From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   QUORA: How did Los Angeles become such a massive city? What makes it unique   
   among other major cities?   
   answered by Steven Haddock, Studied at York University (Canada), Jul 19   
      
   Back in 1892, oil was discovered in Los Angeles. At one point, 1/4 of the   
   world’s oil supply came from the immediate region.   
      
   Not East Texas - Los The city was also a terminus of the railway so the city   
   grew quickly, so quickly that it started to exhaust its water supply. This was   
   solved by building a new aqueduct, which was completed in 1913.   
      
   But there was a catch. Under the terms of the building of the aqueduct it was   
   illegal for the company to sell the water to anyone outside of the Los Angeles   
   city limits. As such, with no other water source, many of the communities   
   outside Los Angeles    
   were amalgamated into it to get water.   
      
   Then, in 1910, some movie companies trying to escape Thomas Edison’s lawyers   
   set up in nearby Hollywood. The trickle of creative arts soon became a flood   
   and the area soon became the world’s leading movie production area with 80%   
   of films being    
   produced there. Then the Depression hit, which hurt most cities, but not L.A.   
   because more people actually went to the movies.   
      
   It wasn’t long before Los Angeles surpassed San Francisco as the largest   
   city in the state, and it just kept growing from there. By 1920 it was the   
   10th largest city in the United States. In 1930 it became the fifth largest   
   city and the fifth to pass 1    
   million in population, passing Cleveland. By 1950 it had passed Detroit to   
   become fourth (and Detroit hit its peak population that year). By 1960, it   
   passed Philadelphia. Finally, in 1990, it passed Chicago.   
      
   Meanwhile a land entrepreneur got the idea to buy up cheap land near the city   
   and build streetcar lines between these houses and the city. The RedLine was   
   born and provided Los Angeles with some of the best public transit in the   
   world.   
      
   But the streetcar wouldn’t dominate long. The property company ran out of   
   property sales to subsidize the system and a new development, the automobile,   
   allowed the city to spread even further.   
      
   Along the way, Los Angeles also developed a massive industrial base (which was   
   particularly busy in World War II) and a few fine universities which   
   encouraged tech companies to come to the area. The first test of ARPANET was   
   actually at UCLA.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)