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• 1 2013-07-14T14:06:21-07:00 Regime VI -- Latifundia Mexicanas, 1822 to 1848 24 Narrative Essay plain 2018-11-09T00:25:58-08:00 Mexican Independence, reaching Alta California by 1822, suddenly toppled the Franciscans from their seat at the apex of Los Angeles rulership. Every Los Angeles regime transition has been Janus-faced.  The new Mexican rulers climbed into the saddle emptied by the Franciscan fathers, and by 1834 proscribed, dismantled and seized the Franciscan's labor-camp haciendas, the fabled Missions, and then seized California's most fertile lands for themselves, founding a landed gentry on the "ranchos," just in time for the arrival of free-enterprise capitalism of the Yankees, who seized control of California in 1846-8.
  
  This transition, as with Spanish and Mexican society in general, was indebted to the Roman Empire.  The Roman conquest of Europe, especially in southern Hispania (Spain), advanced by converting vanquished territories into latifundia (great farms) and the conquered peoples into slaves--granted by the senate and people of Rome in reward to generals for their victories.  

  Los Rancheros

  Following Roman custom, Gobernante Pedro Fages, after seeking and winning approval from a high official in Chihuahua, granted in 1784 a large hacienda to Juan José Dominguez, aged 65, providing him the rights to build a home, to graze cattle, and to employ "gentile" (non-Christian) and neophyte (Baptised) Tongva-Gabrielinos, on that land. This grant--the first Rancho in California--encompassing Palos Verdes and the San Pedro Harbor, was technically a “usufruct” (usage) right, but in effect it was a grant of heritable private property. The lands were held and subdivided by Dominguez’s heirs for the next two generations.
  
  Two other retiring military officers, Jose Maria Verdugo and Manuel Nieto, petitioned for and received similar grants, of Rancho San Rafael (present day Burbank and Glendale) and the sprawling “Los Nietos,” between Santa Ana and San Diego. The nuclei of all the ranchos in Los Angeles, this model spread rapidly, until a new landed aristocracy was literally founded, only to last a few generations before being subsumed into the United States capitalist system during the second half of the 19th century.Note
  
  The significance of Los Rancheros, their large pastoral landholdings, and their regime far transcended their family dynasties: They inscribed into the Los Angeles Basin the hacienda system of large labor forces controlled by an oligarchic elite.  The rulers of Los Angels in the 1820s-40s were landed gentry, uninterested in building a urban society, so they merely presided in Downtown Los Angeles, and it remained a very rural town. View full-screen interactive map.
  
  The principal issue before the new rulers was the proposed “secularization” of the missions. The Franciscan missions, central to the political economy prior to 1822, were the principal stake of power in the years thereafter, leading to nearly all of the political instability among secular Californio grandees.  Of the approximately 500 rancho grants made during the Spanish and Mexican periods, across all of Alta California,  the vast majority (all but 20) were made after secularization began in 1834. In Los Angeles County, most of the valuable non-mission territory had been granted during the Spanish period.
  
  From the time of Mexican independence until the beginning of the war with the United States in 1846, the ruling ranchero class in Los Angeles amounted to only a handful of families, the most prominent names being Nieto, Dominguez, Lugo, Sepulveda, Verdugo, Pico, Yorba, Carillo, Peralta , Ontiveros, Ybarra, whose inherited land grants dated from 1784 to 1842. Long before the U.S. conquest, Spanish and Mexican families were joined by Yankee immigrant-businessmen. Emblematic of this yanqui cohort was Don Abel—aka “Cara de Caballo” (Horseface)—Stearns (1798–1871), a Massachusetts native who in the 1820s adopted Spanish, converted to Catholicism, and became a Mexican citizen. In 1839 he married 14-year old Arcadia Bandini, daughter of the great San Diego-area rancher Juan Bandini. An urban merchant, Stearns rose to leadership within this outpost of Mexican society, sharing rule of the region with José Antonio Carrillo, Pío Pico, Manuel Domínguez, and Antonio F. Coronel. These men were the most prominent officeholders in state apparatus, and also the dominant economic figures.[2]
  
  Much has been made of the differing economic cultural values of the Spanish-descended Rancheros and the commercial capitalist Yankees who began settling in California in the early 19th century. The “Decline of the Californios” (Pitt 1968) is a time-honored narrative that portrays the early Yankee infiltrators as the advance guard of a more progressive, or at least more aggressive, commercial culture. But recent scholarship has shown that the transition from Mexican to United States rule was an ongoing process that took well into the early-twentieth century to complete.[3] Building on this recent work, I seek to emphasize an aspect of the transition that deserves better attention. The cultural differences between Hispanic and Anglo have been exaggerated. These groups were highly integrated within the ruling class: they were landed gentry, maintaining a racialized peon-like workforces within a client-patron political culture.
  
  Prior to the U.S. conquest, a tiny handful of perhaps two dozen landed ranchero families ruled Los Angeles. Secularization, mostly carried out under authority of a law passed in 1833 by the Mexican Congress, and by a 1934 proclamation by Gobernante Figueroa, which was remarkably favorable to the property rights of the neophytes.  Figueroa died in 1835, however, and under his numerous successors in a turbulent era, José Castro (1835-6), Nicolás Gutiérrez (1836), Mariano Chico (1836) and  was supposed to result in distributing about 50% of the land to the neophytes, virtually none of whom actually acquired lands. About 1,250 people of European descent lived in the Pueblo of Los Angeles in the early 1840s, another 430 lived on the ranchos, and possibly 1,100 Gabrielinos lived and worked as on the ranchos as vaqueros (cowboys) and in the city. A majority had shifted from their roles as nyophyte-vassals of the padres, so that only 300 remained on each of the shrunken mission grounds at San Fernando and San Gabriel by 1846.[4]
  
  Commercial trade with the United States in the products of the ranchos before 1848 enriched and empowered Hispanic and Anglo ranchero alike. As the republican government in faraway Mexico City sought to reap the rewards of their California province, naturalized yanquis and Hispanic-indigenous californios resisted for decades before the estadounidenses invaded in the 1840s, when loyalties divided mostly along ethnic lines. But those divisions did not last long after the U.S. occupation from 1846-1850. The voracious Gold Rush suppliers after 1848 enriched the ranchero elite and herds grew to hundreds of thousands as prices reached $20/head, gold coin.
  
  At the time of U.S. conquest, the principal political leaders were José Antonio Carillo, Andrés and Pío Pico, and Manuel Domínguez. Don Mañuel was first in family grants and also established himself as primus inter pares politically. He was elected first to the Los Angeles Ayuntamiento, and then as Alcalde (Mayor and Judge) when he was 29 years old.[5] His massive and verdant Rancho Palos Verdes, originally 70,000 acres, was extremely successful as a cattle ranch, with his adobe home and headquarters on a hillside in present-day Carson City. Patent to his Rancho San Pedro, totaling 43,000 acres, was issued by the Buchanan Administration on December 18, 1858, but it took the family until 1880 to get the papers. Don Manuel died in 1882, and in 1885 his estate was divided among no less than six daughters, three of whose married names illustrate the deep integration between the ruling Hispanic and Anglo families: Ana Josefa Domínguez de Guyer, Guadalupe Domínguez, Maria D. Domínguez de Watson, Victoria Domínguez de Carson, Susana Domínguez, and Maria de los Reyes Domínguez. That the Domínguez family actually clung to so much valuable property forty years after the conquest is also testament to slow transition between Mexican and American rule.[6]
  
  [1] Robinson (1939: 9-13).
  
  [2] Rios-Bustamante (1991: 184-191).
  
  [3] Monroy (1990); Gutierrez (1995); Deverell (2005); Ryan (2006).
  
  [4] Ríos-Bustamante (1991: 203).
  
  [5] Manuel was the son of Cristobal Dominguez, who was the nephew and heir of the original grantee, Juan José Dominguez (Robinson 1939: 14-22).
  
  [6] Clay and Troesken (2005: 61).
• 1 2013-07-14T14:08:55-07:00 Regime VII -- La Conviviencia Inestable, 1848 to 1881. 20 Narrative Essay image_header 2017-07-25T15:07:11-07:00 The U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1848 brought California under yet another new set of rulers. After a brief series of battles, in which control over Los Angeles passed back and forth between the flags of two nations for several weeks, Mexican commander Andrés Pico surrendered to United States Army Lt. Col. John C. Frémont in the Cahuenga Pass (where today the Hollywood Freeway crosses the Santa Monica Mountains) on January 13, 1847. These dramatic events, followed rapidly by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 (which enabled former Mexican citizens to obtain U.S. citizenship) and the discovery of gold in the Sierra foothills, have overshadowed the deeper continuities between the sixth and seventh regional regimes of Los Angeles. As late as 1852, out of a total Los Angeles area population of 2,500, only about 75 had come from the United States. Many more were to follow in the next few years, but as late as 1860 only about a third of the 5,000 Angelenos were of U.S. origin.[1]
  
  A paradox characterizes the rulership of the seventh Los Angeles regime.  It was, as historian William Deverell has shown, a period of the "never ending Mexican War," lasting well into the early 20th century, as Anglos asserted and re-asserted their conquest of California through legal and cultural means.  Former Mexican citizens, especially those of the working-class, often received little protection from the laws and instead faced arbitrary, race-motivated violence and vigilantism.  But this period was also, as the evidence of officeholding suggestions, a period of conviviencia, in which Californios and Anglos shared political power.  Cristóbal Aguilar, born in California in 1816, the husband of Maria Dolores Yorba, daughter of the Verdugo family that held vast rancho lands in LA and Orange Counties, held the Mayor's office three times (alternating with Anglo Mayors), between 1866 and 1872.  But he would be the last LA Mayor of Latino descent until Antonio Villaraigosa, who was elected in 2005 and held office until 2013.
  
  Reviewing the pages of the bilingual newspaper the Los Angeles Star / Estrella de Los Angeles in the early 1850s reflects all of the contradictions in this tension-filled conviencia.  Articles are as likely to document crimes against Californios by Anglos and harsh racial judgements against working-class Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, and Chinese.  But articles also demonstrate an orderly--if highly exploitive--world of business and trade in which Anglo and Mexican property owners and employers went about their daily lives in a bilingual world.
  
  it would be a mistake to exaggerate the generosity of the Anglos.  The estadounidenses brought a new bipolar racism to their regime, gradually reclassifying most Mexican-Americans into the disenfranchised non-white category.  Nevertheless, Californios remained powerful for decades after the conquest. The surnames of many of the region’s highest elected officeholders during the 1850s and 1860s were those of the ruling Californio elite families: del Valle, Coronel, de la Guerra, Sepulveda, Pico, and Ibarra. Even the key post of County Sheriff was held by Californio Tomás Sanchez as late as 1859. Andrés Pico, who led the fight against the yanquis in 1847, was elected State Senator in 1860. His brother, Pío Pico, financed the construction of the first high-class hotel in the city, the Pico House, in 1862. This protracted period of empowerment for the conquered was crucial for maintaining their claim to justice. As late as 1866, for example, 45% of jurors were Mexican-Americans.[2]
  
  As Douglas Monroy and David Gutierrez have shown, however, this ongoing partnership between Californios and Anglos was also an agreement to be “white” together, in common domination over the irreplacable source of their wealth: agricultural laborers.[3] As Monroy summarizes, “the old peonage system of the Californios was giving way to a forced-labor system of the conquerors,” thanks to harsh new laws passed in 1850 providing for the virtual enslavement of native peoples convicted of any offense or deemed to be loitering.[4] While the strategy of joining with Anglos as white Europeans worked well enough for one generation, it committed the old rancho families to the harsh form of white supremacy that plunged thousands of workers into a disempowered status as Anglos began to pour into the region during the 1880s.
  
  A long-running battle over land ownership eventually contributed to the "decline of the Californios," as Anglos challenged the legal proof of title to land held by former Mexican citizens, now U.S. citizens attempting to retain their rights as supposedly guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.  Claimants to rancho lands granted by Spanish and Mexican periods had far less vigorous surveys at hand than the precision expected in the U.S. court system.  A fascinating and yet also tragic archive of "Diseño" (pictorial, hand-drawn) maps were submitted to the U.S. Land Claims Commission in the 1850s onward.  Inspection of the Californios' Diseño maps, compared with those submitted by Anglo claimants, reveals stark differences in the perceived, conceived, and lived experience of Californios and Anglos vis-a-vis the Southern California landscape. 
  
  View digitized original Diseño maps as presented by the UCLA Department of Special Collections.
  
  Cattle, thanks to the Gold Rush and urban development in Northern California, was in great demand during the 1850s through 1870s, commanding extraordinary prices. $20 per head produced a sumptuary consumption competition among the rancheros and their wives. Fine clothing, oil portraits, public largesse marked this economic culture of public display. Aristocratic detachment from manual labor or bookkeeping also marked their culture. Don Manuel Domínguez rendered his accounts directly. He “always carried a chamois money pouch, and as each animal came up the ramp into the cattle-car, the agent was required to drop a twenty-dollar gold piece into the pouch.”[5]
  
  The rancho production system, the heart of the Los Angeles regional economy until the 1880s, was inherently dispersed and low-density. During the sixty years in which it thrived, Californios, commoner, elites, and middle classes alike, established the nuclei of the major settlements in the Los Angeles area. The Californios inscribed their institutional forms into the landscape, beginning with the structure of property boundaries, major roadways, and later municipal boundaries. Howard J. Nelson, Cornelius Loesser and coauthors found that “the vast majority” of rancho boundaries are still the boundaries between real estate parcels owned by different individuals. “Today,” they write, “about 173 miles of roadway in Los Angeles coincides with former rancho boundaries.” About 87 miles of municipal boundaries also coincide to the confirmed titles of the original ranchos.[6] Further, the average geographic scale of the ranchos is very representative of the eventual formation of municipal boundaries, and the peculiar shape of the City of Los Angeles can even be vaguely seen in the rancho shapes on the ground.
  
  [1] Pitt (1968: 122).
  
  [2] Griswold (1982: 118).
  
  [3] Monroy (1990); Gutierrez (1995).
  
  [4] Monroy (1990: 186).
  
  [5] Quoted in Monroy (1990: 184-5).
  
  [6] Nelson, Loesser, et al. (1964: 4-5).
• 1 2018-08-21T18:10:46-07:00 The Phases of Population Growth and Annexation: City of Los Angeles 3 plain 2018-10-31T20:23:05-07:00

  The patterns in the territorial and demographic growth of Los Angeles City fall into four periods.

  Phase 1: Isolation (1850-1885)

  During the three decades following the U.S. conquest of California, Los Angeles City remained an isolated frontier pueblo. Histories of this period certainly record significant local activity, but the outside world had little interest in Los Angeles, and hence there was no significant migration to the area to augment its meager natural growth rates. Apart from a single adjustment of the city boundaries southward in 1859, Los Angeles city annexed no new territory until 1895. By that time, a dramatic population boom had begun, which suddenly increased the land values of the region.

  Phase 2: Metropolitanization (1886-1929)

  The period from the 1880s through the 1920s was undoubtedly the most important for the development of the City of Los Angeles. The population of the city shot from 50,000 in 1890 to 1.2 million in 1930 (having supplanted San Francisco as the largest California city in 1920). . “In the decade of 1920-1930, over 2,000,000 people moved into California, 72% of whom settled in Southern California, with Los Angeles County recording a gain of 1,272,037”[6] Fully 412 square miles of territory were added from 1895 through the end of 1928, in seventy-six separate annexations or incorporations. All but two of the city’s territorial expansions greater than two square miles were made during this period. The largest of these were the Southern and Western Annexation (1896, 10.2 sq. mi); the Shoestring Annexation (1906, 18.6 sq. mi.); the East Hollywood Annexation (1910. 11.1 sq. mi); the giant San Fernando Annexation (1915, 169.9 sq. mi); the large Westgate Annexation (1916, 48.7 sq. mi), and the Laurel Canyon Annexation (1923, 13.6 sq. mi). Although not quite as big, the 1909 Wilmington (9.9 sq. mi) and San Pedro (4.6 sq. mi.) Consolidations were of incalculable strategic value, establishing the territory for the city’s deep-water port.
  
  During this period, Los Angeles emerged as the center of the leading U.S. metropolis west of the Mississippi. The region grew as a whole, through the emergence of a single economic, social, and cultural fabric. But every portion of that continuous fabric also became a potential unit of territorial fragmentation. Thus, not only did Los Angeles City expand, but many new municipalities came into being, and some of those, in turn, were absorbed by the City of Los Angeles. The crucial factor sparking the arrival of Phase 2 was the establishment of rail lines to Los Angeles in the 1870s. Boosters managed to create a population rush in the 1880s, and now the control of territory became very important. Incorporated cities can manage the amenities of their territory by building public works attractive to either residents or industry, by land use zoning, and by restricting the sale of alcohol through licensing powers.
  
  The City of Los Angeles had an unquestioned advantage from the outset, beginning with its priceless water monopoly. Its other great advantage was its functional and political-economic role as central place. Its European founding by the Spanish and Mexicans had embedded in the landscape a transportation hub in the location now called “downtown Los Angeles,” through which information, people and goods needed to flow before being redistributed to outlying districts. With these advantages, city growth oligarchs like Harrison Gray Otis of the Los Angeles Times or the transportation magnate Henry Huntington were able to propel the growth of the central city at a rate faster than that of any other city. This period could also be called the “heroic phase” of the growth of the City of Los Angeles, because it was during this period that two key feats of urban imperialism were realized. First, former Mayor Fred Eaton and City Engineer William Mulholland pushed through the gargantuan Owens Valley Aqueduct project, with the help of a huge bond issue voted by the residents of the city. The Owens Valley Aqueduct is truly world-historic in scale: it still the longest aqueduct ever built. The second great achievement was the thwarting of a plan to build a deep-water port in the Santa Monica Bay, and the realization of the plan for one at San Pedro instead, annexed to the City of Los Angeles by means of a thin “Shoestring Strip” in the years 1906-1909. [7] Collectively, the political, business, and journalistic leaders of Los Angeles acted entrepreneur ally during this “heroic phase” to leverage the existing value of Los Angeles to create the groundwork for a much larger metropolis. Although the growth of the City of Los Angeles leveled-off by the end of the 1920s, it remains the engine at the heart of the metropolitan system.
   

  Phase 3: Stasis (1930-1953)

  The most dynamic years of Los Angeles City’s growth ended abruptly toward the end of the boom of the “Roaring Twenties.” The period from about 1927 all the way until 1954 was one of stability among the municipalities of Los Angeles County. No new cities were created from 1931 through 1953, and territory was added to Los Angeles City only in portions of less than one square mile. Indeed, a case could be made for dividing the territorial history into just two broad periods: before and after 1930. Chart 3 shows that the majority of the area added to the city was completed by that date, while the simple number of annexations actually increased after that date—almost all of a very small size.
  
  The factors involved in the transition to Phase 3 were a complex mix of external hostility and internal restraint. A tight noose of mostly-adjacent incorporations took place in the 1920s, blocking further expansion especially to the southwest and southeast: Montebello (1920), Torrance (1921), Lynwood (1921), Hawthorne (1922), South Gate (1923), West Covina (1923), Signal Hill (1924), Maywood (1924), Bell (1927), and Gardena (1930). The Southeast became a significant battleground. The consolidation of Watts, as we shall see in the next section, provoked discussion of resistance within some communities. The 1920s was the period of institutionalizing racism, and hostility to the concentration of African Americans along the western side of Alameda no doubt played role in the incorporation of all-white middle and working class suburbs such as South Gate. The discovery of oil, mostly outside of Los Angeles City limits, provided another motivation to incorporate and remain independent of the growing central city.
  
  But internal factors were equally important. In 1927, just after the annexation of Watts, William Mulholland declared “that no more territory be annexed to the City until the Colorado River water supply can be obtained because of a shortage of water.” “With a population of 1,250,000 … the point has been reached where the City Council must say no to further annexations."[8] On Mulholland's authoritative recommendation, the City Council passed by a vote of 13-2 a motion “that it be the sense of the Council to discourage and oppose the annexation of any additional territory,” be “referred to the Water and Power Committee.”[9]
  
  In any case, the onset of the Great Depression after October 1929, followed by the Second World War, diverted attention from the project of city building. Urban growth machines, after all, only make sense in times of prosperity. The only exception to the rule of stasis in this period was the Tujunga Consolidation of 1932, and it was most probably instigated by the distress of that former city.
  
  While no major territory was added to the City of Los Angeles during Phase 3, a new pattern began to arise: the chronic adjustment of the boundaries of the city through very small annexations and even (beginning in 1948) detachments. In fifty-nine portions of less than one square mile, a net total of 12.6 square miles was added to Los Angeles City in the years from 1930 through 1953. The exact purpose of these minor adjustments is one of the completely untold stories in the history of Los Angeles. In the case studies section below I shall begin to offer the framework for an explanation, but this phenomenon demands much more research.

  Phase 4: Suburbanization (1954-2010)

  After the lull in activity brought on by the Great Depression and the Second World War, a different and more subtle dynamic arose in the 1950s. In 1954, the year of the Landmark Brown v. Board of Education, a massive wave of municipal incorporations began, following the example of Lakewood. The County Supervisors realized that they could write contracts with new cities to provide a comprehensive package of services, including police and fire protection, to new municipalities. In what became known as the "Lakewood Plan," cities began incorporating on just this basis, proudly proclaiming a “suburban” identity for their new miniature Cold War polities. While it has been a commonplace to characterize the entire history of the Los Angeles region as one of incipient suburbanization, it is really not until the post-World War II period that suburbanization proper began. The Lakewood Plan gave communities a fiscal mechanism to realize independence from the great central city without assuming the full burdens of a genuine, operating city. By outsourcing the core city activities of police and fire protection, these communities could remain primarily residential, bedroom communities peripheral to the basic work taking place in the core metropolis.[10]
  
  There were exceptions to this rule: Industry (1957) and Commerce (1960) incorporated with the intent (emblazoned in their names) of stringing-together highly profitable industrial zones (and probably of protecting these from zoning restrictions). These new communities were not, as a rule, adjacent to the City of Los Angeles, but their growth created a dynamic that altered the balance of power in the region, eroding the city’s once dominant political, economic, and cultural power. In 1956 Baldwin Park, Cerritos, La Puente, Downey incorporated; in 1957 a record of ten incorporations occurred: Rolling Hills, Paramount, Santa Fe Springs, Industry, Bradbury, Irwindale, Duarte, Norwalk, Bellflower, and Rolling Hills Estates.
  
  The County, in effect, began to play the role that LA City once had. Now the process was mediated by the supervision of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO), which did the research necessary to determine the costs of incorporation or annexation, and also now holds the same authority over attempted de-annexation, or secession. What had been a movement toward consolidation reversed itself in the 1950s into a movement toward isolation and fear of the behemoth of the central city. It is in this light that we must view the movement in early 21st century actually to secede from the City of Los Angeles, most notably in the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood, and San Pedro and Wilmington.
• 1 2018-10-31T20:30:28-07:00 Annexation and the Regional Centrality of Los Angeles City, 1880s-1953 2 plain 2018-11-05T19:35:56-08:00

   

  During the three decades following the 1850 U.S. conquest of California, Los Angeles City remained an isolated frontier pueblo. Histories of this period certainly record significant local activity, but the outside world had little interest in Los Angeles, and hence there was no significant migration to the area to augment its meager natural growth rates. Apart from a single adjustment of the city boundaries southward in 1859, Los Angeles city annexed no new territory until 1895. By that time, a dramatic population boom had begun, which suddenly increased the land values of the region.

  Phase 2: Metropolitanization (1886-1929)

  The period from the 1880s through the 1920s was undoubtedly the most important for the development of the City of Los Angeles. The population of the city shot from 50,000 in 1890 to 1.2 million in 1930 (having supplanted San Francisco as the largest California city in 1920). . “In the decade of 1920-1930, over 2,000,000 people moved into California, 72% of whom settled in Southern California, with Los Angeles County recording a gain of 1,272,037”[6] Fully 412 square miles of territory were added from 1895 through the end of 1928, in seventy-six separate annexations or incorporations. All but two of the city’s territorial expansions greater than two square miles were made during this period. The largest of these were the Southern and Western Annexation (1896, 10.2 sq. mi); the Shoestring Annexation (1906, 18.6 sq. mi.); the East Hollywood Annexation (1910. 11.1 sq. mi); the giant San Fernando Annexation (1915, 169.9 sq. mi); the large Westgate Annexation (1916, 48.7 sq. mi), and the Laurel Canyon Annexation (1923, 13.6 sq. mi). Although not quite as big, the 1909 Wilmington (9.9 sq. mi) and San Pedro (4.6 sq. mi.) Consolidations were of incalculable strategic value, establishing the territory for the city’s deep-water port.
  
  During this period, Los Angeles emerged as the center of the leading U.S. metropolis west of the Mississippi. The region grew as a whole, through the emergence of a single economic, social, and cultural fabric. But every portion of that continuous fabric also became a potential unit of territorial fragmentation. Thus, not only did Los Angeles City expand, but many new municipalities came into being, and some of those, in turn, were absorbed by the City of Los Angeles. The crucial factor sparking the arrival of Phase 2 was the establishment of rail lines to Los Angeles in the 1870s. Boosters managed to create a population rush in the 1880s, and now the control of territory became very important. Incorporated cities can manage the amenities of their territory by building public works attractive to either residents or industry, by land use zoning, and by restricting the sale of alcohol through licensing powers.
  
  The City of Los Angeles had an unquestioned advantage from the outset, beginning with its priceless water monopoly. Its other great advantage was its functional and political-economic role as central place. Its European founding by the Spanish and Mexicans had embedded in the landscape a transportation hub in the location now called “downtown Los Angeles,” through which information, people and goods needed to flow before being redistributed to outlying districts. With these advantages, city growth oligarchs like Harrison Gray Otis of the Los Angeles Times or the transportation magnate Henry Huntington were able to propel the growth of the central city at a rate faster than that of any other city. This period could also be called the “heroic phase” of the growth of the City of Los Angeles, because it was during this period that two key feats of urban imperialism were realized. First, former Mayor Fred Eaton and City Engineer William Mulholland pushed through the gargantuan Owens Valley Aqueduct project, with the help of a huge bond issue voted by the residents of the city. The Owens Valley Aqueduct is truly world-historic in scale: it still the longest aqueduct ever built. The second great achievement was the thwarting of a plan to build a deep-water port in the Santa Monica Bay, and the realization of the plan for one at San Pedro instead, annexed to the City of Los Angeles by means of a thin “Shoestring Strip” in the years 1906-1909. [7] Collectively, the political, business, and journalistic leaders of Los Angeles acted entrepreneur ally during this “heroic phase” to leverage the existing value of Los Angeles to create the groundwork for a much larger metropolis. Although the growth of the City of Los Angeles leveled-off by the end of the 1920s, it remains the engine at the heart of the metropolitan system.
   

  Phase 3: Stasis (1930-1953)

  The most dynamic years of Los Angeles City’s growth ended abruptly toward the end of the boom of the “Roaring Twenties.” The period from about 1927 all the way until 1954 was one of stability among the municipalities of Los Angeles County. No new cities were created from 1931 through 1953, and territory was added to Los Angeles City only in portions of less than one square mile. Indeed, a case could be made for dividing the territorial history into just two broad periods: before and after 1930. Chart 3 shows that the majority of the area added to the city was completed by that date, while the simple number of annexations actually increased after that date—almost all of a very small size.
  
  The factors involved in the transition to Phase 3 were a complex mix of external hostility and internal restraint. A tight noose of mostly-adjacent incorporations took place in the 1920s, blocking further expansion especially to the southwest and southeast: Montebello (1920), Torrance (1921), Lynwood (1921), Hawthorne (1922), South Gate (1923), West Covina (1923), Signal Hill (1924), Maywood (1924), Bell (1927), and Gardena (1930). The Southeast became a significant battleground. The consolidation of Watts, as we shall see in the next section, provoked discussion of resistance within some communities. The 1920s was the period of institutionalizing racism, and hostility to the concentration of African Americans along the western side of Alameda no doubt played role in the incorporation of all-white middle and working class suburbs such as South Gate. The discovery of oil, mostly outside of Los Angeles City limits, provided another motivation to incorporate and remain independent of the growing central city.
  
  But internal factors were equally important. In 1927, just after the annexation of Watts, William Mulholland declared “that no more territory be annexed to the City until the Colorado River water supply can be obtained because of a shortage of water.” “With a population of 1,250,000 … the point has been reached where the City Council must say no to further annexations."[8] On Mulholland's authoritative recommendation, the City Council passed by a vote of 13-2 a motion “that it be the sense of the Council to discourage and oppose the annexation of any additional territory,” be “referred to the Water and Power Committee.”[9]
  
  In any case, the onset of the Great Depression after October 1929, followed by the Second World War, diverted attention from the project of city building. Urban growth machines, after all, only make sense in times of prosperity. The only exception to the rule of stasis in this period was the Tujunga Consolidation of 1932, and it was most probably instigated by the distress of that former city.