Los Angeles Community

• The Beginnings
  
• Los Angeles Grows
• Water
  
• Powering Growth
• Los Angeles Department of Water & Power
• The Power System
• Southern California Edison
• Power Distribution
• Power Regulation
• Power Deregulation
• What the Future Holds

The Beginnings
Initially founded September 4, 1781, :as part of Spanish-controlled Mexico, Los Angeles was christened El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula. Los Angeles was incorporated as a city in the U.S. State of California on April 4, 1850.

The new governor of California, Felip de Neve, recommended to the Vceroy in Mexico that the place suggested by Father Crespi as an ideal place for a mission be developed into a pueblo. King Carlos III of Spain in turn took the recommendation and ordered Governor de Neve to establish the pueblo.

De Neve took the job of establishing the settlement very seriously. He drew up plans for the pueblo, including a plaza, fields, pastures, and royal lands. Possibly the first time a city has been planned before the first settler arrived, this is somewhat ironic in view of the unfettered growth of Los Angeles.

Persuading settlers to come here from Mexico was another matter. In spite of inducements such as money and land, it took months before he was able to get enough settlers, and he had to go to Sonora to get them.

Finally, a group of 11 men, 11 women, and 22 children were gathered together at the Mission San Gabriel. On September 4, 1781, they left San Gabriel, accompanied by de Neve, soldiers, mission priests, and a few Indians to settle the site along the river.

The new pueblo grew slowly, and amenities were few. The houses were very small, usually of adobe with flat roofs -- glassless windows, and rawhide doors. The narrow streets were almost impassable when it rained. There were, of course, no sidewalks or lawns, and the trees along the river rapidly disappeared.

By 1790 Los Angeles had 28 households and a population of 139. By 1800 the population was 70 households and a population of 315. There were also a town hall, guardhouse, army barracks, and granaries.

This Spanish town neither knew nor cared that the United States had been born and was already moving relentlessly across the continent. The first Yankee settler did not arrive until about 1820.

Los Angeles Grows
The arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876 and the discovery of oil in the early 1890s had stimulated expansion in the last decades of the nineteenth century. But Los Angeles was still smaller and a city less prominent than San Francisco.

Angelinos set out to remake their geography in order to challenge San Francisco with its port facilities, railway terminal, banks and factories. Harrison Gray Otis, founder and owner of the Los Angeles Times, and a number of business colleagues embarked on reshaping southern California by creating a harbor at San Pedro with federal dollars.

This put them at loggerheads with Collis P. Huntington, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and one of California's "Big Four" robber barons, who was pushing for a port at Santa Monica. The San Pedro forces prevailed and work on the San Pedro breakwater began in 1899 and was finished in 1910. Otis Chandler and his allies secured a change in state law in 1909 that allowed Los Angeles to absorb San Pedro and Wilmington.

Today, the Los Angeles metropolitan area (euphemistically termed the "Southland") consists of Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and Orange counties, and is home to over sixteen million people of diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. The Greater Los Angeles area is sometimes inaccurately referred to as Southern California, but geographically that term more properly includes both Greater Los Angeles and Imperial, Kern, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

Water
Early on, Los Angeles recognized it needed to find new sources of water In order to sustain growth,.Two hundred fifty miles (400 km) northeast of Los Angeles in Inyo County, near the Nevada line, a long slender desert region known as the Owens Valley had the Owens River, a permanent stream of fresh water fed by the melted snows of the high Sierras that terminated in a saline lake.

Sometime between 1899 and 1903, Harrison Gray Otis and his son-in-law successor, Harry Chandler, led successful efforts of buying up cheap land on the outskirts of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. They then acquired control of the Owens River and built an aqueduct, largely designed by William Mulholland to bring the water from the Owens Valley over the intervening mountains and desert to the San Fernando Valley. J.B. Lippencott of the United States Reclamation Service (who was also secretly receiving a salary from the City of Los Angeles) succeeded in persuading Owens Valley farmers and mutual water companies to pool their interests and surrender the water rights to 200,000 acres (800 km©&Mac247;) of land there to Fred Eden, Lippencott's agent and a former mayor of Los Angeles. Eden then resigned from the Reclamation Service, took a job with the Los Angeles Water Department as assistant to William Mulholland, Chief of the Department, turning over to the city all maps, field surveys and stream measurements developed by the Reclamation Service.

By July 1905, the L.A. Times began to warn the voters of Los Angeles that the county would soon dry up unless they voted bonds for building an aqueduct and getting water from the Owens River. Artificial drought conditions were created when water was run into the sewers to decrease the supply in the reservoirs. Residents were forbidden to water their lawns and gardens. On Election Day, the people of Los Angeles voted for $22.5 million worth of bonds to build an aqueduct from the Owens River and to defray other expenses of the project. With this money, the City acquired the land that Eden had acquired from the Owens Valley farmers. Mulholland then started building the longest aqueduct in the world.

Powering Growth
The story of energy to power Los Angeles has long been a story of shortages. Just as with water, in Southern California there often has not been enough of it. The story of power in LA is also a story of struggle: between wealthy investors and the city and county over control and profits, and later between state agencies, the legislature and irritated consumers.

Today, Southern California has two companies that keep the lights on: the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) serves business and residences within the city limits of Los Angeles as well as portions of the Owens Valley. Southern California Edison (SCE) serves everybody else.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
While power crises have had the rest of California fretting about price gouging and rolling blackouts, the city of Los Angeles rests assured that the City of Angels will remain plugged in, thanks to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

But the DWP has a long and spotty past. In 1902, under the leadership of William Mulholland, the Department of Water and Power established the first municipal water works system in LA.

In 1905, LA's first power plant was built at Division Creek in the Owens Valley. The plant generated used water to generate power to be used in the construction of an aqueduct. This was the first time electric energy had been used in such a construction project.

In 1909, The Bureau of Los Angeles Aqueduct Power was established, with Ezra F. Scattergood as chief electrical engineer. Scattergood began preliminary engineering work for the string of new hydro generating stations along the aqueduct.

Water from the eastern Sierra was first delivered to the Los Angeles in 1913 via a 233-mile long aqueduct. It was thought to be a miracle of engineering because the water flowed by gravity from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles.

The aqueduct did more than just supply water to the city - it also brought power to Los Angeles, thanks to Scattergood's successful development of hydroelectric power along the route of the aqueduct. Scattergood became Mulholland's counterpart for the Power System, and was the driving spirit in the development of the municipal electric system.

The first power pole in Los Angeles was placed in 1916. After San Francisquito Power Plant 1, north of Los Angeles, was placed in service in 1917, energy was delivered over a new transmission line. This was the beginning of distribution of municipally-generated electricity in Los Angeles.

At the end of the first decade of the new century, the groundwork had been set and the plans were in motion to provide ample supplies of both water and electricity to the residents of Los Angeles, where population had tripled from 102,479 in 1900 to 319,198 in 1910.

The Power System
By 1940, the once sleepy pueblo had grown to a metropolis of 1.5 million people that provided 41 percent of the state's employment. World War II turned the city into one of the nation's top war production centers, ushering in three decades of explosive population growth and unprecedented economic diversification.

By the early 1970s, oil and natural gas were supplying about 80 percent of the energy for generating DWP electricity. But factors such as the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 and air quality standards in the city caused the DWP to rethink these methods.

As a result, the DWP launched a program of energy resource diversification that has substantially reduced the percentage of DWP electricity generated from petroleum while boosting the share produced from other fuels.

Coal is now the largest single source of power supply for Los Angeles. Natural gas supplies about 20 percent of the city's energy; hydroelectricity accounts for 12 percent; nuclear, 9 percent, and the remainder comes from purchased power, wind, biomass, solar and cogeneration.

Currently, the DWP is the largest municipally-owned utility in the nation, serving 3.8 million individuals and businesses in 464-square-miles, and supplying more than 22 million megawatt (mw) hours of electricity a year to residences. (One megawatt equals one million watts. The average resident uses about 5,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. A kilowatt hour is equivalent to a 100-watt light bulb operating for 10 hours.)

Business and industry consume about 70 percent of the electricity in Los Angeles, but residences constitute the largest number of customers. In addition to serving these consumers, the DWP lights public streets and highways, powers the city's water system and sells electricity to other utilities.

Southern California Edison

The other major supplier of power in the Los Angeles area is Southern California Edison. Clients of Southern California Edison are not quite as lucky as DWP customers and have been victims of blackouts and high prices.

Unlike the DWP, SCE is an investor-owned electric utility company. In fact, it is the second largest in the nation.

With 4.2 million business and residential customers spanning a 50,000 square mile service area in coastal, central, and southern California, SCE's transmission facilities include almost 12,000 circuit miles of lines and 800 substations. Its distribution system, taking power from substations to the customer, includes 88,000 circuit miles of line connecting 1.5 million poles, 642,000 transformers, and 490,000 street lights.

SCE's beginnings date to the turn of the 20th Century. Originally there were several power companies serving Southern California, but four of these were the true ancestors of SCE: a company that provided electric lighting for Visalia, the Santa Barbara Electric Company, a third company that provided electricity for Riverside, Highgrove and Colton, and the West Side Lighting Company, first organized by a group of investors headed by Elmer E. Peck in 1896. Peck's original goal was to try to secure an electric plant operating franchise from the city of Los Angeles, but he had no luck. In the end he went to the LA County Supervisors, who granted him a franchise to operate a plant outside the city limits.

Power Distribution
By the mid-1890s, most LA streets were mazes of overhanging telegraph, telephone, fire alarm, trolley, and electric wires. In 1896 the city passed an ordinance prohibiting most overhead line construction. The West Side Lighting Company realized that to extend their lines and business, the best system was the Edison three-wire conduit technology, invented and patented by Thomas Edison. There was a problem with them acquiring a license: in 1894 a group of San Francisco financiers obtained a license from Thomas Edison's General Electric Company and organized a company called the Los Angeles Edison Electric Company. This was pure speculation on their part: the company never owned or operated a power plant. But they did have exclusive rights to Edison's patented conduit technology. After some wheeling and dealing, West Side Lighting and Los Angeles Edison reached an agreement, and a new company was formed: the Edison Electric Company of Los Angeles. This new company promptly began expanding its service area, building power plants and power lines into areas that had previously had none. It also set about buying up existing local companies like Pasadena Electric Light and Power Company and the Santa Ana Gas and Electric Company. In 1909 the company was renamed the Southern California Edison Company to better reflect the scope of its service area. Over the next decades, SCE built dams and power plants throughout Southern California to meet the demands of a rapidly growing population.

Power Regulation
A word that has been getting tossed around a lot in the past few months is deregulation. But before there was deregulation, there was regulation. And for regulation's beginnings we must turn the clock back to the early 1900s. As the various small utility systems combined and consolidated, the public became increasingly concerned about the prices these new, larger companies could charge. So in 1912, following the passage of the Public Utilities Act of 1911, the state assigned the elected Railroad Commission regulatory authority over a range of private companies including the burgeoning power industry so critical to the community welfare that the U.S. Supreme Court in 1877 had found them to be "clothed with a public interest."

Things were fairly stable for several decades (the Railroad Commission changed its name to the Public Utilities Commission in 1946) until the energy crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s. The PUC suffered from two major shortcomings: by giving companies a guaranteed rate of return on expenses, the utilities were encouraged to build more plants, hire more people and focus on the short-term horizon between rate cases -- which contributed to reliability but put constant upward pressure on prices, and while the PUC controlled the investor-owned energy utilities, it had little sway over the broader policies that determined how energy was produced and consumed. So in 1974 the California Energy Commission was formed to deal with energy use, planning, and conservation. The Energy Commission committed the state to more environmentally friendly (and expensive) power, increasing energy costs. By the 1990s, electricity rates were 50 percent higher than they were on average across the rest of the nation.

Power Deregulation

In 1995, the PUC voted to open California's electricity industry to competition. In this new vision, consumers would be able to choose their own energy provider, and the increased competition between these providers would mean lower prices for energy. In 1995 the State Legislature made it law. So far so good, but there was a fatal flaw in the plan: the law required the utilities to shed their generating and transmission facilities, to freeze rates until they completed the sale of their assets, and buy power in a huge open auction market for electricity, known as the Power Exchange where supply and demand were matched every day and hour. In this commodities market. Wholesale energy prices soared, but the utilities were unable to increase the rates they charged their customers, This lead them deeply into debt and brought a state of crisis. The final irony is that very few people have switched electricity providers since choice became available – less than 1 percent of residential customers, and 15 to 20 percent of industrial consumers.

What the Future Holds
So what lies ahead? The most immediate problem facing SCE is its financial well-being. It has been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for several months, and a true solution has proved elusive. Conservation efforts and increased supplies have prevented wide scale blackouts. Current plans under consideration include the purchase by the state of California of SCE's transmission lines, and erasing a large portion of SCE's debt. Will deregulation survive? In all likelihood, yes, it will. Other states are following in California's footsteps and deregulating their utilities (but they are not instituting the price freezes that drove our utilities into near bankruptcy). And deregulation need not be a bad thing, as some of the more imaginative ideas for future power supplies indicate.

Some fundamental problems remain. How will California balance a growing population of energy-hungry consumers with the environmental concerns that accompany construction of new power plants? In this field, the DWP has shown vision. The Green LA project is a renewable energy program aimed at promoting the use of environment-friendly power sources like sun, wind, and water. Part of this project is a solar energy program that offers incentives to DWP customers who install solar systems in their homes.

Another exciting idea for the future would place power generation in the hands of each consumer. All users would be energy providers and vendors utilizing low emission backyard power systems. All of these systems would contribute power to the larger grids. Power to the people, indeed!*

Labor
At the same time that the L.A. Times was whipping up enthusiasm for the expansion of Los Angeles it was also trying to turn it into a union-free or open shop town. Fruit growers and local merchants who had opposed the Pullman strike in 1894 subsequently formed the Merchants and Manufacturers Association (M & M) to support the L.A. Times anti-union campaign.

The California labor movement, with its strength concentrated in San Francisco, had largely ignored Los Angeles for years. It decided, in 1907, however, when the American Federation of Labor decided to challenge the open shop of "Otis Town." The culmination of this bitter struggle occurred on October 1, 1910 when a bomb destroyed a good part of the L.A. Times publishing plant.

The authorities indicted John and James McNamara, both associated with the Iron Workers Union, for the bombing; Clarence Darrow, who had successfully defended Big Bill Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone in Idaho, represented them.

At the same time the McNamara brothers were awaiting trial, Los Angeles was preparing for a city election. Job Harriman, running on the socialist ticket, was challenging the establishment's candidate.

Harriman's campaign, however, was tied to the asserted innocence of the McNamaras. But the defense was in trouble: the prosecution not only had evidence of the McNamara's complicity, but had trapped Darrow in a clumsy attempt to bribe one of the jurors. On December 1, 1911, four days before the final election, the McNamaras entered a plea of guilty in return for prison terms. The L.A. Times accompanied its report of the guilty plea with a faked photograph of Samuel Gompers trampling an American flag. Harriman lost badly.

The open shop campaign continued from strength to strength, although not without meeting opposition from workers. By 1923, the Industrial Workers of the World had made considerable progress in organizing the longshoremen in San Pedro and led approximately 3,000 men to walk off the job. With the support of the L.A. Times, a special "Wobbly squad" was formed within the Los Angeles Police Department and arrested so many strikers that the city's jails were soon filled.

Some 1200 dock workers were corralled in a special stockade in Griffith Park. The L.A. Times wrote approvingly that "stockades and forced labor were a good remedy for IWW terrorism." Public meetings were outlawed in San Pedro, Sinclair Lewis was arrested at Liberty Hill in San Pedro for reading the United States Bill of Rights on the private property of a strike supporter (the arresting officer told him "we'll have none of 'that Constitution stuff'") and blanket arrests were made at union gatherings. The strike ended after members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion raided the IWW Hall and attacked the men, women and children meeting there. The strike was defeated.
During World War II, Los Angeles grew as a center for production of aircraft, war supplies and munitions. Thousands of African Americans and white Southerners migrated to the area to fill factory jobs.

By 1950 Los Angeles was an industrial and financial giant created by war production and migration. Los Angeles assembled more cars than any city other than Detroit, made more tires than any city but Akron, made more furniture than Grand Rapids, and stitched more clothes than any city except New York. In addition, it was the national capital for the production of motion pictures, radio programs and, within a few years, television shows. Construction boomed as tract houses were built in ever expanding suburban communities financed by the largess of the Federal Housing Administration.

Los Angeles continued to spread out, particularly with the development of the San Fernando Valley and the building of the freeways launched in the 1940s. When the local street car system went out of business Los Angeles became a city built around the automobile, with all of the social, health and political problems that this dependence produces.

THE MOVIE BUSINESS

Los Angeles developed another industry in the early 20th century when movie producers from the East Coast relocated there. These new employers were likewise afraid of unions and other social movements: during Upton Sinclair's campaign for Governor of California under the banner of his "End Poverty In California" (EPIC) movement, Louis B. Mayer turned MGM's Culver City studio into the unofficial headquarters of the organized campaign against EPIC. MGM produced fake newsreel interviews with whiskered actors with Russian accents voicing their enthusiasm for EPIC, along with footage focusing on central casting hobos huddled on the borders of California waiting to enter and live off the bounty of its taxpayers once Sinclair was elected. Sinclair lost.

Hollywood, originally a very conservative city founded by prohibitionists, helped add a special ingredient to the Los Angeles cultural mix. With its reputation for decadent lifestyles as the movie industry developed, the movie business helped create a city with a sometimes reputation for scandalous behavior and outrageous crimes.

The Garment Industry

Los Angeles also acquired another industry in the years just before World War II: the garment industry. At first devoted to regional merchandise, such as sportswear, the industry eventually grew to be the second largest center of garment production in the United States.

Unions began to make progress in organizing these workers as the New Deal arrived in the 1930s. They made even greater gains in the war years, as Los Angeles grew even further.

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