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 | Los Angeles Airport car rental - Travel Guide |  |
The rambling metropolis of LOS ANGELES sprawls across the thousand square miles of a great desert basin, knitted together by an intricate network of congested freeways between the ocean and the snowcapped mountains. Its colorful mélange of shopping malls, palm trees and swimming pools is both mildly surreal and startlingly familiar, thanks to the celluloid self-image that it has spread all over the world.
LA is a young city; in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a community of white American immigrants, poor Chinese laborers and wealthy Mexican ranchers, with a population of less than fifty thousand. Only on completion of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880’s did it really begin to grow, as a national Mecca for good health, clean living, plentiful sunshine and endless acres of citrus crops. The biggest groups of transplants were refugees from the Midwest, who created a new political ruling class to replace the old Mexican elite. The old ranchos were soon subdivided, the population grew rapidly and the enduring symbol of the city became the family-sized suburban house (with swimming pool and two-car garage). The biggest boom came after World War II with the mushrooming of the aeronautics industry which, until post-Cold War military cutbacks, accounted for one in four jobs.
The first-time visitor may well find Los Angeles thrilling and threatening in equal proportions; it's a place that picks you up and sweeps you along whether you want it to or not. While it has its fine-art museums, California cuisine and a few old-fashioned urban plazas, what people really come here for is to experience the city that has come to epitomize the American Dream the fantasy worlds of Disneyland and Hollywood, as well as the gilded opulence of Beverly Hills and Malibu.
The City
With only limited space between the desert, the mountains and the ocean, LA has long since filled in the gaps between what were once small and isolated towns. As a result, it's a massive conglomeration of interconnected, amorphous districts, often with little in common.
If LA has a heart, however, its downtown, in the center of the basin. It offers a taste of almost everything you'll find elsewhere around the city, from upscale avant-garde art along Bunker Hill to the abject dereliction of Skid Row in the Eastside, compressed into an area of small, easily walkable blocks. The area around downtown contains some decaying Victorian suburbs, 1920’s Art Deco buildings and the center of LA's enormous and growing Hispanic population.
Heading west from downtown to the coast, the first major district you come to, Hollywood, has streets caked with movie legend - even if the genuine glamour is long gone. Adjoining West LA is home to the city's newest money, shown off in Beverly Hills and along the Sunset Strip. Santa Monica and Venice to the west are the quintessential seafront LA of palm trees, white sands and laid-back living, while the coastline itself stretches another twenty miles northwest to glamorous Malibu, home to the movie land elite.
Suburban Orange County, to the southeast, holds little of interest apart from Disneyland and a handful of laid-back beach towns. On the far side of the northern hills lies the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, or simply "the Valley," seen by mainstream Los Angeles as nothing more than depressing tract homes and endless strip malls - not unlike the generic LA stereotype viewed by the rest of America. |
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