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wildweasel105's review against another edition
5.0
Gary Krist brings us a fascinating story of the evolution of not only the city of Los Angeles, but of three remarkable people whose careers helped carve out a niche in the most unlikely areas of the American southwest: D.W. Griffith, Aimee Semple McPherson and William Mulholland.
"The Mirage Factory" is the history of how a rough frontier town sprang forth from a 450 square mile plot of a mostly hostile, desert landscape to a sprawling metropolis of over 2 million people in the scant period between 1904 and 1930.
It is a fantastic testament to the willingness of those early perverse settlers who strove to develop a city in such a short time span. But this "mirage factory" also chronicles the history of the three disparate but incredibly influential persons who made Los Angeles what it is today.
D.W. Griffith, considered perhaps as the "father of modern film making" left New York to settle in Los Angeles when movie making was in its infancy. Despite his celebrated hit, "Birth of a Nation", Griffith went on trying to seek to create art for art's sake, but failed to keep up with the changing morals and societal norms as Hollywood changed from 1908 through the mid 1920's. His ego and repeated box office failures eventually spelled his doom.
Aimee Semple McPherson was considered to be the first female evangelist of the turn of the century. Attracted to the climate and promise of an "Eden-like" environs Los Angeles had to offer, she rose to meteoric fame as an evangelist whose charismatic preaching brought thousands of attendees to her American Pentecostal religion, and built her Angelus Temple in the middle of the foundling city of Los Angeles in 1923. She traveled world wide, and was one of the first evangelists to use radio to reach her listeners. However, despite her fame and success, she was overcome with scandal, when in 1926, she allegedly staged her disappearance in 1926. She claimed she was kidnapped while on a beach and disappeared for 5 weeks. A ransom note was offered for her return, and she miraculously came back from her captors. The police investigation indicated that she may have spent the time "getting away from it all" in Carmel, California with a male engineer at her radio station. The scandal may have dimmed her celebrity, but her church still thrived.
The third and final "foundation" to the evolution of Los Angeles was none other than William Mulholland. Mulholland was an Irish immigrant who made his way across America from the East coast as an itinerant handyman and merchant marine. It was in Los Angeles that Mulholland made his claim to fame by being the one to oversee the laying of the first iron water pipeline in 1880. From there, his goal was to supply Los Angeles with enough water to keep all of its 9000 inhabitants happy. However, he foresaw the eventual growth of the city and the demand for irrigation would far exceed this simple beginning. Nothing short of a miracle would occur when Mulholland engineered a reservoir and an aqueduct system that would eventually transport millions of gallons of water 240 miles north of L.A. from the Owens River. This took place in the early 1900's, but it wasn't without scandals and political strife of its own. There were the skirmishes between the ranchers of the Owens River Valley and the Los Angeles Water Department for the legal "ownership" of the water. Then, there was the penultimate tragedy of the St. Francis dam collapse of March 12, 1928 that devastated a huge portion of the L.A. basin. The following investigation indicted Mulholland for the dam's faulty integrity.
If you are a historical non-fiction enthusiast, this book will satisfy your curiosity on how Los Angeles sprang from an undesirable outpost to the land of citrus orchards, mansions, Hollywood and beyond in the span of 30 years. It also reveals the three unusual people who are credited for placing Los Angeles on the map.
"The Mirage Factory" is the history of how a rough frontier town sprang forth from a 450 square mile plot of a mostly hostile, desert landscape to a sprawling metropolis of over 2 million people in the scant period between 1904 and 1930.
It is a fantastic testament to the willingness of those early perverse settlers who strove to develop a city in such a short time span. But this "mirage factory" also chronicles the history of the three disparate but incredibly influential persons who made Los Angeles what it is today.
D.W. Griffith, considered perhaps as the "father of modern film making" left New York to settle in Los Angeles when movie making was in its infancy. Despite his celebrated hit, "Birth of a Nation", Griffith went on trying to seek to create art for art's sake, but failed to keep up with the changing morals and societal norms as Hollywood changed from 1908 through the mid 1920's. His ego and repeated box office failures eventually spelled his doom.
Aimee Semple McPherson was considered to be the first female evangelist of the turn of the century. Attracted to the climate and promise of an "Eden-like" environs Los Angeles had to offer, she rose to meteoric fame as an evangelist whose charismatic preaching brought thousands of attendees to her American Pentecostal religion, and built her Angelus Temple in the middle of the foundling city of Los Angeles in 1923. She traveled world wide, and was one of the first evangelists to use radio to reach her listeners. However, despite her fame and success, she was overcome with scandal, when in 1926, she allegedly staged her disappearance in 1926. She claimed she was kidnapped while on a beach and disappeared for 5 weeks. A ransom note was offered for her return, and she miraculously came back from her captors. The police investigation indicated that she may have spent the time "getting away from it all" in Carmel, California with a male engineer at her radio station. The scandal may have dimmed her celebrity, but her church still thrived.
The third and final "foundation" to the evolution of Los Angeles was none other than William Mulholland. Mulholland was an Irish immigrant who made his way across America from the East coast as an itinerant handyman and merchant marine. It was in Los Angeles that Mulholland made his claim to fame by being the one to oversee the laying of the first iron water pipeline in 1880. From there, his goal was to supply Los Angeles with enough water to keep all of its 9000 inhabitants happy. However, he foresaw the eventual growth of the city and the demand for irrigation would far exceed this simple beginning. Nothing short of a miracle would occur when Mulholland engineered a reservoir and an aqueduct system that would eventually transport millions of gallons of water 240 miles north of L.A. from the Owens River. This took place in the early 1900's, but it wasn't without scandals and political strife of its own. There were the skirmishes between the ranchers of the Owens River Valley and the Los Angeles Water Department for the legal "ownership" of the water. Then, there was the penultimate tragedy of the St. Francis dam collapse of March 12, 1928 that devastated a huge portion of the L.A. basin. The following investigation indicted Mulholland for the dam's faulty integrity.
If you are a historical non-fiction enthusiast, this book will satisfy your curiosity on how Los Angeles sprang from an undesirable outpost to the land of citrus orchards, mansions, Hollywood and beyond in the span of 30 years. It also reveals the three unusual people who are credited for placing Los Angeles on the map.
duparker's review against another edition
4.0
Fun and relaxed look at the messy and creative ways that Los Angeles has expanded over time. It delves into the water, financial and economic issues that all were part of the evolution of the desert into a dream machine.
hummeline's review against another edition
DNF @ 33%. I took a chance on this book, because I’ve been trying to focus on histories by women and people of color, and I shouldn’t have. I don’t know how in the year 2018, you choose D.W. Griffith as one of three people to focus on in the growth of Los Angeles (particularly when there are better examples that aren’t avowed racists). But to then describe that Griffith seemed to be “blithely unaware” of the racism in his film while shooting is very poor historical analysis. The film is racist, Griffith was racist, and to argue that he was so dense as to not realize the way he was portraying black people? Fuck outta here! It then pivots to how many people came to see the film, AGAIN arguing that they seemed “unaware” of the protests. No! People were racist! Good lord. I’d buy this level of analysis from the Dunning School lol but not in the Modern Era. Ugh.
jakewritesbooks's review against another edition
4.0
My Los Angeles kick continues with a good one.
Being a big fan of Chinatown, I’ve always been curious about the truth behind the actual story to hydrate Los Angeles. Throw in the stories of the founding of the movie industry and the story of Aimee Semple McPherson’s controversial life and I’m in.
Gary Krist delivers. He doesn’t get too bogged down in the technical aspects of the respective fields he’s describing. I felt like I got a healthy picture of each particular person involved: McPherson, city engineer William Mulholland, and famed-but-controversial filmmaker D.W. Griffith.
That these three converged at a time that Los Angeles was being made to be the oasis in the desert, the New York of the west coast, was a stroke of remarkable coincidence. Mulholland’s plans to get water to L.A. preceded Griffith moving his productions west, and both preceded McPherson’s arrival to build the busiest Christian church west of the Mississippi. But looking at the three provides a great understanding of how the city was built and made famous.
If I have one beef, it’s that I would have been cool with this one being even longer, like 200-300 pages longer and incorporating the Chandlers and the Dohennys, the former being the big press barons, the latter the oil family. They’re mentioned throughout (at least the Dohennys were) and I’d love to see how they fit in the larger narrative, even if the timeline would have had to expand a bit.
But that’s a minor quibble. This is a good book, the best kind of readable non-fiction.
Being a big fan of Chinatown, I’ve always been curious about the truth behind the actual story to hydrate Los Angeles. Throw in the stories of the founding of the movie industry and the story of Aimee Semple McPherson’s controversial life and I’m in.
Gary Krist delivers. He doesn’t get too bogged down in the technical aspects of the respective fields he’s describing. I felt like I got a healthy picture of each particular person involved: McPherson, city engineer William Mulholland, and famed-but-controversial filmmaker D.W. Griffith.
That these three converged at a time that Los Angeles was being made to be the oasis in the desert, the New York of the west coast, was a stroke of remarkable coincidence. Mulholland’s plans to get water to L.A. preceded Griffith moving his productions west, and both preceded McPherson’s arrival to build the busiest Christian church west of the Mississippi. But looking at the three provides a great understanding of how the city was built and made famous.
If I have one beef, it’s that I would have been cool with this one being even longer, like 200-300 pages longer and incorporating the Chandlers and the Dohennys, the former being the big press barons, the latter the oil family. They’re mentioned throughout (at least the Dohennys were) and I’d love to see how they fit in the larger narrative, even if the timeline would have had to expand a bit.
But that’s a minor quibble. This is a good book, the best kind of readable non-fiction.
evirae's review against another edition
4.0
“Los Angeles, at first glance, is not quite real,” observed the always-scornful New York Times in 1927. “The traveler from the East, after rolling over many leagues of picturesque but not especially fertile desert, has to pinch himself to be sure that this sudden congestion of buildings and humanity, multiplying and transforming themselves almost under his eyes, is not a mirage. What business have thirteen hundred thousand people…out here on the edge of things?”
A masterfully-written history of the Great City's development through industries and movements lead by Griffith, McPhearson, and Mulholland.
Full review to come.
A masterfully-written history of the Great City's development through industries and movements lead by Griffith, McPhearson, and Mulholland.
Full review to come.