The Los Angeles area is rich in native plant species due in part to a diversity in habitats, including beaches, wetlands, and mountains. The most prevalent botanical environment is coastal sage scrub, which covers the hillsides in combustible chaparral. Native plants include: California poppy, matilija poppy, toyon, Coast Live Oak, and giant wild rye grass. Many of these native species, such as the Los Angeles sunflower, have become so rare as to be considered endangered. Though they are not native to the area, the official tree of Los Angeles is the tropical Coral Tree and the official flower of Los Angeles is the Bird of Paradise, Strelitzia reginae.
Owing to geography, heavy reliance on automobiles, and the Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex, Los Angeles suffers from air pollution in the form of smog. The Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley are susceptible to atmospheric inversion, which holds in the exhausts from road vehicles, airplanes, locomotives, shipping, manufacturing, and other sources.[33] Unlike other large cities that rely on rain to clear smog, Los Angeles gets only 15 inches (381 mm) of rain each year. Pollution accumulates over multiple consecutive days. Issues of air quality in Los Angeles and other major cities led to the passage of early national environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act. More recently, the state of California has led the nation in working to limit pollution by mandating low emissions vehicles.
As a result, pollution levels have dropped in recent decades. The number of Stage 1 smog alerts has declined from over 100 per year in the 1970s to almost zero in the new millennium. Despite improvement, the 2006 annual report of the American Lung Association ranks the city as the most polluted in the country with short-term particle pollution and year-round particle pollution. In addition, the groundwater is increasingly threatened by MTBE from gas stations and perchlorate from rocket fuel. With pollution still a significant problem, the city continues to take steps to improve air and water conditions.
Cityscape
Hollywood, a well-known district of Los Angeles, often mistaken as an independent city.
Main article: List of districts and neighborhoods of Los Angeles
The city is divided into many neighborhoods, many of which were towns that were annexed by the growing city. There are also several independent cities in and around Los Angeles, but they are popularly grouped with the city of Los Angeles, either due to being completely engulfed as enclaves by Los Angeles, or lying within its immediate vicinity. Generally, the city is divided into the following areas: Downtown Los Angeles, Northeast - including Highland Park and Eagle Rock areas, the Eastside, South Los Angeles (still often colloquially referred to as South Central by locals), the Harbor Area, Hollywood, Wilshire, the Westside, and the San Fernando and Crescenta Valleys.
Some well-known communities of Los Angeles include West Adams, Watts, Venice Beach, the Downtown Financial District, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Hollywood, Hancock Park, Koreatown, Westwood and the more affluent areas of Bel Air, Benedict Canyon, Hollywood Hills, Pacific Palisades, and Brentwood.
Landmarks
Important landmarks in Los Angeles include Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Tokyo, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Kodak Theatre, Griffith Observatory, Getty Center, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood Sign, Hollywood Boulevard, Capitol Records Tower, Los Angeles City Hall, Hollywood Bowl, Watts Towers, Staples Center, Dodger Stadium and La Placita Olvera/Olvera Street.
Culture
The people of Los Angeles are known as Angelenos. Nighttime hot spots include places such as Downtown Los Angeles, Silver Lake, Hollywood, and West Hollywood, which is the home of the world-famous Sunset Strip.
Some well-known shopping areas are the Hollywood and Highland complex, the Beverly Center, Melrose Avenue, Robertson Boulevard, Rodeo Drive, 3rd St. Promenade in Santa Monica, The Grove, Westside Pavilion, The Promenade at Howard Hughes Center and Venice Boardwalk.
Media
The Fox Plaza in Century City, headquarters for 20th Century Fox, is a major financial district for West Los Angeles.
The major daily newspaper in the area is The Los Angeles Times; La Opinión is the city's major Spanish-language paper. Investor's Business Daily is distributed from its L.A. corporate offices, which are headquartered in Playa Del Rey. There are also a number of smaller regional newspapers, alternative weeklies and magazines, including the Daily News (which focuses coverage on the San Fernando Valley), LA Weekly, Los Angeles CityBeat, L.A. Record (which focuses coverage on the music scene in the Greater Los Angeles area), Los Angeles magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Los Angeles Daily Journal (legal industry paper), The Hollywood Reporter and Variety (entertainment industry papers), and Los Angeles Downtown News. In addition to the English- and Spanish-language papers, numerous local periodicals serve immigrant communities in their native languages, including Armenian, Korean, Persian, Russian, Chinese and Japanese. Many cities adjacent to Los Angeles also have their own daily newspapers whose coverage and availability overlaps into certain Los Angeles neighborhoods. Examples include The Daily Breeze (serving the South Bay), and The Long Beach Press-Telegram.
The Los Angeles metropolitan area is served by a variety of local television stations and is the second-largest media market in North America (behind New York City.
Los Angeles and New York City are the only two media markets to have all seven VHF allocations possible assigned to them.
Los Angeles Times Headquarters.
The city's first television station (and the first in California) was KTLA, which began broadcasting on January 22, 1947. The major network-affiliated television stations in this city are KABC-TV 7 (ABC), KCBS 2 (CBS), KNBC 4 (NBC), KTTV 11 (FOX), KTLA 5 (The CW), and KCOP-TV 13 (MyNetworkTV), and KPXN 30 (i). There are also three PBS stations in the area, including KCET 28, KOCE-TV 50, and KLCS 58. World TV operates on two channels, KNET-LP 25 and KSFV-LP 6. There are also several Spanish-language television networks, including KMEX-TV 34 (Univision), KFTR 46 (TeleFutura), KVEA 52 (Telemundo), and KAZA 54 (Azteca América). KTBN 40 (Trinity Broadcasting Network), is a religious station in the area.
Several independent television stations also operate in the area, including KCAL-TV 9 (owned by CBS Corporation), KSCI 18 (focuses primarily on Asian language programming), KWHY-TV 22 (Spanish-language), KNLA-LP 27 (Spanish-language), KSMV-LP 33 (variety)—a low power relay of Ventura-based KJLA 57—KPAL-LP 38, KXLA 44, KDOC-TV 56 (classic programming and local sports), KJLA 57 (variety), and KRCA 62 (Spanish-language).
The city's first radio station was KNX, which began as an experimental station in 1920 and then became a commercially licensed station in December 1921.
Religion
Los Angeles is home to adherents of many religions, with Roman Catholicism the largest due to the high numbers of Hispanics.
The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles leads the largest archdiocese in the country. Roger Cardinal Mahony oversaw construction of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, completed in 2002 at the north end of downtown. Construction of the cathedral marked a coming of age of the Catholic, heavily Latino community. There are numerous Catholic churches and parishes throughout the city.
Built in 1956 the Los Angeles California Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the second largest Mormon temple in the world.
The Los Angeles California Temple, the second largest temple operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is on Santa Monica Boulevard in the Westwood district of Los Angeles. Dedicated in 1956, it was the first Mormon temple built in California and it was the largest in the world when completed.The grounds includes a visitors' center open to the public, the Los Angeles Regional Family History Center, also open to the public, and the headquarters for the Los Angeles mission.
With 621,000 Jews in the metropolitan area (490,000 in city proper), the region has the second largest population of Jews in the United States. Many synagogues of the Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist movements can be found throughout the city. Most are located in the San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles. The area in West Los Angeles around Fairfax and Pico Boulevards contains a large number of Orthodox Jews. The Breed Street Shul in East Los Angeles, built in 1923, was the largest synagogue west of Chicago in its early decades. (It is no longer a sacred space and is being converted to a museum and community center.)The Kabbalah Centre, devoted to one line of Jewish mysticism, is also in the city.
The Azusa Street Revival (1906–1909) in Los Angeles was a key milestone in the history of the Pentecostal movement, not long after Christian Fundamentalism received its name and crucial promotion in Los Angeles. In 1909, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (B.I.O.L.A., now Biola University)
Dodger Stadium is the home of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
There was a time when the Los Angeles media market boasted two NFL teams, the Rams and the Raiders. Both left the media market in 1995, with the Rams moving to St. Louis and the Raiders heading back to Oakland. Through the 2007-08 season there is no NFL franchise in the Los Angeles market, which is the second-largest city and television market in the United States.[46] Prior to 1995, the Rams called Memorial Coliseum (1946-1979) and Anaheim Stadium (1980-1994) home; and the Raiders played their home games at Memorial Coliseum from 1982 to 1994.
Since the franchise's departures the NFL as an organization, and individual NFL owners, have attempted to relocate a team to the city. Immediately following the 1995 NFL season, Seattle Seahawks owner Ken Behring went as far as packing up moving vans to start play in the Rose Bowl under a new team name and logo for the 1996 season. The State of Washington filed a law suit to successfully prevent the move. In 2003, then NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue indicated L.A. would get a new expansion team, a thirty-third franchise, after the choice of Houston over L.A. in the 2002 league expansion round. When the New Orleans Saints were displaced from the Superdome by Hurricane Katrina media outlets reported the NFL was planning to move the team to Los Angeles permanently. Despite these efforts, and the failure to build a new stadium for an NFL team, L.A. is still expected to return to the league through expansion or relocation.
Los Angeles has twice played host to the summer Olympic Games, in 1932 and in 1984. When the tenth Olympic Games were hosted in 1932, the former 10th Street was renamed Olympic Blvd. The 1984 Summer Olympics inspired the creation of the Los Angeles Marathon, which has been held every year in March since 1986. Super Bowls I and VII were also held in the city as well as soccer's international World Cup in 1994. Los Angeles applied to represent the USOC in international bidding for the 2016 Summer Olympics, but lost to Chicago.
Beach volleyball and windsurfing were both invented in the area (though predecessors of both were invented in some form by Duke Kahanamoku in Hawaii). Venice, also known as Dogtown, is credited with being the birthplace of skateboarding and the place where roller skating first became popular. Area beaches are popular with parties, sunbathers, surfers, swimmers and barefooters, who have created their own subcultures.
Staples Center, a premier venue for sports and entertainment, is home to five professional sports teams.
The Los Angeles area contains varied topography, notably the hills and mountains rising around the metropolis, making Los Angeles the only major city in the United States bisected by a mountain range; four mountain ranges extend into city boundaries. Thousands of miles of trails crisscross the city and neighboring areas, providing opportunities for exercise and wilderness access on foot, bike, or horse. Across the county a great variety of outdoor activities are available, such as skiing, rock climbing, placer mining, hang gliding, and windsurfing. Numerous outdoor clubs serve these sports, including the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club, which leads over 4,000 outings annually in the area.
Los Angeles also boasts a number of sports venues, including the Staples Center, a sports and entertainment complex that also hosts concerts and awards shows such as the Grammys. The Staples Center also serves as the home arena for the Los Angeles Clippers and Los Angeles Lakers of the NBA, the Los Angeles Sparks of the WNBA, the Los Angeles Kings of the NHL and the Avengers of the AFL.
Economy
Companies such as Ernst & Young, Aon, Manulife Financial, Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, City National Bank, and the Union Bank of California have offices in the Downtown Financial District.
The economy of Los Angeles is driven by international trade, entertainment (television, motion pictures, recorded music), aerospace, technology, petroleum, fashion, apparel, and tourism. Los Angeles is also the largest manufacturing center in the United States.[52] The contiguous ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together comprise the most significant port in North America. They are one of the most important ports in the world, and vital to trade within the Pacific Rim.Other significant industries include media production, finance, telecommunications, law, health and medicine, and transportation.
Until the mid-1990s, Los Angeles was home to many major financial institutions in the western United States. Mergers meant reporting to headquarters in other cities. For instance, First Interstate Bancorp merged with Wells Fargo in 1996, Great Western Bank merged with Washington Mutual in 1998, and Security Pacific Bank merged with Bank of America in 1992. Los Angeles was also home to the Pacific Exchange, until it closed in 2001.
The city has five major Fortune 500 companies, including aerospace contractor Northrop Grumman, energy company Occidental Petroleum, healthcare provider Health Net, homebuilding company KB Home, and metals distributor Reliance Steel & Aluminum.
The University of Southern California (USC) is the city's largest private sector employer.
Companies such as Citigroup, Wells Fargo, KPMG, U.S. Bancorp, Bank of America, and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu have offices on Downtown's Bunker Hill.
Other companies headquartered in Los Angeles include 20th Century Fox, Latham & Watkins, Univision, Metro Interactive, LLC, Premier America, CB Richard Ellis, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Guess?, O'Melveny & Myers; Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP, Tokyopop, The Jim Henson Company, Paramount Pictures, Robinsons-May, Sunkist Growers, Incorporated, Fox Sports Net, Capital Group, 21st century Insurance, L.E.K. Consulting, and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf.
The metropolitan area contains the headquarters of companies who moved outside of the city to escape its taxes but keep the benefits of proximity.[54] For example, Los Angeles charges a gross receipts tax based on a percentage of business revenue, while many neighboring cities charge only small flat fees.[55] The companies below benefit from their proximity to Los Angeles, while at the same time avoiding the city's taxes (and other problems). Some of the major companies headquartered in the cities of Los Angeles county are Shakey's Pizza (Alhambra), Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Beverly Hills), City National Bank (Beverly Hills), Hilton Hotels (Beverly Hills), DIC Entertainment (Burbank), The Walt Disney Company (Fortune 500 – Burbank), Warner Bros. (Burbank), Countrywide Financial (Fortune 500 – Calabasas), THQ (Calabasas), Belkin (Compton), Sony Pictures Entertainment (parent of Columbia Pictures, located in Culver City), Computer Sciences Corporation (Fortune 500 – El Segundo), DirecTV (El Segundo), Mattel (Fortune 500 – El Segundo), Unocal Corporation (Fortune 500 – El Segundo), DreamWorks (Glendale), Sea Launch (Long Beach), ICANN (Marina del Rey), Cunard Line (Santa Clarita), Princess Cruises (Santa Clarita), Activision (Santa Monica), and RAND (Santa Monica).
The L.A. area is also home to the U.S. headquarters of all but two of the major Asian automobile manufacturers. Further, virtually all the world's automakers have design and/or tech centers in the L.A. region. Downtown Los Angeles also is the home of the Los Angeles Convention Center which hosts many popular events.
Transportation
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and other agencies operate an extensive system of bus lines, as well as subway and light rail lines across Los Angeles County, with a combined daily ridership of 1.7 million.[68]. With 1.4 million daily boardings, the ridership on Los Angeles' bus network is second only to that of New York. The city's subway system is the ninth busiest in the United States and its light rail system is the third most ridden in the country.
Nevertheless, given the population of the city, Los Angeles' mass transit system does not have high ridership, averaging 276,900 trips a day, a mere 0.4% of the 65 million daily commutesAltogether, 11% of Los Angeles commuters use public transit (including both bus and rail),[70] compared with 54% and 38% in New York and Washington, D.C., respectively.
Los Angeles subway at Wilshire/Vermont
The rail system includes the Red and Purple subway lines, as well as the Gold, Blue, and Green light rail lines. The Orange Line, although a bus rapid transit line rather than a rail line, is usually considered part of the system. The Metro Rapid buses are a bus rapid transit program with stops and frequency similar those of a light rail.
An extension of the Gold Line running from Downtown to East Los Angeles is currently under construction, and is expected to open in late 2009. A second extension from Pasadena into the foothills is being considered. Also in the works is the new Expo Line, which will run from Downtown into Culver City. Construction of this line is expected to finish in the summer of 2010. Plans of a second phase extending the line into Santa Monica are currently being assessed. Momentum is slowly building to extend the Purple Line under Wilshire Boulevard all the way to the ocean in Santa Monica, extending the city's public transportation system further.
Metrolink Commuter rail connects Los Angeles' historic Union Station to far-flung suburbs of Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, and San Diego Counties.
Intercity passenger service is provided by Amtrak. Rail shipping is handled by Union Pacific Railroad and BNSF Railway.
Air transportation
LAX, the fifth busiest airport in the world.
The Los Angeles metropolitan area is served by more airports than any other city in the world.[71] There are six commercial airports and many more general-aviation airports. The main Los Angeles airport is Los Angeles International Airport (IATA: LAX, ICAO: KLAX). The fifth busiest commercial airport in the world and the third busiest in the United States, LAX handled over 61 million passengers and 2 million tons of cargo in 2006.
Other major nearby commercial airports include:
(IATA: ONT, ICAO: KONT) LA/Ontario International Airport, owned by the city of Los Angeles; serves the Inland Empire.
(IATA: BUR, ICAO: KBUR) Bob Hope Airport, formerly known as Burbank Airport; serves the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys
(IATA: LGB, ICAO: KLGB) Long Beach Airport, serves the Long Beach/Harbor area
(IATA: SNA, ICAO: KSNA) John Wayne Airport of Orange County.
(IATA: PMD, ICAO: KPMD) LA/Palmdale Regional Airport is owned by the city of Los Angeles and serves the northern outlying communities of the Santa Clarita and Antelope Valleys.
The world's busiest general-aviation airport is also located in Los Angeles, Van Nuys Airport (IATA: VNY, ICAO: KVNY).
Harbors
A view of the Vincent Thomas Bridge reaching Terminal Island.
The Port of Los Angeles is located in San Pedro Bay in the San Pedro neighborhood, approximately 20 miles (30 km) south of Downtown. Also called Los Angeles Harbor and WORLDPORT LA, the port complex occupies 7,500 acres (30 km²) of land and water along 43 miles (69 km) of waterfront. It adjoins the separate Port of Long Beach.
The sea ports of the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach together make up the Los Angeles – Long Beach Harbor. There are also smaller, non-industrial harbors along L.A.'s coastline. Most of these like Redondo Beach and Marina del Rey are used primarily by sailboats and yachts.
The Port of Los Angeles along with the Port of Long Beach comprise the largest seaport complex in the United States and the fifth busiest in the world.
The port includes four bridges: the Vincent Thomas Bridge, Henry Ford Bridge, Gerald Desmond Bridge, and Commodore Schuyler F. Heim Bridge.
