Global Courant
After decades of enthusiastically giving tours of Los Angeles to out-of-town friends and family, and even co-authoring a walking guide through the city, I’m all too aware that things have changed. Recent guests have been stunned by the tent camps, rubble-strewn sidewalks, and shuttered storefronts I see daily. I am ashamed and heartbroken for the homeless, their neighbors, my city.
Showing visitors our troubles has made me think how Los Angeles — even with its history of civil unrest and corruption, poverty and racism, earthquakes and fires — is often measured against a tradition of gay propaganda that is a West Coast paradise. promotes. Nineteenth-century travel writers likened LA to the Holy Land, and the cliché of the California dream persists, despite those who say the promise of abundance and a fresh start is dead, and the dream a nightmare.
I decided to investigate the sources of boosterism in Los Angeles and the distance between the “blessed” city and the tent cities we see now. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, in San Marino, graciously granted me “reader” status with access to their formidable rare book collection. In California travel guides dating back to the 1800s, I found the triumphalism, defense, and deserved pride that have been ingrained in Los Angeles’ communal psyche and tourism from its inception. I also found prophecies of LA’s future success and hints of lasting failures.
“The Los Angeles City and County Guidebook for Tourists and Strangers,” published in 1885, praises the region for its “unparalleled resources and exquisite climate” which, it claims, will cure “countless… agonizing ailments.” It’s the oldest guide I’ve found in the Huntington archives. In addition to touting healing weather, it urges visitors to try Los Angeles’ first electric elevator in a four-story downtown office building. And it predicted that pipsqueak Los Angeles – then smaller than San Francisco – would grow in “wealth and population more than any other part in the state.”
(photo Larry Gordon / Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens books; photo illustration Los Angeles Times)
The “1886 Southern California Guidebook: A Complete and Accurate Description of Climate, Soil Fertility, Whereabouts and Objects of Interest, Etc. Etc. Etc.” sends tourists to a 700-acre ostrich farm in Los Feliz (adults, 50 cents; children, 25 cents) and to Pasadena’s Raymond Hotel, where “the carefree capitalist can rest and enjoy the warm sun in a quiet and elevated place.”
It hails LA as “one of man’s most prosperous homes, so much favored and blessed.” At least it also confesses to “rare earthquakes and hailstorms” and professes a bit of civic humility through a humble boast: LA “isn’t a perfect paradise, nor a heaven on earth, but it’s good to live here.”
Of course, this kind of boast was pumped by real estate interests, railroads, newspapers, movie studios, and politicians. The painful distance from the truth would fuel satirical novels (since Nathanael West), progressive politics (since Upton Sinclair), and dirty journalism (since Carey McWilliams).
“The Bear Book, A Guide to California,” published in 1908 by the California Tourist Bureau in Los Angeles, returns climate justice (“not perfect, but none are that close”) and praises new buildings (“ not the best … but no one shrinks from comparison”). “Better come early,” the “Bear Book” smugly advises those interested in moving, “and avoid disappointment.”
The shortness of the guides didn’t surprise me, but the casual racism in some – and the way it revealed the dark side of paradise – did.
(photo Larry Gordon / Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens travel guides; photo illustration Los Angeles Times)
Supposed opium dens of Chinatown are highlighted in “Wilson’s Official Guide to Los Angeles”, 1901 (25 cents). Chinese immigrants, it states, “apparently need less air than other mortals”, as they sleep tightly packed on “shelves in tiny rooms barely fit for one”.
The “Tourists’ Guide Book to Southern California”, published in 1894, warns of the dangers of Chinatown: “Especially at night it is advisable to go in the company of a friend who understands pagan customs or with a police officer.”
The 1885 “City and County Guidebook” assures readers that Mexicans will be pushed off the downtown plaza where “every square foot … represents a murdered victim.” Mexicans are being “gradually removed by the rise in property values,” the book crows. “As the American element comes in, crime decreases.”
The Depression produced a different kind of travel guide. “Los Angeles in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City of Angels” is a 2011 University of California Press repackaging of the 1941 Federal Writers Project volume. In the original foreword, John D. Keyes, official of the Writers Project, which aimed to “present Los Angeles truthfully and objectively, without glorifying or defaming it”. Too often the city has been ‘lashed like a city of sin and eccentrics; it has also been strangled under a damp blanket of unbridled eulogy.”
Today’s readers will be shocked at how much has disappeared from the WPA guide and how much was not there yet.
Touted but now gone: the glorious downtown 13-story Richfield Building clad in black terracotta and gold stripes “symbolizing the black gold of the oil fields,” and the “vast, sprawling” Ambassador Hotel (the pool had an artificial beach ). Tourists can spot movie stars at the Cocoanut Grove, the Brown Derby, and Ciro’s (all now gone).
There was no Music Center, no County Museum of Art, no Dodger Stadium; the first highway, the Pasadena, just opened. But with the entertainment industry here, the WPA book predicted that “Los Angeles could well become one of the world’s most influential cultural centers.”
After World War II, skepticism increased. In his 1947 “My LA” essays, LA Daily News columnist Matt Weinstock surprised me with similarities to the current housing crisis. He describes veterans living “in shops, garages, cellars or caravans” and “evicted families sleeping in their cars and single rooms with no bath or cooking facilities.”
His prognosis is cautionary: Los Angeles could end in greatness or “arrogant, militant mediocrity.”
“There is no immediate hope,” writes Weinstock, “that Los Angeles will work itself out of its chaos. There is only the possibility that, with luck, it will pattern the chaos.
In recent decades, the publication of LA travel guides has mushroomed. Many are fixated on the graves of movie stars, rock clubs, surfing beaches and food trucks. Some, like the 2021 People’s Guide to Los Angeles, another UC Press project, point to ethnic minority landmarks and labor activism in a refreshing way. For example, it documents the former Black Panther headquarters that was raided by police and a sweatshop that held migrant workers captive.
Most newer guidebooks still address the allure and fraying of the California dream in one way or another, the sense of an original paradise found and lost.
So is it finally time to let go of the idea that Los Angeles is so special? Or should we hold ourselves and our city to the old ideal, even if it was partly imaginary? Could the myth of “much favored and blessed” push us to face our problems, push us to finally live up to the hype?
No guidebook can give us the answers as we build our future.
Born in New Jersey, Larry Gordon has lived in Los Angeles for 39 years. He is a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and EdSource, and co-author of “Stairway Walks in Los Angeles.”
