Description
Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles?traces the improbable rise of Los Angeles through the prism of six visionaries who had outsize influence on the city's growth: Phineas Banning, Harrison Gray Otis, Henry Huntington, Harry Chandler, William Mulholland, and Moses Sherman. In the late 1870s, Los Angeles was a violent, dusty, 29-square-mile pueblo with a few thousand souls, largely unchanged since its founding in 1781. By 1930, its size had swelled to within 96% of its current 468 square miles, housing a staggering 1.2 million people. In just 50 years, L.A. had joined the ranks of other world-class cities. In the tradition of Mike Davis's classic work?City of Quartz, Paul Haddad (Freewaytopia?and?10,000 Steps a Day in L.A.)?debunks many myths about the City of Angels with a wildly entertaining narrative that?sheds new light on the fascinating birth of modern Los Angeles. Power came from a select few, whose triumphs, scandals, and correspondence are well documented in?Inventing Paradise,?along with other little-known facts about L.A. history,?including:How Los Angeles Times chief Harry Chandler pushed eugenics and endorsed "white spots"Henry Huntington's and Moses Sherman's trolley systems and the extortion-type practices that led to their expansionWhen?Los Angeles was so desperate for water, it hired a miracle worker who promised rainHow L.A.'s power elite peddled the lie that the Owens River used to flow into Los Angeles and rightfully belonged to the cityWhen?Los Angeles annexed a city in which monkeys cast votesHow?Venice, California, was not the first Venice, CaliforniaWilliam Mulholland's game-changing construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which raised the city's population ceiling from 250,000 to 2.5 millionHaddad also covers the heavy costs that came with creating paradise in such a short period of time, including car dependency, environmental problems, and deep-seated inequities between wealthy white Angelenos and people of color due to racist policies. All have left an imprint on present-day Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a city that should not exist-and yet it does. Through?Inventing Paradise, Haddad shows readers that Los Angeles is not a paradise found, but a paradise that was willed into existence, owing to the collective vision of these six Gilded Era-born tycoons.
Binding: Hardback
Binding: Hardback