Passenger Jets And Space Capsules

 How did Los Angeles get so rich and famous?


There’s oil, of course; the plundered soil of L.A. once yielded up more than a third of the country’s oil. And aviation and aerospace; we dreamed up and crafted war planes, passenger jets and space capsules. And then the movies, late to the starting gate, in time overtook the others in renown.


But L.A. made its first fortune by selling winter — badmouthing other places’ icy, grim months, and hyping our own bland, bright, balmy winter.


And we didn’t even bother being nice about it. We straight-up mocked the dopes and losers who chose to stay in the frozen wastes of New England or the Midwest, making snowballs while we plucked oranges from our own backyard trees. As Bill Murray’s character rebuked the demon in “Ghostbusters II,” “If you had Brain One in that huuuge melon on top of your neck, you would be living the sweet life out in Southern California’s beautiful San Fernando Valley.”


Our winter versus their winter is a fight L.A. has picked and won for 150 years, ever since the railroad went transcontinental. Four years after the Golden Spike joined up the east and west rail tracks, a little book by Charles Nordhoff called “California for Health, Pleasure and Residence” was enticing people to California — regular folks and ordinary families, not just the reckless, gold-maddened men of a generation before.


For the early Spanish and Mexican settlers, there was nothing much remarkable about a Southern California that wasn’t unlike their own.


The winter epiphany came when the Yankees did. The underlying justification for their mastery of this bountiful, beautiful semi-tropic place was the conviction that their predecessors — native Americans, Spanish, Mexican — were unappreciative and undeserving, unlike the grateful and energetic Yankee. A Bay Area intellectual named Charles Keeler, hired to write a turn-of-the-century promotional pamphlet for the Santa Fe railroad, looked upon the agricultural handiwork as what happens when “a desert occupied by a scanty, unprogressive Mexican population …. [is] made by Saxon industry perennial gardens of verdure and bloom.”


In short order, the climate was being promoted as “Mediterranean.” It was not just as a descriptor, which scientists still use today, but as a code word to evoke elegant Englishmen wintering among the antiquities in Italy, not the earthy rusticity of Mexico, of which L.A. had so recently been part.


https://groups.google.com/g/menyo12/c/DeXCrdsP8WY


Climate was what L.A. sold, and really, for years, that’s all it had to sell. Far into the 19th century, L.A. was a scruffy village of dust and mayhem — but just look up, the new Angelenos insisted. Look at our fine mountains, breathe our air, fragrant (eventually) with citrus blossoms. Look at us — in shirtsleeves, in the winter!


When Southern California did get good PR, The Times was almost pathetically eager to promote it. It quoted at length from an October 1893 story in a Liverpool newspaper that praised L.A.’s “picturesqueness and its magnificent climate.”


https://groups.google.com/g/geogner44/c/_fC4Yl6-_wo


A seamless railroad brought thousands here without perilous voyages around Cape Horn or slogs across deserts and sabertooth mountains. Naturally, among the first to climb aboard for California were the ill.


An early and clear-eyed California chronicler did make the Cape Horn trip here. The future author of “Two Years Before the Mast,” Richard Henry Dana Jr. was a Harvard undergrad when a case of measles damaged his eyes. To restore his health, he dropped out at age 19, in 1834, signed on to a California-bound brigantine voyage — as anyone would, right? — and returned to Boston whole in body if not in spirit.


https://groups.google.com/g/sunguh12/c/t0iGXVBsfmg


Tuberculosis, “consumption,” was endemic and fatal. If they had money, the stricken traveled to the Alps or the south of France for relief. Then, miraculously, here was L.A.’s dry, shimmering air, only a few days’ train ride away.


In the chapter called “Southern California for Invalids,” Nordhoff writes of running into a tubercular friend at a hotel in L.A., a friend he had last seen two years before, on the East Coast, at death’s door. Yet here he was, looking hale and hearty: “I shall never be a sound man, of course,” he told the astonished Nordhoff, “but this climate has added 10 years to my life!”


These ailing Angelenos were called “lungers,” for their enfeebled lungs. Camps and sanitariums opened for business, and welcomed trainload upon trainload of them. An 1887 Times story praised Southern California as “a mecca for sick pilgrims,” its climate a miracle treatment for hay fever, asthma, even senility.


The Times was full of ads and testimonials, like this one from 1891 for “Dr. Wong’s Famous Sanitarium” on South Main Street: “Last winter I was a first-class candidate for a consumptive’s grave. … I took Dr. Wong’s medicine and was completely cured in seven weeks’ time.” — R.C. Platt.


Dr. Walter Jarvis Barlow came here from New York in 1895 for his own TB, and ended up heading the county medical association and founding a sanitarium in Echo Park, near Dodger Stadium. It’s still a respiratory hospital today, 120 years after it opened, and it still has his name. The site of the spectacular federal courthouse on the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena was originally a boarding house built in 1882 by Emma Bangs, who had brought her tubercular daughter west. Soon other TB patients discovered the place and moved in; locals called them the “busted lung brigade.”

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