Los Angeles

Los Angeles was founded in 1781 as a Spanish pueblo of forty-four settlers, and for a century afterward nothing much happened. In 1880 the population was eleven thousand. By 1930 it was over a million. Almost nothing about that was inevitable.

Three things caused it, and photographs of all three survive in quantity.

The first was water. There is not enough of it here, and the Los Angeles Aqueduct — two hundred and thirty-three miles from the Owens Valley, finished in 1913 — is what made the growth possible. William Mulholland opened the gates and said there it is, take it, and that was the entire speech. The construction photographs are extraordinary: a concrete channel crossing desert, siphons over canyons, and mule teams in numbers that are hard to credit.

The second was oil. Edward Doheny drilled near Westlake in 1892 and by 1900 there were derricks through residential districts, in back gardens, along the beach at Venice. Photographs of Signal Hill and Huntington Beach show hillsides so thick with wooden derricks that the ground is not visible.

The third was film. The industry came west from 1910 for the light and the space and the distance from Edison's patent enforcement. Early studio photographs show open-air stages — sets built outdoors with muslin diffusers overhead, because the sun was the lighting.

And underneath all of it, agriculture. Orange groves ran for miles across what is now the San Fernando Valley and the San Gabriel Valley, and the crate labels that advertised them are their own visual genre. Photographs of packing houses, pickers and groves in blossom are among the most common images of the region from this period.

Angels Flight opened in 1901, a funicular railway up Bunker Hill, and appears constantly in downtown photographs. Venice was built from 1905 with actual canals, imported gondoliers and a pier, on the theory that Californians wanted Italy.

The archive holds around twelve hundred images naming Los Angeles.

The Bridge, the Fair and the Gateway