km) away. Despite this, few changes were made to the building codes to prevent future losses.
The repeal of a law limiting building height and the controversial redevelopment of Bunker Hill, which destroyed a picturesque though decrepit neighborhood, ushered in the construction of a new generation of skyscrapers. Bunker Hill's 62-floor First Interstate Building (later named Aon Center) was the highest in Los Angeles when it was completed in 1973. It was surpassed by the Library Tower (now called the U.S. Bank Tower) a few blocks to the north in 1990, a 310 m (1,018 ft) building that is the tallest west of the Mississippi. Outside of Downtown, the Wilshire Corridor is lined with tall buildings, particularly near Westwood. Century City, developed on the former 20th Century Fox back lot, has become another center of high-rise construction on the Westside.
During the latter decades of the 20th century, the city saw a massive increase of street gangs. At the same time, crack cocaine became widely available and dominated by gangs in the 1980s. Although gangs were disproportionately confined to lower-income inner-city sections, fear knew no boundaries citywide. Since the early 1990s, the city saw a decrease in crime and gang violence with rising prices in housing, revitalization, urban development, and heavy police vigilance in many parts of the city. With its reputation, it had led to Los Angeles being referred as "The Gang Capital of America".
A subway system, developed and built through the 1980s as a major goal of mayor Tom Bradley, stretches from North Hollywood to Union Station and connects to light rail lines that extend to the neighboring cities of Long Beach, Norwalk, and Pasadena, among others. Also, a commuter rail system, Metrolink, has been added that stretches from nearby Ventura and Simi Valley to San Bernardino, Orange County, and Riverside. The funding of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority project is funded by a half cent tax increase added in the mid 1980s, which yields $400 million every month. Although the regional transit system is growing, subway expansion was halted in the 1990s over methane gas concerns, political conflict, and construction and financing problems during Red Line Subway project, which culminated in a massive sinkhole on Hollywood Boulevard. As a result, the original subway plans have been delayed for decades as light rail systems, dedicated busways, and limited-stop "Rapid" bus routes have become the preferred means of mass transit in LA's expanding series of gridlocked, congested corridors.
The 1995 murder of Stephanie Kuhen in Los Angeles led to condemnation from President Bill Clinton and a crackdown on Los Angeles-area gangs.
Proposition 14 and the battle for space
Since its beginning, the city was geographically divided by ethnicity. In the 1920s, Los Angeles was the location of the first restrictive covenants in real estate. By the Second World War, 95 percent of Los Angeles housing was off-limits to blacks and Asians. Minorities who had served in WWII or worked in L.A.'s defense industries returned to face increasing patterns of discrimination in housing. More and more, they found themselves excluded from the suburbs and restricted to housing in East or South Los Angeles, Watts, and Compton. Such real-estate practices severely restricted educational and economic opportunities.
Historian Peter Radkowski wrote:
By the 1960s, the fair housing conflict of California would evolve into a collision of legislative action, racial backlash, and judicial ruling: the Rumford Act on the floors of the state capitol; Proposition 14 at the ballot box; Mulkey v. Reitman before the Supreme Court of California, and Reitman v. Mulkey before the Supreme Court of the United States. These events explicitly shaped a gubernatorial election in California, and arguably set in motion a sea change in political allegiances and presidential elections.
In 1955, William Byron Rumford, the first black from Northern California to serve in the California State Legislature, introduced a fair-housing bill. In 1959, the California Legislature passed the California Fair Employment Practices Act sponsored by Augustus Hawkins of Los Angeles. That same year, the state's Unruh Civil Rights Act addressed fair housing but did not have any teeth. The aggrieved party had to sue to get compensation.
In 1963, California Legislature passed and Governor Pat Brown signed the Rumford Fair Housing Act which outlawed restrictive covenants and the refusal to rent or sell housing on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, or physical disability.
In reaction to the Rumford Act, a well-funded coalition of realtors and landlords immediately began to campaign for a referendum that would amend the state Constitution to protect property owners' ability to deny minorities equal access to housing. Known as Proposition 14, it caused a storm of deep and bitter controversy across the state. Radkowski wrote:
The debate over Proposition 14 cultivated a whirlwind of information and misunderstanding, marked by angry exchanges on the merits, and running through the entire debate a plague of bitterness, ill feelings, and slurs. On any given day, the effort to overturn the Rumford Act might involve highbrow jurisprudence, righteous indignation, or racial epithet. In many ways, the Rumford Act played as bawdy and violent as the land and mineral grabs of the original California Gold Rush: Rumford received an invitation to a stag dinner party—complete with one hour of “entertainment”—that was sponsored by the Associated Home Builders of the Greater East Bay; while across the state, pamphlets and pickets revealed the ugly fascist undercurrents of support for Proposition 14.
While conservatives such as Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles argued that blacks are "better off in Los Angeles than anywhere else," blacks knew that they were kept out of participating in the city's prosperity. On May 26, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. told a crowd of 35,000 at Wrigley Field, "We want to be free whether we're in Birmingham or in Los Angeles."
In November, 1964, California voters passed Proposition 14 by a wide margin.
In August, 1965, the Watts Riots broke out. Lasting six days, it left 32 dead, 1,032 injured, 3,952 arrested, $40 million in damage, and 1,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. According to later reports, the riot was a reaction to a long record of police brutality by the LAPD and other injustices suffered by blacks, including discrimination in jobs, housing, and education.
In 1966, the California State Supreme Court, in Mulkey v. Reitman, ruled that Proposition 14 violated the State Constitution's provisions for equal protection and due process.
In 1967, in Reitman v. Mulkey, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the decision of the California Supreme Court and ruled that Proposition 14 had violated the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964[62] also addressed the issue, but made few provisions for enforcement.
The U.S. Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) introduced meaningful federal enforcement mechanisms.
Economic changes
The last of the automobile factories shut down in the 1990s; the tire factories and steel mills left earlier. Most of the agricultural and dairy operations that were still prospering in the 1950s have moved to outlying counties while the furniture industry has relocated to Mexico and other low-wage nations. Aerospace production has dropped significantly since the end of the Cold War or moved to states with better tax conditions, and the entertainment industry has found cheaper areas to produce films, television programs and commercials elsewhere in the United States and Canada. However, many studios still operate in Los Angeles, such as CBS Television City at the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Beverly Boulevard and 20th Century Fox in Century City.
Those macroeconomic changes have brought major social changes with them. While unemployment dropped in Los Angeles in the 1990s, the newly created jobs tended to be low-wage jobs filled by recent immigrants and other exploitable populations; by one calculation, the number of poor families increased from 36% to 43% of the population of Los Angeles County during this time. At the same time, the number of immigrants from Mexico, Central America and Latin America has made Los Angeles a "majority minority" city that will soon be majority Latino. The unemployment rate dropped from 6.9% to 6.8% in 2002, and is around 11.6% currently.
The desire for residential housing in the downtown area has been noticed, and several historical buildings have been renovated as condos (while maintaining the original outside design), and many new apartment and condominium towers and complexes are being built.
Since the 1980s, there's been an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, making Los Angeles the most socioeconomically divided city in the United States.
On November 10, 2004, the Los Angeles Daily News reported plans to turn the northeast San Fernando Valley into an industrial powerhouse, which would provide new and more jobs.
All about Los Angeles:
- History of Los Angeles 3
- History of Los Angeles 1
- History of Los Angeles
- Geography of Los Angeles
- Climate of the Los Angeles
- Media in Los Angeles
- Economy of Los Angeles
- Religion in Los Angeles
- Sports in Los Angeles
- Demographics of Los Angeles
- Education in Los Angeles
- Transportation in Los Angeles
- Government of Los Angeles
- Crime in Los Angeles
- Culture of Los Angeles
- Los Angeles County, California
- Beverly Hills
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