Imagining Los Angeles

From the Dust Jacket of Imagining Los Angeles: Photographs of a 20th Century City:

With the exception of its almost year round sunshine, the fates dealt Los Angeles a weak hand. It possesses neither a reliable water supply nor a useful natural harbor. Pinned among mountains, desert, and ocean, the region is subject to earthquakes, floods and wind-propelled fires.

Yet these barriers did nothing to deter the ambitions and appetites of its residents, whose determination and creativity qute literally imagined Los Angeles into full maturity in the 20th century. In the span of just those 100 years, the city exploded from a population of slightly more than 102,000 clustered on about 45 squre miles to nearly four million residents stretched across some 465 square miles.

Collected here are some 175 photos from more than a dozen Southern California archives that tell the tale of men and women who hoped and dared on a grand scale, the people who made Los Angeles the worlds's quintessential 20th-century city.

The fruits of their imaginations, from the Owens Valley Aqueduct to the Los Angeles Harbor to the Hollywood movie studios to the towering freeway interchanges, are all testimony to the ingenuity and imagination of Los Angeles-and its people-in the 20th century.