1. Harbor of Avalon, Catalina Island. 2. and 3. San Fernando Mission.
California specializes in schoolhouses and street lamps. In the newest and in some instances in the most isolated settlements, you will find beautiful schoolhouses, an earnest of the children and the education that are to be; and all over California in country villages one finds the main streets lined with ornate lamp standards surmounted by handsome globes. They give an air even to sordid little streets lined by saloons, country groceries, and dry-goods emporiums.
California is not afraid to spend money for education. Her school buildings, many of them in the Mission style, would make Eastern towns of the same size gasp with amazement.
Hollywood with its lovely villas is a popular and beautiful suburb of Los Angeles, and seems almost like a second Los Angeles save that it is among the hills instead of on the plain.
CHAPTER IV.
Los Angeles is unique. Where will you find another city like it, so open, so bright, with such handsome apartment houses, designed for light housekeeping, such multitudes of cafeterias? Where will you find such a green square of civic center with people sitting quietly about, enjoying the sunshine, the splashing of the fountain, the tameness of the starlings? These are the happy, not the unhappy, unemployed. They have come from far and near to live simply in light housekeeping apartments, to bask in the sunshine, many of them to enjoy a sunny old age on a modest but comfortable income. The last census, they tell us, shows that 80 per cent of the Los Angeles people are from the State of Iowa. But from all the Middle West they have fled from the cold winters to the warmth of this big city which really seems to be not a city at all, but an immense collection of open parks, bright houses, and handsome streets. Thousands of people are pouring into Los Angeles every year. Great fields around the city have been included within the city limits, fine streets with ornate lamps and copings have been cut through them, handsome stucco and shingle villas have been erected. These are homes of well-to-do people who mean to spend at least part of each year, if not the rest of their lives, in Los Angeles. It is all a puzzle, this phenomenal growth of the city. It is not wholly due to business, for the most prosperous business man in Los Angeles is probably the real estate dealer, who has plotted the fields, added new streets, and sold at ever-increasing prices the villa and home sites. The merchant and the provision dealer do well, but after all, their territory is the city itself. There is no great hinterland with which to deal. It is not due to manufacturing interests, for as yet these have been but little developed. It must be, as a lady said to me, "the sale of the climate," an unfailing stock of sunshine that has made Los Angeles the happy, growing, extremely prosperous city that it is.
One may choose from many hotels one's hostel, or one may live in a beautiful apartment, cook one's own breakfast of bacon and eggs, and sally forth to any one of a dozen cafeterias for luncheon and dinner. We found the Hotel Leighton on West Lake Park eminently satisfactory; a spacious, quiet, well managed establishment with the spaces of the park before it and the cars within three minutes' walk.