10. Olympics
With the Great Depression knocking out potential bids from rival cities, the 1932 Olympics was pretty much L.A.’s for the taking. Civic leaders had other priorities but some locals, notably developer William May Garland, believed that Los Angeles still a faraway outpost to many would benefit from Olympics exposure. They were right. The 1932 Summer Games drew 1.25 million people and provided the spark to renovate the Memorial Coliseum. It also earned a profit of $1 million and gave Olympic Boulevard its name. If 1932 put L.A. on the map, the 1984 Olympics vaulted the city onto the global stage and Peter Ueberroth, president of the city’s organizing committee, concocted a financial package that produced a $222 million surplus.
9. Bunker Hill
Raymond Chandler called Bunker Hill of the 1940s an “old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town.” An initial plan to tear down Victorian mansions and replace them with residential towers was rejected by downtown business leaders, led by Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Chief Executive Asa Call. With pressure from business interests, the Community Redevelopment Agency went back to the drawing board coming up with a plan for a commercial redevelopment zone. The area was razed beginning in the early 1960s and stayed mostly vacant for two decades. Some development began including two L.A. County buildings and the downtown Music Center complex in 1964. In the late 1970s, construction was readied on the skyscrapers that now dominate the neighborhood.
8. Hollywood
Louis B. Mayer came west in the early 1900s after turning $50,000 into $500,000 through a deal that gave him 90 percent of the New England ticket sales for “The Birth of a Nation.” When Mayer began producing his own pictures, he convinced actress Anita Stewart to break her contract with Vitagraph to star in his flicks. But the deal that led to the creation of the studio system came in 1924, when Mayer sold Louis B. Mayer Productions to Marcus Loew, owner of Metro Pictures, for $75,000. The deal that created Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gave the three top executives 20 percent of MGM’s profits, with Mayer getting 53 percent of that, on top of a $1,500 weekly salary.
7. Century City
Darryl Zanuck took over struggling Fox Studio Corp. in 1935, creating Twentieth Century Fox. The new studio began acquiring lots of land (including a parcel from silent-movie cowboy Tom Mix) and had 260 acres by the early 1940s just as television induced moviegoers to stay home more. Its finances already precarious, the studio’s 1958 blockbuster “Cleopatra” with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton cost $37 million to make (it was budgeted at $6 million), putting more pressure on Fox to sell its real estate. In 1960, Leon Hickman, the real estate vice president of the Aluminum Company of America, paid $38 million to develop most of the studio’s land. The area is now home to nearly 10 million square feet of office space, fetching some of the highest rental prices in L.A.
6. Dodger Stadium
When Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley wanted to build a new stadium, New York power broker Robert Moses tried to steer him to a city-built stadium in Queens. But O’Malley had other ideas a private ballpark and went searching for alternatives. Los Angeles had something that New York didn’t: Chavez Ravine. The Mexican neighborhood had been torn down in 1952 to make way for housing that never got built, and L.A. officials promised O’Malley he could construct his own stadium without interference. The deal to bring the Dodgers out west included 185 acres of land and $2 million for clearing the property. Although O’Malley still wanted more space he was looking for at least a 300-acre parcel the lure of building his own stadium trumped space constraints. O’Malley spent $18 million to build Dodger Stadium, which opened in Chavez Ravine in 1962 with 52,564 fans.
5. Los Angeles International Airport
The Chamber of Commerce, sensing that L.A. wouldn’t reap the financial rewards of air travel without its own municipal airport, began pushing the City Council in 1926 to search for possible airport locations. Meanwhile, Inglewood Municipal Judge Frank D. Parent, real estate promoter Harry Culver and George Cleaver, an oil land developer, formed a partnership to acquire Bennett Rancho, sprawling fields of wheat, barley and beans. The property’s owner, James Martin, hired real estate agent William Mines to broker the land, and Mines formed a partnership with Parent, Culver and Cleaver. Voters turned away a $6 million bond measure that would have allowed the city to purchase three possible sites for the airport. Forced to choose just one, the council agreed to pay $3,000 an acre for roughly 500 acres of what had become known as Mines Field and was already being used by private aviators. The site was officially dedicated as Los Angeles Municipal Airport in 1930.
4. Valley Development
For less than the price of a San Fernando Valley house today, Isaac Lankershim and his son-in-law, Isaac Newton Van Nuys, snatched up land that is now Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Reseda and Canoga Park. Andres Pico sold the tens of thousands of acres for $115,000, about $100,000 more than he had paid for it a decade earlier. Lankershim, who hailed from San Francisco, turned his property into a wheat and barley farm after a drought wiped out thousands of livestock animals. The flour milling business that resulted was lucrative, but the call of suburbia was too great. During the real estate grab of the 1880s, Lankershim bought an additional 12,000 acres that were subdivided into smaller lots priced from $5 to $150 an acre. In 1909, Gen. Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times paid $2.5 million for the nearly 50,000-acre Lankershim property.
3. Red Cars
The Red Car system once spanned more than 1,000 miles of tracks, connecting far-flung parts of Southern California from Long Beach to Pasadena to Santa Monica with over 900 cars. Henry Huntington, who established the Pacific Electric Railway Co. in 1901, painted the cars red and expanded the rail network. But in a rare example of cooperation, companies with a stake in the success of the automobile ensured the demise of the Red Cars. General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum joined together in 1936 to buy up transit systems in cities throughout the country. The joint venture bought the Red Cars, but was subsequently convicted by a federal court of violating federal antitrust laws. The Red Cars, which never were profitable, continued to bleed money as riders fled public transportation to travel in their own vehicles.
2. Port of Los Angeles
It might have been located in Santa Monica if Collis Huntington, head of the Southern Pacific Railroad, had his way. Huntington, who acquired a large stake in the Santa Monica pier by snatching up waterfront property, lobbied aggressively to stop the creation of the port in San Pedro. The political battle between the supporters of a port on the Westside and the supporters of the port in San Pedro was called the “Great Free-Harbor Fight.” L.A. Times Publisher Otis Chandler wouldn’t let Huntington turn Santa Monica into his personal trade empire. A board of experts commissioned to study the issue concluded that the port should be located in San Pedro. In 1906, city residents approved the annexation of a 16-mile strip of land, dubbed the Shoestring Addition, connecting Los Angeles with San Pedro and Wilmington.
1. Owens Valley
William Mulholland, the first superintendent of the Department of Water and Power, recognized that a growing Los Angeles couldn’t be sustained by the L.A. River alone. Mulholland and Fred Eaton, a former Los Angeles mayor, scoured Southern California for alternatives. Eaton settled on the Owens River and proposed to Mulholland a joint venture in which the two would buy the land rights and benefit from surplus water, while the city would build the aqueduct. Mulholland rejected the idea and favored a project that was entirely public. Still, Eaton acquired rights to more than 50 miles of land in the Owens Valley and in 1905 offered the land rights. Construction was begun on the aqueduct in 1908, much to the shock of the residents of the Owens Valley who were led to believe that the federal government was moving full steam ahead with an irrigation effort. In November 1913, thousands watched as water flowed through the Los Angeles Aqueduct for the first time. Mulholland, commemorating the triumph, exclaimed to the crowd, “There it is! Take it!”
*Staff Reporter Howard Fine contributed to this story.
