L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

In 1922, his mother announced that she was separating from Bill’s father and moving to Los Angeles and that she was taking Bill’s three younger siblings with her. Bill went with her to help with the move—and to see the City of Angels for himself.

      LOS ANGELES was Deadwood writ large—a boomtown on a scale never seen before or since in this country. The city was growing so quickly that residents and visitors couldn’t even agree on how to pronounce its name. To some it was “Loss An-jy-lese;” to others, “Loss An-jy-lus” or even “Lows An-y-klyese”—a pronunciation the Los Angeles Times suspected was a deliberate eastern slur. (The paper of record insisted that the proper pronunciation was the distinctly Spanish “Loce Ahng-hail-ais,” a pronunciation it printed under its masthead for several years.) Not until the 1930s did today’s “Los An-ju-less” gain the clear upper hand.

Whatever its pronunciation, it was clear that people couldn’t wait to get there. Model Ts crammed the old Santa Fe Trail—today’s Route 66—full of Midwesterners who were California-bound. By 1922, the city’s population had risen to more than 600,000. Fifteen-story skyscrapers (heights had been capped after the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906) lined Spring Street, the so-called Wall Street of the West. Dazzling electric signs proclaimed its next goal—2,000,000 POPULATION BY 1930!(It made it to 1,200,000.) At the corner of Wilshire and La Brea, newcomers were transfixed by something they had never seen before, neon signs, the first in the United States. Everywhere there were automobiles. On a typical workday, some 260,000 cars jammed downtown Los Angeles, making the intersection of Adams and Figueroa on the edge of downtown the busiest in the world, with more than double the traffic of its nearest rival, Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. Los Angeles also had one of the most extensive streetcar networks in the country. Together, the intraurban Yellow and interurban Red lines provided service over more than a thousand miles of rail and transported an average of 520,000 people into the downtown area every day. Total number of passenger trips in 1924:

110,000,000.

“All of the talk was ‘boom,’ ‘dollars,’ ‘greatest in the world,’ ‘sure to double in price,’” marveled the author Hamlin Garland, who visited L.A. in 1923.

“I have never seen so many buildings going up all at one time.… There are thousands in process in every direction I looked.” The mingling of architectural styles was—to use a word coined in that same period—surreal. The city’s neighborhoods, reported Garland, consist of “hundreds of the gay little stucco bungalows in the Spanish-Mexican, Italian-Swiss, and many other styles, a conglomeration that cannot be equaled anywhere else on earth I am quite sure.” If others noticed this, they didn’t seem to mind.

“The whole Middle West,” Garland concluded, “wants to come here.”

And no wonder. The city (to say nothing of its underworld) was a carnival. In downtown Los Angeles, the theaters and movie palaces that lined Broadway attracted thronging crowds to motley performances that mixed vaudeville performers, singers, dancers, chorus girls, acrobats, even elephants with silent films by stars like Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford. Then as now, starstruck tourists could sign up for “star tours” that took them past the homes of their favorite celebrities on the beach in Santa Monica and in Beverly Hills. Streetcars packed with bands and draped with advertisements crisscrossed the city, announcing new towns every month. Elephants, lions, and circus freaks lured people out to the newest developments (or, more commonly, to a free lunch under a tent on an empty lot followed by a pitch for a “marvelous investment opportunity”).

“If every conceivable trick in advertising was not resorted to, it was probably due to an oversight,” wrote one early philanthropist. Along Hollywood and Wilshire Boulevards, the city’s first apartment buildings were starting to rise. South of downtown was the beginning of a vast manufacturing district, home to tire fabrication and automotive assembly plants that would eventually transform bucolic Los Angeles into the country’s preeminent manufacturing center. High in the Hollywood Hills, a giant sign, each letter fifty feet tall and covered with four thousand lightbulbs, promoted one of Harry Chandler’s new developments, “Hollywoodland!” The “-land” later fell over, and the sign became the new city’s most distinctive symbol.