Population Growth in Los Angeles

Paper Summary:

The paper relates that transportation played a large part in bolstering a sudden population explosion that made Los Angeles a major urban environment. The paper discusses how the railroads held a monopoly on land and transportation that caused Los Angeles to become a magnet for immigrant labor and migrating whites between the 1870s and the 1890s.

From the Paper:

"In the 1870s, the Southern Pacific Railroad Company was a major player in "boosterism" within the history of Californian urban development. For Los Angeles, the main aspects of population growth depended heavily on the ability of people to migrate across the country, as well as from San Francisco to the north. The power of Southern Pacific to own land is manifest in its control over this resource for building railroads on the west coast:"
""The Reverend Dana Bartlett, planning advocate and settlement house pioneer, battled the corporate "octopus" of the Southern Pacific Railroad (the largest floodplain owner) to reclaim the riverbed as a nature preserve (Davis 63).""

Sample of Sources Used:

• Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Vintage, 1999.
• Fogelson, Robert. The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

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