Cities: Magnet in the West

CITIES

(See Cover)

Senator Kennedy: You might not have the responsibility in each one of these fields, but you certainly are mayor of the city and therefore we need some leadership.

Mayor Yorty: I do not need a lecture from you on how to run my city.

Kennedy: One of the problems is not just a question of people going around promising Negroes or the poor all kinds of things, but the fact that these people expect to have as much of a chance as you and I have had.

Yorty: Well, certainly they will not have the chance you have had, but I hope they have the one that I have had.

Senator Ribicoff: I would say that the city of Los Angeles right now, from your testimony, does not stand for a damn thing.

Yorty: Well, it stands for a lot. We are a great city.

Up to this point, the atmosphere had been light and friendly all week in stately, colonnaded Room 318 of the Old Senate Office Building, once the scene of the McCarthy censure hearings. One by one, the mayors of eight of the largest U.S. cities took their place behind a makeshift wooden table to describe their problems to the Senate Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, holding its second week of hearings on the plight of U.S. cities. The subcommittee heaped lavish praise on Detroit’s Jerome Cavanagh. It had kind words for Oakland’s John H. Reading, praised New Haven’s Richard C. Lee and Atlanta’s Ivan Allen Jr. Chairman Ab raham Ribicoff of Connecticut and New York’s Robert Kennedy, both Democrats, went so far as to pose with New York Republican John Lindsay after some good-natured repartee during Lindsay’s testimony. Grinned Bobby: “It must be National Brotherhood Week.”

Brotherhood Week was quickly suspended when Samuel William Yorty, 56, the tough and peppery mayor of Los Angeles, appeared on the scene. His city had attracted national attention with the Watts riots, and a second McCone report last month drew attention once more to the needs of the Negro there. Yorty, who disdains reading from prepared texts, appeared with an assortment of somewhat disorganized exhibits that seemed to affect the committee much as a red flag affects a bull. And, not least, Bobby Kennedy and Abe Ribicoff, who as Governor of Connecticut had been among the first to support Jack Kennedy’s presidential bid, saw before them a maverick Democrat who supported Richard Nixon in 1960 and wrote a pamphlet called “I Cannot Take Kennedy.”

“Extremely Unfair.” Yorty had come prepared to explain to the committee the peculiar, almost unique government of the city of Los Angeles: a bewildering entanglement of jurisdictions that intertwine with county and state and deprive the mayor of authority over most of the city’s major functions. The subcommittee, which obviously had not done its homework in certain vital aspects of Los Angeles government, was not interested. As soon as Yorty had finished his opening statement, its members turned to the problem of Los Angeles’ disadvantaged minorities and what Yorty was doing about them. Kennedy and Ribicoff zeroed in with question after question, frequently demanding statistics that Yorty was unable to supply. Unlike any previous witness, Yorty was at times barred from referring queries for specific details to a subordinate. Complained he to Kennedy: “You are being extremely unfair. I think you should confine your questions to things that are possible for me to answer without bringing a computer.”

After Yorty had explained several times that he had no authority to specific areas, Ribicoff declared: “This morning you have really waived authority and responsibility in the following areas of Los Angeles: schools, welfare, transportation, employment, health and housing, which leaves you as the head of the city basically with a ceremonial function, police and recreation.”

Mayor Yorty: That is right, and fire.

Senator Ribicoff: Collecting of sewage?

Yorty: Sanitation, that is right.

Ribicoff: In other words, basically you lack jurisdiction, authority, responsibility for what makes a city move?

Yorty: That is exactly it.

In the investigation’s harshest denunciation so far, Ribicoff then criticized Yorty for failing to provide leadership in the ghetto: “You are giving short shrift, and you are shortchanging a few generations by doing absolutely nothing for the disadvantaged groups.” The rest of the questioning was equally acrimonious, but Yorty remained calm, his face reddening only occasionally. As he saw it, he told the subcommittee, the trouble was that “in the East they tend to look at the whole nation, look at the cities and think they are all the same. They are all different, and they have to be handled differently, and ours certainly has to be handled in a different way.” As the end neared, Bobby Kennedy took a last crack at Yorty: “The mayor of Los Angeles I would like to have stay here through all of these hearings, and I think he could safely do so, because as I understand from your testimony, you have nothing to get back to.” Answered Yorty: “That is sort of a ridiculous statement.”

Political Minus. The hearing ended, but the dispute was not over. The quick-tongued, wiry (5 ft. 9 in., 155 Ibs.) Yorty has always taken on the most formidable foe he could find, whether it be the “entrenched downtown interests” in Los Angeles or the Kennedys—and no one has ever battled with him and come away unscathed. Back home in Los Angeles, Yorty called a press conference. Smiling as if he had just come from a health resort instead of the steam bath of a Senate hearing, Yorty charged that he had been caught in “a trap” set by Bobby Kennedy as part of his “lavish campaign to build himself up and tear President Johnson down. He’s trying to ride on his brother’s fame and his father’s fortune to the presidency. This headstrong young man has become very arrogant.” Bobby, said Yorty, had “played the prosecutor,” assisted by “a group of smirking, bright-eyed young men passing questions.”

Even if Sam Yorty did not have all the answers he should have had, and even if he exaggerated his lack of power, their confrontation was probably a political plus for him and a minus for Bobby Kennedy’s political fortunes in California, a state that has long had to endure outside barbs. While Yorty’s longtime foe, the Los Angeles Times, criticized the mayor’s “indifferent performance” in fighting poverty, it came down hard on the subcommittee’s “remarkable obtuseness in its failure to comprehend how the city and county of Los Angeles function.”

Another Yorty nemesis, California Governor Pat Brown, swallowed hard and conceded that the subcommittee “went a little strong—to put it mildly.” And President Johnson, himself stung by criticism from the Senate group, did Yorty no harm by chiming in that the Johnson Administration had done more to alleviate urban problems than “any Administration in the history of the country,” including “the last Administration,” in which Bobby was Attorney General.

If the whole uproar accomplished nothing else, it at least demonstrated in a dramatic way that the cities’ problems are growing as rapidly as their populations—and that the mayors often do not have the full authority needed to cope with them. In New York City, for example, Mayor Lindsay must go hat in hand to the state legislature for money, is unable to fuse the income of the independent Port Authority and Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority into the city’s finances. Atlanta’s Mayor Allen, like many other big-city mayors, is hampered by the intransigence of a rural-dominated state legislature. And, though Sam Yorty may have more authority than he cares to exercise, the fact remains that his power is severely limited. “Mayors are being made scapegoats all over the country,” says Yorty. “In lots of ways, the cities we represent have much bigger problems than the states.”

Sam Yorty is in many ways the personification of the city he heads. He is a maverick in a land of mavericks, a scrapper who is part political opportunist and part high-minded booster. Like a majority of adult Angelenos, he comes from “back East”—anywhere east of the Sierras. He is defensive about California’s virtues and suspicious of condescending Easterners. Like Los Angeles itself, which has long put up with the patronizing attitude of northern neighbor San Francisco, he seems to take pleasure in playing the underdog even when he knows that he is top dog. During his career, he has sprawled over the political landscape in much the way that his city has sprawled over the countryside. And, as last week’s hearing showed, neither he nor his city is very well understood by Easterners.

Sealed Destiny. Los Angeles is probably the fastest-growing city in the history of the world. No European laid eyes on it until 1769, when an expedition of Spanish explorers came upon an Indian village called Yang-na and renamed the site Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles—Our Lady Queen of the Angels. Twelve years later, the area was settled by 44 low-caste peons (including ten Negroes) from Mexico. The pueblo came under American occupation in 1846, was incorporated (pop. 1,610) in 1850—the same year that California received statehood.

Citrus fruit, the arrival of the railroad and Southern California’s spreading reputation as a sun-drenched health haven led to a land boom in the 1880s. The landlocked city enhanced its metropolitan status by reaching out 20 miles to annex San Pedro as an outlet to the Pacific. By 1900, the population exceeded 100,000, and when Los Angeles quenched its thirst with an aqueduct to the far-off Owens River Valley in 1913, its destiny was sealed. Los Angeles and its environs claimed well over 2,000,000 inhabitants by 1930. Having emerged after World War II as a center for the aviation and electronics industries, the burgeoning metropolis passed the 4,000 000 mark by 1950, has grown by more than 200,000 a year ever since.

Today the city itself, with a population of 2,800,000, rambles through 469 sq. mi. of desert, mountain and valley. But the city is only the core of a vast, amoeba-like mass that makes up the Los Angeles metropolitan area, a 5,000-sq. mi. tract that includes Los Angeles County (pop. 7,020,000) and such neighboring cities as Long Beach and San Bernardino. Though Los Angeles proper ranks third in population among U.S. cities (after New York and Chicago), Greater Los Angeles is already the second-most-populous metropolis in the U.S., is almost sure to surpass New York by 1975. Last week alone, some 5,000 people moved into the area. By 1990, such growth will make the city the hub of an uninterrupted urbanized stretch of almost 19 million inhabitants occupying the 175-mile-long, coastal area that runs from Santa Barbara in the north to San Diego in the south. Already sociologists are calling this Southern California megalopolis the prototype of the city of the future.

Thrusting Towers. Los Angeles is an amalgam of disparate communities so bewildering that even natives do not know—or care—where one begins and the other leaves off. The city proper is complex enough, an agglomeration of 60-odd communities as different as elm-and-pine-shaded Encino in the San Fernando Valley and Venice, a tawdry oceanside spot ten miles to the south. The county’s 75 other incorporated cities may be either outlying areas or, like opulent Beverly Hills, an enclave within the central city. Most U.S. cities have a single downtown core, but Los Angeles has dozens, such as Alcoa’s new Century City complex in West Los Angeles, or a new behemoth shopping center in the San Fernando Valley.

Having grown outward, Los Angeles is now in the process of growing upward, a shift reflected in the thrusting towers near city hall and the modern, luxury high-rise apartment houses that now line the west end of Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills and Westwood. Still, for all the city’s growth, there remain many areas of country living deep inside the city limits, where hills and valleys, treed lawns and wild animals abound. Patios, swimming pools—preferably in odd shapes—and private tennis courts are numerous enough to be taken for granted.

To move around in this eye-popping urbanized sprawl, Angelenos depend almost completely on the auto. Fifty-five percent of downtown Los Angeles is given over to cars—in space occupied by freeways, offstreet parking and streets—and nearly 500 miles of freeways snake their way through the city’s environs. Los Angeles County now has 3,900,000 autos for a population of 7,000,000, and the number is growing faster than the human population. There is little public transport; less than 8% of Angelenos travel to and from work by public transport v. 54% of New Yorkers. The auto, of course, is ihe main contributor to the city’s infamous smog, which keeps spreading—despite a recent requirement for exhaust devices—simply because the number of vehicles is increasing so fast.

Breathtaking Elegance. Along with its amazing physical growth, Los Angeles has also grown mightily in other ways. As the golden city in a golden state, it has become the symbol of vitality, youth, growth and opportunity —a municipal magnet in the West. Once overly dependent on the movie industry, it is now the hub of a huge industrial complex of top firms in aircraft, electronics and research, all attracted by the year-round sunshine. Long considered a sort of cultural desert, the city now boasts some of the nation’s top universities, a huge number of intellectual enterprises, and a music center and museum that rival any in the U.S. Of course, it also has its seamy side and the problems that come with growth—and one of the difficulties of solving them is that the average Angeleno seems too busy living and building in the sun to worry much about them.

No longer can the visitor scowl at the architecture as California gaudy or Hollywood vulgar or Spanish phony. While Los Angeles, like many big cities, has mile after mile of uninspired, tractlike homes, more and more of its buildings and residences are the work of some of the world’s best architects: Richard J. Neutra, John Lautner, Lloyd Wright, William Pereira, Victor Gruen, Welton Becket. Tasteful homes have sprouted everywhere—along the streets and boulevards, in the glens and canyons, around the foothills, up the sides of the hills along the beaches, out into the Mojave Desert.

The sweep and elegance of residential show places are breathtaking—and so are the prices. In Bel Air and Holmby Hills, homes worth upwards of half a million dollars are commonplace, and so are residents of the likes of Walt Disney, Red Skelton, Burt Lancaster, Industrialist Tex Thornton and Department Store Magnate Edward Carter. Other enclaves of the very rich are Beverly Hills’ Trousdale Estates, where homes cost from $100,000 to $300,000, and Hancock Park, an old area of the central city that has been restored to extraordinary elegance. In Hancock Park, in stately mansions set on handsomely landscaped grounds, live Industrialist Norton Simon, Banker Howard Ahmanson and Norman Chandler, president of the Times Mirror Co.

The vast majority of Los Angeles’ citizens, of course, do not live on any such grand scale, but most of them still have easy access to what Los Angeles offers: natural beauty, climate, the comfort and pleasant living of a city filled with color, palms and tropical breezes. Hurdling space in its voracious lust for land, defying time in its blinding bursts of change, Los Angeles nonetheless maintains an easy, vacation-like atmosphere that is foreign to the East. When Lincoln Steffens, a native Californian, visited the Soviet Union in 1917, he exclaimed: “I have seen the future, and it works.” Retorts Author Clifton Fadiman, a confirmed Angeleno: “We have seen the future, and it plays.”

Mushroomburgers & Sundaes. Los Angeles is the holy temple of the American cult of youth. As evidenced by the tight slacks and long hair on Sunset Strip, the bikinied surfers who abound along the coast and the fashionable boutiques and beauty parlors of Beverly Hills, it is a city that seeks ceaselessly after youth. Sports cars and motorcycles are everywhere—but so, too, are the symptoms of another Los Angeles fixation: death. In the city that made interment a high art, and to which oldsters gravitate to spend their final years, bus-stop benches double as advertisements for funeral homes and cemeteries.

Angelenos for years ate mostly on the run, and mushroomburgers and double nut-fudge sundaes are still standard fare, but Los Angeles has also acquired restaurants that rival the nation’s best, such as Perino’s, Scandia, the Bistro and Duke’s Glenn Cove. New nightspots are proliferating (the most popular: The Daisy and The Other Place); but there is virtually no such thing as nightclub hopping. The clubs are so far apart that, as Actor Peter Falk complains, “You have to pack water,” and Los Angeles is an early-to-bed, early-to-rise town where many executives have to be up in time to tune in with New York’s three-hour head start on the business of the day.

The growth and excitement of Los Angeles are far more than its boulevards, its opulent living and its gaudy entertainments. The city’s job-sprouting economy (average family income: $9,000) also ripples with new muscle—and diversity. The sociology and economy of the whole area have been molded by the aerospace industry, by research into pure science, and by such think factories as RAND Corp. California Institute of Technology’s satellite-tracking Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena has become all but synonymous with the race to the moon and deep space probes. Along “science strip,” a 130-mile coastal stretch encompassing dozens of laboratories, test ranges and research companies, scientists have become leaders of such communities as Redondo Beach and Santa Monica.

The Los Angeles school system, which needs—and builds—14 new class rooms a week, pays the highest teacher salaries (average: $8,800) of any major U.S. school system. State-supported U.C.L.A. has become a topnotch school with less fuss and furor than Berkeley, and the privately endowed University of Southern California has evolved from a mere football school into a respected seat of learning. In fact, Los Angeles now has a higher-education complex that rivals the Boston area. And the Los Angeles Times, under the guiding hand of Otis Chandler, 38, has put away its stuffiness and now provides the best-reported national and international news west of the New York Times.

Old stereotypes about Los Angeles are fast losing whatever basis they may have had. No longer does the city suffer from chronic San Francisco envy, even though it has taken up the San Francisco—originated topless-waitress fad. With more grandeur if less concentrated charm, Los Angeles is refreshingly free of San Francisco’s narcissistic smugness. Los Angeles has no time to be smug. It is too busy: busy building its $19 million privately financed Music Center, a downtown complex consisting of the 3,250-seat Pavilion and two smaller, almost completed theaters; busy putting up galleries like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; busy attending hundreds of plays, symphony concerts and art shows every week. And busy at the task of absorbing and finding a place in the sun for its incessant influx of newcomers.

Post Office Meeting. Sam Yorty is one of the millions who came to California to seek opportunity and room to roam. He was born in Lincoln, Neb., in 1909, the son of a poor farmer and an Irish-born mother, arrived in Los Angeles after high school with $80 in his pocket. He enrolled in Southwestern University Law School, working first as a part-time clothing salesman, next as a movie projectionist, but found that his real flair was for speechifying: “I would rather give a speech than eat.” He became interested in politics, appeared on behalf of Democratic office seekers, and as a reward was made a field agent for the city water and power department.

But Sam wanted office for himself. In 1936, he ran for the California state assembly—the first of more than a dozen public offices he has sought and the first of seven he has won. He was swept into office on the strength of Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide win over Republican Alf Landon. A few days after winning re-election in 1938, Sam met blonde, attractive Betty Hensel in a post office, married her within two weeks. (They have one son, William, 20, a U.C.L.A. student and lead guitarist in a shaggy-haired group called the Ryot.) The following year, after twelve years of off-and-on study, he finally became a lawyer.

In the assembly, Sam adopted the sometimes liberal, sometimes conservative, always independent course he has followed since. He authored legislation curbing sweatshops, created and headed an un-American activities committee that waged campaigns against both Communists and Nazis. After rising to captain in the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, he bounced back to the state assembly in 1949, got himself elected a year later to the first of two terms in Congress, where he fought doggedly for California’s claim on tide-lands oil. Looking, as always, for bigger things, he took on Republican Senator Tom Kuchel in 1954, lost in a bitter contest. He practiced law for the next seven years, then decided in 1961 to challenge the incumbent mayor, genial but colorless Norris Poulson. Sam shaved off the mustache he had worn since he was 17 (“I always wanted to look older”) and literally rode into office on trash. A major campaign issue that won the hearts of housewives was his opposition to a since-repealed city ordinance requiring that tin cans be separated from other rubbish.

Though Los Angeles politics are nominally nonpartisan, Sam was, in fact, the first Democrat elected mayor in more than 50 years. That should have made California Democrats happy, but it emphatically did not. Sam had already shown his maverick streak by supporting Republican Richard Nixon against Jack Kennedy in 1960 after his first choice, Lyndon Johnson, had lost to J.F.K. for the Democratic nomination. When Nixon ran for the California governorship against Pat Brown in 1962,

Sam pointedly withheld an endorsement of Brown, has been haunting his fellow Democrat ever since. After easily winning re-election against Jimmy Roosevelt last year, Yorty confronted Brown more directly, challenged him in this summer’s gubernatorial primary. Attacking the two-term Governor as “the captive of left-wingers,” Yorty polled nearly 1,000,000 votes (v. 1,300,000 for Brown), a strong enough showing to make Republican Candidate Ronald Reagan’s chances against Brown in November look mighty favorable.

Yorty’s appeal to the voters is based partly on his skill as a hard-punching public speaker. More important, he goes after the big guns, wears no man’s collar and follows a pragmatic, undoctrinaire course that arouses Californians’ sense of individualism. Sam Yorty is no organization man.

Bewildering Structure. Notwithstanding Bobby Kennedy’s suggestion that Yorty has nothing to do in his $35,000-a-year job, he manages to stay on the move. He rises in his hilltop home in the San Fernando Valley at 6:30, swims four quick lengths of his pool, hurries to early appointments at city hall by fire department helicopter. Staff meetings, paperwork and ceremonial functions keep him so busy that he frequently gulps clown a hot pastrami sandwich at his desk for lunch, often does not arrive home until 10:30.

Yorty must work with and within one of the nation’s most bewildering governmental structures. The job of running the city itself, defined by an archaic, 41-year-old charter, is split between the mayor and its 15-member city council in such a way that neither can exercise effective powers. Further diluting the mayor’s authority is the county board of supervisors, five elected officials who have the last word on many countywide affairs. As the Senate’s cities experts discovered last week, city government is confined largely to such functions as police and fire protection, while the county provides such vital services as public health and welfare. More than 300 special districts deal with water, air pollution and transportation, and all 70 school districts in Los Angeles County are run by completely independent boards.

Such diffused authority often makes it difficult to deal with Los Angeles’ problems—and, for all its attractions, Los Angeles has been plagued by most of the same troubles that beset other U.S. cities. Of all, none has attracted more attention than Watts, the symbol of hope and frustration for the metropolitan area’s 650,000 Negroes. Watts (pop. 30,000) occupies a small part of a vast South Los Angeles Negro ghetto the size of Boston. Though its stucco homes and pastel-colored housing projects have a neat and ordered look that does not accord with the Eastern idea of slums, the Watts Negro feels even deeper frustration than Negroes elsewhere. Unemployment rates are high, fatherless homes are common, lawyers and doctors scarce. Served by a skeleton public transportation system and often unable to afford a car, the Watts Negro is among the most isolated in the U.S.

The latest McCone report shows that considerable progress has been made in Watts since the riots but that a great deal more will have to be done if future riots are to be prevented. Watts has no hospital, only one public swimming pool and no movie theater. In the midst of one of the nation’s best school systems, its schools are congested and inferior. The job of getting to the roots of poverty has fallen largely on state and federal agencies and private industry, which together have created perhaps 12,000 jobs for South Los Angeles Negroes since the Watts riots. For what remains wrong with Watts, Sam Yorty gets much of the blame.

The criticism of Yorty stems as much from his attitude as from what he has or has not done for the city’s minorities —which also include a 780,000-member Mexican-American community, the third largest concentration of Mexicans in the world after Mexico City and Guadalajara. Many voters have got the impression that Yorty has “stood up to the Negroes.” He has scored Pat Brown and Washington for stirring up the hopes of Los Angeles Negroes, repeatedly blamed outside agitators for Watts’s troubles. Doing little to cure slum conditions, he has concentrated on preventing new ghettos from developing—advocating, for example, a policy of “integration without inundation,” wherein Negro occupancy would be limited in order to keep whites from moving out.

No Mafia. Like other U.S. cities, Los Angeles has its crime problem. Under gruff longtime Chief Bill Parker, still un-replaced since his death in July, the city’s 5,181-man force won a justifiable reputation as a highly efficient, untouchable operation that kept Los Angeles tree of Mafia-style crime. Still, Los Angeles’ proximity to Mexico helps give it the biggest narcotics problem after New York, and its plethora of autos produces the highest incidence of auto theft and auto stripping of any U.S. city. It is a tribute to the efficiency of the police, whose numbers have remained steady for ten years while the population has nearly doubled, that they have been able to keep up with the rising crime rate. It is, in fact, this very efficiency, brusque as it often is, that seems to bother minorities, particularly Negroes. They tend to see the cop as the symbol of white power and to blame him for most of their ills.

There are, of course, other problems. Los Angeles is struggling to lay enough sewage lines, provide enough water, build enough hospitals to accommodate its mushrooming population. The city can barely build new freeways fast enough to keep up with the growing auto population, and traffic is already so bad that a single accident can pile up as many as 50 cars in one grand smashup. The task of problem solving is falling increasingly on the state government in Sacramento or on Washington. After city and county authorities balked at using local tax funds, for example, the state put up $3,900,000 for seed money for a new rapid-transit system still in the planning stages.

Beyond Authority. Sam Yorty can rightfully say that he lacks the power to do many of the things that need doing. He himself once said: “Any man who reads beyond the second paragraph of the city charter would be out of his mind to run for mayor.” But Yorty ran and won, and he has shown by his actions as mayor that, when he wants to, he can exert a good deal more power and responsibility than he admits to having. Despite his faults and his constant feuds—Angelenos tend to be either 100% for him or 100% against him—Yorty has, in fact, stamped himself as a better-than-average mayor in a city that has a tradition of do-nothing mayors.

Yorty has run a scandal-free administration. His appointments, including 16 minority members (20% of all city employees are now Negro) to high-level posts, have been unassailable. He has attracted new industry to Los Angeles, engaged aerospace companies to help modernize police and sanitation operations, two weeks ago pushed through the city council his plan for a city-sponsored downtown convention center that could make Los Angeles a convention headquarters rivaling Chicago and New York. When the cause has moved him, he has also gone beyond his expressly constituted authority with noteworthy results. At Yorty’s prodding, the city’s completely independent Airports Department set up a project aimed at providing a system of flying buses—bus pods toted by helicopter sky cranes—between Los Angeles International Airport and downtown. When an impasse developed between the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the U.S. Interior Department, Yorty personally intervened to negotiate a go-ahead on a nuclear-powered $430 million desalinization plant in nearby Orange County.

Yorty is righting for a revision of the city charter that would give him more leeway in running the city, even though it would leave the county and state with most of their present powers. It obviously takes more than one man to run a city as vast, diverse and complicated as Los Angeles. The qualities that give Los Angeles its vitality, in fact, also make it a hard city to tame. Most Americans, as Berkeley’s Sociologist Nathan Glazer points out, would like, if given their choice, to create their own version of Los Angeles. They would like to duplicate the providential medley of sea, sun and sky, the combination of cultural and recreational advantages, the chance to seize opportunity in a mobile and open society.

Despite the Ribicoff subcommittee’s reservations, Los Angeles stands for a great deal—including the fact that promises and problems are invariably intertwined. Los Angeles is more than a city; it is, for good and bad, an embodiment of American drive and vision. The City of the Angels has its Lucifer as well as its Michael—but neither would choose to change places with lesser creatures.