By JOEL KOTKIN

The last 20 years have been momentous ones for Los Angeles, yet that’s not really news. Los Angeles always has been a city of extremes, looming over the global scene in ways often larger than life and, all too often, out of whack with a more prosaic reality.

Yet as we approach the new millennium, perhaps Los Angeles is beginning to achieve something that it has never had a sense of normalcy and civic identity transcending the twin poles of Valhalla and dystopia that have shaped the world’s perceptions since its earliest times.

This is not to suggest that 21st century Los Angeles will be irrelevant to future history, but that, as it moves fitfully from adolescence to maturity, it will be regarded, like other great world cities, as an adult society, with its own triumphs, failures and contradictions.

The manufacture of paradise

The City of Angels did not seem prepared for such an exaggerated role in its earliest days. First as a dusty outpost of Spain and Mexico, and then as a far-flung possession of the United States, it seemed more on the road to permanent obscurity, except perhaps as an exceptionally bad neighborhood. In its first two decades under the American flag, noted one early historian, the city was “undoubtedly the toughest town in the entire nation,” with a startlingly high concentration of murderers, ruffians, thieves and other undesirables.

Yet by the early part of the new century, entrepreneurs began to flock to the city, recognizing that beneath the dust and rough exterior lay the potential for one of the great real estate promotions of all time. By the 1870s, the railroads provided an easy link to a city blessed by a striking topography, abundant sunshine and mild climate. Los Angeles, the promoters realized, had the potential to offer the shivering masses of the East and Midwest something that many craved the hope of a new life washed by the bright sunshine of a new city.

Early leaders like the Los Angeles Times’ Harrison Gray Otis and Pacific Electric Railway mogul Henry Huntington envisioned the creation of a new world metropolis at a time when the city’s population was barely past 100,000.

“I am a farsighted man,” Huntington proclaimed, “and I believe Los Angeles is destined to be the most important city in this country, if not the world.”

L.A.’s elite did not leave manifest destiny to market forces. Growth was made possible by endless promotion, as well as government-backed or initiated engineering feats, including the building of rail links, a major port, and most importantly, the capture and delivery of massive water supplies. They also had a particular notion about the kind of city they wanted to develop. In 1908, the nation’s first comprehensive urban zoning ordinance was created. Los Angeles was to be great, but it was also to be well-ordered.

Zoning was part of a broader notion about creating a city not of teeming ethnic neighborhoods and packed wards, but a city built around the primacy of detached, middle-class, single-family homes comfortably clustered amid a vast archipelago of village-like communities.

By 1930, single-family residences accounted for 93 percent of the residential buildings, almost twice the percentage in Chicago, and spread over an area that made Los Angeles the world’s largest city in terms of space. This process was accelerated by the shift toward the private car; as early as the 1920s, Angelenos were four times as likely to own a car as the national average and 10 times as likely as a Chicago resident.

At the time, it seemed like the recipe for creating a Valhalla on earth. “City making now is different from that of previous times,” the editor of the Los Angeles Express noted. This new city would serve as “the world’s symbol of all that was beautiful and healthful and inspiring.”

The new paradise was linked early on to a new industrial vision that saw perceived lifestyle advantages as a lure for new, future-oriented industries. The first and most conspicuous example was the film industry. Neither the early moguls nor the stars needed to be near navigable rivers, sources of iron ore or massive gray office complexes to build factories built on dreams.

But Hollywood represented only one part of this new Valhallan economy. More important was the notion of a science-based economic community. Lacking natural ports, navigable rivers, sources of iron ore or proximity to the nation’s established population centers, the region needed to “use more resourcefulness, more intelligence, more scientific and engineering brains than she would otherwise be called upon to use,” noted Caltech President Robert Millikan in 1921.

Millikan and other technology promoters successfully lured a treasure trove of human talent. Between 1940 and the 1970s, the region’s population of technical and professional workers jumped 200 percent, five times the rate of its East Coast rivals. By then, Los Angeles had the largest concentration of mathematicians and skilled technicians. It also was the nation’s greatest center for industrial research and development.

Tinseltown had become the world-leading brain center.

Those involved in these new industries, from machinists to scientists, fit easily into a sprawling environment dominated by privately owned homes, backyard barbecues and gardens. It was not only the land of sunshine, but of dreams and a kind of rebirth for millions of recently arrived middle-class migrants.

“When enough people are impelled by the desire of the new and novel, they lose their umbilical attachment to their native habitat and go sailing!” architect Michael Goodman observed in 1941. “A new attitude is initiated. In other words, the Spirit of El Dorado is still with us.”

The road to dystopia

These sunny images were not shared by everyone. The more the promoters sold the image of Los Angeles as the new high-tech urban paradise, the more it became an inviting target for critics of every type. Some simply found the place mindless in its narcissistic self-worship and materialism. “The plastic asshole of the world,” was William Faulkner’s stinging description.

There were also less subjective horrors. In their drive to create a great city in the desert, L.A.’s business and political elites repeatedly ran roughshod over the environment. The theft of the Owens Valley watershed the basis of the classic L.A. movie, “Chinatown” left a scar on that once-bucolic landscape and its people that has never been forgotten.

Closer to home, natives and even relative newcomers witnessed the devastation of one of the world’s great agricultural paradises. As late as 1940, Los Angeles was the leading food-producing county in the nation, with more than 12,400 farms. By 1964, the number was reduced to just 2,600. What lovely scenery there remained seemed to disappear under an ever-worsening cloud of smog.

There also was a racist agenda at work. Although majority Mexican in its early decades, this Valhalla was designed predominately for white folks, preferably from the north of Europe. Even the Jews, who had been heavily represented among the earliest entrepreneurs and civic elites, were gradually banished from the downtown clubs, chic neighborhoods and insider political networks that dominated the city.

By the 1940s a pattern of ethnic Balkanization had set in, accentuated by the great distances characteristic of the new mega-metropolis. The Mexicans, along with poorer Jews and Japanese, were largely relegated to the Eastside of the city. The growing African-American population found itself increasingly segregated along the southern fringes, while the tiny Chinese population remained ensconced north of downtown. The wealthier Jews, along with most of the film community, settled in their own elite “gilded ghettos” in the Hollywood hills, the Westside and eventually the San Fernando Valley.

Over time, separation would metastasize resentments and shape the perceptual map of the city. Many African Americans, but also other minorities, felt themselves outsiders to the broader dream of Los Angeles. In 1965, their anger exploded and burned through much of south Los Angeles, shattering any notion of a trouble-free Valhalla.

After Watts, many intellectuals, trade unionists, neighborhood activists and civil-rights leaders embraced a new narrative of L.A. as being oppressive. For them, the City of Angels did not represent new hopes, but, in the words of the hyperbolic left-wing chronicler Mike Davis, it had become a “city of quartz” harsh, brutal and unfeeling.

The Bradley era

The 1970s brought to an end the period of WASP domination in Los Angeles. Tom Bradley’s elevation to the mayoralty installed a new coalition dominated by African Americans, organized labor and Jews. The new mayor was hardly a radical, but he set the tone for a new kind of Los Angeles that was almost dogmatically multicultural and multiracial.

Bradley and his backers, including a large part of the business elite, managed to re-craft a new Valhallan image for the city. No longer a racially pure business city, Los Angeles was now the emerging “capital of the Pacific Rim,” the successor not only to tired and elitist San Francisco but a crumbling, Atlanticist New York.

The boom of the 1980s lent credence to this ideal. Los Angeles began to challenge San Francisco for the financial leadership of the West Coast. Hollywood consolidated its dominance over New York as the nation’s cultural center. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach slowly surpassed New York in trade volume. And the massive Reagan defense buildup plus huge investments by Japanese financial and industrial companies put L.A. on the economic equivalent of steroids.

The 1984 Olympics represented the high-water mark for this period. Brilliantly staged and executed, the games reflected Los Angeles’ self-image as an emerging world capital well governed, technologically sophisticated and with a highly diverse population. Los Angeles, as Atlantic magazine proclaimed a few years later, had finally “come of age.”

Yet underneath the glittering success, there were already signs of growing social fissures. Visions of an ever-expanding, ever more dense and expensive city offended many who had come to Los Angeles precisely because it had still afforded a certain standard of lifestyle, complete with detached home, backyard and carport. Resistance to the “growth machine” intensified as residents complained that Los Angeles was becoming less and less L.A. and more and more a smog-shrouded, desert New York.

At the same time, more serious social and demographic problems were lurking, often almost out of sight. The massive immigration of the 1970s and 1980s had transformed Los Angeles into a highly cosmopolitan and infinitely more interesting city, with a higher percentage of foreign-born residents than any region outside Miami. The tide of newcomers sparked the expansion of numerous industries, from garments to food and furniture. But it also introduced a largely Third World population, many of whom were ill-educated, ill-trained and culturally isolated.

Left-wing local academicians and radical writers were quick to seize on these discordant themes. The emerging “L.A. School” of social scientists led by UCLA professors such as Paul Ong, Allen Scott and Edward Soja created a searing new picture of Los Angeles as both dynamic and intrinsically unfair. But the greatest push for the new vision came from less scholarly sources, such as the movie “Blade Runner,” which portrayed a mongrelized 21st century Los Angeles, and from the writings of the ever-more-ubiquitous Mike Davis, who was quickly becoming the acknowledged “expert” on everything concerning the City of Angels.

Dystopia triumphant

If timing is everything in the world of ideas, the events of the early 1990s could not have been more blessed for the creators of the new L.A. dystopia. The awful events of those times the defense cutbacks, the 1992 riots, the 1994 earthquake and the ensuing fires seemed to confirm all the worst possible assessments of Los Angeles. The idea that L.A. was a “city on the edge” now gained global currency.

Economic rivals now scoured the city for businesses itching to leave. They were aided by the news media, which never passed up a chance to portray Los Angeles as the worst example of urban dysfunction. “Los Angeles: America’s First Third World City: Multi-ethnic melting pot a simmering stew of despair,” ran the banner headlines in the Arizona Republic. Los Angeles, the Phoenix-based paper reported in October 1992, was a hopelessly divided city in which most of the middle class was simply waiting to leave if they could.

The national media, historically negative toward Los Angeles, had a field day. Virtually every newspaper and TV network now concentrated on L.A. as the example for everything evil from crime to white flight to lack of community. Though New York was itself suffering from both prolonged economic decline and a similar mass out-migration of whites, the story of L.A.’s decline took central billing from the Gothamite-dominated press.

But perhaps the worst damage was inflicted from inside. Even as the city slowly rebuilt its economy, the predominant view among the economic, political and media elites from the Southern California Association of Governments to the Los Angeles Times and even this newspaper was that of a city in permanent, perhaps irreversible decline. In the Los Angeles of the early 1990s, observes historian Kevin Starr, virtually the only “realistic” opinion was that of the confirmed pessimist. Anyone who held out any hope for the city, Starr recalls, was labeled a “mindless booster.”

Nowhere was the dissolution more obvious than among those business leaders, who, in rational circumstances, should have stood up against what economist David Friedman described as an atmosphere of “unmoderated negativity.” Many business people simply left, others panicked and sold off their assets, often at bargain-basement prices. Business groups that stayed often added to the gloom by adopting a scorched-earth policy exaggerating the city’s plight in hopes of getting reforms favorable to commerce and industry.

The beginnings of maturity

Amid the psychological and social wreckage, Los Angeles gradually got on its feet. The people who led this effort were, for the most part, not from the traditional business or political leadership. On the political level, the greatest role was played by Richard Riordan, the inarticulate and uncharismatic deal maker and lawyer, who for some reason decided that he could save the city.

Although often politically inept, the mayor’s unpretentious style and his apparent love for the city lifted L.A.’s spirits. At the same time, he displayed an uncanny ability to develop a new core of activist business leaders including Steve Soboroff, Eli Broad and Bruce Karatz who reinvigorated civic projects, such as the Staples Center arena, the new Cathedral and the Disney Concert Hall.

Perhaps even more important was the rise of a new economy, anchored largely by small business and often owned by women and minorities. As Los Angeles faded as a corporate center, the city experienced a massive increase in the number of smaller firms. The growth was even more dramatic in industries such as entertainment, trade, multimedia, garments and textiles, where at least many of the jobs lost in the early part of the decade were recovered.

The new industries and companies produced their own new business leadership. Instead of largely white corporate chieftains, there now were leaders such as Toytown founder Charlie Woo, restaurateur Linda Griego, developers Jose Legaspi and Earvin “Magic” Johnson, all of whom redoubled their efforts when the city was on its knees. Others, such as special-effects whiz Scott Ross of Digital Domain, Rhythm and Hues’ John Hughes, EarthLink’s Sky Dayton and Idealab’s peripatetic Bill Gross, played a key role in helping regain some standing in the emerging digital economy.

Slowly, haltingly, Los Angeles began to recover some of its intellectual self-confidence. Voices that rose out of the crisis of the early 1990s such as economist Friedman, writer Gregory Rodriguez, planner Bill Fulton, demographer James Allen and veteran broadcaster Warren Olney have added a more measured, less hysterically negative tone to our civic debate.

Meanwhile, Mike Davis, exposed as a factually challenged as well as profoundly biased analyst, disembarked to New York, apparently ready to leave Los Angeles to its future without his deconstructing vision.

Yet it would be a mistake for those of us who unapologetically care about this city to break out the champagne. Many of the issues raised over the past two decades racism, poverty, environmental degradation have not disappeared, even if the most extreme exaggerations have been rightly discredited. Los Angeles remains a troubled city, although arguably no more so than New York, Chicago, Houston or San Francisco.

Nor has Los Angeles lost its unique place in the evolution of the urban idea. Even today, when cities from Atlanta and Charlotte to Seattle decry not wanting to be “like L.A.,” they unwittingly confirm that our city has become the archetypal American metropolis of the new era. The sprawling, multi-polar, tree-lined, and often inchoate sprawl that is Los Angeles reflects Americans’ desire to create an urban form freed from the compression, uniformity and social control that characterized the traditional city.

Perhaps more chastened by reality, hopefully more aware of its realities and shortcomings, Los Angeles still remains the city of America’s future. How to make sure that future turns out decently remains the daunting challenge for the 20 years that lie ahead.

Business Journal columnist Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow with the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy and a research fellow at the Reason Public Policy Institute.