Los Angeles & Southern California - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [0]
Destination Los Angeles & Southern California
Getting Started
Itineraries
History
The Culture
Food & Drink
Environment
Southern California Outdoors
Los Angeles & SoCal for Children
Los Angeles
Orange County
San Diego County
Palm Springs & the Deserts
Santa Barbara County
Directory
Transportation
Health
The Authors
Behind the Scenes
World Time Zones
Map Legend
Return to beginning of chapter
Destination Los Angeles & Southern California
You might have a great number of expectations about what you’ll discover when you arrive in sunny Southern California. Surf, endless fun and sun, youth culture inventing itself before your eyes, and the legends of Hollywood and the ‘Old West’ surrounding you everywhere. And they are all here. But just for a moment, let us give you a slightly different take on the mythology of Los Angeles and Southern California.
* * *
FAST FACTS
SoCal geographical size: 42,383 sq miles
SoCal population: 21,586,200
LA unemployment 2007: 5.1%
Number of movie studios in LA: 30
Life expectancy: women 81.8 years, men 77.1 years (two years more than nationwide)
Median price for a single-family home LA County: $593,000
SoCal contribution to GDP in 2006: $793.1 billion
Average rush-hour speed on LA freeways: 17mph
Average per capita income in LA County: $34,426
Number of annual passengers passing through LAX: 61 million (world’s fifth busiest airport)
Proportion of North American adult films made in SoCal: 85%
* * *
There’s a jutting outcrop of barren and heat-blasted rock high above Death Valley known as Aguereberry Point. The only way you can reach it is by taking the twisted and treacherous road wrenched and hewn in the 1930s by the eccentric prospector (Pete Aguereberry) after whom it is named. From here you can look out across 100 miles of one of the most desolate and forbidding landscapes on the planet and ask yourself, ‘Why on earth would human beings ever risk their lives to cross this barren, hellish place?’ To the east you’ll spy the desolate mountains that pioneers just barely made it through; while to the west you will be able to make out towering mountains, their peaks covered with snow and the promise of life-giving water.
From this elevated viewpoint you can begin to imagine that even the slightest hope of what lay ahead was enough to keep early settlers alive for the last leg of their westward journey. If they did survive, their dreams would have been fulfilled. Among the wonders they found were alpine mountains soaring to over 10,000ft; coastal plains and beaches without equal; soil as rich as anywhere on earth, able to sustain livestock and produce wine, vast groves of fruit and fields of vegetables; and weather and sunlight that’s the envy of all who live anywhere other than the Mediterranean. This was Southern California, the land of dreams and dreamers. And it is no less wondrous now.
Today’s Southern California, or ‘SoCal’ as its new natives call it, is the culmination of the efforts of generations of such dreamers. Bear in mind that on the pages that follow we’re talking about one half of a single American state. It has an economy roughly the equal of Spain. Its universities are plentiful and world class. From Los Angeles, the imagery spun by Hollywood dominates the digital transmissions and cultural trends of the entire planet. Surf, sand and sex will endure as long as there is a SoCal coast.
But SoCal is not a finished work. It remains one of the most dynamic places on earth in which to live and play. Just consider space probes, Disneyland, the internet, automotive and fashion design, the movie industry and its attendant media slaves – all are headquartered in or managed from here. The region’s growing pains have largely found an equilibrium. The problem now is growth itself.
The nightmares of the ’90s – the race riots and the catastrophic Northridge earthquake among them – seem already to belong to a different age. But perhaps it’s because of this very adaptability and equanimity that SoCal has found