Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles

“The author’s writing is colorful and lively, as befits this story of a special frontier place and its incredible creators.”

Los Angeles was a sleepy pueblo in the California desert when it became a part of the United States after the War with Mexico (1846–1848). Misinformed public history has LA as largely the product of post-World War II America. The modern city began before 1932.

Today, this 486 square mile conglomeration of ten municipalities and 73 communities remains that original small town in too many ways. Los Angeles is, however, today both America’s second largest city and metropolitan area.

The characters who originally came along for this ride are legendary. Paul Haddad tells their story of creating “a city that should not exist” in Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles. The author’s writing is colorful and lively, as befits this story of a special frontier place and its incredible creators.

Haddad explains that the growth began with the vision of six industrialists in 1859 and covered generations, to be capped at the end of this period with the famous Olympics of 1932. This city and metropolitan area, however, could “boast no natural features that could sustain its current population.”

The background is complicated and unlikely, such as the “Annexation Era” (1896–1932), when 90 percent of what became the city today was acquired. Haddad expounds on the different men and different elements of this phenomenal growth: climate, commerce, entertainment, the harbor, newspapers, oil, propaganda, railroads, real estate, street cars, syndicates, and, most importantly, water.

William Mulholland, one of the modern city’s six founding fathers, is celebrated for bringing water to the city, and he is a major character in Inventing Paradise. “Dozens of other figures in this book,” however, “each excelled in one specific sector” in the story of Los Angeles.

Angelenos publicly celebrated their milestones time and again! The opening of the roadways in Topanga Canyon in 1915 included 1,500 vehicles on a scenic tour (5,000 motorists tried out the canyon that day), a wild turkey dinner, “a parade, a cabaret, and a brigade of speakers.” The following year more annexations made LA unquestionably the largest city in America! The opening of Mulholland Drive in 1924 reportedly was a gala that drew 100,000 people!

Volumes have been published on many of these founders of modern LA and more could be. Inventing Paradise is about these individuals, however; it is not a social history of the people of LA.

“General” Moses Sherman, for example, “threw himself into high risk, high profit ventures,” while Henry Huntington “had the soul of a poet.” Phineas Banning, first founder of the city to be in 1851, was literally and in his self-serving literature, larger than life. Haddad includes the personal price that these men paid for their careers.

Mulholland’s many accomplishments will always be overshadowed by the St. Francis Dam break and other controversies, however. Haddad writes of how that failure represented the decline and the beginning of the end of these founding fathers, in influence and physically as age and time took a toll.

Inventing Paradise is also very much a story of the dark side of Los Angeles’ colorful past. That history includes chicanery, falsehoods, outright fraud, and racism. Harry Chandler’s “ruthless” unethical tactics in making the Los Angeles Times a great newspaper, for example, became legend.

The negatives began with the treatment of the indigenous people who first inhabited the one-square mile of Los Angeles when the city of Angels was founded in 1781 and came to include the infamous treatment of people of African and Asian descent, and even eugenics.

Today we appreciate the wrong headedness of the founders in boasting that “Los Angeles was engineered by human hands” and therefore superior to the “naturally blessed San Francisco.” Failure and success in building LA is well-represented in decisions made in its transportation sector.

 “This book intends to bring order out of chaos” in explaining the history of LA through the golden age of its rise and its often unscrupulous founders. The reader will need to look elsewhere for the characters before 1859 and after 1932.

This book is well organized, unlike the city of Los Angeles itself! Inventing Paradise is annotated, has a bibliography, illustrations, and a list of annexations and consolidations.