one contemporary observer the impression that “Christianity ranked as the city’s leading industry after real estate and motion pictures.”

Every day for several weeks, hundreds of Persian soldiers crowded onto the streetcars from downtown, their spears and longbows poking day laborers and shop clerks on their way to work.

Acting with uncommon dispatch, the L.A. City Council passed an ordinance providing a million dollars in relief funds, promising complete restoration and compensation for everyone materially affected by the flood. The council also authorized the formation of a Joint Restoration Committee, consisting of both a delegation of city representatives and a

Apparently Perry recognized what many people in Los Angeles would learn in the years to come: the value of a man possessed.

“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.”

endomorphic

“The river was the greatest attraction [for me],” he would later write. “It was a beautiful, limpid little stream with willows on its banks. I always loved the Los Angeles River.”

His name was even being bruited about as the next mayor of Los Angeles—though when asked to run, he responded with the famous demurral, “I would rather give birth to a porcupine backward.”

But for many Angelenos, the spiritual paradise Sister McPherson had conjured up had proven to be a bust—just another ephemeral desert mirage.