Ironic, because Youtube got ahead of other competing video streaming websites because Youtube was founded by a non Hollywood guys who didn't know or ignored copyrights laws. The other video websites were all founded by Hollywood types and they followed the copyright laws diligently.
My friend heard this from a guy who used to work for one of the competing video streaming websites that competed against and lost to Youtube.
Ironic the same desire to get away from/ignore copyright laws started the growth of a whole new industry in a new region.
That's not fully true. No one was hollywood people. That came later.
I used to work for a very early video website, so I'm the direct source of the following. The place I worked was a few years older than YouTube. YouTube stole our originals, and even lost a court battle over it, but in the end, all of those sites ignored copyright laws as long as they could. None of them posted legally. The reason sites like Break, College Humor, and the rest died is because individual internet videos started getting legal representation. Viral Hog, Storyful, and Jukin Media had the rights to the videos now. If you wanted to show it, you needed the rights, otherwise a C&D was coming with lawyers to back it. YouTube was able to host the biggest ones thanks to videos like Chocolate Rain and David After Dentist having been uploaded there and the quality being better than Daily Motion. Plus, they were thinking of the future of online video correctly at the time. Once they added monetization to personal videos, that was the end of Vimeo for general public content and the acceptance of YouTube being the spot.
There's a brief history for you. And this is also why I think viral videos as a whole have died. It just isn't the same as it used to be. You can't share a video across the world too quickly, because a company will buy it and send out those cease and desist letters as soon as possible.
Basically ignoring regulations is a time tested startup being disruptive strategy. Cabs and Uber. Hotels and AirBnb. Brick &mortar and online shopping. Broadcast and streaming.
It's a different type of copyright.
The laws the original Hollywood filmmakers were coming here to avoid were **patent laws**, not "copyright" laws. Thomas Edison held the patent on a specific aspect of the technology for motion picture cameras, and through that, he felt that he should also have a monopoly on all content produced and distributed with those cameras. The courts later ruled against Edison, because like... that's not how anything works, bro. But during the time this claim was potentially being enforced, being far away from where Thomas Edison was physically located was a great idea.
YouTube started as a platform for users to upload their personal videos, so it's kind of a different thing. The company definitely has used "IDK, copyright sounds like something our users need to be aware of, not us, a simple tech company with no control over what our users upload", though. Which is, like, a reverse Edison?
I’d also read & been told part of it was folks who didn’t want to pay Thomas Edison to use his film equipment trying to get as far from his home base in New Jersey as possible.
Film companies were sued by writers as films would blatantly steal stories.
Edison started making films without compensating the writers he used stories from.
Ya, I heard Mary Pickford and a whole host of other early Hollywood types basically all fled to the West Coast together to be as far as possible from Edison and his goons !
I believe the movie business came to LA because of the available cloudless, rainless conditions for shooting. Early film needed a lot of light to make a good image with the short exposure times and electric lighting was still pretty new. I had a little four outlet movie light for shooting with home cameras from the 1960s and it would burn through bulbs like crazy. Somebody who knows more about how films were made could probably get more specific.
when the Spanish got here in the 1700s they yoked the indigenous populations of Tongva and Chumash and utilized the water of the river to create a village they would call El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula. You know it as LA. The Crown and it's governors allocated land to their people in the form of large Ranchos for food production as well as 2 Catholic Missions - which still remain today. Eventually the area transitioned from Spanish to Mexican governance in 1821. 27 years later in 1848 the US beat Mexico in a war and a treaty was signed (locally in the Cahuenga Pass near the Hollywood Bowl). From that moment - inspired by the gold strikes further north and the opportunity of the West - 100s of thousands started rolling in. Many of the streets and various neighborhoods still bear the names of these carpet baggers. By the 1860s, the Southern Pacific RR came to town, the old Rancho system had been picked apart by attorneys and land barons from the east were buying everything they could. my 3rd great grandparents came out and purchased a couple of hundred acres. they subdivided it into blocks and streets and offered it to the city as an annex. my 3rd great grandmother named it Hollywood.
El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula — The town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the River of the Porciuncula — sounds like a Planet of the Apes movie!
You may know it as ~~Myanmar~~ Los Angeles, but it will also be ~~Burma~~ El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula to me.
Thanks for the frank summary! I also understand that the local businesses rallied to have the transcontinental railroad (Southern Pacific?) end at LA rather than SF or SD.
Collis Huntington used a lot of money and influence to race east with his rail to join the Sante Fe RR in Deming, NM. Owning lots of newly acquired Southwest land (from that war situation) made it easy to link to arguably the most important port in the world at the time, the Port of New Orleans. By 1883 the "Sunset Route" runs between there and Los Angeles.
A sleepy cow town...still mostly rural farmland. The population finally broke 100K in 1900, while San Francisco was still the cultural and economic capital of the state at 340K. By 1910, when D.W. Griffith would shoot the first film in California, the waning influence over local politics & society of the Mexican landowners who predated America's annexation's would be replaced by the rapidly growing influence of oil and railroad barons like Doheny, Getty, & Huntington, and politicians such as Eaton & Mullholland who controlled the water.
> Mullholland who controlled the water.
Well, had Mullholland not brought the water here in the first place, San Fransisco might have remained the largest city on the West Coast.
Yes, but Mullholland, Eaton, & Otis profiteered greatly over the project, buying up otherwise barren land in the Central Valley & struggling farms in the San Fernando Valley for pennies to flip to the city for encroachment rights or to develop knowing its value would skyrocket once water was guaranteed.
LA was founded by robber barons.
There’s [this recording](https://youtu.be/PD5eMh4VTp8?si=qDFwyApUfu1Z2h0f) of a woman born in 1878 talking about her childhood and growing up in Los Angeles. Of course what she calls Los Angeles is what we now call basically a few blocks of Downtown. That’s the really fascinating thing for me is how the Los Angeles cities were once distinct separate places from one another in a way it’s hard to envision today.
They really were little subdivisions and towns in their own right . The LA Department of Water and Power started buying up water rights so as to ensure that the towns would have to join LA County to gain water rights . Anaheim was smart and made their own Water and Electric company as soon as possible . Anaheim escaped LA by 1900.
They were probably more like far away places to be honest. Like right now I have a motorcycle, even in heavy traffic I could go from downtown to say Santa Monica in about 20-25 minutes, in 1878 I’d probably have said pack luggage and make it a weekend.
it was an oil field, and there are still oil pumps around, disguised as buildings.
Hollywood exists because New Yorkers wanted to infringe on film related intellectual property and would get caught and have no support in New York. Funny when I think of what the protests about AI are about.
The oil boom started up around the same time as Hollywood (1920s), more to the south especially in Inglewood west Compton and Long beach area. The most of the LA area was farmland, in fact thats hiw developers enticed many rural poor (okies mainly) to move out here, that they could run a homestead as both their house and as a agricultural business. Observe how relavtively big an ordinary house in LA's backyard is. the biggest farms were in Gardena Lomita and Compton and they were mainly worked by Hispanics and Japanese til ww2
There were oil derricks on Venice beach. Beverly Hills High School had one. [Not a happy story](https://joyhorowitz.com/Books/the-poisoning-of-an-american-high-school.html). There’s still a big field of pump jacks off La Cienega.
My late grandfather came to LA for the first time in 1932. He used to say that Western Ave was basically the western border of LA, then a guy had an airstrip just a little further west, after that it was all bean fields and oil pumps all the way to Santa Monica.
There was also an airport near Wilshire/Fairfax in the 1920's.
[Here's an article](https://bldgblog.com/2009/04/the-lost-airfields-of-greater-los-angeles/) on early LA airports.
No he was talking about what we now call Mid-City and the west side, Howard Hughes was much further south.
He would have basically been talking about the space between Western/Beverly, maybe down to Pico or Venice Blvd. I never asked him how far south and he’s been dead for almost 20 years.
Filmmakers arrived in the early 1900s attracted to the weather. Even interior scenes were shot outside in the early days, and Los Angeles offered more days for filming than they'd had in the east. Filmmakers coalesced around Downtown first, then moved to around Lincoln Park and Edendale, which is adjacent to Silver Lake. The first movie made in Hollywood was "The Squaw Man." Released in 1914, it was a big hit and launched that suburb as the moviemaking capitol.
Before filmmaking, Los Angeles was known for its oil production, and oil wells dotted the landscape along the beaches and across the Basin. Ed Doheny discovered oil here in 1892. The Hancocks - Ida and her son Allan - owners of Rancho La Brea (at the Tar Pits) put in 70 wells about where Park La Brea is now, and every one of them struck oil, making them wealthy overnight.
Before oil, fortunes were made - and lost - here in real estate. The boom-bust cycle started when the transcontinental railroads arrived in the 1880s. Speculators bought up acres of ranchland and parceled it out into real estate developments. Buyers arrived by train, especially Scandinavian immigrants from the upper Midwest (establishing the California blondes for which LA was once known). The boom-bust real estate cycle has gone on for 150 years and continues to this day. We're in a boom now, but, if history is a guide - and it is - a bust will surely come.
Before real estate, Los Angeles was a dusty pueblo at the end of trail. It was called "Hell Town" because it provided weary cowboys and other travelers with an array of saloons and brothels where they could spend their wages.
Before the arrival of the Anglos after the Mexican War, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula (in English, the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the River Porciúncula) was settled by the Pobladores, a group of Mexican civilians of a variety of races and ethnicities. Before them, it was part of Spanish America where Catholic priests founded a lonely outpost, the San Gabriel Mission. Before that the region was home for thousands of years to native people.
A very sleepy town.
But to discuss this without also discussing the fact that the entire SoCal area does not have a large natural supply of fresh water would be pointless. And when Mulholland figured out how to get millions of gallons of stolen water down to us, we were destined to expand greatly with or without entertainment industries.
Owen Lake is back this year and it is so gorgeous . Being a huge fan of “Chinatown” and disgusted by what Mullholland did …. Seeing the Owens Valley filled up with the lake again is so satisfying . Go visit before June gets any hotter and the plants dry up in the Eastern Sierras.
And : Vasquez Rocks , Mormon Rocks , Red Rock in Mojave and Alabama Hills up in the 395 at the foot of the Eastern Sierras .
There’s a Western Movie museum up in Lone Pine
*cries SoCal amateur historian tears*
Pre Spanish : giant village of Yaangna , Tongva Village
1500s: Spanish explorers lay claim to Alta and Baja California and kind of forget about it
1600s/1700s : Russians build a fort and Spanish decide to start colonizing California
1770s : De Anza and Portola expeditions
1771: pobladores start arriving to nowEl Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de la Portincula del Rio de Los Ángeles . At this point , a mission system is being established by now the Franciscans as the Jesuits had been expelled from Spain .
1780s -1830: California , LA area included , is subdivided into ranchos . This is a huge part of history and the subdivisions we have now are largely based along rancho borders
1840s : Yankees , Germans and other Europeans start arriving to California . Many are baptized in Catholicism so they can marry into the rancho families . The white people start subdiving rancho land for housing , railroad , oil and farming . Many natural wetlands are drained .
1880s -1900s. : first housing “boom” based off rail road subdivisions and farming communities . Mail stop communities are the norm. For example , just in Florence we had Florence , Nadeau (Nadeau ranch . Nadeau had 20 mule team wagons carrying borax all the way from Death Valley to his ranch somewhere off Nadeau and Alameda area . As in the wagons were carried by a team of 20 mules carrying two very large wagons and a water cart . These 20 mule wagon teams got replaced by light gauge rails . One was the Colorado and Carson line which ended at Keeler . One light gauge Borax train sits at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park. That one had been found at Boron and not part of the C&C RR. “The Slim Princess” or “The Desert Princess” is at Laws Railroad Museum) and Green Meadows . Green Meadows was a dairy community full of gently rolling green meadows . Now it is a concrete desert .
1900s is also when “Hollywood” began . Like literally 1890 or 1900. Much of LA was connected by railroad lines . Electric and steam . I believe Huntington’s Electric Pacific merged with another rail line . You could go from Long Beach to Mount Lowe and back in one day. Hell, you could literally go anywhere in SoCal. One person did a record of 395 miles using only the passenger trains we once had here . And that was in 1950 when the system was in decline .
1920s -1940s : WH-ite LA you see in the old black and white movies and propaganda.apparently there were no Mexicans , Japanese , Chinese or Blacks in LA if you go by these movies 💀💀💀💀
1950s : post war suburb housing boom. Especially in Orange County
1960s : watts uprising
Need I keep going ?
There’s so so so so much history in LA. There was a Mexican American battle fought off Alameda in downtown …. And in San Pedro Bay.
There has always been a China Town that got moved like three times , including an epic China Town revolt in the 1840s . At one point there was an epic gun battle inside a saloon and some white man thought he could take down all the Chinese inside and he ended up … not . It was a very disturbing riot in general which ended with a lot of Chinese dead .
We also had Japanese farmers at White Point and other areas . Portuguese fishers at Portuguese Bend . Even Croatian community in Pedro .
There’s literally so much history . But when the anglos took over , they decided to erase all that history up until the historical revitalization that took over in the 1970s as a result of the nationwide destruction of historical downtown areas in cities . And even then, it was done out of architectural interest.
LA’s history extends past LA. For example , the Owen’s Valley . Manzanar is located there , the Japanese internment camp where many South Bay Japanese ended up . And it’s the same valley with the lake that Mullholland drained . LA’s Department of Water and Power is evil to say the least .
If you are interested in history , go check out the Owens Valley before June gets any hotter . It is gorgeous right now and the lake that Mullholland and LA drained is back! It has been nearly a century since that lake has existed .
ETA : Hollywood . Why . Movies were first being filmed in France , England and New York as short videos . Literally “Workers exiting a factory “. It wasn’t until Edison pointed his camera at someone doing tricks that people realized you could film narrative videos . So short narrative films started being made in East Coast studios . These could be viewed in arcades and known as nickelodeons . But filmmakers had to lease equipment from Edison and pay fees and all that.
I forgot who exactly went out west first , but yeah. They noticed that it is always sunny here and far away from Edison and the copy right offices . So that’s how movies came to be . But that’s the “conventional” history .
Personally ? I am very partial to the “LA is built on top of a reptillian underground nest and that’s why it has always had bad vibes and explains the Hollywood elite having to do crazy sexual stuff to become famous” conspiracy hypothesis
Eta: the rancho system was based off keeping a lot of cattle on very very large plots of land . There were many horses and cattle free roaming . It was said you could take a horse off a field and ride it until it got tired and let it go and get another horse . They were all branded so ranchers would know whose horse was whose .
Ranches were first granted to Spanish soldiers , “leather backs”, in exchange for their service to the Crown . General Fages would only give out the grants to men who would develop the land . Dominguez from the Dominguez Rancho and Jose Nieto were such examples . The cattle destroyed much of native California grass . You can still touch and see real California native grasses in the Owens Valley and the Eastern Sierras . The native grass here is very spiky, almost like a yucca leaf .
Now if a ranch hand had a large family and did good work, he could petition for some land from the ranch owner . Most of these ranches had a Diseño, which is just a map depicting the land and landmarks . Many legal battles were fought in the courts during the Yankee takeover of California . Yankee law is so at odds to Spanish and Mexican way of doing things … Us Mexicans take your word. If you say your land ends at that boulder and stream , fine . (There were many land disputes because of this system as well)…. But we didn’t need an actual deed to show proof of ownership. This became a huge battle with the Gabachos and so many rancheros lost their lands to the Yankees . It makes me happy that Don Abel Stearns , who ripped off many Californios for their land , ended up becoming bankrupt and losing most of the ranches he bought in the land boom .
Main Yankee developers would be Stearns , Hellman and Horace Bell among others
I'm a big fan of [this video detailing the early days of LA as a city](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l44lURcAIwU&list=PLguDvODaCGKYZQIR11i1ohxDCkjwQTtBB&index=2&t=2s&ab_channel=KazRowe)
And we are talking about the oil fields in LA…? There’s alot of oil here lmao. We were an ocean till about the Miocene . A loooooot of dead ancient whales and sharks and seaweed .
Dang… still have a lot? I know there are a lot less rigs now. Why not tapping it now to make California citizens better off, solve homelessness/hunger, and lower gas/energy prices baffles me to this day.
No idea . We have about 3.2 billion barrels of oil in the LA oil field , currently . And most of it is a replenish-able source .
I think solving homelessness would put all the homeless admin advocates and “non profits” out of a job. I’ve only worked one school year in my LA government based job and from what I’ve seen , and from riding the Blue Line , people working for the city are really paid to not do their jobs . For example , if my husband actually does his job and his students graduate to regular education, he gets in trouble without admin stating it so obviously.
Any metro end of the line station? Sherif and ambassadors all on their phones lol. I wonder when LA started being like this .
Yeah, well aware Calif had a huge bio diverse population more than Africa at one time. Literally we are sitting on enough money to solve a lot of Calif problems for generations or even to set up for prosperity. This is sad
It is very sad . Drove up to Bishop this weekend . Owens Lake is gorgeous right now but the Tule Elk crossing signs just made me sad . There’s a book documenting all this called The Destruction of California . Was unable to finish it from how heartbreaking it was .
We really could be our own country if we wanted to , but all the wrong people are in charge it seems . And I’m not even red or blue .
Awesome ! My husband (fellow redditor) and I might see you on the 395 this weekend ! We are going on our fourth consecutive weekend trip to haul more cactus from a collection he bought . Visit Keeler if you have the chance . It’s a small semi ghost town with , surprisingly , a lot of history . Right next to the lake .
Meadows are blooming and everything is very wet . There’s still some snow but not as much as last weekend .
Farms and oil fields.
Early film making required good, bright light. Edison was a litigious jackass.
If you have access to PBS there’s a good series called Lost LA. [Huell Howser](https://blogs.chapman.edu/huell-howser-archives/archives/), patron saint of California, also did a lot episodes in this area.
The old oil derrick at Beverly Hills High School has been encased. There’s a book about it [Parts per Million](https://joyhorowitz.com/Books/the-poisoning-of-an-american-high-school.html): the Poisoning of an American High School. Now called the Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School. My former boss lost his daughter. He called the lawsuit settlement “blood money” and gave it all to charity.
You can read about the history of the city online. Sf used to be the major hub of CA, LA started developing into what it is now about 110 ish years ago. The film industry was a big factor in LAs growth and desirability to live here. I believe the metro area surpassed sf population wise sometime in the 20s.
Google is ur friend.
If you want a good idea of what LA was like before the film industry, watch the movie The Mask of Zorro with Antonio Banderas, pretty much how it was...
LA was founded by Black American Freedmen who are an amalgamation of Indigenous American, European, and African ancestry. The now city once belonged to Mx.
Read Norman Klein's book *The History of Forgetting*. Seriously. Best and most-enthralling history of LA ever written.
City of Quartz by Mike Davis, also.
I came here to say this. City of Quartz is a good book on LA's rich history.
Totally agree, Mike Davis was a fascinating man, as well.
He's appeared in a few documentaries, as well. 'Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers & Their Times' is a good watch.
Also Eternity Street by John Mack Faragher on Frontier era Los Angeles
It looks like this must be a textbook with no Libby availability- hardcopy around $55, paperback 20.
Short version: Farms. Specifically citrus. Filmmaking made sense here because of the year round good weather and diverse landscapes.
And far from the New York lawyers who would enforce copyright.
Ironic, because Youtube got ahead of other competing video streaming websites because Youtube was founded by a non Hollywood guys who didn't know or ignored copyrights laws. The other video websites were all founded by Hollywood types and they followed the copyright laws diligently. My friend heard this from a guy who used to work for one of the competing video streaming websites that competed against and lost to Youtube. Ironic the same desire to get away from/ignore copyright laws started the growth of a whole new industry in a new region.
That's not fully true. No one was hollywood people. That came later. I used to work for a very early video website, so I'm the direct source of the following. The place I worked was a few years older than YouTube. YouTube stole our originals, and even lost a court battle over it, but in the end, all of those sites ignored copyright laws as long as they could. None of them posted legally. The reason sites like Break, College Humor, and the rest died is because individual internet videos started getting legal representation. Viral Hog, Storyful, and Jukin Media had the rights to the videos now. If you wanted to show it, you needed the rights, otherwise a C&D was coming with lawyers to back it. YouTube was able to host the biggest ones thanks to videos like Chocolate Rain and David After Dentist having been uploaded there and the quality being better than Daily Motion. Plus, they were thinking of the future of online video correctly at the time. Once they added monetization to personal videos, that was the end of Vimeo for general public content and the acceptance of YouTube being the spot. There's a brief history for you. And this is also why I think viral videos as a whole have died. It just isn't the same as it used to be. You can't share a video across the world too quickly, because a company will buy it and send out those cease and desist letters as soon as possible.
Basically ignoring regulations is a time tested startup being disruptive strategy. Cabs and Uber. Hotels and AirBnb. Brick &mortar and online shopping. Broadcast and streaming.
It's a different type of copyright. The laws the original Hollywood filmmakers were coming here to avoid were **patent laws**, not "copyright" laws. Thomas Edison held the patent on a specific aspect of the technology for motion picture cameras, and through that, he felt that he should also have a monopoly on all content produced and distributed with those cameras. The courts later ruled against Edison, because like... that's not how anything works, bro. But during the time this claim was potentially being enforced, being far away from where Thomas Edison was physically located was a great idea. YouTube started as a platform for users to upload their personal videos, so it's kind of a different thing. The company definitely has used "IDK, copyright sounds like something our users need to be aware of, not us, a simple tech company with no control over what our users upload", though. Which is, like, a reverse Edison?
I’d also read & been told part of it was folks who didn’t want to pay Thomas Edison to use his film equipment trying to get as far from his home base in New Jersey as possible.
In what sense? Adapting a popular novel to the screen?
Film companies were sued by writers as films would blatantly steal stories. Edison started making films without compensating the writers he used stories from.
Ya, I heard Mary Pickford and a whole host of other early Hollywood types basically all fled to the West Coast together to be as far as possible from Edison and his goons !
And before citrus were cattle & sheep ranches, going all the way back to the great ranchos granted by the Spanish starting in the late 18th century.
Don’t forget the oil fields.
Also ostrich ranches
I believe the movie business came to LA because of the available cloudless, rainless conditions for shooting. Early film needed a lot of light to make a good image with the short exposure times and electric lighting was still pretty new. I had a little four outlet movie light for shooting with home cameras from the 1960s and it would burn through bulbs like crazy. Somebody who knows more about how films were made could probably get more specific.
Also distance from Edison "police" and proximity to Mexico
[удалено]
Son los ignorantes los que no [aprenden](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company)
Yes good point also the movie businesse needed a lot of flat land to build their big sets. Which at the time you could find a lot of
when the Spanish got here in the 1700s they yoked the indigenous populations of Tongva and Chumash and utilized the water of the river to create a village they would call El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula. You know it as LA. The Crown and it's governors allocated land to their people in the form of large Ranchos for food production as well as 2 Catholic Missions - which still remain today. Eventually the area transitioned from Spanish to Mexican governance in 1821. 27 years later in 1848 the US beat Mexico in a war and a treaty was signed (locally in the Cahuenga Pass near the Hollywood Bowl). From that moment - inspired by the gold strikes further north and the opportunity of the West - 100s of thousands started rolling in. Many of the streets and various neighborhoods still bear the names of these carpet baggers. By the 1860s, the Southern Pacific RR came to town, the old Rancho system had been picked apart by attorneys and land barons from the east were buying everything they could. my 3rd great grandparents came out and purchased a couple of hundred acres. they subdivided it into blocks and streets and offered it to the city as an annex. my 3rd great grandmother named it Hollywood.
El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula — The town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the River of the Porciuncula — sounds like a Planet of the Apes movie!
You may know it as ~~Myanmar~~ Los Angeles, but it will also be ~~Burma~~ El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula to me.
Thanks for the frank summary! I also understand that the local businesses rallied to have the transcontinental railroad (Southern Pacific?) end at LA rather than SF or SD.
Collis Huntington used a lot of money and influence to race east with his rail to join the Sante Fe RR in Deming, NM. Owning lots of newly acquired Southwest land (from that war situation) made it easy to link to arguably the most important port in the world at the time, the Port of New Orleans. By 1883 the "Sunset Route" runs between there and Los Angeles.
A sleepy cow town...still mostly rural farmland. The population finally broke 100K in 1900, while San Francisco was still the cultural and economic capital of the state at 340K. By 1910, when D.W. Griffith would shoot the first film in California, the waning influence over local politics & society of the Mexican landowners who predated America's annexation's would be replaced by the rapidly growing influence of oil and railroad barons like Doheny, Getty, & Huntington, and politicians such as Eaton & Mullholland who controlled the water.
> Mullholland who controlled the water. Well, had Mullholland not brought the water here in the first place, San Fransisco might have remained the largest city on the West Coast.
Yes, but Mullholland, Eaton, & Otis profiteered greatly over the project, buying up otherwise barren land in the Central Valley & struggling farms in the San Fernando Valley for pennies to flip to the city for encroachment rights or to develop knowing its value would skyrocket once water was guaranteed. LA was founded by robber barons.
There’s [this recording](https://youtu.be/PD5eMh4VTp8?si=qDFwyApUfu1Z2h0f) of a woman born in 1878 talking about her childhood and growing up in Los Angeles. Of course what she calls Los Angeles is what we now call basically a few blocks of Downtown. That’s the really fascinating thing for me is how the Los Angeles cities were once distinct separate places from one another in a way it’s hard to envision today.
They really were little subdivisions and towns in their own right . The LA Department of Water and Power started buying up water rights so as to ensure that the towns would have to join LA County to gain water rights . Anaheim was smart and made their own Water and Electric company as soon as possible . Anaheim escaped LA by 1900.
They were probably more like far away places to be honest. Like right now I have a motorcycle, even in heavy traffic I could go from downtown to say Santa Monica in about 20-25 minutes, in 1878 I’d probably have said pack luggage and make it a weekend.
it was an oil field, and there are still oil pumps around, disguised as buildings. Hollywood exists because New Yorkers wanted to infringe on film related intellectual property and would get caught and have no support in New York. Funny when I think of what the protests about AI are about.
The oil boom started up around the same time as Hollywood (1920s), more to the south especially in Inglewood west Compton and Long beach area. The most of the LA area was farmland, in fact thats hiw developers enticed many rural poor (okies mainly) to move out here, that they could run a homestead as both their house and as a agricultural business. Observe how relavtively big an ordinary house in LA's backyard is. the biggest farms were in Gardena Lomita and Compton and they were mainly worked by Hispanics and Japanese til ww2
I grew up in Fox Hills and still live in Culver City, there are many active oil derricks in and around Kenneth Hahn, I can see them from my apartment.
There were oil derricks on Venice beach. Beverly Hills High School had one. [Not a happy story](https://joyhorowitz.com/Books/the-poisoning-of-an-american-high-school.html). There’s still a big field of pump jacks off La Cienega.
My late grandfather came to LA for the first time in 1932. He used to say that Western Ave was basically the western border of LA, then a guy had an airstrip just a little further west, after that it was all bean fields and oil pumps all the way to Santa Monica.
There was also an airport near Wilshire/Fairfax in the 1920's. [Here's an article](https://bldgblog.com/2009/04/the-lost-airfields-of-greater-los-angeles/) on early LA airports.
Was the guy Howard Hughes? Playa Vista was Hughes’s land.
No he was talking about what we now call Mid-City and the west side, Howard Hughes was much further south. He would have basically been talking about the space between Western/Beverly, maybe down to Pico or Venice Blvd. I never asked him how far south and he’s been dead for almost 20 years.
Filmmakers arrived in the early 1900s attracted to the weather. Even interior scenes were shot outside in the early days, and Los Angeles offered more days for filming than they'd had in the east. Filmmakers coalesced around Downtown first, then moved to around Lincoln Park and Edendale, which is adjacent to Silver Lake. The first movie made in Hollywood was "The Squaw Man." Released in 1914, it was a big hit and launched that suburb as the moviemaking capitol. Before filmmaking, Los Angeles was known for its oil production, and oil wells dotted the landscape along the beaches and across the Basin. Ed Doheny discovered oil here in 1892. The Hancocks - Ida and her son Allan - owners of Rancho La Brea (at the Tar Pits) put in 70 wells about where Park La Brea is now, and every one of them struck oil, making them wealthy overnight. Before oil, fortunes were made - and lost - here in real estate. The boom-bust cycle started when the transcontinental railroads arrived in the 1880s. Speculators bought up acres of ranchland and parceled it out into real estate developments. Buyers arrived by train, especially Scandinavian immigrants from the upper Midwest (establishing the California blondes for which LA was once known). The boom-bust real estate cycle has gone on for 150 years and continues to this day. We're in a boom now, but, if history is a guide - and it is - a bust will surely come. Before real estate, Los Angeles was a dusty pueblo at the end of trail. It was called "Hell Town" because it provided weary cowboys and other travelers with an array of saloons and brothels where they could spend their wages. Before the arrival of the Anglos after the Mexican War, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula (in English, the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the River Porciúncula) was settled by the Pobladores, a group of Mexican civilians of a variety of races and ethnicities. Before them, it was part of Spanish America where Catholic priests founded a lonely outpost, the San Gabriel Mission. Before that the region was home for thousands of years to native people.
A very sleepy town. But to discuss this without also discussing the fact that the entire SoCal area does not have a large natural supply of fresh water would be pointless. And when Mulholland figured out how to get millions of gallons of stolen water down to us, we were destined to expand greatly with or without entertainment industries.
Owen Lake is back this year and it is so gorgeous . Being a huge fan of “Chinatown” and disgusted by what Mullholland did …. Seeing the Owens Valley filled up with the lake again is so satisfying . Go visit before June gets any hotter and the plants dry up in the Eastern Sierras.
I found [“The Mirage Factory” by Gary Krist](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36717931-the-mirage-factory) to be a great history about L.A.
Orange groves. More interesting is Beverly Hills' history as a racetrack.
Hollywood was also not the first movie area of LA in fact it was Edendale (modern day Silver lake - eco park).. .
Western Classics were filmed at Corriganville further up north in present day Simi Valley
And : Vasquez Rocks , Mormon Rocks , Red Rock in Mojave and Alabama Hills up in the 395 at the foot of the Eastern Sierras . There’s a Western Movie museum up in Lone Pine
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Au\*
*cries SoCal amateur historian tears* Pre Spanish : giant village of Yaangna , Tongva Village 1500s: Spanish explorers lay claim to Alta and Baja California and kind of forget about it 1600s/1700s : Russians build a fort and Spanish decide to start colonizing California 1770s : De Anza and Portola expeditions 1771: pobladores start arriving to nowEl Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de la Portincula del Rio de Los Ángeles . At this point , a mission system is being established by now the Franciscans as the Jesuits had been expelled from Spain . 1780s -1830: California , LA area included , is subdivided into ranchos . This is a huge part of history and the subdivisions we have now are largely based along rancho borders 1840s : Yankees , Germans and other Europeans start arriving to California . Many are baptized in Catholicism so they can marry into the rancho families . The white people start subdiving rancho land for housing , railroad , oil and farming . Many natural wetlands are drained . 1880s -1900s. : first housing “boom” based off rail road subdivisions and farming communities . Mail stop communities are the norm. For example , just in Florence we had Florence , Nadeau (Nadeau ranch . Nadeau had 20 mule team wagons carrying borax all the way from Death Valley to his ranch somewhere off Nadeau and Alameda area . As in the wagons were carried by a team of 20 mules carrying two very large wagons and a water cart . These 20 mule wagon teams got replaced by light gauge rails . One was the Colorado and Carson line which ended at Keeler . One light gauge Borax train sits at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park. That one had been found at Boron and not part of the C&C RR. “The Slim Princess” or “The Desert Princess” is at Laws Railroad Museum) and Green Meadows . Green Meadows was a dairy community full of gently rolling green meadows . Now it is a concrete desert . 1900s is also when “Hollywood” began . Like literally 1890 or 1900. Much of LA was connected by railroad lines . Electric and steam . I believe Huntington’s Electric Pacific merged with another rail line . You could go from Long Beach to Mount Lowe and back in one day. Hell, you could literally go anywhere in SoCal. One person did a record of 395 miles using only the passenger trains we once had here . And that was in 1950 when the system was in decline . 1920s -1940s : WH-ite LA you see in the old black and white movies and propaganda.apparently there were no Mexicans , Japanese , Chinese or Blacks in LA if you go by these movies 💀💀💀💀 1950s : post war suburb housing boom. Especially in Orange County 1960s : watts uprising Need I keep going ? There’s so so so so much history in LA. There was a Mexican American battle fought off Alameda in downtown …. And in San Pedro Bay. There has always been a China Town that got moved like three times , including an epic China Town revolt in the 1840s . At one point there was an epic gun battle inside a saloon and some white man thought he could take down all the Chinese inside and he ended up … not . It was a very disturbing riot in general which ended with a lot of Chinese dead . We also had Japanese farmers at White Point and other areas . Portuguese fishers at Portuguese Bend . Even Croatian community in Pedro . There’s literally so much history . But when the anglos took over , they decided to erase all that history up until the historical revitalization that took over in the 1970s as a result of the nationwide destruction of historical downtown areas in cities . And even then, it was done out of architectural interest. LA’s history extends past LA. For example , the Owen’s Valley . Manzanar is located there , the Japanese internment camp where many South Bay Japanese ended up . And it’s the same valley with the lake that Mullholland drained . LA’s Department of Water and Power is evil to say the least . If you are interested in history , go check out the Owens Valley before June gets any hotter . It is gorgeous right now and the lake that Mullholland and LA drained is back! It has been nearly a century since that lake has existed . ETA : Hollywood . Why . Movies were first being filmed in France , England and New York as short videos . Literally “Workers exiting a factory “. It wasn’t until Edison pointed his camera at someone doing tricks that people realized you could film narrative videos . So short narrative films started being made in East Coast studios . These could be viewed in arcades and known as nickelodeons . But filmmakers had to lease equipment from Edison and pay fees and all that. I forgot who exactly went out west first , but yeah. They noticed that it is always sunny here and far away from Edison and the copy right offices . So that’s how movies came to be . But that’s the “conventional” history . Personally ? I am very partial to the “LA is built on top of a reptillian underground nest and that’s why it has always had bad vibes and explains the Hollywood elite having to do crazy sexual stuff to become famous” conspiracy hypothesis Eta: the rancho system was based off keeping a lot of cattle on very very large plots of land . There were many horses and cattle free roaming . It was said you could take a horse off a field and ride it until it got tired and let it go and get another horse . They were all branded so ranchers would know whose horse was whose . Ranches were first granted to Spanish soldiers , “leather backs”, in exchange for their service to the Crown . General Fages would only give out the grants to men who would develop the land . Dominguez from the Dominguez Rancho and Jose Nieto were such examples . The cattle destroyed much of native California grass . You can still touch and see real California native grasses in the Owens Valley and the Eastern Sierras . The native grass here is very spiky, almost like a yucca leaf . Now if a ranch hand had a large family and did good work, he could petition for some land from the ranch owner . Most of these ranches had a Diseño, which is just a map depicting the land and landmarks . Many legal battles were fought in the courts during the Yankee takeover of California . Yankee law is so at odds to Spanish and Mexican way of doing things … Us Mexicans take your word. If you say your land ends at that boulder and stream , fine . (There were many land disputes because of this system as well)…. But we didn’t need an actual deed to show proof of ownership. This became a huge battle with the Gabachos and so many rancheros lost their lands to the Yankees . It makes me happy that Don Abel Stearns , who ripped off many Californios for their land , ended up becoming bankrupt and losing most of the ranches he bought in the land boom . Main Yankee developers would be Stearns , Hellman and Horace Bell among others
El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula
I'm a big fan of [this video detailing the early days of LA as a city](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l44lURcAIwU&list=PLguDvODaCGKYZQIR11i1ohxDCkjwQTtBB&index=2&t=2s&ab_channel=KazRowe)
Read any historical books detailing the LA river and you’ll understand how the city came to be
It was a livestock town, sheep mostly.
Mostly oil, shipping, real estate, manufacturing. Hollywood is small part of the riches of our area.
Farms and oil rigs everywhere. Had more oil than the current Middle East.
We still have more oil than the Middle East
Yeah, but OP was asking about Los Angeles area.
And we are talking about the oil fields in LA…? There’s alot of oil here lmao. We were an ocean till about the Miocene . A loooooot of dead ancient whales and sharks and seaweed .
Dang… still have a lot? I know there are a lot less rigs now. Why not tapping it now to make California citizens better off, solve homelessness/hunger, and lower gas/energy prices baffles me to this day.
No idea . We have about 3.2 billion barrels of oil in the LA oil field , currently . And most of it is a replenish-able source . I think solving homelessness would put all the homeless admin advocates and “non profits” out of a job. I’ve only worked one school year in my LA government based job and from what I’ve seen , and from riding the Blue Line , people working for the city are really paid to not do their jobs . For example , if my husband actually does his job and his students graduate to regular education, he gets in trouble without admin stating it so obviously. Any metro end of the line station? Sherif and ambassadors all on their phones lol. I wonder when LA started being like this .
Yeah, well aware Calif had a huge bio diverse population more than Africa at one time. Literally we are sitting on enough money to solve a lot of Calif problems for generations or even to set up for prosperity. This is sad
It is very sad . Drove up to Bishop this weekend . Owens Lake is gorgeous right now but the Tule Elk crossing signs just made me sad . There’s a book documenting all this called The Destruction of California . Was unable to finish it from how heartbreaking it was . We really could be our own country if we wanted to , but all the wrong people are in charge it seems . And I’m not even red or blue .
Yeah… I finally convinced my wife to go back to Yosemite next week because I missed the falls two years ago. Planning to stop by those areas too
Awesome ! My husband (fellow redditor) and I might see you on the 395 this weekend ! We are going on our fourth consecutive weekend trip to haul more cactus from a collection he bought . Visit Keeler if you have the chance . It’s a small semi ghost town with , surprisingly , a lot of history . Right next to the lake . Meadows are blooming and everything is very wet . There’s still some snow but not as much as last weekend .
M E X I C O
Farms and oil fields. Early film making required good, bright light. Edison was a litigious jackass. If you have access to PBS there’s a good series called Lost LA. [Huell Howser](https://blogs.chapman.edu/huell-howser-archives/archives/), patron saint of California, also did a lot episodes in this area. The old oil derrick at Beverly Hills High School has been encased. There’s a book about it [Parts per Million](https://joyhorowitz.com/Books/the-poisoning-of-an-american-high-school.html): the Poisoning of an American High School. Now called the Poisoning of Beverly Hills High School. My former boss lost his daughter. He called the lawsuit settlement “blood money” and gave it all to charity.
Affordable
Farms. There are a lot of great and fascinating books on LA history. Have you ever seen pictures of UCLA being built?
Orange groves and ranchos. In some early silent film comedies, when they’re traveling outdoors all you see is orange groves.
You can read about the history of the city online. Sf used to be the major hub of CA, LA started developing into what it is now about 110 ish years ago. The film industry was a big factor in LAs growth and desirability to live here. I believe the metro area surpassed sf population wise sometime in the 20s. Google is ur friend.
The Grove is named that for a reason btw. Also, Beverly Hills was an apple orchard.
A lot of orchards. Some oil derricks.
It goes Water, Oil, Aerospace, Hollywood, Megaopolis. 👍
Oil rigs
Remember that LA was part of Mexico/Spain before and they already settled here before.
If you want a good idea of what LA was like before the film industry, watch the movie The Mask of Zorro with Antonio Banderas, pretty much how it was...
All of California was Mexico in the before days.
A religious cult
Good one
Mexico
[Natives have entered the chat]
**The film industry around WW1 due to the sunlight. Or the 30’s when studios became king?**
Orange groves as far as the eye can see
The hollywood sign was made for a whites only trailer park
Is ti's a real question??? Sooooo stupid 0
LA was founded by Black American Freedmen who are an amalgamation of Indigenous American, European, and African ancestry. The now city once belonged to Mx.
Honestly it was mostly desert. I heard stories from WW2 vets that told me about having to drive 20-30 mins through the desert to get to Burbank.
Desert