Sixty Stories in Search of a City‪.‬

Recent scholarship in cultural and literary studies has shown how narrative and the stories we tell shape knowledge and our perception of the world. This is true for understanding people, politics, cultures, and economies as well as our assessment of cities. Through story we have come to know Pittsburgh as a city of steel. Chicago we know as hog-butcher to the world. Detroit is the motor city. Los Angeles is the city shaped by automobiles, a metropolis of sunshine, citrus, and surf viewed through a windshield or rear view mirror. Southern California has been fertile ground for such narrative invention. These narratives have been told through words and through images, and the latter have been as significant as the former in creating what people then and now refer to as the "Southland," itself a fictive geography. The images that accompany this essay are suggestive of boosters' and place promoters' graphic inventiveness and of the trove of imagery they created. Rather than serving as illustrations in the sense of an image that reinforces a point or presents an idea in a different manner, the visual record these illustrations represent ought to be viewed as an essential primary source for the study of place and for analyses of the discourse, both textual and graphic, that has shaped knowledge, ideas, and visions of greater Los Angeles. (1) I want to consider narrative invention--the creation, use, and dissemination of stories--as well as the implications of the stories we tell. I begin with a survey of the standard talk about Los Angeles and then focus on two stories--Los Angeles, the city of the future, and Los Angeles, a world city--that have served as meta-narratives; they are sufficiently broad and sufficiently elastic to encompass a host of other stories. However, for all the talk of futurity, modernity, and progress, most Los Angeles stories ignore, obscure, or misinterpret a preeminent aspect of the modern city: manufacturing and industrialism. Recovering that history is critical for understanding economies and ecologies as well as immigration and demographics in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century metropolis. The same is true for claims of a world city whose origins can be traced to place entrepreneurs' robust and expansive territorial imaginations. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century boosters sought to fix Los Angeles as the central place in a regional economy with control of a hinterland stretching from the Canadian border into Mexico with ties across the Pacific to South Asia. In their stories, Los Angeles would be the entrepot for a Pacific Rim century. What those who told such stories never counted on was that the world would come to greater Los Angeles, and it is in the latter mostly unintended form that the metropolis now constitutes a world city. (2)