The City Before the Car

In the summer of 1880, when the morning light crept over the San Gabriel Mountains and spilled into the valleys below, Los Angeles was still waking up. Not the sprawling megacity that would one day claim fifteen million souls across five hundred square miles of concrete and palm trees, but a modest town of roughly eleven thousand people who lived within a geography that pressed against them from every direction. To the north and east, mountain ranges rose like walls, their chaparral-covered slopes and pine-forested peaks creating a natural barrier that made travel difficult in any weather but impassable during the winter rains. To the west, the Pacific Ocean stretched endlessly, its cool breezes providing relief from the summer heat but offering no passage to the east, to the markets, to the future. And to the south and east, the Colorado Desert waited, an unforgiving expanse of sand and rock that had turned back Spanish explorers, Mexican soldiers, and American Forty-Niners alike.

This geography would shape Los Angeles in ways that no one in 1880 could fully imagine. The mountains that hemmed the city in would one day become the boundaries of distinct communities, each valley its own world with its own identity. The ocean that fronted the town's western edge would become both its greatest recreational asset and the source of its most notorious smog, as the prevailing winds carried automobile exhaust from the ports and freeways into the basin and trapped it against the mountain walls. And the desert that bordered the region to the east would call to the city's dreams of growth, promising sunshine and expansion, drawing millions of retirees and refugees from colder climates who would transform the inland empire into one of the fastest-growing regions in American history.

But in 1880, these futures were undreamed. The people who walked the dusty streets of Los Angeles that summer—merchants and laborers, farmers and lawyers, Chinese immigrants working in laundries and Anglo settlers dreaming of land—knew only a town that was proud of its orange groves, its pleasant climate, and its promise of a better life in the golden state. They knew that just a decade earlier, the town had been even smaller, that the Civil War was ancient history, and that somewhere out east, a great railroad was slowly pushing toward California, bringing with it the promise of connection to markets and migrants that would transform the sleepy pueblo into something larger. They did not know that within forty years, their quiet agricultural town would be connected by an electric railway system that could carry a person from the Pacific coast to the Arizona border in a matter of hours. They did not know that within fifty years, this same region would be building highways and freeways that would make those same rail lines obsolete. They did not know that the automobile, then a plaything of the wealthy and a curiosity for the curious, would arrive to remake their world in ways that neither rail barons nor visionaries could predict.

The Los Angeles of 1880 was, in many ways, a city of contradictions even in its infancy. It was simultaneously isolated and ambitious, bound by its geography yet dreaming of breaking free. Its residents knew that their town sat at the edge of the continent, thousands of miles from the centers of American power and commerce in New York, Chicago, and Washington. Yet they also believed, with a faith that would prove prophetic, that this isolation would not last, that the very barriers that made their city remote would eventually become advantages, that people fleeing the crowds and cold of the East would one day flock to a place where sunshine was reliable and land was cheap. Los Angeles in 1880 was a city that was already sprawling, not in the horizontal sense that would later define it, but in its aspirations. Its residents looked at the vast empty lands surrounding their town—the ranchos with their Spanish land grants, the desert lands to the east, the mountain valleys waiting to be settled—and saw not limits but possibilities. They were dreaming of something bigger, even if they could not yet articulate what that something might be.

The rancho lands that surrounded the original pueblo of Los Angeles told the story of the city's agricultural roots and its Spanish colonial heritage. The Rancho San Antonio, later known as the ranchos of the Machado and Higuera families, stretched west from the original settlement toward the ocean. The Rancho Los Feliz, named for the son of a Spanish corporal who had received the land as a pension for his military service, spread north toward the mountains where the Hollywood Bowl would one day nestle against the hills. The Rancho Los Cerritos and Rancho Los Alamitos reached south and east toward the ports and marshes that would one day become Long Beach. And to the north, the Rancho San Fernando and its sister properties extended into the San Fernando Valley, a vast flatland that would one day become one of the most densely populated suburbs in America but in 1880 was still covered in oak trees, wildflowers, and the cattle of Mexican and American ranchers.

These rancho lands were the legacy of a Spanish colonial system that had granted enormous tracts to soldiers, missionaries, and settlers as a way of populating and developing the remote frontier of New Spain and later Mexico. Under Spanish and Mexican rule, Los Angeles had been a small pueblo, more of a waystation than a true city, a place where travelers could rest and refresh themselves on the long journey between the missions and presidios of coastal California. The pueblo had been founded in 1781, part of a Spanish program to establish a chain of settlements along the Pacific coast, and for nearly a century it had remained small, isolated, and largely irrelevant to the larger currents of North American history. The rancho system had allowed a handful of families to accumulate enormous landholdings, but it had not created a dynamic economy or a growing population. California remained a remote backwater, connected to the rest of the world only by sporadic ship visits and an occasional overland expedition.

The American conquest of California in 1846 and the subsequent influx of Anglo settlers began to change this picture, though slowly at first. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 confirmed American control of California, and the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill the same year transformed the northern part of the state into a destination for fortune seekers from around the world. Los Angeles, situated far from the gold fields, benefited only indirectly from this rush, serving as a waypoint for travelers moving between the ports of San Francisco and the southern overland routes. But the very factors that made California valuable—the mild climate, the fertile soil, the reliable sunshine—also made the southern reaches attractive to a different kind of immigrant: settlers seeking permanent homes rather than quick fortunes.

The citrus industry would prove to be the economic foundation upon which Los Angeles built its early twentieth-century boom. Oranges and lemons, grown in the valleys and on the slopes surrounding the young city, found ready markets in the mining towns of the interior and eventually in the eastern cities that could be reached by the new railroads. The climate was perfect for citrus cultivation: warm days and cool nights, ample sunshine, and soil that drained well and was free of the frosts that plagued other citrus-growing regions. The industry required capital and labor, organization and marketing, and it attracted entrepreneurs who saw the potential for profits in transforming the orange groves of the rancho owners into a commercial agricultural system that could supply not just California but the entire nation.

One of the most famous of these early citrus entrepreneurs was Luther Calvin "L.C." Tibbetts, a Utah native who had come to California