The Numbers on Los Angeles Are Numbing

In old Western movies there was often a scene in which the hero stood on a rise with the heroine, waved an arm at a desolate landscape supporting a general store, a bank, a post office, a depot, a saloon, a rooming house and a jail, and said:

“Someday, Caroline, there’s going to be a big city out there.”

Today, the West is settled by an abundance of big cities that started in much that way, Los Angeles among them.

On Sept. 4, 1781, when Los Angeles was founded at the Plaza by 44 illiterate settlers (26 of them black) under the Spanish flag, the scene described above would have seemed a boomtown by comparison.

The glittering ceremony of legend probably did not occur. A gray-robed friar from the nearby San Gabriel Mission may have said a prayer; one of the three soldiers in escort may have planted a flag. Most of the pobladores would have been too busy setting up their temporary wickiups to notice the pageantry.

In “Los Angeles: The Enormous Village,” John D. Weaver writes: “In the darkness that night, hunkering into the bare ground like savages, some of the heads of the pueblo’s first families must have had misgivings about their decision to plow and plant this remote rim of Christendom the Spaniards had named El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles. “

As a native of the Los Angeles area I tend to see it through clouds of nostalgia: clear skies, clean beaches, big red cars, unclogged streets, unlittered sidewalks, 12-story skyscrapers, Midwestern morality (despite Hollywood), and always freedom and promise.

Naturally I can see the changes: the forest of skyscrapers, the smog, the crowded freeways, the trashy sidewalks, the greedy values, the mushrooming of urban centers, the overcrowded schools, the slapstick transit system, the teeming ghettos, the violence, the overburdened sewers. We seem to be strangling in our own growth.

As I say, I have been aware of this overwhelming transformation, but I had not realized its scope until I received a recent report from Kathleen R. Shilkret, media manager of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

Because economically it must be seen as one organic whole, Los Angeles is regarded by the Chamber as embracing the five counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura. Soon enough they will all be one.

Shilkret’s report is called “Gee-Whiz Statistics on the Los Angeles Five-County Area.” They are staggering.

This area is greater in population than all the states of the Union except California (including Los Angeles), New York and Texas.

With 13.4 million residents as of July 1, 1987, it is second in population among consolidated metropolitan areas.

Its gross product of $298 billion in 1987 makes it 10th among the nations of the world, ahead of Brazil, India, Mexico, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

The cliche that Los Angeles is “Forty suburbs in search of a city” is as out of date as the Keystone Kops. The area now contains 158 incorporated cities, ranging in population from Los Angeles (3.5 million) to Vernon (90).

Los Angeles is first in the production of guided missiles and space vehicles, first in motion picture and television entertainment, fourth in the production of apparel (after New York, California (including Los Angeles) and Pennsylvania); third in furniture (after North Carolina and California (including Los Angeles)), and first in beer--about 18 million barrels a year.

Money? L.A. is first in savings and loan deposits ($114.3 billion), third in bank deposits ($68.6 billion). It has 120 foreign banks.

It has 154 universities and colleges, following only New York, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Texas, and is a major center for health sciences, with four medical schools, numerous clinics and 203 hospitals.

The report notes that we have eight professional sports teams, three horse racing tracks and major college teams, with an attendance of 16 million yearly. And contrary to the wasteland myth, about 21 million people annually attend cultural events.

It is easy to be dismayed by all this. But I remain convinced that Los Angeles is the freest city in the world and the city with the most promise.

And this year the Dodgers are going to win the pennant.