The Mirage Factory

But it’s worth noting that, thanks to more enlightened conservation policies in recent years, the city consumed less water in 2015 than it did in 1970, despite gaining more than one million additional residents.

to Norman Mailer’s knock on the place as “a constellation of plastic.” As late as the 1980s, critics were still skeptical of its urban bona fides, with theorist Edward Soja calling it not so much a city as “a gigantic conglomeration of theme parks, a lifespace composed of Disneylands.”

It was already obvious that it would never be like any other major American or European city. L.A. was, as one writer put it, a “polycentric conurbation”—widely

Los Angeles was now the city that boasted the greatest religious pluralism in the country, that served as the center of the world’s most lucrative creative industry, and that was sustained by an ingenious water system not substantially different from what its creator first envisioned half a century before.

On July 24, as his body lay in state in the rotunda of that gleaming white City Hall, all flags in the city were lowered to half-staff. Later, at the moment of his interment at Forest Lawn cemetery, the flow of water down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from Haiwee Reservoir was halted, and all work on the Colorado River aqueduct was stopped, for a full s

Today, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel has over six million members in more than fifty thousand branch congregations around the world.

L.A. had grown from the country’s thirty-sixth-largest city in 1900 to the powerhouse it was on that April afternoon in 1928.

it was Hollywood, the city’s homegrown industry (and one, of course, predicated on the creation of image and illusion), that brought Los Angeles worldwide visibility and the unique identity it is still known for today.

Beginning with its conjuring of an oasis in the desert, an achievement itself made possible only through a campaign of deception and elusive intentions, the city had attracted the population it needed by selling another mirage: a lifestyle image of leisure, health, easy prosperity, and spiritual fulfillment, all in a place where it never rains or t