Los Angeles: The Rough Guide to (Rough Guides)

The rough guide to Los Angeles is the most comprehensive handbook to America's mega-city. Features include:
In-depth accounts of all the attractions, from Hollywood and the beaches to the brand-new Getty Museum. Critical reviews of restaurants and accomodation for every price range, plus the best in LA's nightlife. Thorough coverage of the metropolitan area, including Disneyland and the lower-key charms of Old Pasedena. Lively discussion of the city's history, from the birth of the studios, through the Watts riots, right up to the present. Detailed neighborhood and transport maps, including eight pages of color plans.

Introduction A maddening collection of freeways and beaches, fast-food joints and palm trees, seedy suburbs and high-gloss neighborhoods and extreme lifestyles, Los Angeles is California's biggest and most stimulating city - and an unconventional one by any standard. Indeed, LA's character is so shifting and elusive - understandable "only dimly, and in flashes," according to F Scott Fitzgerald - that the city might be freely dismissed by many outsiders if it weren't so central to the world's mass culture. Its multiple personalities and lack of any unifying design make it seem at first neither approachable, nor perhaps even enjoyable; but once the free-spirited chaos of the place takes hold, you'll be hard-pressed to resist.

Made up of scores of distinct municipalities, LA is a model for modern city development, having traded urban centralization for suburban sprawl and high-rise corporate towers for strip malls. It gets more than ample opportunity to show off its wares because of its stature as international entertainment center, which paints a picture of a sunny and glamorous place like no other. It is certainly unique, an unpredictable and addictive assault on the senses where mud-wrestling venues and porn cinemas stand next door to chic boutiques and trendy restaurants, the whole of it under constant threat of the next earthquake, flood, or natural disaster.

Despite this uniqueness, LA has much in common with other major US cities. With the largest combined port in the country (and biggest in the world outside of China), LA is a center for transpacific trade and a dominant financial hub in its own right. Predictably, real estate is a chief concern of the local economy, as is the media industry; defense-related businesses, on the other hand, have met their demise in recent years and will probably never regain the prominence they had during the Cold War. Meanwhile, LA's social gaps are quite broad, and there's no end in sight for the nasty racial divisions broadcast to the world in the 1992 riots and the OJ Simpson trial three years later. Not a simple matter of black versus white, LA's unparalleled diversity sometimes gets in its way: there are more languages spoken here than in any other US city, and residents - especially white suburbanites - tend to cordon themselves off from one another.

This also means of course there are plenty of thriving ethnic enclaves, from Hispanic East LA to Little Tokyo. But most visitors tend to overlook these neighborhoods, except when looking for a specialty cuisine, and concentrate their time in a few notable areas, namely Hollywood, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica - certainly a good start, especially if you've come for the typically Los Angeles thrills of stargazing and shopping. Such an itinerary, however, misses out on a number of the city's less glitzy charms. LA has an underrated mix of modern and historic architecture, from the grand civic scale of City Hall to the rustic Craftsman-style homes peppered around Pasadena. The city's museums have gotten quite an upgrade recently, with the opening of the Getty Center art museum; there's also the top-notch LA County Museum of Art among plenty of uniquely LA art collections scattered about the basin. Beaches, of course, should be a part of any trip to LA, and you'll find plenty of them around, most popularly, perhaps, in Venice, though good options abound in Malibu and along the Orange County Coast, too. Regardless of where you choose to be, you'll never be far from decent food and nightlife - fitting for an entertainment capital.

To access the city's many attractions, you'll likely need a car, unless you've targeted relatively compact neighborhoods. Driving on LA's much-ballyhooed freeways can be a challenge, but as long as you don't try to emulate some of the crazier local motorists, you should have few problems.

Climate

LA holds several types of warm climate zones, including desert, semi-arid, and Mediterranean areas, and differences between constituent cities' temperatures can be great: for example, Pasadena is ten to fifteen degrees hotter on average than Santa Monica, which can resemble a maritime climate at times. In general, toasty air and sunny skies reign: summer and fall months are fairly warm and dry; winter and spring periods are cooler and wetter, but still quite warm. Due to the enclosed geographic design of the LA basin, there are high levels of smog, worst during a few summer months in the eastern parts of the region. Torrential rainstorms do occur during the winter months, and disastrous storms and mudslides affect hillside neighborhoods across the city with uneasy frequency.