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Mike Leco USATourist Administrator Joined: 14 Jun 2004 Posts: 101 Location: Pittsburgh Pennsylvania USA

Posted: Sat Jul 17, 2004 7:51 am    Post subject: Los Angeles is a really big city!    I was in Los Angeles, or LA, last month on business. I am always intimidated by the size of that city. I do not mean that it has lots of tall buildings and streets teeming with masses of people. The city only has small clusters of tall buildings in specific areas that are seperated by miles of low suburban architecture. The freeways are teeming with cars, but the typical streets is LA are not packed with people. I mean the city is large in area. It is spread out over such a vast area, that it makes most other cities seem compact in comparison. I had a luncheon appointment in the northern end of the city near Santa Monica. It was a short 20-minute drive from Los Angeles International Airport. After lunch, I had an afternoon appointment in Anaheim, near the original Disneyland amusement park. It was nearly a 40-mile drive from the northern part of the city to this southern suburb. The freeways where six and eight lanes wide in each direction, yet it took nearly and hour and a half for me to make the commute. I never left the urban environment for the entire trip, and I was in thick traffic the entire way. The Los Angeles basin is approximately 50 miles wide from the Pacific Ocean Beaches to the foothills of the eastern mountains. It is at least 50 miles long from the northern hills to the southern hills. The city fills every square meter of the land in this basin, creeps up the canyons on the hillsides and spills out through the gaps into the surrounding valleys. It is the epitome of urban sprawl gone berserk. Fortunately, the many towns and cities that were consumed by Los Angeles over the years have managed to retain some of their individuality. Hollywood is different from downtown and from Beverly Hills. The 50 miles of Pacific Ocean beachfront are divided into over a dozen of distinctly different beach communities with widely different characters. Malibu and Palo Verde are renowned for their rich and famous celebrity hideaways. Santa Monica is the upscale tourist destination while next to it Venice Beach is the counter culture hangout. Laguna Beach is the art community and Long Beach is the seaport commercital center. The city of Los Angeles is huge and intimidating, but it does offer a unique chance to sample the charms of many different cities within one city. As you travel from one Los Angeles neighborhood to another, it is almost like entering a new city with a different character and different life style.

I know what you mean. It's not a buzzing city like New York or London, but it's certainly sprawling. You can see that from the plane when you fly in. It's also an ugly city. With the exception of a few places like Santa Monica I think LA is an unattractive place. However, the sun shines nearly every day which certainly helps, and there is something compelling about the place.

 Mark.

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