City of Angels: Essential Facts About Los Angeles
By June 28, 2022
Origins Of Angels
Los Angeles was officially founded on September 4, 1781, though it was then known as El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, which translates to "The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels." It was originally a ranching town created in the era of Spanish colonization. Visitors can still take a peek at the city's history on its oldest road, Olvera Street, which dates back to the 1780s. The California dream was sold early and hard, with advertisements from the 1800s promising sunshine, food, and prosperity to anyone brave enough to travel west. The Gold Rush of the 1850s didn't hurt California's population growth, either. L.A. became an incorporated municipality on April 4, 1850 and, by the end of the century, swelled from just 11 families to a city of more than 50,000.
It's A Dry Heat
But how were all these people expected to live, let alone grow crops, in what is dangerously close to desert conditions? Enter William Mulholland, the man whose dream for the City of Angels was so big, he stole an entire lake for it. From 1907 to 1913, Mulholland built an aqueduct which essentially took all of the water from Owens Lake, a whopping 175 miles away in the Sierra Nevada, to the reservoirs of Los Angeles. The ranchers around Owens Lake obviously put up a fight, but thanks to some devious tricks on Mulholland's part, the city grew beyond what the natural resources of the basin could have ever provided naturally, for better or worse.
Lights, Camera, Action!
Thanks to advancements in technology, the moving picture was creating quite a storm around the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but building a thriving industry around the budding new art form was proving too difficult and expensive a task. Thomas Edison in particular was extremely controlling of rights fees for his inventions, so American moviemakers decided to head West and hopefully skirt some of those demands. Eventually, word got out that Los Angeles was the place to be, as it was just hours from snowy mountaintops, vast deserts, sunny beaches, woody forests, and any other backdrop a director could hope for, and the great weather meant they could set up a shooting schedule that wouldn't get rained out or snowed in. Thus, Hollywood was born, and even after 100 years of a global film market, Tinseltown still reigns supreme on profitability and production output.
Olympic Haven
Of course, no entertainment capital could call itself such without hosting the world's greatest stage, the Summer Olympics, an honor the City of Angels has nabbed three times if we count the upcoming 2028 Games. More impressive, however, is the fact that Los Angeles is the only city to actually net a profit from the Olympic Games, which has proven to be more and more of a money pit for hosting cities over the decades. As the city is already equipped with all the sports arenas and technical support needed to host and televise the games, they manage to come out on top. In fact, they claim that 2028 will be a "no impact" event, intending to use the same L.A. Memorial Coliseum where they held the city's first opening ceremony back in 1932.
