City of Angels (and autos)

My boss suggested I post a little info piece on the city of Los Angeles, since it has been my home for many years now. And boy when I say many years, I truly mean many. When I look at Los Angeles now, I see a city I hardly recognize any more. When sitting  in the insane traffic gridlocks, so common here now, I gaze at new houses replacing  older ones. I see a nice classic ranch house for a family off four torn down and in its place is a two story square block of nondescript ugliness, with almost no front yard and absolutely no back yard because it’s all about square footage now.

I currently live a few miles from the ocean, but it is a very nice neighborhood on the  West-side. One of our neighbors across the street sold their nice little three bedroom  stylish corner home and the new owners came in with bulldozers and mowed it down. How  sad. The sadness is because they replaced it with what many of us now term a “mini mansion”. Yea, that’s right, another of those big square maximum square footage deals. Well, there goes the neighborhood. I ran into the new owners as their home was having  the final little details completed. It turns out they are an older couple looking to settle in to their new digs on the West-side. Just out of curiosity (alright I’m nosy)  I asked how many bedrooms their home has, and I still cannot figure out what a senior  citizen retired couple would do with a five bedroom house. I guess I’d figure out something if it was mine.

On another note, Los Angeles has always been known as a city for larger than life  entertainment. Hollywood has the movie studio lots where anything you can dream can  now be put on the big screen. Night club scenes are huge here too. Even some of the largest internet start-ups are here, they are especially attracted to the Venice Beach part of L.A. Man growing up down there I remember us kids took pride in the fact that  outsiders never came down there at night. Boy has that changed. Professional sports teams are also an enormous part of the L.A. life style. The Lakers, Dodgers, Kings, and  yes even the Galaxy to name a few of the biggest drawers of fans and money.

Aside from living in a place where you can swim in the ocean in the morning, snow ski  in the afternoon and then spend the night under the stars in the desert, this city offers the nearly four million resident’s and guests an enormous possibility of educational opportunities. All within the city limits, we have the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), California State University Northridge (CSUN), and  California State University Los Angeles (CSULA), and that’s just the state universities.

 As far as the private institutes go, I count well over 20 very prestigious institutes  including the University of Southern California (USC) and Loyola Marymount University (LMU) and the list is too long to cover in this blog. Suffice it to say, whether one was interested in Medical, Legal, Psychological, or Film, or you name it, the prospects are tremendous here. Not that these types of educational paths are easy, they are not. However Los Angeles also has an enormous resource of private tutors throughout the city including the nation wide TutorZ.com. Not to mention the temperature is almost always 75 degrees  Fahrenheit all the time (I had to throw that in).

So when Los Angeles was founded back in 1871, there were 14 families that totaled the  population at 44 people and the town was originally named “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora  la Reina de Los Angeles de la Porciula”. Translating original name into English would  be; “Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angeles of the Small Portion”.  The Population grew, but the name shrank. Unfortunately so did the traffic. Arrrgg!