CALIFORNIA (See Cover)
That amazing mechanism, the human eye, adjusts itself to Los Angeles in a matter of hours. The optic nerves grow submissive before the red glare of geraniums, the flash of windshields, the sight of endless and improbable vistas of pastel stucco. Even on his first, casual, hundred-mile drive the pilgrim achieves a kind of stunned tranquillity, and gazes unblinkingly at palace-studded mountains, rat-proofed palms, and supermarkets as big as B-2Q hangars.
This surrender of the senses is seldom averted by the city's more conventional scenery. Downtown Los Angeles has genuine smoke-stained old brick and stone buildings, jammed together as tightly as those of Philadelphia or Baltimore. Hundreds of old-fashioned clapboard houses stand uneasily in the sun along its older residential streets. But the visitor in 1949 is apt to stare at them less in recognition than in disbelief, like a wanderer pushing through the vine-hung ruins of Angkor-Thorn.
They are obviously the work of a dead race—the people who thought Los Angeles was going to be a Cleveland with orange trees. After four frantic years of war and four wild years of peacetime boom, it is plain that Los Angeles will never be like anything else on earth.
More Fish them Boston. By now it is probably the third biggest city in the U.S. —more than 2,000,000 people live within its far-flung city limits, more than 4,000,000 in its metropolitan area—and it has gotten pinker, more sprawling, more like a Los Angeles promoter's dream with every advancing mile.
It has given the lie to the starched double-doubters who had cried that Los Angeles was a gaudy but impractical contraption which would inevitably collapse, trapping swarms of blondes and bare-toed yogis in its wreckage. It has become an industrial giant, has attracted not only new people (949,585 in Los Angeles County since Pearl Harbor), but new money, new business, and $450 million in factories and machinery since V-J day.
Its economy no longer depends directly on its basic industries—oil, oranges, motion pictures and aircraft. It lands more fish than Boston or Gloucester, makes more furniture than Grand Rapids, assembles more automobiles than any other city but Detroit, makes more tires than any other city but Akron. It is a garment center (bathing suits, slacks, sports togs) second only to New York. It makes steel in its backyard. Its port handles more tonnage than San Francisco.
It has built 240,000 new houses and apartment units in the last four years. Whole new villages have sprung from its brown plains, some lush and expensive, others as starkly laid out as well-planned graveyards, all equipped with their own highly colored, glass-heavy shops and markets. Enormous, gleaming new branch department stores have sprung up, not only along Wilshire Boulevard's fabulous Miracle Mile, but in virtually every suburban area. A city ordinance requires that new stores have parking lots; most are as big as football fields.