City guide - Los Angeles

30 November -0001

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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 melange 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.

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 .

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 1880s 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 group 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.

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 movieland 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 lie 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.

If a single place-name encapsulates the LA dream of glamour, money and overnight success, it's Hollywood . Millions of tourists arrive on pilgrimages; millions more flock here in pursuit of riches and glory. Hollywood blurs the edges of fact and fiction, simply because so much seems possible - and yet, for most people, so little actually is. Those who do strike it rich here get out as soon as they can, just as they always have; the big film companies, too, long ago relocated well away, leaving Hollywood a blend of prostitutes and petty crimi-nals with visiting tourists and slumming hipsters - all under the shadow of grand old movie palaces and dive hotels.

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