LOS ANGELES, THE SPELL-BINDER
"This is the land the sunset washes,
These are the banks of the Yellow Sea;
Where it rose, or whither it rushes,
These are the western mystery!
"Night after night her purple traffic
Strews the landing with opal bales;
Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails."
Emily Dickinson
Los Angeles, "the City of the Angels," is invested with the same poetic suggestion in its name as that which surrounds Santa FÉ,—"the City of the Holy Faith." A terraced street is known as "Angel Flight." Any retrospective contemplation of Los Angeles gives one the sensation of having been whirled through the starry immensities of space. During even a brief stay one afterward discovers by the unerring logic of mathematics that within a few days he has perhaps travelled some four hundred miles by the electric trolley cars, besides his motor-car journeys when shot through space from old San Gabriel to the Pacific Coast, or from Elysium Park to Hollywood, and far and away on the opposite side of the city. Were one caught up in an aËro-car, journeying far above the clouds for ten days, it could hardly seem more unreal. One can only think of Los Angeles as the City of Vast Spaces. The town has laid out all the surrounding country, one would fancy, in beautiful tracts (there are over four thousand), each tract containing several acres,—laid out under alluring names, with streets, sidewalks, and lamp-posts.
The "boom" is something tremendous. Companies and corporations run free electric cars to points forty miles out of town, as Redondo Beach and other localities, for people to inspect the lots offered,—lots at prices from "four dollars down, and four dollars a month," with the entire cost from ninety dollars up to that of several hundred. If all the world is not supplied with homes it is not the fault of enterprising Los Angeles. The incomparable electric trolley system renders the entire region within fifty miles around eligible for city privileges. People think nothing of going thirty, forty, even seventy-five miles by the "express electrics." Over an area of a thousand miles in length and perhaps one hundred and fifty in width there is scattered a population less than that centred within city limits in Chicago. The world is wide—in Southern California. There is nothing of the dreamy, languorous old Spanish atmosphere in Los Angeles. It is the most electrically up-to-date city imaginable. The city limits comprise over twenty-eight thousand acres. The streets are paved and oiled; the lighting is wonderful, most of it being done from tall towers rather than ordinary lamp-posts. Not even New York has any street or avenue so illuminated by night as is Broadway in Los Angeles, where, as in the boulevards in Paris, one can easily read by the street lights. Los Angeles has twenty-one great parks and innumerable hills and valleys in the residence regions. This diversity affords natural facilities for landscape gardening which are utilized with fine effect. Spacious boulevards, artificial lakes, and series of terraces everywhere enchant the eye, seen amidst the bewildering luxuriance of creamy magnolia blossoms and the graceful pepper tree.
The enterprise of Los Angeles is equalled by the refinement and culture of the people, and the schools, churches, libraries—the social life—all reveal the best spirit of American institutions.
That this is one of the spellbinding cities goes without saying. Everything is in gleam and glitter and glow. The electric car and the telephone system are here developed to a higher degree than perhaps in any other Western city except Denver. The growth of Los Angeles is something fairly incredible. A leading park commissioner, Dr. Lamb, has described the beauty of the four thousand tracts of land (each tract comprising many acres), all laid out, ready for buyers and builders. Of the twenty-one parks, one comprises more than three thousand acres, and another, Elysium Park, over eight hundred acres of hills and valleys already decoratively laid out with terraced drives and beautiful shrubs, flowers, and artificial lakes. The trend of the city is rapidly toward the ocean, some fifteen to twenty miles away, and it can hardly be five years before from Venice and Santa Monica, on the coast, to Pasadena, ten miles to the east of Los Angeles, there will be one solid city, one vast metropolis of the Southwest. The public library is ably administered, and it is one of considerable breadth of resources, with the advantage of having for its librarian Mr. Charles F. Lummis, the well-known writer on the Southwest. Madam Severance, who in 1878 founded the Woman's Club, a large and influential association of which for many years she was the president, and Mrs. Rebecca Spring, the friend of Margaret Fuller, are two Boston women who have transferred their homes to Los Angeles and whose lives emphasize Emerson's assertion that it is the fine souls who serve us and not what we call fine society.
The rush and the brilliancy of life in all this Los Angeles region transcend description. Broadway has more than two miles of fine business blocks, the architecture being restricted to some eight or nine stories. The beautiful parks, with their artificial lakes, their date-palm trees, their profusion of brilliant flowers, attract the eye. There are residence sections of exceeding beauty,—the lawns bordered by hedges of rosebushes in full bloom and perhaps another rose hedge separating the sidewalk from the street.
From the high plateaus of Northern Arizona to the blossoming plains of California is a contrast indeed. In Arizona these thousands of acres need only irrigation to become richly productive. The climate is delightful, for the elevation—over seven thousand feet—insures coolness and exhilaration almost every day through the summer. But at present there seems no conceivable way to procure water with which to irrigate. In California precisely the same land is irrigated and has also the advantage of a rainy season, and the vegetation and fruits abound luxuriously. Orange groves, with the golden fruit shimmering on the trees; lemon groves, olive orchards, and the avenues and groves of the eucalyptus tree make fair the landscape. An important industry here is that of lima beans. Tracts of fifteen hundred acres sown with these are not unusual, and the crops are contracted for by Russia and Germany almost as soon as sown. On one of these it is said that the owner had made a princely fortune within two years. The creation of the city in imagination is in great favor. Vast tracts of country from one to ten miles outside the city limits are staked out, as before noted; avenues and streets defined and named, lamp-posts erected, an attractive name given the locality, and lots are offered for sale from perhaps four or five hundred dollars up, on the terms of "fifty dollars down and ten dollars a month."
The trolley-car service in and around Los Angeles is said to be the best in the world. To Venice and Santa Monica, on the beach,—at a distance of some seventeen miles,—there are electric "flyers" that make the trip within thirty minutes. Venice is a French Étretat. The little rows of streets at right angles with the coast line, running down to the water, are named "Rose Avenue," "Ozone Avenue," "Sunset Street," and other alluring names. This Venice is a veritable (refined and artistic) "Midway," with its colonnades of shops offering every conceivable phase of trinkets and bijouterie; its concert halls, casino, gay little restaurants, and every conceivable variety of amusement. It is the most unique little toy town of a creation conceivable, and the electrical display and decorations at night are fascinating in their scenic effect.
Santa Monica, some two miles farther up the coast, is still, stately, and poetic. Here the blue Pacific rolls in in the most bewildering sea greens and deep blues, and over it bends a sky rivalling that of Arizona in depth and richness of color. The entire Pacific Coast is an idyl of landscape loveliness.
But of life. What are the people of this lovely young city of two hundred thousand inhabitants doing and thinking? It is not a question to be answered in a paragraph. Life here is intense, interesting, full of color and movement, and its many-faceted aspects invite consideration. As one sits, for instance, on a Pasadena piazza, with the golden glory of the sunset seen over the Sierra Madre, and the rose hedges, the orange groves, the great bushes of heliotrope that are almost like young trees pouring out their mingled fragrance on the evening air, one falls under its spell. As the twilight deepens into darkness the great searchlight from Mount Lowe, directly in the foreground, a picturesque panorama, may swing out with its weird, sweeping, dazzling illumination over the scene. When this searchlight is out, people at the far-away beaches can see to read by it at distances of from twenty-five to fifty miles. Quite near Mount Lowe—one of the adjacent peaks—is Mount Wilson, on which the new Carnegie Observatory is to be located. This will be fitted with the largest telescope in the world and will have the advantage of every latest scientific appliance.
Pasadena, like all the California towns and cities, covers very large tracts of country. There is a thriving business centre, not very far from which are the great Raymond Hotel and other winter resorts for the throngs of tourists who are almost as important to the revenues of California as they are to Italy. There are both North and South Pasadena,—each almost a separate city in itself,—and the most beautiful street is Orange Grove Avenue, with large estates on either side and spacious lawns. On Fair Oaks Avenue, in a pretty cottage, lives Prof. George Wharton James, the famous explorer, scientist, and notable writer on the Grand CaÑon in Arizona,—and the greatest interpreter, indeed, of the entire Southwest. The books of Professor James, "In and Out of the Old Missions of California," "The Indians of the Painted Desert," and "Indian Basketry" (besides his book on the "Grand Canyon," which is the accepted authority), interpret the many phases of life in the Southwest in a vivid and accurate manner, rendering them invaluable to contemporary literature. Professor James makes his original explorations, taking with him an assistant and his own camera, and going through varied hardships, almost greater than could be realized. In the vast desert spaces, remote from any human habitation, he has had to swim large, muddy, inland lakes, where vermin were swarming; to go without food and water, and to endure the intense fatigue of long tramps. In perusing his books the reader little dreams at what fearful cost of energy all this original material was obtained. In his home Professor James has a most interesting collection of the objets d'art of the Southwest. One must travel over this part of the country in order to appreciate them. They are as distinctive of New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California as the old masters and other phases of Italian art are of Italy. There are brilliant Navajo blankets and rugs—soft, rich, and vivid in color, with curiously decorated designs; the most interesting array of Indian pottery—the many specimens from the old tombs being far finer than any pottery done by the modern Indians; and at the entrance to his lawn Professor James has a huge meteorite from Meteorite Mountain in Arizona, which weighs over a ton. He has a large section of a tree of the Petrified Forest, and the finer specimens that show the bark and the fibre, and also the crystallization. His library is large and fine, and comprises many autograph gift copies from other authors.
One feature of the life of Professor James is especially helpful. In his spacious library upstairs, on every Thursday evening, he gives an informal talk on his travels and explorations to his friends and neighbors. His personal experiences in studying the phenomenon of the Salton Sea and the vagaries of the Colorado River, which is a law unto itself, are most interesting.
The call of the wild is not more irresistible than the call of the desert to Professor James. He has lived on it and with it, and learned to read its hieroglyphics. The desert spirits have companioned him. He has explored vast spaces of the Grand CaÑon; he has encamped, day after day, even week after week, on the Painted Desert; he has wandered in the grim strange Tonto Basin, and sailed (of late) the Salton Sea,—this sheet of four hundred square miles of water, this impromptu lake where but a little while before was a deserted hollow of a long extinct volcanic sea. Nature leads man a pretty dance out in this Land of Enchantment. No one would venture to prophesy at night just what stage transformation might take place before morning. This very uncertainty of any particular tenure of mountain, sea, or desert perhaps tends, unconsciously, to so react upon the population that their more real life is thrown forward into the future. For instance, Los Angeles lays no particular stress upon her present population, but announces that by 1910 the figures will undoubtedly reach the half-million mark. Nor, indeed, can the observer doubt this in any contemplation of the present incredible rapidity of progress in every direction. The city seems half made up of millionnaires, and the latest municipal bank clearings amounted to almost four hundred millions of dollars. Los Angeles is really an exotic, for the latest census reveals the astonishing fact that ninety per cent of its inhabitants are from the East, leaving only ten per cent as native Californians. Never was the advertising of a city carried out to the degree of being fairly a fine art so wonderfully as in Los Angeles. In the Chamber of Commerce there is a perpetual exhibition of fruits and flowers in season, and of the products and manufactures of the country.
Los Angeles, like most of the other more important Western cities, is deeply concerned with irrigation schemes. This region of California supplements its rainfall with irrigation, and between the two the whole country is in bloom and blossom. Los Angeles is now arranging a gigantic scheme to bring water from the Owen's River, two hundred miles away, by means of tunnels through mountains and a huge canal. This fall of water will not only entirely supply the city with water power of immense force and volume, but it is estimated that it will also irrigate a hundred thousand acres. The scheme will employ five thousand men for some four years, and it is estimated that the cost will be twenty-five millions. No undertaking daunts the Western city. If an enterprise is desirable, it is to be achieved. That is the law and the prophets in the Land of Enchantment.
Los Angeles, like Colorado Springs, is the paradise of excursions. The trip up Mount Lowe to the observatory offers a magnificent panorama of landscape, including Pasadena Valley and Catalina and Santa Barbara islands. Old San Gabriel Mission and the San Gabriel Valley are infinitely interesting, and the famous bells of San Gabriel still ring in their quaint, rude stone framework even though they are jangled and out of tune with the lapse of years. The Sierra Nevada Mountains rise from the San Gabriel Valley.
One of the excursions has a feature that is new to every visitor,—that of glass-bottom power boats which give a view of the marvels of the ocean. These boats run from Avalon on the coast—an hour's express trolley ride from Los Angeles—to the submarine gardens adjoining Catalina Island, and they have a capacity to seat over a hundred passengers around the glass. In sailing over these submarine gardens the boats move very slowly, that the passengers may enjoy the view of the strange seaweed, the marine flowers, the varied aquatic vegetation. Catalina Island is a favorite sea resort, lying in such convenient proximity to the city.
Los Angeles seems to be the paradise of every one who has a new idea—or ideal—for the betterment of humanity. There is an atmosphere of idealism. Among the recent institutions is the Pacific School of Osteopathy, with a faculty of thirty physicians, men and women, who base their therapeutics on the scientific fact that the body is subject to chemical, electrical, thermal, mental, and mechanical treatment. In the line of ethics Rev. B. Fay Mills has established a comprehensive movement of "Fellowship," including religious services and social intercourse, with a large and enthusiastic membership drawn by this eloquent orator and preacher who for many years before in his pastorate in Boston preached to large congregations who gave him profound appreciation.
A most important centre that radiates sweetness and light in infinite measure is that of Christ Church (Episcopal), whose rector, Rev. Baker P. Lee, is not only eminent as a preacher, but as a leader and inspirer of a network of organizations connected with the church for the betterment of human life. Christ Church parish is a large one, numbering over two thousand in direct connection with the church, with a list of communicants of over twelve hundred. Within the past three years the parish has built a magnificent new church and a rectory, and the holy earnestness of the young and gifted rector makes the work one of vital spirituality.
No city can offer more beautiful homes than those of Los Angeles; more attractive parks, more enchanting scenery, or more delightful excursions over a network of electric lines which aggregate above five hundred miles of single track and reach one hundred towns and villages from Monrovia of the foothills to Redondo by the sea. The world has but one Southern California, with its cool, soft, gray sea-fogs in the early mornings, followed by its cloudless days of blue sky over golden sunshine; where the sea-breeze gladly brings its health-giving ozone in exchange for the odors of orange blossoms and roses; where the mountains stand glorying in the ruggedness of their rocky cliffs until, touched by sunset's wand, they glow with pink lights and purple shadows; and over all comes a golden radiance that changes the forbidding outlines of their jagged peaks into radiant beauty,—fitting features of the vast panorama of nature to hold their eternal place in the Land of Enchantment.
