The year 1923 amounted to a civic “Big Bang,” a pinpoint event whose reverberations reach us today.
To the first and the best known: Let’s sing the birthday song to the Hollywood sign, built as a massive, ultimately ramshackle advertisement that became as unmistakably L.A. as the Eiffel Tower is for Paris and the Statue of Liberty is for New York.
Some among the others: The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in East Hollywood set up shop, the nucleus of an aesthetic, a technique, an insanely rich international empire of imagination.
The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum opened in 1923, a hometown project that assumed international renown, a venue for one, then two, and now soon to be three Olympic Games.
The gilded and marbled Beaux-Arts Biltmore Hotel rose that year to lord over Pershing Square like a glamorous Vanderbilt debutante; its own legend holds that the Black Dahlia drank perhaps her last drink here, and that the fan-besieged Beatles arrived perforce by helicopter, landing on the roof.
Up in Echo Park, a widowed Canadian preacher named Aimee Semple McPherson celebrated New Year’s Day 1923 by opening the doors of her massive new Angelus Temple to thousands of the faithful.
With a showmanship worthy of her Hollywood neighbors, she staged elaborate morality plays for her flock, and soon broadcast on her own radio station, and ushered her Foursquare brand of Pentecostalism into the big tent of American Protestantism. Then, her relentlessly publicized moral tumble — an alleged affair and a mysterious five-week disappearance — was probably a first for a woman minister of the Gospel, but old-ish news for men of the cloth.
At Cal Tech, physicist Robert Millikan brought home the first of Southern California’s dozens of Nobel Prizes “for his work on the elementary charge of electricity and on the photoelectric effect.” The prize, and his quarter-century leadership of Caltech, laid down a marker for the muscular science and tech place that this region would become.
El Cholo, the “Spanish Cafe,” began dishing up Mexican food and drink for the carriage trade, with margaritas so enticing that an ex-con on the lam supposedly dared to come back to his L.A. haunts to drink just one more.
So why the big civic surge? Elsewhere, the ‘20s roared. In Los Angeles, they screamed. L.A. had had booms before, but this one was a combustion of elements firing all at once:
The runaway allure of the movie industry, a resurgent real estate market, a virtually blank public canvas for men of arts and sciences to write upon, an underfoot sea of oil and a world demanding it, and the booster ambitions of rich and not-rich-enough men, all basking in the benevolence of the accommodating weather.