Los Angeles

Los Angeles, officially the City of Los Angeles, often known by its initials L.A., is the most populous city in the U.S. state of California as well the second-most populous in the United States, after New York, with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621. It is the county seat of Los Angeles County, and is known as the "Entertainment Capital of the World", due to its Hollywood neighborhood being the traditional center of the U.S. film industry. Its municipal government is currently controlled by the Democratic Party, and its current mayor is Karen Bass.

• According to CoreLogic, the median house price in Los Angeles is $456,000. This compares with a median price of $187,000 in Houston. There is a similar story for other cities across the state. I won’t even mention house prices in San Francisco. Higher housing costs are a predictable result of restricting supply; it is far more difficult to arrange a new development in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles or other California population centers than in Texas. Builders will have to meet environmental restrictions and density limits in many areas. The Census Bureau reports that between 1980 and 2010 the number of housing units in Texas increased by 81.9 percent, compared with just 41.3 percent in California.
  • Dean Baker, "Tall tales about Texas" (13 June 2014), Al-Jazeera America

• When I went to America, her message had so sunk into my ears that I became a radical. I went to America to study at the University of California, where a jurist of international law was teaching. I wanted to take my degree in international law. And that was the period of McCarthyism, of the communist witch hunts—my choices were laid out. To get away from Sunset Boulevard, from the girls with red nail polish, I ran off to Maxwell Street and lived among the Negroes. A week, a month. I felt good with them—they were real, they knew how to laugh. And the day in San Diego when I wasn’t able to get a hotel room because I have olive skin and looked like a Mexican ... well, that helped.
  • Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, April 1972 interview to Oriana Fallaci, as quoted in Interviews with History and Conversations with Power (2011).

• The global role of the United States is perhaps the ultimate chapter in that long period of European expansion which had begun in western Europe, and especially on the Atlantic seaboard, during the 15th century. Europe slowly had outgrown its homeland. Its cultural empire eventually formed a long band traversing most of the Northern Hemisphere and dipping far into the Southern. The modern hub of the peoples and ideas of European origin is now New York as much as Paris, or Los Angeles as much as London. In the history of the European peoples the city of Washington is perhaps what Constantinople - the infant city of Emperor Constantine - was to the last phase of the Roman Empire; for it is unlikely that Europeans, a century hence, will continue to stamp the world so decisively with their ideas and inventions.
  • Geoffrey Blainey, A Short History of the World (2000)

• Not so long ago, I examined some maps showing juvenile delinquency, diptheria, tuberculosis and murder quotients in a number of cities from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The maps all looked alike. Disease, crime and delinquency were invariably grouped in the same parts of the cities — in the slum districts. That is the cause of crime, not the motion picture.
  • Humphrey Bogart, “Censorship: Jimmy Walker Never Heard of a Book Seducing a Dame but Bluenoses are Still on the Trail of our Films”, Hollywood Reporter, (Oct 1941); republished in “When Humphrey Bogart Tackled Movie Censorship in 1941”, Hollywood Reporter, (2/27/2018).

• Are you with your friends on a rooftop laughing, smoking in L.A., trying to kick the habit.
  • Alessia Cara, "Find My Boy", In the Meantime (2021), New York: Def Jam Recordings

• In Los Angeles, everything is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car.
  • George Carlin, Brain Droppings (1997)

• Boston is among an increasing number of municipalities, universities, and private foundations that have announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. In late October, ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, Auckland, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; and Seattle announced commitments to divest from fossil fuel companies and increase investments to make cities more sustainable. Also last month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a bill that requires the city’s three pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Those are in addition to divestment commitments made last year by Berlin; Bristol, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Durban, South Africa; London; Los Angeles; Milan; New Orleans; New York City; Oslo; Norway; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, Canada. “Cities are at the forefront of tackling the climate emergency and there is real momentum to move investments away from fossil fuels and toward climate solutions,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is chair-elect of C40 Cities, a network of mayors working to confront climate change, said in a statement. “I will continue to encourage more cities to join the movement, and urge national governments and private finance institutions to mobilize more finance to invest directly in cities to support a green and fair recovery.”
  • Boston to Divest From Fossil Fuels, Tobacco, Private Prisons, Chief Investment Officer, Dec 6, 2021

• Los Angeles has always been a natural home for pornography, even back in the days.
  • Devin Faraci, "Why California Is Porn's Home State" (23 August 2011), Birth. Movies. Death.

• I used to love to call L.A. when I lived in New York. "What're y'all doin'? Talkin' to TV producers, huh? Bummer. Me? I'm readin' a book! Yeah, we're thinkin' back East! Yeah, we're evolving. Is that "The Big One" I hear in the background? Bye, you lizard scum, bye!"
  • Bill Hicks, "Goodbye, Lizard Scum" Arizona Bay

• It’s a great city to be an artist in—the American city to be an artist in, in many ways. It’s much more affordable. It’s where the art schools are. It’s like London. It’s an art school town.
  • Barbara Kruger Interview (2013)

• By the beginning of 1968 most American cities were preparing for war—building up their arsenals, sending undercover agents into black neighborhoods like spies into enemy territory, recruiting citizenry as a standing reserve army. The city of Los Angeles, where thirty-four people had been killed in an August 1965 riot in the Watts section, was contemplating the purchase of bulletproof armored vehicles, each of which could be armed with a .30-caliber machine gun; a choice of smoke screen, tear gas, or fire-extinguishing launchers; and a siren so loud it was said to disable rioters. “When I look at this thing, I think, My God, I hope we’ll never have to use it,” said Los Angeles deputy police chief Daryl Gates, “but then I realize how valuable it would have been in Watts, where we had nothing to protect us from sniper fire when we tried to rescue our wounded officers.” Such talk had become good politics since California governor Pat Brown had been defeated the year before by Ronald Reagan, largely because of the Watts riots. The problem was that the vehicles cost $35,000 each. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office had a more cost-effective idea—a surplus army M-8 armored car for only $2,500.
  • Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (2004)

• [Los Angeles is] the world's biggest third-class city.
  • John D. MacDonald, A Deadly Shade of Gold

• Say, what's up. Straight up, holler! What, I am C-A. Day-Go, L.A., to the Bay. Yeah, it's my shit.
  • Jason Martin, "Say That Then" (June 2013), Understand Me (December 2013)

• One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child.
  • Norman Mailer, Superman Comes to the Supermarket. (November 1960)

• Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work. ... In this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles.
  • Norman Mailer, Superman Comes to the Supermarket. (November 1960)

• Then, she take it all in. Best kush filling my joints. Say, I sound too L.A.? That's the point!
  • Jason Martin, "Say That Then" (June 2013), Understand Me (December 2013)

• L.A. reminds me of that friend who just breaks into your house without knocking and eats all your food. You can't stop complaining about him when he's there, but when he leaves, you just wish he'd come by and bug you. L.A.'s got a heightened sense of color and joy, so much so that it becomes annoying. It makes me emotionally itchy.
  • John Mayer, Rolling Stone magazine, Mayer, John (May 9, 2002), "RAVES". Rolling Stone. (895):23

• It was Christmastime in Los Angeles in 1902. The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter out to the saloon-lined intersection of First Street and Los Angeles Street, more commonly known to Times readers as the “Hobo Corner,” epicenter of Victorian LA’s Skid Row. “It was the toughest night of the year on the “Hobo Corner,’” the sensation-minded reporter wrote. “The tenderloin was literally swarming with tramps. Most of them were beastly drunk and the rest were sorry they weren’t. They were filthy dirty; some of them fairly squirmed with tenants—their steady company as it were.”
  • Hadley Meares, “The early days of Skid Row, once known as ‘Hobo Corner’”, LA Curbed, (Dec 14, 2017).

• In 1876, Los Angeles became the end of the line of the transcontinental railroad. According to historian Glen Creason, the railroads were constructed east of LA’s historic core. That year, the main Southern Pacific Rail Yard and passenger terminus, known as River Station (now the site of the Los Angeles State Historic Park), opened. In 1888, it was joined by the Arcade Station at Fourth and Alameda.
  Thousands of men, many displaced veterans of the Civil War, began to “ride the rails,” stowing away in empty boxcars and jumping trains. Because of this, many cities saw a great increase in the number of transient visitors.
  They tended to congregate around or nearby the rail yards in cheap hotels, saloons, and brothels which sprung up to service them. In 1889, it was reported that 18 “tramps” had been arrested at the Southern Pacific Yard in one morning and would be forced to work on the chain gang, ironically building roads for the city.
  LA leaders knew what to blame for this “tramp harvest”—the increased mobility offered by the railroads.
  • Hadley Meares, “The early days of Skid Row, once known as ‘Hobo Corner’”, LA Curbed, (Dec 14, 2017).

• By 1902, it was evident that something had to be done. “The hobos are also killing that particular part of Los Angeles in which they have settled like a blight,” the LA Times reported. “The police would have an easier time down in the tenderloin if the city would put in a few more electric lights. There is seldom any cussedness going on where there is plenty of illumination. Los Angeles Street is as dark as a pocket.”
  • Hadley Meares, “The early days of Skid Row, once known as ‘Hobo Corner’”, LA Curbed, (Dec 14, 2017).

• They call it the City of Angels. Funny. In my 30 years here, I haven't seen a single one. My old friend Henry Wilson used to say, people dare to dream here. He liked that about L.A. I'd say, bull, dreaming will get you killed. Maybe I was right.
  • True Crime: Streets of LA (November 2003), written by Peter Morawiec and Micah Linton, Activision

• I am C-A. Sac-Town, Seaside, L.A.!
  • Charles Phillip Ivory Penniman, "Say That Then" (June 2013), Understand Me (December 2013)

• The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles.
  • Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

• In L.A., we wear Chucks, not Ballies... Let me the serenade the streets of L.A.
  • Tupac A. Shakur, "California Love" (1995)

• This time of year, the whole crazy city could go in one big fire storm. There were times that he almost wished that it would. He hated this smoggy, tawdry Babylon of a city, its endless tangle of freeways, the strange-looking houses, the filthy air, the thick, choking, glossy foliage everywhere, the drugs, the booze, the divorces, the laziness, the sleaziness, the porno shops and the naked encounter parlors and the massage joints, the weird people wearing their weird clothes and driving their weird cars and cutting their hair in weird ways. There was a cheapness, a trashiness, about everything here, he thought. Even the mansions and the fancy restaurants were that way: hollow, like slick movie sets. He sometimes felt that the trashiness bothered him more than the out-and-out evil. If you kept sight of your own values you could do battle with evil, but trashiness slipped up around you and infiltrated your soul without your even knowing it. He hoped that his sojourn in Los Angeles was not doing that to him.
  • Robert Silverberg, Against Babylon in Omni (May 1986)

• I live in the Mexican part of L.A.; it's called L.A.
  • Bobby Slayton, [1]

• For all its power and wealth and contrasting poverty and powerlessness, for all its size and complexity, Los Angeles is a strongly non-arrogant community, willing to shift and re-examine its problems, indeed its fundamental premises.
  • Kevin Starr, LA 2000: A City For the Future (1988)

• We start from scratch, every generation. History does not bend inevitably toward justice, or freedom, or decency, or even stability. History doesn’t do that in Hong Kong, or in Moscow, or in Washington or New York City or Los Angeles. History goes where we push it. And if we don’t push, someone else will.
  • Kevin D. Williamson, "The End of (Whig) History" (1 July 2020), National Review

• Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
  • Frank Lloyd Wright ^{[citation needed]}

• California
• San Francisco
• 2013 Los Angeles International Airport shooting

• Official website