Moon Metro Los Angeles is now available as a Spot guide, a stunning new mobile format compatible with Treo Smartphones and other Palm devices. Moon Spot Guides detect where you are, remember what you like, and can guide you to the hip Thai restaurant around the corner or the Modern Art Museum three blocks away. Download a Moon Metro Los Angeles Spot Guide now in digital form at Earthcomber.com.

Moon Metro Los Angeles
2nd Edition
ISBN 1-56691-789-1
$16.95
Purchase here through Amazon.com or visit Booksense.com to find your local independent bookseller.

Desert or paradise, dream or dystopia, golden sunshine or noir shadow…no place embraces contradictions like the City of the Angels. Once a frontier cow town with no water supply or natural harbor, Los Angeles has become a mythic metropolis of nearly 10 million, easily the world’s most diverse city, and soon to be America’s largest. Perpetually caught in the throes of its own growth, L.A. is constantly reinventing itself — as Mediterranean Eden, as media capital, as gateway to Latin America and the Pacific Rim. The city’s spasmodic development has redefined urban and suburban culture everywhere, introducing, for better or worse, new phrases like “strip mall,”“prefab,” and “drive-thru.” And while this influence provokes some to dismiss the city as a cultural wasteland, the reality is more complex: Efforts to restore and redevelop historic areas like Hollywood and downtown prove that Los Angeles is committed to preserving its past, even as it barrels headlong into the future.

Older than many realize, Los Angeles was founded in 1781, when a group of 44 Mexicans established a tiny settlement near the present downtown. The initial Pueblo de Los Angeles grew with the region’s thriving ranchero culture, but remained a small frontier town until the Santa Fe Railroad directly linked southern California with the rest of the nation in 1885.

The railways brought the first of several great tides of immigrants to Los Angeles. And with the construction of a giant aqueduct, then the world’s largest, Los Angeles was poised to welcome all comers. Between 1910 and 1940, the city’s population increased by more than 1,500 percent. During the 1920s, L.A.’s downtown bustled with traffic, and the nascent film industry firmly established itself just south of the Santa Monica mountains. Hollywood, where the major studios were based, took on an almost supernatural aura during the depression-ravaged ’30s, and lent Los Angeles an air of infinite possibility. Attracted to the impossible glamor of the silver screen, to the promise of cheap farmland, or just to the spectacular weather, people poured into Los Angeles. After World War II, the construction of the L.A. freeway system linked the area’s far-flung communities into a unified system, and forever tied the city’s future to the automobile.

The face of Los Angeles continued to change through the ’60s and ’70s with new waves of immigration — from Korea and Southeast Asia, from Eastern Europe, and, most markedly, from Mexico and Latin America. The city’s economic divide widened considerably, the mansions of Beverly Hills and Bel Air growing ever more grandiose, the conditions in South Central and elsewhere growing ever more dire. Meanwhile L.A.’s own brand of counterculture flourished in the rock clubs of the Sunset Strip, in the cabins of Topanga Canyon, and along the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica.

Today Los Angeles has never been more vast, varied, or fascinating. Those expecting a single center or dominant character will no doubt feel a bit overwhelmed. L.A. demands to be experienced on its own terms — terms that usually involve a certain amount of traffic, for one thing. But for all its sprawling diversity, the millions who live here do share what Lewis Lapham has called the “dreaming energy of the California mind,” that faith in Los Angeles as a constant work in progress, bound only by the limits of imagination.