Los Angeles Basin

Why you should experience Los Angeles Basin in Los Angeles, California.

Los Angeles Basin is a vast enclave where Southern California's metropolitan character meets a coastal plain enclosed by mountain ranges, historic river corridors and an urban expanse assembled from once-separate agricultural towns, industrial districts and residential communities.

Positioned between the San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley, and South Bay, the area occupies the broad lowlands extending through Wilshire Boulevard, Interstate 10 and the Harbor Freeway from the Pacific-facing Westside across Central Los Angeles toward the Lower Los Angeles River. Coastal flats rise gradually toward interior terraces and foothills, allowing dense urban districts, detached-house neighborhoods and commercial corridors to extend across terrain whose elevation changes remain subtle until the surrounding ranges assert themselves. Movement across the basin follows immense east-west arteries crossed by north-south routes reaching from the mountains toward the coast, creating a metropolitan structure in which successive centers emerge across distances far greater than the traditional core of an American city. The Santa Monica Mountains form a powerful northern boundary, with the Baldwin Hills and other interior elevations interrupting the plain before the ground descends toward coastal communities farther south. The result is a greater area whose enormous horizontal scale, mountain enclosure, distributed urban centers and persistent relationship with the Pacific have produced the physical setting for much of metropolitan Los Angeles.

What you should know about Los Angeles Basin.

Los Angeles Basin is best known for undergoing one of the most consequential metropolitan expansions of the twentieth century after nineteenth-century agriculture, speculative settlement and resource extraction established the economic foundations for explosive urban growth. Mexican independence preceded the creation of seventy-two large ranchos across present-day Los Angeles and Orange counties, placing enormous tracts under cattle grazing before later subdivision fragmented those holdings. Agriculture subsequently intensified across the basin as vineyards, citrus groves, walnut orchards and vegetable fields connected fertile ground with expanding regional markets. A radically different source of wealth emerged in 1892 when Edward Doheny and Charles A. Canfield struck oil near present-day Westlake, initiating the petroleum boom that placed derricks amid developing urban neighborhoods. Industrial expansion followed the availability of petroleum, natural gas and electrical power, with the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, founded in 1888, promoting manufacturing alongside the agricultural economy. Population surged from 5,728 residents in Los Angeles in 1870 to 102,479 by 1900, increasing pressure on a local water supply already strained by rapid settlement. William Mulholland and Fred Eaton pursued an Eastern Sierra supply, voters authorized $23 million for construction in 1907 and 5,000 workers spent five years building the 233-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct. Eastern Sierra water reached the metropolitan region on November 5, 1913, supplying the expanding population with a resource whose scale profoundly widened the possibilities for twentieth-century urbanization.

Automobile ownership reshaped the basin during the following decades by filling enormous stretches of ground that earlier development had left between dispersed communities. Interurban transportation had already encouraged settlement across the flatlands, but those communities remained concentrated around individual stops with undeveloped acreage separating them. Private automobiles dissolved much of that spatial limitation during the 1920s, permitting residential construction to advance through the intervening land and creating demand for an entirely new commercial landscape. Service stations appeared early in the century, followed by automobile-oriented stores, restaurants, garages and other roadside businesses whose architecture increasingly addressed motorists. Designers during the 1920s initially adapted domestic and revival forms to these new functions, frequently placing parking behind buildings to preserve older streetscape patterns. By the early 1930s, visible parking areas and structures conceived around automobile access had become increasingly accepted components of commercial construction. Postwar development intensified the same geographic logic as detached-house subdivisions expanded across remaining open ground and commercial activity followed major arterial roads. Los Angeles consequently evolved as a constellation of neighborhood centers and regional business districts distributed across the basin, with the automobile filling spaces that earlier transportation had left between settlements. That pattern transformed the lowlands into a nearly continuous urban field without eliminating the multiple centers inherited from the towns, subdivisions and commercial corridors that preceded metropolitan consolidation.

How to fold Los Angeles Basin into your trip.

Los Angeles Basin works as the anchor for a daytime outing connecting Simon Rodia's thirty-three-year construction project in Watts, the great passenger terminal created by three competing railroads and J. Paul Getty's re-creation of an ancient Roman villa above the Pacific.

Begin at Watts Towers, where Italian immigrant Simon Rodia spent thirty-three years constructing an extraordinary assemblage of seventeen interconnected sculptural structures on the residential property surrounding his house. Rodia built the work from steel pipes and rods wrapped in wire mesh and cement, covering its surfaces with seashells, glass, ceramics and fragments gathered across Los Angeles. Three principal towers rise above the complex, accompanied by walls, a gazebo, an entrance structure and a ship form that expanded his work far beyond a collection of isolated spires. Rodia completed the ensemble in 1954, transferred the property to a friend and departed Los Angeles. His house burned the following year, yet the towers survived both the fire and a later effort to demolish them. A 1959 engineering test demonstrated their structural strength, ending the immediate destruction threat, and the complex received federal recognition in 1990 for its national significance as folk art combining sculpture and architecture. Continue to Los Angeles Union Station, commissioned in 1933 as a joint venture among Southern Pacific, Union Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroads to consolidate three passenger terminals. John and Donald Parkinson designed the building through a combination of Spanish Colonial, Mission Revival and Art Deco forms that became associated with the terminal's distinctive Mission Moderne architecture. Construction cost a reported $11 million, and the completed station opened in 1939 with a three-day celebration attended by half a million people. Its vast waiting room, courtyards and passenger concourse gave Los Angeles a unified rail gateway at the closing edge of the great American terminal-building era. The building remains the largest railroad passenger terminal in the western United States, preserving the scale of long-distance passenger travel at a site still functioning as a major transportation interchange. Conclude at Getty Villa Museum, whose origins reach to J. Paul Getty's purchase of a 64-acre Pacific Palisades property after World War II and his decision to open galleries within the ranch house to the public in 1954. Getty's growing antiquities collection eventually exceeded that building, leading him in 1968 to pursue a separate museum modeled principally on the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, the Roman residence buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE. Construction began in 1970, and the new museum opened on January 16, 1974 with architecture drawing additional details from ancient houses at Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae where incomplete knowledge of the Villa dei Papiri required supplementation. The $18 million building expanded the museum from 6,000 square feet of gallery area in the ranch house to 48,000 square feet and twenty-seven galleries. Getty died in 1976 without seeing the completed Villa, leaving nearly $700 million to the trust that carried his institution into a radically larger era. The progression moves from Rodia's solitary decades of construction through the Parkinsons' metropolitan rail terminal and culminates at Getty's archaeological re-creation above the Pacific, spanning three radically different ambitions that became inseparable from the cultural geography of the Los Angeles Basin.

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