A
semitropical metropolis of palm trees and swimming pools,
television studios and aerospace factories, Los Angeles
has become the second most populous city and metropolitan
area (after New York) in the United States. The city sprawls
across some 464 square miles (1,202 square kilometres) of
a broad coastal plain agreeably situated between the San
Gabriel Mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the
west. Its hallmark is an architecturally dramatic network
of freeways. The automobile so dominates life in this uniquely
mobile community that Reyner Banham, an English observer
who took his cue from scholars who study Italian in order
to read Dante, is said to have learned to drive a car so
he could "read Los Angeles in the original."
Los
Angeles County contains more than 80 other incorporated
cities, including Beverly
Hills, Pasadena,
and Long
Beach, within its 4,083 square miles. The county also
encompasses two channel islands, Santa Catalina and San
Clemente; a mountain peak, Mt. San Antonio, familiarly known
as Old Baldy, 10,080 feet (3,072 metres) high; more than
900 square miles of desert; and 74 miles (119 kilometres)
of seacoast. The metropolitan area has paid for its spectacular
growth by acquiring such present-day urban attributes as
smog-filled skies, polluted harbours, clogged freeways,
crowded classrooms, explosive ghettos, and annual budgets
teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Since the city and
the county are so intertwined physically and spiritually,
any consideration of Los Angeles must move back and forth
between the two entities.
Information
provided by online encyclopedia Britannica (www.britannica.com).
A
semitropical metropolis of palm trees and swimming pools,
television studios and aerospace factories, Los Angeles
has become the second most populous city and metropolitan
area (after New York) in the United States. The city sprawls
across some 464 square miles (1,202 square kilometres) of
a broad coastal plain agreeably situated between the San
Gabriel Mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the
west. Its hallmark is an architecturally dramatic network
of freeways. The automobile so dominates life in this uniquely
mobile community that Reyner Banham, an English observer
who took his cue from scholars who study Italian in order
to read Dante, is said to have learned to drive a car so
he could "read Los Angeles in the original." 
