Mock Los Angeles all you want — It ’s young ! It ’s superficial ! It has no actual culture!—but the City of Angels can equal any other American metropolis in buried narration . We excavate 10 of the eldritch .
1. LOS ANGELES ONCE HAD A CENTRAL PARK.
When this 10 - Akka parkwas created in 1887 , it was n’t precisely primal ( being located in Vernon , then away metropolis limits ) , and it was n’t exactly as grand as its NYC twin ( being about 830 acres smaller ) . It was n’t even LA ’s only Central Park ( Pershing Square concisely claimed the title about six years later ) . But it was a nice little urban oasis , dotted with families picnic under the long bough of pepper Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree . Alas , the in camera own park was subdivided in 1904 , and today Vernon is a desolate stretch of memory , manufacture , and onefamous shambles . Of of course , if the ballpark had n’t been destroy , we never would ’ve had the grimy urban fix forMichael Jackson ’s “ Thriller ” telecasting .
2. LA WAS ONCE COVERED IN OIL DERRICKS.
Any driver take La Cienega to LAX will pass a few stray pumpjacks lazily chugging away in the distance . These incongruous heart are souvenir from the 24-hour interval when the city wascovered in oil wells . In the decades before World War II , Los Angeles resembled a wildcat town from the Texas frontier , sporting a coppice of wooden derricks ; in Santa Barbara , they stretch off into the surf . These days , the heart are a shade more discerning . Modern LA has a predilection for comically - mask base ( think of all those metallic element “ decoration tree ” cell phone towers ) , so one pump near Beverly Hills High School has beenwrapped up like a Christo instalment .
3. THE 1963 BALDWIN HILL DAM COLLAPSE WAS THE NATION’S FIRST LIVE TELEVISED DISASTER.
The JFK assassination was America ’s first nationally televised tragedy . But it take adam collapsethree weeks later for a tragedy to come about in real prison term . After a tornado in the Baldwin Hills dam in the South Los Angeles neighborhood widen and then split apart , 292 million gallon of water—440 Olympic - sizing swimming puddle — create a 50 - foot wave . Remarkably , only five the great unwashed died in the ensue torrent . The entire cataclysm was captured live by a KTLA helicopter , a television first . Thirteen age afterward , nearby oil geographic expedition was fault for the dam ’s failure .
4. LA WAS ORIGINALLY PLANNED AS A GRID, WITH NORTH-SOUTH STREETS NAMED AFTER MEXICAN GOVERNORS, AND EAST-WEST STREETS NAMED AFTER U.S. PRESIDENTS.
metropolis planners
cook up this mind in the 1850s , just a few years after the Mexican - American war , when Spanish speaker unit outnumbered English . The proposed Mexican regulator name ( Micheltorena , Alvarado , Figueroa ) were to be pad with a sprinkling of random Spanish names ( San Pedro , Soto).The architectural plan was buried after the demographic of the city tilted toward English speakers , although some of its names survive today .
5. DORITOS ORIGINATED IN DISNEYLAND.
Tom Simpsonvia Flickr //CC BY - NC - ND 2.0
Orange County ’s only true share to Mexican quick food sprang fromDisneyland’sCasa de Fritos restaurant , which opened in 1955 and served detached Fritos with every meal . Sometime before 1966 , the eating place tried cook up stale tortilla chips ; the new snack was the hit of the park , and became so pop that production eventually moved to Oklahoma and Alabama . The marketing executive who is said to have coined the name ( allegedly “ little golden things ” in a mangled , pigeon Spanish)was buried alongside his signature snack in 2011 .
6. MT. LEE—OF THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN—WAS ORIGINALLY FLATTENED TO MAKE SPACE FOR LA’S GRANDEST MANSION.
The 1700 - foot summit behind LA ’s well - known turning point was n’t always so flat . In 1923 , Mack Sennett — the fantastically flush manufacturer of the Keystone Cops — bought 18 Akka of glorious mountaintop . The space was planned for avast complexthat was to let in a library , a 2800 - straight foot consortium with sandlike beach , and terraced Italian gardens , all look out on the splendor of Los Angeles below . The entire star sign would have be $ 1 million ( about $ 14 million in today ’s money , or what Chrissy Teigen and John Legendjust paidfor Rihanna ’s Beverly Hills mansion ) . Steam shovels lopped 69 foot off the eyeshade , then the dandy Depression lopped off Sennett ’s fortune . Today the quite a little still disport a conspicuous flattop .
7. SOME OF GANDHI’S ASHES ARE KEPT IN PACIFIC PALISADES.
After the revered martyr ’s blackwash in 1948 , a funeral progression of well over a million hoi polloi attended Gandhi ’s cremation at the merging of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers . Some of the ash tree were parceled out in separate urns intended for multiple bodies of water around India . One of these urn was passed along to a diary keeper , who in twist gave the urn to the guru Paramahansa Yogananda . He installed the ashes in aquaint lakeside shrineinside the Self Realization Fellowship in Pacific Palisades , just northwards of Santa Monica , where they remain unfastened to visit from the populace .
8. A 1942 PANIC OVER A RUMORED JAPANESE ATTACK WAS SO FIERCE IT RESULTED IN FIVE CIVILIAN DEATHS.
The invasion hysteria behind Spielberg ’s epic poem flop1941was quite real . veneration of a Nipponese attack on the West Coast culminate in a mass freakout in February 1942 , when Angelinos reported seeing strange aircraft in the sky . The Great Los Angeles Air Raid kicked off when the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade panic andfired 1400 anti - aircraft shells at the phantom menace . In the barrage of firepower , three people were accidentally killed and another two died of heart attacks . The event lives on in the sum of UFO conspiracy theorists .
9. GEORGE AND BARBARA BUSH ONCE LIVED IN COMPTON.
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In 1949 , George HW Bush was a salesman , hawking drilling bits for an oil troupe subsidiary . He and his 24 - year old married woman Barbara move into624 S. Santa Fe Avenue in Compton , where they live for six months . George W. Bush was three at the time . Compton was lily-white by police force , with now - illegal caparison compact restricting occupation . Four decades afterwards , after the 1992 LA Riots , a programme to designate the building a diachronic turning point peter out out in the urban center council . The buildingbecame a go denand was later razed .
An earlier version of this military post mentioned secret tunnel that had once existed beneath the Playboy sign of the zodiac . Alas , that story was an April Fool ’s prank .
