Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created, Bought, and Sold the Dream of Los Angeles traces the improbable rise of Los Angeles through the prism of six visionaries who had outsize influence on the city’s growth: Phineas Banning, Harrison Gray Otis, Henry Huntington, Harry Chandler, William Mulholland, and Moses Sherman.
In the late 1860s, Los Angeles was a violent, dusty, 28-square-mile pueblo with a few thousand souls, largely unchanged since its founding in 1781. By 1930, its size had swelled to within 96% of its current 468 square miles, housing a staggering 1.2 million people. In just 50 years, L.A. had joined the ranks of other world-class cities.
With research that debunks many myths about the City of Angels and a wildly entertaining narrative, author Paul Haddad (Freewaytopia and 10,000 Steps a Day in L.A.) sheds new light on the fascinating birth of modern Los Angeles. Power came from a select few, whose triumphs, scandals and correspondence are well documented in Inventing Paradise, including:
• The founding of the San Pedro and Wilmington ports by Phineas Banning during the Civil War era, giving Los Angeles an international seaport
• The Otis-Chandler-Sherman cabal that led to the annexation of the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood, and dozens of other communities
• How Harry Chandler pushed eugenics to create “white spots”
• Henry Huntington's and Moses Sherman's trolley systems and the extortion-type practices that led to their expansion
• How L.A.’s power elite peddled the lie that the Owens Valley River used to flow into Los Angeles and rightfully belonged to the city
• William Mulholland’s game-changing construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which raised the city’s population ceiling from 250,000 to 2.5 million.
Haddad also covers the heavy costs that came with creating paradise in such a short period of time, including car dependency, environmental problems, and deep-seated inequities between wealthy white Angelenos and people of color due to racist policies. All have left an imprint on present-day Los Angeles.
Los Angeles is known as the City That Should Not Exist—and yet it does. Through Inventing Paradise, Haddad shows readers that Los Angeles is not a paradise found, but a paradise that was willed into existence, owing to the collective vision of these six Gilded Era-born tycoons.