According to writer Lenore Coffee, Hollywood in the early 1920s “was like a carnival; or the way one feels when the circus is coming to town, only the circus was always there. Actors walked about in heavy grease-paint make-up, and out-of-work actors did precisely the same thing, hoping to create the impression that they, too, were employed.”

1912 the so-called Shenk Rule gave local business owners a powerful tool to keep African-Americans from patronizing their establishments—by charging astronomically higher prices to nonwhite customers. The pernicious new law was named after the L.A. city attorney who found that “it was neither extortion [n]or a violation of the Civil Rights Act to

In 1902 Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act, designed, as one historian has put it, to “develop marginal land for cultivation through irrigation, enabling thousands of people back East to leave crowded city slums and regain pride of place.”

And by the 1890s, he knew its ins and outs better than anyone in the world. This became clear when, at a meeting of the city’s engineering board, no schematic diagram of the pumping and distribution system was immediately available. According to company lore, Mulholland merely called for a street map and proceeded to sketch out the entire system

L.A.’s early detractors—those who had scorned its growth potential because it had “no local forests to burn, no big rivers to dam, no coal to dig”—had been silenced. The city had found its own unique solutions to those disadvantages, and was poised to grow even faster. Having outstripped Denver in population by 1910, Los Angeles now had its sights

flowering of a seductive urban ethos—arguably the birth of the whole idea of a “lifestyle”—based on utopian notions of leisure, physical wellness, and spiritual fulfillment.

Aimee Semple McPherson (the evangelist) was the charismatic faith healer and pioneering radio preacher who, courting both scandal and fanatical devotion, founded her own religion and cemented southern California’s reputation as a national hub for seekers of unorthodox spirituality and self-realization.

For his role in saving the city’s water supply during the holiday, he was awarded a commemorative watch, though one gets the sense that this kind of grueling physical effort was William Mulholland’s idea of fun.

“There has never been anything like this before in the history of the human race,” a New York Times writer mused in 1925. “The motion picture is the school, the diversion, perhaps even the church of the future.”