ICONS

There was a time when you couldn’t get a beach towel bedecked with a palm tree in Los Angeles. Not that there weren’t beach towels; there just weren’t many palm trees. It wasn’t until Los Angeles cadged the 1932 Olympics that it became the city of fronds. With the world on its way, city developers wanted to create a Mediterranean paradise, so the Park Commission, on a $100,000 budget, grew about 30,000 palms of several varieties in Baldwin Park. The city lined the main boulevards in town with the trees, chosen in part because they didn’t block the view from a double-decked touring bus, and gave the rest to anyone who would plant one. A smaller distribution heralded the 1984 Olympics. But the trees developed legs in the ‘90s, when Angelenos discovered that they could survive a once-a-month watering schedule.