Industry

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Many cities have been dominated by just one or two industries over the last 100 years.

Los Angeles has seen a progression of them.

Agriculture and oil, which dominated the area at the turn of the century, gave way to a man-made industry entertainment when America started going to the movies.

As people took to the skies both for travel and warfare aerospace became a major force. Then it was financial services. Today, as the Internet’s popularity booms, technology plays a major role.

Several of those industries entertainment chief among them still remain major forces. Others, like agriculture, have all but disappeared. And still others, like aerospace, have undergone major transformations.

H. Eric Schockman, associate professor of political science at USC, said a common thread runs through all these industries that have made Angelenos wealthy from oil to aviation to movies to technology.

“I don’t think there’s any hard data that says there’s more creative people here, but California is kind of a haven for people who are on the cutting edge,” he said. “Trends start in Southern California.”

What made agriculture and oil take off at the turn of the century was simply that they were here. Once oil was discovered, it could be easily mined; so easily, in fact, that in a five-year period at the end of the 19th century, some 2,300 oil wells were dug in L.A. many in backyards.

Another natural resource the area’s mild, Mediterranean climate made it easy to plant crops here, particularly orange and other citrus crops that dominated Los Angeles County’s agricultural trade for most of the century.

But like most natural resources, oil and agriculture were victims of depletion. While a limited amount of oil is still pumped here, the vast amount was brought up during the booms of the early part of the century. Agricultural land, meanwhile, fell victim to a burgeoning population. As more people moved to L.A., it made economic sense to subdivide farmland and build housing, retail stores, factories and other buildings.

But the same natural resource that helped grow the agricultural sector a mild climate helped grow two other industries: entertainment and aviation.

Motion pictures flocked here partially because of L.A.’s year-round sunshine, a draw promoted by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in a 1907 brochure. The fact that a variety of settings from beaches to deserts to mountainous terrain to snowy peaks could all be reached in less than a day’s travel time didn’t hurt either.

Aircraft, meanwhile, could be built and serviced outdoors all year round. The lack of storms or severe wind for most of the year made it an ideal place for test flights. (In the 1980s, the climate helped develop the space industry in Los Angeles, because space shuttles could also be easily landed here.)

The success of these industries, which helped grow L.A. County from a population of just over 170,000 in 1900 to close to 10 million today, fueled the success of two others: real estate and banking.

As the population grew in the early part of the century, developers most notably, Henry E. Huntington, who sold housing along his Pacific Electric Railway line subdivided land, built homes and sold them to the newly arrived. Later, Kaufman & Broad Home Corp. would do the same thing in L.A.’s suburbs.

At the same time, local banks particularly savings and loans, such as Great Western Savings, Home Savings of America and Glendale Federal found success in home loans.

“The modern savings-and-loan business, which provided stable sources of home mortgages for the middle class, flourished in Southern California as nowhere else, providing vast fortunes for the likes of Mark Taper (Great Western Savings) and Howard Ahmanson (Home Savings),” writes William Fulton in “The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles.”

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