Book Mark : Los Angeles has been shamelessly promoted, a center of hype and hoopla long before Hollywood arrived. In “20th Century Los Angeles,” Norman M. Klein and Martin J. Schiesl explain how boosterism continues.

Lucky Baldwin was one of many entrepreneurs who arrived in Los Angeles during the boom of the 1880s. He came with a considerable fortune to invest, bought the land that later became Baldwin Hills and Santa Anita, juggled bank investments with horse-breeding, lived with an opulent disregard for Victorian conventions, and got himself into various financial and moral scrapes (he was shot by a young woman who claimed he forced his attentions on her). Often, he stretched his real estate investments to the edge of bankruptcy, but died a very wealthy man in 1909.

His biographer, a specialist in books about Gilded Age plutocrats, wrote: “In real-estate promotion, Lucky Baldwin unquestionably was ahead of his time; and equally without question he knew his stuff. In reply to one prospect who protested that $200 an acre for some unimproved ground was too much, he answered indignantly: “Hell! We’re giving away the land. We’re selling the climate.”

Sales pitches about “the climate” are repeated more often than any other in early brochures about Los Angeles. The boosterism continues in articles into the ‘40s and ‘50s, and is well-remembered in novels, films, critical essays stretching into the present.

By 1900, boosterism in Los Angeles had developed virtually into a public-service corporation, centered around three industries: tourism, real estate and transportation. As those industries changed, the promotional rhetoric shifted as well. Various myths have been created: The Myth of the Climate (1880s-1930s); the Myth of a Freeway Metropolis (1936-1949); the Myth of Downtown Renewal (1936-1949) and the Myths for the ‘80s and Afterward.

The climate fantasy seems as light as the air itself, deceptively innocent. It is hardly a secret that the climate in Southern California is very moderate, a liberation from winter coats. But the brochures also promised miracle cures. By removing oppressive humidity, the air could cure tuberculosis, rheumatism, asthma, sleeplessness, even impotence. For a time, Los Angeles was called “the city for those with one lung.” In the winters, as many as 20,000 tubercular and rheumatic patients would take the air, or the hot springs in the Los Angeles area, often within a mile of downtown itself. Health foods and sanatoriums were already a major industry.

Late Victorians suffered from lung diseases much more often than we do. Dry air was considered one of the only cures. No wonder then that doctors’ offices in Los Angeles often were built with porches on all sides, to ventilate the air for patients. The air in Los Angeles was not only fresh, it was fragrant, very intense with the smells of what grew here. New arrivals to Los Angeles often mentioned the overpowering aroma of orchards, and vineyards, that the air smelled like wine. The sensuality was improved by moral order. Not only was Los Angeles the faraway land of Ramona, of miscegenetic romance, of missions and ranchos, of banditos like Vasquez, it was also wholesome Protestant farm country. One could enjoy the exotic freedom from civilization, and still remain civil and productive, while the desert air sanitized the body.

The promotion of the city’s climate had much to camouflage.

Despite all the promotion, the water supply was filthy; it brought on spells of typhoid during the summer, or “fever season.” During the rainy season, there were floods. The Los Angeles River would swell into the lowlands and run directly down Alameda Street, where the trains from Kansas City turned en route to the main depot. In winter, many houses in the downtown flatlands would fill up with as much as two feet of water. Then, during the dry season, water was desperately scarce, despite reservoirs and pumps from some of the nearby hills.

Perhaps it was best for tourists to look up at the sky and not down at the hazardous water systems. Despite the new aqueduct in 1913, the city continued to struggle for water. And despite the new sewers, in place by the ‘20s, there were still floods and mudslides. In the early decades of boosterism, the future had to be promised, even invented.

In 1921, to expand summer tourism, the All-Year Club was established as a private company, through the leadership of the Los Angeles Times. With country bonds, as well as private donations, it raised a $1-million budget for the first three years, and became the dominant promotional machine for the decade.

During the Depression, the marketing of the climate seemed to backfire. Its seductive advertisements were partly responsible for the great influx of impoverished Okies and Arkies in the ‘30s. Beginning in 1929, advertisers carried the caption “Warning! Come to California for a glorious vacation. Advise anyone not to come seeking employment.”

Promotion about weather was cut back, particularly during the war years, when rationing made tourism impractical anyway, even unpatriotic. Also, the sunshine, lotus-land image was hardly appropriate for selling the new industrial Los Angeles evident during World War II.

The next stage of the sunshine strategy beginning with the late-30s, centered around the automobile--the great liberator for cruising along wider roads.

But the strategy also involved fantasies about the causes of urban blight. The fantasy city, like many variations of modernist planning after World War II, was also built upon a profound anxiety about guarding against crime--an implied racism. Then later, after the shocks of the Watts Riot in 1965, the rich districts began being walled off even more coherently against the poor. During the 1980s, with considerable investments in real estate between Hancock Park and Fairfax, a wall of safety emerged along the Wilshire Corridor--continuing into the 1990s with a plan for the “West Bank,” beyond the Harbor Freeway to extend this barrier between north and south to downtown.

Today what was marketed as the lotus-land for Caucasians has become “the new Ellis Island” for the largest influx of nonwhite immigration in the world, far exceeding the numbers arriving in New York. Many of the old booster images have become running jokes in conversation, about the toxins of the week, or plans to convert the cement banks of the trickling L.A. River into a freeway alternate. Certainly, the air is no longer alluring. News on the climate looks ominous, with public warnings about earthquakes, greenhouse effects, inversion layers and offshore oil spills.

Greater Los Angeles is about to become the new Pacific Byzantium, with only a minority of whites, and a population exceeding greater New York. Statistics on crime grow worse. The underclass grows steadily larger. New museums, art endowments, freeway sculpture, murals programs, cultural Olympics add window dressing to the new image in the making.

The Pacific Byzantium becomes a brokerage center for huge investments from Japan, Taiwan, the European Economic Community. It is also becoming as primitive as many Pacific Rim cities, with new sweatshops, depleted medical services and a two-tier, segregated society increasingly more similar to many Pacific cities.

It has also become a vital intermediary for the Chinese democratic movement in exile. A new internationalist fantasy is emerging around Los Angeles. As always, this fantasy will be translated into another series of master plans, involving transportation, investment and promotion.

There are already fantasy maps of “pedestrian-friendly” urban villages” planned for downtown, in place of the “bunker mentality.” In debates over where to place a freeway bypass, one consultant for Center City West said: “I will not have this plan go down in history as having destroyed five neighborhoods in Los Angeles.”

But we must not take these hopeful plans about the new Los Angeles strictly at face value--nor the headlines about new programs for South-Central Los Angeles, or the war against drugs, another downtown myth camouflaging the destruction of a community. Los Angeles has promised a lot before, but its image, as always, is guided by the power of real-estate firms, the transportation industry and tourist planning to lure investors.

The images promise, but policies dictate. Then, as the needs of these three key industries shift, new images emerge, to camouflage new policies--as ever, about a completely new city, redesigned from wall to wall. Certain humanistic intentions are mixed into these policies, but the larger interests tend to dominate. Los Angeles becomes a disposable city, planned whole and devoured whole. There is profit when the new city is built, and profit when it is demolished. That is why there are so many ruins left over from old plans acted on, then destroyed.

Los Angeles is the most photographed and least remembered city in the world. But despite its seemingly short memory, much of what planners had hoped to avoid--or erase--has come to pass anyway. The social pathology of the city cannot be ignored, particularly its extraordinary disregard for the fabric of community life, in pursuit of both a new Babylon and a new Jerusalem.

Used with permission of Regina Books.

BOOK REVIEW: A review of “20th Century Los Angeles” appears on Page 2 of today’s Book Review section.