City Profile
The second largest city in the US, outside New York, the City of Los Angeles is intertwined with Los Angeles County. The total area consists of more than 4,000 square miles, of which about 10% is taken up by the city. LA County takes in cities like Hollywood, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Pasadena and Beverly Hills. It is also includes 900 square miles of desert, 70 miles of coastline, the Santa Monica Mountains (rising up to 3,000 feet in the air), and the channel islands, Santa Catalina and San Clemente.
Los Angeles is a city of many faces, the most prominent being the home of the American movie industry. There are numerous motion picture studios established in many parts of Los Angeles, principally in the Hollywood and Burbank areas. Tourism is a major industry, LAX, the Los Angeles International Airport, is one of the busiest in the country. One of the most significant tourist attractions is Disneyland at Anaheim. Another is Hollywood, 8 miles north west of the City Centre. Hollywood was originally established in 1887, by a prohibitionist who planned to have a non drinking religious estate. In 1911 the first motion picture studio was developed.
In 1781 when the city was founded, 26 of the 44 founders of Los Angeles were of African origins, but by the start of the 1930s less than 40,000 of the Los Angeles population was black. This has changed markedly in recent years with a dramatic increase in the black population. Similar increases in the Hispanic population, and less growth in numbers of Asians, and American Indians, has result in whites very much becoming a minority.
Racial strife has erupted on a number of occasions, the two most significant being the1965 Watts riot, which left 34 people dead, and more than 1,000 injured, after six days of rioting, looting and burning. South Central Los Angeles came under fire in 1992, when riots claimed the lives of 52 people, and caused three quarters of a billion dollars of damage. In the 21st century Los Angeles has come of age, and is one of the most dynamic, most cosmopolitan, and most visited cities in the United States.