How Californians were convinced to live in the hills


If you've ever walked out to your backyard and pondered where to put the picnic table, you've done the most basic land surveying possible. And it's easy, you find a nice level piece of ground, not too far away from the backdoor, and set up the table and chairs there. If your backyard had lumps and bumps, and maybe sloped up steeply in one corner, you probably wouldn't set up your table over there. You could, of course, by using some complex engineering, possibly with stilts for the table, or by building a level platform, but chances are you'd just put the table on the most logical place. And that's how places like Los Angeles began, on the flats.

The hills were nice to look at, but no one in their right mind would go to the trouble and expense of building on them, until the space on the flats became very expensive, which happened so long ago in Los Angeles that most people don't even think about it.

As an old marketing guy, I gotta tell ya that I'd have seen it as a real challenge to convince people back in 1910 to live in the hills of Los Angeles. Of course I'd emphasize that the land would be cheaper, and less crowded. I'd also say that it was more exclusive, as you would be above the crowding, with a view, possibly to the sea. There was no truth in advertising in 1910! I would emphasize that you would be above the dirt and smoke of the city, and even go so far as to name a city "Bel Air" (Good Air). I would be very careful to keep the neighborhoods from getting ratty, and I'd do everything I could to get rid of the unsightly (and smelly) oil wells that dotted the hills.

Getting to and from these houses on the hills would require a car, as you sure as heck didn't want to try to trudge up there on foot, so it became connected with the wealth of car ownership, and little by little the convenience of taking the trolley car, and walking to your favorite restaurant became something that "simply wasn't done" by the right people in Los Angeles. Nobody walks in LA!

Could I interest you in a hillside lot?
Help support history adventuring, and see a lot of cool old photos of Phoenix on Patreon

 Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more