Los Angeles! How can I tell you of it and of the lovely region of the American Riviera all round about it? My ideas of Los Angeles had been indefinite. I had only heard of it. I only knew that up in Dawson and in Alaska the frost-stung digger for gold dreams of Southern California and the country of Los Angeles, and when, during his seven long months of winter and darkness, he assures himself of his stake and his fortune, he talks of the far south and prepares to go there and to end his days among these orange groves and olive orchards and teeming gardens. And when he dies—so it is said—every good Yukoner and Alaskan has no other prayer than to be translated to Southern California! So I had imagined much for this perhaps most charming of all regions of the semi-tropics, within the immediate borders of the United States. But I had not yet conceived the fine, modern city among all of this delight of climate and of verdure. A city with broad, asphalted business streets, built up on either side with new, modern sky-scrapers far exceeding in bigness those of San Francisco. The edifices bordering Market Street in San Francisco are fine, but old in type—most or all erected thirty or forty years ago—while the many huge blocks of Los Angeles are as up to date as those of New York. It possesses two hundred miles of modern electric tramways, and H. E. Huntington has sold out his holdings in the Southern Pacific left him by his uncle, C. P. Huntington, and has put and is now putting his millions into the electric tramway system of Los Angeles.
MARENGO AVENUE—PASADENA.
STREET VIEW—LOS ANGELES.
During the morning we rode some thirty miles upon the tourist’s car, seeing the city, its many fine parks, its public buildings, its business blocks, its extraordinary extent of imposing residences. And when we might ride no longer, we strolled on through Adams Street and Chester Place and St. James Place, and among those sections of the residence quarter where no tramways are allowed to profane the public way. And here among these modern palaces, perhaps, we learned to comprehend the real inwardness of Los Angeles’ astonishing growth, for many of these superb homes are not built and owned by the business men making fortunes out of the commerce of the city, but are built and owned by those who have already acquired fortunes in other parts of the United States and of the world, and who by reason of the genial climate of Southern California, have come here to live out the balance of their days. Their incomes are derived from sources elsewhere than in California, and they spend freely of those incomes in the region of their new homes. The exquisite lawns, the flowering shrubs, the tropical and semi-tropical palms and palmettos, all kept and cared for by means of the constant use of water and expert gardeners’ skill, give to the city a residence section of marvelous charm. Water does it all, and man helps the water.
Los Angeles possesses many fine churches and schools and two flourishing colleges. One run by the Methodist Church; the other under the control of the State. From a city of twenty-five thousand in 1890, Los Angeles is now grown to one hundred and twenty-five thousand, and is still expanding by leaps and bounds. It is the center of the gardens and orchards and citrus fruit trade of Southern California, and is the Mecca toward whose environs comes in perpetual procession the unending army of the world’s “One Lungers,” and their friends.
Of an afternoon we rode out to Pasadena in the swift, through electric train. Once a separate community, now already become a suburb of the greater growing city. “The finest climate on the earth,” they say, and mankind from all parts of the earth are there to prove it. A large town of residences, each standing apart in its own garden; many surrounded by oranges and pomegranates and figs. Lovely homes and occupied by a cultivated society.