Los Angeles

• 1. Introduction

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  Los Angeles spreads across roughly 469 square miles of land between the Pacific Ocean and the San Gabriel Mountains, and inside that footprint live an estimated 3.87 million people. That makes it the second-most populous city in the United States, behind only New York City, and the largest city in the Western United States. Beyond the city limits, the metropolitan area holds 12.9 million people as of 2024, and the wider combined statistical area exceeds 18 million. The land here was not always called Los Angeles. It was home first to the Tongva people, then claimed for Spain, then folded into Mexico, then bought by the United States. How does a small ranch town of about 650 residents in 1820 become a metropolis with the third-largest GDP in the world? What forces, water, oil, film, and ambition, pulled millions toward this stretch of coast? And how does a place this large hold together a population that speaks well over 200 languages?

• 2. Naming The Pueblo

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  El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles was the name a group of 44 settlers gave the town they founded on the 4th of September 1781. Those settlers were known as Los Pobladores. The original full name is disputed. The Guinness Book of World Records rendered it as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula, while other sources offer shortened or alternate versions.

  The local English pronunciation has shifted repeatedly over the decades. A 1953 article in the journal of the American Name Society traced one pronunciation to the period after the 1850 incorporation, and another to a California trend, beginning in the 1880s, of giving places Spanish-sounding names. In 1908, librarian Charles Fletcher Lummis, who argued for a hard g, reported that at least 12 pronunciation variants were in circulation.

  The Los Angeles Times waded into the fight in the early 1900s. For several years it printed a respelling under its masthead, Loce AHNG-hayl-ais, approximating the Spanish los ángeles. The public did not embrace it. By the 1930s a different pronunciation had won out, and in 1934 the United States Board on Geographic Names decreed that the federal government use it. In 1952 a jury appointed by Mayor Fletcher Bowron endorsed the same official pronunciation.

• 3. Water And Oil

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  Petroleum was discovered in the city and surrounding area in 1892, and the consequences were enormous. By 1923, those discoveries had helped California become the country's largest oil producer, accounting for about one-quarter of the world's petroleum output. The discovery of oil in the 1890s brought rapid growth, and the population, which had passed 102,000 by 1900, kept climbing.

  Growth on that scale strained the water supply. The completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, supervised by William Mulholland, secured the city's future by carrying water from Eastern California. Clauses in the city charter blocked Los Angeles from selling aqueduct water to any area outside its borders. As a result, many neighboring communities felt compelled to join the city outright simply to get access.

  The railroads had already begun stitching Los Angeles to the rest of the country. The transcontinental Southern Pacific line from New Orleans reached the city in 1876, and the Santa Fe Railroad arrived in 1885. Today the city remains home to one of the busiest container ports in the Americas, and to the nation's largest urban oil field, where more than 700 active oil wells sit within 1,500 feet of homes, churches, schools, and hospitals.

• 4. The Film Capital

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  Hollywood merged into Los Angeles in 1910, and at that moment 10 movie companies were already operating in the city. The industry grew with astonishing speed. By 1921, more than 80 percent of the world's film industry was concentrated in the area. The money it generated insulated Los Angeles from much of the economic damage the Great Depression inflicted elsewhere in the country.

  Los Angeles is often billed as the creative capital of the world, and the source offers a striking reason: one in every six residents works in a creative industry. More artists, writers, filmmakers, actors, dancers, and musicians live and work here than in any other city at any other time in world history. The city plays host to the Academy Awards, the Primetime Emmy Awards, and the Grammy Awards, among many other industry shows.

  The institutions run deep. The USC School of Cinematic Arts is the oldest film school in the United States. Of the five major film studios, only Paramount Pictures sits within the city limits, located in the so-called Thirty-Mile Zone of entertainment headquarters. Its parent company, Paramount Skydance Corporation, has had its corporate headquarters in Los Angeles since 2025.

• 5. Living On The Fault

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  Approximately 10,000 earthquakes strike Southern California every year, though most are too small to be felt. The city sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, and its instability has produced numerous faults. The strike-slip San Andreas Fault, marking the boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, passes directly through the metropolitan area.

  The segment of the San Andreas crossing Southern California ruptures roughly every 110 to 140 years, and seismologists have warned about the next big one. The last major quake on it was the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake. Other significant events have hit closer to home, including the 1933 Long Beach, 1971 San Fernando, 1987 Whittier Narrows, and 1994 Northridge earthquakes.

  The 1994 Northridge earthquake, at magnitude 6.7, shook the city violently. It caused $12.5 billion in damage and 72 deaths. The danger is not limited to the ground. Harbor areas have been damaged by tsunami waves from distant quakes, including the Aleutian Islands event in 1946, the Valdivia earthquake in 1960, the Alaska earthquake in 1964, the Chile earthquake in 2010, and the Japan earthquake in 2011.

• 6. Many Cities In One

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  Well over 200 languages are spoken in Los Angeles, and a 2021 survey reported that some 56.8 percent of residents aged five and older spoke a language other than English at home. The 2020 census counted a population of 3,898,747. By the 2023 figures, the city was 47.2 percent Hispanic or Latino, 28.3 percent non-Hispanic White, 12.0 percent Asian, and 8.5 percent Black.

  People of Mexican ancestry form the largest national origin group at 31.9 percent of the population, followed by Salvadoran at 6.0 percent and Guatemalan at 3.6 percent. The city holds the second-largest Mexican, Armenian, Salvadoran, Filipino, and Guatemalan populations of any city in the world. It also has the largest Japanese, Iranian, Cambodian, and Romani populations in the country.

  The map of Los Angeles reads like a gazetteer of these communities. Chinatown, Historic Filipinotown, Koreatown, Little Armenia, Little Ethiopia, Tehrangeles, Little Tokyo, Little Bangladesh, and Thai Town each anchor a distinct group. The religious landscape is just as varied. A 2014 study found Christianity the most practiced faith at 65 percent, and the metropolitan area holds 621,000 Jews, the second-largest Jewish population in the United States after New York City.

• 7. Turning Points

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  Tom Bradley was elected the city's first African American mayor in 1973, and he served five terms before retiring in 1993. His tenure spanned a turbulent stretch of the city's modern history. In early 1984, Los Angeles surpassed Chicago in population to become the second-largest city in the country.

  The 1984 Summer Olympics arrived that same year, the second time the city had hosted the games after 1932. Despite a boycott by 14 Communist countries, the 1984 Olympics turned a profit, becoming more financially successful than any before it. The only other Olympics to turn a profit, according to an analysis of contemporary newspaper reports, was the 1932 Summer Olympics, also held in Los Angeles.

  Not every flashpoint was celebratory. The Watts riots of 1965 left 34 dead and over 1,000 injured. On the 29th of April 1992, the acquittal of four LAPD officers by a Simi Valley jury, after the videotaped beating of Rodney King, set off large-scale riots. That same year the city recorded 1,092 murders. By 2009 homicides had fallen to a 50-year low of 314. Looking ahead, Los Angeles will host the Summer Olympics for a third time in 2028, joining London and Paris as the only cities to host the games three times.