HOW IT STARTED:

Under the inescapable smog that still blanketed the city, Los Angeles in the early 1970s was poised between its parochial past and its global future…Downtown Los Angeles was a ghost town. The big East Coast department stores had not even opened LA branches yet. The Los Angeles Times was just emerging from its insular, arch-conservative past to pursue its ambition of becoming a world-class newspaper. Control of City Hall finally shifted in 1973 from longtime mayor Sam Yorty, an erratic midwesterner who held power in his final years by overtly appealing to white anxiety about racial change, to African American Tom Bradley, a dignified and reserved former police officer who became the first Black mayor of a mostly white large city. The model and actress Anjelica Huston, who arrived just before Bradley’s victory in the spring of 1973, wrote later that “Los Angeles was a small town then; it felt both incredibly glamorous and a little provincial.” Huston arrived from Manhattan, leaving a tumultuous relationship with a brilliant but erratic fashion photographer that had immersed her in the nocturnal Andy Warhol demimonde of the Lower East Side. Bright and sunny, healthful and relaxed, Los Angeles then seemed to her “the antithesis of New York,” as she recalled. Unlike New York, “there were no rats in the trees, no smell of urine on Third Avenue.” Huston rode horses through Griffith Park and planted wisteria, dahlias, and chrysanthemums behind her house on Beachwood Drive. “It was like a big garden to me,” she remembered of LA in those years. “After those years in New York, it was like the land of milk and honey.”

—Ronald Brownstein, Rock Me on the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics, published in 2021.

 How it’s going:

A journey through Los Angeles, the adopted home of Vice President Kamala Harris, offers a masterclass in urban dysfunction. As you drive through the streets of the southside, and along Central Avenue, the historic main street of black LA, now mostly Hispanic, the ambience is increasingly reminiscent of Mexico City or Mumbai: broken pavements; battered buildings; outdoor swap meets; food stalls serving customers much as one would see in the developing world.

Democrats, particularly in deep blue California and even bluer cities like Los Angeles, can clearly win elections. But what they can’t do is govern effectively. Virtually every Democratic city in the land is now in decline. Crime, especially of the violent variety, is rising. That’s shadowed by continued out-migration to less dense, more conservative areas, a trend that’s seeing the country’s biggest cities lose out economically.

But if signs of progressive failure are clear from New York to San Francisco, it’s Los Angeles where I feel it most keenly. I’ve lived here since 1975. Back then, the idea that this diamond in the sands could tarnish was unimaginable. But it has. Once a middle-class haven with a broad industrial base, LA now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state, and among the worst in the country. Dovetailed by failing schools and parks, and an exodus of residents and businesses, long-term prospects of this great American city look bleak — a future that could yet be translated right across the country.

— Joel Kotkin, “How the City of Angels went to hell,” UnHerd, yesterday.

Gooder and harder, California.

Related: Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time.

Earlier, from Jack Dunphy: The Slow, Agonizing Death of Los Angeles. “I was born in Los Angeles and spent most of my life within its city limits. My father was born there, also, and by the standards of L.A., where most people’s roots are as deep as a tumbleweed’s, this is rather like tracing one’s lineage back to the Mayflower. About twelve years ago, while still employed with the Los Angeles Police Department, I made what was at the time an anguished decision to move my family to the suburbs. Today, the only anguish I feel about Los Angeles comes when I’m obligated to go there for some work, social, or entertainment activity, and I’m grateful these are more infrequent as the years pass.”