Los Angeles For Dummies
When friends visit from out of town, they’ll often ask me to show them the real Los Angeles. I’ll start by taking them north on the 5 Freeway out of the city towards Santa Clarita. I exit at Roxford Street then turn left on Foothill Boulevard and park beside an innocuous hillside covered with chaparral shrubs. I point to the myriad pipes zigzagging down the mountain and tell them this is where Los Angeles begins.
In 1913, engineer William Mulholland christened the Los Angeles aqueduct transporting water from the Eastern Sierra to the Los Angeles Basin. The water was appropriated from the Owens River Valley destroying a vast agricultural plain in Eastern California. Without this precious water, Los Angeles would be a desert.
In essence, Los Angeles was born courtesy of a massive water grift.
From Sylmar, I’ll drive my unsuspecting friends south on the 5 Freeway through the San Fernando Valley to the 110 Freeway in Pasadena. This is the oldest freeway in Los Angeles originally called the “Arroyo Seco Parkway.” It opened in 1940 and connects Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles.
This is the second grift that formed Los Angeles. The LA freeway system.
Los Angeles has 527 miles of freeways. Locals know them by their numbers. There’s the 10 (Santa Monica Fwy), the 5 (Golden State Fwy), the 405 (San Diego Fwy)…
