This article is about the largest city in California. For other uses of 'Los Angeles', see Los Angeles (disambiguation)

Downtown Los Angeles skyline facing northeast toward the San Gabriel Mountains on a clear winter day. Missing from the center foreground of the photo is the Staples Center arena, completed in 1999.

The City of Los Angeles, widely known by its abbreviation L.A., is a large coastal conurbation in Southern California in the western United States. It was incorporated as a city in California on April 4, 1850. The city is the county seat of Los Angeles County. Los Angeles is the largest city in California, and the second most populous city in the United States (after New York City), with a population of 3,694,820 as of the 2000 census. A July 1, 2004, Census estimate shows the city's population at 3,847,400.

The economy of Los Angeles is driven by agriculture, petroleum, motion pictures, aerospace, international trade, and tourism. It is the largest entry point for immigrants to the United States, with people from every nation. According to at least one typology of world cities, Los Angeles is an "Alpha" world city, since it has hosted two Olympic Games, and is home to renowned scientific and cultural institutions. It is a major center for producing entertainment, including motion picture, TV, and recorded music.

The City of Los Angeles is governed by a mayor and a 15-member council. The Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles Public Library System and Los Angeles Unified School District are among the largest such organizations in the country. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power provides service to city residents and businesses.

The Los Angeles metropolitan area (frequently termed the "Southland") includes Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange and Ventura counties, and is home to more than sixteen million people of diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. The Greater Los Angeles area is often referred to as Southern California, but geographically that term more properly includes both the Los Angeles metroplex and Imperial, Kern, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

Los Angeles, California

Flag of Los Angeles Seal of Los Angeles
City nickname:"The City of Angels"
County	Los Angeles County, California
Area  - Total  - Water	1,290.6 km² (498.3 mi²) 75.7 km² (29.2 mi²) 5.86%
Population  - Total (2004)  - Metropolitan  - Density	3,847,400 16,710,400 3,041.3/km²
Time zone	Pacific: UTC-8
Latitude Longitude	33°56' N 118°24' W
City Flower:	Bird of paradise (Strelitzia reginae)
City Tree:	Coral tree
United States House of Representatives:	Bill Thomas, Howard McKeon, Brad Sherman, Howard L. Berman, Henry A. Waxman, Xavier Becerra, Hilda L. Solis, Diane E. Watson, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Maxine Waters, Juanita Millender-McDonald, Linda Sanchez, Dana Rohrabacher
California Assembly:	Tony Strickland, Keith Richman, Cindy Montañez, Lloyd L. Levine,Fran Pavley, Paul Koretz, Dario Frommer, Carol Liu, Jackie Goldberg, Fabian Núñez, Herb J. Wesson, Jr., Mark Ridley-Thomas, Marco Antonio Firebaugh, Jerome Horton, Mervyn M. Dymally, George Nakano, Alan Lowenthal, Jenny Oropeza, Dennis Mountjoy
City of Los Angeles Official Website (http://www.ci.la.ca.us/)

History

Main Article: History of Los Angeles, California

The Los Angeles coastal area was occupied by the Tongva, Chumash, and even earlier Native American peoples for thousands of years. The Spanish people first arrived in 1542, when Juan Cabrillo visited the area. In 1769 the Spanish returned to California to stay. In 1771, the San Gabriel mission was founded, thus establishing a long-term Spanish presence in the area.

On September 4, 1781 settlers from the San Gabriel Mission founded the town and named it El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles de la Porciuncula, "The Town of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of the Small Portion". It remained a small mission and ranch town for decades.

Mexican independence from Spain was achieved in the 1820's, but the greatest change took place in present day Montebello after the Battle of Rio San Gabriel in 1847, which decided the fate of Los Angeles. Yankees gained control after they flooded into California during the Gold Rush and secured the subsequent admission of California into the United States.

Los Angeles was incorporated as a city in 1851. Railroads arrived when the Southern Pacific completed its line to Los Angeles in 1876. Oil was discovered in 1892, and by 1923, Los Angeles was supplying one-quarter of the world's petroleum.

Even more important to the city's growth was water. In 1913, William Mulholland completed the aqueduct that assured the city's growth and led to the annexation by the City of Los Angeles, starting in 1915, of dozens of neighboring communities without water supplies of their own.

In the 1920s the motion picture and aviation industries both flocked to Los Angeles and helped to develop it further. The city was the proud host of the 1932 Summer Olympics. World War II brought new growth and prosperity to the city, although many of its Japanese-American residents were transported to internment camps. The post-war years saw an even greater boom as urban sprawl expanded into the San Fernando Valley.

The Watts riots in 1965 reminded the country of the deep divisions that even the nation's youngest city faced. The XXIII Olympiad was successfully hosted in Los Angeles in 1984. The city was tested by the 1992 civil unrest and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. A city-wide vote on San Fernando Valley and Hollywood secession was defeated in 2002.

Seismic activity

Like most areas of California, Los Angeles' history is punctuated with major earthquakes, most recently the 1994 Northridge earthquake, centered in the northern San Fernando Valley. Coming less than two years after the civil unrest, the Northridge earthquake resulted in an additional shock to Southern Californians, in addition to billions of dollars in damage. Other major earthquakes include the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake and the 1971 Sylmar earthquake.

Culture

Main article: Arts and culture of Los Angeles

Los Angeles is famous as the world capital of motion picture production. It is also an important center for music, art, and architecture. As a major global metropolis, Los Angeles has evolved a unique cultural surface that is most influentially portrayed in its main medium, Hollywood.

Despite its young age, Los Angeles has earned impressive fame and inspired much criticism. A frequent stereotype is that Los Angeles is a cultureless wasteland. For more criticism, see Arts and culture of Los Angeles: Criticism.

Residents of the city and county of Los Angeles are served by the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) and its branch locations. The LAPL is funded by voter approved bond and tax levy packages. The Main Library is located in downtown Los Angeles and has been recognized as a National Historic Site.

Sports

Los Angeles is the home of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers men's basketball teams, the Los Angeles Sparks women's basketball team, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, the Club Deportivo Chivas USA and Los Angeles Galaxy soccer teams, and the Los Angeles Avengers arena football team. Los Angeles has been without an NFL franchise since 1995 despite being the second biggest television market in North America.

Anaheim, about 25 miles to the south-east, is home to the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim hockey team and the Anaheim Angels baseball team. At various times in history, however, the Angels have been known as the Los Angeles Angels and California Angels; talks in 2004 suggested the team was considering returning to the former name, over loud protests from the Anaheim government. In late December 2004 the name was officially changed to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in order to associate with the larger city while still complying with contractual obligations.

Beach volleyball and windsurfing were both invented in the area (though predecessors of both were first invented in some form by Duke Kahanamoku in Hawaii). Venice, also known as Dogtown, is credited with being the birthplace of skateboarding and the place where rollerblading first became popular. Area beaches are popular with surfers, who have created their own subculture.

Los Angeles has twice played host to the summer Olympic Games: in 1932 and in 1984.

Los Angeles is perhaps the most mountainous metropolis in the world, with four mountain ranges partly inside city boundaries. Thousands of miles of trails crisscross the city and neighboring areas, providing exercise and wilderness access on foot, bike, or horse. Across the county a great variety of outdoor activities are available, such as skiing, rock climbing, gold panning, hang gliding, and windsurfing. Numerous outdoor clubs serve these sports, including the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club, which annually leads over 4,000 outings in the area.

Flora

Los Angeles is remarkably rich in native plant species. With its beaches, dunes, wetlands, hills, mountains, and rivers, the area contains a number of important biological communities. The largest area is coastal sage scrub, which covers the hillsides in combustible chaparral. Native plants include: California poppy, matilija poppy, toyon, coast live oak, giant wild rye grass, and hundreds of others. Unfortunately, many native species are so rare as to be endangered, such as the Los Angeles sunflower.

Jacaranda blossom

There are many exotic flowers and flowering trees that are blooming year-round, with subtle colors, including the jacaranda, hibiscus, phlox, bougainvillea, coral tree blossoms and bird of paradise. If there were no city here, flower-growing could still flourish as an industry, as it does in Lompoc. Wisteria has been known to grow to house-lot-size, and in Descanso Gardens, there are forests of camellia trees. Orchids require special attention in this Mediterranean climate.

Media

The city is served by several local television stations including:

Los Angeles is served by the Los Angeles Times and La Opinión (the city's major Spanish-language paper.), as well as smaller regional newspapers, alternative weeklies and magazine, including the Los Angeles Newspaper Group's Daily News (which focuses coverage on the Valley), Village Voice Media's L.A. Weekly, L.A. City Beat, Los Angeles magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Los Angeles Daily Journal (legal industry paper), Variety, (show-biz industry paper), and Los Angeles Downtown News. In addition to the English and Spanish language papers, numerous local periodicals serve immigrant communities in their native languages.

Most of the above papers are center-left or left in their political stance with the clear exception of the Daily News, which is center-right. One example of this is that the L.A. Times often does high-quality investigative journalism on important inner-city issues like healthcare and crime, while the L.A. Daily News is usually content to run wire stories on those issues, if it covers them at all.

Many cities adjacent to Los Angeles also have their own daily newspapers whose coverage and availability overlaps into certain Los Angeles neighborhoods. Examples include the Daily Breeze (serving the South Bay), and the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

Religion

Los Angeles is home to adherents of many religions. The cathedral of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (at the north end of downtown) was completed in 2002. A major temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is situated in West Los Angeles.

Los Angeles' large multi-ethnic population has fostered some of the less common religions of North America . Immigrants from Asia, for example, have formed a number of significant Buddhist congregations.

Los Angeles is also home to a number of Neopagans and other mystical religions.

The city has also been home to some very colorful religious leaders and icons. In the 1920s, Aimee Semple McPherson established a thriving evangelic ministry, open to both black and white congregants. Today, the Church of Scientology has a major presence in the city.

Education

K-12 schools

The primary school district that serves Los Angeles is the Los Angeles Unified School District.

After Proposition 13 in 1978, urban school districts had considerable trouble with funding and LAUSD became known for its underfunded, overcrowded and poorly maintained campuses. Wealthy and upper-middle-class parents placed their children in elite private schools like Harvard-Westlake and Crossroads School, while middle-class families fled into suburban school districts beyond LAUSD boundaries.

Since then, the LAUSD has embarked on an aggressive school construction program to relieve overcrowding, and has developed high-quality magnet schools to nurture talented students and encourage them to remain within the public school system.

Colleges and universities

• University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• University of Southern California (USC)
• California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA)
• California State University, Northridge (CSUN)
• Loyola Marymount University (LMU)
• Los Angeles City College (LACC)
• Occidental College (Oxy)
• Southwestern University School of Law
• Pepperdine University School of Law

Note: for more colleges and universities in the L.A. area, such as Caltech, see Los Angeles County, California#Colleges and Universities

Sites of interest

U.S. Bank Tower in Downtown Los Angeles is the tallest building west of the Mississippi River.

• Angels Flight
• Angelus Temple *
• Baldwin Hills Village*
• Biltmore Hotel
• Bonaventure Hotel
• Bradbury Building *
• Central Los Angeles Library
• Chinatown
• Disney Hall
• Exposition Park
• Farmers Market
• J. Paul Getty Center
• Grauman's Chinese Theater
• Griffith Observatory
• Griffith Park
• Hollywood Bowl
• Hollywood Walk of Fame
• Korean Bell of Friendship
• La Brea Tar Pits
• SS Lane Victory (A WWII Victory ship) *
• Leimert Park
• Little Tokyo *
• Los Angeles City Hall
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
• Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum
• Los Angeles Zoo
• Museum of Tolerance
• Olvera Street
• Peterson Automotive Museum
• Ralph J. Scott (fireboat) *
• Southwest Museum
• Union Station
• Universal Studios
• U.S. Bank Tower
• Watts Towers *

*National Historic Landmark

Law and government

Main article: Law and government of Los Angeles

Los Angeles city hall

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) polices the city of Los Angeles. (The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department polices all areas of L.A. county that do not have independent city police departments.)

The city has a mayor-council system. The current mayor is James Hahn. There are 15 city council districts. Other elected city officials are the city attorney and the city controller. The city attorney prosecutes misdemeanors within the city limits. The district attorney, elected by the county voters, prosecutes misdemeanors in unincorporated areas and in 78 of the 88 cities in the county, as well as felonies everywhere in the county.

The city government has been perceived as insufficiently effective by some of its areas, which ultimately led to an unsuccessful secession movement by the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood in 2002. The main problem seems to be that the city administration in Downtown gives more priority to high-density neighborhoods like Mid-City and Downtown at the expense of its far-flung suburban neighborhoods.

To make the government more responsive and to help encourage the cohesiveness of neighborhood communities, the city council has promoted the formation of neighborhood councils. These advisory councils were first proposed by city council member Joel Wachs in 1996 and were incorporated in the Charter Reform of 1999. The councils cover districts which are not necessarily identical to the traditional neighborhoods of Los Angeles, the borders of which often reflect those of cities that were annexed to Los Angeles (see Communities, Neighborhoods, and Districts below). More than 90 neighborhood councils have been formed and all stakeholders in a district may vote for council members. Though the councils have little actual power, they are still official government bodies and so must abide by California's Brown Act that strictly governs the meetings of deliberative assemblies. These and other regulatory requirements have proven frustrating for activists unaccustomed to bureaucratic procedures. The first notable achievement of the neighborhood councils was their organized opposition in March 2004 to an 18% increase in water rates by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which led the city council to suspend the rate hike pending further study.

Los Angeles has 20 Sister Cities, more than any other municipality in California. Notable sister cities include Athens, Jakarta, Berlin, Mumbai, Vancouver, Mexico City and St. Petersburg.

See also: List of mayors of Los Angeles, California

Geography

Los Angeles' large urban sprawl: About 16 million people live in the imaged area.

Main article: Geography of Los Angeles

The city is situated in a semitropical Mediterranean climate zone.

L.A. has a total area of 472.08 square miles. The extreme north-south distance is 44 miles, the extreme east-west distance is 29 miles, and the length of the city boundary is 342 miles.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 1,290.6 km² (498.3 mi²). 1,214.9 km² (469.1 mi²) of it is land and 75.7 km² (29.2 mi²) of it is water. The total area is 5.86% water.

The highest point in Los Angeles is Sister Elsie Peak, 5,080 feet at the far reaches of the northeastern San Fernando Valley, part of Mt. Lukens. The city is mostly at sea level elevation or a few feet above.

The major waterway of Los Angeles is the Los Angeles River.

See also: Los Angeles Basin

Urban layout

From a height, a flat area completely filled with houses, buildings, roads, and freeways

Greater Los Angeles (also referred to locally as "Southern California" or "The Southland") is such a sprawling area that residents refer to broad general sub-regions. It is not always meaningful to refer to Los Angeles as a distinct city, but people outside of Southern California commonly refer to the entire region as "L.A.," even though there are five counties, more than 100 distinct municipalities, hundreds of neighborhoods and districts, and more people than any individual state except for Texas, New York, Florida, and, of course, California.

At the same time, the area's reputation for sprawl is more historic than real in today's terms. Los Angeles achieved a high degree of automobile ownership earlier than most urban areas, and as a result it developed somewhat less densely. This decentralization has resulted in the city of Los Angeles having a very low popultion density compared to other large American cities (less than one-third the density of New York City, and nearly half the density of Chicago). In contrast to this, the extent of the region's suburban sprawl as been so thoroughly cultivated so as to result in a greater metropolitan area with a relatively high density of 7,070 people per square mile (according to the 2000 census).

Some areas are bounded by natural features such as mountains or the ocean; others are marked by city boundaries, freeways, or other constructed landmarks. For example, Downtown Los Angeles is the area of Los Angeles roughly enclosed by three freeways and one river: The Harbor Freeway to the west, the Hollywood Freeway to the north, the Los Angeles River to the east, and the Santa Monica Freeway to the south. Or, consider the San Fernando Valley: Lying north-northwest of Downtown L.A., "The Valley" is a 15 mile-wide basin ringed by mountains.

Some other areas of Los Angeles include the Westside; South L.A. (formerly known as South Central L.A.); and the San Pedro/Harbor City area. Adjoining areas that are outside the actual city boundaries of the incorporated city of Los Angeles include the South Bay, the San Gabriel Valley and the Foothills. The San Pedro/Harbor City area was annexed to the city of Los Angeles so the city could have access and control over the Port of Los Angeles and is only connected by a narrow Corridor with the rest of L.A, which follows the Harbor Freeway for the most part. Many Angelenos consider the Eastside to be the area east of the Los Angeles River, above Orange County.

Angelenos usually identify other Angelenos based on what part of the area they are from, and have commonly-spread biases towards such people. For example, a person from the westside usually is contrasted with a person from the eastside. A person from the valley is not considered to be identical to people from the South Bay.

The city boundaries are quite complicated. For example, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood are completely surrounded by the City of Los Angeles except for a small border the two cities share. Culver City is surrounded by L.A. except where it shares a boundary with the unincorporated communities of Ladera Heights and Baldwin Hills. Both Santa Monica and Marina del Rey are surrounded except on their ocean side. San Fernando in the northern corner of the San Fernando Valley is also a separate city entirely surrounded by L.A. territory. There are also unincorporated enclaves which are under Los Angeles County jurisdiction.

Communities, neighborhoods and districts

Hollywood is a well-known area of Los Angeles, housing many actors and actresses

The city is divided into many neighborhoods. Most of the neighborhood names come either from farm towns that were annexed by the growing city, physical terrain features, major streets, or subdivision names coined by enterprising developers. These divisions have no legal status but are of significance to residents for cultural and financial reasons. Signs have been placed on major thoroughfares designating some of the communities, a practice going back decades. (The "neighborhood councils" of Los Angeles began in 1999 and often follow different borders).

Depending on the context, West Los Angeles can refer to either a specific neighborhood or the entire Westside.

For more communities and cities local to the L.A. area, see Los Angeles County, California.

These are districts and neighborhoods within the city proper: Arleta, Arroyo Seco, Atwater Village, Baldwin Hills, Bel-Air, Beverlywood, Boyle Heights, Brentwood, Canoga Park, Carthay Circle, Century City, Chatsworth, Cheviot Hills, Chinatown, Country Club Park,