cities-in-california

"In Spanish, where most words are either masculine or feminine, the Pacific Ocean is considered masculine, so it ends in an “o.” Ipso facto, Pacifico. But then we explained that when Pacifica was named, by vote at a public meeting, nobody there spoke Spanish, or at least not grammatically. And then we added that Americans associate fine lovely things with the female sex, and so maybe that’s why the name Pacifica sounded so nice to people of the city."

"The site of the village where Portola first made local contact, Pruristac, looks inviting today. It was on the north bank of San Pedro Creek behind where the Sanchez Adobe now sits. The journals of the explorers referred to the population of “six or seven families” in the village. The Ohlone in this area made huts of tules tied over willow branch frames… When the Spanish explorers arrived, one of the thing they noticed was that the Ohlones were extracting lime from a small cave such as this one, on the site that became the Rockaway Quarry. The Indians made use of the mineral for body paint. Subsequently, the Spanish enlarged the diggings to provide whitewash for the mission and presidio buildings from San Francisco to San Jose from 1780-1782. The only other village in Pacifica evident to the explorers was Timigtac, near what is now the intersection of Reina Del Mar Avenue and Highway 1. There were no other villages along the coast from here to go to the Golden Gate because the soil was very sandy and the winds blew strongly much of the time. Explorers said that perhaps only one extended family lived on this site. A substantial shellmound, or midden, is on the site, an indication that quantities of “clams and mussels were consumed there over a period of many years. It may have been used mainly for periodic gathering of seafood, much as a hunting lodge is used."

"Because of its ease of commuting to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, there have always been high-profile people who kept a low-profile presence in town. Some have even been known to simply drive out of Pacifica every morning without ever engaging the community in any way. A California Supreme Court Justice, for example, once lived in town without ever being interviewed in the local weekly newspaper. There have also been rumors of baseball players and movie stars living under the radar in Pacifica… Unlike typical tourist towns in California, Pacifica is more of a residential enclave with a public beach and a public pier. There are no longer any car dealerships or magnet shopping centers that attract people from “over the hill.” The primary sales tax generators are the grocery stores and the gas stations. That is a formula that is not common for cities of 40,000 people."

"I got a guitar on Christmas day; I dreamed that Jimmy Page would come to Santa Monica to teach me to play."

"Oakland has been the birthplace of so many movements. San Francisco often gets the glory but maybe just because people don’t know the history...You think of musicians that came out of Oakland, the visual artists. Oakland was where the Black Panthers had their first headquarters and that continues today. Oakland is still a great place for jazz, for hip-hop, for social movements, and creativity."

"I live in Oakland, California, the city where the Black Panther Party was created in 1966. We still have major issues with police racism, police violence. I spoke not long ago at an event in celebration of the seventeenth birthday of a young man who had been recently killed near one of the high schools by the police... there's a reason why most people never have the opportunity to look at the Black Panther Party "Ten-Point Program," because those points are still very much on the agenda today."

"Oakland will be the birthplace of revolution in the United States."

"The KKK leaders hunkered down to operate in the shadows and keep the flame of hate and bigotry alive in the United States. While many Ku Klux Klan chapters did shut down, others continued operating as independent local groups still dedicated to white supremacy, Christian dominance, and rigid morality. While many continued to use the KKK name, language and garb proudly, others adopted new names to obscure their identities. As the White Cross Clan pressed its racist agenda in Oakland, California, other Klan front groups attacked minorities and preached hate in other cities. By maintaining only loose ties with national KKK leaders, these local groups avoided possible prosecution in federal court as well as the requirement to pay federal taxes. Like-minded local politicians often protected the newly named chapters. Even as the national press wrote the KKK’s obituary, local newspapers were writing about radical racist groups operating in their midst."

"From Oakland to Sac-Town, the Bay Area and back down, Cali is where they put their mack down, give me love!"

"Not for nothing did Eldridge Cleaver say that the North Korean police made him miss the Oakland police."

"Oakland is this kind of town: You have to pay 50 cents to go from Oakland to San Francisco. Coming to Oakland from San Francisco is free."

"L.A. reminds me of that friend who just breaks into your house without knocking and eats all your food. You can't stop complaining about him when he's there, but when he leaves, you just wish he'd come by and bug you. L.A.'s got a heightened sense of color and joy, so much so that it becomes annoying. It makes me emotionally itchy."

"Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles."

"We start from scratch, every generation. History does not bend inevitably toward justice, or freedom, or decency, or even stability. History doesn’t do that in Hong Kong, or in Moscow, or in Washington or New York City or Los Angeles. History goes where we push it. And if we don’t push, someone else will."

"For all its power and wealth and contrasting poverty and powerlessness, for all its size and complexity, Los Angeles is a strongly non-arrogant community, willing to shift and re-examine its problems, indeed its fundamental premises."

"I live in the Mexican part of L.A.; it's called L.A."

"If I had to make one comparison, I'd say that when it's five below in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles, and when it's 110 in New York, it's 78 in Los Angeles; but there are 2,000,000 interesting people in New York–and only 78 in Los Angeles. There may be a hell of a lot more, but it's hard to find them."

"This time of year, the whole crazy city could go in one big fire storm. There were times that he almost wished that it would. He hated this smoggy, tawdry Babylon of a city, its endless tangle of freeways, the strange-looking houses, the filthy air, the thick, choking, glossy foliage everywhere, the drugs, the booze, the divorces, the laziness, the sleaziness, the porno shops and the naked encounter parlors and the massage joints, the weird people wearing their weird clothes and driving their weird cars and cutting their hair in weird ways. There was a cheapness, a trashiness, about everything here, he thought. Even the mansions and the fancy restaurants were that way: hollow, like slick movie sets. He sometimes felt that the trashiness bothered him more than the out-and-out evil. If you kept sight of your own values you could do battle with evil, but trashiness slipped up around you and infiltrated your soul without your even knowing it. He hoped that his sojourn in Los Angeles was not doing that to him."

"In L.A., we wear Chucks, not Ballies... Let me the serenade the streets of L.A."

"The entrance to the Underworld is in Los Angeles."

"We pushed the system to the extreme. We're fighting a wildfire with urban water systems"

"I am C-A. Sac-Town, Seaside, L.A.!"

"They call it the City of Angels. Funny. In my 30 years here, I haven't seen a single one. My old friend Henry Wilson used to say, people dare to dream here. He liked that about L.A. I'd say, bull, dreaming will get you killed. Maybe I was right."

"By 1902, it was evident that something had to be done. “The hobos are also killing that particular part of Los Angeles in which they have settled like a blight,” the LA Times reported. “The police would have an easier time down in the tenderloin if the city would put in a few more electric lights. There is seldom any cussedness going on where there is plenty of illumination. Los Angeles Street is as dark as a pocket.”"

"In 1876, Los Angeles became the end of the line of the transcontinental railroad. According to historian Glen Creason, the railroads were constructed east of LA’s historic core. That year, the main Southern Pacific Rail Yard and passenger terminus, known as River Station (now the site of the Los Angeles State Historic Park), opened. In 1888, it was joined by the Arcade Station at Fourth and Alameda. Thousands of men, many displaced veterans of the Civil War, began to “ride the rails,” stowing away in empty boxcars and jumping trains. Because of this, many cities saw a great increase in the number of transient visitors. They tended to congregate around or nearby the rail yards in cheap hotels, saloons, and brothels which sprung up to service them. In 1889, it was reported that 18 “tramps” had been arrested at the Southern Pacific Yard in one morning and would be forced to work on the chain gang, ironically building roads for the city. LA leaders knew what to blame for this “tramp harvest”—the increased mobility offered by the railroads."

"It was Christmastime in Los Angeles in 1902. The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter out to the saloon-lined intersection of First Street and Los Angeles Street, more commonly known to Times readers as the “Hobo Corner,” epicenter of Victorian LA’s Skid Row. “It was the toughest night of the year on the “Hobo Corner,’” the sensation-minded reporter wrote. “The tenderloin was literally swarming with tramps. Most of them were beastly drunk and the rest were sorry they weren’t. They were filthy dirty; some of them fairly squirmed with tenants—their steady company as it were.”"

"We’re facing a historic natural disaster. And I think that can't be stated strong enough"

"[Los Angeles is] the world's biggest third-class city."

"The vision of Los Angeles as a dream factory, where everything is shiny and soul-crushingly empty, reworks Hollywood as Moloch, the who devours his own children. Even LA-born , who cleverly chronicled the city in the sixties and seventies, recapitulates the usual conventions. Here is composer , a woman who famously played chess against Marcel Duchamp during his first retrospective in the United States in (he was clothed, she was nude; both understood the power of the ), kissing off her hometown with the quip that "people with brains went to New York and people with faces came to Los Angeles.""

"By the beginning of 1968 most American cities were preparing for war—building up their arsenals, sending undercover agents into black neighborhoods like spies into enemy territory, recruiting citizenry as a standing reserve army. The city of Los Angeles, where thirty-four people had been killed in an August 1965 riot in the Watts section, was contemplating the purchase of bulletproof armored vehicles, each of which could be armed with a .30-caliber machine gun; a choice of smoke screen, tear gas, or fire-extinguishing launchers; and a siren so loud it was said to disable rioters. “When I look at this thing, I think, My God, I hope we’ll never have to use it,” said Los Angeles deputy police chief Daryl Gates, “but then I realize how valuable it would have been in Watts, where we had nothing to protect us from sniper fire when we tried to rescue our wounded officers.” Such talk had become good politics since California governor Pat Brown had been defeated the year before by Ronald Reagan, largely because of the Watts riots. The problem was that the vehicles cost $35,000 each. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office had a more cost-effective idea—a surplus army M-8 armored car for only $2,500."

"Say, what's up. Straight up, holler! What, I am C-A. Day-Go, L.A., to the Bay. Yeah, it's my shit."

"One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child."

"Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work. ... In this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles."

"Then, she take it all in. Best kush filling my joints. Say, I sound too L.A.? That's the point!"

"I used to love to call L.A. when I lived in New York. "What're y'all doin'? Talkin' to TV producers, huh? Bummer. Me? I'm readin' a book! Yeah, we're thinkin' back East! Yeah, we're evolving. Is that "The Big One" I hear in the background? Bye, you lizard scum, bye!""

"According to CoreLogic, the median house price in Los Angeles is $456,000. This compares with a median price of $187,000 in Houston. There is a similar story for other cities across the state. I won’t even mention house prices in San Francisco. Higher housing costs are a predictable result of restricting supply; it is far more difficult to arrange a new development in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles or other California population centers than in Texas. Builders will have to meet environmental restrictions and density limits in many areas. The Census Bureau reports that between 1980 and 2010 the number of housing units in Texas increased by 81.9 percent, compared with just 41.3 percent in California."

"This firestorm is the big one"

"When I went to America, her message had so sunk into my ears that I became a radical. I went to America to study at the University of California, where a jurist of international law was teaching. I wanted to take my degree in international law. And that was the period of McCarthyism, of the communist witch hunts—my choices were laid out. To get away from Sunset Boulevard, from the girls with red nail polish, I ran off to Maxwell Street and lived among the Negroes. A week, a month. I felt good with them—they were real, they knew how to laugh. And the day in San Diego when I wasn’t able to get a hotel room because I have olive skin and looked like a Mexican ... well, that helped."

"The global role of the United States is perhaps the ultimate chapter in that long period of European expansion which had begun in western Europe, and especially on the Atlantic seaboard, during the 15th century. Europe slowly had outgrown its homeland. Its cultural empire eventually formed a long band traversing most of the Northern Hemisphere and dipping far into the Southern. The modern hub of the peoples and ideas of European origin is now New York as much as Paris, or Los Angeles as much as London. In the history of the European peoples the city of Washington is perhaps what Constantinople - the infant city of Emperor Constantine - was to the last phase of the Roman Empire; for it is unlikely that Europeans, a century hence, will continue to stamp the world so decisively with their ideas and inventions."

"Not so long ago, I examined some maps showing juvenile delinquency, diptheria, tuberculosis and murder quotients in a number of cities from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The maps all looked alike. Disease, crime and delinquency were invariably grouped in the same parts of the cities — in the slum districts. That is the cause of crime, not the motion picture."

"Are you with your friends on a rooftop laughing, smoking in L.A., trying to kick the habit."

"In Los Angeles, everything is based on driving, even the killings. In New York, most people don't have cars, so if you want to kill a person, you have to take the subway to their house. And sometimes on the way, the train is delayed and you get impatient, so you have to kill someone on the subway. That's why there are so many subway murders; no one has a car."

"Boston is among an increasing number of municipalities, universities, and private foundations that have announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. In late October, ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, Auckland, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; and Seattle announced commitments to divest from fossil fuel companies and increase investments to make cities more sustainable. Also last month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a bill that requires the city’s three pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Those are in addition to divestment commitments made last year by Berlin; Bristol, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Durban, South Africa; London; Los Angeles; Milan; New Orleans; New York City; Oslo; Norway; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, Canada. “Cities are at the forefront of tackling the climate emergency and there is real momentum to move investments away from fossil fuels and toward climate solutions,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is chair-elect of C40 Cities, a network of mayors working to confront climate change, said in a statement. “I will continue to encourage more cities to join the movement, and urge national governments and private finance institutions to mobilize more finance to invest directly in cities to support a green and fair recovery.”"

"Los Angeles has always been a natural home for pornography, even back in the days."

"It’s a great city to be an artist in—the American city to be an artist in, in many ways. It’s much more affordable. It’s where the art schools are. It’s like London. It’s an art school town."

"I don't believe that there is a blasé person in the State. Credit that to the earthquake. The catastrophe, too, will be a great factor in the future greatness of San Francisco, just as the fires of London were in the making of that city a world metropolis.""

"Say this prayer every night, and if it works, we'll live forever: "Dear Lord, whose mercy's not diminished, let me live till the airport's finished.""

"Of all our visitors, I believe I preferred Emperor Norton; the very mention of whose name reminds me I am doing scanty justice to the folks of San Francisco. In what other city would a harmless madman who supposed himself emperor of the two Americas have been so fostered and encouraged? Where else would even the people of the streets have respected the poor soul's illusion? Where else would bankers and merchants have received his visits, cashed his cheques, and submitted to his small assessments? Where else would he have been suffered to attend and address the exhibition days of schools and colleges? Where else, in God's green earth, have taken his pick of restaurants, ransacked the bill of fare, and departed scatheless?"

"At the end of our streets is sunrise; At the end of our streets are spars; At the end of our streets is sunset; At the end of our streets the stars."

"The winds of the Future wait At the iron walls of her Gate, And the western ocean breaks in thunder, And the western stars go slowly under, And her gaze is ever West In the dream of her young unrest. Her sea is a voice that calls, And her star a voice above, And her wind a voice on her walls-- My cool, grey city of love."