Page 16 - 2015 Travel Guide to California

HISTORY
THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN on Mount
Lee in the Hollywood Hills area of Los
Angeles, above; Jefferson Airplane and
Grateful Dead concert poster and
Grateful Dead’s 45 rpm single, below.
»
1960s: WE BUILT
THIS CITY ON
ROCK ’N’ ROLL
14 2015 T R AV E L G U I D E TO C A L I F O R N I A
Rush, California became the 31st state of the
United States. New Californians brought
the new Golden State into being, plowing
its fields, founding its great universities,
building its cities.
California’s lustrous reputation was tar-
nished on the morning of April 18, 1906,
when a massive earthquake rocked
Northern California and leveled much of
San Francisco; what the rolling, rumbling
ground didn’t knock down, the ensuing
firestorm burned down. Some 3,000 people
died. Now, it was San Francisco’s turn to
start over. San Francisco dramatized its
recovery, and celebrated the new Panama
Canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific,
with the splendidly showy Panama-Pacific
International Exposition of 1915.
dream-weavers of Hollywood. In the 1940s,
creative people from Europe such as Billy
Wilder and Thomas Mann, fleeing fascism
and war to begin anew, lent the movies an Old
World artistic sensibility.
California’s story since World War II has
featured growth and more growth. Com-
bined with in-country migration, global
immigration made California the most
populous state in the Union in 1962.
The Rise of Hollywood
Just two years after that optimistic display, the
nation plunged into World War I. After the war
ended in 1918, still more migrants rushed to
California. In 1920, Los Angeles (and much
later San Diego and San Jose) surged past San
Francisco in population. The orange groves
and dusty byways of old Los Angeles began
morphing into “LA”—more specifically, and
more mythically, “Hollywood.”
Actors, writers, directors and producers
streamed to Los Angeles, growing a quiet cot-
tage industry of silent motion pictures into a
technologically advanced business. Stars
were born in a place that came to be called
“the dream factory.” Not a few of the Dust
Bowl migrants who left the drought-stricken
Midwest for California in the 1930s got their
first impressions of their new home from the
A Center for Change
From the 1960s on, California has been, in a
positive sense, the most disruptive state in
the nation. Student political activism, the
hip counter-culture and early awakenings
of the New Age movement found fertile
ground in California. The in-season, sus-
tainable, slow-food movement arguably
took root fastest in California. American
environmentalism in large part began in
California, when Scottish immigrant John
Muir founded the Sierra Club in San Fran-
cisco back in 1892 and took President
Theodore Roosevelt camping amid the nat-
ural wonders of Yosemite Valley in 1903.
From the 1980s on, Silicon Valley has
joined Hollywood as a creative lodestar for
the whole planet. The high-technology world
has enshrined risk-taking, innovation,
learning from failure and—you guessed it—
starting over. Quoting another California
innovation, the 1960s Whole Earth Catalog,
Apple’s Steve Jobs urged Stanford University
graduates in a commencement speech in
2005 to “stay hungry, stay foolish.”
Californians, across centuries and cul-
tures, always have.
AMERICA’S MOST FAMOUS psychedelic rock bands, Jefferson Airplane
and the Grateful Dead, lived in San Francisco’s hippie haven, the Haight-
Ashbury district, in the mid-to-late 1960s. The Airplane soared in a
colonnaded 1904 Colonial Revival mansion at 2400 Fulton St. The Dead
jammed at 710A Ashbury St. in an 1890 Queen Anne building. The houses
survive as eye-pleasing private residences, rich with sidewalk photo
opportunities, and are featured on city walking tours.
SUPANNEE HICKMAN/SHUTTERSTOCK