"Night after night her purple traffic
Strews the landing with opal bales;
Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails."
Emily Dickinson
"In what ethereal dances!
By what eternal streams!"
Los Angeles, "the City of the Angels," is invested with the same poetic suggestion in its name as that which surrounds Santa Fé,—"the City of the Holy Faith." A terraced street is known as "Angel Flight." Any retrospective contemplation of Los Angeles gives one the sensation of having been whirled through the starry immensities of space. During even a brief stay one afterward discovers by the unerring logic of mathematics that within a few days he has perhaps travelled some four hundred miles by the electric trolley cars, besides his motor-car journeys when shot through space from old San Gabriel to the Pacific Coast, or from Elysium Park to Hollywood, and far and away on the opposite side of the city. Were one caught up in an aëro-car, journeying far above the clouds for ten days, it could hardly seem more unreal. One can only think of Los Angeles as the City of Vast Spaces. The town has laid out all the surrounding country, one would fancy, in beautiful tracts (there are over four thousand), each tract containing several acres,—laid out under alluring names, with streets, sidewalks, and lamp-posts.
The "boom" is something tremendous. Companies and corporations run free electric cars to points forty miles out of town, as Redondo Beach and other localities, for people to inspect the lots offered,—lots at prices from "four dollars down, and four dollars a month," with the entire cost from ninety dollars up to that of several hundred. If all the world is not supplied with homes it is not the fault of enterprising Los Angeles. The incomparable electric trolley system renders the entire region within fifty miles around eligible for city privileges. People think nothing of going thirty, forty, even seventy-five miles by the "express electrics." Over an area of a thousand miles in length and perhaps one hundred and fifty in width there is scattered a population less than that centred within city limits in Chicago. The world is wide—in Southern California. There is nothing of the dreamy, languorous old Spanish atmosphere in Los Angeles. It is the most electrically up-to-date city imaginable. The city limits comprise over twenty-eight thousand acres. The streets are paved and oiled; the lighting is wonderful, most of it being done from tall towers rather than ordinary lamp-posts. Not even New York has any street or avenue so illuminated by night as is Broadway in Los Angeles, where, as in the boulevards in Paris, one can easily read by the street lights. Los Angeles has twenty-one great parks and innumerable hills and valleys in the residence regions. This diversity affords natural facilities for landscape gardening which are utilized with fine effect. Spacious boulevards, artificial lakes, and series of terraces everywhere enchant the eye, seen amidst the bewildering luxuriance of creamy magnolia blossoms and the graceful pepper tree.
The enterprise of Los Angeles is equalled by the refinement and culture of the people, and the schools, churches, libraries—the social life—all reveal the best spirit of American institutions.