LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

museum complex with distinguished collections of Asian (Indian, Tibetan, Nepalese), Islamic, medieval, European, and modern art. The largest building, the four-level Ahmanson Gallery, houses the permanent collection, the adjoining Frances and Armand Hammer Wing displays temporary exhibitions, and the Leo S. Bing Center contains a library (with more than 60,000 volumes) and auditorium. The Robert O. Anderson Building, housing the museum's modern-art collection, opened in 1986. The Textile and Costumes Research Center is the strongest in the western United States. Established in 1913, the museum was part of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art until 1961, when it became an independent institution. It moved to its present location in 1965. History The growth of the metropolis The SpanishMexican town and city On August 2, 1769, a Spanish expedition headed by Gaspar de Portol, searching for mission sites, camped near a river they named the Porcincula, in honour of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of Porcincula (Nuestra Seora la Reyna de los Angeles de Porcincula). The area's first Europeans exchanged gifts with the peaceful, Uto-Aztecan-speaking Indians of the nearby village of Yang-na and left on the following morning. Despite three earthquakes during his overnight stay, Father Juan Crespi noted in his diary that this delightful place among the trees on the river had all the requisites for a large settlement. Two years later the Mission San Gabriel Arcngel was established about nine miles northeast of the campsite. A decade went by before Gov. Felipe de Neve succeeded in colonizing the fertile river basin with 44 recruits from Mexico, most of them of Indian and African blood. The illiterate settlers assembled on the west bank of what is now the Los Angeles River on September 4, 1781, to claim the land they had been promised. Little is known about the events of that momentous day, but mythmakers have cloaked the city's founding in a ceremonial splendour worthy of its destiny and its high-sounding name, which has long been confused with the name given the river. It is now generally agreed that the city's correct name is El Pueblo de la Reyna de Los Angeles (The Town of the Queen of the Angels). El Pueblo, as it was commonly called, remained so isolated from the United States during its formative years that Joseph Chapman, the first Yankee to become an Angelino, was thought of as an Englishman (El Ingls). An engaging pirate from Boston, Chapman landed in 1818 with a black fellow privateer, Thomas Fisher. The first outsider to arrive by way of the arduous overland route was a fur trapper, Jedediah Smith, who turned up in 1826, four years after an independent Mexico had hoisted its flag above El Pueblo. Los Angeles, with a population of nearly 1,250, had become a ciudad (city) in 1835 when Richard Henry Dana looked in on it. In the hands of an enterprising people, he mused in Two Years Before the Mast (1840), what a country this might be. By the time war broke out between the United States and Mexico in 1846, the California capital was so overrun with enterprising people that Gov. Po Pico felt helpless against the hordes of Yankee immigrants, who were cultivating farms, establishing vineyards, erecting mills, sawing up lumber, building workshops, and doing a thousand other things which seem natural to them, but which Californians neglect or despise. When American forces under Capt. John C. Frmont and Commo. Robert F. Stockton entered the city on August 13, 1846, not a shot was fired. A revolt was put down the following January, and on July 4, 1847, Los Angeles celebrated its first Independence Day. The American city Los Angeles was incorporated on April 4, 1850, and designated the seat of Los Angeles County. The lawless, adobe cow towngambling, drinking and whoring are the only occupations, grumbled a pioneer physician in 1849prospered in the wake of the Gold Rush when hungry miners in San Francisco and Sacramento gorged on beef from southern California. A catastrophic drought (186265) following several years of declining cattle prices brought an end to the era of the ranchos. Vast Spanish and Mexican land grants, mortgaged and bankrupt, their owners ignorant of Yanqui laws and Yanqui interest rates, were broken up, fenced, and planted by a new breed of Angelino. By 1860 the city had become so Americanized that it had banned bullfighting and formed a baseball club. With the arrival of the railroads (the Southern Pacific in 1876, the Santa Fe in 1885), Los Angeles began to ship its oranges back east and, by means of a massive advertising campaign, to lure immigrants westward to the New Eden. Aided by a railroad rate war, the boom of the 1880s more than quadrupled the city's population, from 11,183 in 1880 to 50,395 in 1890. Father Crespi's campsite was overrun by shrewd, aggressive Yankee boosters determined to build a city in their own image and requiring only two things denied them by a bountiful providence: a harbour and an adequate water supply. Unlike San Francisco and San Diego, Los Angeles has no natural harbour. A narrow, artfully gerrymandered shoestring strip connects the inland city with its port, 23 miles south of City Hall. Los Angeles acquired its two harbour communities, San Pedro and Wilmington, by consolidation in 1909 following an epic struggle between the powerful Southern Pacific Railroad interests and the Free Harbor League. Work began on the harbour in 1899. The opening of the first municipal wharf in 1914 coincided with the completion of the Panama Canal, which put the ports of the Atlantic seaboard some 8,000 miles closer to Los Angeles. Its harbour became the busiest on the West Coast. In 1904, casting about for new sources of water to sustain the city's relentless growth, William Mulholland, water-bureau superintendent, explored the Owens Valley some 250 miles northeast of Los Angeles and returned with a bold plan for an aqueduct to carry melted snow from the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada to Los Angeles faucets. The plan outraged Owens Valley ranchers, enriched two syndicates of Los Angeles speculators, gave rise to rumours of wrongdoing and, highly fictionalized, ended up on the motion-picture screen as Chinatown (1974). There it is; take it, Mulholland told the thousands of Angelinos who assembled on November 5, 1913, to watch the Owens River water come cascading into a San Fernando Valley spillway. The 233-mile-long aqueduct, with 142 separate tunnels totalling 52 miles in length, has been supplemented by a 105-mile extension into the Mono Basin. The system supplies 80 percent of the city's water needs. The remainder comes from local wells, the California Aqueduct, and the Colorado River. A severe drought in 197677 gave Angelinos a foretaste of the time (1985) when their Colorado River water would, by court order, be shared with Arizona. Meanwhile, with rain and snow dumping about three-fourths of California's usable surface water in the north, while more than half of its people live in the south, the water wars between powerful corporate farmers and resourceful urban environmentalists continue to be fought out in the legislature, the courts, and the voting booth.